Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  The therapist there explained that once women started talking to each other, they discovered that this happened a lot, especially but not only to girls. When survivors needed help but couldn’t afford therapy, this therapist helped them form a group—and I joined; it was six women and me. I discovered it wasn’t my fault. But when people in the town knew we were telling family secrets, even the women’s center had to turn the therapist out. Still, she kept on meeting with us on our own. But what really saved me was what you felt. I had dressed and lived as a girl until I was about eight, so I never felt I was a man like my grandfather. As my therapist put it, I never identified with the aggressor. If I had, I might have become an abuser myself. It’s terrible to be a victim, and to believe sex is the only thing you’re worth—without help, girls grow up to keep believing that. But some boys start abusing other people because that’s a way of being a man. That means guilt, being afraid you’ll get arrested if you tell the truth, cutting off all empathy—everything that makes it harder to get out. I wouldn’t say I was lucky—but it would have been worse if I thought I had to control and abuse other people. He is telling me his story to say thank you. Because the women’s movement was born of women talking to each other, childhood sexual abuse was revealed to be a fact, not a Freudian fantasy—and children began to be believed. We finish our coffee. He is a rare person—a man who knows what it is to be a woman—and also someone who has ended abuse in one generation. I thank him for surviving—and teaching. There are many kinds of lessons on a campus. • It’s 1995, and I am at the Dominican College, near San Francisco. Because an outdoor amphitheater on its campus holds a thousand people, it is about to be the site of a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood. No one has uttered a peep of protest. Planned Parenthood clinics have provided health care for so many for so long that it has become one of the most trusted organizations in America. Even some anti-abortion protesters seem to have figured out that demonstrating against clinics only turns public opinion against them, especially since just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood services are related to abortion. But this is the calm before the storm. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco writes a letter to the college’s president condemning me as a “leading advocate for virtually unrestricted abortion in the United States.” Though the college gets not a penny from the Catholic Church, it was founded by Dominican nuns long ago. They are no longer around to speak for themselves, but the archbishop says their legacy is being betrayed. Everything just keeps going, both the accusations and the event.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As decades passed, and the word *still* entered my life—as in “Oh, you’re still traveling”—it dawned on me that I’d been writing least about what I was doing most. So I sat down and began to make notes about many trips, past and present, that left me amazed by what is, angered by what isn’t, and hooked on what could be. As I looked through old date books and schedules, letters and abandoned journals, suddenly I was awash in a sense memory of my father going through his tattered road maps and address books, trying to figure out how much gas money he needed to get from here to there, where to find trailer parks that would shelter his wife and two daughters, and what roadside dealers might buy the small antiques which he sold and bartered as we made our way across the country. It was so vivid that I could sense our conspiratorial whispering as we tried not to wake my mother, who was asleep in this house trailer that was our home for most of each year. Until that moment, I would have sworn that I had rebelled against my father’s way of life. I created a home that I love and can retreat to, though he wanted no home at all. I’ve never borrowed a penny, though he was constantly in debt. I take planes and trains to group adventures, though he would spend a week driving cross-country alone rather than board a plane. Yet in the way that we rebel, only to find ourselves in the midst of the familiar, I realized there was a reason why the road felt like home. It had been exactly that for the evocative first decade of my life. I was my father’s daughter.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy—and it could be again. I’d never known there was a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I’d been assuming opposition—and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one’s foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground. Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn’t cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution—or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world—I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model.12 He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That’s why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women? Unlike the Native model, the Founding Fathers’ Constitution allowed slavery and private property as well as the exclusion of women. But like its model, the Constitution upended every system of governance in Europe, from ancient Greece to the Magna Carta, by putting all power in the hands of the people, creating layers of talking circles from local to federal, separating military and civilian power, and doing away with monarchies and hereditary rulers. It seemed to me that Americans could at least say thank you. Instead, there was a notion that democracy was invented in ancient Greece, despite the fact that it had slavery as well as excluding women from citizenship, had citizenship also limited by class, and much more. As a Native spokeswoman said with irony when Indian nations were being lectured about democracy in the 1970s, “We, the Indian people, may be the only citizens of this nation who really understand your form of government…copied from the Iroquois Confederacy.”13 III.Before Houston, I’d been proud of the diverse experiences and geography represented on the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women. Afterward, I couldn’t believe there was not one woman from Indian Country. In that way, I came to work closely with four women who joined us in the 1980s and 1990s, and we’ve continued to work informally ever since. Each of them could have been a success anywhere, yet chose to stay within a way of life that was, by conventional standards, marginalized, impoverished, and in danger of disappearing. Each of them had one Indian and one non-Indian parent, and that, too, would have made conventional success easier. Their choice to stay and struggle proved the value of warmth and relatedness, of balance and a sense of the natural world. All I knew was that being around them made me feel oddly understood and hopeful.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Most wouldn’t have been imprisoned at all if it weren’t for a drug addiction, or a lack of literacy, or being, as one put it, “a man junkie.” With or without that self-understanding, women were often selling drugs or prostituting themselves for a controlling partner or a pimp. What struck me was not how different women in prison are, but how un-different. Inside, women tend to form familylike groups, blame themselves unreasonably, worry more about their children than about themselves, stylize uniforms to look a little better, need kindness, and want to tell their stories. What’s different is not who those women are but the higher percentage of them who have been abused as children or denied an education or forced to fight back in self-defense and then been criminalized for it. Women were unexpectedly familiar. But a growing mystery was the number of letters I received from men in prison. Polite and enigmatic, they asked me for a note or an autograph or a photo for their daughters or because they didn’t have visitors. If not for a distinctive prisoner number on the envelope, I wouldn’t have known where they came from. Only when a few men who were former prisoners came to public meetings—and stayed on afterward to talk—did I begin to understand. In the absence of women, they had been used as women. In the media, they had seen the women’s movement naming, protesting, and prosecuting sexual abuse, yet citing their own abuse in letters could have been punished as informing. They were reaching out for some contact in their own way. My first revelation came from a slender young Puerto Rican man at a Philadelphia conference on eating disorders. After hearing me say that a body invasion like rape could be more traumatic than a beating, he stayed afterward to agree. “I’ve been beaten up and I’ve been gang-raped,” he said, to the best of my memory, “and I’ll take beatings any day. My cellmate gave me a girl’s name and rented me out for oral, anal sex—everything. He got food and drugs in return. I would pass out—and wake up bleeding. I pretended I was in the ceiling, looking down on my body—that’s how I survived. I’ve been on the outside for nine years, but I still can’t go into a room if it’s all men and no women.” Like young children whose sexual abuse is often oral, he had developed an eating disorder, and was drawn to the conference. I noticed that these men often talked about their male prison partners and abusers in the same terms that women used to describe pimps and battering husbands. The combination of fear and dependency they described sounded like the capture-bonding known as the Stockholm Syndrome, the enmeshing of hostage and hostage-taker that can happen when an all-powerful person controls but spares the life of a powerless person.

• From Querelle (1953)

  For the first time in his life he dared think those obscene words that he had never been able to employ in his speech, had not even liked to hear. "Dragging me through your shit! And the look on Nona's mug, that asshole, when he told me about it!" The three dockers shifted their ground. Dede caught a glimpse of Robert's head, jammed between Querelle's thick thighs, pummeled by both his fists. All of a sudden one of Robert's felt-slippered feet swung up to kick Querelle in the face so that he had to let go. Dede hesitated for a moment before bending down to pick up the sailor's beret. He held it in his hand for a second and then put it on top of a stone post. If Robert was going to lose, he should not have to suffer the humiliation of seeing his little buddy, looking disconsolate, but wearing that flamboyant beret, blatant as a searchlight-nor would he see the boy holding oat that remarkable piece of headgear to the winner, as if crowning him. \Vhile he had not hesitated long, the chain of deliberations involved quite amazed Dcde himself. It surprised him, and gave him a feeling that was both painful-there had been a breach-and almost voluptuous. He was astonished to find-having made up his mind on what seemed a trivial matter-that it had become a matter of importance. The importance lay in the revelation to the kid's consciousness that he was a free agent. He thought that over. 122 I JEAN GENET The previous evening he had, while kissing Mario, cut across the even flow of an emotion that had begun long ago, and this first act of audacity had given him a glimpse of freedom, intoxicated him and fortified him enough to permit him to make a second attempt. Yet that (successful ) attempt had seemed to repulse the man (who, as we've said, lay slumbering) within him, aod who really was his own longed-for resemblance both to Mario and, in a greater degree, to Robert. Dede had known Robert when the latter was still working in the dockyards. Together they had pulled a couple of jv�s in the warehouses, and when Robert had graduated from docker to pimp, Dede had not told him about his relationship with the detective. All the same, because of their old friendship, and out of respect for Robert's success, Dede never thought of spying on him, but managed to obtain information from him that he could pass on to Mario. Querelle had gotten up again. Dede watched his buttocks contract. A mocking but appreciative voice yelled : "Wow, what a piece of ass! Wanna try it?"

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt and are always agreed. “And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it! “Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects. “If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect. “And yet I know it, and we all know it. “What could be a greater miracle than that? “Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?” thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  We started out in the claustrophobic rooms of a tenement preserved to show how generations of European immigrants lived, and a neighborhood shop that sold can openers and other cheap items in the front, and diamond rings in the back. Then we went to a bar where Native American steelworkers were sitting silently, drinking as the morning light filtered through venetian blinds. They were Mohawk, Bellow explained with a novelist’s eye for a good story, and they had so little fear of heights that they could walk on steel beams seventy stories up while catching hot rivets in a metal sieve—sort of a death-defying jai alai. He admired their natural gift and looked at them as different. To me, they seemed as isolated as Mexican migrants working in California fields, or South African men working in diamond mines. Years later, as if I’d sent out a call to the universe, I met women on a Mohawk reservation in Canada. They lived near a railway bridge that had given birth to this myth of fearlessness. They assured me that Mohawk men were just as afraid of heights as anybody else, but they needed the jobs. Maybe they were helped by a trail-walking habit of placing one foot directly in front of the other, and by a tradition of bravery in the face of danger, but so many had perished that Mohawk women asked their men never to go out on the same job together, to lessen the risk of group widowhood and fatherless children. If I hadn’t been in that sad bar watching men numb themselves with alcohol—and met those women—I too would have believed in the myth of a fearless choice. No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t. In my own schoolbooks, I remembered reading headings like “Indians Were Backward.” Those sources ignored, or were ignorant of, a culture with agricultural techniques that gave the world three-fifths of the food crops still in cultivation in modern times,6 developed long-strand cotton that made the mills of England possible, and attracted so many white settlers to Indian instead of European ways of life that Benjamin Franklin complained bitterly about it. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Indians enjoyed equality and plenty; Europeans were in chains.”7 Often the myths about Indians depicted them as more violent than the white society around them, though “scalping” was initiated by the U.S. Army, in order to pay soldiers and settlers a reward for each Indian killed. In my childhood, Hollywood westerns presented a few noble savages as well as fearsome warriors (or rather non-Indian actors playing them), but pioneer women were portrayed as suffering a fate worse than death if captured. “Half-breeds” born of such liaisons were seen as wanting only to be accepted into white society, and, especially if they were females, they were doomed by an out-of-control sexuality.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  We could finish each other’s sentences. Inspired by our different paths to a shared place, we had the idea of collecting Gandhian tactics into a pamphlet for women’s movements everywhere. After all, Gandhi’s tactic of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, would be well suited to women, and so would his massive marches and consumer boycotts. As part of our research, we interviewed Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a rare woman leader during the independence struggle. She had worked with Gandhi, led his national women’s organization, warned him against agreeing to the partition of India and Pakistan as the price of independence, and then led a renaissance of Indian handicrafts that used the talents of millions of refugees displaced by partition. As we explained our idea of teaching Gandhian tactics to women’s movements, she listened to us patiently, sitting and rocking on her veranda, sipping tea. When we were finished, she said, “Well, of course, my dears. We taught him everything he knew.” She made us laugh—and she explained. In India under the British, Gandhi had witnessed a massive women’s movement organizing against suttee, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and much more. In England as a young man studying to be a barrister, Gandhi also saw the suffrage movement, and he later urged activists working for self-rule in India to emulate the courage and tactics of the Pankhursts, England’s most famous and radical suffragists. After his return to India from South Africa, where he organized against the discrimination that Indians were subjected to, he was alarmed to find an independence movement with almost no roots in the villages and the daily lives of ordinary people. He began to live like a villager himself, to organize mass marches and consumer boycotts, and to measure success by changes in the lives of the poorest and least powerful: village women. As Kamaladevi explained kindly, Devaki and I had the Great Man theory of history, and hadn’t known that the tactics we were drawn to were our own. She made us both laugh again—and learn. As Vita Sackville-West wrote: I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong. —WHEN I WENT HOME after that second India visit, I saw my own past differently. I had walked in Indian villages in the 1950s, sure that they had no relevance to my own life. But now a women’s revolution was springing from talking circles of our own. At home, I had been going to everything from battered women’s shelters and freestanding women’s clinics to women’s centers on campuses and protests by single mothers trying to survive on welfare. My becoming an itinerant feminist organizer was just a Western version of walking in villages.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  She was elected to Congress in 1970, as a war raged in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon was in the White House. It was hard to imagine any two people more different than Bella and Nixon. Indeed, after the Watergate scandal broke, she would become one of the first members of Congress to call for his impeachment. —A YEAR AFTER HER ELECTION, Bella, Shirley Chisholm, and their sister congresswoman, Patsy Mink from Hawaii, decided to hurry history along. Though this new wave of feminism had many groups working on issues, there was no nationwide organization to advance them all by getting more pro-equality women into elected and appointed office. It was clear that neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party would do this on its own. Indeed, both parties doubted there were women who could win elections or be “qualified” for appointments. When Bella, Shirley, and Patsy called a dozen or so of us into a congressional meeting room to talk about founding a new national organization, I felt as if we were already breaking barriers just by being there. It was the first of many such meetings. Our job was to research a few hundred names for a founding meeting that would include women from new feminist groups as well as such established ones as the YWCA, the National Council of Negro Women, and the National Council of Jewish Women. All this needed to be done yesterday if we were to form a national group that could have an impact on the upcoming 1972 elections. Washington can be so hot that the British Embassy once gave its workers extra pay for working in a tropical climate. It was that kind of July in 1971, when 320 diverse women began arriving for three days of big meetings and nights of caucuses. I’m not sure any of us ever left the hotel to see the light of day. We were saved from chaos by the creative chairing of Aileen Hernandez, a labor organizer who had been the first African American and first woman on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and also the first African American president of NOW. We voted to call ourselves the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC); to have a structure that included state, city, and local caucuses; to be multipartisan; and to adopt a statement of purpose that opposed sexism, racism, institutional violence, and poverty through the election and appointment of pro-equality women to political office. I was elected to a temporary twenty-four-member policy council along with Bella, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, Beulah Sanders from the National Welfare Rights Organization, Native American leader LaDonna Harris, and many more. Our job was to initiate state and city caucuses and to meet with those already forming by contagion just from reading news reports of the NWPC. I traveled to a dozen states, from familiar California to unfamiliar Tennessee.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But like Scheherazade, who evaded death by telling irresistible stories, the loner moves his coffee mug toward us and begins to talk: In World War II, I was in Indochina—that’s what Vietnam was called then—and I didn’t just meet Ho Chi Minh, I knew him. We were fighting the Japanese, and so was he. We were allies. Plus he was our hero because his guerrilla fighters rescued American pilots shot down in the jungle by the Japanese. Ho spent so much time with Americans that sometimes his own men only recognized him by the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket. Also, he loved President Roosevelt for pissing off Churchill by saying that colonialism had to end after the war. Ho even knew our Declaration of Independence by heart—it was his model for sending the French colonists home. But after FDR died, everything changed. Truman sold Ho Chi Minh down the river by supporting the French—otherwise France wouldn’t join NATO. But didn’t we also fight a revolution to get rid of the British? Didn’t we fight a civil war to keep our country from being split into north and south? Well, that’s what Ho Chi Minh is doing now—and we’re on the wrong side. There is silence. I can’t tell whether the three young guys think this is truth or treason, but they slap money on the counter and drift away. I go over to talk to this man I now think of as the Prophet of the Diner. He’s the first American I’ve ever heard say what I was told as a student in India long ago: that Ho Chi Minh just wanted independence for his country and would make it a buffer against China—the very opposite of the American belief that Ho’s victory would have a “domino effect” of pushing other Asian countries toward China. At the risk of sounding around the bend, I explain to the Prophet that I’ve read Ho Chi Minh’s poetry and he doesn’t sound power-mad to me. It’s part of the reason I keep a sign on my bulletin board: ALIENATION IS WHEN YOUR COUNTRY IS AT WAR AND YOU WANT THE OTHER SIDE TO WIN. He laughs and says he himself went to the State Department to remind them that Ho Chi Minh was once an ally—and could be again. Other vets have done the same thing, including a former OSS doctor who treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria. Some have offered to be go-betweens and help bring the United States and Ho together to talk. But as far as the Prophet knows, everyone has been turned down. When he learns that I’m a writer from New York, he says I should write about Ho Chi Minh, who once lived in and loved New York. It’s a personal note that might humanize him. I promise to try, but I don’t have much hope in the middle of a war. I do some reading.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  In a classic sense, they were trying to kill the messenger. Their projections made me realize that I was projecting, too. I couldn’t understand why Hillary wanted to go back to Washington, and so campaigned for the Senate in the first place. After eight years in the White House with political piranhas circling, and every move accompanied by hostile lawsuits and media attacks—from ultra-right-wing groups spending unlimited money on anti-Clinton conspiracy theories—why ask for six more years in the Senate with a target painted on her back? It seemed quixotic and self-punishing, especially now that she had such great alternatives as creating her own foundation, and supporting female empowerment globally. Finally, I had to admit that the latter would have been my choice, not hers. If she was willing to face a degree of combat that I couldn’t even imagine, I should celebrate. As my own part of her Senate campaign, I began to invite Hillary Haters to the living room events where Hillary herself was fund-raising. To my surprise, all but a few turned around once they had spent time in her presence. This woman they had imagined as smart, cold, and calculating turned out to be smart, warm, and responsive. Instead of someone who excused a husband’s behavior, she was potentially, as one said, “a great girlfriend” who had their backs. They also saw her expertise. For instance, George Soros, the Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist, introduced her in his Manhattan living room by saying, “Hillary knows more about Eastern Europe than any other American.” After she was elected to the U.S. Senate on her own merits, she worked constructively, even with old enemies there, and was solidly reelected to a second term. I began to hear the first serious talk of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. By the time the election of 2008 was in the wind, she had a higher popularity rating than any other potential candidate, Republican or Democrat. Meanwhile, I knew from campaigning in Illinois with Voters for Choice that a young two-term state legislator named Barack Obama had helped defeat a bill designed to weaken Roe v. Wade there. But when I went to the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, I was as surprised as the rest of the country to watch his inspirational blockbuster of a speech. His rise was much more like a movement event than politics as usual. After his election to the U.S. Senate, Obama appeared at a living room fund-raiser in Manhattan to celebrate, and to help pay off his campaign debt. I watched as supporters urged him to disobey traditional rules for a freshman senator and refuse to follow the quiet example of the newly elected. He was reluctant, citing his need to learn and the power of the Bush presidency. I urged him, too. After all, everybody knew that George W. Bush would never have become president without his family, and everybody also knew that Obama had become senator against all odds.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The meeting had already begun. Round the cloth-covered table, at which Katavasov and Metrov seated themselves, there were some half-dozen persons, and one of these was bending close over a manuscript, reading something aloud. Levin sat down in one of the empty chairs that were standing round the table, and in a whisper asked a student sitting near what was being read. The student, eyeing Levin with displeasure, said: “Biography.” Though Levin was not interested in the biography, he could not help listening, and learned some new and interesting facts about the life of the distinguished man of science. When the reader had finished, the chairman thanked him and read some verses of the poet Ment sent him on the jubilee, and said a few words by way of thanks to the poet. Then Katavasov in his loud, ringing voice read his address on the scientific labors of the man whose jubilee was being kept. When Katavasov had finished, Levin looked at his watch, saw it was past one, and thought that there would not be time before the concert to read Metrov his book, and indeed, he did not now care to do so. During the reading he had thought over their conversation. He saw distinctly now that though Metrov’s ideas might perhaps have value, his own ideas had a value too, and their ideas could only be made clear and lead to something if each worked separately in his chosen path, and that nothing would be gained by putting their ideas together. And having made up his mind to refuse Metrov’s invitation, Levin went up to him at the end of the meeting. Metrov introduced Levin to the chairman, with whom he was talking of the political news. Metrov told the chairman what he had already told Levin, and Levin made the same remarks on his news that he had already made that morning, but for the sake of variety he expressed also a new opinion which had only just struck him. After that the conversation turned again on the university question. As Levin had already heard it all, he made haste to tell Metrov that he was sorry he could not take advantage of his invitation, took leave, and drove to Lvov’s. Chapter 4 Lvov, the husband of Natalia, Kitty’s sister, had spent all his life in foreign capitals, where he had been educated, and had been in the diplomatic service. During the previous year he had left the diplomatic service, not owing to any “unpleasantness” (he never had any “unpleasantness” with anyone), and was transferred to the department of the court of the palace in Moscow, in order to give his two boys the best education possible. In spite of the striking contrast in their habits and views and the fact that Lvov was older than Levin, they had seen a great deal of one another that winter, and had taken a great liking to each other.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and living on those blessings, like the children I did not understand them, and destroy, that is try to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the children when their mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me. “Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing taught by the church. “The church! the church!” Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river. “But can I believe in all the church teaches?” he thought, trying himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the church which had always seemed most strange and had always been a stumbling block to him. “The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The atonement?... “But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been told to me and all men.” And it seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith of the church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in goodness, as the one goal of man’s destiny. Under every article of faith of the church could be put the faith in the service of truth instead of one’s desires. And each doctrine did not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made it possible for each man and millions of different sorts of men, wise men and imbeciles, old men and children—all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and which alone is precious to us. Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. “Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. “What have I discovered?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over onto it. “What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered? “I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master. “Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?—Eternal evolution and struggle.... As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride,” he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them. “And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself. And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill. Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself. But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “According to my thought that cannot err, how just vengeance justly was avenged, hath set thee pondering;4 but I will speedily release thy mind; and do thou hearken, for my words shall make thee gift of an august pronouncement. Because he not endured for his own good a rein upon the power that wills,5 that man who ne’er was born, as he condemned himself, condemned his total offspring; wherefore the human race lay sick down there for many an age, in great error, till it pleased the Word of God to descend where he joined that nature which had gone astray from its Creator to himself, in person, by sole act of his eternal Love.6 Now turn thy sight to what I now discourse: This nature, so united to its Maker, as it was when created was unalloyed and good; but by its own self had it been exiled from Paradise, because it swerved from the way of truth, and from its proper life. As for the penalty, then, inflicted by the cross,—if it be measured by the Nature taken on, never did any other bite as justly;7 and, in like manner, ne’er was any so outrageous if we look to the Person who endured it, in whom this nature was contracted. So from one act issued effects apart; God and the Jews rejoiced in one same death; thereat shuddered the earth and heaven opened. No more, now, should it seem hard saying to thee that, just vengeance was afterward avenged by a just court. But now I see thy mind from thought to thought entangled in a knot, from which, with great desire, it release awaiteth. Thou sayest, Yea, what I hear I understand; but why God willed for our redemption this only mode, is hidden from me. This decree, my brother, is buried from the eyes of every one whose wit is not matured within love’s flame. But since this target much is aimed at, and discerned but little, I will declare why such mode was more worthy. The divine excellence, which spurns all envy from it, burning within itself shooteth such sparkles out as to display the eternal beauties.8 That which distilleth from it without mean,9 thereafter hath no end; because its imprint may not be removed when it hath stamped the seal. That which down raineth from it without mean, is all free,10 because not subject to the power of changing things. It is more close conformed to it, therefore more pleasing to it; for the sacred glow that rayeth over everything, in that most like itself is the most living. All these points of vantage hath the human creature, and should one fail, needs must it fall from its nobility. Sin only is the thing that doth disfranchise it,11 and maketh it unlike to the highest good, so that its light the less doth brighten it;

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Now I realized that for me, the road was permanent, and settling down was temporary. Traveling had created my nonroad life, not the other way around. Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn’t have to talk—and I had been both. Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the editors I’d been freelancing for were gigantically uninterested in the explosion of feminism across the country. I finally got angry enough and desperate enough to partner with a woman who was much braver than I, and to travel to campuses and community groups. Over time and far from home, I discovered something I might never otherwise have learned: people in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn’t possible on the page or screen. Gradually, I became the last thing on earth I would ever have imagined: a public speaker and a gatherer of groups. And this brought an even bigger reward: public listening. It was listening that taught me there would be readers for a national feminist magazine, no matter what publishing experts said. Up to then, I’d been a freelance writer who never wanted to work in an office or be responsible for anything other than my own rent. But because of what I learned on the road, I invited writers and editors to explore starting a feminist magazine that was devoted, in the words of the great Florynce Kennedy, “to making revolution, not just dinner.” When those women also said they had no place to publish what they cared about most, Ms. magazine was born. From then on, I came home to a magnetic office full of journalists and editors. Ms. gave me not only an added reason to go on the road, but a chosen family to return to after every trip, my pockets full of scribbled notes about new events. Altogether I might never have had the will or the way to do any of the things that matter most to me, had it not been for just being Out There. Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It’s right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present. —AS YOU CAN SEE, the first reason for this book is to share the most important, longest-running, yet least visible part of my life.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Plus I could see and hear his speech better on television. Also the press was full of dire warnings about too few people and failure, or too many people and violence. This march was being called too dangerous by a White House worried that it could turn off moderates in Congress who were needed to pass the Civil Rights Act, and too tame by Malcolm X, who said that asking for help from Washington was too needy, not self-sufficient, and unlikely to succeed. For all those reasons, I decided not to go to the march—right up until I found myself on my way. All I can say years later is: If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something. On that hot August day, I was just one person being carried slowly along in a sea of humanity. I washed up next to “Mrs. Greene with an e,” an older, plump woman wearing a straw hat, who was marching with her grown-up, elegant daughter. As Mrs. Greene explained, she had worked in Washington during the Truman administration, in the same big room as white clerks, but segregated behind a screen. She hadn’t been able to protest then, so she was protesting now. As we neared the Lincoln Memorial, she pointed out that the only woman seated on the speakers’ platform was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that had been doing the work of racial justice since the 1930s, yet even she hadn’t been asked to speak. Mrs. Greene wanted to know: Where is Ella Baker? She trained all those SNCC young people. What about Fannie Lou Hamer? She got beaten up in jail and sterilized in a Mississippi hospital when she went in for something else entirely. That’s what happens—we’re supposed to give birth to field hands when they need them, and not when they don’t. My grandmother was dirt poor and was paid seventy-five dollars for every live birth. The difference between her and Fannie Lou? Farm equipment. They didn’t need so many field hands anymore. These are black women’s stories, who will tell them? I hadn’t even noticed the absence of women speakers. Also I’d never thought about the racist reasons for controlling women’s bodies. I felt a gear click into place in my mind. It was like India, where high-caste women were sexually restricted and women at the bottom were sexually exploited. This march was magnetic because living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key. Mrs. Greene’s daughter rolled her eyes as her mother told me about complaining to their state delegation leader. He had countered that Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson were singing.3 Singing isn’t speaking, she told him in no uncertain terms. I was impressed.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  When corporate raider Carl Icahn took over TWA, he expected flight attendants to both take a pay cut and accept a work increase—unlike the (almost totally male) machinists and pilots. In 1986, flight attendant Vicki Frankovich led a strike of unprecedented length and unity—and campaigned for a public boycott of TWA because of its discrimination. Ms. magazine named her one of our Women of the Year. Icahn had the support of the pilots and machinists and more or less won, but he was forced to admit that the striking flight attendants had cost him $100 million.3 When I met him quite accidentally, I discovered he was furious about the Ms. article supporting Frankovich. He told me he didn’t discriminate against women. As proof, he said that if he needed one of his top male executives on a national holiday—and that executive spent the holiday with his family instead—he would fire him, too. I could see what flight attendants were up against. By then, I’d been flying so much and listening to so many that I had to resist saying we when I talked about job problems. I also began to get the other end of women’s stories whose first chapters I had seen on earlier flights. In the 1970s, on a flight to Milwaukee, for instance, a stewardess told me she resented feminists for saying that men could do her job, and that women could be pilots. “That isn’t the way the world works,” she said with energy. “You’re telling people to fight what’s in our nature and biology. You’re only making women discontent by telling them to do the impossible.” At the end of the 1980s, I ran into her again on a flight to Albuquerque. She was now the mother of two little girls, and giving out flight attendant’s pins and pilot’s wings to children on board—as airlines often do to welcome families—and offering either one to both boys and girls. She had discovered there were boys who liked her job of taking care of passengers, and girls who wanted to pilot the plane. What had changed her mind? Two things, she said. Because her airline finally had been forced to democratize its hiring, she worked with male flight attendants and realized they could do the job because “people are people.” Second, she had read that Whitney Young, the late civil rights leader, confessed to boarding a plane in Africa and feeling an involuntary moment of fear when he saw that the pilot was black. He realized how much self-hatred had been bred into him by a racist culture. “I also mistrusted myself and other women,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I learned that from my mother—but I’m not going to pass it on to my daughters.” When I last saw her, she was standing at the front of the plane, giving out pilot’s wings to two little girls. Some women were novels in themselves.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  He stayed in the hotel suite of actor and activist Ossie Davis, who spoke at the march, and made sure Dr. King knew he was there in support. But as his daughter explained, “He also knew his presence would have disrupted or split the focus—and he was a supporter of the big picture.” Somehow I found this little-known fact very moving. These two men seemed to be growing toward each other. Dr. King was becoming more radical by speaking out on issues like the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X was beginning to talk about a bloodless revolution. Some tragedies become more tragic. They might have become part of the same talking circle. III.Thanks to Mrs. Greene—and many others brave enough to stand up for themselves and other women—I began to understand that females were an out-group, too. That realization solved such mysteries as why the face of Congress was male but the face of welfare was female; why homemakers were called women who “don’t work,” though they worked longer, harder, and for less pay than any other class of worker; why women did 70 percent of the productive labor in the world, paid and unpaid, yet owned only 1 percent of the property; why masculinity meant leading and femininity meant following in the odd dance of daily life. More than ever, I found myself wanting to report on this new view of the world as if everyone mattered. But it was still the 1960s, and even my most open-minded editor explained that if he published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not—in order to be objective. I had retreated into writing profiles of Margot Fonteyn, the dancer I couldn’t be, or Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, and other authors I admired—which seemed as close as I would ever get to being an author myself. Then two women from a lecture bureau wrote to ask if I would speak to groups who had expressed curiosity about this new thing called women’s liberation. I’d recently written a piece for my column in New York magazine, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” It had been triggered by my own click of consciousness—namely, that I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I’d had years before. Like many women, I’d been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies. I was intrigued by the offer, but I had a big problem: I was terrified of public speaking. I’d so often canceled at the last minute when magazines booked me on television to publicize this or that article—as writers were often expected to do—that some shows had blacklisted me. Fortunately, I had a friend named Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneer of nonsexist, multiracial child care in New York, a fearless speaker, a mother, and a member of an extended black family in rural Georgia—all things I was not.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I’ve never tried to write about this way of life, not even when I was reporting on people and events along the way. It just seemed to have no category. I wasn’t on a Kerouac road trip, or rebelling before settling down, or even traveling for one cause. At first I was a journalist following stories, then a sometime worker in political campaigns and movements, and most consistently an itinerant feminist organizer. I became a person whose friends and hopes were as spread out as my life. It just felt natural that the one common element in that life was the road. When friends or reporters assumed that spending so much time away from home was a hardship, I often asked them to travel with me, hoping they would get as hooked as I was. Yet in all these years, only one took me up on it—for just three days.1 As decades passed, and the word still entered my life—as in “Oh, you’re still traveling”—it dawned on me that I’d been writing least about what I was doing most. So I sat down and began to make notes about many trips, past and present, that left me amazed by what is, angered by what isn’t, and hooked on what could be. As I looked through old date books and schedules, letters and abandoned journals, suddenly I was awash in a sense memory of my father going through his tattered road maps and address books, trying to figure out how much gas money he needed to get from here to there, where to find trailer parks that would shelter his wife and two daughters, and what roadside dealers might buy the small antiques which he sold and bartered as we made our way across the country. It was so vivid that I could sense our conspiratorial whispering as we tried not to wake my mother, who was asleep in this house trailer that was our home for most of each year. Until that moment, I would have sworn that I had rebelled against my father’s way of life. I created a home that I love and can retreat to, though he wanted no home at all. I’ve never borrowed a penny, though he was constantly in debt. I take planes and trains to group adventures, though he would spend a week driving cross-country alone rather than board a plane. Yet in the way that we rebel, only to find ourselves in the midst of the familiar, I realized there was a reason why the road felt like home. It had been exactly that for the evocative first decade of my life. I was my father’s daughter. I never imagined starting this book with my father’s life. Then I realized I had to. More discoveries followed. For instance, I always thought of my road life as temporary, assuming that one day I would grow up and settle down.