Sadness

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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Horrific as it may be for us to contemplate, infanticide is anything but a rarity, even today. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes studied contemporary infant deaths in northeast Brazil, where about 20 percent of infants die in their first year. She found that women consider the deaths of some children a “blessing” if the babies were lethargic and passive. Mothers told Scheper-Hughes they were “children who wanted to die, whose will to live was not sufficiently strong or developed.” Scheper-Hughes found that these children received less food and medical attention than their more vigorous siblings.6 Joseph Birdsell, one of the world’s greatest scholars of Australian Aboriginal culture, estimated that as many as half of all infants were intentionally destroyed. Various surveys of contemporary pre-industrial societies conclude that anywhere from half to three-quarters of them practice some form of direct infanticide. Lest we start feeling too smug in our compassion and superiority, recall the foundling hospitals of Europe. The number of babies delivered to near-certain death in France rose from 40,000 in 1784 to almost 140,000 by 1822. By 1830, there were 270 revolving boxes in French foundling hospital doors specially designed to protect the anonymity of those depositing unwanted infants. Eighty to 90 percent of these children are estimated to have died within a year of arrival. Once our ancestors began cultivating land for food, they were running on a wheel, but never fast enough. More land provides more food. And more food means more children born and fed. More children provide more help on the farm and more soldiers. But this population growth creates demand for more land, which can be won and held only through conquest and war. Put another way, the shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutable belief that it’s better to take strangers’ land (killing them if necessary) than to allow one’s own children to die of starvation. Closer to our own time, the BBC reports that as many as 15 percent of the reported deaths of female infants in parts of southern India are victims of infanticide. Millions more die in China, where female infanticide is prevalent, and has been for centuries. A late nineteenth–century missionary living in China reported that of 183 sons and 175 daughters born in a typical community, 126 of the sons lived to age ten (69 percent), while only 53 of the daughters made it that far (30 percent).7 China’s one-child policy, combined with the cultural preference for sons, has only worsened the already dismal odds of survival for female infants.8 There are also problematic cultural assumptions lurking within demographers’ calculations, in which life is assumed to begin at birth. This view is far from universal. Societies that practice infanticide don’t consider newborn infants full human beings. Rituals ranging from baptism to naming ceremonies are delayed until it is determined whether or not the child will be permitted to live. If not, from this perspective, the child was never fully alive anyway.9 Is 80 the New 30?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Marry me or I’ll leave you. And I was scared of losing him, and I wanted to get away from home, and I was graduating from college and didn’t know what the hell else to do—so I married him. We had no money to live on, really. My fellowship to graduate school, a small trust fund I couldn’t touch for several years, and a few rapidly falling stocks my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Brian had dropped out of graduate school in a fit of fury with the establishment, but now he found himself having to take a job. Our life changed radically. We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl into the bourgeois box. Our idyll was over. The long walks, the studying together, the lazy afternoons in bed—all these belonged to a golden age that had passed. Brian now spent his days (and most of his nights) toiling away in a small market-research firm where he sweated over the computers, anxiously awaiting their answers to such earthshaking questions as whether or not women who have had two years of college will buy more detergent than women who have graduated from college. He threw himself into market research with the same manic passion that he had for medieval history or anything else. He had to know everything; he had to work harder than anybody else, including his boss—who sold the business for several million dollars in cash not long after Brian checked into the psycho ward. The whole operation was later shown to be a fraud. But by that time, Brian’s boss was living in an old castle in Switzerland with a new young wife and Brian had been “certified.” For all his brilliance, Brian didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) what a con man his boss was. He often used to sit watching the computers until twelve o’clock at night. Meanwhile I sweated in the stacks of Butler Library writing a ridiculous thesis on dirty words in English poetry (or, as my uptight thesis adviser had titled it: “Sexual Slang in English Poetry of the Mid-eighteenth Century”). Even then I was a pedantic pornographer. Our marriage went from bad to worse. Brian stopped fucking me.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I dragged my albatross of a suitcase around the corner into the Rue de la Harpe (shades of Charlie’s girlfriend Sally) and surprisingly found a room in the first hotel I tried. The prices had gone up steeply since the last time I’d been there and I was given the last remaining room on the very top floor (a painfully long climb with that suitcase). The place was a fire-trap, I remarked to myself with masochistic pleasure, and the top floor was where I was most likely to be trapped. All sorts of images rushed into my mind: Zelda Fitzgerald dying in that asylum fire (I had just read a biography of her): the seedy hotel room in the movie Breathless; my father warning me gravely before my first unescorted trip to Europe at nineteen that he had seen Breathless and knew what happened to American girls in Europe; Bennett and I fighting bitterly in Paris five Christmases ago; Pia and I staying in this same hotel when we were both twenty-three; my first trip to Paris at thirteen (a posh suite at the Georges V with my parents and sisters, and all of us brushing our teeth with Perrier); my grandfather’s stories about living on bananas in Paris as a penniless art student; my mother dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said)…. I had been temporarily cheered by my luck in finding a place, but when I actually saw the room and realized I’d have to spend the night alone there, my heart sank. It was really half a room with a plywood partition across it (God knows what was on the other side) and a sagging single bed covered by a very dusty chintz spread. The walls were old striped wallpaper, very splotched and discolored. I pulled my suitcase in and closed the door. I fiddled awhile with the lock before being able to work it. Finally, I sank down on the bed and began to cry. I was conscious of wanting to cry passionately and without restraint, of wanting to weep a whole ocean of tears and drown. But even my tears were blocked. There was a peculiar knot in my stomach which kept making me think of Bennett. It was almost as if my navel was attached to his so that I couldn’t even lose myself in tears without wondering and worrying about him. Where was he? Couldn’t I even cry properly until I found him? The strangest thing about crying (perhaps this is a carryover from infancy) is that we never can cry wholeheartedly without a listener—or at least a potential listener. We don’t let ourselves cry as desperately as we might. Maybe we’re afraid to sink under the surface of the tears for fear there will be no one to save us. Or maybe tears are a form of communication—like speech—and require a listener.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father’s neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita’s smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone—to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. And I have a neat pendant to that little scene—also in a Beardsley setting. Lolita, who had been reading near the fire, stretched herself, and then inquired, her elbow up, with a grunt: “Where is she buried anyway?” “Who?” “Oh, you know, my murdered mummy.” “And you know where her grave is,” I said controlling myself, whereupon I named the cemetery—just outside Ramsdale, between the railway tracks and Lakeview Hill. “Moreover,” I added, “the tragedy of such an accident is somewhat cheapened by the epithet you saw fit to apply to it. If you really wish to triumph in your mind over the idea of death—” “Ray,” said Lo for hurray, and languidly left the room, and for a long while I stared with smarting eyes into the fire. Then I picked up her book. It was some trash for young people. There was a gloomy girl Marion, and there was her stepmother who turned out to be, against all expectations, a young, gay, understanding redhead who explained to Marion that Marion’s dead mother had really been a heroic woman since she had deliberately dissimulated her great love for Marion because she was dying, and did not want her child to miss her. I did not rush up to her room with cries. I always preferred the mental hygiene of noninterference. Now, squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions, it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self. When my mother, in a livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist (so I vividly imagined her), had run panting ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a thunderbolt, I was but an infant, and in retrospect no yearnings of the accepted kind could I ever graft upon any moment of my youth, no matter how savagely psychotherapists heckled me in my later periods of depression. But I admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead personal ignorance of universal emotions.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I swung onto the highway. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?” “Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.” 33 In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments— swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. C HAPTER 8 Star : the newspaper’s name was not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected. time leaks : spent with Quilty. For an index to his appearances, see Quilty, Clare . sly quip … Rigger : The Right Reverend Rigger (in some versions “Reverend MacTrigger”) figures in an old limerick that begins, “There was a right royal old nigger.” “His five hundred wives / Had the time of their lives,” and the rest is too obscene to appear here. But see Joyce’s Ulysses , where Bloom quotes it (1961 Random House ed., pp. 171–172). For a summary of Joyce allusions, see outspoken book: Ulysses . Arguseyed : “observant”; from the hundred-eyed monster of Greek mythology, who was set to watch Io, a maiden loved by Zeus. In Laughter in the Dark , Albinus meets his fatal love in the Argus cinema, where she is an usher (p. 22). “My back is Argus-eyed,” says the speaker in “An Evening of Russian Poetry” (see “Humbert Humbert” ). In Pale Fire , one of the aliases of the assassin Gradus is “d’Argus”; Hermann in Despair envisions “argus-eyed angels” (p. 101); the title character in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight “seems argus-eyed” (p. 95); Ada and Van dread “traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations” ( Ada , p. 425), and Van, in search of the nature and meaning of Time, drives an “Argus” car (p. 551). celebrated actress : an allusion to her resemblance to Marlene Dietrich; here . ne montrez pas vos zhambes : French; do not show your legs ( jambes phonetically spelled to indicate an American accent—a recollection of Charlotte; see ne montrez pas vos zhambes ). Edgar : in honor of Poe; see “Edgar”… “writer and explorer” and Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter .

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  There were printed programs, long speeches. People flew in from across the country to pay their respects. The pews in the university chapel were uncushioned, and the bones in my butt rocked against the hard wood. I sat beside my mother in the front row, trying to ignore her sighs and throat clearings. Her frosty lipstick was put on so thick it started melting down her chin. When the president of the university announced that the science department would establish a research fellowship in my father’s name, my mother let out a groan. I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common—a dead man whose last name we shared. Her hand was cold and bony, like my father’s had been on his deathbed just days earlier. An obvious foreshadowing to me now, but I didn’t think of that then. Less than a minute later, she let go of my hand to dig around in her purse for her little pillbox. I didn’t know exactly what she was taking that day—an upper, I thought. She kept her coat on in the chapel during the ceremony, fidgeted with her stockings, her hair, glanced back viciously at the crowded pews behind us each time she heard somebody sigh or sniffle or whisper. The hours felt interminable, waiting for everyone to arrive, sitting through the formal proceedings. My mother agreed. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whispered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors. When it was time for people to go up and say nice things about my father, she glared at the line forming up the central aisle. “They think they’re special now because they know someone who died.” She rolled her red, quick-roving eyes. “It makes them feel important. Egomaniacs.” Friends, colleagues, coworkers, loyal students spoke emotionally from the rostrum. The people wept. My mother squirmed. I could see our reflections in the gloss of the casket in front of us. We were both just pale, floating, jittery heads. I couldn’t sleep in Reva’s bed. It was a lost cause. I decided to take a shower. I got up and undressed and turned the water on with a squelch, watched the bathroom fill with steam. Since I’d started sleeping all the time, my body had gotten very thin. My muscles had turned soft. I still looked good in clothes, but naked I looked fragile, weird. Protruding ribs, wrinkles around my hips, loose skin around my abdomen. My collarbones jutted out. My knees looked huge.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I waited for Reva to confirm but she just dumped the armful of mail on the dining table, then took off her coat and draped it over the back of the sofa next to my fox fur. Two pelts. I thought of Ping Xi’s dead dogs again. A memory arose from one of my last days at Ducat: a rich gay Brazilian petting the stuffed poodle and telling Natasha he wanted “a coat just like this, with a hood.” My head hurt. “I’m thirsty,” I said, but it came out like I was just clearing my throat. “Huh?” The floor shifted slightly beneath my feet. I felt my way into the living room, my hand skimming the cool wall. Reva had made herself comfortable in the armchair already. I steadied myself, hands free, before staggering toward the sofa. “Well, it’s over,” Reva said, “It’s officially over.” “What is?” “With Ken!” Her bottom lip trembled. She crooked her finger under her nose, held her breath, then got up and came toward me, cornering me against the end of the sofa. I couldn’t move. I felt slightly ill watching her face turn red from lack of oxygen, holding in her sobs, then realized that I was holding my breath, too. I gasped, and Reva, mistaking this for an exclamation of compassionate woe, put her arms around me. She smelled like shampoo and perfume. She smelled like tequila. She smelled vaguely of French fries. She held me and shook and cried and snotted for a good minute. “You’re so skinny,” she said, between her sniffles. “No fair.” “I need to sit down,” I told her. “Get off.” She let me go. “Sorry,” she said and went into the bathroom to blow her nose. I lay down and turned to face the back of the sofa, snuggled against the fox and beaver furs. Maybe I could sleep now, I thought. I closed my eyes. I pictured the fox and the beaver, cozied up together in a little cave near a waterfall, the beaver’s buckteeth, its raspy snore, the perfect animal avatar for Reva. And me, the little white fox splayed out on its back, a bubble-gum pink tongue lolling out of its pristine, furry snout, impervious to the cold. I heard the toilet flush. “You’re out of toilet paper,” Reva said, rupturing the vision. I’d been wiping myself with napkins from the bodega for weeks—she must have realized that before. “I could really use a drink,” she huffed. Her heels clacked on the tile in the kitchen. “I’m sorry to come over like this. I’m such a mess right now.” “What is it, Reva?” I groaned. “Spit it out. I’m not feeling well.” I heard her open and close a few cabinets. Then she came back with a mug and sat down in the armchair and poured herself a cupful of gin.

• From Querelle (1953)

  himself, walked a few steps straight ahead, and, using his hands, scrambled back up the slope where the grass was singing. Some branches grazed against his cheeks· and hands : it was then that he felt a profound sadneSs, a longing for maternal caresses, because those thorny branches appeared gentle, velvety with the fog adhering to them, and they reminded him of the soft radiance of a woman's breast. A couple of seconds later he was back again on the path, then on the road, and he re-entered the 67 I QUERELLE city by a different gate from the one he had emerged from with the other sailor. Something seemed to be missing from his side. "It's dull, with no one to talk to." He smiled, but very faintly. He was leaving, back there in the fog, on the grass, a certain object, a small heap of calm and night emanating from an invisible and gentle dawn, an object, sacred or damned, waiting at the foot of the outer walls for permission to enter the city, after expiation, after the probationary period imposed for purification and humility. The corpse would have that boring face he knew, all its lines smoothed away. With long, supple strides, that same free and easy, slightly rolling gait that made people say "There's a_guy steps like an hombre," Querelle, his soul at peace, took the road leading to La Feria. That episode we wanted to present in slow motion. Our aim was not to horrify the reader, but to give the act of murder something of the quality of an animated cartoon-which in any case is exactly the art form we would most like to be able to use, to show the deformations of our protagonist's musculature and soul. In any case, and in order not to annoy the reader too much-and trusting him to complete, with his very own malaise, the contradictory and twisted windings of our own vision of the murder-there is a great deal we have left out. It would be easy to have the murderer experience a vision of his brother. Or to have him killed by his brother. Or to make him kill or condemn his brother. There are a great number of themes on which one might embr?ider some revolting tapestry like that. Nor do we want to go on about the secret and obscene desires inhabiting the one going to his death. Vic or Querelle, take your pick. We abandon the reader to this confusion of his innards. But let us consider this : after committing his first murder Querelle experienced a feeling of being dead, that is to say, of existing somewhere in the depths-more exactly, at the 68 I JEAN GENET

• From Querelle (1953)

  110 I JEAN GENET He smiled. He arched his back and his legs. Facing Roger, he knew himself to be a man. His hand let go. He did not come. That great ·sadness born of shame welled ·up once more, but Roger's smile was still there, responding to his own. ''Why'n the hell didn't I bust his jaw!" For a moment Gil dreamt that the power of his thought, being so obstinately aimed at the mason, might bother him, cause him trouble, drive him crazy. Roger would not be coming along now. It was too late. Even if he came, G'il would never see him in this dense fog. Almost sleepwalking, Gil stepped into a bistro. "Shot of brandy, please." The sight of the bottles provided diversion. He read the labels. "Another one." Drinking only red or white wine as a rule, Gil was not accus· tamed to hard liquor. "Another, please." He knocked back half a dozen in all. Little by little , an arrogant, vigorous lucidity began to dispel his confusion, his sadness, to dissipate the heavy atmosphere in which his brain had been breathing and '"Yhich he normally took to be that of "clear reasoning." He went outside again. Already he was able to think about his desire for Roger without ambiguity . . A couple of times he evoked the pale, matte inner surfaces of Paulette's thighs, but then arrived quickly at the boy's smile. Yet he was still dependent on Thea, the thought of whom became all the more aggravating as its power waned while refusing to be obliterated altogether. "That assholel" He was thinking about Roger as he walked on down toward Recouvrance. "It's that easy," he said to himself, vaguely musing over Thea's diminished stature. "I can make him disappear, whenever I want to." Tears were running down his cheeks. And now he saw quite

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  When people feel crappy on a regular basis, quite a few of them self-medicate. Thirty percent of all medications consumed in the United States are taken to manage some form of distress. For these sufferers, their predictions are regularly not calibrated to their bodies’ actual expenditures, likely because their brain is misestimating the cost. So they feel miserable and take medication, or they turn to alcohol or certain street drugs like opiates.3 That’s the bad news. What can you do, practically speaking, to keep your predictions calibrated and body budget balanced? I apologize if I suddenly sound like your mother, but the road begins with eating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep. I know, I know, it sounds mundane or even trite, but sadly there is no substitute, biologically speaking. A body budget, like a financial budget, is easier to maintain when you have a solid foundation. When you were a baby, your caretakers entirely managed your body budget. As you grew, they gradually transferred more and more responsibility for maintaining your budget to you. Today your friends and family might pitch in a little, but its nourishment is pretty much up to you. So to whatever extent you can, eat your greens, go easy on the refined sugars and bad fats and caffeine, work out vigorously and regularly, and get plenty of sleep.4 This advice might seem impossible without significant changes in the structure and habits of your life. For some people, the difficulty comes in resisting junk food and excessive TV time and other temptations of mainstream culture. Other people who struggle to make ends meet, who have to choose between eating and paying the bills, might not have the luxury of making lifestyle changes. But please do what you can. The science is crystal clear on healthful food, regular exercise, and sleep as prerequisites for a balanced body budget and a healthy emotional life. A chronically taxed body budget increases your chances of developing a host of different illnesses, as we’ll see in the next chapter. A next line of attack is to modify your physical comfort if you can. Try a massage from a lover, a close friend, or a paid massage therapist (if you can afford it). Human touch is good for your health—it improves your body budget by way of your interoceptive network. Massage is especially helpful after vigorous exercise. It limits inflammation and promotes faster healing of the tiny tears in muscle tissue that result from exercise, which you might otherwise experience as unpleasant.5

• From Querelle (1953)

  It so happened that Mario had not told Querelle that he had taken care to tell Nono all about the new developments. Thus, all Querelle had to do was to satisfy his lust for revenge� Madame Lysiane undressed more slowly. The sailor's apparent ardor thrilled her. She was even naive enough to believe that she herself was its object. She was hoping that even before she was quite naked, the impatient, already glittering faun wo�ld charge out of the shrubbery to tumble her over on her back in a Burry of tom lace. Querelle lay down close beside her. At last he had an occasion to affirm his virility and to make his brother appear ridiculous. And Madame Lysiane had the painful experi- 269 I QUERELLE ence of realizing that it was thanks to Querelle that she, like l\1ario and like Norbert, had emerged from her solitude, into which his departure would again plunge all of them. He had appeared among them with the suddenness and elegance of the joker in a pack. He scrambled the pattern, yet gave it meaning. As for Querelle, he experienced a strange sensation as he left Madame Lysiane's room : he was sorry to leave her. While he was putting on his clothes again, slowly, a little sadly, his gaze came to rest on the photograph of Nona that hung in a frame on the wall. One after another he saw his friends' faces pass : Nona, Robert, Mario, Gil. He felt a kind of melancholy, a hardly conscious fear that they would not grow much older without him; vaguely, and lulled almost to the point of sickening by �1adame Lysiane's sighs as she stood dressing herself with those overemphatic gestures he could observe in the mirror on the wardrobe door, he wished he were able to drag them all down into murder, to fix them there, so that they would nevermore experience love elsewhere or otherwise, only through him.

• From Querelle (1953)

  extraordinary tenderness; and that more often than not toward evening, when the gang was getting ready to leave. Theo would be scouring his hands with a little soft sand, and then he would straighten his back to take a good look at the work in progress: at the rising wall, at the discarded trowels, the planks, the wheelbarrows, the buckets. Over all these, and over the workmen, a gray, impalpable dust was settling, turning the yard into a single object, seemingly finished, the result of the day's commotion. The peace of the evening appeared due to this achievement, a deserted yard, powdered a uniform gray. Stiff after their day's work, worn out and silent, the masons would drift off with slow, almost funereal steps. None of them were more than forty years old. Tired, kit bag over left shoulder, right hand in pants pocket, they were leaving the day for the night. Their belts uneasily held up pants made for suspenders; every ten meters they would give them a hitch, tucking the front under the belt while letting the back gape wide, always showing that little triangular flap and its two buttons intended for fastening to a pair of suspenders. In this sluggish calm they would return to their quarters. None of them would be going to the girls or the bistro before Saturday, but, once abed and at peace, they would let their manhood take its rest and under the sheets store up its black forces and white juices; would go to sleep on their side and pass a dreamless night, one bare ann with its powder-dusted hand stretched out over the edge of the bed, showing the delicate pulsation of the blood in bluish veins. Theo would trail along beside Gil. Every evening he offered him a cigarette before setting out to catch up with the others, and sometimes-and then his expression would change -he would give him a great slap on the shoulder. "Weii, buddy? How's it going?" Gil would reply with his usual, noncommittal shrug. He would barely manage a smile. On the bolster, Gil felt his cheek grow hot. He had lain there with his eyes wide open, and by reason of his ever increasing need to empty his bladder, his 46 I JEAN GENET anger was aggravated by impatience. The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they d�w their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them.

• From Querelle (1953)

  66 I JEAN GENET to be an .. incident" in the courtroom. His lawyer rose to speak. Querelle wanted to lose consciousness for a moment, to take refuge in the droning in his ears. He felt he ought to delay the closing scene. Finally, the Court reconvened. Querelle felt himself grow pale . .. The Court pronounces the death sentence." Everything around him disappeared. He himself and the trees shrunk, and he was astonished to find that he was wan and weak with this new tum of events, just as startled as we are when we learn that Weidmann was not a giant who could tower above the tops of cedar trees, but a rather timid young man of waxen and pimply complexion, standing only 1.70 meters tall among the husky police officers. Ail Querelle was conscious of was his terrible misfortune of being certifiably alive, and of the loud buzzing in his ears. Quereiie shivered. His shoulders were getting a little cold, as were his thighs and feet. He was standing at the base of the tree, beret in hand, packe·t of opium under his arm, protected by the th ick cloth uniform and the stiff collar of his peacoat. He put on his beret. In some indefinite way he sensed that all was not yet finished. He still had to accomplish the last formality: his own execution. 44Gotta do it, I guess!" Saying "sensed," we intend to convey the kind of premoni tion one celebrated murderer, a short while after his apparently totally unexpected arrest, meant when he told the judge: "I sensed that I was about to be nabbed ... " Querelle shook him self, walked a few steps straight ahead, and, using his hands, scrambled back up the slope where the grass was singing. Some branches grazed against his cheeks· and hands: it was then that he felt a profound sadneSs, a longing for maternal caresses, because those thorny branches appeared gentle, velvety with the fog adhering to them, and they reminded him of the soft radiance of a woman's breast. A couple of seconds later he was back again on the path, then on the road, and he re-entered the

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But just a year after Jemmy, York, and Fuegia had been returned to their people at Woollya cove, near the base of what is now called Mount Darwin, the Beagle and her crew returned to find the huts and gardens the British sailors had built for the three Fuegians deserted and overgrown. Eventually, Jemmy appeared and explained that he and the other Christianized Fuegians had reverted to their former way of living. Darwin, overcome with sadness, wrote in his journal that he’d never seen “so complete & grievous a change” and that “it was painful to behold him.” They brought Jemmy aboard the ship and dressed him for dinner at the captain’s table, much relieved to see that he at least remembered how to use a knife and fork properly. Captain FitzRoy offered to bring him back to England, but Jemmy declined, saying he had “not the least wish to return to England” as he was “happy and contented” with “plenty fruits,” “plenty fish,” and “plenty birdies.” Remember the Yucatán. What looks like even extreme poverty—“the bottom of the scale of human beings”—may contain unrecognizable forms of wealth. Recall the “starving” Australian Aboriginal people, happily roasting low-fat rats and noshing on juicy grubs as revolted Englishmen looked on, certain they were witnessing the last demented spasms of starvation. When we start detribalizing—peeling away the cultural conditioning that distorts our vision—“wealth” and “poverty” may reveal themselves where we least expect to find them.24 CHAPTER TWELVEThe Selfish Meme (Nasty?)Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, coined the term meme to refer to a unit of information that can spread through a community via learning or imitation the way a favored gene is replicated through reproduction. Just as egalitarianism and resource-and risk-sharing memes were favored in the prehistoric environment, the selfishness meme has flourished in most of the post-agricultural world. Even so, no less an authority on economics than Adam Smith insisted that sympathy and compassion come to human beings as naturally as self-interest.1 The faulty assumption that scarcity-based economic thinking is somehow the de-facto human approach to questions of supply, demand, and distribution of wealth has misled much anthropological, philosophical, and economic thought over the past few centuries. As economist John Gowdy explains, ‘“Rational economic behavior’ is peculiar to market capitalism and is an embedded set of beliefs, not an objective universal law of nature. The myth of economic man explains the organizing principle of contemporary capitalism, nothing more or less.”2 Homo Economicus We have a greed, with which we have agreed… “Society,” by EDDIE VEDDER

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  And it’s the residue of a childhood lived under the daily threat of thermonuclear war. That’s another reason not to be nostalgic about a 1950s boyhood. What has changed in Lakewood since 1996 ? I see the distance between the past and present in my town widening more, and more of the claims of the past resisted. The original residents of the 1950s are now the city’s “frail elderly.” As their role in my town diminishes, something tangible in our lives together is passing away. My suburb isn’t perfect. It isn’t a paradise or a utopia. Its failures as a place are corrected by those living here, and some of that involvement is harder to find. Life is more distracting now and coarser in some ways and less convivial. Making up what my town lacks takes even more effort than it did in the 1950s. But a large number of people still make the attempt. Those who do are increasingly men and women of color, just as the members of my parish church are. My community today is about as diverse as all of southern California is, meaning my suburb is one of the more ethnically and racially diverse places in the nation. My neighborhood has become somewhat younger. Many of its retired residents have left to return “home” to the Midwest and Border South communities they gave up to make a life in southern California. Some have moved to the new suburbs of Los Angeles, which are now Las Vegas and Phoenix. If I were writing Holy Land today, these changes would be essential to the story, but I’d also note that ethnic and generational differences haven’t screened my new neighbors from the influences of the past. They seem to have acquired enough of the habits built into this suburb that make a dignified life possible. Can you describe your daily life today ? I can’t think of anything more ordinary. It’s exactly as described in Holy Land . The pedestrian and the sacred are both there. I still live alone. Critics —and they are many —describe lives of forced conformity and anonymity in the suburbs. Doesn’t conformity and anonymity dishonor the value of individuals and create a society that is neither healthy nor particularly creative ? Everyday life is mostly anonymous and unremembered wherever it’s lived. We’re always looking for a human-scale solution to an American problem: reconciling the autonomy of individuals and the shared obligations of a community. American places—from urban high-rises to “off-the-grid” rural escapes—offer a range of solutions, none of them completely satisfying and each requiring something that might be called conformity. Some of these American places are more benign than others, and some of them are suburban. Those critics have called suburban life “stratified, anesthetized, and standardized.” How do you understand that criticism ? Americans are always anxious about the ways we house ourselves.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Our bodies echo the same story. The human male has testicles far larger than any monogamous primate would ever need, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve stand-by sperm cells for multiple ejaculations. He also sports the longest, thickest penis found on any primate on the planet, as well as an embarrassing tendency to reach orgasm too quickly. Women’s pendulous breasts (utterly unnecessary for breastfeeding children), impossible-to-ignore cries of delight (female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard-carrying crowd), and capacity for orgasm after orgasm all support this vision of prehistoric promiscuity. Each of these points is a major snag in the standard narrative. Once people were farming the same land season after season, private property quickly replaced communal ownership as the modus operandi in most societies. For nomadic foragers, personal property—anything needing to be carried—is kept to a minimum, for obvious reasons. There is little thought given to who owns the land, or the fish in the river, or the clouds in the sky. Men (and often, women) confront danger together. An individual male’s parental investment, in other words—the core element of the standard narrative—tends to be diffuse in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one particular woman and her children, as the conventional model insists. [image file=image_rsrc67X.jpg] But when people began living in settled agricultural communities, social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably. Suddenly it became crucially important to know where your field ended and your neighbor’s began. Remember the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s.” Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves, perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who went from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies to becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend, along with his house, slaves, and livestock.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  And it’s the residue of a childhood lived under the daily threat of thermonuclear war. That’s another reason not to be nostalgic about a 1950s boyhood. What has changed in Lakewood since 1996 ? I see the distance between the past and present in my town widening more, and more of the claims of the past resisted. The original residents of the 1950s are now the city’s “frail elderly.” As their role in my town diminishes, something tangible in our lives together is passing away. My suburb isn’t perfect. It isn’t a paradise or a utopia. Its failures as a place are corrected by those living here, and some of that involvement is harder to find. Life is more distracting now and coarser in some ways and less convivial. Making up what my town lacks takes even more effort than it did in the 1950s. But a large number of people still make the attempt. Those who do are increasingly men and women of color, just as the members of my parish church are. My community today is about as diverse as all of southern California is, meaning my suburb is one of the more ethnically and racially diverse places in the nation. My neighborhood has become somewhat younger. Many of its retired residents have left to return “home” to the Midwest and Border South communities they gave up to make a life in southern California. Some have moved to the new suburbs of Los Angeles, which are now Las Vegas and Phoenix. If I were writing Holy Land today, these changes would be essential to the story, but I’d also note that ethnic and generational differences haven’t screened my new neighbors from the influences of the past. They seem to have acquired enough of the habits built into this suburb that make a dignified life possible. Can you describe your daily life today ? I can’t think of anything more ordinary. It’s exactly as described in Holy Land . The pedestrian and the sacred are both there. I still live alone. Critics —and they are many —describe lives of forced conformity and anonymity in the suburbs. Doesn’t conformity and anonymity dishonor the value of individuals and create a society that is neither healthy nor particularly creative ? Everyday life is mostly anonymous and unremembered wherever it’s lived. We’re always looking for a human-scale solution to an American problem: reconciling the autonomy of individuals and the shared obligations of a community. American places—from urban high-rises to “off-the-grid” rural escapes—offer a range of solutions, none of them completely satisfying and each requiring something that might be called conformity. Some of these American places are more benign than others, and some of them are suburban. Those critics have called suburban life “stratified, anesthetized, and standardized.” How do you understand that criticism ? Americans are always anxious about the ways we house ourselves.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Kitty felt how distasteful her father’s warmth was to Levin after what had happened. She saw, too, how coldly her father responded at last to Vronsky’s bow, and how Vronsky looked with amiable perplexity at her father, as though trying and failing to understand how and why anyone could be hostilely disposed towards him, and she flushed. “Prince, let us have Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said Countess Nordston; “we want to try an experiment.” “What experiment? Table-turning? Well, you must excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but to my mind it is better fun to play the ring game,” said the old prince, looking at Vronsky, and guessing that it had been his suggestion. “There’s some sense in that, anyway.” Vronsky looked wonderingly at the prince with his resolute eyes, and, with a faint smile, began immediately talking to Countess Nordston of the great ball that was to come off next week. “I hope you will be there?” he said to Kitty. As soon as the old prince turned away from him, Levin went out unnoticed, and the last impression he carried away with him of that evening was the smiling, happy face of Kitty answering Vronsky’s inquiry about the ball. Chapter 15 At the end of the evening Kitty told her mother of her conversation with Levin, and in spite of all the pity she felt for Levin, she was glad at the thought that she had received an _offer_. She had no doubt that she had acted rightly. But after she had gone to bed, for a long while she could not sleep. One impression pursued her relentlessly. It was Levin’s face, with his scowling brows, and his kind eyes looking out in dark dejection below them, as he stood listening to her father, and glancing at her and at Vronsky. And she felt so sorry for him that tears came into her eyes. But immediately she thought of the man for whom she had given him up. She vividly recalled his manly, resolute face, his noble self-possession, and the good nature conspicuous in everything towards everyone. She remembered the love for her of the man she loved, and once more all was gladness in her soul, and she lay on the pillow, smiling with happiness. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry; but what could I do? It’s not my fault,” she said to herself; but an inner voice told her something else. Whether she felt remorse at having won Levin’s love, or at having refused him, she did not know. But her happiness was poisoned by doubts. “Lord, have pity on us; Lord, have pity on us; Lord, have pity on us!” she repeated to herself, till she fell asleep. Meanwhile there took place below, in the prince’s little library, one of the scenes so often repeated between the parents on account of their favorite daughter.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Dolly could not help sighing. Her dearest friend, her sister, was going away. And her life was not a cheerful one. Her relations with Stepan Arkadyevitch after their reconciliation had become humiliating. The union Anna had cemented turned out to be of no solid character, and family harmony was breaking down again at the same point. There had been nothing definite, but Stepan Arkadyevitch was hardly ever at home; money, too, was hardly ever forthcoming, and Dolly was continually tortured by suspicions of infidelity, which she tried to dismiss, dreading the agonies of jealousy she had been through already. The first onslaught of jealousy, once lived through, could never come back again, and even the discovery of infidelities could never now affect her as it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean breaking up family habits, and she let herself be deceived, despising him and still more herself, for the weakness. Besides this, the care of her large family was a constant worry to her: first, the nursing of her young baby did not go well, then the nurse had gone away, now one of the children had fallen ill. “Well, how are all of you?” asked her mother. “Ah, mamma, we have plenty of troubles of our own. Lili is ill, and I’m afraid it’s scarlatina. I have come here now to hear about Kitty, and then I shall shut myself up entirely, if—God forbid—it should be scarlatina.” The old prince too had come in from his study after the doctor’s departure, and after presenting his cheek to Dolly, and saying a few words to her, he turned to his wife: “How have you settled it? you’re going? Well, and what do you mean to do with me?” “I suppose you had better stay here, Alexander,” said his wife. “That’s as you like.” “Mamma, why shouldn’t father come with us?” said Kitty. “It would be nicer for him and for us too.” The old prince got up and stroked Kitty’s hair. She lifted her head and looked at him with a forced smile. It always seemed to her that he understood her better than anyone in the family, though he did not say much about her. Being the youngest, she was her father’s favorite, and she fancied that his love gave him insight. When now her glance met his blue kindly eyes looking intently at her, it seemed to her that he saw right through her, and understood all that was not good that was passing within her. Reddening, she stretched out towards him expecting a kiss, but he only patted her hair and said: “These stupid chignons! There’s no getting at the real daughter. One simply strokes the bristles of dead women. Well, Dolinka,” he turned to his elder daughter, “what’s your young buck about, hey?” “Nothing, father,” answered Dolly, understanding that her husband was meant. “He’s always out; I scarcely ever see him,” she could not resist adding with a sarcastic smile.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Kitty, too, did not come, sending a note that she had a headache. Dolly and Anna dined alone with the children and the English governess. Whether it was that the children were fickle, or that they had acute senses, and felt that Anna was quite different that day from what she had been when they had taken such a fancy to her, that she was not now interested in them,—but they had abruptly dropped their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent that she was going away. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, put down her accounts, and packed. Altogether Dolly fancied she was not in a placid state of mind, but in that worried mood, which Dolly knew well with herself, and which does not come without cause, and for the most part covers dissatisfaction with self. After dinner, Anna went up to her room to dress, and Dolly followed her. “How queer you are today!” Dolly said to her. “I? Do you think so? I’m not queer, but I’m nasty. I am like that sometimes. I keep feeling as if I could cry. It’s very stupid, but it’ll pass off,” said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over a tiny bag in which she was packing a nightcap and some cambric handkerchiefs. Her eyes were particularly bright, and were continually swimming with tears. “In the same way I didn’t want to leave Petersburg, and now I don’t want to go away from here.” “You came here and did a good deed,” said Dolly, looking intently at her. Anna looked at her with eyes wet with tears. “Don’t say that, Dolly. I’ve done nothing, and could do nothing. I often wonder why people are all in league to spoil me. What have I done, and what could I do? In your heart there was found love enough to forgive....” “If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened! How happy you are, Anna!” said Dolly. “Everything is clear and good in your heart.” “Every heart has its own _skeletons_, as the English say.” “You have no sort of _skeleton_, have you? Everything is so clear in you.” “I have!” said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a sly, ironical smile curved her lips. “Come, he’s amusing, anyway, your _skeleton_, and not depressing,” said Dolly, smiling. “No, he’s depressing. Do you know why I’m going today instead of tomorrow? It’s a confession that weighs on me; I want to make it to you,” said Anna, letting herself drop definitely into an armchair, and looking straight into Dolly’s face. And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears, up to the curly black ringlets on her neck.