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 The Divine Comedy (1950)

  6. Probably Celestine V, who was elected Pope in 1204, at the age of eighty, and resigned five months later in favour of Boniface VIII: this latter circumstance is in itself sufficient to account for Dante’s wrath. Objections may be raised against this interpretation; but the other names suggested (such as Esau, or Vieri de’ Cerchi, chief of the Florentine Whites) are even less satisfactory. C A N T O I VDante is roused by a heavy thunder, and finds himself on the brink of the Abyss. Not in his own strength has he crossed the dismal river. Virgil conducts him into Limbo, which is the First Circle of Hell, and contains the spirits of those who lived without Baptism or Christianity. The only pain they suffer is, that they live in the desire and without the hope of seeing God. Their sighs cause the eternal air to tremble, and there is no other audible lamentation amongst them. As Dante and Virgil go on, they reach a hemisphere of light amid the darkness, and are met by Homer and other Poets, and conducted into a Noble Castle, in which they see the most distinguished of the Heathen women, statesmen, sages, and warriors. Homer and the other Poets quit them; and they go on to a place of total darkness. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] A HEAVY thunder broke the deep sleep in my head; so that I started like one who is awaked by force; and, having risen erect, I moved my rested eyes around, and looked steadfastly to know the place in which I was. True is it, that I found myself upon the brink of the dolorous Valley of the Abyss, which gathers thunder of endless wailings. It was so dark, profound, and cloudy, that, with fixing my look upon the bottom, I there discerned nothing. “Now let us descend into the blind world here below,” began the Poet all pale; “I will be first, and thou shalt be second.” And I, who had remarked his colour, said: “How shall I come, when thou fearest, who are wont to be my strength in doubt?” And he to me: “The anguish of the people who are here below, on my face depaints that pity, which thou takest for fear. Let us go; for the length of way impels us.” Thus he entered, and made me enter, into the first circle that girds the abyss. Here there was no plaint, that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the eternal air to tremble; and this arose from the sadness, without torment, of the crowds that were many and great, both of children, and of women and men. The good Master to me: “Thou askest not what spirits are these thou seest? I wish thee to know, before thou goest farther, that they sinned not; and though they have merit, it suffices not: for they had not Baptism, which is the portal of the faith that thou believest;

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Food, beer, and wine are more expensive here than in town, and each song on the jukebox costs a dollar. Pay is docked for everything, even the cross-country bus rides that bring workers to this seasonal job. That’s why Mitch has been collecting used clothing, bedding, and food from the community. We distribute all we have to workers Mitch knows—mostly single black men from the South and a few Puerto Rican families—under the watchful eyes of labor bosses, who lean back in their chairs at a distance. He explains that migrant workers around here pick every kind of vegetable, fruit, herb, and flower in a billion-dollar agribusiness. This camp is focused on harvesting, washing, and bagging the potatoes for which Long Island is famous. Workers board trucks at dawn, work all day, and are trucked back to this camp at dusk. Without cash or a car, they haven’t seen any other place on this island, not a bar or a church or a beach. They might as well be in a foreign country. Later, when the elderly George Catalan sees these camps, he says they look worse than the barracks in California where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II, and that now house migrant farmworkers. I think these camps also look worse than those in The Grapes of Wrath . There are no white workers or even gang bosses, and definitely no role for Henry Fonda. As my mother said, for some people, the Depression never ends. After more efforts by Mitch to distribute donated food and clothes, he is arrested for being in the same car with a gun, though it’s not his gun and its owner is not arrested. Some of the Long Island police have been recruited from the Deep South. I make bail for him, but I’m not surprised when, a week later, he calls me from Canada. I know he will be the same activist there as he was here, and will live a fine life, but this country has lost a great heart. I will never again believe that secrets can’t be hidden in the places we think we know best. —IN THE FOUR DECADES after Marion comes to sleep on my couch, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and other advocates raise national consciousness as well as local labor standards. They gradually make the plight of migrant farmworkers less of a secret. On the other hand, hostility to undocumented workers keeps growing as their numbers increase, and as they move into southern and midwestern states to take up the slack in restaurant work, construction, landscaping, child and elder care, and more. I don’t have to tell you that ever since the terrorism panic of 9/11, some Americans’ fear of foreigners just keeps increasing. Even though the number of immigrant workers falls as the mortgage bubble bursts and triggers the Great Recession, this fear goes on. In Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia, laws are passed barring undocumented immigrants from schools, housing, and even hospitals.

• From Querelle (1953)

  100 I JEAN GENET and frosty voice; in short, in everything which led people to refer to him as a "berserker''-aii of that smouldering rancor was now wounded to the quick, and it almost brought tears to his -eyes. The others had attacked it so fiercely that it melted, became soft and tepid, pitiful, ready to expire. From his toes to the rims of hi s dry eyes, Gil's body was shaken by deep sobs, and these destroyed ail remaining traces of cruelty. His need to urinate became more and more imperative. It turned ail of Gil's attention to his bladder. But in order to reach the latrine he would have to get up and cross the room, the room he imagined was bristling with sneers and jeers. He remained stretched out, thinking only. of hi s violent physical need. Finaiiy he decided to '1ive with shame." Pushing back the bedsheets he already felt · the inadequacy of his gestures. His wrist moved o ver the folds without his hand clutching them-as it was not permitted to make a fist-looking like some humble Christian brow, a miser able sinner showing only his ashen gray neck, unworthy of any brightness. Humbly Gil raised his head, without looking around, hesitantly gathered up his socks and put them on, taking care not to expose his legs. The door across from him suddenly opened. Gil did not raise his eyes. " 'Tain't too warm out there, boys." It was the voice of Theo who had just come in. He went over to the stove where a saucepan fuii of water was heating. "Is this going to be soup? Not much in it!" "That's not for soup. 'That's for shaving," someone told him. "Oh. I'm sorry, my mistake." And, with a faint note of resentment in his voice, he went on: "But it's true, you can't really spoil soup by putting too much in. But I guess we'll have to tighten our belts-dunno why, but there just don't seem to be any vegetables these days." Gil blushed as he heard the sound of four or five snickers. One of the younger masons took him up: "That's because you haven't really been lqokin'."

• 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)

  95 I QUERELLE Querelle! All the Querelles of the Fighting Navy! Beautiful sailors, you taste sweet, like wild oats. A reception on board. The deck is decorated with green plants, red carpet. Crewmen, aU in white, come and go. QuereJle looks indifferent. I observe him without his seeing me. He stands th ere, hands in pockets, leaning back a little, his neck thrust fonvard like that of the bull (or is it a tiger? a lion?) on the Assyr ian bas relief, its Bank pierced by an arrow. The festivities mean nothing to him. He's whistling, smiling. Querelle hauling a heavy launch to the quayside; four crew me n are pulling on the rope, expanding their chests with the effort, the rope passed over their left shoulders, but Quereile fa ces the other way. He pulls walking backwards. I'm sure he does it to avoid looking like a dray-beast. He noticed that I was looking at him. I had to take my eyes off his. Beauty of Querelle's feet. His bare feet. He plants them furn1y on the deck. His strides are wide and long. Despite his smile, Querelle's face is sad. It makes me think of the sadness of a handsome boy, very strong, very manly, who has been caught like a kid but on a grave charge, and who now sits in the pris oner's booth, crushed by th e severity of his sentence. In spite of his smile, his good looks, his insolence, the radiant vigor of his body, his boldness, Querelle seems to be branded with the in describable brand of some profound humilia tion. This morning he appeared quite washed out. His eyes looked tired. Qu ere11e lay sleeping on the deck in the sun. Stood and looked down at him. My face, it dove down and submerged in his; and

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “O thou, who through this Hell art led,” he said to me, “recognize me if thou mavest; thou wast made before I was unmade.” And I to him: “The anguish which thou hast, perhaps withdraws thee from my memory, so that it seems not as if I ever saw thee. But tell me who art thou, that art put in such a doleful place, and in such punishment; that, though other may be greater, none is so displeasing.” And he to me: “Thy city, which is so full of envy that the sack already overflows, contained me in the clear life. “You, citizens, called me Gacco; for the baneful crime of gluttony, as thou seest, I languish in the rain; and I, wretched spirit, am not alone, since all these for like crime are in like punishment”; and more he said not. I answered him: “Ciacco, thy sore distress weighs upon me so, that it bids me weep; but tell me if thou canst, what the citizens of the divided city shall come to? 2 if any one in it be just; and tell me the reason why such discord has assailed it.” And he to me: “After long contention, they shall come to blood, and the party of the woods shall expel the other with much offence 3 Then it behoves this to fall within three suns, and the other to prevail through the force of one who now keeps tacking. It shall carry its front high for a long time, 4 keeping the other under heavy burdens, however it may weep thereat and be ashamed. Two 5 are just; but are not listened to there; Pride, Envy, and Avarice are the three sparks which have set the hearts of all on fire.” Here he ended the lamentable sound. And I to him: “Still I wish thee to instruct me, and to bestow a little further speech on me. Farinata and Tegghiaio, who were so worthy; Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo and Mosca, and the rest who set their minds on doing good; 6 tell me where they are, and give me to know them: for great desire urges me to learn whether Heaven soothes or Hell empoisons them.” And he to me: “They are amongst the blackest spirits; a different crime weighs them downwards to the bottom; shouldst thou descend so far, thou mayest see them. But when thou shalt be in the sweet world, I pray thee recall me to the memory of men; more I tell thee not, and more I answer not.” Therewith he writhed his straight eyes asquint; looked at me a little; then bent his head, and fell down with it like his blind companions.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X From the arch of the bridge, to which his Guide has carried him, Dante now sees the Diviners, Augurs, Sorcerers, &c., coming slowly along the bottom of the Fourth Chasm. By help of their incantations and evil agents, they had endeavoured to pry into the Future which belongs to the Almighty alone, interfering with His secret decrees; and now their faces are painfully twisted the contrary way; and, being unable to look before them, they are forced to walk backwards. The first that Virgil names is Amphiaräus; then Tiresias the Theban prophet, Aruns the Tuscan. Next comes Manto, daughter of Tiresias; on seeing whom, Virgil relates the origin of Mantua his native city. Afterwards he rapidly points out Eurypylus, the Grecian augur; Michael Scott, the great magician, witty slender loins (possibly from his northern dress); Guido Bonatti of Forlì; Asdente, shoemaker of Parma, who left his leather and his awls to practise divination; and the wretched women who wrought malicious witchcraft with their herbs and waxen images. And now the Moon is setting in the western sea; time presses, and the Poets hasten to the next chasm. OF NEW punishment behoves me to make verses, and give matter for the twentieth canto of the first canzone, which concerns the sunken. I now was all prepared to look into the depth discovered to me, which was bathed with tears of anguish; and through the circular valley I saw a people coming silent and weeping, at the pace which the Litanies 1 make in this world. When my sight descended lower on them, each seemed wondrously distorted, between the chin and the commencement of the chest: for the face was turned towards the loins; and they had to come backward, for to look before them was denied. Perhaps by force of palsy some have been thus quite distorted; but I have not seen, nor do believe it to be so. Reader, so God grant thee to take profit of thy reading, now think for thyself how I could keep my visage dry, when near at hand I saw our image so contorted, that the weeping of the eyes bathed the hinder parts at their division? Certainly I wept, leaning on one of the rocks of the hard cliff, so that my Escort said to me: “Art thou, too, like the other fools? Here pity lives when it is altogether dead. Who more impious than he that sorrows at God’s judgment? Raise up thy head, raise up, and see him for whom the earth opened herself before the eyes of the Thebans, whereat they all cried, ‘Whither rushest thou, Amphiaräus? 2 Why leavest thou the war?’ And he ceased not rushing headlong down to Minos, who lays hold on every sinner. Mark how he has made a breast of his shoulders: because he wished to see too far before him, he now looks behind and goes backward.

• From Querelle (1953)

  35 I QUERELLE attitude that does not boil down to a simple matter of choice. Let us consider his characteristic manner of walking. Querelle grew up among hoodlums, and that is a world of most studied attitudes, round about the age of fifteen-when you roll your shoulders quite ostentatiously, keep your hands thrust deep into your pockets, wear your pants too tight and turned up at the bottoms. Later on he walked with shorter steps, legs tight and the insides of his thighs rubbing against each other, but holding his arms well away from his body, making it appear th at this was due to overdeveloped biceps and dorsals. It was only shortly after he committed his first murder that he arrived at a ga it and posture peculiar to himself: he stalked slowly, both arms stiffly extended, fists clenched in front of his fly, not touching it; legs well apart. This search for a posture that would set him, Querelle, apart, and thus prevent him from '"being mistaken for any other member of the crew, originated in a kind of terrifying dandy ism. As a chi.Jd he had used to amuse himself with solitar y competitions with himself, trying to piss ever higher and farther. Querelle sn1iled, contracting his cheeks. A sad smile . . One might have called it ambiguous, intended for the giver rather than the receiver. Sometimes, in thinking about it, the image, the sadness Lieutenant Seblon must have seen in that smi le, could be compared to that of watching, in a group of country choirboys, the most virile one, standing firm on sturdy feet, with sturdy thighs and neck, and chanting in a masculine voice the canticles to the Blessed Virgin. He puzzled his ship mates, made them uneasy. First, because of his physical strength, and secondly by the strangeness of his overly vulgar behavior. They watched him approaching, on his face the slight anguish of a sleeper under a mosquito net who hears the complaint of a mosquito held back by the netting and incensed by the impenetrable and invisible resistance. When we read " ... his whole physiognomy had its changeable aspects: from the ferocious it could tum gentle, often ironic: his walk was a

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Not That LoudQuiet Encounters with Rape CultureMiriam Zoila PérezI KEEP A LIST OF EVERYONE I’VE EVER KISSED—TWENTY-FOUR people—in my journal. I started it sometime postcollege, when my romantic and sexual life picked up considerably after coming out as queer. The first name on the list is not even a name—“Boys @ spin the bottle party (age: 11)”. There were three that night, I think; two of them were brothers. About half the entries have asterisks next to their names—my own not-so-subtle way of indicating that we had sex. Since the vast majority of the people whom I’ve kissed (eighteen total) aren’t cisgender men, the definition of what constitutes “sex” is a bit murky; it’s hard, even for me, to shake the heteronormative definitions ingrained in me since childhood. I can’t even tell you at this point what exactly I did with the woman who is tenth on the list that constituted sex: I remember a picnic dinner on her bedroom floor; I remember her wrought-iron headboard; I remember I got higher than I wanted to before we hooked up. But at the time that I documented our relationship on my strange, bordering-on-obsessive list, I’d felt like we’d had sex. So I scribbled a sloppy star next to her last name. A few years ago, I noticed another pattern among my sexual partners, undocumented on my list: my lovers were, more often than not, survivors of sexual abuse. The fact of it had registered in my subconscious but it wasn’t until last summer, when I was dating someone new and we both admitted that neither of us were survivors, that I realized just how unusual such a situation is in my sexual history. The person I was dating shared a history so similar to my own, of partnering and sleeping with many survivors, and teared up as they talked about how unfair it was that so many of their lovers had been harmed in that way. Sexual assault is no longer an undercurrent in political life: it shouts at us from news headlines, colors the electoral debates, shapes rally slogans and protest chants. But something doesn’t have to be loud to be deafening, to suck up all the oxygen in the room, to shroud the windows and dim the lights. In my personal life, sexual abuse has been a barely audible, inescapable presence when I have sex. It’s a silent partner as I get to know a new lover, learn what they like and don’t like in bed, how they want to be touched, what is off-limits. I rarely learn the details of my lover’s experiences; sometimes they never even call themselves survivors. But I know those experiences are nonetheless there, in the shadows in the corner of bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens. They showed up in the whispers of one lover—“don’t ever put your hands around my neck”—and in the tears of another every time she climaxed in the five years that we were together.

• 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 Querelle (1953)

  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 III I QUERELLE dearly that the mason was interfering with his love for Roger. He also realized that this love rid him of Theo, but not completely. Minuscule as Theo now was, he was still lurking in a corner of his mind. By compressing his love like a gas, Gil hoped to crush, to stifle what remained of the idea of Theoand that Idea, fading into Theo's physical presence,. now grew ever smaller in relation to Gil. Climbing the steps up from the Rue Casse would have sobered him up, most probably, had he not run into the boy right in the middle of the fog. He might well have resumed his lugubrious existence among the other masons. As it was, he uttered a joyful shout, quickly wiping off the tears with the back of his hand. "Roger, my buddy, let's go have a drink!" He put his ann round the boy's neck. Roger smiled. He looked at the cold and damp face separated from his own by a thin curtain of fog they were both breathing through. "You all right, Gil?"

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

  Try also to invent your own emotion concepts, using your powers of social reality and conceptual combination. The author Jeffrey Eugenides presents a collection of amusing ones in his novel Middlesex, including “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age,” “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy,” and “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar,” though he does not assign them words. You can do the same thing yourself. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a car, driving away from your hometown, knowing that you will never, ever return. Can you characterize that feeling by combining emotion concepts? If you can employ this technique day to day, you’ll be better calibrated to cope with varied circumstances, and potentially more empathic to others, with improved skill to negotiate conflict and get along. You can even name your creations, like my word “chiplessness” in chapter 7, and teach them to your family and friends. Once you’ve shared your creations, they are just as real as any other emotion concept and bring the same benefits to your body budget. An emotionally intelligent person not only has lots of concepts but also knows which ones to use and when. Just like painters learn to see fine distinctions in colors, and wine lovers develop their palettes to experience tastes that non-experts cannot, you can practice categorizing like any other skill. Suppose you see your teenage son heading out to school looking like he just rolled out of bed: hair unkempt, clothing wrinkled, and remnants of last night’s dinner dotting his shirt. You could berate him and send him back to his room to change, but instead, ask yourself what you are feeling. Are you concerned that his teachers won’t take him seriously? Disgusted by his greasy hair? Nervous that his attire will reflect badly on you as a parent? Irritated that you spend money on clothing he never wears? Or perhaps you’re sad that your little boy has grown up and you miss the exuberance of his childhood. If all this introspection sounds implausible, realize that people pay good money to therapists and life coaches for exactly this purpose: to help them reframe situations, that is, find the most useful categorization in the service of action. You can do it yourself and become an expert categorizer of emotion with enough practice, and it gets easier with repetition.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "I'm telling you, you better stay put. I'll talk to my buddies and see what we can do for you. I'll come and see you as often as I'm able. I'll even give your little buddy here some coins so he can buy you some stuff to eat and some smokes." "That's damn white of you. Thanks." But the moment before, in order to lose himself, to concentrate himself into his stare and disperse it among the shadows, Gil had used up too much of his energy to be able to express his gratitude with the fuii warmth of his being. He was tired. An immense sadness had crept over his face, dragging down the comers of the mouth Querelle recalled seeing in a different state-a little moist, gay, open in song. His body was sagging on the comer of the crate, and his entire gestalt was that of someone who thinks : "What the fucking hell am I going to do 173 I QUERELLE now?" He was on the verge of grief, not despair, but the grief of a child, abandoned, if only for an instant, when night is coming on. Strength and conviction were ebbing away. He was not a true murderer. He was afraid. "You think it's all over for me, if they catch me?" "\Vho knows. It's a lottery. But don't start worrying now. They won't get you." .. You're a real buddy. What's your first nan1e?" "] o." ••You're a buddy, J o. I'll never forget it." At last his soul was filled with joy at the encounter with Querelle who was on his way out and back to normal life, and who was strong, with the strength of a hundred million people.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Ironically, as that young Puerto Rican man also said, the men least likely to be in prison seemed to be those who committed crimes against women—at least anything short of murder. The average rapist has raped seven to eleven times before being arrested. Men guilty of domestic violence stay in their homes while their victims go to shelters—if they’re lucky. We must not let prisons stay a secret. It dawned on me that for prisoners, getting out of that secret space is progress, but because I am free, progress for me is going in. While writing this chapter, for instance, I heard about the unPrison Project. It provides children’s books to mothers in prison so they have another way to connect with their children during visits, minds fly over prison walls, and mothers also improve their literacy. Seventy percent of all people in prison return within five years, but of those who get help there with literacy, only 16 percent return. Who can argue with that?Deborah Jiang-Stein, the inventor of the unPrison Project, invited me to go with her to the Shakopee women’s prison, near Minneapolis, Minnesota. —WE MEET OUTSIDE THE prison with both the surprise of strangers and the instant intimacy of people who share work. I had read her book Prison Baby: A Memoir, and she has read my writing. I know she was born to an incarcerated and addicted mother, was lucky to survive withdrawal from the heroin she had absorbed from her mother’s body and blood, and was also lucky to spend her first year in a rare prison with a nursery so she could be with her mother. Then she was adopted by a Jewish family of teachers who gave her the gift of education, a gift she passes on to women like her mother, who was in and out of prison all her life. Deborah refers to herself as multiracial, and one can see Asian and many other influences in her expressive face. You might say she is a universal person. She went through a hard childhood of being obviously different from her adoptive family, yet not being told the secret of her birth. She, too, experienced teenage years of addiction and rebellion until she finally discovered her true story. With the end of secrecy, she discovered her mission. Since she is way more familiar than I am with prison routine, she guides me through filling out forms, removing jewelry, leaving everything but our indoor clothing in a locker, and passing through metal detectors. When we are finally in the halls of the prison itself—surprising because they are bright and clean, and depressing because there is no way out—we see five mothers with very young children. I am sad because I know this is a rare visiting day. Deborah is glad because she knows this prison is rare in allowing maternal visits at all.

• From Querelle (1953)

  But never for a moment did he think of doing so. It was too late for that. The phrase had a soothing effect on him. He heard himself saying it very calmly. The rage became transformed into a great sorrow, heavy and solemn, emanating from his chest to wrap his entire body and spirit into an infinite sadness that was to be his permanent condition. He walked on a while in the midst of the fog, hands in pockets, always certain of the elegance of his bearing, glad to retain it even in this solitude. There wasn't much of a chance of his meeting Roger. They had not agreed on a meeting. Gil thought of the kid. He saw his face, lit up with that smile that always appeared when he was listening to a song. The face was not quite the same as Paulette's, whose s1nile was not so clear, but' was troubled by her femininity, which destroyed the natural ease in the smiles of Gil and Roger. " 'Twixt her thighs, oh wowl La Paulette, what hasn't she got there, between her thighs!" And went on, almost murmuring it out loud : 108 I JEAN GENET 41Her pussy! Her little pussy! Her cunt!" · He thought of it, imbuing the words with a tenderness that turned them into a desperate incantation. "Her damp little pussy! Her little thighs." He continued the line of thought : 44Mustn't call them her 'little thighs,' she's got beautiful thighs, Paulette has. She's got nice fat thighs, and up there between them there's that little furry pussy." He had a hard-on. In the midst of his sadness-or shame-and obliterating it, he now recognized the existence of a new, yet already proven certainty. He was discovering himself again. All his being was now running down into his prick, to make it hard. It was just a part of him, but it had this providential vigor that was capable of keeping his shame at bay. By siphoning off the shame which was oozing from his body, into the prick, replenishing its spongy tissues, Gil felt himself growing harder, stronger, prouder again. There could be no doubt that it was a moment to call to his aid all the fluids which bathed his internal organs. Instinctively he looked for the darkest and most out-of-the-way spot on the esplanade. Paulette's smile was alternating with that of her brother. In a state of extreme animation Gil's mind's eye wandered down the thighs, raised the skirt, there were her garters. Above those (his thoughts slowed down a little) there wa_s white skin, suddenly darkened by the presence of a fleece which he just couldn't get a stationary, a fixed image of, under the spotlight of his desire. And in one go, after running up under her dress and lingerie, his prick came out again at just about the level of Paulette's breasts : he would be able to see better with the tip of his prick.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Where are you from?” Lionel asked, and then, because the question seemed too personal, even though they had just fucked, he said, “Not that you have to tell me.” “Bangor,” Charles said. “Maine.” “What’s it like there?” “Cold. Wet. Empty,” he said. “It’s kind of a bleak place.” “That seems dramatic.” Charles didn’t say anything after that, and Lionel was afraid that he had been too sharp. He put his hand on Charles’s chest and moved closer to him beneath the blanket. The bed’s complaint under his shifting weight drew his attention to the fact that he was yet again sharing this lumpy mattress with another person. So remarkable was the thought that he could not hold it still, and it slipped down out of his awareness. It was just as well. “Sorry,” Lionel said. “What are you sorry for?” “You got quiet.” “If I’m quiet, I’m quiet.” “Okay,” Lionel said, “sorry for being sorry.” Charles flicked the bruise on Lionel’s cheek with the same casual gesture he’d used to spin his fork around last night. Lionel could still feel the indentations of Charles’s teeth. The skin was swollen and a little tender from the hickey. But it was nothing, really. By morning it would be gone. It seemed sad that it would fade or that things had to end. When he was a child, that had depressed him. When his mother read him stories, he’d bawl at the end even if the little duck found its way back to its mother or the bears and the girl became friends or green eggs and ham were eaten. It didn’t matter if the story had a happy ending or if things turned out okay and all the scary things were put away. He hated that vertiginous feeling of things ending. That sense of the world dropping off under his feet. It had been the same at math camp. Everyone rolling up their sleeping bags, putting away their clothes for one last time. Saying good-bye, or pointedly not saying good-bye. There was, too, something unsurprising in all that. After all, his father had left them suddenly. Or it had seemed sudden, at least to Lionel. One day, his dad had packed up for a trip the way he always did. But then weeks went by, and when he asked his mother where his father had gone, she turned to him and said, as if describing the weather forecast, that he wasn’t coming back and that Lionel should get used to it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Where to?” “To the country, to my brother’s,” answered Sergey Ivanovitch. “Then you’ll see my wife. I’ve written to her, but you’ll see her first. Please tell her that they’ve seen me and that it’s ‘all right,’ as the English say. She’ll understand. Oh, and be so good as to tell her I’m appointed secretary of the committee.... But she’ll understand! You know, _les petites misères de la vie humaine,_” he said, as it were apologizing to the princess. “And Princess Myakaya—not Liza, but Bibish—is sending a thousand guns and twelve nurses. Did I tell you?” “Yes, I heard so,” answered Koznishev indifferently. “It’s a pity you’re going away,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Tomorrow we’re giving a dinner to two who’re setting off—Dimer-Bartnyansky from Petersburg and our Veslovsky, Grisha. They’re both going. Veslovsky’s only lately married. There’s a fine fellow for you! Eh, princess?” he turned to the lady. The princess looked at Koznishev without replying. But the fact that Sergey Ivanovitch and the princess seemed anxious to get rid of him did not in the least disconcert Stepan Arkadyevitch. Smiling, he stared at the feather in the princess’s hat, and then about him as though he were going to pick something up. Seeing a lady approaching with a collecting box, he beckoned her up and put in a five-rouble note. “I can never see these collecting boxes unmoved while I’ve money in my pocket,” he said. “And how about today’s telegram? Fine chaps those Montenegrins!” “You don’t say so!” he cried, when the princess told him that Vronsky was going by this train. For an instant Stepan Arkadyevitch’s face looked sad, but a minute later, when, stroking his mustaches and swinging as he walked, he went into the hall where Vronsky was, he had completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister’s corpse, and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend. “With all his faults one can’t refuse to do him justice,” said the princess to Sergey Ivanovitch as soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch had left them. “What a typically Russian, Slav nature! Only, I’m afraid it won’t be pleasant for Vronsky to see him. Say what you will, I’m touched by that man’s fate. Do talk to him a little on the way,” said the princess. “Yes, perhaps, if it happens so.” “I never liked him. But this atones for a great deal. He’s not merely going himself, he’s taking a squadron at his own expense.” “Yes, so I heard.” A bell sounded. Everyone crowded to the doors. “Here he is!” said the princess, indicating Vronsky, who with his mother on his arm walked by, wearing a long overcoat and wide-brimmed black hat. Oblonsky was walking beside him, talking eagerly of something. Vronsky was frowning and looking straight before him, as though he did not hear what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “All I say is,” answered Agafea Mihalovna, evidently not speaking at random, but in strict sequence of idea, “that you ought to get married, that’s what I say.” Agafea Mihalovna’s allusion to the very subject he had only just been thinking about, hurt and stung him. Levin scowled, and without answering her, he sat down again to his work, repeating to himself all that he had been thinking of the real significance of that work. Only at intervals he listened in the stillness to the click of Agafea Mihalovna’s needles, and recollecting what he did not want to remember, he frowned again. At nine o’clock they heard the bell and the faint vibration of a carriage over the mud. “Well, here’s visitors come to us, and you won’t be dull,” said Agafea Mihalovna, getting up and going to the door. But Levin overtook her. His work was not going well now, and he was glad of a visitor, whoever it might be. Chapter 31 Running halfway down the staircase, Levin caught a sound he knew, a familiar cough in the hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he caught sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, and now it seemed there was no possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that this tall man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his brother Nikolay. Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture. Just now, when Levin, under the influence of the thoughts that had come to him, and Agafea Mihalovna’s hint, was in a troubled and uncertain humor, the meeting with his brother that he had to face seemed particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do. Angry with himself for so base a feeling, Levin ran into the hall; as soon as he had seen his brother close, this feeling of selfish disappointment vanished instantly and was replaced by pity. Terrible as his brother Nikolay had been before in his emaciation and sickliness, now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted. He was a skeleton covered with skin. He stood in the hall, jerking his long thin neck, and pulling the scarf off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile. When he saw that smile, submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his throat.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Some contributors do indeed withhold their funds from this college, which is hurtful. But when the trustees hold firm to their support for free speech on campus, new contributions make up for the loss of the old. If anything, the archbishop has only brought more media coverage of an era of declining church membership, aging priests, shutdowns of a dozen historic churches, the revelations of sexual abuse by priests, and many other troubles that caused him to be summoned to the Vatican for a tactical consultation. On the day itself, I’m impressed to see a small protest plane circling over the amphitheater, pulling an anti-abortion banner. Someone yells out, “Look, the right-to-lifers have an air force!” There is laughter. The event goes right on. Even though I know this lonely little plane is a commercial one that can be hired for birthdays, weddings, and advertising, the symbolism of its constant circling makes me sad. Talking later to Dolores Huerta, my friend of thirty years—a lifetime organizer of farm workers and efforts to elect progressive women—I tell her that I can’t shake the sadness of this symbolic distance between an airplane representing the church and the real lives of women on the ground. She reminds me of the organizer’s mantra: Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots. Three months later, Archbishop John Quinn retires at the age of sixty-six, nine years ahead of schedule. San Francisco newspapers report that he was too distant from the people. • In rural Oklahoma, where oil wells grow in fields next to cattle and winter wheat, I’m talking with a university auditorium full of students in a postlecture discussion. Most people are trying to figure out how to make their daily lives more fair—whether it’s who gets tenure or who gets the kids ready for school—but I notice that an all-white group of twenty or so people in Jesus T-shirts are not taking part. Finally, a young T-shirted man stands up to protest my support for legal abortion, which is odd because we haven’t been talking about abortion at all. He says abortion isn’t even in the Constitution, so how can it be protected by it? A female college student who looks about twelve rises to say that women aren’t included in the Constitution either, but now that we’re citizens, we have reproductive freedom as part of a constitutional right to privacy. If the Founding Fathers had included Founding Mothers, that freedom would have been in the Bill of Rights to begin with. The crowd applauds. I can see we’ve reached the magical point when people start to answer each other’s questions. I can just listen and learn.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I didn’t know exactly why; I still don’t. I know it has something to do with my high school boyfriend—it usually does, right? Well, “boyfriend” is probably a loose term: we’d met on a youth group ski trip during which I’d given him an unreciprocated hand job without as much as a kiss. The lack of reciprocation continued as our relationship evolved into a hookup game of “defend the goal”—his goal, my defense—including after junior prom, when I’d almost let him enter me in the parking lot of a shuttered CVS, but stopped short because I decided that losing my virginity on prom night—to someone I wasn’t even technically dating—was too cliché. Some of the details of the night a week later are crystal clear—we were in the backseat of my two-door Honda Civic, it was dark, we were in a parking lot, and Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion” was playing on my car stereo. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to have sex with him, but the boundaries I put up were weak at best, and he dutifully approached them over and over until I conceded. It was painful and brief—I remember he didn’t orgasm, which was unusual. And though my life no longer involves being pressured into sex in a car with a boy that I didn’t really want and never enjoyed, it’s hard to escape wondering why it is that, in encounters I wanted and even initiated, it’s rare that I seek the same pleasure I want to give to other people. I know that there is a huge divide between feeling pressured into having sex too quickly by a high school boyfriend and being sexually abused, but some version of those violations and so many others have so thoroughly shaped all of my sexual and romantic relationships that I no longer really can imagine a world in which I could have sex that didn’t resonate with some sort of trauma. Rape interferes with how my partners and I can experience joy and connection even within incredibly loving, supportive, and nonnormative relationships. Rape culture means that even as someone who realized just how nonconsensual that high school relationship was just a few months after it ended, I still struggle with the repercussions of that experience and the many that followed it. Even though I had the strength to confront that boyfriend over AOL Instant Messenger to tell him just how I felt about our relationship (in the form of a badly written and very emo poem, of course), I kept doing sexual things that I didn’t really want to do for years after.