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 Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  Now in retrospect, I see that it implies a certain trauma, or at least a passionate drive to get somewhere, as it parallels other boat imagery in my book. This image of Polynesians in a shoe-boat was a metaphor before I even understood it. RIVER AS JOURNEY The rat turned up three times, and began engaging us as characters, pulling us back as we tried to get away. Related to that was the image of us on the life raft. That image was always in each of the rat panels, but very often alone, too, as a metaphor for our travels: half escape, half journey to unknown future. It bookmarks chapter nine, below. THE METAPHORICAL CRASHING INTO REALITY In another example, I struggled with this very literal image of Leela and me appearing at the front door of our friends’, Kate and Lisa. The initial drawing, which I never even finished, was uninspired and never worked in the story. Eventually, I realized that I had to bridge two main narratives in the book—the real journey and the cartoon analog—and push them into the same frame. This new image, at right, is much more alive and integrated into the story. THE SQUAWKING IN OUR BRAINS In a sequence that was mostly characters talking about real estate, I tried to at least make it lively by featuring the squawking of the pet bird our lawyer seemed to keep in his office. But it also served to illustrate the massive unreality of trying to deal with these administrative details during this time of horror. At the bottom, I combined text from our lives and experience with images borrowed from one of Rosalie’s favorite books. In other places I tried contrasting small abstract self-representations with more realistic but expressive ones, trying to cover as much expressive ground as possible. And sometimes I hoped the drawing itself would emulate the content, the scratching in this drawing reflecting the harsh frailness that I felt, for instance, in this snarl of traffic rendered as a tangle of lines. ART AS METAPHOR And because the book is about art and how it relates to the events, it became a journey through lots of different image-makers’ work: EC Comics, Osamu Tezuka, Harold Gray, Renaissance painters, and more. I borrowed lots more images and techniques as I went along. Through Osamu Tezuka, I tried to show how our story, too, was about rebuilding our bodies. PAGE LAYOUT AS METAPHOR Here the form of the page becomes metaphorical, as I show my character having difficulty listening, not ready yet for that kind of interaction. The pages return to the simple six-panel grid immediately after this one. In fact, I borrowed the top of this page layout from Kurt Wolfgang in order to make this dialogue-heavy sequence interesting, and only saw the metaphoric way in which it makes one speaker’s words seem like a series of equally weighted, impossible-to-comprehend phrases.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  On visits to India, for instance, I see the phrase sex work as the only English words in the Bengali signs that mark Sonagachi in Kolkata—one of the biggest and poorest red-light districts in the world—though no one disputes the fact that many are born into or sold into its brothels. I hear the phrase accepted by university students in India when they’re addressing the inhabitants of red-light districts, despite the fact that the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a union of 1.8 million of the poorest women in India—the ones who carry bricks to construction sites or sell vegetables in the street, by far the group most representative of poor women—voted against including prostitution as a job like any other. As its founder, Ela Bhatt, said, “Work is worship, noble and dignified.” Once in Las Vegas, I meet a friend who knows the sex industry there. We start off gently by going to one of the big hotels in the afternoon and having a drink at a topless bar. As a cover for two women alone asking questions, we say we are the wives of men about to arrive for a business convention and want to find places where it’s safe for our husbands to have a little adventure after all these years on the factory line. It’s always seemed to me that if I told a bald-faced lie I would be found out in a minute, but we try it on the male manager and it works. He says we can talk to one of the topless pole dancers during her break. She seems glad to get rest and a Coke, pulls a shawl over her three strategically placed pasties, and explains that she started out as a waitress, but soon she was told she would have to strip or be fired. Now she has just been told that she will lose her job stripping unless she also agrees to go into the Champagne Room. I have to say that I believed those separate rooms were only for lap dancing at the cost of a bottle of champagne, but it turns out I’m naïve. They are also for fast sex. She knows she is being drawn into prostitution, one step at a time in the routine way, but she needs the money. Because she is glad to have someone to talk to, we learn that she had to quit high school to earn money because her mother is sick, but she really hopes to write movies one day. She wants to tell the story of her life in the real Las Vegas, not this fancy hotel, but her one-room apartment with her mother. I end by giving her my real email address, if not my name, and watch her get up on stage, suddenly transformed by a blue spotlight and a phony smile. Then we drive in our rented car to tell our same old wives’ tale at two big brothels in the county where they are completely legal.

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

  When I moved away from home to go to college, I spoke to my parents once every two months because it was all I could bear. The shape of our conversation was the same every time: hello, yes, how are you, fine, guess who died. It was a never-ending stream of names, some old, some not, but all mostly too young to have died. Second cousins, third cousins, neighbors, friends of my parents, each passing out of this world and into whatever hangs behind this world like a second eyelid. My mother was placed on a ventilator, and later I was alerted via text message that she had died. I don’t mean to imply that I feel angry about this. It was by choice that I refused to speak on the phone to people who thought I needed comfort. The text message was from another cousin, a different cousin, not the daughter of my rapist. I found out my grandfather died by browsing Facebook one morning before a biochemistry exam. I imagine I’ll find out that W. died via Facebook—it must be what I keep looking for, that final update, that final confirmation that he is gone out of the world. SOMETIMES I WONDER IF MY COUSIN KNOWS THAT I AM HANGING around her Facebook like a ghost, like a fiend. Technology lets us believe we are living parallel lives, both in and out of the world, both here and there. I can skim the facts of other people’s lives from their posts like foam from boiled milk. How many people, when my mother died, came to my page to wish me love and light? How many returned time and again looking for some clue of my pain or anguish or grief? Isn’t that what we do? We scent a tragedy in the air and we try to trace it—not to its source, but to those most affected. We try to make sense of it by watching them grapple with it. In this way, we aren’t living parallel lives at all. We’re leeches, proliferating in a still pool of light. Spectating isn’t living, after all; it’s consumption. Grist for the mill. Yet I cannot look away from my cousin’s page. There is a point at which the glimpsed becomes the central, becomes the whole of the thing. I turn my head and look, I stare because I know how to watch a person wither from abundance. I know how to read status updates like a person reads the air to discern the chance of rain. There are the upbeat messages, the ones about the fight: At chemo with this guy! He’s so strong! He’s a fighter! When things are looking grim, there are more vague messages about God and the meaningfulness of His plan: God will always make a way! It’s not over until God says it’s over!

• From On Beauty (2005)

  us central – think of the position he paints himself in, right between those two inscribed empty globes on the wall . . .’ Howard kept talking along these almost automatic lines. He felt a breeze from the garden get into his system, deep, through channels a younger body would never permit. He felt very sad, retracing these arguments that had made him slightly notable in the tiny circle in which he moved. The retraction of love in one part of his life had made this other half of his life feel cold indeed. ‘Introduce me,’ instructed a woman suddenly, gripping the slack muscle in his upper arm. It was Claire Malcolm. ‘Oh, God, excuse me – can I steal him, just a moment?’ she said to the curator and his friend, ignoring their concerned faces. She pulled Howard some steps away towards the corner of the room. Diagonally across from them Monty Kipps’s enormous laugh announced itself first and mightiest over a refrain of hoots. ‘Introduce me to Kipps.’ They stood next to each other, Claire and Howard, looking out across the room like parents on the edge of a school football field, watching their boy. It was an oblique angle but also a close one. The peachy flush of alcohol had pushed through Claire’s deep tan, and the various moles and freckles of her face and dećolletage were ringed by this aroused pinkness; it brought youth back to her like no product or procedure could ever hope to. Howard hadn’t seen her in almost a year. They had managed this subtly, without drawing attention to the fact or conferring to achieve it. They had simply avoided each other on campus, giving up the cafeteria entirely and making certain they did not attend the same meetings. As an extra measure, Howard had stopped going to the Moroccan cafeín which, of an afternoon, one could see almost everybody in the English Department sitting alone, marking piles of essays. Then Claire had gone to Italy for the summer, which he had been thankful for. It was miserable seeing her now. She was in a simple shift dress of very thin cotton. Her tiny yogic body came up against it and then retreated once more – it depended on how she stood. You would have no idea, looking at her like this – make-up free, so simply dressed – no idea at all of the strange, minute cosmetic  kipps and belsey attentions she gave to other, more private parts of her body. Howard himself had been amazed to discover them. In what position had they been lying when she had offered the peculiar explanation of her mother being Parisian? ‘For Godssake, why would you want to meet him ?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Doughnut?’ With one hand absently holding on to the blinds’ strings, Howard looked out of the window on to Wellington’s yard. Here was the white church and the grey library, antagonizing each other on opposite sides of the square. A pot-pourri of orange, red, yellow and purple leaves carpeted the ground. It was still warm enough, but only just, for kids to sit on the steps of the Greenman, reclining on their own knapsacks, wasting time. Howard scanned the scene for Warren or Claire. The news was that they were still together. This from Erskine, who got it from his wife Caroline, who was on the board of trustees at the Wellington Institute of Molecular Research where Warren spent his days. It was Kiki who had told Warren; the explosion had happened – but no one had died. It was just walking wounded as far as the eye could see. No packed bags, no final door slams, no relocation to different colleges, different towns. They were all going to stay put and suffer. It would be played out very slowly over years. The thought was debilitating. Everybody knew about it. Howard expected that the shorthand, water-cooler version, currently circulating the college would be ‘Warren’s forgiven her’ said with pity mixed with a little contempt – as if that covered it, the feeling. People said ‘She’s forgiven him’ about Kiki, and only now was Howard learning of the levels of purgatory forgiveness involves. People don’t know what they’re talking about. At the water cooler Howard was just another middle-aged professor suffering the expected mid-life crisis. And then there was the other reality, the one he had to live. Last night, very late,  On Beauty he had peeled himself off the crushing, too short divan in his study and gone into the bedroom. He lay down in his clothes, above the quilt, next to Kiki, a woman he had loved and lived with his entire adult life. On her bedside table he could not avoid seeing the packet of anti-depressants, sitting alongside a few coins, some earplugs, a teaspoon, all crushed in a small wooden Indian box with elephants carved upon its sides. He waited almost twenty minutes, never sure if she was awake or not.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  me in here . I’m still in here. And I don’t want to be resented or despised for changing . . . I’d rather be alone. I don’t want someone to have contempt for who I’ve become. I’ve watched you become too. And I feel like I’ve done my best to honour the past, and what you were and what you are now – but you want something more than that, something new. I can’t be new. Baby, we had a good run.’ Weeping, she lifted his palm and kissed it in the centre. ‘Thirty years – almost all of them really happy . That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over . . .’ Howard, crying himself now, got up from where he lay and sat behind his wife. He stretched his arms around her solid nakedness. In a whisper he began begging for – and, as the sun set, received – the concession people always beg for: a little more time.  on beauty and being wrong  Spring break arrived, budding pink and violet in the apple trees, streaking orange through the wet sky. It was still as cold as ever, but now Wellingtonians permitted themselves hope. Jerome came home. Not for him Cancuń, or Florida, or Europe. He wanted to see his family. Kiki, tremendously touched by this, took his hand in hers and led him into their chilly garden to witness the changes there. But she had other motives besides the simply horticultural. ‘I want you to know,’ she said, bending down to pluck a weed from the rose bed, ‘that we will support you in each and every choice that you will ever make.’ ‘Well,’ said Jerome mordantly, ‘I think that’s beautifully and euphemistically put.’ Kiki stood up and looked helplessly at her son and his gold cross. What else could she say? How could she follow him where he was going? ‘I’m joking,’ Jerome assured her. ‘I appreciate it, I do. And vice versa,’ he said, and gave his mother the same look she’d given him. They sat on the bench under the apple tree. The snow had peeled the paint and warped the wood, making it unsteady. They spread their weight to settle it. Kiki offered Jerome a portion of her giant shawl, but he declined. ‘So there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Kiki, cautiously. ‘Mom . . . I know what happens when a man puts his thing in a woman’s – ’ Kiki pinched him in his side. Kicked him on his ankle. ‘It’s Levi . You know that when you’re not around he’s got no one . . . Zora won’t spend any time with him, and Howard treats him like some piece of – I don’t know what – moon rock . I worry about him. Anyway, he’s got in with these people – it’s fine, I’ve  On Beauty

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  With these in mind, I looked for material for this story and worked. FOREST STORY Finishing REFLECTION For a lot of storytellers, the true drive to make the story is only understood after looking back and asking questions. What was I trying to accomplish? What did I accomplish? What did I experience while telling this story? For me, with Rosalie’s book, I was just trying to merely get through it, but upon reflection, I realized I was trying to internalize thoughts that I had already had in the immediate aftermath of her loss. I also realized much later that I was trying to keep her vivacious spirit alive, but I never could have vocalized that then. With this story, about the forest and my friend, I think I was trying to understand what it means to be growing old. I am trying to process loss, I think. I have always been moved by drawings, and have always tried to improve my own drawings, and stay engaged with the process of drawing. And now I see that my old friend is gone, but I have a new friend who helps me in this quest to be engaged with lines and art. I learned as I worked on this story that this was one part that was trying to come out. We often define ourselves by our young mind and ideals. Obsessed with youth and my younger, vibrant self, I think I was trying here to allow some space in my older self to be surprised and confused by things, in the way you are when you are younger. DEBRIEFING Looking back, I see that the gathering of material stirred up an interest in finding my old friend. It was the search for material that gave the story the key problem to solve: “Can I find my old friend?” Inspired by Why I Killed Peter, I suspected I was writing a story that would culminate in a reunion scene, but it never emerged. I had to let the search for my connection to the forest and for Kathryn become a part of my everyday life. When it did, I opened up to new experiences that could be a part of the story. I could ask again, What story needed to be experienced? Not fully aware of it, there were several. First, I LOVED drawing all those trees. And I loved abstracting them with ink line, lines I have used since I was a teenager. Ultimately the story became an answer to the question I raised in the first chapter of this book, Why Comics? The answer came as I was working: that I love lines, and I feel like something is right when I am making them. And finally, I have a friend under my nose now, who lives in the forest and with whom I can talk “books and life.” She became a guide back, through art, line and drawing, to the forest.

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

  A MONTH BEFORE MY MOTHER DIED, I GOT ON A PLANE AND went down to Alabama. I had been told that this would bring some measure of peace to her, but in retrospect, I can’t help but to think of how cruel a thing it was to do. After all, when she saw me and I saw her, we wouldn’t be able to hide from the fact that the whole thing was ending. There is a kind of magic to distance. As long as I stayed away, she could go on thinking that things weren’t as bad as they were, and I could go on thinking that I was doing something good for her by doing nothing, by not talking about it or seeing it. My uncle was having a birthday barbecue in the middle of August, and by some random chance, the party fell on the third day of my five-day trip. My mother was very tired. She found my presence irritating, which was flattering in a way—she wasn’t putting on a show of wanting me around. I thought to myself that things might not be so bad after all. At least she wasn’t trying to love on me as she had started to do with my brother. There were a lot of white gnats fluttering in the air like snowflakes with their own minds, so many of them pouring out of the pecan trees that the food had to be whisked directly from the grill and into the house. I was given the task of standing behind my mother and waving away the bugs from her. She leaned forward in her chair, swaying occasionally if she heard a song that she liked or felt a rhythm that moved her. People kept stopping by her chair to say a kind word to her on their way to grab beers from the cooler. She was loved by them.

• 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 Querelle (1953)

  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 dandyism. As a chi.Jd he had used to amuse himself with solitary 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 smile, 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 shipmates, 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 36 I JEAN GENET sailor's, and standing up, he always kept his legs well apart. This murderer had traveled a great deal . . . ," we know that this description of Campi, beheaded April 30, 1884, fits like a glove. Being an interpretation, it is exact. Yet his mates were able to say of Querelle : "What a funny guy," for he presented them, almost daily, with another disconcerting and scandalous vision of himself. He shone among them with the brightness of a true freak. Sailors of our Fighting Navy exhibit a certain honesty which they owe to the sense of glory that attracts them to the service. If they wanted to go in for smuggling or any other form of trafficking they would not really know how to _ go about it. Heavily and lazily, because of the boredom inherent in their task, they perform it in a manner that seems to us like an act of faith. But Querelle kept his eye on the main chance. He felt no nostalgia for his time as a petty hoodlum-he had never really outgrown it-but he continued, under the protection of the French Bag, his dangerous exploits. All his early teens he had spent in the company of dockers and merchant seamen. He knew their game. Querelle strode along, his face damp and burning, without thinking about anything in particular. He felt a little uneasy, haunted by the unformulated glimmer of a suspicion that his exploits would gain him no glory in the eyes of Mario and

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  They have brought about change, from what gets taught to who gets tenure; from how the university invests its money to where athletic uniforms are made; from students taking a role in campus decision-making to Take Back the Night marches against sexualized violence on campus; from marginalizing some by class, race, sexuality, and physical ability to including diverse people and new courses of study. In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just “given” the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then, academic courses on Europe far outnumbered those on Africa, even though it is the birthplace of us all and is bigger than Europe, China, India, and the United States combined. When I’m on campus now and look at course listings, the relative importance reflected in them is much better but still way off. There has always been this question of what is being taught. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in general and African American women’s history in particular, summed it up, “We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds.”1 No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. I say this as a reminder that campuses not only help create social justice movements, they need them. Now, campuses look more like the country in terms of race and ethnicity—though we’re not there yet, and bias can survive college degrees. I see women outnumbering their male counterparts on some campuses, but degrees are often a way out of the pink-collar ghetto and into a white-collar one. Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt. I see campuses representing more age diversity. More than a third of college students are over twenty-five, and this age group is growing faster than students of conventional age, a change that was pioneered by veterans and the GI Bill of Rights, then by older women returning to campus. I remember watching a thirty-year-old pregnant woman arguing about the health care system with an eighteen-year-old male student, and thinking: This has to be good for education.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I understood that LaDonna’s presence among the thirty-five International Women’s Year commissioners would send a signal to Native American women around the country who otherwise might not feel invited to state conferences. What I didn’t understand was how rare this was. At less than 1 percent of the population—at least, by the notorious undercount of the U.S. Census9 —the more than five hundred tribes and nations made up the smallest, poorest, and least formally educated group in the United States. Nations were very diverse, varying in size from the vast Navajo Nation that extended into several states to reservations of less than twenty acres. But across that diversity, they shared such common struggles as dealing with a federal government that had yet to honor one treaty in its entirety, gaining control of the schooling and treatment of their own children, protecting their land from exploitation for oil, uranium, and other resources on it—and much more. For instance, women on reservations suffered the highest rate of sexual assault in the country, yet the non-Native men who were the majority of their assaulters were not subject to tribal police or jurisdiction, and were mostly ignored by the larger legal system. From quiet, understated, and sometimes hesitant Native women who came to meetings and stayed to talk, I learned about the generations of Indian families who had been forced by law to send their children to Christian boarding schools often funded by tax dollars; never mind the separation of church and state. The nineteenth-century founder of those schools coined the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” They deprived children of their families, names, language, culture, and even their long hair. Then they were taught a history that measured progress by their defeat. Often, these children were subjected to forced labor, malnutrition, and physical and sexual abuse. Later, after several schools were closed down, the land around them yielded graves of starved and abused children. Saddest of all, two centuries of child abuse in Indian boarding schools had sometimes normalized punitive child rearing and sexualized violence within Indian families. Childhood patterns are repeated because they are what we know. Even when the schools were humane, teaching Native languages and practicing Native religion was illegal, something that continued until the 1970s. Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer’s desire.”10 In Indian Country, there is a belief that one act of violence takes four generations to heal. Because many centuries of such acts have yet to be known or taken seriously by most Americans, much less healed, this nation may keep repeating its violent childhood—until we find the wound and heal it. I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all, but not I. “And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at herself in the looking-glass. She had a traveling looking-glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the glass.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Stepan Arkadyevitch, with the same somewhat solemn expression with which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s room. Alexey Alexandrovitch was walking about his room with his hands behind his back, thinking of just what Stepan Arkadyevitch had been discussing with his wife. “I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, on the sight of his brother-in-law becoming suddenly aware of a sense of embarrassment unusual with him. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a cigarette case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and sniffing the leather, took a cigarette out of it. “No. Do you want anything?” Alexey Alexandrovitch asked without eagerness. “Yes, I wished ... I wanted ... yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with surprise aware of an unaccustomed timidity. This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to do was wrong. Stepan Arkadyevitch made an effort and struggled with the timidity that had come over him. “I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection and respect for you,” he said, reddening. Alexey Alexandrovitch stood still and said nothing, but his face struck Stepan Arkadyevitch by its expression of an unresisting sacrifice. “I intended ... I wanted to have a little talk with you about my sister and your mutual position,” he said, still struggling with an unaccustomed constraint. Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled mournfully, looked at his brother-in-law, and without answering went up to the table, took from it an unfinished letter, and handed it to his brother-in-law. “I think unceasingly of the same thing. And here is what I had begun writing, thinking I could say it better by letter, and that my presence irritates her,” he said, as he gave him the letter. Stepan Arkadyevitch took the letter, looked with incredulous surprise at the lusterless eyes fixed so immovably on him, and began to read. “I see that my presence is irksome to you. Painful as it is to me to believe it, I see that it is so, and cannot be otherwise. I don’t blame you, and God is my witness that on seeing you at the time of your illness I resolved with my whole heart to forget all that had passed between us and to begin a new life. I do not regret, and shall never regret, what I have done; but I have desired one thing—your good, the good of your soul—and now I see I have not attained that. Tell me yourself what will give you true happiness and peace to your soul. I put myself entirely in your hands, and trust to your feeling of what’s right.”

• 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.