Tenderness

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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sick-room, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillow cases, towels, and shirts. The waiter, who was busy with a party of engineers dining in the dining hall, came several times with an irate countenance in answer to her summons, and could not avoid carrying out her orders, as she gave them with such gracious insistence that there was no evading her. Levin did not approve of all this; he did not believe it would be of any good to the patient. Above all, he feared the patient would be angry at it. But the sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole as it were interested in what she was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty had sent him, Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man at the instant when, by Kitty’s directions, they were changing his linen. The long white ridge of his spine, with the huge, prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bare, and Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with the sleeve of the night shirt, and could not get the long, limp arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after Levin, was not looking that way; but the sick man groaned, and she moved rapidly towards him. “Make haste,” she said. “Oh, don’t you come,” said the sick man angrily. “I’ll do it my myself....” “What say?” queried Marya Nikolaevna. But Kitty heard and saw he was ashamed and uncomfortable at being naked before her. “I’m not looking, I’m not looking!” she said, putting the arm in. “Marya Nikolaevna, you come this side, you do it,” she added. “Please go for me, there’s a little bottle in my small bag,” she said, turning to her husband, “you know, in the side pocket; bring it, please, and meanwhile they’ll finish clearing up here.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  He had volunteered to travel to New York, with union support, because he had no family. Like generations of young men imported from the Philippines as migrant laborers—and like earlier generations brought from China to lay tracks for the railroads—he couldn’t marry outside his race due to antimiscegenation laws, but he didn’t have enough money to import a bride. Now he was sleeping on a cot in a Brooklyn labor hall, with no kitchen, and he wanted to cook Filipino food for the boycott crew. He loved to cook. When he asked if he could use my kitchen, I made him laugh by explaining that I’d lived here four years before discovering the oven didn’t work. Soon he was making massive meals on my tiny stove. It did cross my mind that I’d lost first a couch and now a kitchen, but Marion and I were caught up in trying to find sympathetic journalists. Only the media seemed likely to bring attention to the boycott as well as to the threats against Cesar and his workers, and to change this from a secret to a public issue. My editor at Look magazine had long ago rejected a report on migrant farmworkers out of fear that orange juice advertisers would pull their ads. Instead, I proposed an interview with Cesar—just his words, without pretending it was an objective report. Later, orange juice advertisers did cancel, which contributed to the end of the magazine, and also to my learning the not-so-secret influence of ads. To raise money and public consciousness, Marion and I organized a Carnegie Hall benefit, complete with entertainers and political leaders reading aloud the stories of farmworkers’ lives. In July 1969 the visibility of the grape boycott plus continuing turmoil in California put Cesar on the cover of Time magazine. We had come a long way, yet this was just a preface to a secret closer to home. —MITCH, A YOUNG AFRICAN American organizer from Alabama, has been learning from the programs and methods of both Cesar and the Black Panthers. He asks if I want to visit a migrant farmworkers’ camp on Long Island, just two hours from where I live. I’ve often walked Long Island’s charming seaside towns, enjoyed its wide ocean beaches, and seen the old mansions of the Hamptons that seem to be straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. I haven’t given a thought to what I’m not seeing. It’s the end of the summer when we drive over a crowded bridge and freeway out of the city, beyond the suburbs, then turn off onto asphalt roads, a backcountry dirt road, and finally the rutted lanes of farmland near Riverhead. Under the cover of trees, I see a long, ramshackle shed with doors hanging open. Inside are rows of iron cots with bare mattresses. On a cement floor near the shed, there is an old jukebox and a small makeshift store. This is one of many camps where migrant workers live, Mitch explains.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  The first one is like a spacious motel, with a couple of men sitting at the bar, waiting their turn. My friend goes out to the car to make phone calls, and I talk with a young dark-haired woman in a bikini and the highest heels I’ve ever seen. She, too, accepts my story and tells me her mother ran an illegal brothel in the South; it was where she grew up. The girls looked after her as a child and took the scariest S&M photos off their walls when she was around. Like the dancer in the topless bar, she also has dreams, and goes off to her room to bring back a notebook full of magazine illustrations that she has cut out and pasted into its pages. She confesses that she never went to school past the sixth grade, but she still hopes that her Dream Book will get her hired as a designer. Twice while we’re talking, she goes off briefly with a customer and comes back with breath smelling of disinfectant. In the daytime, she explains, it’s mainly truck drivers who stop for a blowjob. I ask if she feels safe, and she says management puts an alarm button in each room, but the times she’s had a bad guy, she couldn’t get to it. “It’s hard to do anything when they’re on top of you,” she says matter-of-factly.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. “If not I, who is to blame for it?” he thought unconsciously, seeking someone responsible for this suffering for him to punish; but there was no one responsible. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding. “I have sent to mamma. You go quickly to fetch Lizaveta Petrovna ... Kostya!... Nothing, it’s over.” She moved away from him and rang the bell. “Well, go now; Pasha’s coming. I am all right.” And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she had brought in in the night and begun working at it again. As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the maid-servant come in at the other. He stood at the door and heard Kitty giving exact directions to the maid, and beginning to help her move the bedstead. He dressed, and while they were putting in his horses, as a hired sledge was not to be seen yet, he ran again up to the bedroom, not on tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Two maid-servants were carefully moving something in the bedroom. Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions. “I’m going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta Petrovna, but I’ll go on there too. Isn’t there anything wanted? Yes, shall I go to Dolly’s?” She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying. “Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to him. He had just gone into the drawing-room, when suddenly a plaintive moan sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for a long while he could not understand. “Yes, that is she,” he said to himself, and clutching at his head he ran downstairs.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  In books we brought along, we read about earlier grave excavations here that revealed a young couple laid out side by side, wearing jewelry and breastplates, their noses shaped in copper to keep them after the fragile cartilage was gone. Their bodies were surrounded by buttons made of copper-covered wood and stone as well as more than a hundred thousand pearls.5 That night we join Deborah’s mother, her eighty-six-year-old grandmother, and teachers and neighbors at a community potluck supper in the school gym. It’s a welcome for us. With the slow-paced humor and warmth I’ve come to cherish, they talk about the history of small-town Ohio, and are delighted that we are interested. Deborah’s grandmother has lived her entire life near Adena mounds that may be even older than the one we just saw. They reminisce about everything from romantic outings in the Great Circle Earthworks to the connection they feel to people they just call “the ancients.” We tell them about the young couple in copper and pearls. All of us light a candle for them. What I don’t tell them is a feeling I don’t understand myself. As a child, I went to Theosophical meetings with my mother, and to a Congregational church where I was christened. I’ve enjoyed many years of Passover seders, rewritten with scholarship and poetry to include women. But not one of them felt as timeless and true as Serpent Woman. II.Coming home from a road trip in the late 1970s, I notice graffiti painted in big white letters over the Queens Midtown Tunnel: WHEELS OVER INDIAN TRAILS . Soon I find myself looking for this graffiti whenever I come home. I wonder, Who climbed so high above the traffic? One of New York’s brash young street artists? Some Marlon Brando–esque guy in love with a culture not his own? A descendant of a tribe that once lived here? I assume this is not a message from a living culture. I don’t yet realize that it is part of a journey that will change how I see the world and the possible. Later when I’m sitting in my favorite place amid the tall outcroppings of igneous rock in Central Park, just a short walk from my apartment, I wonder, Who rested in this same place long ago, before the Dutch and then the English arrived? Whose hand touched this stone, and who looked at the same horizon? This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It’s been reaching out all along, I just wasn’t paying attention. —WHEN I WAS YOUNGER and trying to become a writer by interviewing other writers, I got an assignment to profile Saul Bellow, the much-awarded novelist who chronicled Chicago in all its diversity. Since he didn’t want to sit still for an interview, he took me on a day’s tour of this city that was a character in all his writing.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X X I I IThe seven virtues in alternate strains now proclaim, with tears, that the forces of the world have found their hour; and Beatrice declares that though her glory will for a time be withdrawn from them, it is but for a season. Then she signs to Matilda, to Dante and to Statius to follow her; but after only a few steps, graciously summons Dante to her side, bids him drop all diffidence, interprets the things he has just seen, and hints at the political Messiah who shall restore the due relations of Church and State and purify them both. But her comment is far darker than the text. So at least she knows it will seem to Dante’s dull and over-crusted mind; wherefore the stamp has been impressed upon his eye rather than on his unreceptive intellect. Dante gently expostulates with her for uttering herself only in inextricable enigmas. She answers that she does so to show him how inadequate has been the training of the teaching he has lately followed; but he, who, since he drank of Lethe, has forgotten all the interval between his loss of Beatrice upon earth and his finding of her again in Eden, answers that he cannot mind him of ever having wandered from her or being in need of any other school than that of her wisdom; upon which she reminds him that this forgetfulness of ever having left her is a sign that it was tainted with evil; for only the memory of what is so tainted is washed away by Lethe. Finally she promises that henceforth she will vex him no more by veiled discourse, but will speak with the naked simplicity that his untrained powers demand. The sun is now in high heaven, and they reach a fountain whence two streams flow, and seem loth to part from each other. Dante has forgotten all that Matilda told him about them, not so much that Lethe has washed away the thought, for surely it was untainted by any evil, as that before Eunoë is tasted and secures every good impression from being obliterated, such all-absorbing experiences as have but now been Dante’s, may obliterate from the memory even the most beautiful thoughts that have preceded them. Henceforth, however, all fair memories of good, whatsoever their relative significance, shall be secured against oblivion and shall take their perfect place in the perfect whole; for Dante, followed by Statius, drinks of the stream of Eunoë; and thence with life fresh as the leaves of spring he issues, inly equipped and cleansed for his further journey to the stars. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] “DEUS, venerunt gentes”:1 now three, now four, alternately and weeping, a sweet psalmody the ladies began; and Beatrice sighing and compassionate was hearkening to them so altered, that little more did Mary change at the cross.

• From Querelle (1953)

  All through the day they have toiled (servicemen, soldiers or sailors, never have that feeling of having toiled), blending their actions in a network of common endeavor, for the purposes of an achieved work like a visible, tightly drawn knot, and now they are returning. A shadowy friendship-shadowy to themunites them, and also a quiet hatred. Few of them are married, and the wives of those live some distance away. Toward six o'clock in the evening it is when the workmen pass through the iron gates of the Arsenal and leave the dockyard. They walk up in the direction of the railroad station where the canteens are, or do\vn the road to Recouvrance where they have their furnished rooms in cheap hotels. Most of them are Italians and Spaniards, though there are some North Africans and Frenchmen as well. It is in the midst of such a surfeit of fatigue, heavy muscles, virile lassitude, that Sublieutenant Seblon of the Vengeur loves to take his evening walk. They used to have this cannon permanently trained upon the penitentiary. Today the same cannon (its barrel only) stands a I JEAN GENET mounted upright in the middle of the same courtyard where once the convicts were mustered for the galleys. It is astonishing that turning criminals into sailors used to be regarded as a form of punishment. Went past La Feria. Saw nothing. Never any luck. Over in Recouvrance I caught a glimpse of an accordion-a sight I frequently see on board, yet never tire of watching-· . folding, unfolding on a sailor's thigh. Se brester, to brace oneself. Derives, no doubt, from bretteur, fighter: and so, relates to se quereller, to pick a fight. When I learn-if only from the newspaper-that some scandal is breaking, or when I'm just afraid that it may break upon the world, I make preparations to get away: I always believe that I shall be suspected of being the prime mover. I regard myself as a demon-ridden creature, merely because I have imagined certain subjects for scandal. As for the hoodlums I hold in my arms, tenderly kissing and caressing their faces before gently covering them up again in my sheets, they are no more than a kind of passing thrill and experiment combined. Mter having been so overwhelmed by the loneliness to which my inversion condemns me, is it really possible that I may some day hold naked in my arms, and continue to hold, pressed close to my body, those young men whose courage and hardness place them so high in my esteem that I long to throw myself at their feet and grovel before them? I dare hardly believe this, and tears well up in my eyes, to thank God for grant- 9 I QUERELLE ing me such happiness. My tears make me feel soft. I melt. My own cheeks still wet with tears, I revel in, and overflow with tenderness for, the Bat, hard cheekbones of those boys.

• From Querelle (1953)

  121 I QUERELLE was more than pleased. In some obscure way he hoped to estab lish a friendship with Robert and gain his recognition as a Hbrother-in-law." Two days later he made a full confession, but started out with care : "I think I've made it. With your bro, I mean." "No kidding." "Honest to God. But don't mention it, not even to him." "It's none of my business. But are you trying to tell me that you managed to bugger him?" Nono laughed, looking both embarrassed and triumphant. "No kidding, you've done that? It does surprise me, you know." Madame Lysiane was kind and gentle. The tasty gentleness of her pale meat was combined with that kindness of a woman whose most essential function consists in watching over brothel clients, treating them like charming invalids. She told her "girls" to be ministering angels to these gentlemen; to see that the official from Police Headquarters, in love with Carmen, was vol uptuously deprived of his candy; to let the old Admiral strut about naked, clucking, with a feather stuck in his anus, pursued round the room by Elyane dressed up as a farmer's wife; to be an ang el to Mr. Court Reporter who liked to be rocked to sleep; an angel to the one who was chained to the foot of the bed where he would bark like a dog; to be angels to all those stiff and secretive gentlemen who were stripped bare to their very souls by the warmth of the brothel and Madame Lysiane's ministra tions; all of wh ich goes to show that she carried within her the lu shness and beauty of a Mediterranean landscape. To herself, \vith a shrug of her shoulders, ivladame Lysiane sometimes used to say: ·wen, my dear girls-it is fortunate that such men exist: it gi ves the lowly-born a chance to experience love." She was a kind lady. 0 0

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I’m learning and you’re learning—and more will.” —WHEN I TELL THIS story to my friend Alice Walker, I discover that she too has always wanted to see the mounds. Like so many African Americans, Alice has Native Americans in her family tree. As William Loren Katz, a favorite historian of Alice’s, once wrote, “Europeans forcefully entered the African blood stream, but Native Americans and Africans merged by choice, invitation and love.”2 Her friend Deborah Matthews, who grew up near these Ohio mounds and had a Cherokee great-grandmother, offers to show us what she learned in her childhood. In the summer of 1997, I leave my home in New York, Alice and Deborah leave their respective homes in California, and we meet at the motel where Alice and I will be staying—though with the added comfort of meals in the nearby homey kitchen of Deborah’s mother, a generous woman Alice calls by her middle name, Magnolia. On the first day, Deborah shows us the mounds in her small hometown of Newark. One is a round, slightly raised grassy area about the size of a city block, with ancient curved edges still visible under bushes and refuse. Surrounded by working-class houses with families sitting on front porches in the August heat, it is an open space with kids playing near public restrooms. A second is Moundbuilders Golf Course at the Moundbuilders Country Club, just outside town. A third is the Great Circle Earthworks, which is protected as a state park. Its thirty acres are surrounded by a wall that even after two thousand years of erosion is still fifteen feet high. At the center are four mounds in the shape of a bird, its beak pointing toward the entrance. Deborah says excavations have revealed an altar inside the bird’s body, and dowsing has identified energy lines along the top of the wall. She came here as a little girl on family outings. “If we ventured outside the wall,” she remembers, “our elders would say, ‘Just follow the circle and it will bring you back to us.’ ” In Magnolia’s kitchen, we eat homemade peach cobbler and talk about differences in the way countries treat their past. At Stonehenge in England, there are guards and tape-recorded tours. Modern Greeks picnic among the ruins and are intimate with their ancient history. Both can count themselves as descendants of past glories. Here, people arrived from another continent and, by war, disease, and persecution, they eliminated 90 percent of the residents. From 1492 to the end of the Indian Wars, an estimated fifteen million people were killed. A papal bull had instructed Christians to conquer non-Christian countries and either kill all occupants or “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”3 From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "But then, what difference would that make? If it's him ( Robert) who has the smaller one, that would just be . . . " (she couldn't find the right word, but felt a twinge of maternal tenderness toward a Robert less well-endowed than his brother) . " . . . I could mention it to him, to make him mad . . . But then, if his eyes turned sad, and he replied to me, in a light and confident tone : '\Veil, it isn't my fault'-if he said that, it would be a very serious business. It would mean that he recognized his infirmity and placed himself under my wing, having broken his own. What would I do then? If I kissed him straightway, and smiled the way he smiled at me, the way he kissed me when I pushed my tousled head up from under the sheets-then he would know how it hurts to be pitied, by a creature one loves. Does he love me? I'd go on loving him, I. would-more tenderly, but not so passionately." Quere11e flipped his cigarette into the air. It landed some distance away, yet quite close enough to lie there like a small white stick of dynamite, still smouldering, the fateful sign that war had been declared, that it was "out of his hands," even if its burning a little further would lead to some cataclysm. Querelle did not look at it, but he knew what he had thrown away there. The gravity of his gesture became conscious to h�m, and it forced him-irresistibly, now that the gauntlet had been thrown-to proceed straight ahead. He put his hands into his pockets, the diagonal ones on his belly, and said, staring at Mario with a fixed and malicious frown, taking care to pronounce his words very clearly: "What are you trying to say? Yeah, you. What is it you're trying to tell me? Asking me if you could take Nona's place." The sailor's calmness frightened Mario. If he went along with 194 I JEAN GENET

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, yes,” she agreed; “I never could. _Je n’ai pas le cœur assez_ large to love a whole asylum of horrid little girls. _Cela ne m’a jamais réussi._ There are so many women who have made themselves _une position sociale_ in that way. And now more than ever,” she said with a mournful, confiding expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but unmistakably intending her words only for Levin, “now when I have such need of some occupation, I cannot.” And suddenly frowning (Levin saw that she was frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed the subject. “I know about you,” she said to Levin; “that you’re not a public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my ability.” “How have you defended me?” “Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won’t you have some tea?” She rose and took up a book bound in morocco. “Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, indicating the book. “It’s well worth taking up.” “Oh, no, it’s all so sketchy.” “I told him about it,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to his sister, nodding at Levin. “You shouldn’t have. My writing is something after the fashion of those little baskets and carving which Liza Mertsalova used to sell me from the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in that society,” she turned to Levin; “and they were miracles of patience, the work of those poor wretches.” And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As she said that she sighed, and her face suddenly taking a hard expression, looked as it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself. She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing-room, while she stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. “About her divorce, about Vronsky, and what he’s doing at the club, about me?” wondered Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna Arkadyevna had written.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Ah!” said Levin, listening more to the sound of her voice than to the words she was saying, and all the while paying attention to the road, which passed now through the forest, and avoiding places where she might make a false step. “And about Sergey Ivanovitch and Varenka. You’ve noticed?... I’m very anxious for it,” she went on. “What do you think about it?” And she peeped into his face. “I don’t know what to think,” Levin answered, smiling. “Sergey seems very strange to me in that way. I told you, you know....” “Yes, that he was in love with that girl who died....” “That was when I was a child; I know about it from hearsay and tradition. I remember him then. He was wonderfully sweet. But I’ve watched him since with women; he is friendly, some of them he likes, but one feels that to him they’re simply people, not women.” “Yes, but now with Varenka ... I fancy there’s something....” “Perhaps there is.... But one has to know him.... He’s a peculiar, wonderful person. He lives a spiritual life only. He’s too pure, too exalted a nature.” “Why? Would this lower him, then?” “No, but he’s so used to a spiritual life that he can’t reconcile himself with actual fact, and Varenka is after all fact.” Levin had grown used by now to uttering his thought boldly, without taking the trouble of clothing it in exact language. He knew that his wife, in such moments of loving tenderness as now, would understand what he meant to say from a hint, and she did understand him. “Yes, but there’s not so much of that actual fact about her as about me. I can see that he would never have cared for me. She is altogether spiritual.” “Oh, no, he is so fond of you, and I am always so glad when my people like you....” “Yes, he’s very nice to me; but....” “It’s not as it was with poor Nikolay ... you really cared for each other,” Levin finished. “Why not speak of him?” he added. “I sometimes blame myself for not; it ends in one’s forgetting. Ah, how terrible and dear he was!... Yes, what were we talking about?” Levin said, after a pause. “You think he can’t fall in love,” said Kitty, translating into her own language. “It’s not so much that he can’t fall in love,” Levin said, smiling, “but he has not the weakness necessary.... I’ve always envied him, and even now, when I’m so happy, I still envy him.” “You envy him for not being able to fall in love?” “I envy him for being better than I,” said Levin. “He does not live for himself. His whole life is subordinated to his duty. And that’s why he can be calm and contented.” “And you?” Kitty asked, with an ironical and loving smile.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt relieved that no one was in the main part of the house. He followed me wearily, the wet corduroy chafing his thighs; I looked down hastily at the turn of the stair and saw his blurred brown footprints on the carpet. In the flat, I helped him take off his clothes. He groaned and ached as I pulled his arm back to slide the shirt off. ‘My fucking shoulder, man,’ he half-shouted, and I passed my trembling fingertips gently over his back and he breathed in suddenly when I brushed a bruise that was mysteriously welling up in the blackness of his skin. He was shivering and chilled, his lower lip hanging miserably. I pulled off his shoes and stood them on the doormat, becoming more practical, concerned only with immediate necessities. At the same time he grew more passive and inert. I pulled down his zip and tugged his tight, rain-slimed corduroys and his little briefs down over his ass and thighs; he managed to lift each foot as I pulled the wet, resisting trousers off, kneeling in front of him and glancing at his shrunken cock and his scrotum shrivelled up tight with cold and fear. I propelled him to the bathroom and sat him down before attempting to clean and dress his wound. It was very painful, but he said nothing beyond the occasional ouch. I used some lint that I found in the cupboard, and stuck it down with several small Band-Aids. When James was back I would ring him. I ran a hot bath and got Arthur to sit in it whilst I gently sponged water down his back, washed his flat muscular chest, lifted his arms and soaped his armpits and sides. Then I slid my hand between his legs and stroked his cock and balls. He lay back in the long, deep tub as if relaxing. ‘Darling, what happened?’ ‘I got in a fight.’ He looked at me crossly but sorrily. ‘I wouldn’t have come back here, only I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t see why you should get mixed up with all this.’ ‘Who did you get in a fight with?’ ‘My brother—Harold. My big brother. He got this knife, he cut me with it—the fucking bastard cut me with it.’ He looked at me with a kind of tired outrage. ‘I can’t go back there no more, my brother’ll murder me. Only he don’t know where I am, ’ere. I’ll have to stay ’ere—for a bit, Will.’ He splashed his hands down in the water. Blood was seeping out again through the lint of his dressing.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The guard came in and he was angry. He snarled at me, “You should have been done a long time ago. You have to leave.” He began handcuffing Henry, pulling his hands together behind his back and locking them there. Then he roughly shackled Henry’s ankles. The guard was so angry he put the cuffs on too tight. I could see Henry grimacing with pain. I said, “I think those cuffs are on too tight. Can you loosen them, please?” “I told you: You need to leave. You don’t tell me how to do my job.” Henry gave me a smile and said, “It’s okay, Bryan. Don’t worry about this. Just come back and see me again, okay?” I could see him wince with each click of the chains being tightened around his waist. I must have looked pretty distraught. Henry kept saying, “Don’t worry, Bryan, don’t worry. Come back, okay?” As the officer pushed him toward the door, Henry turned back to look at me. I started mumbling, “I’m really sorry. I’m really sor—” “Don’t worry about this, Bryan,” he said, cutting me off. “Just come back.” I looked at him and struggled to say something appropriate, something reassuring, something that expressed my gratitude to him for being so patient with me. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. Henry looked at me and smiled. The guard was shoving him toward the door roughly. I didn’t like the way Henry was being treated, but he continued to smile until, just before the guard could push him fully out of the room, he planted his feet to resist the officer’s shoving. He looked so calm. Then he did something completely unexpected. I watched him close his eyes and tilt his head back. I was confused by what he was doing, but then he opened his mouth and I understood. He began to sing. He had a tremendous baritone voice that was strong and clear. It startled both me and the guard, who stopped his pushing. I’m pressing on, the upward way New heights I’m gaining, every day Still praying as, I’m onward bound Lord, plant my feet on Higher Ground. It was an old hymn they used to sing all the time in the church where I grew up. I hadn’t heard it in years. Henry sang slowly and with great sincerity and conviction. It took a moment before the officer recovered and resumed pushing him out the door. Because his ankles were shackled and his hands were locked behind his back, Henry almost stumbled when the guard shoved him forward. He had to waddle to keep his balance, but he kept on singing. I could hear him as he went down the hall: Lord lift me up, and let me stand By faith on Heaven’s tableland A higher plane, that I have found Lord, plant my feet on Higher Ground.

• From Querelle (1953)

  But then, as time was of the essence, getting rid in one stroke of all the tragic protocol required by heroics, like an Emperor who addresses his enemy directly, ignoring the frills of warrior etiquette and the babble of generals and ministers, he spoke directly to his brother. With a matter-of-factness and authority only Querelle was capable of understanding, implying a secret familiarity that excluded all onlookers and bystanders from their conversation, he said : "Beat it. I'll get ahold of you. We'll �ettle this another time." For a moment Robert had thought of confronting the patrol on his own, but now it was approaching at ominous speed. He added : "All right. Take-off time.'' Nothing more was said, they did not even look at each other, but started walking along on the sidewalk with no cops on it. Dede followed Robert in silence. Now and again he looked at Querelle, whose right hand was smeared with blood. Talking to Robert, Nono regained his true manliness which he tended to lose a little when he was with Querelle. Not that he took on any homosexual mannerisms, but in the presence of 126 I JEAN GENET Querelle he ceased to think of him as a man who loved women and relaxed into the special atmosphere that a man who loves men always ca11s forth. Between them, for them alone, a universe came into being (with its own laws and its secret, invisible understandings ) that totaiiy excluded the idea of woman. At the moment of pleasure a certain tenderness had disturbed the relationship between those two-it affected the boss in particular. Tenderness is not quite the right word, but it does serve to indicate the melange of gratitude toward the body providing one with pleasure, of the sweetness of the moment of joy, of physical exhaustion and even disgust drenching, relieving, sinking and raising your spirits, and finally, of sadness; and this poor touch of tenderness, manifested like a kind of quiet and colorless flash of lightning, then continues to subtly influence and alter the simple physical relationship between men. Not that this becomes anything even approaching the true love between man and women, or between hvo beings one of whom is feminine, but it is the absence of woman in this universe that obliges the two men to call forth a measure of womanliness in themselves. To invent the woman. It is not the weaker, or the younger, or the more gentle of the two who succeeds better in this, but the one who has more experience in it, frequently the stronger and older man. A complicity unites the hvo men, but while it arises from the absence of woman, that complicity calls forth the woman who joins them together by her very absence.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I learn that there are several kinds of drastic nerve blocks that could diminish her pain and leave her mind clear. But such procedures can be done only in a hospital. Wilma’s caregiving team has a conference with Dr. Grim, who says a local ambulance could take her to and from the hospital—more than two hours or so each way. We talk to Wilma. She thinks about it. The ambulance comes and parks in the yard just in case. She decides she might die in transit, or become too hooked to tubes to leave the hospital, and she wants to be at home in Indian Country. She thanks us for giving her a choice. To me, she says with some of her old humor, “You’re an organizer to the end.” It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts. From that moment on, I accept Wilma’s wisdom. Seeing that I need a task, Wilma’s daughters assign me the duty of making sure each visitor’s contribution is recorded on a list in the kitchen. I write names down next to rhubarb and peach pies, vats of sweet iced tea, and trays of cornbread. A high school student carries in crates of bottled water, and a silent man in overalls mows the lawn just because it needs it. Wilma’s family wants to be able to thank each person, hence the list. Once again the individual honors the community, and vice versa. I finally understand why Winterhawk, Charlie’s son by an earlier marriage, turned down a scholarship to Dartmouth and stayed here instead. It was not just land that brought Wilma home; it was also community. At the long kitchen table, knowing Wilma creates a bond among us, and strangers talk. The husband of her dear friend who died in the car crash has been here for days, and explains that Wilma helped to raise their daughter. Gail Small, Wilma’s friend and one of the activists she admires and profiled in her book Every Day Is a Good Day, has come all the way from the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana. There, Gail has waged a lifetime battle to keep extractive and exploitive energy companies from destroying the land, and to keep religious schools from abusing the next generation. As she says, “Children were sexually molested by priests and nuns, then came home to spread the cancer themselves.” She started not only an environmental group called Native Action, but also a high school on the reservation. Oren Lyons has come from his home in upstate New York, the headquarters of the governing body of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Ivan Petrovitch and I settled in Alexey’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyevitch’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoise-shell cigar-case and took a cigarette. “How are you feeling today?” her brother asked her. “Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual.” “Yes, isn’t it extraordinarily fine?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture. “I have never seen a better portrait.” “And extraordinarily like, isn’t it?” said Vorkuev. Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance lighted up Anna’s face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin flushed, and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke. “We were just talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of Vashtchenkov’s last pictures. Have you seen them?” “Yes, I have seen them,” answered Levin. “But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you ... you were saying?...” Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately. “She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school people on Grisha’s account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been unfair to him.” “Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn’t care for them very much,” Levin went back to the subject she had started. Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude to the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her. Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to. The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness. Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry. Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as this remark. Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she appreciated the thought. She laughed. “I laugh,” she said, “as one laughs when one sees a very true portrait. What you said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and literature too, indeed—Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the _combinaisons_ made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.” “That’s perfectly true,” said Vorknev. “So you’ve been at the club?” she said to her brother.

• From Querelle (1953)

  234 I JEAN GENET "But what about my clothes? I still haven't got any." "That's just it, you'll get some in Quimper. You can't buy anything here a�yway. But now you've got money, you'll get by. Five thousand, for godssakes. You can take it easy for a while." "I've been lucky to have you on my side, you know, Jo?" "That's for sure. But now you've got to watch out so's you won't get caught. And I guess I can count on you not to spill the beans even if that should happen." "Come on, you won't have to worry about that for a mo ment. I'll take care of myself, the cops will never get to know anything about you. I never met you. Well, is it tonight I'm leaving?" "Yeah, it's time for you to get going. Makes me feel a little sick, to see you leaving. Really got to like you, kid." "Me too. You've been a real friend. But we'll meet again. I won't forget you." "That's what you're saying now, but it won't take you long to chuck me overboard." "No, man. Don't say that. I'm not like that." "Is that right? You won't forget me?" With these last words Querelle put his hand on Gil's shoul- der. Gil looked at him and replied: "You heard what I said." Querelle smiled and put his arm round Gil's neck. "So it's true, we really got to be very close, right?" "I liked the cut of your jib the moment I saw you." They stood facing each other, looking into each other's eyes. "I sure wish everything goes all right for you." Querelle pulled Gil up against his shoulder. There was no resistance. "You god damn kid, get going." He kissed him, and Gil kissed him back, but Querelle still held him tight, and whispered: "It's a pity.'" In a similar whisper, Gil asked:

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  If there is one that men want to talk about most, it’s how much they missed having nurturing fathers, or any man in their lives who cared. Once they delve into that, the question is how to become that father or man themselves. This childhood wish is one of the greatest allies that feminism could have. Men also talk about seeing their mothers treated with violence or humiliation by fathers or stepfathers. I’ve watched the biggest, baddest-looking college athletes with tears rolling down their faces because they were remembering how they felt while witnessing their mothers being beaten. Whatever the makeup of the audience, I’ve learned to have faith in the smart, funny, revelatory responses and the surprises of a discussion that usually goes on longer than the lecture itself. I wish I could bring you a thousand YouTube videos of people standing up and asking what they need to know, or sharing what they’ve learned, or telling their stories, or asking for help, or saving me from some impasse I can’t solve. A sample: • At a law school in Canada, we are deep in a discussion of the law as a universal instrument that feminists should not expect to be flexible. I am arguing that this is what judges are for—otherwise, justice could be meted out by a computer. The mostly male law students are arguing that any exception is dangerous and creates a “slippery slope.” Make one exception, and the number will grow until the law will be overturned de facto. I am not a lawyer. I am stuck. Those young men may or may not represent the commonsense majority in the audience, but they have triumphed. Then a tall young woman in jeans rises from the back of the room. “Well,” she says calmly, “I have a boa constrictor.” This quiets the audience right down. “Once a month,” she continues, “I go to a dissection lab on campus to get frozen mice to feed my boa constrictor. But this month, there was a new professor in charge, and he said to me: ‘I can’t give you frozen mice. If I give you frozen mice, everyone will want frozen mice.’ ” There is such an explosion of laughter that even the argumentative young men can’t resist. She has made her point: not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law has to be flexible. She has saved the day. • At a community college in California, an auditorium full of returning women students is into a long and serious discussion about how difficult it is to get their male partners to share equally in the housework and child care. It’s not just because the men are resistant; it’s because the women themselves feel guilty, or don’t want to seem like nags, or don’t know how to divide work and child care because they’ve never seen it at home.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Returning with the bottle, Levin found the sick man settled comfortably and everything about him completely changed. The heavy smell was replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty with pouting lips and puffed-out, rosy cheeks was squirting through a little pipe. There was no dust visible anywhere, a rug was laid by the bedside. On the table stood medicine bottles and decanters tidily arranged, and the linen needed was folded up there, and Kitty’s _broderie anglaise_. On the other table by the patient’s bed there were candles and drink and powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay in clean sheets on high raised pillows, in a clean night-shirt with a white collar about his astoundingly thin neck, and with a new expression of hope looked fixedly at Kitty. The doctor brought by Levin, and found by him at the club, was not the one who had been attending Nikolay Levin, as the patient was dissatisfied with him. The new doctor took up a stethoscope and sounded the patient, shook his head, prescribed medicine, and with extreme minuteness explained first how to take the medicine and then what diet was to be kept to. He advised eggs, raw or hardly cooked, and seltzer water, with warm milk at a certain temperature. When the doctor had gone away the sick man said something to his brother, of which Levin could distinguish only the last words: “Your Katya.” By the expression with which he gazed at her, Levin saw that he was praising her. He called indeed to Katya, as he called her. “I’m much better already,” he said. “Why, with you I should have got well long ago. How nice it is!” he took her hand and drew it towards his lips, but as though afraid she would dislike it he changed his mind, let it go, and only stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both hers and pressed it. “Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed,” he said. No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone understood. She understood because she was all the while mentally keeping watch on what he needed. “On the other side,” she said to her husband, “he always sleeps on that side. Turn him over, it’s so disagreeable calling the servants. I’m not strong enough. Can you?” she said to Marya Nikolaevna. “I’m afraid not,” answered Marya Nikolaevna.