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 Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  It’s part of the Chino soil series. In 1917, the Bureau of Soils of the Department of Agriculture classified most of the soil now covered by houses and lawns as Chino clay loam. This soil had been carried away from the San Gabriel Mountains only ten thousand years ago. As late as 1914, the runoff from foothill canyons was allowed to flow unchecked into the vague rivers of the coastal plain. They dropped new sand and clay over soil deposited by older rivers during the late Pleistocene. The rivers of the coastal plain found new beds almost every winter. Every summer, the rivers disappeared. Where the ground dipped slightly, as it does here, the rivers concentrated alkali. It made mediocre land for wheat or barley, but it was good enough for growing sugar beets. When sugar beet production declined in the 1920s, the truck farmers who leased the land from the Montana Land Company alternated crops of carrots, lima beans, and alfalfa. Most of the farmers, before 1942, were Japanese. 244 My mother came to Southern California in 1943, while my father was serving as gunnery officer on the destroyer Bradford . The Bradford ’s home port was Long Beach. My mother worked there as an escrow clerk in a bank. The Bradford ’s duty throughout the war in the Pacific was to serve as an escort ship for carrier operations. The Bradford directed fighter aircraft, monitored radar, and screened carriers from Japanese submarines and torpedo planes. The Bradford also collected downed Navy flyers whose planes were too damaged or low on fuel to reach the carriers from which they were launched. The crew members of the Bradford never lost a pilot they were sent to find. In two years of bitter fighting, no sailor on board was killed in enemy action. In the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where kamikaze aircraft sank or damaged more than thirty ships, the Bradford was unharmed. The war ended, and my parents stayed in Southern California. They stayed a continent away from my father’s mother in New York City. They bought a house on a street that ended, for a few years, in bean fields. 245 Don Rochlen, the publicist who promoted the new suburb, told reporters from Los Angeles newspapers that the house lots in the new suburb were made small by design so that the streets could be wider. The houses are close enough so that you might hear, if you listened, a neighbor’s baby cry, a father arguing with a teenage son, or a television playing early on a summer night. Most things here are close enough for comfort. 246 Once, my father and I watched a rerun of Victory at Sea in the small middle bedroom where my parents kept the television set. It was early evening, and my father had just come home from work at the Gas Company offices in Los Angeles. He sat next to me on the bed.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  When I was a boy, I served with my brother on Holy Thursday. One of us carried the pitcher that held warm water. The other carried the basin that caught the water poured over each man’s right foot. The foot washing was awkward for both the men and the priest. It required the men to strip off a shoe and sock from a foot that had already been carefully washed at home. The priest had to bend down, nearly on his hands and knees, to reach the white feet projecting from dark pant legs. One altar boy positioned the basin under the man’s extended foot. The priest poured a small amount of water from the pitcher the other altar boy handed him. The priest quickly wiped off the water with a towel, stood up, stepped to the next man, and got down on his knees again. When my father died, I did not take his place as unofficial sacristan. I did have my right foot washed on Holy Thursday night. 314 On Good Friday the services are shortened. No mass is said. The priest and the congregation read one of the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. A narrator reads the descriptions, the priest reads the words of Jesus, and other readers take the parts of Peter and Pontius Pilate. The congregation reads aloud what the crowds are supposed to have said. Near the end of the service, after the readings, the congregation participates in the veneration of the cross. Altar servers bring three or four large crucifixes from the sacristy and take them down to the first step in front of the altar. Each server holds a crucifix forward, so that the feet of the figure of Jesus on the cross are in reach of someone kneeling on the first step. Another server holds a small, starched square of white linen. 315 When I was a boy and served on Good Friday, the lines of congregants stretched to the back of the church. There was no distinction about who could participate in the veneration of the cross. Mothers and fathers stood with their small children, waiting in line.

• From Querelle (1953)

  96 I JEAN GENET then I drew back almost instantly, for feax that he should see me. To those tranquil, assured-and long-moments, perhaps granted us one day, to sleep in each other's anns, I still prefer these in stants of discomfort, these rapid moments one has to destroy because the legs grow stiff from bending down, or an ann goes numb, or because a door or an eyelid isn't quite properly closed. I cherish those stolen moments, and Querelle pays no attention to them. Reception on board, for Admiral A . . . He's a tall and thin old man, with very white hair. He rarely smiles, but I know that behind that severe and even a little haughty exterior he conceals gr eat gentleness, great kindness. He made his appeara nce up the gangway followed by a Marine, a. big bruiser in full battle chess -gaiters, cartridge belt, helmet and all. His bodyguard. The spectacle moved me a great deal, and I enjoy recollecting it. The fragile outline of the old man with his neat gestures, seen against the magnificent bearing of his orderly! One day I, too, shall be an old officer, decorated, gilded, and frail, but framed thus, by the solid muscular body of some twenty-year-old warrior. We are at sea. There is a storm. If we get shipwrecked, what will Querelle do? W auld he try to save me? He does not know that I love him. I would try to save him, but I would rather try to make him save me. In a shipwreck, everybody grabs hold of what is most precious to him: a violin, a manuscript, some pho tographs . . . Querelle would take me. But I know that he would first of all save his own beauty, even if I should die. He stood watching another crewman scrubbing the deck. Not having anything else to lean on, Querelle was leaning on his hand s, one on top of the other, resting on his belt, above the

• From Querelle (1953)

  49 I QUERELLE "\Vhat would you like me to do?" Wit hout shifting his knees, Dede had managed to lean back even farther. He now had the posture of a young female saint at the very moment of a visitation, fa11en on her knees at the foot of an oak tree, crushed by the revelation, by the splendor of Grace, then bending over backwards in order to save her face from a vision that is searing her eyelashes, her very eyeballs, blinding her. He smiled. Gently he put his arm round the detective's neck. With little kisses he pecked at, without ever touching them, his forehead, temples, and eyes, the rounded tip of the nose, his lips, yet always without actually touching them; Mario felt like being subjected to a thousand prickly points of flame, darting and flickering to and fro. He thought: "He's covering me with mimosa blossoms." Only his eyelids fluttered, no other part of his body moved, nor did his hands, still resting on his knees, nor did his peeker grow lively. He was, nevertheless, touched by the kid's unaccus· tamed tenderness. It reached him in a thousand small shocks, sad only in their tentativeness, and warm, and he permitted it slowly to swell and lighten his body. But Dede was pecking at a rock. The intervals between kisses grew longer, the youngster wit hdrew his face, still smiling, and started to whistle. Imitating the twitter of sparrows on all sides of Mario's rigid and massive head, from eye to mouth, from neck to nostrils, he moved his small mouth, now shaped like a chicken's ass, whistling now like a blackbird, now like an oriole. His eyes were smiling. He was having a good time, sounding like all the birds in a grove. It made him feel quite soft inside to think that he was all these birds, and that at the same time he was offering them up on this burning but immobile head, locked in stone. Dede tried to delight and fascinate him with these birds. But Mario felt a kind of anguish, being confronted with that terrifying thing: the smile of a bird. Then, again, he thought with some relief: "He's powdering me with mimosa blossoms."

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew thoughtful. Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it. “I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,” said the little girl in English; “there, pick them up!” “Everything’s in confusion,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there are the children running about by themselves.” And going to the door, he called them. They threw down the box, that represented a train, and came in to their father. The little girl, her father’s favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him, and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her father held her back. “How is mamma?” he asked, passing his hand over his daughter’s smooth, soft little neck. “Good morning,” he said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him. He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with a smile to his father’s chilly smile. “Mamma? She is up,” answered the girl. Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. “That means that she’s not slept again all night,” he thought. “Well, is she cheerful?” The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it, and blushed too. “I don’t know,” she said. “She did not say we must do our lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma’s.” “Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though,” he said, still holding her and stroking her soft little hand. He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate and a fondant. “For Grisha?” said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate. “Yes, yes.” And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed her on the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go. “The carriage is ready,” said Matvey; “but there’s someone to see you with a petition.” “Been here long?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Half an hour.” “How many times have I told you to tell me at once?” “One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,” said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was impossible to be angry. “Well, show the person up at once,” said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  They came forward, genuflected briefly on the first step in front of the altar, leaned forward, and kissed the feet of the figure of Jesus on the cross. If I was holding the cross, I tried to keep it as steady as possible. If I was holding the square of starched, white cloth, I was supposed to wipe the feet of the figure. I wasn’t sure if this was reverence or something to do with hygiene. As the members of the congregation venerated the cross, the cloth I carried grew bright red from the lipstick I wiped from the feet of Jesus. 316 While the congregation knelt and venerated the cross, the choir sang. The hymn the choir sang was Pange Lingua, a hymn traditional for Good Friday. Among its many verses are some addressed to the cross itself. Dulce lignum, Dulces clavos, Dulce pondus sustinet. Sweet the wood, Sweet the nails, Sweet the weight you bear. HOLY LAND A CONVERSATION Is Holy Land a memoir? It doesn’t look much like one. And it doesn’t have some of the things memoirs are supposed to have. Holy Land is a memoir of a place more than an account of a life. You write intimately about your childhood, for instance, and almost nothing about your adult life. Holy Land reconciles what is personal and what is public in an unremarkable life. More of the personal or the public would have made a different book. The gaps in the story are filled, however. Readers fill them with memories of the intimacy they once had with the things they grew up with. Why does Holy Land look the way it does? It’s 316 short bits, some only a sentence or two in length. No section is longer than a single, double-spaced, typed sheet of paper. That was my grid—the boundaries of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch rectangle of white. The formal structure of Holy Land isn’t all that abstract, however, because it also reflects a physical reality. I don’t drive. I have a boring collection of vision problems that prevents me from getting a license or owning a car. I live about a mile from my office at City Hall where I work as a division manager. It takes me about half an hour to walk to City Hall in the morning and another half-hour in the evening returning

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  174). rill : a very small brook. cabanes : huts; simple dwellings. que dis-je : French; what am I saying? marmot : any rodent of the genus Marmota, such as the woodchuck. Venus came and went : H.H. is being verbally playful about a sexual climax. un monsieur très bien : French; a proper gentleman (a very pompous and bourgeois expression). hospitalized … by now : reference to H.H.’s Western-style fight with Quilty on p. 299. strumstring : H.H.’s coinage; the crooner is Gene Autry (1907– ). harpies : from classical mythology; foul creatures, part woman, part bird, that stole the souls of the dead, or defiled or seized their victims’ food. orchideous masculinity : belonging to the natural order of plants akin to genus Orchis. Its Greek etymology adds a comic dimension, for orchis means “testicle” as well as the plant. The hideous increases the humor. parapets of Europe : a Rimbaud echo; see ramparts of ancient Europe . Oriental tale : invented by Nabokov. Beardsley : after Aubrey Beardsley; see McFate, Aubrey . Woerner’s Treatise : it exists, Nabokov told the annotator. A Girl of the Limberlost : by Gene Stratton Porter (1863–1924), it was once a great favorite of schoolgirls (published 1914). Little Women (1869), by Louisa May Alcott (1832–1882), continues to be read. ganglia : plural of ganglion , an anatomical and zoological word; “a mass of nerve tissue containing nerve cells, a nerve center”; a center of strength and energy. dans … l’âge : French; in a mature age (when he is most robust). vieillard encore vert : French; literally, “an old man still green”—that is, sexually potent. Know Your Own Daughter : the “biblical title” is real, said Nabokov, although it has been impossible to document. Many similar titles exist, all lending themselves to double-entendre : Frances K. Martin, Know Your Child (1946); C. Lewis, How Well Can We Know Our Children? (1947); C. W. Young, Know Your Pupil (1945); and E. D. Adlerblum, Know Your Child Through His Play (1947). See A Guide to … Development . The Little Mermaid : anyone familiar with this fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), the Danish fabulist, knows that H.H.’s gift has been carefully chosen, and that there are several ironies involved. The little mermaid longs to “enchant a mortal heart”—namely, the prince—and thus win an immortal soul. Lolita has succeeded all too well; but neither H.H., Quilty, nor her husband Dick Schiller, who will carry her off to Alaska, qualifies as prince in the fairy tale Lolita. At the end of Andersen’s tale, the mermaid has been transposed into one of the freely circulating children of the air, who must float for three hundred years before they are admitted into the kingdom of heaven.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  It’s part of the Chino soil series. In 1917, the Bureau of Soils of the Department of Agriculture classified most of the soil now covered by houses and lawns as Chino clay loam. This soil had been carried away from the San Gabriel Mountains only ten thousand years ago. As late as 1914, the runoff from foothill canyons was allowed to flow unchecked into the vague rivers of the coastal plain. They dropped new sand and clay over soil deposited by older rivers during the late Pleistocene. The rivers of the coastal plain found new beds almost every winter. Every summer, the rivers disappeared. Where the ground dipped slightly, as it does here, the rivers concentrated alkali. It made mediocre land for wheat or barley, but it was good enough for growing sugar beets. When sugar beet production declined in the 1920s, the truck farmers who leased the land from the Montana Land Company alternated crops of carrots, lima beans, and alfalfa. Most of the farmers, before 1942, were Japanese. 244 My mother came to Southern California in 1943, while my father was serving as gunnery officer on the destroyer Bradford . The Bradford ’s home port was Long Beach. My mother worked there as an escrow clerk in a bank. The Bradford ’s duty throughout the war in the Pacific was to serve as an escort ship for carrier operations. The Bradford directed fighter aircraft, monitored radar, and screened carriers from Japanese submarines and torpedo planes. The Bradford also collected downed Navy flyers whose planes were too damaged or low on fuel to reach the carriers from which they were launched. The crew members of the Bradford never lost a pilot they were sent to find. In two years of bitter fighting, no sailor on board was killed in enemy action. In the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where kamikaze aircraft sank or damaged more than thirty ships, the Bradford was unharmed. The war ended, and my parents stayed in Southern California. They stayed a continent away from my father’s mother in New York City. They bought a house on a street that ended, for a few years, in bean fields. 245 Don Rochlen, the publicist who promoted the new suburb, told reporters from Los Angeles newspapers that the house lots in the new suburb were made small by design so that the streets could be wider. The houses are close enough so that you might hear, if you listened, a neighbor’s baby cry, a father arguing with a teenage son, or a television playing early on a summer night. Most things here are close enough for comfort. 246 Once, my father and I watched a rerun of Victory at Sea in the small middle bedroom where my parents kept the television set. It was early evening, and my father had just come home from work at the Gas Company offices in Los Angeles. He sat next to me on the bed.

• From Querelle (1953)

  45 I QUERELLE extraordinary tenderness; and that more often than not toward evening, when the gang was getting ready to leave. Theo would be scouring his hands with a little soft sand, and then he would straighten his back to take a good look at the work in progress: at the rising wall, at the discarded trowels, the planks, the wheelbarrows, the buckets. Over all these, and over the work men, a gray, impalpable dust was settling, turning the yard into a single object, seemingly finished, the result of the day's commotion. The peace of the evening appeared due to this achievement, a deserted yard, powdered a uniform gray. Stiff after their day's work, worn out and silent, the masons would drift off with slow, almost funereal steps. None of them were more than forty years old. Tired, kit bag over left shoulder, right hand in pants pocket, they were leaving the day for the night. Their belts uneasily held up pants made for suspenders; every ten meters they would give them a hitch, tucking the front under the belt while letting the back gape wide, always showing that little triangular flap and its two buttons intended for fastening to a pair of suspenders. In this sluggish calm they would return to their quarters. None of them would be going to the girls or the bistro before Saturday, but, once abed and at peace, they would let their manhood take its rest and under the sheets store up its black forces and white juices; would go to sleep on their side and pass a dreamless night, one bare ann with its powder-dusted hand stretched out over the edge of the bed, showing the delicate pulsation of the blood in bluish veins. Theo would trail along beside Gil. Every evening he offered him a cigarette before setting out to catch up with the others, and sometimes-and then his expression would change -he would give him a great slap on the shoulder. "Weii, buddy? How's it going?" Gil would reply with his usual, noncommittal shrug. He would barely manage a smile. On the bolster, Gil felt his cheek grow hot. He had lain there with his eyes wide open, and by reason of his ever increasing need to empty his bladder, his

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his nearness, and his caresses, and moral soothing, when she met his simple, confiding, and loving glance, and heard his naïve questions. Anna took out the presents Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl was Tanya at Moscow, and how Tanya could read, and even taught the other children. “Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha. “To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.” “I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling. Anna had not had time to drink her coffee when the Countess Lidia Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, stout woman, with an unhealthily sallow face and splendid, pensive black eyes. Anna liked her, but today she seemed to be seeing her for the first time with all her defects. “Well, my dear, so you took the olive branch?” inquired Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as soon as she came into the room. “Yes, it’s all over, but it was all much less serious than we had supposed,” answered Anna. “My _belle-sœur_ is in general too hasty.” But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, though she was interested in everything that did not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what interested her; she interrupted Anna: “Yes, there’s plenty of sorrow and evil in the world. I am so worried today.” “Oh, why?” asked Anna, trying to suppress a smile. “I’m beginning to be weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and sometimes I’m quite unhinged by it. The Society of the Little Sisters” (this was a religiously-patriotic, philanthropic institution) “was going splendidly, but with these gentlemen it’s impossible to do anything,” added Countess Lidia Ivanovna in a tone of ironical submission to destiny. “They pounce on the idea, and distort it, and then work it out so pettily and unworthily. Two or three people, your husband among them, understand all the importance of the thing, but the others simply drag it down. Yesterday Pravdin wrote to me....” Pravdin was a well-known Panslavist abroad, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna described the purport of his letter. Then the countess told her of more disagreements and intrigues against the work of the unification of the churches, and departed in haste, as she had that day to be at the meeting of some society and also at the Slavonic committee.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  He took the heavy roll back to his office. A few days later, road graders began stripping the recently harvested fields. 196 Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart sat with the dignitaries when the plaque honoring Clark Bonner was unveiled at the golf course. In one newspaper photograph of the event, Clark Bonner’s three grandchildren are in the foreground, unveiling the plaque that says Bonner is the founder of my city. In another photograph, Boyar, Taper, and Weingart are standing off to one side, smiling. 197 Mrs. Taper and Mrs. Boyar attended the dinner held before the dedication of Clark Bonner’s plaque. The dinner was at the golf course clubhouse. The next day, the local newspaper described the clothes of the two women in detail. Mrs. Taper wore organdy studded with rhinestones. Mrs. Boyar wore silk taffeta. They both carried gloves. Ben Weingart represented the three developers at the dinner. Before he spoke, the men who had known Clark Bonner talked about Bonner’s vision. County Supervisor Herbert Legg said that Weingart’s suburb was not one bit different from the community Bonner had planned. 198 Mae Boyar, Louis Boyar’s wife, developed arthritis when she was twenty-two. She often was in pain, even unable to walk. She saved and borrowed the $700 Louis Boyar needed to begin a construction company when they moved to Los Angeles in 1934. Mae Boyar died in 1960. In 1964, ten years after Boyar’s suburb incorporated as a city, the city council dedicated a new park in Mae Boyar’s name. The news story on the day after the dedication ceremony said that Boyar was in tears when he spoke. Boyar said his wife was generous, even when they were young and had no money. He said that she often would be so touched by the troubles of others that she could not sleep. 199 The city began buying land for the Mae Boyar Park in 1959. Part of it was purchased from a Baptist church. The owners of the other empty lots stalled for a higher price, and most of the land had to be condemned. Three of the property owners fought the city’s appraisals until 1963. The condemnation proceeding eventually went to trial. The city offered $145,000 for the property. A county judge required the city to pay $199,000 for the park’s ten acres. The city dedicated Mae Boyar Park on her birthday, October 3, 1964. [image "Image" file=Image00014.jpg] 200 On the same day in 1957, the city dedicated three parks on land that had been set aside by the suburb’s three developers. Each park is a rectangle of playing fields next to an elementary school and surrounded by blocks of houses. The three parks are named for Simon Bolívar, José de San Martín, and José del Valle. Del Valle was the author of the Declaration of Independence of Central America and the president of Honduras. Bolívar’s armies liberated half of South America.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  My father arranged for the men to be in the sacristy and directed them to two rows of folding chairs on either side of the altar. When I was a boy, I served with my brother on Holy Thursday. One of us carried the pitcher that held warm water. The other carried the basin that caught the water poured over each man’s right foot. The foot washing was awkward for both the men and the priest. It required the men to strip off a shoe and sock from a foot that had already been carefully washed at home. The priest had to bend down, nearly on his hands and knees, to reach the white feet projecting from dark pant legs. One altar boy positioned the basin under the man’s extended foot. The priest poured a small amount of water from the pitcher the other altar boy handed him. The priest quickly wiped off the water with a towel, stood up, stepped to the next man, and got down on his knees again. When my father died, I did not take his place as unofficial sacristan. I did have my right foot washed on Holy Thursday night. 314 On Good Friday the services are shortened. No mass is said. The priest and the congregation read one of the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. A narrator reads the descriptions, the priest reads the words of Jesus, and other readers take the parts of Peter and Pontius Pilate. The congregation reads aloud what the crowds are supposed to have said. Near the end of the service, after the readings, the congregation participates in the veneration of the cross. Altar servers bring three or four large crucifixes from the sacristy and take them down to the first step in front of the altar. Each server holds a crucifix forward, so that the feet of the figure of Jesus on the cross are in reach of someone kneeling on the first step. Another server holds a small, starched square of white linen. 315 When I was a boy and served on Good Friday, the lines of congregants stretched to the back of the church. There was no distinction about who could participate in the veneration of the cross. Mothers and fathers stood with their small children, waiting in line. They came forward, genuflected briefly on the first step in front of the altar, leaned forward, and kissed the feet of the figure of Jesus on the cross. If I was holding the cross, I tried to keep it as steady as possible. If I was holding the square of starched, white cloth, I was supposed to wipe the feet of the figure. I wasn’t sure if this was reverence or something to do with hygiene. As the members of the congregation venerated the cross, the cloth I carried grew bright red from the lipstick I wiped from the feet of Jesus. 316 While the congregation knelt and venerated the cross, the choir sang.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

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

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The guard’s words roused him, and forced him to think of his mother and his approaching meeting with her. He did not in his heart respect his mother, and without acknowledging it to himself, he did not love her, though in accordance with the ideas of the set in which he lived, and with his own education, he could not have conceived of any behavior to his mother not in the highest degree respectful and obedient, and the more externally obedient and respectful his behavior, the less in his heart he respected and loved her. Chapter 18 Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting out. With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining gray eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile. Vronsky stepped into the carriage. His mother, a dried-up old lady with black eyes and ringlets, screwed up her eyes, scanning her son, and smiled slightly with her thin lips. Getting up from the seat and handing her maid a bag, she gave her little wrinkled hand to her son to kiss, and lifting his head from her hand, kissed him on the cheek. “You got my telegram? Quite well? Thank God.” “You had a good journey?” said her son, sitting down beside her, and involuntarily listening to a woman’s voice outside the door. He knew it was the voice of the lady he had met at the door. “All the same I don’t agree with you,” said the lady’s voice. “It’s the Petersburg view, madame.” “Not Petersburg, but simply feminine,” she responded. “Well, well, allow me to kiss your hand.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  82 I JEAN GENET "Have you finished with my handkerchief, sir?" ''That's right. Well, come along and get it." Querelle followed the officer to his cabin. The latter started looking for the handkerchief, but did not find it. Querelle waited, immobile, strictly at attention. Then Lieutenant Seblon took one of his own, monogrammed, clean handkerchiefs, white cambric, and offered it to the seaman. "Sorry. Seems I can't find yours. Do you mind if I give you this one?" Querelle nodded his indifferent-seeming acceptance. "I' m sure it'll tum up again. I had it laundered. Now, I'm pr etty certain you wouldn't have done that yourself. You don't look like that kind of lad to me." Querelle was taken aback by the officer's "tough" expression as he uttered those words in an aggressive, almost accusing tone. All the same, he smiled. "That ain't quite so, sir. I know how to take care of things." That's news to me. You're the kind of guy, it seems to me, takes his washing to some little sixteen-year-old Syrian chick, so she can do it and . . . (here Lieutenant Seblon's voice quavered. He knew he better not say what he perfectly well knew he would say, after three seconds of silence) ... bring it to you all nicely stnoothed and ironed." "No such luck. I don't know any girls in Beirut. What there is to wash, I do myself." And then, without understanding why, Querelle noticed a slight relaxation of the officer's rigid attitude. Spontaneously, with the amazing sense for putting their attractions to work for them that young men have, even those to whom any degree of methodical coquetry is quite foreign, he gave his voice a some what sly inflection, and his body, relaxing too, became animated from neck to calves-by the almost imperceptible shifting of one foot in front of the other-by a series of short-lived ripples that were truly graceful and reminded Querelle himself of the

• From Querelle (1953)

  Querelle went on in the same, simultaneously imperious and tender manner. As luck would have it ( this kind of luck being a kind of affection or disease, caused by the humors circulating in the vascular system of events ) , there was one more most appropriate slip of the tongue. Holding Gil by the shoulders with both hands, Querelle said : %53 I QUERELLE "Take it easy, old hoss. We'll get some more." He was talking about their jobs, and Gil understood it that way, but the emotion those words called forth in him, due to a secret double-entendre that made them refer to children, made Gil fully aware of his own attachment and created a wonderful confusion in his heart, between the accomplice and the lover. For Gil, it was a revelation. Then, however, error crept in, and we have to record it: it was exactly the same mistake survivors habitually commit when they urge those about to die to have faith and courage. As he thought, most carefully, in fact begging Gil not to betray him even if the police should happen to catch him, he went on : "It wouldn't really make any difference, you know. 'Whatever happens, you're not running any risk." And like a babe at the breast of Innocence, Gil asked : ''No risk? What do you mean?'' "Well, you know. You have a death sentence hanging over you already." Gil felt his stomach turning, becoming quite empty, knotting itself up; then it unfolded again, and the weight of the entire globe entered into it. He leaned against Querelle who took him in his arms. Let us mention, at this point, that Gil never said a word about Querelle to the police. Before Gil was sent on to Rennes, Mario contrived to be present at every one of his interrogations, being slightly afraid that he might bring up Querel1e's name. l\1ario was convinced that the young mason had committed one of the murders, but that he was innocent of the other one. From the moment of his arrest Gil had forgotten Querelle, and he never mentioned his name for the simple reason that no one ever brought it up. No need to labor the point : the reader will easily understand why neither Gil nor the detectives ( with the exception of Mario ) ever could really understand the connection between the murder of the sailor and the soon truly subterranean existence of a man who had murdered a mason . As for Mario, his part in the sequence of 254 I JEAN GENET

• From Querelle (1953)

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

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Grandson of the good Gualdrada, his name was Guido Guerra; 3 and in his lifetime he did much with counsel and with sword. The other, that treads the sand behind me, is Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, whose fame should be grateful up in the world. And I, who am placed with them in torment, was Jacopo Rusticucci; 4 and certainly, more than aught else, my savage wife injures me.” Had I been sheltered from the fire, I should have thrown myself amid them below, and I believe my Teacher would have permitted it. But as I should have burnt and baked myself, fear overcame the good will which made me greedy to embrace them. Then I began: “Not contempt, but sorrow, your condition fixed within me, so deeply that it will not leave me soon, when this my Lord spake words to me, by which I felt that such men as you are might be coming. Of your city am I, and always with affection have I rehearsed and heard your deeds and honoured names. I leave the gall, and go for the sweet apples promised me by my veracious Guide; but to the centre it behoves me first to fall.” “So may the soul long animate thy members,” he then replied, “and so thy fame shine after thee; tell, if courtesy and valour abide within our city as they were wont, or have gone quite out of it? for Guglielmo Borsiere 5 —who has been short time in pain with us, and yonder goes with our companions—greatly torments us with his words.’ “The upstart people and the sudden gains, O Florence, have engendered in thee pride and excess, so that thou already weepest thereat.” Thus I cried with face uplifted; and the three, who understood this as an answer, looked at one another as men look when truth is told. “If otherwhile it costs thee so little to satisfy others,” they all replied, “happy thou, if thus thou speakest at thy will! Therefore, if thou escape out of these gloomy regions, and return to see again the beauteous stars; when thou shalt rejoice to say, ‘I was,’ 6 see that thou speak of us to men.” Then they broke their wheel; and, as they fled, their nimble legs seemed wings. An “Amen” could not have been said so quickly as they vanished: wherefore it please my Master to depart. I followed him; and we had gone but little, when the sound of the water was so near us, that in speaking we should scarce have heard each other.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Her sobs came hoarse and brokenhearted. And the strap smacked her pubic lips again and again, and she did not know what was worse, the little shock of pain, or the violation of it. Her head was pulled so far back she was now resting it in the Queen's lap, and she felt her own sobs rising up out of her chest and out of her lips almost languidly. "I am defenseless, I am nothing," she found herself thinking as she had thought it on the Bridle Path in the midst of the worst exhaustion. The belt licked her breast. It was no more than she could bear, and it did not even occur to her to lift her arms, though her pubis was flooded with warm pain. Her sobs had a delicious release for her. She felt herself growing limp, yielding. She felt the Queen's hand caressing her chin, and then she realized Lady Juliana had dropped down before her in a flurry of pink silk and was kissing her throat and her shoulders. "There, there," said the Queen, "my brave little slave..." "There, there, my girl, my virtuous, lovely girl," said Lady Juliana at once as if given permission. The blows had stopped. Beauty's cries filled the room. "And you were good, very good, you tried very hard, and you struggled so hard to be graceful." The Queen moved Beauty forward into Lady Juliana's arms, and Lady Juliana rose to her feet pulling Beauty up in her embrace, her hands pressed into Beauty's enflamed buttocks. Lady Juliana's arms were soft and her lips were tickling Beauty, stroking her, and Beauty felt her breasts against Lady Juliana's plump breasts, and then Beauty seemed to lose all awareness of her own weight, her sense of balance. She was drifting in Lady Juliana's arms, feeling the delicious cloth of the Lady's gown, and her rounded limbs beneath it. "O, sweet little Beauty, my Beauty, you are so good, so very good," the Lady whispered to her. And her lips pried open Beauty's lips, and her tongue touched the inside of Beauty's mouth as her fingers pressed harder into Beauty's buttocks. Beauty's wet sex was pressed against Lady Juliana's gown, and she felt the hard mound of Lady Juliana's sex. "Blessed Beauty, O, you do love me, don't you, I love you dearly." Beauty could not stop herself from throwing her arms about Lady Juliana's neck. She felt the prickling of those blond braids, but Lady Juliana's skin was plump and soft, and her lips strong and silken. They sucked at Beauty's mouth, plump lips, while Lady Juliana's teeth bit here and there as if tasting Beauty. And then Beauty looked into Lady Juliana's eyes, so large and innocent and full of tender concern. Beauty moaned and laid her cheek against Lady Juliana's cheek. "That is enough," said the Queen coldly. Slowly, slowly, Beauty felt herself being released.

• From Querelle (1953)

  248 I JEAN GENET of the wide leather strap he used as a belt, behind his back : he seemed to be implying that their doings were just good clean fun. Since this scene took place close to the beginning of Madame Lysiane's affair with Querelle, and as Querelle was unable to figure out the exact intertwining relationships be tween Nono, the cop Mario, and his brother, he came close to suspecting some kind of conspiracy. It scared him. The foiiow ing evening he told Gil to take off. As soon as he entered the old penitentiary, he methodicaily went into the routine he had planned the night before and which was designed to ensure his own safety. The first thing was to get the revolver back from Gil, by starting out with the cunning question: "You stiii got the-heater?" "Sure. I've got it hidden in here." "Can I see it?" "Why? 'What's the matter?" Gil was afraid to ask whether the time had come to use it, but feared this might be the case. Quereiie had spoken in very gentle tones. He knew that he had to proceed very carefuiiy so as not to arouse any suspicions in Gil's mind. He was doing a great acting job. Holding back the explanation while making it impossible for Gil to refuse or even hesitate, he did not say "] ust give it to me," but "Let's see it, I'Il tell you what it's about ... " Gil watched Quereiie watching him, and both of them were bewildered by the gentleness of their O\vn voices-in the dark, they sounded almost te�der. The shadows and this gentleness plunged both of them, naked, flayed alive, into the same vat of sweet balm. Quereile truly felt friendship, more than that, love for Gil, and Gil reciprocated. We do not want to imply that Gil already suspected what Quereiie was leading him to (that sacrificial and necessary end), we only want to point out the universality contained in a particular occasion. It was not a case of forebodings-not that we don't believe in such, it is only that they belong to a realm of scientific study that no longer is art-because the work of art is free. Reading,