Yearning

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 Querelle (1953)

  Sheltering behind the old prison walls, Gil was unable to watch the scenes at dusk and dawn"'that went on outside, but the sounds of banging, the shouts from the naval shipyards came filtering through the stones and conjured up some pleasant images in Gil's mind. Within the young man imprisoned by those walls, by his guilt, and by his adolescence, almost stifled by anguish and by the all-pervasive smell of tar, the powers of imagination began to unfold with extraordinary vigor. They struggled bravely with all the aforementioned obstacles, and in that battle they grew strong. Listening, Gil could pick out the particular squeak and grind of cranes and pulley blocks. His work gang had not been stationed in Brest for very long, and thus he had not yet become impervious to the vivid scenery of the naval shipyards. He had taken in those clear, incisive noises that corresponded to a sunbeam striking a brass rail, a splinter of glass, to a decorated launch flashing by with its load of very upright, gilded officers, to a sail out in the Roads, to the slow maneuvering of a cruiser, to the naval cadets' businesslike yet puerile rigging drill. In the prisoner, each one of these noises released an image a thousand times more exciting than their 174 I JEAN GENET actual origin. As the sea is our natural symbol for freedom, any visual image including it is charged with that symbolic power, becomes a metaphor of freedom; and in the captive's soul each one of those images left a wound, made even more painful by the very banality of the real things corresponding to it. The spontaneous apparition of a great steamer in mid-ocean would cause an instant crisis of yearning in any child's mind, but Gil's consciousness was no longer so easily invaded by steamer and ocean; rather, it was the characteristic noise of a chain ( and can it be that the screeching of a chain releases the mechanism of yearning? A simple chain, its links rusting away from the inside? ) . . . Without being aware of it, Gil was serving a dolorous apprenticeship as a poet. The image of the chain cut across some fibers of his awareness, and then the cut widened and became wide enough to let in that ship, and the ocean, and the world, and on to the final destruction of Gil who had gone out of himself and had found tha_t his only true existense was in this world which had just stabbed him, run him through, annihilated him. Squatting most of the day behind the same big

• From Querelle (1953)

  To ask this question, pausing in the act of pouring the tea, Querelle raised his head and directed his smile at the Lieutenant's reflection in the mirror, but Seblon beat a quick retreat into himself. He replied, curtly: ''Sure, I'll sign it for you." A few days earlier he would have reacted differently. He would have asked Querelle a number of insidious questions, describing ever-narro,Ving circles round what was most essential, to the point of actually touching that center or even revealing parts, but never all of it. Querelle was getting on his nerves. His face, present, did not manage to dispel the image of that audacious gunman who had disappeared into the morning fog. "He was just a boy, but he had nerve." Smnetimes he thought, feeling a little ashamed, that it didn't need all that much to attack a fairy. Querelle had been insolent enough to say to his face, with a somewhat artificial undertone of threat directed against the unknown robber: "Those guys, do they know who they tangle with?" \Vell, it was clear that the "ravisher" had known the inconsistent nature of his victim. He hadn't been afraid. In every respect, Querelle felt the officer putting a distance between them, at the very moment he himself, if slowly and with a thousand reservations, would have been ready to let himself be taken in by the profound and generous tenderness only a homo was able to offer. As to the officer, his adventure generated some reflections and new attitudes we shall account for, and out of these he gained sufficient force to make it possible for him to conquer Querelle. Loved by Qucrelle, I would be loved by all the sailors of France. My lover is a compendium of aJJ their manly and naive virtues. 262 I JEAN GENET 0 0 0

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In addition to a great deal of circumstantial evidence from societies around the world and closely related nonhuman primates, we’ll take a look at some of what evolution has spit out. We’ll examine the anatomical evidence still evident in our bodies and the yearning for sexual novelty expressed in our pornography, advertising, and after-work happy hours. We’ll even decode messages in the so-called “copulatory vocalizations” of thy neighbor’s wife as she calls out ecstatically in the still of night. Readers acquainted with the recent literature on human sexuality will be familiar with what we call the standard narrative of human sexual evolution (hereafter shortened to “the standard narrative”). It goes something like this: 1. Boy meets girl. 2. Boy and girl assess one another’s mate value from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities: He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience, and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources.She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health, and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children (known as male parental investment).3. Boy gets girl: assuming they meet one another’s criteria, they “mate,” forming a long-term pair bond—the “fundamental condition of the human species,” as famed author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed: She will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving (vigilant toward signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection)—while keeping an eye out (around ovulation, especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband.He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities (which would reduce his all-important paternity certainty)—while taking advantage of short-term sexual opportunities with other women (as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful).Researchers claim to have confirmed these basic patterns in studies conducted around the world over several decades. Their results seem to support the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, which appears to make a lot of sense. But they don’t, and it doesn’t. While we don’t dispute that these patterns play out in many parts of the modern world, we don’t see them as elements of human nature so much as adaptations to social conditions—many of which were introduced with the advent of agriculture no more than ten thousand years ago. These behaviors and predilections are not biologically programmed traits of our species; they are evidence of the human brain’s flexibility and the creative potential of community.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  It’s possible to answer with fury or neglect. It’s possible to be so assured of privilege that contempt for a place like mine is the only answer. It’s possible to be so rootless that the questions are merely ironic. You once said that you wrote Holy Land to counterbalance the willful ignorance some prefer to have about suburban life. Do you think that we’re ready to reconsider that bias ? I want the day to come when writers deal honestly with the divided heart that’s in every story of every American place. We hunger for a home but doubt its worth when we have it. We long to acquire a sense of place but dislike its claims on us. This essential American contradiction isn’t going to change. No place is immune from the peculiarly American certainty that something better is just beyond the next bend in the road or waiting to be realized in the next utopia. How can a home —four walls, a ceiling, and a floor —affect our values? And if it can, doesn’t this leave room for a certain amount of manipulation? And is that necessarily bad ? Holy Land is, in part, a meditation on the fate of the things we touch and the corresponding effects of their touch on us. Manipulation is precisely what happens, but it works both ways. I can’t call this either good or bad, but only inevitable. What we hope for, I think, is tenderness in this encounter. Holy Land is the story of growth as a reflection of optimism . In southern California today, growth is the prime source for pessimism. Can we conclude that the suburban experiment has failed ? The builders of my suburb turned lima bean fields into housing tracts with an astonishing degree of good luck and wisdom. Some of the good luck has run out of suburban development, and much of the wisdom in the building of Lakewood has been ignored. Have suburbs failed as a result? In Los Angeles, suburbs like mine are all we have. They’d better not fail, or 13 million of us will be homeless. Of course, new suburbs can be made better, and what we value in older suburbs can be preserved. The preference of a majority of people for neighborhoods that look remarkably like mine won’t go away, however, even though the suburban frontier has grown harsher. Optimism still makes bearable the risks of our lives together. Los Angeles is often described as an increasingly polarized community from which people “in the middle” are being squeezed out, leaving a great many working poor and the few who are relatively wealthy. If that’s so, what is in store for the kind of homeowner Holy Land describes ? The suburb described in Holy Land depended then—and depends now—on jobs that let men and women with ordinary skills make a living. Once those jobs were riveting jets together at Douglas and cracking crude oil into gasoline at Shell and Texaco.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She longed to question him as to where his master was. She longed to turn back and send him a letter to come and see her, or to go herself to see him. But neither the first nor the second nor the third course was possible. Already she heard bells ringing to announce her arrival ahead of her, and Princess Tverskaya’s footman was standing at the open door waiting for her to go forward into the inner rooms. “The princess is in the garden; they will inform her immediately. Would you be pleased to walk into the garden?” announced another footman in another room. The position of uncertainty, of indecision, was still the same as at home—worse, in fact, since it was impossible to take any step, impossible to see Vronsky, and she had to remain here among outsiders, in company so uncongenial to her present mood. But she was wearing a dress that she knew suited her. She was not alone; all around was that luxurious setting of idleness that she was used to, and she felt less wretched than at home. She was not forced to think what she was to do. Everything would be done of itself. On meeting Betsy coming towards her in a white gown that struck her by its elegance, Anna smiled at her just as she always did. Princess Tverskaya was walking with Tushkevitch and a young lady, a relation, who, to the great joy of her parents in the provinces, was spending the summer with the fashionable princess. There was probably something unusual about Anna, for Betsy noticed it at once. “I slept badly,” answered Anna, looking intently at the footman who came to meet them, and, as she supposed, brought Vronsky’s note. “How glad I am you’ve come!” said Betsy. “I’m tired, and was just longing to have some tea before they come. You might go”—she turned to Tushkevitch—“with Masha, and try the croquet ground over there where they’ve been cutting it. We shall have time to talk a little over tea; we’ll have a cozy chat, eh?” she said in English to Anna, with a smile, pressing the hand with which she held a parasol.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Again. The higher the persons over whom one knows a man to be placed the better the knowledge one has of his eminence: thus, although a peasant may know that the king is the highest in the land, yet since he knows only some of the lowest officials of the kingdom, with whom he has business, he does not realize the king’s exalted position, as one who knows the dignity of all the great men of the kingdom, over whom he knows the king to be placed: although neither of them comprehends the height of the kingly rank. Now we know none but the lowest things: and consequently although we know that God is far above all, we do not know the divine supereminence as the separate substances do, to whom the highest orders of things are known, while they know God to be higher than them all. Again. It is clear that the causality and virtue of a cause are all the better known, according as more and greater effects thereof are known. Wherefore it evidently follows that separate substances know the divine causality and power better than we, although we know him to be the cause of all. CHAPTER L THAT THE NATURAL DESIRE OF THE SEPARATE SUBSTANCES IS NOT SET AT REST IN THE NATURAL KNOWLEDGE THEY HAVE OF GODNOW it is not possible that the separate substance’s natural desire rest in such a knowledge of God. For whatever is imperfect in a species, seeks to acquire the perfection of that species: thus whoso has an opinion about a matter, and therefore imperfect knowledge about it, for this very reason is spurred to the desire for certain knowledge about it. Now the aforesaid knowledge which separate substances have about God without knowing his substance, is an imperfect kind of knowledge; for we do not deem ourselves to know a thing if we know not its substance: so that the chief point in knowing a thing is to know what it is. Therefore this knowledge which the separate substances have about God does not set their appetite at rest, but spurs it on to the vision of the divine substance. Again. The knowledge of effects is an incitement to know the cause: wherefore men began to philosophize because they sought the causes of things. Therefore the desire for knowledge naturally implanted in all intellectual substances does not rest unless, knowing the substance of effects, they know also the substance of their cause. Consequently, since separate substances know that God is the cause of all the things whose substances they see, their natural desire does not rest, unless they see God’s substance also.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Kitty held her by the hand, and with passionate curiosity and entreaty her eyes asked her: “What is it, what is this of such importance that gives you such tranquillity? You know, tell me!” But Varenka did not even know what Kitty’s eyes were asking her. She merely thought that she had to go to see Madame Berthe too that evening, and to make haste home in time for _maman’s_ tea at twelve o’clock. She went indoors, collected her music, and saying good-bye to everyone, was about to go. “Allow me to see you home,” said the colonel. “Yes, how can you go alone at night like this?” chimed in the princess. “Anyway, I’ll send Parasha.” Kitty saw that Varenka could hardly restrain a smile at the idea that she needed an escort. “No, I always go about alone and nothing ever happens to me,” she said, taking her hat. And kissing Kitty once more, without saying what was important, she stepped out courageously with the music under her arm and vanished into the twilight of the summer night, bearing away with her her secret of what was important and what gave her the calm and dignity so much to be envied. Chapter 33 Kitty made the acquaintance of Madame Stahl too, and this acquaintance, together with her friendship with Varenka, did not merely exercise a great influence on her, it also comforted her in her mental distress. She found this comfort through a completely new world being opened to her by means of this acquaintance, a world having nothing in common with her past, an exalted, noble world, from the height of which she could contemplate her past calmly. It was revealed to her that besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given herself up hitherto there was a spiritual life. This life was disclosed in religion, but a religion having nothing in common with that one which Kitty had known from childhood, and which found expression in litanies and all-night services at the Widow’s Home, where one might meet one’s friends, and in learning by heart Slavonic texts with the priest. This was a lofty, mysterious religion connected with a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings, which one could do more than merely believe because one was told to, which one could love.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Maybe. But still it’s queer to me, just as at this moment it seems queer to me that we country folks try to get our meals over as soon as we can, so as to be ready for our work, while here are we trying to drag out our meal as long as possible, and with that object eating oysters....” “Why, of course,” objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. “But that’s just the aim of civilization—to make everything a source of enjoyment.” “Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be a savage.” “And so you are a savage. All you Levins are savages.” Levin sighed. He remembered his brother Nikolay, and felt ashamed and sore, and he scowled; but Oblonsky began speaking of a subject which at once drew his attention. “Oh, I say, are you going tonight to our people, the Shtcherbatskys’, I mean?” he said, his eyes sparkling significantly as he pushed away the empty rough shells, and drew the cheese towards him. “Yes, I shall certainly go,” replied Levin; “though I fancied the princess was not very warm in her invitation.” “What nonsense! That’s her manner.... Come, boy, the soup!... That’s her manner—_grande dame,_” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I’m coming, too, but I have to go to the Countess Bonina’s rehearsal. Come, isn’t it true that you’re a savage? How do you explain the sudden way in which you vanished from Moscow? The Shtcherbatskys were continually asking me about you, as though I ought to know. The only thing I know is that you always do what no one else does.” “Yes,” said Levin, slowly and with emotion, “you’re right. I am a savage. Only, my savageness is not in having gone away, but in coming now. Now I have come....” “Oh, what a lucky fellow you are!” broke in Stepan Arkadyevitch, looking into Levin’s eyes. “Why?” “‘I know a gallant steed by tokens sure, And by his eyes I know a youth in love,’” declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Everything is before you.” “Why, is it over for you already?” “No; not over exactly, but the future is yours, and the present is mine, and the present—well, it’s not all that it might be.” “How so?” “Oh, things go wrong. But I don’t want to talk of myself, and besides I can’t explain it all,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, why have you come to Moscow, then?... Hi! take away!” he called to the Tatar. “You guess?” responded Levin, his eyes like deep wells of light fixed on Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I guess, but I can’t be the first to talk about it. You can see by that whether I guess right or wrong,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, gazing at Levin with a subtle smile. “Well, and what have you to say to me?” said Levin in a quivering voice, feeling that all the muscles of his face were quivering too. “How do you look at the question?” Stepan Arkadyevitch slowly emptied his glass of Chablis, never taking his eyes off Levin.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  27 My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that allows one to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit. Several times already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita’s script causing me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own. Whenever that happened—whenever her lovely, loopy, childish scrawl was horribly transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondents—I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenětres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take off—whereupon the lighted image would move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper. Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. “ Savez-vous qu’à dix ans ma petite était folle de vous ?” said a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a dozen years before.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Come, it’s all over, and thank God!” was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when she had said good-bye for the last time to her brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the carriage till the third bell rang. She sat down on her lounge beside Annushka, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping-carriage. “Thank God! tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexey Alexandrovitch, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.” Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great care. With her little deft hands she opened and shut her little red bag, took out a cushion, laid it on her knees, and carefully wrapping up her feet, settled herself comfortably. An invalid lady had already lain down to sleep. Two other ladies began talking to Anna, and a stout elderly lady tucked up her feet, and made observations about the heating of the train. Anna answered a few words, but not foreseeing any entertainment from the conversation, she asked Annushka to get a lamp, hooked it onto the arm of her seat, and took from her bag a paper-knife and an English novel. At first her reading made no progress. The fuss and bustle were disturbing; then when the train had started, she could not help listening to the noises; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled guard passing by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible snowstorm raging outside, distracted her attention. Farther on, it was continually the same again and again: the same shaking and rattling, the same snow on the window, the same rapid transitions from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat, the same passing glimpses of the same figures in the twilight, and the same voices, and Anna began to read and to understand what she read. Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by her broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  When Wilma and I began to spend more time together as friends, she talked about looking over at her young husband and wishing with all her heart that she could be the traditional wife he wanted. But she also longed to be part of the political activism exploding all around her in San Francisco in the 1960s. She kept studying for a degree and took part in the nineteen-month-long occupation of Alcatraz, an abandoned prison on a federally owned island that was supposed to revert to Indian ownership. This experience of activism and community made her feel reconnected to her own life at last. In 1974 Wilma and her husband went their separate ways. She continued college and found support among other single mothers, but still felt far from her own land. In the summer of 1976, she left her comfortable home, bought a red car with the last of her money, and set off with her two teenage daughters for Oklahoma and Mankiller Flats. The family house had burned down years before, but they camped in their car by a lake near the ancestral land that her father had refused to sell, no matter how broke he was. Wilma and her daughters swam, caught fish, and harvested wild foods as she had done as a child. They learned to tell time by the sun, played Scrabble by lantern light, and listened to music from a portable radio by the campfire. Far from feeling insecure with no money and no home, Wilma said she felt free for the first time since she had left there. It made me realize how deep her connection to the land was. Later, she found an abandoned house nearby, made it into a makeshift home, and applied for an entry-level job at the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah. Several rejections later, she was hired as a writer of funding proposals. She not only worked harder than anyone else but began to prove her unique gift as an organizer. By respecting and expecting self-authority in others, she drew people out of passivity and despair. It was the beginning of her long and rocky path to leadership. Three years later Wilma was driving on a deserted country road and suffered a head-on collision with another car. Her body was crushed, and she barely survived. She wasn’t told until later that the driver of the other car was a woman friend—who had died instantly. Wilma was in a wheelchair for what was supposed to be the rest of her life. Only after seventeen surgeries—plus a bout with myasthenia gravis, a weakening neuromuscular disease—did she walk again. Even then, she had to wear a metal brace from knee to ankle on one leg, suffered swelling and pain, and needed specially constructed shoes. All this had happened long before we met. Her flowing skirts concealed the brace, and her calm concealed the pain. I never would have guessed any of it.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Not to me, and they haven't been to the house either. But I must take care not to stay away too long." And suddenly Gil gave vent to a sigh, terminating in a wild groan : "Oh! Your sister, boy, could I use her now. She's beautiful, you know! Aarrghh . ." . "She looks a bit like me." Gil knew it. Not wanting to let Roger see that, and also with the intention of showing his superiority to the boy, he said : "A whole lot better, though. You're like an uglier version of her." 161 I QUERELLE Roger \�v·as glad that the darkness obscured his blush. Nevertheless he raised his face toward Gil's, smiling wistfully. "Didn't mean to say you was ugly, that ain't so. As a matter of fact, you do have the same little mug." He bent over the boy's face and took it in his hands : "God, if I could be holding her the way I'm holding you now. Boy, I'd be off to a flying start." Of its own accord, rising from the clamp of Gil's hands, the upturned face of the boy approached Gil's. \Vith a quiet murmuring sound Gil touched Roger's forehead. TI1en their noses met and played at Eskimo kisses for ten seconds or so. As he had suddenly rediscovered the brother's resemblance to his sister and felt the emotion rising in him, Gil was unable to dissimulate. In one breath, his mouth close to Roger's, he whispered : "It is a pity that you ain't your sister." Roger smiled : "Is that right?" Roger's voice sounded clear, pure, apparently unmoved. Having loved Gil for a long time and hoped for this moment, having prepared himself for it, he did not want to appear moved by anything beyond friendship. The same prudence that had enabled him to deceive the police officers by his limpid look now made him couch his reply to Gil in an impassive tone. Gil's avowal of his feelings, having occurred first, allowed the proud child to demonstrate his own cool. But it's also true that he did not yet know the conventional signals of amorous abanpon, didn't know that the voluptuous groans have to be willed a little : "By God, you're as nice to touch as a girl." Gil pressed his mouth on the boy's lips. Roger drew back, smiling. "Are you afraid?" "Oh, no!" "Well? What did you think I was going to do?" 162 I JEAN GENET Gil felt embarrassed by the misfired kiss. With ·a sneer in his voice, he said : "You don't feel too safe, hey, with a guy like me?" "Why shouldn't I? Sure I feel safe. I wouldn't come here, otherwise." "That's not what it looks like." Then, with an abrupt change to serious business, as if the idea to be expressed were so important as to make him brush all the previous nonsense aside :

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But at that moment a ring was heard. Yegor departed, and Levin was left alone. He had eaten scarcely anything at dinner, had refused tea and supper at Sviazhsky’s, but he was incapable of thinking of supper. He had not slept the previous night, but was incapable of thinking of sleep either. His room was cold, but he was oppressed by heat. He opened both the movable panes in his window and sat down to the table opposite the open panes. Over the snow-covered roofs could be seen a decorated cross with chains, and above it the rising triangle of Charles’s Wain with the yellowish light of Capella. He gazed at the cross, then at the stars, drank in the fresh freezing air that flowed evenly into the room, and followed as though in a dream the images and memories that rose in his imagination. At four o’clock he heard steps in the passage and peeped out at the door. It was the gambler Myaskin, whom he knew, coming from the club. He walked gloomily, frowning and coughing. “Poor, unlucky fellow!” thought Levin, and tears came into his eyes from love and pity for this man. He would have talked with him, and tried to comfort him, but remembering that he had nothing but his shirt on, he changed his mind and sat down again at the open pane to bathe in the cold air and gaze at the exquisite lines of the cross, silent, but full of meaning for him, and the mounting lurid yellow star. At seven o’clock there was a noise of people polishing the floors, and bells ringing in some servants’ department, and Levin felt that he was beginning to get frozen. He closed the pane, washed, dressed, and went out into the street. Chapter 15 The streets were still empty. Levin went to the house of the Shtcherbatskys. The visitors’ doors were closed and everything was asleep. He walked back, went into his room again, and asked for coffee. The day servant, not Yegor this time, brought it to him. Levin would have entered into conversation with him, but a bell rang for the servant, and he went out. Levin tried to drink coffee and put some roll in his mouth, but his mouth was quite at a loss what to do with the roll. Levin, rejecting the roll, put on his coat and went out again for a walk. It was nine o’clock when he reached the Shtcherbatskys’ steps the second time. In the house they were only just up, and the cook came out to go marketing. He had to get through at least two hours more.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As Zapata rides to his destiny, his wife hangs on to his boot, dragging in the dust, imploring him to stay home. Since I couldn’t yet admit to myself that I was more interested in going to sea and the revolution than in staying home as the mother or the wife, I just vowed silently that I would never become an obstacle to any man’s freedom. Even the dictionary defines adventurer as “a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures,” but adventuress is “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.” When women did travel, they seemed to come to a bad end, from the real Amelia Earhart to the fictional Thelma and Louise. In much of the world to this day, a woman may be disciplined or even killed for dishonoring her family if she leaves her home without a male relative, or her country without a male guardian’s written permission. In Saudi Arabia, women are still forbidden to drive a car, even to the hospital in an emergency, much less for an adventure. During the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring, both female citizens and foreign journalists paid the price of sexual assault for appearing in the public square. As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”3 The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.4 However, these journeys have often been unchosen one-way trips in cultures that were patriarchal and patrilocal; that is, women were under male control and also went to live in their husbands’ households. In matrilocal cultures, men joined their wives’ families—in about a third of the world they still do—but with equal status, since those cultures are and almost never were matriarchal. In the face of all the dire and often accurate warnings of danger on the road for women, it took modern feminism to ask the rock-bottom question: Compared to what? Whether by dowry murders in India, honor killings in Egypt, or domestic violence in the United States, records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road. Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home. —AS YOU WILL SEE, this book is the story not of one or even several trips, but of decades of travel leading out from the hub of home. You might say it’s the story of a modern nomad.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend, Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a quite young man, who—her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at this avowal made her smile. In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to Vozdvizhenskoe. Chapter 17 The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a cart. The counting-house clerk was just going to jump down, but on second thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and beckoned to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they drove, dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of a whetstone against a scythe, that came to them from the cart, ceased. One of the peasants got up and came towards the carriage. “Well, you are slow!” the counting-house clerk shouted angrily to the peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of the rough dry road. “Come along, do!” A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and his bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mud-guard with his sunburnt hand. “Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor house? the count’s?” he repeated; “go on to the end of this track. Then turn to the left. Straight along the avenue and you’ll come right upon it. But whom do you want? The count himself?” “Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this peasant.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  He never realized his dreams, but my mother was unable even to pursue hers. In my heart, I know that if I were forced into an either/or choice between constancy and change, home and the road—between being a hazar, a dweller in houses, and an arab, a dweller in tents—I, too, would choose the road. I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father’s ghostly paths and we are entering the same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain, as if we were images in a time-lapse photograph. We are so different, yet so much the same. [image "With speaking partner Florynce Kennedy on campus in the 1970s. Courtesy of Gloria Steinem/Ray Bald" file=Image00009.jpg] WITH SPEAKING PARTNER FLORYNCE KENNEDY ON CAMPUS IN THE 1970S. COURTESY OF GLORIA STEINEM/RAY BALD [image "II." file=Image00010.jpg] Talking CirclesB ecause I saw my father as a rootless wanderer, my first solution was to become the opposite. I was sure my peculiar childhood would give way to an adulthood with one job, one home, and one vacation a year. Indeed, I probably longed for that life more than people who had grown up in it. I could have had a sign on my forehead, HOME WANTED , but I just assumed a real home would have to wait until I had a husband and children, a destiny I both thought was inevitable and couldn’t imagine. Not even in a movie had I ever seen a wife with a journey of her own. Marriage was always the happy end, not the beginning. It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down. It would take two years of living in India, where I went right after college—to avoid my engagement to a good but wrong man—to show me that my father’s isolated way of traveling wasn’t the only one. There was a shared road out there, both ancient and very new. I.When I first arrived in New Delhi, I longed for the “memsahib travel” of a car and a driver, something every local official and tourist seemed able to afford. I couldn’t imagine any other way of navigating streets jammed with slow oxcarts, fast motorcycles, yellow and black taxis that looked like bumblebees, swarms of bicyclists, a wandering cow or two, ancient buses stuffed with passengers inside and festooned with freeloaders outside, and peddlers who darted up to sell food and trinkets at every stop. It would take two months as a rare foreigner living in Miranda House, the women’s college at the University of Delhi, and kindhearted students teaching me how to wear saris and take buses, for me to realize that in a car by myself, I wouldn’t really be in India.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I think my father loved that, too. But as soon as Labor Day had ended this precarious livelihood, my father moved his office into his car. In the first warm weeks of autumn, we drove to nearby country auctions, where he searched for antiques amid the household goods and farm tools. After my mother, with her better eye for antiques and her reference books, appraised them for sale, we got into the car again to sell them to roadside antique dealers anywhere within a day’s journey. I say “we” because from the age of four or so, I came into my own as the wrapper and unwrapper of china and other small items that we cushioned in newspaper and carried in cardboard boxes over country roads. Each of us had a role in the family economic unit, including my sister, nine years older than I, who in the summer sold popcorn from a professional stand my father bought her. But once the first frost turned the lake to crystal and the air above it to steam, my father began collecting road maps from gas stations, testing the trailer hitch on our car, and talking about such faraway pleasures as thin sugary pralines from Georgia, all-you-can-drink orange juice from roadside stands in Florida, or slabs of salmon fresh from a California smokehouse. Then one day, as if struck by a sudden whim rather than a lifelong wanderlust, he announced that it was time to put the family dog and other essentials into the house trailer that was always parked in our yard, and begin our long trek to Florida or California. Sometimes this leave-taking happened so quickly that we packed more frying pans than plates, or left a kitchen full of dirty dishes and half-eaten food to greet us like Pompeii on our return. My father’s decision always seemed to come as a surprise, even though his fear of the siren song of home was so great that he refused to put heating or hot water into our small house. If the air of early autumn grew too chilly for us to bathe in the lake, we heated water on a potbellied stove and took turns bathing in a big washtub next to the fireplace. Since this required the chopping of wood, an insult to my father’s sybaritic soul, he had invented a wood-burning system all his own: he stuck one end of a long log into the fire and let the other protrude into the living room, then kicked it into the fireplace until the whole thing turned to ash. Even a pile of cut firewood in the yard must have seemed to him a dangerous invitation to stay in one place. After he turned his face to the wind, my father did not like to hesitate. Only once do I remember him turning back, and even then my mother had to argue strenuously that the iron might be burning its way through the ironing board.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Gil went on eating. He and Querelle seemed to have run out of words already, but Roger perc.:eived that a relationship was being established between them in which there was no room for him. It was, now, a matter of two men talking, in all earnest, about things a boy his age could only daydream abo�t. "Say, you're Robert's brother, the one who's staying at Nono's?" "Yeah. And I know Nono, too." Not for one n1inute did Querelle consider the nature of his relationship with Nono. There was no undertone of irony in his statement. "No kidding, you're a buddy of Nono's?" "You heard me. \Vhat about it?" "D'you think he . . . (Gil was going to say: "could help me," but realized it would be too much heartbreak to get a "no" for an answer) . He hesitated, then said : "Do you think he might help me?" In turning him into -an outlaw his crime naturally encouraged Gil to seek refuge among pimps and prostitutes, as they were people who lived-or so he thought-at the very borderline of legality. The murder he had committed would have totally crushed any laboring man of a riper age. Gil, on the contrary, was hardened by it, it made him glow from within, conferring, as it did, a reputation he would not have attained otherwise, and from the lack of which he had been suffering. Gil was a mason, but his life had been too short for him to identify him· self with his trade. He was still entertaining all sorts of vague dreams, and these had suddenly become true (what we call "dreams" are those little peculiarities that may indicate fan· 110 I JEAN GENET

• From Escape (2007)

  Ruth was unhappy. She wanted to go home. Cathleen just left one day and went back to work. Barbara insisted we all had to stay. Tammy was marching in step, but I was desperate to get home. The conflict between Ruth and Barbara escalated. Several of Merril’s daughters reported this to Uncle Rulon, and he assigned another man to be responsible for Merril’s family until he recovered. This man had more power than even Barbara, and she hated being usurped. He took us all out to dinner, but Barbara’s open hostility toward him made the meal tense. I didn’t engage at all with either of them. I just needed to get back to my children. We’d been apart now for nearly three weeks. One of Merril’s daughters brought Arthur and Betty to stay with me for a week. That helped, but there were still the three others I yearned for. I talked to them every day, but it wasn’t the same. LuAnne had sent a present to her father. It was nicely wrapped—I assumed someone had taken her shopping. When Merril opened the present there was a wilted flower along with a few scraps of fabric. Everyone in his room roared with laughter. I ached for LuAnne so much; I knew what she had sent her father were treasures in her five-year-old eyes. Merril was so sick I’m not sure he understood what was going on, but I hated that everyone else was mocking my sweet little girl. Merril had improved enough after a month to return home. We flew back to Colorado City on Uncle Rulon’s private plane. As we touched down, I could see that a crowd of people had gathered on the tarmac to greet us. I scanned the crowd looking for my children. I finally saw a small redhead popping through the crowd. Merril reached out for her. “Well, how is my Betty baby doing?” Moments later I was hugging the rest of my children. Ruth’s Nose Warren’s preaching touched every area of our lives. We were used to Uncle Rulon’s admonitions. Children no longer got immunizations because he prohibited them. Arthur and Betty had theirs, but none of the others did. Uncle Rulon said the immunizations were engineered to make our children sterile. The government was behind it, he said. But we still took our kids to doctors when they needed treatment. It seemed to me that Warren’s views were always an extreme departure from his father’s. He began preaching that anyone who needed medical help to heal was a person of little faith. A person in harmony with God could heal him-or herself with fasting and prayer. Before I saw this play out in our own home, I knew of several people who nearly died and children who became severely ill before they were taken to the hospital as a last resort.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences. What I daydreamed of was a lover who would be older than I, richer and more influential, but also companionable. He would prize me for my sexuality, which was at once my essence and also an attribute I was totally unfamiliar with, like the orphan’s true name, a magical identity he knows nothing of until the very moment of revelation. The name ennobles the orphan, just as one’s sexual nature confers a previously undivined but achingly anticipated human nature upon love’s candidate. I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being. Although I lived surrounded by people and regularly visited a psychoanalyst, it never entered my mind to discuss with anyone my fantasies, those in which the Belgian soldier or a silver-haired stranger in a dove-gray suit seated in his Silver Cloud took me away and married me. For other boys, who can legally marry their fantasies, marriage itself must seem less magical. It is, after all, a ceremony they will eventually go through. But for me, who’d never even read about the sort of union I longed for, marriage became more and more impossible, a transubstantiation as eerie and irreversible as death. Perhaps by framing this ideal and funereal homosexual marriage in a prospect of poisonous flowers, I was making it more and more remote, thereby putting off the day when I’d have to decide whether I myself was a homosexual or not. Of course I wanted to love a man and to be heterosexual; the longer I could delay sorting out this antinomy the better. I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving but spent the long weekend with the Scotts. They took the opportunity to introduce me to Father Burke, their “confessor,” and spiritual guardian. Rachel had told me that he regularly wrote her long letters full of counsel and prayer, although he lived only some fifty or sixty miles away and she and DeQuincey saw him often. Father Burke also wrote Quince long letters, which Quince would never show to Rachel. Father Burke had taken over the poorest, oldest, most backward parish in the state: a mortification, I suppose. In his unheated, shabby little church he officiated at several services a day. He was famous, at least to the Scotts, for his short, lucid sermons—“Worthy of Boussuet,” DeQuincey assured me, “little miracles of theology and common sense.”