Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This maternal role is even more important in the remarried family. If the mother does not take an independent role, the child sees her as siding with the stepfather against him. It’s also up to the mother to bring the child into the orbit of the happy couple to offset his observations of the failed marital relationship. Few women recognize this as an unparalleled opportunity to influence their children’s future attitudes toward marriage. The Biological Dad THE FOURTH MEMBER of the quartet is the biological father, who together with his ex-wife can make or break the child’s relationship to the stepfather. Some absent fathers, though they don’t directly block the child’s attachment to another man, can prevent it from happening by keeping alive the child’s hope for a better relationship. Such children are the ones most likely to have a poor relationship with their stepfathers—a fact most adults find hard to understand. After all, a child who is unhappy in one relationship should logically welcome another person to fill that gap. But that would be true only if the child gives up hope for the father’s renewed love and interest or rejects the father, as we saw in Larry’s story. Billy, no matter how many disappointments he sustained, never gave up expecting that his father would someday love him and value him. To many children, the father’s disinterest fuels a passionate attachment in the son toward the father. A close relationship with a stepfather would be a betrayal of the father. Whether he is nearby or far away, the biological father’s attitude toward the stepfather is of utmost importance. He stands symbolically at the entrance to their relationship. If the biological father resents the stepfather or competes with him for the child’s affection, it is almost impossible for the child to love the new man. But if the father encourages the new relationship, he helps clear the path for stepfather and child to proceed. In contrast, children and adolescents who have rejected their biological father, seeing him as a failure or morally flawed or lacking in interest, often turn eagerly to their stepfather as a person they can admire and emulate. Many talked of their stepfather with great affection and praise. “I really love him. He’s a good, loyal man.” Others said, “My stepfather saved my life.” One young man explained to me, “I have no respect for my father. He’s irresponsible and self-centered. But my stepfather is just the kind of person that I want to be. I’m lucky to have him.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I did feel a little queasy by the time we reached the Baths, what with the rash drinking and the anticipated misery of swimming, memories of last time, and the sense of hearty purpose in the echoing din after the quiet streets outside. The air in there had the morning-after chlorine smell of nail-varnish remover and stale cigarette-smoke. The changing-room was busy and there were a lot of dads with their sons and friends' sons, kids screeching about, running into me as I winced and wove through the room. I found a locker and started to undress. I got my new trunks on and they seemed okay, just not very supporting: they had a good sleek feel. They were perhaps rather conspicuous. I was pulling my shirt over my head when I heard a voice I knew and then another. My heart leapt, I had no time to plan an escape: for a second or two I thought I might keep my head hidden in my shirt, and move off somewhere else like a defendant leaving court under a blanket. But I nerved myself, tugged my arms free, and looked. Luc and Patrick were sauntering towards me, and just behind them, smiling to himself, was Matt. I was so appalled by this grouping, and what it implied, that I simply sat back with a sigh and a smile. The group themselves showed no concern, however: they were relaxed and cheerful. They didn't see themselves as a tribunal for my complex, shaming crime. They had come from the shower—the teenagers in long towels tucked round their waists, Matt naked, but holding his towel and wrung-out shorts in front of him. Luc was the first to notice me, and stepped forward with a big grin and shook my hand as if he was really fond of me, or as if this bleak male place demanded classic camaraderie. "What extremely good luck, Edward!" he said. "Yes, amazing." He was a hundred times more wonderful than Agustin. The pictures of him were rubbish. Despite my looming humiliation I was thinking that he wasn't wearing any clothes, only that towel, and that he was about to take it off I stood up and felt the warmth coming off his chest and face, and saw that his arms, even so, had gooseflesh. "This is my friend Patrick, by the way, who, whom I have told you about." Meeting them both was like meeting filmstars, their aura and beauty put weights on your tongue. Patrick shook my hand too and nodded and said he was pleased to meet me; he spoke English easily, though without Luc's tendency to parody an English accent. Matt had been observing this and I shot him a warning glance over Patrick's shoulder.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw hated Mom’s various love interests and allowed none of them in Kentucky. In Ohio, I had grown especially skillful at navigating various father figures. With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool—so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of “girlieness,” I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things were really true. I hated earrings, I hated police cars, and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year. In Kentucky, I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t, because the only men in my life—my grandmother’s brothers and brothers-in-law—already knew me. Did I want to make them proud? Of course I did, but not because I pretended to like them; I genuinely loved them. The oldest and meanest of the Blanton men was Uncle Teaberry, nicknamed for his favorite flavor of chewing gum. Uncle Teaberry, like his father, served in the navy during World War II. He died when I was four, so I have only two real memories of him. In the first, I’m running for my life, and Teaberry is close behind with a switchblade, assuring me that he’ll feed my right ear to the dogs if he catches me. I leap into Mamaw Blanton’s arms, and the terrifying game is over. But I know that I loved him, because my second memory is of throwing such a fit over not being allowed to visit him on his deathbed that my grandma was forced to don a hospital robe and smuggle me in. I remember clinging to her underneath that hospital robe, but I don’t remember saying goodbye. Uncle Pet came next. Uncle Pet was a tall man with a biting wit and a raunchy sense of humor. The most economically successful of the Blanton crew, Uncle Pet left home early and started some timber and construction businesses that made him enough money to race horses in his spare time. He seemed the nicest of the Blanton men, with the smooth charm of a successful businessman. But that charm masked a fierce temper. Once, when a truck driver delivered supplies to one of Uncle Pet’s businesses, he told my old hillbilly uncle, “Off-load this now, you son of a bitch.” Uncle Pet took the comment literally: “When you say that, you’re calling my dear old mother a bitch, so I’d kindly ask you speak more carefully.” When the driver—nicknamed Big Red because of his size and hair color—repeated the insult, Uncle Pet did what any rational business owner would do: He pulled the man from his truck, beat him unconscious, and ran an electric saw up and down his body.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  In this, Dad embodied a phenomenon social scientists have observed for decades: Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.16 MIT economist Jonathan Gruber even found that the relationship was causa l : It’s not just that people who happen to live successful lives also go to church, it’s that church seems to promote good habits. In his religious habits, Dad lived the stereotype of a culturally conservative Protestant with Southern roots, even though the stereotype is mostly inaccurate. Despite their reputation for clinging to their religion, the folks back home resembled Mamaw more than Dad: deeply religious but without any attachment to a real church community. Indeed, the only conservative Protestants I knew who attended church regularly were my dad and his family.17 In the middle of the Bible Belt, active church attendance is actually quite low.18 Despite its reputation, Appalachia—especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio—has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South. This pattern of deception has to do with cultural pressure. In southwestern Ohio, where I was born, both the Cincinnati and Dayton metropolitan regions have very low rates of church attendance, about the same as ultra-liberal San Francisco. No one I know in San Francisco would feel ashamed to admit that they don’t go to church. (In fact, some of them might feel ashamed to admit that they do.) Ohio is the polar opposite. Even as a kid, I’d lie when people asked if I attended church regularly. According to Gallup, I wasn’t alone in feeling that pressure. The juxtaposition is jarring: Religious institutions remain a positive force in people’s lives, but in a part of the country slammed by the decline of manufacturing, joblessness, addiction, and broken homes, church attendance has fallen off. Dad’s church offered something desperately needed by people like me. For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions. When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me—and for the people struggling in that world—religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track. Dad’s faith attracted me even though I learned early on that it had played a significant role in the adoption that led to our long separation.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The Caregiver Grown UpAS KAREN DESCRIBED her life and all that changed, I remembered a question I’d asked myself four years earlier: what happens to caregiver children in the long run? Mental health professionals generally assume that this role can only be detrimental to the child’s development because she loses out on both schooling and play and sacrifices her own interests to the needs of the family. The answer is more complicated than that. Yes, she loses important pleasures and activities of childhood and adolescence. But she also gains a great deal that serves her well in the long run. After talking to many of these children and watching them grow to mature adulthood, it may be time to revise our view of what this experience does to children. Many caretaker children become admirable adults. Karen is a sensitive, moral person whose altruism and capacity for loyal devotion are rooted in her childhood role. Her early experiences left her with a responsiveness to other people and a high moral sense that helped her to achieve loving relationships as an adult. Talking with Karen was easy and rewarding because she caught my meaning and interest so fast. Her career is undoubtedly grounded in the empathy and compassion of her childhood. Karen understands the give and take of true love and friendship. She has freed herself from being a martyr. Her relationships are no longer a one-way street and she expects full return on her loving investments in others. Despite her painful experiences, Karen loves her parents and siblings wholeheartedly, and grows to adulthood understanding that love entails loyalty and sacrifice when necessary. She never became cynical or bitter. She did not turn on her parents, accusing them of having robbed her of her childhood and adolescence (even though she sometimes felt so). She’s glad that she did what she did as a child and adolescent. And she’s also very pleased and aware that she was able to break free of her self-sacrifice and guilt, which had become a bottomless pit. Her experiences as a daughter laid the groundwork for her ability to participate fully in a loving relationship with a man and to be a sensitive and devoted mother.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I went to bed expecting to wake up the next morning, give my mediocre presentation, and call it a day. The science fair was a competition, and I even thought that, with a little salesmanship, I could advance to the next round. But in the morning I discovered that Mom had revamped the entire presentation. It looked like a scientist and a professional artist had joined forces to create it. Though the judges were blown away, when they began to ask questions that I couldn’t answer (but that the maker of the collage would have known), they realized something didn’t fit. I didn’t make it to the final round of the competition. What that incident taught me—besides the fact that I needed to do my own work—was that Mom cared deeply about enterprises of the mind. Nothing brought her greater joy than when I finished a book or asked for another. Mom was, everyone told me, the smartest person they knew. And I believed it. She was definitely the smartest person I knew. In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor, and toughness. I earned my first bloody nose at five and my first black eye at six. Each of these fights began after someone insulted my mother. Mother jokes were never allowed, and grandmother jokes earned the harshest punishment that my little fists could administer. Mamaw and Papaw ensured that I knew the basic rules of fighting: You never start a fight; you always end the fight if someone else starts it; and even though you never start a fight, it’s maybe okay to start one if a man insults your family. This last rule was unspoken but clear. Lindsay had a boyfriend named Derrick, maybe her first boyfriend, who broke up with her after a few days. She was heartbroken as only thirteen-year-olds can be, so I decided to confront Derrick when I saw him walking past our house one day. He had five years and about thirty-five pounds on me, but I came at him twice as he pushed me down easily. The third time I came at him, he’d had enough and proceeded to pound the shit out of me. I ran to Mamaw’s house for some first aid, crying and a little bloody. She just smiled at me. “You did good, honey. You did real good.” In fighting, as with many things, Mamaw taught me through experience. She never laid a hand on me punitively—she was anti-spanking in a way must have come from her own bad experiences—but when I asked her what it felt like to be punched in the head, she showed me. A swift blow, delivered by the meat of her hand, directly on my cheek. “That didn’t feel so bad, did it?” And the answer was no. Getting hit in the face wasn’t nearly as terrible as I’d imagined.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Big Red nearly bled to death but was rushed to the hospital and survived. Uncle Pet never went to jail, though. Apparently, Big Red was also an Appalachian man, and he refused to speak to the police about the incident or press charges. He knew what it meant to insult a man’s mother. Uncle David may have been the only one of Mamaw’s brothers to care little for that honor culture. An old rebel with long, flowing hair and a longer beard, he loved everything but rules, which might explain why, when I found his giant marijuana plant in the backyard of the old homestead, he didn’t try to explain it away. Shocked, I asked Uncle David what he planned to do with illegal drugs. So he got some cigarette papers and a lighter and showed me. I was twelve. I knew if Mamaw ever found out, she’d kill him. I feared this because, according to family lore, Mamaw had nearly killed a man. When she was around twelve, Mamaw walked outside to see two men loading the family’s cow—a prized possession in a world without running water—into the back of a truck. She ran inside, grabbed a rifle, and fired a few rounds. One of the men collapsed—the result of a shot to the leg—and the other jumped into the truck and squealed away. The would-be thief could barely crawl, so Mamaw approached him, raised the business end of her rifle to the man’s head, and prepared to finish the job. Luckily for him, Uncle Pet intervened. Mamaw’s first confirmed kill would have to wait for another day. Even knowing what a pistol-packing lunatic Mamaw was, I find this story hard to believe. I polled members of my family, and about half had never heard the story. The part I believe is that she would have murdered the man if someone hadn’t stopped her. She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal. Each time someone stole a bike from our porch (three times, by my count), or broke into her car and took the loose change, or stole a delivery, she’d tell me, like a general giving his troops marching orders, “There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.” Youngest of all the Blanton boys was Uncle Gary. He was the baby of the family and one of the sweetest men I knew. Uncle Gary left home young and built a successful roofing business in Indiana. A good husband and a better father, he’d always say to me, “We’re proud of you, ole Jaydot,” causing me to swell with pride. He was my favorite, the only Blanton brother not to threaten me with a kick in the ass or a detached ear.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Years later, our marine boot camp marksmanship instructors would tell us that the kids who already “knew” how to shoot performed the worst, because they’d learned improper fundamentals. That was true with one exception: me. From Papaw, I had learned excellent fundamentals, and I qualified with an M16 rifle as an expert, the highest category, with one of the highest scores in my entire platoon. Papaw was gruff to the point of absurdity. To every suggestion or behavior he didn’t like, Papaw had one reply: “Bullshit.” That was everyone’s cue to shut the hell up. His hobby was cars: He loved buying, trading, and fixing them. One day not long after Papaw quit drinking, Uncle Jimmy came home to find him fixing an old automobile on the street. “He was cussing up a storm. ‘These goddamned Japanese cars, cheap pieces of shit. What a stupid motherfucker who made this part.’ I just listened to him, not knowing a single person was around, and he just kept carrying on and complaining. I thought he sounded miserable.” Uncle Jimmy had recently started working and was eager to spend his money to help his dad out. So he offered to take the car to a shop and get it fixed. The suggestion caught Papaw completely off guard. “What? Why?” he asked innocently. “I love fixing cars.” Papaw had a beer belly and a chubby face but skinny arms and legs. He never apologized with words. While helping Aunt Wee move across the country, she admonished him for his earlier alcoholism and asked why they rarely had the chance to talk. “Well, talk now. We’ve got all fucking day in the car together.” But he did apologize with deeds: The rare times when he lost his temper with me were always followed with a new toy or a trip to the ice cream parlor. Papaw was a terrifying hillbilly made for a different time and place. During that cross-country drive with Aunt Wee, they stopped at a highway rest stop in the early morning. Aunt Wee decided to comb her hair and brush her teeth and thus spent more time in the ladies’ room than Papaw thought reasonable. He kicked open the door holding a loaded revolver, like a character in a Liam Neeson movie. He was sure, he explained, that she was being raped by some pervert. Years later, after Aunt Wee’s dog growled at her infant baby, Papaw told her husband, Dan, that unless he got rid of the dog, Papaw would feed it a steak marinated in antifreeze. He wasn’t joking: Three decades earlier, he had made the same promise to a neighbor after a dog nearly bit my mom. A week later that dog was dead. In that funeral home I thought about these things, too. Most of all I thought about Papaw and me. I thought about the hours we spent practicing increasingly complex math problems.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then Firbank’s hand went into his pocket and flung backwards a scatter of nickel coins. Unsurprisingly the next scene showed the crowd about twenty strong. They were reaching the brow of the hill, capering around, others almost marching, but in a volatile Firbankian way, like some primitive disco dance. They were calling and waving their hands, and then chanting something together—a name, an epithet. The camera, with a certain artistic flair, concentrated on the youngsters: tots and urchins with a droll seriousness to them, rowdy pubescent boys bursting out of children’s clothes, and others, with their wide-eyed Italian faces, gazing into the lens as they half-strode, half-loitered with the crowd, plucking at the sleeve of the heart. And yet it was the mood which fascinated. This marionette of a man, on his last legs, had been picked on by the crowd, yet as they mobbed him they seemed somehow to be celebrating him. He became perhaps for a moment, what he must always have wanted to be, an entertainer. The children’s expressions showed that profoundly true, unthinking mixture of cruelty and affection. There was fear in their mockery, yet the figure at the heart of their charivari took on the likeness not only of a clown, but of a patron saint. It was a rough impromptu kind of triumph. There was a brief tableau in which order had been more or less imposed. The children gathered round Firbank and glared and grinned at the camera; Firbank flapped his hat in his hand and looked hot and bothered. A little girl tugged at his trousers and he pulled his pocket inside-out with a drooping and muffled gesture to say he had no more to give. He smiled too, but showed that he wished it was all over: it was a tiring situation for so childless and singular a man. In the final few seconds he was walking away by himself: there was something decisive and businesslike about him; in spite of everything he was in a hurry, he had work to do.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  One of my very good friends, her father was the president of the bank, so I got to see different things. I knew there was another life out there, and that exposure gives you something to dream for.” My cousin Gail is one of my all-time favorite people: She’s one of the first of my mom’s generation, the Blanton grandchildren. Gail’s life is the American Dream personified: a beautiful house, three great kids, a happy marriage, and a saintly demeanor. Outside of Mamaw Blanton, a virtual deity in the eyes of us grandkids and great-grandkids, I’ve never heard anyone else called “the nicest person in the world.” For Gail, it’s an entirely deserved title. I assumed that Gail had inherited her storybook life from her parents. No one’s that nice, I thought, especially not someone who’s suffered any real adversity. But Gail was a Blanton, and, at heart a hillbilly, and I should have known that no hillbilly makes it to adulthood without a few major screwups along the way. Gail’s home life provided its own emotional baggage. She was seven when her dad walked out and seventeen when she graduated from high school, planning for college at Miami University. But there was a catch: “Mom told me I couldn’t go to college unless I broke up with my boyfriend. So I moved out the day after graduation, and by August, I was pregnant.” Almost immediately, her life began to disintegrate. Racial prejudice bubbled to the surface when she announced that a black baby was joining the family. Announcements led to arguments, and then one day Gail found herself without a family. “I didn’t hear from any of our relatives,” Gail told me. “My mom said she never wanted to hear my name again.” Given her age and the lack of family support, it’s hardly surprising that her marriage soon ended. But Gail’s life had grown considerably more complex: She hadn’t just lost her family, she’d gained a young daughter who depended entirely on her. “It completely changed my life—being a mom was my identity. I might have been a hippie, but now I had rules—no drugs, no alcohol, nothing that was going to lead to social services taking my baby away.” So here’s Gail: teenage single mom, no family, little support. A lot of people would wilt in those circumstances, but the hillbilly took over. “Dad wasn’t really around,” Gail remembered, “and hadn’t been in years, and I obviously wasn’t speaking to Mom. But I remember the one lesson I took from them, and that was that we could do anything we wanted. I wanted that baby, and I wanted to make it work. So I did it.” She got a job with a local telephone company, worked her way up the ladder, and even returned to college. By the time she remarried, she had hit one hell of a stride. The storybook marriage to her second husband, Allan, is just icing on the cake.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  You haven’t been to Cairo. And there’s this one, which has one more head on it. You can see how the artist changed the king’s appearance until he got the image which we know today.’ Looking again, I could see, reading Arabically from right to left, how the wide Pharaonic features were modified, and then modified again, elongated and somehow orientalised, so that they took on, instead of an implacable massiveness, an attitude of sensibility and refinement. A large, blank, almond-shaped eye was shown unrealistically in the profile, and the nose and the jaw were drawn out to an unnatural length. The rearing cobra on the brow was traditional, but its challenge seemed qualified by the subtle expression of the mouth, very beautifully cut, with a fuzz of shadow behind the everted curl of the upper lip. ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’ ‘In Egypt before the war. Made my trunk pretty heavy … I was coming back from the Sudan for the last time.’ ‘It becomes more wonderful the more you think about it.’ I could not have delighted him more. ‘I’m so glad you see the point. For a while it was quite an icon to me.’ The point, as I saw it, was that you could take an aesthetic decision to change shape. The king seemed almost to turn into a woman before our eyes. ‘A chappie came from the Louvre and wrote a thing about it. It doesn’t yet have the Pharaonic beard, you see—you know, the ugly, square beard—which he does have in most of the remaining statues, even the female Pharaohs, whatever they were called, are shown with beards—perfectly lifelike, though, wouldn’t you think?’ Charles loved making these misogynistic gibes. ‘So what happened to him?’ I asked. ‘Ooh—it all came to an end. They went back to worshipping boring old Amon. The whole thing only lasted about twenty years—it could have happened within your lifetime. There are those who say it was a bad thing—like Methodism, someone once declared—but I disagree. Cover him up again will you?’ I put the sun-worshipper back into his millennial darkness. The drawing-room was behind the dining-room and had larger plate-glass windows that brought in all the light they could from a tiny paved garden bounded by a tall whitewashed wall. The room was papered a pale green and had a suite of white and gilt chairs, tables, and a square, spindly-legged sofa. A plumply cushioned modern armchair on one side of the fireplace looked at a portable television. ‘I’ll sit down, my dear,’ Charles decided, ‘It’s so tiring, talking.’ He took the comfortable seat. ‘Really, I should go,’ I said. ‘No, no—I don’t mean that. And look at this fine picture; and there’s more to show you.’

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The truth of all this was brought home to many in my generation as we learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was one of the most brilliant young men of his generation and one of the finest theological minds of the century. When World War II broke out, he found himself in the comparative safety of the United States, but he believed firmly that God was calling him to return to his native Germany. Working as a pastor and teacher at a time of terrible ambiguities and uncertainties, with many friends regarding him as “a bit extreme” but with his conscience urging him on, he joined the campaign against Hitler, knowing well where it might lead. His Letters and Papers from Prison tells its own story of profound reflection and prayer as he faced the hangman’s noose not long before the end of the war. Who can say what wonderful works he might have written, had he survived? But who can tell what impact his faithful life and witness have had precisely through his martyrdom? This points all the way back to earlier examples of similar victories. In AD 177 a pagan mob in the city of Lyons, in southern France, killed several of the leading Christians in the area. The result was that Irenaeus came to Lyons as the new bishop (the previous bishop was among the martyrs) and was able, from that post, to teach and write vigorously on the subversive, world-changing truths of incarnation and resurrection against those, like the early Gnostics, who wanted to settle for a quieter life with the sharp edges of the gospel smoothed out. The blood of the martyrs was, in this case, the seed of some life-changing and gospel-enhancing theological teaching, which has served the church well ever since. Come forward from there a century or more. The initial victory of Jesus on the cross did not spare the church at the end of the third century from vicious and violent persecution under the emperor Diocletian. But the victory showed itself in a different way. Far from being stamped out, the church continued to grow at such a rate, not least because of the witness of those who had faced death for their faith, that the Roman Empire was forced to admit defeat. Nobody had known that people could live like that or face death like that. This was something new. They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a “religion” nor a “political power,” but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The cross stands at the center of the story of Jesus, Israel, the human race, the creator God, and his world. This is where the biblical narrative finds its heart. Second, the cross here is the means of victory over all the powers of the world. At the name of Jesus, declares the poem, every knee shall bow. The poem provides no explanation for why this is so, at least not in traditional terms (such as “he died for our sins”). But in fact the whole of the first half of the poem offers itself as an explanation that fits remarkably well with themes we have seen elsewhere in the New Testament, for instance, in Mark 10. The first half of the poem describes Jesus’s refusal to do what normal worldly power would do, namely, to exploit a status for one’s own benefit. In Paul’s day, and in the world well known in Philippi (a Roman colony), the contrast is stark: everyone knew how worldly emperors behaved, and Jesus did the opposite. His self-emptying, his humility, his obedience to the divine plan even though it meant his own cruel and shameful death—all this is the complete opposite of normal human behavior, normal imperial behavior. The result is that the cross establishes the kingdom of God through the agency of Jesus. That is what the last three stanzas of the poem are celebrating. We are here exactly on the same page as the four gospels. Third, the poem in its present context is setting out the pattern of life that is both the foundation and the model for the way Jesus’s followers ought to behave in relation to one another. The first four verses of the chapter stress the shared life of the community, mutual love and partnership in the spirit, heartfelt affection, and sympathy. On this basis Paul instructs the church: Hold on to the same love; bring your innermost lives into harmony; fix your minds on the same object. Never act out of selfish ambition or vanity; instead, regard everybody else as your superior. Look after each other’s best interests, not your own. (2:2–4) The poem then sets out the story of Jesus himself not only as the example of how to do this but as, so to speak, the place where this kind of life is to be found. The “place” is the Messiah himself, “in whom” his people find their identity: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus” (2:5). They already belong to him and this is how his “mind” worked, so theirs should work in the same way not only because they are copying him, but because his “mind” is at work in theirs.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But the most precious of all these encounters was that with Arrian of Nicomedia, the best of my friends. Younger than I by some twelve years, he had already begun that outstanding political and military career in which he continues to distinguish himself and to serve the State. His experience in government, his knowledge of hunting, horses, and dogs, and of all bodily exercise, raised him infinitely above the mere word-mongers of the time. In his youth he had been prey to one of those strange passions of the soul without which, perhaps, there can be no true wisdom, nor true greatness: two years of his life had been passed at Nicopolis in Epirus in the cold, bare room where Epictetus lay dying; he had set himself the task of gathering and transcribing, word for word, the last sayings of that aged and ailing philosopher. That period of enthusiasm had left its mark upon him; from it he retained certain admirable moral disciplines, and a kind of grave simplicity. In secret he practiced austerities which no one even suspected. But his long apprenticeship to Stoic duty had not hardened him into self-righteousness; he was too intelligent not to realize that the heights of virtue, like those of love, owe their special value to their very rarity, to their quality of unique achievement and sublime excess. Now he was striving to model himself upon the calm good sense and perfect honesty of Xenophon. He was writing the history of his country, Bithynia; I had placed this province, so long ill governed by proconsuls, under my personal jurisdiction; Arrian advised me in my plans for reform. This assiduous reader of Socratic dialogue treated my young favorite with tender deference, for he knew full well the rich stores of heroism, devotion, and even wisdom, on which Greece has drawn to ennoble love between friends. These two Bithynians spoke the soft speech of Ionia, where word endings are almost Homeric in form. I later persuaded Arrian to employ this dialect in his writings. At that period Athens had its philosopher of the frugal life: in a cabin of the village of Colonus, Demonax was leading an exemplary but merry existence. He was no Socrates, for he lacked both the subtlety and the ardor, but I relished his waggish good humor. Another of these good-hearted friends was the actor Aristomenes, a spirited performer of ancient Attic comedy. I used to call him my Greek partridge; short, fat, happy as a child (or a bird), he was better informed than anyone else on religious rituals, poetry, and cookery of former days.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  He taught me that lack of knowledge and lack of intelligence were not the same. The former could be remedied with a little patience and a lot of hard work. And the latter? “Well, I guess you’re up shit creek without a paddle.” I thought about how Papaw would get on the ground with me and Aunt Wee’s baby girls and play with us like a child. Despite his “bullshits” and his grouchiness, he never met a hug or a kiss that he didn’t welcome. He bought Lindsay a crappy car and fixed it up, and after she wrecked it, he bought her another one and fixed that one up, too, just so she didn’t feel like she “came from nothing.” I thought about losing my temper with Mom or Lindsay or Mamaw, and how those were among the few times Papaw ever showed a mean streak, because, as he once told me, “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” His wisdom came from experience, from his own earlier failures with treating the women in his family well. I stood up in that funeral home, resolved to tell everyone just how important he was. “I never had a dad,” I explained. “But Papaw was always there for me, and he taught me the things that men needed to know.” Then I spoke the sum of his influence on my life: “He was the best dad that anyone could ever ask for.” After the funeral, a number of people told me that they appreciated my bravery and courage. Mom was not among them, which struck me as odd. When I located her in the crowd, she seemed trapped in some sort of trance: saying little, even to those who approached her; her movements slow and her body slouched. Mamaw, too, seemed out of sorts. Kentucky was usually the one place where she was completely in her element. In Middletown, she could never truly be herself. At Perkins, our favorite breakfast spot, Mamaw’s mouth would sometimes earn a request from the manager that she keep her voice down or watch her language. “That fucker,” she’d mutter under her breath, chastened and uncomfortable. But at Bill’s Family Diner, the only restaurant in Jackson worth sitting down at for a meal, she’d scream at the kitchen staff to “hurry the hell up” and they’d laugh and say, “Okay, Bonnie.” Then she’d look at me and tell me, “You know I’m just fucking with them, right? They know I’m not a mean old bitch.” In Jackson, among old friends and real hillbillies, she needed no filter. At her brother’s funeral a few years earlier, Mamaw and her niece Denise convinced themselves that one of the pallbearers was a pervert, so they broke into his funeral home office and searched through his belongings.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My grandma also had two younger sisters, Betty and Rose, whom I loved each very much, but I was obsessed with the Blanton men. I would sit among them and beg them to tell and retell their stories. These men were the gatekeepers to the family’s oral tradition, and I was their best student. Most of this tradition was far from child appropriate. Almost all of it involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail. Much of it centered on how the county in which Jackson was situated—Breathitt—earned its alliterative nickname, “Bloody Breathitt.” There were many explanations, but they all had one theme: The people of Breathitt hated certain things, and they didn’t need the law to snuff them out. One of the most common tales of Breathitt’s gore revolved around an older man in town who was accused of raping a young girl. Mamaw told me that, days before his trial, the man was found facedown in a local lake with sixteen bullet wounds in his back. The authorities never investigated the murder, and the only mention of the incident appeared in the local newspaper on the morning his body was discovered. In an admirable display of journalistic pith, the paper reported: “Man found dead. Foul play expected.” “Foul play expected?” my grandmother would roar. “You’re goddamned right. Bloody Breathitt got to that son of a bitch.” Or there was that day when Uncle Teaberry overheard a young man state a desire to “eat her panties,” a reference to his sister’s (my Mamaw’s) undergarments. Uncle Teaberry drove home, retrieved a pair of Mamaw’s underwear, and forced the young man—at knifepoint—to consume the clothing. Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics. But the stories made me feel like hillbilly royalty, because these were classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side. My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes. The Blanton men, like the tomboy Blanton sister whom I called Mamaw, were enforcers of hillbilly justice, and to me, that was the very best kind. Despite their virtues, or perhaps because of them, the Blanton men were full of vice. A few of them left a trail of neglected children, cheated wives, or both. And I didn’t even know them that well: I saw them only at large family reunions or during the holidays. Still, I loved and worshipped them. I once overheard Mamaw tell her mother that I loved the Blanton men because so many father figures had come and gone, but the Blanton men were always there. There’s definitely a kernel of truth to that. But more than anything, the Blanton men were the living embodiment of the hills of Kentucky. I loved them because I loved Jackson.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Lisa loved spending time with this family and accompanied them on several camping trips in the Sierras. The two girls were inseparable from first grade through high school graduation, and Lisa was maid-of-honor at Bettina’s wedding. In fact, Lisa gave us Bettina’s name as someone to include in our comparison group. The thing I remember most about my interview with Bettina was her statement, “I always thought of myself as a good person, and I never doubted that I would find a good man to love me and to love in return.” She referred to her home as being “rock solid.” Of course, being raised by parents who are happily married does not innoculate children against divorce or other serious troubles. Life is not so simple. In an earlier book, The Good Marriage, I interviewed several young adults who had been raised by parents who were very happy in sexually close, romantic marriages. Such parents were often so devoted to each other that their children, watching the ongoing love affair, sometimes felt excluded from the parents orbit. When these youngsters grew up, they rejected their parents as role models and opted for more reserved behavior in their own marriages. In other close-knit families, children grow so close to their parents that separation in adolescence and early adulthood is an issue. I was relieved when Bettina told me how she had decided to go to Cornell instead of her father’s alma mater, Stanford University. When the acceptance letters came, Bettina yelped, “Cornell, here I come!” Her father said to her with thinly veiled irritation, “No one turns Stanford down.” “Well then,” Bettina answered tartly, “here goes the first.” And she tootled off. As if turned out, Bettina married another Cornell graduate and settled in upstate New York, far away from her parents. She still visits them a couple of times a year and now that her dad is retired, her parents travel more widely and often stop off to see her when they’re back east. “They’re great role models for my husband and me,” Bettina said. “They’re really savvy about how to do each life stage. I hope that we can do as well.” After talking to Bettina, I remember feeling struck by the fact that both girls started from almost the same place; they had outstanding parents, solid middle-class backgrounds, and happy memories from when they were very young. But after Lisa’s parents divorced, their paths diverged in ways no one could have predicted. “You know, I have a lot in common with my friends from divorced families,” Lisa said. “We define ourselves as children of divorce.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Among these portraits the two most beautiful are the least known: they are also the only ones which transmit to us the name of the sculptor. One is the bas-relief signed by Antonianos of Aphrodisias and found some fifty years ago on the property of an agronomic institute, the Fundi Rustici, in the Committee Room of which it is now placed. Since no guidebook of Rome indicates its existence in that city already so crowded with statues, tourists do not know about it. This work of Antonianos has been carved in Italian marble, so it was certainly executed in Italy, and doubtless in Rome, either because that artist was already established in the capital, or because he had been brought back by Hadrian on one of the emperor's travels. It has exquisite delicacy. The young head, pensively inclined, is framed by the tendrils of a vine twined in supple arabesque; the brevity of life comes inevitably to mind, the sacrificial grape and the fruit-scented air of an evening in autumn. Unhappily, the marble has suffered from storage in a cellar during the recent war-years: its whiteness is temporarily obscured and earth-stained, and three fingers of the figure's left hand have been broken. Thus do gods pay for the follies of men. *[The preceding paragraph appeared for the first time six years ago; meanwhile this bas-relief was acquired by a Roman banker, Arturo Oslo, a whimsical man who probably would have stirred the imagination of Stendhal or of Balzac. Signor Osio has lavished upon this fair object the same solicitous attention that he gives to the animals on his property at the edge of Rome, where they run free in their natural state, and to the trees which he has planted by the thousand on his shore estate at Orbetello. A rare virtue, this last, for Stendhal was writing as early as 1828, "The Italians loathe trees;" and what would he say today when real estate speculators, trying to pack more and more colossal apartment houses into Rome, are circumventing the city's laws to protect its handsome umbrella pines? Their method is simply to kill the trees by injections of hot water. A rare luxury, too, though one which many a man of wealth could enjoy, is this landowner's animation of woods and fields with creatures at full liberty, and that not for the pleasure of hunting them down, but for reconstituting a veritable Eden.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I wondered if he regularly came back here after supper for silent work uninterrupted by the phone or the half-curious public chattering up the stairs that I saw through an open door beyond. A public brought in by the damp lowland weather, obedient to a notice in a hotel hallway or to a Michelin guide: what would they take away from these cryptic works of art? And what would their creator have cared for these chance visitors? Echevin gestured to a portrait photograph high on the wall: a lean-faced man of fifty, with a short, pointed silvery beard, sitting with cheek tilted towards the jewelled knob of a cane: the fastidious ironic look of the heterosexual bachelor, half dandy and half clergyman, and an air of steely enigma, almost as if he sought to outdo the starlit sphinx he had painted, which now stood propped against the opposite wall with rubber corners shielding the coffee-coloured gilt of its frame. ("Just back from a Symbolist show in Munich," my host explained, proudly, but as if it were a bore.) And maybe it was a bore to work so long and closely with a man who looked so coldly down from above two thousand books and catalogues (in French and Flemish, German and English, Danish, was that?, Hungarian, and Japanese) that somehow, if only by a footnote, touched on him, or on his world and time. Echevin's note was less that of boredom than of a polite impatience, which I felt as I stumbled after him was directed equally at me and at Orst himself. Unsure quite what to do now we were there, standing side by side at the immense plain desk which took up half the room, he flicked open a folder and just like his son a minute or two before tapped the pile of photostats inside with a strong square finger. "These should interest you," he said, without complete conviction. He turned one or two of them over but didn't give me time to see them properly. "His articles for the British press. There. 'A Great Belgian Sculptor'—that was about Meunier—no, you may not know of him. That was in The Studio —and there, 'Burne-Jones's Funeral', from The Times: did you know Burne-Jones was the first painter to be given a service at Westminster Abbey? A strange and admirable choice, don't you think?" He closed the folder again: "Orst was once a famous figure in London, when England was open to the influence of Europe and when Belgium was the focus of the avant-garde. But that was a long time ago."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A scandalous love-affair followed (la Byron was suing for divorce in England, to the consternation of the Catholic Belgian press), and Orst produced a series of studies, portraits and outright fantasies over the heady six months before her death by drowning at Ostend in May 1899. The portraits and fantasies did not, it seems, finish with her death: furnished with passionate memories and several hundred photographs, Orst carried on painting her for another thirty or forty years—until he lost his sight in the mid-1930s. In 1900 he left Brussels and returned to the abandoned city of his birth; his career as a portrait-painter was over (though he was persuaded to take the occasional commission, for instance to draw the King's children) and henceforth he devoted himself to his melancholy obsession. I imagined him spending his days in this childhood house, in this room perhaps; but apparently he had built a house of his own on the other side of town, a tall white maison d ' artiste topped by a figure of Hermes who gazed out with a lofty challenge over the surrounding suburban gardens. (The house had been demolished after the war to make room for an important road.) There were three pictures of Orst himself in the booklet. The first was by a fellow-student at the Academy, a hasty charcoal drawing that emphasised potential brilliance and potential tragedy. In the second, a photograph, he was seen in his studio against a background of tapestry and objets de vertu, already the cold-eyed dandy I knew from the picture in Echevin's study, half emerging, half held back by shadow. A pebbly pince-nez hung at his lapel. The third, taken in his last years, looked none the less like an experiment from the early days of photography, or like something indoors seen through a breath-clouded window, a wash of white light into which the blind old man, shawled in a wheelchair, seemed almost to dematerialise. I was gripped by Orst's obsession with his actress. I loved the superior way he had renounced everything in its favour, and made such a show of retreating from view into the snows of a dream. Of course I was working it up rather from the few facts given in the pamphlet: my mind ran ahead and took possession of the idea.