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.

Page 136 of 288 · 20 per page

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

  Around the same time, I started teaching at the New York University School of Law. I would travel to New York to teach my classes and then fly back to Montgomery to run EJI. I asked Walter to come to New York each year to talk with students, and it was always a powerful moment when he walked into the classroom. He was a survivor of a criminal justice system that had proven, in his case, just how brutally unfair and cruel it could be. His personality, presence, and witness said something extraordinary about the humanity of people directly impacted by systemic abuse. His firsthand perspective on the plight of people wrongfully convicted was deeply meaningful to students, who often seemed overwhelmed by Walter’s testimony. He usually spoke very briefly and would give short answers to the questions posed to him. But he had an enormous effect on the students who met him. He would laugh and joke and tell them he wasn’t angry or bitter, just grateful to be free. He would share how his faith had helped him survive his hundreds of nights on death row. One year, Walter got lost on the trip to New York, and he called to tell me that he couldn’t make it. He seemed confused and couldn’t offer a coherent explanation of what had happened at the airport. When I got back home, I went to see him and he seemed his usual self, just a little down. He told me that his junkyard business wasn’t going great. When he described his finances, it became clear he was spending the money we’d secured for him more quickly than seemed prudent. He was buying equipment to make his collection of cars simpler, but he wasn’t generating the kind of revenue necessary to support the costs. After an hour or two of anxious talk, he relaxed a bit and seemed to return to the jovial Walter I’d come to know. We agreed that we would travel together on any future trips. — Walter wasn’t the only one who was facing new financial pressures. When a conservative majority took power in Congress in 1994, legal aid to death row prisoners became a political target, and federal funding was quickly eliminated. Most of the capital representation resource centers around the country were forced to close. We had never received state support for our work, and without the federal dollars we faced serious financial challenges. We scraped along and found enough private support to continue our work. Teaching and increased fund-raising responsibilities got piled on top of my bulging litigation docket, but somehow things progressed. Our staff was overextended, but I was thrilled with the talented lawyers and professionals we had working with us. We were assisting clients on death row, challenging excessive punishments, helping disabled prisoners, assisting children incarcerated in the adult system, and looking at ways to expose racial bias, discrimination against the poor, and the abuse of power. It was overwhelming but gratifying.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  442 Lecture 65: Walt Whitman Walt Whitman Lecture 65 Born in West Hills, Long Island, in May 1819, just two months before Herman Melville fi rst saw the light of day in New York City, Whitman was the second son of a housebuilder who moved his family to Brooklyn when Walter was four years old. A fter seven years of formal schooling, he worked fi rst as an of fi ce boy, learned the printing trade in Brooklyn, and worked as a printer in New York. At the age of 34, while working as a homebuilder and running a printshop in Brooklyn, he published his fi rst volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass. In “Song of Myself,” the fi rst and longest of the 12 poems in this volume, he celebrates himself as a fi gure who can represent all of humankind because he can identify with people of every kind, high and low, male and female, good and vicious, free and enslaved. Whitman even prompts us to identify him with Christ because of his eagerness to consort with outcasts, his capacity to suffer, and his sympathy for all who are oppressed and abused. In light of this universal sympathy, Whitman presents a vision of poetry that is radically democratic, reaching out to all readers with his free verse: long, rhythmic lines unconstrained by meter or rhyme. Whitman was a mechanic—a skilled laborer—as well as a poet. Son of a homebuilder, he prided himself on working with his hands as well as with his mind and soul. Having learned printing and journalism as a young man, he helped to set the type for his own fi rst volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass. He worked beside a pair of brothers in their printshop. The meanings of the words leaf and grass in printer’s lingo may help to explain the title of his book. But whatever they mean for printers, Whitman fully exploits the natural, primary meanings of the words leaves and grass. Like Keats, Whitman thought poetry should bloom as plants do. For Whitman a single leaf of grass—meaning a single grass shoot—could symbolize the individual citizens of a democracy.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then Luc told me about his father's business. A meticulous account, something he had worked out for himself rather than something half-forgotten he had been told. He said, "I call it The Fall of the house of Altidore." I was so flattered and sympathetic that I found it quite hard to concentrate. His great-grandfather Guillaume, apparently, had created a little publishing firm in the 1890s, and produced small and luxurious printings of belles-lettres and poetry—part of Maeterlinck's work on bees, collections of verse and essays on Flemish art by Verhaeren with beautiful brown plates. I hadn't realised how wealthy and grand the Altidores had been: the publishing was just a jeu d'esprit of Guillaume, who presided at the family's modern apogee, and was a great collector too. Now the original Editions Altidore were worth thousands of pounds, but the mercantile empire that had financed them had dwindled away. Luc's grandfather had been a gambler, with little interest in shipping and copper. He liked to travel and have house-parties, and had built himself a house to have them in, a little frescoed château in woodland near the coast and the casinos. He lost a fortune in the Congo; and a good deal more in the Depression. The only thing he made money on was publishing, and he broadened the list to include many of the more popular writers of the day. Ten years ago Luc's father had inherited a moribund business but one with a long backlist, dull in the main but studded with steady sellers. He had poured in a lot of his rich older wife's money and in the boom of the early eighties things picked up. He had visions, said Luc, of their regaining something of their turn-of-the-century grandeur. Workmen had been sent to repair the roof of the little château. Then things turned down again, and Editions Altidore, like so many others, was bought up by a huge conglomerate. Luc's father kept some decorative, pretend position there, was enormously rich again from the buy-out, and over the course of a year or so of irregular commuting removed himself from his home and his family and lived a fashionable life in Brussels instead. He had never sought a divorce, in the four years since he went, though Luc knew that he lived with an actress—virtually a teenager, he said with disgust—and his mother had been difficult ever since. I was struck by his unfriendly strength of feeling as he told me all this, and dismayed by the high-principled severity of the young, that was a focusing perhaps of other fears and doubts. I felt quite abashed, sitting there holding his father's book, as if I were somehow involved or to blame; like when a friend recounts to you an argument he had and enters into it again with such vehemence that you start to feel you are yourself the butt of his remembered anger. I smiled.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Geoffrey and Mirabelle Turlough were great friends of my parents, though I was never quite sure why. Geoffrey was a wiry man with a depressing grey beard and no sense of fun, whilst Mirabelle could have represented fun in a pageant and was huge and outgoing, with short dark hair and glasses on a chain. He was in charge of the local planning office, but had been a fine amateur tennis-player just after the war: one could picture him doing months of practice serves. They had met at the Tennis Club where Mirabelle often umpired the ladies' matches. Later a shoulder injury had forced him to give up, but Mirabelle, who was no player, retained a passionate interest in the game, one that he seemed rather to resent. In my teens he was always in grey flannels, jacket and tie, when she would be wearing white daps and sports shirts with pockets right out on the end of her breasts; she would often be tugging the shirt down over her hips in a jolly, let's-give-it-a-go sort of way. Each year at the end ofJune she would appear on the television in uniform, glaring down the tramlines and howling "Fault" whenever possible. "She shouts so loud", my father once said, "you hardly need a telly to pick it up." Even so, those two weekends late in the summer term were always spent with the curtains drawn and the tennis on, not from any particular interest of ours in the sport, but rather from the hope of seeing our friend crouched behind the muscled legs of the receiver. The next week the Turloughs would come to supper, and Mirabelle would reveal the best of the scandals she had picked up about the players—particularly sexual ones of a kind that were never talked of at home, and which all of us, including Geoffrey, took rather stiffly.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He had had poems published in the London Mercury when he was only fifteen (my own age at this first meeting) and Squire had included his work as a brilliant new star in his Selections from Modern Poets a few years later. He had written novels, too, which had a reputation for candour; and slender appreciations of Tennyson and Patmore. All that local people would have seen of his work was the Memoirs, remaindered inexhaustibly in Digby's window, and the thin bookmaking ideas he had taken up more recently—the text to some pictures of Royal London, an anthology of "The Kentish Muse". I knew little of this at the time, of course: to me he was the spruce aquiline old gent I saw hurrying through the town, looking up with embarrassed good humour through bushy eyebrows and smiling at strangers as if they had recognised him. Once or twice he had come into a shop at the same time as me, and I was aware of an unconscious heightening of tone, a kind of feudal relish on the part of the traders that I found silly but moving. Sometimes I passed him on the common. He had a neurotic papillon spaniel that aroused Sibelius's interest and would hurtle down the leaf-strewn slopes so that it and the whirled-up leaves seemed one. He would say "Good morning" or "Good afternoon", but I never for a moment thought he knew who I was. Much of his mystique for me came from his house. Blewits was named from the lilac-gilled mushrooms that grew in profusion in its dank spinney, and which he gave almost at random to people from the town. When I was a little boy my mother received a basket of them, and I remembered her anxiously pondering if they were edible, the gift of a good or bad spirit, and then hastily putting them in the bin. Gigantic beech-trees whelmed above the house on the common side and roared thrillingly on windy nights. In winter you could look down through them at the steep red roofs and shingled gables, the air full of rooks and bonfire smoke. In summer everything was hidden; the drive twisted through laurels and rhododendrons, the light was speckled and private. To visit the house was to have the magic access of a dream fused with the proud ordeal of winning a prize. It was late May and the mossy outbuildings were roofed with fallen horse-chestnut flowers. I thought they would be fun to explore, those sheds with small cobwebbed windows and sometimes a chimney: more fun than talking to Sir Perry Dawlish. "Good afternoon, Sir Perry," I kept rehearsing, on my aunt's anxious prompting. "No more cake, thank you, Sir Perry." I had a high regard for "The Months" but even so was not fully convinced that this famous old writer, who had actually known Gordon Bottomley, would want to spend much time on them.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  By and large, I should not have worried. The photographs were intensely professional, the lighting and tonality were beautiful, and the silkiest of purses had been made from even the hairiest of sows’ ears. I spotted young Aldo at once, in his role of the Baptist, his naked torso broadening into brightness, his stiff little pennant at an angle over his head, an expression of faint surprise about his sleepy dark eyes and stubble-roughened jaw. The controversial conversation piece in which Aldo appeared with the as yet unmartyred St Sebastian hung alongside. Sebastian was a boy of tedious, waxen beauty, with a little loincloth about to tumble down. They had been cleverly posed against a projected backdrop taken from some Tuscan master, but for all the quattrocento piquancy of their gestures they reminded me of nothing so much as those queeny fashion spreads in Tatler and Uomo Vogue. The impression was reinforced by a surge of Trouble for Men across my nostrils and the appearance at biceps level of the luminous pink spectacles of Guy Parvis. For a second I thought I might actually be caught up in one of his Alternative Image TV programmes, and prepared to sidestep the cameras as they zoomed in on Sebastian’s Gillette-smooth profile. But it seemed he was there in a private capacity. I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks. I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down. The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs. Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style—martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine—and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more—a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Americans keep wondering what has "got into" the stu dents. What has "got into" them is their history in this coun try. They are not the first Negroes to face mobs: they are merely the first Negroes to frighten the mob more than the mob frightens them. Many Americans may have forgotten, for example, the reign of terror in the 1920's that drove Negroes out of the South. Five hundred thousand moved North in one year. Some ofthe people who got to the North barely in time to be born are the parents of the students now going to school. This was forty years ago, and not enough has hap pened-not enough fr eedom has happened. But these young people are determined to make it happen and make it happen now. They cannot be diverted. It seems to me that they are the only people in this country now who really believe in free dom. Insofar as they can make it real for themselves, they will make it real for all of us. The question with which they present the nation is whether or not we really want to be free. It is because these students remain so closely related to their past that they are able to face with such authority a population ignorant of its history and enslaved by a myth. And by this population I do not mean merely the unhappy people who make up the Southern mobs. I have in mind nearly all Amer Icans. These students prove unmistakably what most people in this country have yet to discover: that time is real. Mademoiselle, August 1960 The Dangerous Road Befo re Ma rtin Luther J( ing I FIRST met Martin Luther King, Jr. nearly three years ago now, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was there on a visit fr om his home in Montgomery. He was "holed up," he was seeing no one, he was busy writing a book-so I was intormed by the fr iend who, mercilessly, at my urgent request, was taking me to King's hotel. I felt terribly guilty about interrupting him but not guilty enough to let the opportunity pass. Still, having been raised among preachers, I would not have been surprised if King had cursed out the fr iend, refused to speak to me, and slammed the door in our faces. Nor would I have blamed him if he had, since I knew that by this time he must have been t< >rced to sutrer many an admiring tool. But the Reverend King is not like any preacher I have ever met bet(>re. For one thing, to state it baldly, I liked him.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Our readers will know something of the unhappy circumstances that have befallen this remarkable painter in the years since his last exhibitions in London, and will be in a position to understand the dictates, in his life as in his art, of a heart, and an eye, subjected to so violent a shock: his has been, in the words of one of his contemporaries, "un veuvage precoce"—a premature widowhood, indeed; and one that has imposed upon him its own high and unwavering demands. There are those (a few in Belgium herself, though more, we admit, on our own neighbouring shores) who continue to question M. Orst's standing in the first rank of modern artists; and some who are all too ready to consign his productions to the midden of depravity, along with those of M. Felicien Rops and one or two others, to be spoken of only as one speaks of the art of the criminal or the madman. To be sure, that M. Orst's paintings—and his admirable sculpture in plaster and gesso, not to mention his abundant work on the stone—have value as testimony to a fertile mind subjected to pressures of exceptional severity, cannot be denied; what we do deny, absolutely, is the inherent unworthiness of his subjects or of the dark sensibility which all his work reveals. Some thoughts such as these, as we say, passed through our mind as we waited at the doorway of the Villa Hermes; which, in due course, was opened by a young woman in a pale costume (reminiscent of the hygienic dress of Ancient Greek maidens, and styled according to M. Orst's own design), who indicated to us to enter. We gave our name, and she withdrew soundlessly—we had already been apprised that all the servants of the house are encouraged not to speak, and to make themselves understood, as far as is possible, by gesture. We found ourselves detained in the long and somewhat sepulchral vestibule, which runs to the full depth of the house, and off which open various small rooms. At a number of these a curtain was drawn back to reveal a fragment of an Attic frieze, displayed on a high plinth, or a drawing from the hand of Giovanni Bellini or Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In all the rooms of this ground floor, it should be said, the windows are either placed too high to permit one to see out or else are filled with coloured glass, which serves to create a magical play of symbolic light.

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

  We have to wonder why the legal system fails to acknowledge the fact that children change or that they should have the right to participate in planning their own lives. Imagine ordering a twelve-year-old to wear the shoes that fit her when she was six. When she complains that the shoes pinch or cries because she limps or whimpers that she can’t walk at all, we ignore her. We turn her objections aside because we must zealously uphold the parents’ right to select their children’s clothes. Unfortunately, returning to court to change such orders is not a real option for most people because it’s emotionally and financially too costly. What’s more, most courts would not hear the child’s voice but instead assume that the parent who speaks on behalf of the child is acting out of anger at the other parent. Essentially there is no place within the court or the mediation system or elsewhere in society for children like Joan or Paula or the thousands of others to make their plea for justice or compassion when they are young. They have no rights. They have no voice. When they reach adulthood, however, the power is all theirs and the parents whom they regarded as bullies when they were minors are rejected in anger and disdain. Is this really what we want? I was presented somewhat unexpectedly with another solution by a father who told me about visiting his eleven-year-old daughter. We were driving in his car to a conference center in upstate New York. Divorced three years earlier, the father, who was a busy pediatrician, traveled a thousand miles twice a month to visit his daughter. Typically he called during the week, made plans for the weekend, and then took two rooms at a residential hotel. When his daughter had her tenth birthday, he thought that it might be hard or boring for her to spend the weekend alone with her father so he invited her to bring a friend. The child was very happy to do so. I asked the father whether he had ever thought of asking his daughter to fly to his home. He said sharply, “I don’t want my little girl alone on an airplane.” I was very impressed with his sensitivity and concern and so I said, “Your child is very fortunate to have you for her father.” As I glanced at the man, I was startled to see tears rolling slowly down his cheek. “Doctor, you’re crying!” “You’re the only person in the whole world who has ever said that to me,” he said. “Everyone else tells me that I’m a fool.” There may be many sensitive, loving fathers or mothers who would be willing to make the necessary sacrifice in order to fly to visit their children. Perhaps no one ever asked them.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  His flat stomach was crossed by the longest scars I had ever seen, as though long ago, and with the crudest means, someone had removed all his insides. With his scarred black skin inside the thick black fur he struck me, who adored him for a moment, like some exquisite game animal, partly skinned and then thrown aside still breathing. I excused myself for the lavatory, tiptoed to the front door; but then slammed it behind me. 11 ‘Sugar?’ ‘I don’t, thank you.’ ‘I rather do these days. I’ve given in.’ Charles discarded the tongs, and shovelled up roughly half a dozen sugar-lumps in his bowed, flat fingers. We sat and sipped as Graham came in again with more hot water, and Charles watched his manservant with confident gratitude. At Skinner’s Lane everything was running like clockwork. ‘I have my own teeth,’ he added. We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care. Each time I visited it there were signs of new disturbances, books moved from table to floor, old Kalamazoo folders stacked or scattered, as if some task of sorting and searching were being executed, leaving only greater confusion, like a site turned over for coins and amulets by amateurs. Books whose titles had caught my eye last time atop their teetering plinths were now cast down or overlaid by other strata: atlases with cracked spines, popular sheet-music (the ‘Valse’ from Love-Fifteen ), magazines whose colour printing had freaked with sun and age and, Gauguin-like, showed brown royalty, pink dogs, pale blue grass. I felt at home there. As we sat on either side of the empty hearth, I was reminded of my Oxford tutorials, and the sense I often used to have of inadequacy and carelessness in the face of my tutor, whose hours with me, he came to imply, were needless distractions from his own, decades-long work on succession and the law. There was a similar maleness and candour to it, that scholarly inversion of the rules of the drawing-room that allowed one to talk about sodomy and priapism as though one were really talking about something else. There was a similar toleration of silence. ‘Most tiresome,’ Charles enigmatically resumed. ‘One lives in the past fully enough as it is, without people coming back like that.’ ‘Your grocer’s boy. Yes, I confess to having been a bit disappointed.’ ‘He couldn’t see that he only had meaning in the past, poor fellow.’ ‘I think Martyrs were perhaps a bit much for him.’

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But everyone overlooks the fact that Stokely Carmichael be gan his life as a Christian and for many, many years, unnoticed by the world's press, was marching up and down highways in my country, in the deep south, spent many many years being beaten over the head and thrown in jail, singing "We shall overcome," and meaning it and believing it, doing day by day and hour by hour precisely what the Christian Church is sup posed to do, to walk fr om door to door, to feed the hungry, to speak to those who arc oppressed, to try to open the gates of prisons tor all those who are imprisoned. And a day came, inevitably, when this young man grew weary of petitioning a headless population and said in effect, what all revolutionaries have always said, I petitioned you and petitioned you, and you can petition for a long, long time, but the moment comes when the petitioner is no longer a petitioner but has become a beggar. And at that moment one concludes, you will not do it, you cannot do it, it is not in you to do it, and therefore I must do it. When Stokely talks about black power, he is WHITE RACISM OR WORLD COMMUNITY? 7 53 simply translating into the black idiom what the English said hundreds of years ago and have always proclaimed as their guiding principle, black power translated means the self-de termination of people. It means that, nothing more and noth ing less. But it is astounding, and it says a great deal about Christendom, that whereas black power, the conjunction of the word 'black' with the word 'power', frightens everybody, no one in Christendom appears seriously to be frightened by the operation and the nature of white power. Stokely may make terrifying speeches (though they are not terrifying to me, I must say) and Stokely may be , though I don't believe it, a racist in reverse, but in fact he's not nearly as dangerous as the people who now rule South Africa, he's not nearly as dangerous as many of the people who govern my own poor country.

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

  He looked troubled. “This, right here, is a whole ’nother kind of situation. Guys on the row talk about what they’re going to do before their executions, how they’re going to act. I used to think it was crazy to talk like that, but I guess I’m starting to do it, too.” I was uncomfortable with the conversation. “Well, you should think about living, man—what you’re going to do when you get out of here.” “Oh, I do that, too. I do that a lot. It’s just hard when you see people going down that hall to be killed. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.” Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life to someone who was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned, but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer, slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered. I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Honestly, no," Paul admitted. "He was remembered in the town, but rather as someone from long ago. His great London days were forty or fifty years before—when he was your age, more or less. He was a blind, half-paralysed, half-mad old man, who might as well have been dead for all anyone cared. I was quite frightened of him, and of course determined to prove I wasn't. If I say so myself, I was very tolerant of him, and came to be fond of him. I used to do a few chores in the house, read to him, listen to him muttering and raving about the past, and the beautiful woman who'd ruined his life and brought him to this state—I didn't understand it all, but I gained a sense of his own mythology, you might say. I knew my way around a place I'd never been. And he could still be quite lucid about the world: 'You be my eyes,' he used to say. 'Tell me what you saw in the street, what was the sky like, what colour were the clouds?' Often, of course, I had no idea, and he would shake his blind head and pretend to be angry. And really he did teach me to see for myself: I did start to take notice. I remember starting to imitate his expressions of aesthetic pleasure—a rather feminine and troubling language for a fifteen-year-old boy, this charmant and exquis and ravissant, all in French, which was the language of his kind." I nodded slowly with recognition—how music has demanded something similar, like the language of endearments which I never voiced except inside my head. "Well, it was a lesson in real life, and I discovered I needed it, I wanted to come back for more. He was my best teacher, not the brave monks who actually taught us and looked after us through those terrible years . . ." I felt great wide-eyed questions welling up, about what it had been like; and then shamefaced doubts about what could tolerably be asked by someone who knew nothing about it, who had never known anything like it. "Your parents weren't worried about your spending so much time with him?" was all I prudishly came up with.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  pants in the school basement, pushing their hardness against her cotton panties, eyes squeezed shut. But Eddie Fish is not a boy. Eddie is a man—twenty-eight years old—and Jennie knows these woods are about to become a part of her history. She is writing the story of her life, the story of her body on these damp suburban grounds with the man she has chosen precisely because he is a man. The blond hairs on his wrists glisten as he reaches around her and unhooks her bra. She is impressed by his skill at bra unhooking, the ease with which he pulls the straps off her arms and hangs it on a nearby branch, a white cotton 32B flag of surrender. She is impressed by his warm dry palms that brush against her nipples, and by his eyes, dark blue in the noon of this clear Indian summer day, staring straight at her. “Lisa Wallach,” he says, murmuring the name of his last girlfriend as he stares at Jennie’s breasts. She looks at him, flushed. “Sorry,” he laughs, “I can’t explain it. Your hair, your tits— you look just like her now—” She doesn’t know enough to be horrified. To slap Eddie Fish across his pale stubbled cheek, grab her bra off the branch and streak through the woods, away from him. Instead, she is flattered by the comparison to Lisa Wallach, who is a woman after all—at least twenty-six—and who is very beautiful in that frosted blond urban way. Lisa is a lawyer. She has an apartment in the city, and wears leather boots with stacked heels, long velvet skirts almost brushing the floor. “What am I doing here with you?” he murmurs as he un does the top button of her tennis shorts, bends down and un laces each sneaker, pulls off her Fred Perry socks, small green abandoned wreaths. He unzips her shorts and shimmies them down around her ankles, along with her panties. Parts of her

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In our second year at school Graves and I shared a study-bedroom. He was too camp and snobbish to be popular, but I had fallen swiftly under his influence and he had correspondingly formed a keen dependence on me. No one else made any claim on us, and though part of me longed to be billeted with one of the fabulous Raleigh rebels, I consigned that plan to my thriving fantasy folder, and settled in with Graves and his record collection instead. He was tall and heavy-boned, with wavy brown hair and a long intelligent face made thuggish by adolescence. He loathed what he called the "plebeian" use of Christian names, and we addressed each other as Graves and Manners from the start, and till the end. Graves was going to be a great conductor as well as a great writer, and the double demands of his destiny were enacted daily in the narrow space of our study, when he would leap from his desk, pen in hand, to "bring them through" an especially devilish test of ensemble or stab out the climactic chords of whatever record was on. The walls were soon spattered with ink. He was working on a play, "Noble to Myself", in which all the characters had titles, and I would be required to take three or four parts in read-throughs, improvising ever more clipped and drawling accents. His parents lived in Somerset, and seemed for all practical purposes to be a good deal more remote than that. Often he came home with me for weekends, though my mother didn't warm to him or his nocturnal habits, and my brother mocked him behind his back; my father, who found the thought of his visits oppressive, was irresistibly caught up in talk about music and would sit up with him after the rest of us had gone to bed, listening to Bax or Busoni "quietly". My father's memorabilia included an inscribed photograph of Beecham, and one of his batons, which Graves used to eye yearningly as he sat on his hands on the sofa. Sometimes, in conversation, my father would illustrate a point or remind us of a song by singing a few bars; it was lovely, but we all found it embarrassing.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In a prose as firm as that of the great Latin stylists of his time, Hadrian's arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, his gradual re-ordering of a war-torn world are reconstructed with an imaginative insight which only years in the company of the Emperor could give. Marguerite Yourcenar writes only in French. She is the author of some fifteen books varying in range from art and literary criticism to novels historical and modern, and to drama, poetry, and translation (from English and from ancient and modern Greek). As widely travelled as the Emperor of whom she writes, she was born in Brussels of French parents and has lived in several countries of Europe, but is now an American citizen, making her home since 1950 on Mount Desert Island, Maine. In January 1981, Mme Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the prestigious French Academy, a measure of the extraordinary place she holds in the history of French letters. Illustrated with over 40 photographs especially chosen by the author FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX, 19 Union Square West, New York 10003

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  She was extremely intelligent, was very well read, and spoke many languages fluently. They would often play chess, and he was impressed with her patient style and how she often laid elaborate traps for his pieces. He knew that Elizabeth had been schooled in hardship. She had lost not only her mother when she was so young but also her most beloved stepmother, Catherine Howard, when she was eight. Catherine was Henry’s fifth wife and a cousin of Anne Boleyn. Henry had had her beheaded on trumped-up charges of adultery. Cecil also knew that the few months Elizabeth had spent in the Tower of London had had a traumatic effect on her, since she had expected to be executed at any moment. She had emerged from all of these experiences as a remarkably affable young woman, but Cecil knew that behind the exterior she was willful, temperamental, and even devious. Cecil was also certain about one more thing: ruling was not for women. Queen Mary I had been England’s first true female ruler, and she had proven to be a disaster. All the government ministers and administrators were men, and a woman could not stand up to the rough-and-tumble of dealing with them, and with male foreign diplomats. Women were too emotional and unsteady. Elizabeth might have a very capable mind, but she did not have the resilience for the job. And so Cecil had formed a plan: Slowly he and his cohorts would take over the reins, the queen advising but mostly following her ministers’ guidance. And as quickly as possible they would get her married, preferably to a Protestant, and her husband would take over and rule as the king. Almost from the beginning of her reign, however, Cecil realized that his plan would not be so easy to enact. The queen was headstrong and had plans of her own. In one way, he could not help but be impressed. Her first day on the job, she held a meeting and made it clear to her future councillors that she knew more than they did about the financial state of the country; she was determined to make the government solvent. She appointed Cecil as her secretary of state, and she began meeting with him several times a day, giving him no spare hour to rest. Unlike her father, who had let his ministers run things so he could devote himself to hunting and pursuing young women, Elizabeth was completely hands-on; Cecil was astounded at how many hours she put into the job, working well past midnight. She was exacting in what she expected from him and the other ministers, and occasionally she could be quite intimidating. If he pleased her with what he said or did, the queen was all smiles and a touch coquettish. But if something turned out wrong or if he disagreed too vociferously, she would shut him out for days, and he would return home to stew in his anxiety.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  bravery in battle. Along with this, she loved to read books that recounted the chivalric tales of real-life knights in armor, and the stories of great leaders in the past; among these, one of her favorites was Illustrious Women by Boccaccio, which related the deeds of the most celebrated women in history. And as she whiled away her time in the library, all of these books converging in her mind, she would daydream about the future glory of the family, somehow herself in the midst of it all. And at the center of these fantasies was the image of her father, a man who to her was as great and legendary as anyone she had read about. Although the encounters with her father were often brief, to Caterina they were intense. He treated her as an equal, marveling at her intelligence and encouraging her in her studies. From early on, she identified with her father—experiencing his traumas and triumphs as if they were her own. As were all the Sforza children, girls included, Caterina was taught sword fighting and underwent rigorous physical training. As part of this side of her education, she would go on hunting expeditions with the family in the nearby woods of Pavia. She was trained to hunt and kill wild boars, stags, and other animals. On these excursions she would watch her father with awe. He was a superior horseman, riding with such impetuosity, as if nothing could harm him. In the hunt, taking on the largest animals, he showed no signs of fear. At court, he was the consummate diplomat yet always maintained the upper hand. He confided in her his methods—think ahead, plot several moves in advance, always with the goal of seizing the initiative in any situation. There was another side to her father, however, that deepened her identification with him. He loved spectacle; he was like an artist. She would never forget the time the family toured the region and visited Florence. They brought with them various theater troupes, the actors wearing outlandish costumes. They dined in the country inside the most beautifully colored tents. On the march, the brightly caparisoned horses and the accompanying soldiers—all decked in the Sforza colors, scarlet and white—would fill the landscape. It was a hypnotic and thrilling sight, all orchestrated by her father. He delighted in always wearing the latest in Milanese fashions, with his elaborate and bejeweled silk gowns. She came to share this interest, clothes and jewels becoming her passion. He might seem so virile in battle, but she would see him crying like a baby as he listened to his favorite choral music. He had an endless appetite for all aspects of life, and her love and admiration for him knew no bounds. And so in 1473, when her father informed the ten-year-old Caterina of the marriage he had arranged for her, her only thought was to fulfill her duty as a Sforza and please her father. The man

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  felt a deep affinity for animals and saw them as possessing souls, a belief that was virtually unheard of at the time. This impelled him to become a vegetarian and to go around freeing caged birds in the marketplace. He saw all nature as one, including humans, and he imagined a future in which that belief would be shared. The great feminist, philosopher, and novelist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) believed that we humans can actually create the future by how we imagine it in the present. For her, in her short life, much of this came in her imagining a future in which the rights of women and, most important, their reasoning powers were given equal weight to men. Her thinking in these terms in fact did have a profound influence on the future. Perhaps one of the most uncanny examples of this is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a scientist, novelist, and philosopher. He aspired to a kind of universal knowledge, similar to Leonardo’s, in which he tried to master all forms of human intelligence, steep himself in all periods of history, and through this be able to not only see the future but commune with its inhabitants. He was able to anticipate a theory of evolution decades before Darwin. He foresaw many of the great political trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the eventual unification of Europe after World War II. He imagined many of the advances of technology and the effects these would have on our spirit. He was someone who actively attempted to live outside his time, and his prophetic powers were legendary among his friends. Finally, sometimes we may feel like we are born into the wrong period in history, out of harmony with the times. And yet we are locked into this moment and must live through it. If such is the case, this strategy of immortality can bring us some relief. We are aware of the cycles of history and how the pendulum will swing and the times will change, perhaps after we are gone. In this way, we can look to the future and feel some connection to those who are living well beyond this terrible moment. We can reach out to them, make them part of our audience. Some day they will read about us or read our words, and the connection will go in both directions, indicating this supreme human ability to surmount one’s time and the finality of death itself. A man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 18 Meditate on Our Common Mortality The Law of Death Denial Most of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead, the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks,