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 My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  About this time, when I was ten or so, we were all brought together in Carrickfergus; my brothers and sisters then first became living, individual beings to me. Vernon was going to a bank as a clerk, and was away all day. Willie, six years older than I was, Annie four years my senior, and Chrissie two years my junior, went to the same day-school, though the girls went to the girls’ entrance and had women teachers. Willie and I were in the same class; though he had grown to be taller than Vernon, I could beat him in most of the lessons. There was, however, one important branch of learning, in which he was easily the best in the school. The first time I heard him recite “The Battle of Ivry” by Macaulay, I was carried off my feet. He made gestures and his voice altered so naturally that I was lost in admiration. That evening my sisters and I were together and we talked of Willie’s talent. My eldest sister was enthusiastic, which I suppose stirred envy and emulation in me, for I got up and imitated him, and to my sisters’ surprise I knew the whole poem by heart. “Who taught you?” Annie wanted to know, and when she heard that I had learned it just from hearing Willie recite it once, she was astonished and must have told our teacher, for the next afternoon he asked me to follow Willie and told me I was very good. From this time on, the reciting class was my chief education. I learned every boy’s piece and could imitate them all perfectly, except one redheaded rascal who could recite the “African Chief” better than anyone else, better even than the master. It was pure melodrama; but Redhead was a born actor and swept us all away by the realism of his impersonation. Never shall I forget how the boy rendered the words: “Look, feast thy greedy eyes on gold, Long kept for sorest need; Take it, thou askest sums untold And say that I am freed. Take it; my wife the long, long day Weeps by the cocoa-tree, And my young children leave their play And ask in vain for me.” I haven’t seen or heard the poem these fifty odd years. It seems tawdry stuff to me now; but the boy’s accents were of the very soul of tragedy and I realized clearly that I couldn’t recite that poem as well as he did. He was inimitable. Every time his accents and manner altered; now he did these verses wonderfully, at another time those, so that I couldn’t ape him; always there was a touch of novelty in his intense realization of the tragedy. Strange to say it was the only poem he recited at all well.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This refusal to be constrained was notably apparent in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which she called a “biomythography.” Biographer Alexis De Veaux describes Zami, in her definitive biography of Lorde, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, as a book that “recovers from existing male-dominated literary genres (history, mythology, autobiography, and fiction) whatever was inextricably female, female-centered.” In Zami and much of her other work, Lorde expressed the radical idea that black women could hold the center, be the center, and she was unwavering in this belief. At her most vulnerable, Lorde gave the world some of her most powerful writing with her work in The Cancer Journals, which chronicled her life with breast cancer and having a double mastectomy. “But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.” With these words, she assumed as much control as she could over a body succumbing to disease and a public narrative that, until then, allowed a singular narrative about what it meant to live with illness. She made herself visible and gave other women permission to make themselves visible in a world that would prefer that they disappear, stay silent. In all of her writing, Audre Lorde offers us language to articulate how we might heal our fractured sociopolitical climate. She gives us instructions for making tools with which we can dismantle the houses of our oppressors. She remakes language with which we can revel in our sensual and sexual selves. She forges a space within which we can hold ourselves and each other accountable to both our needs and the greater good. Anthologies like this are so very necessary because, all too often, people misappropriate the words and ideas of black women. They do so selectively, using the parts that serve their aims, and abandoning those parts that don’t. People will, for example, parrot Lorde’s ideas about dismantling the master’s house without taking into account the context from which Lorde crafted those ideas. Lorde is such a brilliant and eloquent writer; she has such a way of shaping language that of course people want to repeat her words to their own ends. But her work is far more than something pretty to parrot. In this collection of Lorde’s prose and poetry, you will be able to appreciate the grace, power, and fierce intelligence of her writing, to understand where she was writing from and why, and to bear witness to all the unforgettable ways she made herself, and all black women, gloriously visible. PROSE Poetry Is Not a Luxury

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  June 20, 1986 Bonnieux, France How incredibly rich to be here in the south of France with the Zamani Soweto Sisters from South Africa. Gloria and I became acquainted with them through Ellen Kuzwayo and our fundraising work with the Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa. They are one of the groups we help support through contributions. I’m only sorry that Ellen couldn’t be here also, but at least I had a chance to share time and space with her in London on June 16, the anniversary of the Soweto uprising. I learn tremendous courage from these women, from their laughter and their tears, from their grace under constant adversity, from their joy in living which is one of their most potent weapons, from the deft power of their large, overworked bodies and their dancing, swollen feet. In this brief respite for us all made possible by Betty Wolpert’s kindness, these women have taught me so much courage and perspective. June 21, 1986 Bonnieux Sweet Solstice, and again the goddess smiles upon me. I am sitting in the stone-ringed yard of Les Quelles, a beautiful old reclaimed silk factory, now a villa. Gloria and the women of the Zamani Soweto Sisters surround me, all of us brilliant and subtle under the spreading flowers of a lime-tea tree. It looks and feels like what I’ve always imagined the women’s compound in some African village to have been, once. Some of us drink tea, some are sewing, sweeping the dirt ground of the yard, hanging out clothes in the sunlight at the edge of the enclosure, washing, combing each other’s hair. Acacia blossoms perfume the noon air as Vivian tells the stories behind the tears in her glowing amber eyes. The young students who do not ask their parents’ permission to run in the streets and die. The wealthy Black undertaker who lends his funeral hearses to the police to transport the bodies of the slain children. The three little children who saw a heavy-armored Casspir barreling down the road in Dube and ran to hide behind the silk-cotton tree at the edge of the yard, too young to know that they could be seen as the tank rolled down the road. The blond policeman leaning out from the side of the tank to fire behind the tree at the little ones as they hid, reaching back over his shoulder to fire again as the vehicle rolled along, just to make sure the babies were all dead.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  A good autumn coming, if I remember to take it easily. I have interesting classes, and SISSA is planning a benefit this fall around the quilt Gloria and I brought back from the Zamani Soweto Sisters in europe. I’ll be doing another benefit for Kitchen Table in Boston. That feels real good. It will be six years next month since the vision of KTP became a reality through the hard work of Barbara [Smith] and Cherrie [Moraga] and Myrna and the others. August 15, 1986 New York City Women of Color in struggle all over the world, our separateness, our connectedness, so many more options for survival. Whatever I call them, I know them for sister, mother, daughter, voice and teacher, inheritor of fire. Alice of Soweto cursing the mission songs: “We have our own political songs now for the young people to sing—no more damn forgiveness!” Her voice is almost hysterically alone in the shocked silence of the other hymn-singing women. Katerina stands in the Berlin hall, two hours into the discussion that follows the poetry reading by her and other Afro-German women. “I have had enough,” she says, “and yes, you may need to continue to air your feelings of racism because for you they are a new discovery here tonight. But I have known them and lived with them all of my life and tonight it is now time for me to go home.” And she walks down the aisle and out, straight and beautiful, with that fine and familiar Black woman’s audacity in the face of a totally unsupported situation. Rangitunoa, Maori tribal woman, standing to speak in her people’s sacred place, the marae. Women have not spoken here before because they have not known the ancient language. In the old days, women did not speak in the marae at all. Now this young woman who loves women stands to speak in the tongue of her people, eloquently alone and suspect in her elders’ eyes. Dinah, Aboriginal woman come down from the hot north hills of the outback, traveling by bus three days from mission to mission to meet with the writing women of Melbourne, because she had heard of this conference and she wishes to bring her stories to them. The stern, shy Samoan women in Auckland, plush and mighty, organizing study groups for their teenaged kin, holding evening classes for them in how to understand the Pakahas (whites). The Aboriginal women reclaiming the famous Ayers Rock as Ulluru, a place of women’s Dreaming. The women of the South Pacific islands demanding their peoples’ land rights, rejecting the european and american nuclear madness that is devastating their islands. Brown people filling the streets of downtown Auckland, marching in support of a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific. It could almost be Washington, D.C.!

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It was poetry that gave her the language to make sense of that oppression and to resist it, and she was a prolific poet with several collections to her name including The First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, Coal, and The Black Unicorn. Her work took other forms—teaching, cofounding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, public speaking, and a range of advocacy efforts for women, lesbians, and black people. During her time in Germany, she gave rise to the Afro-German movement—helping black German women use their voices to join the sisterhood she valued so dearly. She also demanded that white German women confront their whiteness, even when it made them defensive or uncomfortable. In an essay about Lorde’s time in Germany, Dagmar Schultz wrote that “many white women learned to be more conscious of their privileges and more responsible in the use of their power.” Lorde was not constrained by boundaries. She combined the personal and the political, the spiritual and the secular. As an academic she fearlessly wrote about the sensual and the sexual even though the academy has long disdained such interests. Her erotic life was as valuable as her intellectual life and she was unabashed in making this known. This refusal to be constrained was notably apparent in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which she called a “biomythography.” Biographer Alexis De Veaux describes Zami, in her definitive biography of Lorde, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, as a book that “recovers from existing male- dominated literary genres (history, mythology, autobiography, and fiction) whatever was inextricably female, female-centered.” In Zami and much of her other work, Lorde expressed the radical idea that black women could hold the center, be the center, and she was unwavering in this belief. At her most vulnerable, Lorde gave the world some of her most powerful writing with her work in The Cancer Journals, which chronicled her life with breast cancer and having a double mastectomy. “But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.” With these words, she assumed as much control as she could over a body succumbing to disease and a public narrative that, until then, allowed a singular narrative about what it meant to live with illness. She made herself visible and gave other women permission to make themselves visible in a world that would prefer that they disappear, stay silent.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I don’t want my involvement with health matters to obscure the revelation of differences I encountered. The Afro-European women. What I learned about the differences when one teaches about feeling and poetry in a language that is not the original language of the people learning, even when they speak that language fluently. (Of course, all poets learn about feeling as children in our native tongue, and the psychosocial strictures and emotional biases of that language pass over into how we think about feeling for the rest of our lives.) I will never forget the emotional impact of Raja’s poetry, and how what she is doing with the German language is so close to what Black poets here are doing with English. It was another example of how our Africanness impacts upon the world’s consciousness in intersecting ways. As an African-American woman, I feel the tragedy of being an oppressed hyphenated person in america, of having no land to be our primary teacher. And this distorts us in so many ways. Yet there is a vital part that we play as Black people in the liberation consciousness of every freedom-seeking people upon this globe, no matter what they say they think about us as Black americans. And whatever our differences are that make for difficulty in communication between us and other oppressed peoples, as Afro-Americans we must recognize the promise we represent for some new social synthesis that the world has not yet experienced. I think of the Afro-Dutch, Afro-German, Afro-French women I met this spring in europe, and how they are beginning to recognize each other and come together openly in terms of their identities, and I see that they are also beginning to cut a distinct shape across the cultural face of every country where they are at home. I am thinking about issues of color as color, Black as a chromatic fact, gradations and all. There is the reality of defining Black as a geographical fact of culture and heritage emanating from the continent of Africa—Black meaning Africans and other members of a diaspora, with or without color. Then there is a quite different reality of defining Black as a political position, acknowledging that color is the bottom line the world over, no matter how many other issues exist alongside it. Within this definition, Black becomes a codeword, a rallying identity for all oppressed people of Color. And this position reflects the empowerment and the worldwide militant legacy of our Black Revolution of the 1960s, the effects of which are sometimes more obvious in other countries than in our own. I see certain pitfalls in defining Black as a political position.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  So, then, we have two great reasons why Mark is a book of supreme importance. First, it is the earliest of all the gospels; if it was written just shortly after Peter died, its date will be about AD 65. Second, it embodies the record of what Peter preached and taught about Jesus. We may put it this way: Mark is the nearest approach we will ever possess to an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus. The Lost Ending There is a very interesting point about Mark's gospel. In its original form it stops at Mark 16:8. We know this for two reasons. First, the verses which follow (Mark 16:9-2o) are not in any of the great early manuscripts; only later and inferior manuscripts contain them. Second, the style of the Greek is so different that these verses and the rest of the gospel cannot have been written by the same person. But the gospel cannot have been meant to stop at Mark 16:8. What then happened? It may be that Mark died, perhaps even suffered martyrdom, before he could complete his gospel. More likely, it may be that at one time only one copy of the gospel remained, and that a copy in which the last part of the roll on which it was written had got torn off. There was a time when the Church did not much use Mark, preferring Matthew and Luke. It may well be that Mark's gospel was so neglected that all copies except for a mutilated one were lost. If that is so, we were within an ace of losing the gospel which in many ways is the most important of all. The Characteristics of Mark's Gospel Let us look at the characteristics of Mark's gospel so that we may watch for them as we read and study it. (i) It is the nearest thing we will ever get to a report of Jesus' life. Mark's aim was to give a picture of Jesus as he was. The scholar B. F. Westcott called it `a transcript from life'. A. B. Bruce of Glasgow's Free Church College said that it was written `from the viewpoint of loving, vivid recollection', and that its great characteristic was realism. If we are ever to get anything approaching a biography of Jesus, it must be based on Mark, for it is his delight to tell the facts of Jesus' life in the simplest and most dramatic way.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Ananus was a Jewish high priest; Festus and Albinus were procurators of Palestine, holding the same position as Pilate had held. The point of the story is that Ananus took advantage of the interregnum, the period between the death of one procurator and the arrival of his successor, to eliminate James and other leaders of the Christian Church. This, in fact, fits well with the character of Ananus as it is known to us, and would mean that James was martyred in AD 62. A much longer account is given in the history of Hegesippus. Hegesippus' history is itself lost, but his account of the death of James has been preserved in full by the Church historian Eusebius, who wrote early in the fourth century (Ecclesiastical History, 2:23). It is lengthy, but it is of such interest that it must be quoted in its entirety. To the government of the Church in conjunction with the apostles succeeded the Lord's brother, James, he whom all from the time of the Lord to our own day call the Just, as there were many named James. And he was holy from his mother's womb; wine and strong drink he drank not, nor did he eat flesh; no razor touched his head, he anointed himself not with oil, and used not the bath. To him alone was it permitted to enter the Holy Place, for neither did he wear wool, but linen clothes. And alone he would enter the Temple, and be found prostrate on his knees beseeching pardon for the people, so that his knees were callous like a camel's in consequence of his continual kneeling in prayer to God and beseeching pardon for the people. Because of his exceeding righteousness he was called the Just, and Oblias, which is in Greek Bulwark of the People, and Righteousness, as the prophets declare concerning him. Therefore, certain of the seven sects among the people, already mentioned by me in the Memoirs, asked him: `What is the door of Jesus?' and he said that He was the Saviour - of whom some accepted the faith that Jesus is the Christ. Now the aforesaid sects were not believers either in a Resurrection or in One who should come to render to every man according to his deeds; but as many as believed did so because of James. So, since many of the rulers, too, were believers, there was a tumult of the Jews and scribes and Pharisees, for they said there was danger that all the people would expect Jesus the Christ. Accordingly they said, when they had met together with James: `We entreat thee restrain the people since it has gone astray unto Jesus, holding him to be the Christ. We entreat thee to persuade concerning Jesus all those who come to the day of the Passover, for we all listen to thee.

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

  As I think back to our periodic visits through the years, I am frankly amazed at his turnaround. Here was a child who set out to become a carbon copy of his abusive father and who fell into every trap that violent, dysfunctional families can set for their children. And yet he is a survivor—a child of divorce who drew on his own inner resources in adulthood to break the mold established by his unhappy parents. The Scars of Violence U NLIKE MOST CHILDREN in the study who don’t remember events around the breakup, those adults who remembered these events in vivid detail had all witnessed violence in their homes when they were very young. The images of those episodes did not fade away decades after the divorce. We have only recently begun to understand the awful, lasting influence of seeing one parent hit or hurt by the other, the suffering that it causes to the child and how detrimental it is to mental health. 1 Many judges who deal with such families do not understand that merely witnessing violence is harmful to children; the images are forever etched into their brains. Even a single episode of violence is long remembered in detail. In fact, there is accumulating scientific evidence that witnessing violence or being abused physically or verbally literally alters brain development, resulting in a hyperactive emotional system. 2 But on the hopeful side, Larry’s experience shows that even the worst kinds of marriages and divorces do not condemn children to a life of everlasting misery. Dramatic turnarounds happen, especially in the latter part of the third decade of life, among youngsters who appear for many years to have been failing in their schooling and social adjustment. Larry’s struggles with the long-lasting effects of both the marriage and postdivorce family take us to the heart of the challenges that the child faces in growing up. Perhaps most strikingly, Larry’s experiences reveal that divorce is not the quick solution to a bad marriage that many people understand it to be. High-conflict marriages often lead to high-conflict families after divorce. Postbreakup, the children are not better protected and the bitter fighting continues. Ironically, despite the recent proliferation of legal and mental health experts, the divorce has the effect of leaving the child to find his own way in a treacherous labyrinth in which he can easily become lost and harmed. Of the 131 children in this study of children from educated middle-class homes, 32 heard or saw evidence of violence during the marriage or breakup. Although there are homes where women are violent or where both parents hit each other, in these families the women were victims. The typical pattern was for the woman to sue for divorce and for the father to protest, deny the violence, or admit to only one episode. It is also common for such men to sue for joint custody.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  The genealogy of Jesus with which the gospel begins is a good example of this. The genealogy is to prove that Jesus is the Son of David. In Hebrew there are no figures; when figures are necessary, the letters of the alphabet stand for the figures. In Hebrew there are no written vowels. The Hebrew letters for David are DWD; if these letters are taken as figures and not as letters, they add up to fourteen; and the genealogy consists of three groups of names, and in each group there are fourteen names. Matthew does everything possible to arrange the teaching of Jesus in such a way that people will be able to assimilate and to remember it. Every teacher owes a debt of gratitude to Matthew, for Matthew wrote what is above all the teacher's gospel. Matthew has one final characteristic. Matthew's dominating idea is that of Jesus as King. He writes to demonstrate the royalty of Jesus. Right at the beginning, the genealogy is to prove that Jesus is the Son of David (1:1-17). The title, Son of David, is used more often in Matthew than in any other gospel (15:22, 21:9, 21:15). The wise men come looking for him who is King of the Jews (2:2). The triumphal entry is a deliberately dramatized claim to be King (21:1-11). Before Pilate, Jesus deliberately accepts the name of King (27:11). Even on the cross, the title of King is affixed, even if it is in mockery, over his head (27:37). In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew shows us Jesus quoting the law and five times abrogating it with a regal: `But I say to you. - .' (5:22, 28, 34, 39, 44). The final claim of Jesus is: `All authority ... has been given to me' (28:18). Matthew's picture of Jesus is of the man born to be King. Jesus walks through his pages as if in the purple and gold of royalty. 2Mark The Essential GospelThe Synoptic Gospels The first three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, are always known as the synoptic gospels. The word synoptic comes from two Greek words which mean to see together; and these three are called the synoptic gospels because they can be set down in parallel columns and their common matter looked at together. It would be possible to argue that of them all Mark is the most important. It would indeed be possible to go further and to argue that it is the most important book in the world, because it is agreed by nearly everyone that it is the earliest of all the gospels and therefore the first life of Jesus that has come down to us. Mark may not have been the first person to write the life of Jesus. Doubtless there were earlier simple attempts to set down the story of Jesus' life; but Mark's gospel is certainly the earliest life of Jesus that has survived. The Pedigree of the Gospels

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In the thirty years since Lorde wrote that open letter, black women have continued to implore white women to recognize and engage with their intellectual contributions and the material realities of their lives. They have asked white women to acknowledge that, as Lorde also wrote in her open letter to Daly, “The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.” One of the hallmarks of Lorde’s prose and poetry is her willingness to recognize, acknowledge, and honor the lived realities of women—not only those who share her subject position but also those who do not. Her thinking always embodied what we now know as intersectionality and did so long before intersectionality became a defining feature of contemporary feminism in word if not in deed. Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity. She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.” But how do you best represent a significant, in all senses of the word, body of work? This is the question that has consumed me as I assembled this Audre Lorde reader. Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters, at least for me. I first encountered her writing in my early twenties, as a young black queer woman. She was the first writer I ever read who lived and loved the way I did and also looked like me. She was a beacon, a guiding light. And she was far more than that because her prose and poetry astonished me—intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I don’t expect to be believed; but nevertheless I am telling the bare truth when I say that in my impersonation of “Shylock” I brought in the very piece of “business” that made Henry Irving’s “Shylock” fifteen years later, “ever memorable”, according to the papers. When at the end, baffled and beaten, Shylock gives in: “I pray you, give me leave to go from hence, I am not well: send the deed after me, And I will sign it,” the Duke says, “Get thee gone, but do it,” and Gratiano insults the Jew—the only occasion, I think, when Shakespeare allows the beaten to be insulted by a gentleman. On my way to the door as Shylock, I stopped, bent low before the Duke’s dismissal; but at Gratiano’s insult, I turned slowly round, while drawing myself up to my full height and scanning him from head to foot. Irving used to return all across the stage and folding his arms on his breast look down on him with measureless contempt. When fifteen years later Irving, at the Garrick Club one night after supper, asked me what I thought of this new “business”; I replied that if Shylock had done what he did, Gratiano would probably have spat in his face and then kicked him off the stage. Shylock complains that the Christians spat upon his gaberdine. My boyish, romantic reading of the part, however, was essentially the same as Irving’s, and Irving’s reading was cheered in London to the echo because it was a rehabilitation of the Jew, and the Jew rules the roost today in all the cities of Europe. At my first words I could feel the younger members of the audience look about as if to see if such reciting as mine was proper and permitted; then one after the other gave in to the flow and flood of passion. When I had finished everyone cheered, Whalley and Lady W… enthusiastically, and to my delight, Lucille as well. After the rehearsal, everyone crowded about me: “Where did you learn?” “Who taught you?” At length Lucille came. “I knew you were someone”, she said in her pretty way, “quelqu’un”, “but it was extraordinary! You’ll be a great actor, I’m sure.” “And yet you deny me a kiss”, I whispered, taking care no one should hear. “I deny you nothing”, she replied, turning away, leaving me transfixed with hope and assurance of delight. “Nothing”, I said to myself, “nothing means everything”; a thousand times I said it over to myself in an ecstasy. That was my first happy night in England. Mr. Whalley congratulated me and introduced me to his daughter who praised me enthusiastically, and best of all the Doctor said, “We must make you Stage Manager, Harris, and I hope you’ll put some of your fire into the other actors.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Meanwhile I spent nearly every morning with Smith: golden hours! Always, always before we parted, he showed me some new beauty or revealed some new truth: he seemed to me the most wonderful creature in this strange, sunlit world. I used to hang entranced on his eloquent lips! (Strange! I was sixty-five before I found such a hero-worshipper as I was to Smith, who was then only four or five and twenty!) He made me know all the Greek dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and put them for me in a truer light than English or German scholars have set them yet. He knew that Sophocles was the greatest and from his lips I learned every chorus in the Oedipus Rex and Colonos before I had completely mastered the Greek grammar; indeed, it was the supreme beauty of the literature that forced me to learn the language. In teaching me the choruses, he was careful to point out that it was possible to keep the measure and yet mark the accent too: in fact, he made classic Greek a living language to me, as living as English. And he would not let me neglect Latin: in the first year with him I knew poems of Catullus by heart, almost as well as I knew Swinburne. Thanks to Professor Smith I had no difficulty in entering the Junior Class at the University; in fact, after my first three or four months’ work I was easily the first in the class, which included Ned Stevens, the brother of Smith’s inamorata. I soon discovered that Smith was heels over head in love with Kate Stevens, shot through the heart as Mercutio would say, with a fair girl’s blue eye! And small wonder, for Kate was lovely; a little above middle height with slight, rounded figure and most attractive face: the oval, a thought long, rather than round, with dainty, perfect features, lit up by a pair of superlative grey-blue eyes, eyes by turns delightful and reflective and appealing that mirrored a really extraordinary intelligence. She was in the Senior Class and afterwards for years held the position of Professor of Greek in the University. I shall have something to say of her in a later volume of this history, for I met her again in New York nearly fifty years later. But in 1872 or ’73, her brother Ned, a handsome lad of eighteen who was in my class, interested me more. The only other member of the Senior Class of that time was a fine fellow, Ned Bancroft, who later came to France with me to study.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  He was the younger son of Zebedee, who possessed a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee and was sufficiently well off to be able to employ hired servants to help him with his work (Mark His mother was Salome, and it seems likely that she was the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus (Matthew 27:56; Mark 16:1). With his brother James, he obeyed the call of Jesus (Mark 1:20). It would seem that James and John were in partnership with Peter in the fishing trade (Luke 5:7-10). He was one of the inner circle of the disciples, for the lists of the disciples always begin with the names of Peter, James and John, and there were certain great occasions when Jesus took these three specially with him (Mark 3:17, 5:37, 9:2, 14:33). In character he was clearly a turbulent and ambitious man. Jesus gave to him and to his brother the name Boanerges, which the gospel writers take to mean Sons of Thunder. John and his brother James were completely exclusive and intolerant (Mark 9:38; Luke 9:49). So violent was their temper that they were prepared to blast a Samaritan village out of existence because it would not give them hospitality when they were on their journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:54). Either they or their mother Salome had the ambition that when Jesus came into his kingdom, they might be his principal ministers of state (Mark 10:35; Matthew 20:20). In the other three gospels, John appears as a leader of the apostolic band, one of the inner circle, and yet a turbulent, ambitious and intolerant character. In the Book of Acts, John always appears as the companion of Peter, and he himself never speaks at all. His name is still one of the three names at the head of the apostolic list (Acts 1:13). He is with Peter when the lame man is healed at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple (Acts 3:'ff.). With Peter, he is brought before the Sanhedrin and faces the Jewish leaders with a courage and a boldness that astonishes them (Acts 4:1-13). With Peter, he goes from Jerusalem to Samaria to survey the work done by Philip (Acts 8:14). In Paul's letters, he appears only once. In Galatians 2:9, he is named as one of the pillars of the Church along with Peter and James, and with them is depicted as giving his approval to the work of Paul. John was a strange mixture. He was one of the leaders of the Twelve; he was one of the inner circle of Jesus' closest friends; at the same time he was a man of temper and ambition and intolerance, and yet of courage.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  If, however, we are defending the Petrine authorship of this letter, there is one problem we must face - and that is the excellence of the Greek. It seems impossible that it could be the work of a Galilaean fisherman. New Testament scholars are at one in praising the Greek of this letter. F. W. Beare writes: `The epistle is quite obviously the work of a man of letters, skilled in all the devices of rhetoric, and able to draw on an extensive, and even learned, vocabulary. He is a stylist of no ordinary capacity, and he writes some of the best Greek in the whole New Testament, far smoother and more literary than that of the highly-trained Paul.' James Moffatt speaks of this letter's `plastic language and love of metaphor'. J. B. Mayor says that i Peter has no equal in the New Testament for `sustained stateliness of rhythm'. Charles Bigg has likened certain of i Peter's phrases to the writing of the Greek historian Thucydides. In his commentary, E. G. Selwyn has spoken of i Peter's `Euripidean tenderness' and of its ability to coin compound words as the poet and dramatist Aeschylus might have done. The Greek of i Peter is not entirely unworthy to be set beside that of the masters of the language. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine Peter using the Greek language like that. The letter itself supplies the solution to this problem. In the concluding short section, Peter himself says: `Through Silvanus ... I have written this short letter' (i Peter 5:12). Through Silvanus - dia Silouanou - is an unusual phrase. The Greek means that Silvanus was Peter's agent in the writing of the letter; it means that he was more than merely Peter's secretary, taking down word for word what Peter said. Let us approach this from two angles. First, let us inquire what we know about Silvanus. (The evidence is set out more fully in our study section on i Peter 5:12.) In all probability, he is the same person as the Silvanus of Paul's letters and the Silas of Acts, Silas being a shortened and more familiar form of Silvanus. When we examine these passages, we find that Silas or Silvanus was no ordinary person but a leading figure in the life and counsels of the early Church. He was a prophet (Acts 15:32); he was one of the `leaders among the brothers' at the Council of Jerusalem and one of the two chosen to deliver the decisions of the Council to the church at Antioch (Acts 15:22, 15:27). He was Paul's chosen companion in the second missionary journey, and was with Paul both in Philippi and in Corinth (Acts 15:37-40, 16:19, 16:25, 16:29, 18:5; 2 Corinthians 1:19). He was associated with Paul in the initial greetings of i and 2 Thessalonians (i Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1). He was a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37).

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.” But how do you best represent a significant, in all senses of the word, body of work? This is the question that has consumed me as I assembled this Audre Lorde reader. Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters, at least for me. I first encountered her writing in my early twenties, as a young black queer woman. She was the first writer I ever read who lived and loved the way I did and also looked like me. She was a beacon, a guiding light. And she was far more than that because her prose and poetry astonished me—intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible. When I read her books, I underlined and annotated avidly. I whispered her intimately crafted turns of phrase, enjoying the sound and feel of them in my mouth, on my tongue. Lorde was the first writer who actively demonstrated for me that a writer could be intensely concerned with the inner and outer lives of black queer women, that our experiences could be the center instead of relegated to the periphery. She wrote beyond the white gaze and imagined a black reality that did not subvert itself to the cultural norms dictated by whiteness. She valorized the body as much as she valorized the mind. She valorized nurturing as much as she valorized holding people accountable for their actions, calling out people and practices that decentered the black queer woman’s experience and knowledge. Most importantly, she prioritized the collective because, “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” As a reader, it is gratifying to see the legacy Lorde has created and to see the genealogy of her work in the writing of the women who have followed in her footsteps. Without Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger,” we might never have known Claudia Rankine’s manifesto of poetic prose, Citizen. In one of her most fiery essays, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde asks, “What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy,” and quickly answers her own question. “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  There is no mention of the passion, the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus Christ; no mention of the Church as the true Israel; no mention of that faith which is a combination of undefeatable hope and trust; no mention of the Holy Spirit, of prayer, of baptism; and no passionate desire to call men and women to the supreme example of Jesus Christ. If one took away these great truths from i Peter, there would be little or nothing left - and yet none of them occurs in 2 Peter. (3) It is wholly different in character and style from i Peter. This was realized in the fourth century by the biblical scholar Jerome, who wrote: `Simon Peter wrote two Epistles which are called Catholic, of which the authenticity of the second is denied by many because of the difference of the style from the first.' The Greek style of this letter is very difficult. F. B. Clogg calls it ambitious, artificial and often obscure, and remarks that it is the only book in the New Testament which is improved by translation. F. H. Chase, Bishop of Ely in the early part of the twentieth century, writes: `The Epistle does produce the impression of being a somewhat artificial piece of rhetoric. It shows throughout signs of selfconscious effort. The author appears to be ambitious of writing in a style which is beyond his literary power.' He concludes that it is hard to reconcile the literary character of this letter with the supposition that Peter wrote it. James Moffatt says: `2 Peter is more periodic and ambitious than i Peter, but its linguistic and its stylistic efforts only reveal by their cumbrous obscurity a decided inferiority of conception, which marks it off from i Peter.' It might be claimed, as Jerome did indeed claim, that, while Peter used Silvanus for i Peter, he used someone else to assist in writing down 2 Peter and that this explains the change in style. But, in his commentary on 2 Peter, J. B. Mayor compares the two letters. He quotes some of the great passages of i Peter and then says: `I think that none who read these words can help feeling that, not even in Paul, not even in John, is there to be found a more beautiful or a more living description of the secret of primitive Christianity, of the force that overcame the world, than in the perfect quaternion of faith and hope and love and joy, which pervades this short epistle [i.e. i Peter].

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  When I read her books, I underlined and annotated avidly. I whispered her intimately crafted turns of phrase, enjoying the sound and feel of them in my mouth, on my tongue. Lorde was the first writer who actively demonstrated for me that a writer could be intensely concerned with the inner and outer lives of black queer women, that our experiences could be the center instead of relegated to the periphery. She wrote beyond the white gaze and imagined a black reality that did not subvert itself to the cultural norms dictated by whiteness. She valorized the body as much as she valorized the mind. She valorized nurturing as much as she valorized holding people accountable for their actions, calling out people and practices that decentered the black queer woman’s experience and knowledge. Most importantly, she prioritized the collective because, “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” As a reader, it is gratifying to see the legacy Lorde has created and to see the genealogy of her work in the writing of the women who have followed in her footsteps. Without Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger,” we might never have known Claudia Rankine’s manifesto of poetic prose, Citizen. In one of her most fiery essays, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde asks, “What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy,” and quickly answers her own question. “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Lorde gave these remarks in 1979 after being invited to an academic conference where there was only one panel with a black feminist or lesbian perspective and only two black women presenters. Forty years later, such meager representation is still an issue in many supposedly feminist and inclusive spaces. The essay is pointed, identifying pernicious issues marginalized people face in certain oppressive spaces—having to be the sole representative of their subject position, having to use their intellectual and emotional labor to address oppression instead of any of their other intellectual interests as if the marginalized are only equipped to talk about their marginalization. This is a reality we often lose sight of when we surrender to assimilationist ideas about social change. There is, for example, a strain of feminism that believes if only women act like men, we will achieve the equality we seek. Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  from CHOSEN POEMS: OLD AND NEW (1982) The Evening News Afterimages A Poem For Women In Rage from OUR DEAD BEHIND US (1986) To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman Outlines Equal Opportunity Diaspora A Question of Climate Florida Political Relations There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women from THE MARVELOUS ARITHMETICS OF DISTANCE (1993) Making Love to Concrete Thaw Inheritance—His jessehelms The Politics of Addiction Today Is Not the Day Notes Prose Index Poetry Index Introduction Roxane Gay There is this thing that happens, all too often, when a black woman is being introduced in a professional setting. Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons why she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a micro-aggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” In 1979, for example, Audre Lorde wrote a letter to Mary Daly, and when Daly did not respond to her missive Lorde made her entreaty an open letter. Lorde was primarily concerned with the erasure of black women in Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, a manifesto urging women toward a more radical feminism. In her open letter, Lorde wrote, “So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.” The letter is both gracious and incisive. What Lorde is really demanding of Daly and white feminists more broadly is for them to seriously engage with and acknowledge black women’s intellectual labor.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Thembi, called Alice, flames under her taut sweetness, walking a dangerously narrow path too close to the swamp where there are bright lights flashing like stars just below the murky surface in harmony with the voices of astonished frogs in the green night. She begs me to release her from the pain of not doing enough for our own, of not making our daughters into ourselves. She tells me to dream upon all of their stories and write them a poem. Petal, whose eyes are often too quiet as she moves about, short, solid, and graceful. We discuss love, comparing tales, and her eyes flash, amused and aglow. Other times they are wary, filled with distrust and grieving. Petal, who bore seven children and only two live. Who was tortured for weeks by the South African police. Who was helped by the International Hospital for Torture Victims in Switzerland. Sula, wry and generous, knows how to get any question answered with a gentle inescapable persistence. Sometimes she drinks a lot. Her first husband broke her heart, but she quickly married again. “The missionaries lied to us so much about our bodies,” she said, indignantly, “telling us they were dirty and we had to cover them up, and look now who is running about in bikinis on the Riviera, or naked and topless! I had a friend . . .” and she starts another story, like one most of these women tell, of a special woman friend who loved her past explaining. Sweet-faced Emily tells of the militant young comrades in Soweto, their defiance of the old ways, carrying their determination for change into the streets. She demonstrates for us a spirited and high-stepping rendition of their rousing machine-gun dance. She does not like to listen to the other women singing hymns. Emily, who loved her best friend so much she still cannot listen to the records they once enjoyed together, and it is five years already since her friend died. Linda of the hypnotic eyes who was questioned once by the South African police every single day for an entire month. About Zamani Soweto Sisters and subversive activities, such as a tiny ANC flag stitched on the little dead boy’s pocket in the corner of a funeral procession quilt. “The quilts tell stories from our own lives. We did not know it was forbidden to sew the truth, but we will caution the women never to stitch such a thing again. No, thank you, I do not wish to take a cup of tea with you.” I can hear her grave dignity speaking. She finishes the tale with a satisfied laugh. Linda has a nineteen-year-old daughter. The women joke and offer us their daughters to introduce to our sons and nephews in america. No one offers us their sons for our daughters.