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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  19. For these reasons most learned men, in former ages especially, of the highest repute in theology and philosophy, after mastering with infinite pains the immortal works of Thomas, gave themselves up not so much to be instructed in his angelic wisdom as to be nourished upon it. It is known that nearly all the founders and lawgivers of the religious orders commanded their members to study and religiously adhere to the teachings of St. Thomas, fearful least any of them should swerve even in the slightest degree from the footsteps of so great a man. To say nothing of the family of St. Dominic, which rightly claims this great teacher for its own glory, the statutes of the Benedictines, the Carmelites, the Augustinians, the Society of Jesus, and many others all testify that they are bound by this law. 20. And, here, how pleasantly one’s thoughts fly back to those celebrated schools and universities which flourished of old in Europe—to Paris, Salamanca, Alcalá, to Douay, Toulouse, and Louvain, to Padua and Bologna, to Naples and Coimbra, and to many another! All know how the fame of these seats of learning grew with their years, and that their judgment, often asked in matters of grave moment, held great weight everywhere. And we know how in those great homes of human wisdom, as in his own kingdom, Thomas reigned supreme; and that the minds of all, of teachers as well as of taught, rested in wonderful harmony under the shield and authority of the Angelic Doctor.

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

  Objection 3: Further, as stated above [3761](A[1]), perfection is measured according to charity. Now the most perfect charity would seem to be in the martyrs, according to Jn. 15:13, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends”: and a gloss on Heb. 12:4, “For you have not yet resisted unto blood,” says: “In this life no love is more perfect than that to which the holy martyrs attained, who strove against sin even unto blood.” Therefore it would seem that the state of perfection should be ascribed to the martyrs rather than to religious and bishops. On the contrary, Dionysius (Eccl. Hier. v) ascribes perfection to bishops as being perfecters, and (Eccl. Hier. vi) to religious (whom he calls monks or {therapeutai}, i.e. servants of God) as being perfected. I answer that, As stated above [3762](A[4]), there is required for the state of perfection a perpetual obligation to things pertaining to perfection, together with a certain solemnity. Now both these conditions are competent to religious and bishops. For religious bind themselves by vow to refrain from worldly affairs, which they might lawfully use, in order more freely to give themselves to God, wherein consists the perfection of the present life. Hence Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. vi), speaking of religious: “Some call them {therapeutai},” i.e. servants, “on account of their rendering pure service and homage to God; others call them {monachoi}” [*i.e. solitaries; whence the English word ‘monk’], “on account of the indivisible and single-minded life which by their being wrapped in,” i.e. contemplating, “indivisible things, unites them in a Godlike union and a perfection beloved of God” [*Cf. Q[180], A[6]]. Moreover, the obligation in both cases is undertaken with a certain solemnity of profession and consecration; wherefore Dionysius adds (Eccl. Hier. vi): “Hence the holy legislation in bestowing perfect grace on them accords them a hallowing invocation.”

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

  They are similar except for the fact that those who don’t want children were more distant from their parents, either angrier or less involved. One important, though usually unconscious, motive for having a child is a sort of payback, to express appreciation for having been brought into the world and to provide your own parents with a child who is a symbolic lien on immortality. It’s natural for new mothers to present their newborns to their moms and dads with a great sense of pride and interconnectedness. I was interested that so few children of divorce seemed interested in their own parents’ desire to become grandparents. It was a theme that came up frequently among those raised in intact families. It may be natural for children who are still angry about divorce to refuse this gift as a way of keeping their distance from their parents. If this is true, it is an exceptionally sad legacy of our divorce culture. The Caregiver Grown Up A S K AREN DESCRIBED her life and all that changed, I remembered a question I’d asked myself four years earlier: what happens to caregiver children in the long run? Mental health professionals generally assume that this role can only be detrimental to the child’s development because she loses out on both schooling and play and sacrifices her own interests to the needs of the family. The answer is more complicated than that. Yes, she loses important pleasures and activities of childhood and adolescence. But she also gains a great deal that serves her well in the long run. After talking to many of these children and watching them grow to mature adulthood, it may be time to revise our view of what this experience does to children. Many caretaker children become admirable adults. Karen is a sensitive, moral person whose altruism and capacity for loyal devotion are rooted in her childhood role. Her early experiences left her with a responsiveness to other people and a high moral sense that helped her to achieve loving relationships as an adult. Talking with Karen was easy and rewarding because she caught my meaning and interest so fast. Her career is undoubtedly grounded in the empathy and compassion of her childhood. Karen understands the give and take of true love and friendship. She has freed herself from being a martyr. Her relationships are no longer a one-way street and she expects full return on her loving investments in others. Despite her painful experiences, Karen loves her parents and siblings wholeheartedly, and grows to adulthood understanding that love entails loyalty and sacrifice when necessary. She never became cynical or bitter. She did not turn on her parents, accusing them of having robbed her of her childhood and adolescence (even though she sometimes felt so).

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

  I left Larry in his early twenties full of admiration for the progress he had achieved in rejecting the alcohol and violence that were the ideals of his adolescent years. But I had more questions than answers about what lay ahead for him. After years of rage in childhood and adolescence, can a young man fully turn his life around? Can he set new goals and sustain his progress by his own efforts? Can he decide to be his own father and carry it off? Larry had been propelled far by his disappointment and anger at his father. His decision to adopt his father as a negative image had energized his grueling work and school program and kept him going. But how would that affect his future relationships with women and in making the important life choices that lay ahead? Considering the view of man-woman relationships that he had experienced in his family, would he be able to become the good husband and father that he aspired to be? Although the lives of all these young people were full of unexpected turns, Larry’s history so far was baffling. I also had many concerns about his younger sister, who had been so demeaned by her father. How had she negotiated the transition to young womanhood? Had her mother been able to rally enough to really help her? I looked forward eagerly to seeing her as well, but I was worried about the long-lasting impact of her father’s efforts to humiliate her. TENFamily TiesWhen it came time to locate Larry for the twenty-five-year interview, I had no trouble finding him since he was listed as a licensed structural engineer in several public directories. I was very curious to know, now that another decade had gone by, if his transformation had stayed on course. Had he continued to turn his life around without help? Did he completely break the identification with his violent father? Or, as is so often the case, did he go on to repeat his father’s bad behavior despite his conscious wish to be different? What kind of relationship did he have with his mother? And most intriguing, what kind of relationship would he create with a woman, given the wretched model his parents had provided?

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

  I’m happy to say that within this study there is a group of fathers who made the grade. They were loved, admired, and appreciated by their adult children. These men gave priority to the relationship with their children from the first marriage and expected their wives to join them. Sometimes this commitment generated a lot of tension in the remarriage but the men insisted. These fathers had invested a great deal of love and effort into parenting before divorce and had no intention of changing their ways after divorce. They helped all their children and stepchildren financially through college and made sacrifices to do so when necessary. When they could, they helped their adult children find first jobs. One father of modest means sent a check to his son for the down payment on a house; the young man was flabbergasted. He had not asked for help and was everlastingly grateful for the thoughtfulness and generosity that prompted it. On the other end of the spectrum, we saw fathers who abandoned their children outright. One man adopted his stepsons and stopped seeing his own children (who were the same age as his stepsons) even though they had been close during the first marriage. Others saw their children once a year and felt it was adequate. Some violent husbands continued to be violent in their second marriages and did not see their behavior as being detrimental to their children. The sons and daughters of such men struggled for years to break away from the powerful model of such immoral behavior. As adults, most angrily rejected their fathers and have little compassion for them when they’re in trouble. When Larry learned that his father had prostate cancer, he felt bad but said, “I feel sorry for him but he was never there for me. I can’t be of help to him, either.” Most fathers in this study fall in between. They intend to maintain frequent contact with their children but gradually visit less as the difficulties of maintaining a relationship loom larger and as they are caught up in second marriages with new children and stepchildren as well as new jobs, new communities, and new concerns. These men are regarded by their children as selfish and insensitive to the consequences of their failures as fathers. “My dad loves life but he has no heart for others,” said one young man. “He never wrote, he never called. He didn’t understand that getting a message from him would change my life.” Most young adults do not blame their stepmothers or stepsiblings for these shortcomings; they blame their father. They often speak of their fathers with affection, even with compassion, but they make no attempt to hide their disappointment or anger. They say, “I love him but I don’t respect him.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This love is, also, quite remarkably self effacing. He informs the girl's parents that, even though their daughter may be prepared to marry him without their con sent, he will not marry her without it. The girl loves her par ents too much, he explains, to be able to endure such a rupture; nor can he himself , for reasons of his own, bear to be the author of such pain. Since history affords so few examples of this species of re straint on the part of the prospective bridegroom, perhaps we should take a closer look at him: and try to find out what he is actually saying. I scarcely have the heart to indicate the echoes to be found, here, of In Abraha m)s Bosom (yes: the supplicant of Paul Green's In Abraham )s Bosom) nor do more than indicate the existence of Eugene O'Neill's All God)s Chil lttn Got Wings, or the terror underlying The Hairy Ape: not now can I tell you: the road was rocky. The setting of Guess Who)s Coming to Dinner is the key. We are on the heights of San Francisco-at a time not too far removed from the mo ment when the city of San Francisco reclaimed the land at Hunter's Point and urban-renewalized the niggers out of it. The difficult and terrified city, where the niggcrs arc, lives far beneath these heights. The father is in a perfectly respectable, perhaps even admirable profession, and the mother runs an art gallery. The setting is a brilliant re-creation of a certain and far from unattractive-level of American lif e. And the black doctor is saying, among other things, that his presence in this landscape (this hard-won Eden) will do nothing to threaten, or defile it-i ndeed, since in the e\'ent that he mar ries the girl, they are immediately going to the Far East, or some such place, he will not even be present. One can scarcely imagine striking a bargain more painless; and without eYen losing a daughter, who will, merely, in effect, be traveling, and broadening her education; keeping in touch ,·ia trans Pacific telephone, and coming home to San Francisco from time to time, with her yet more various, toddling, and exotic acquisitions.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When he had completed his instant X-ray of my brain, lu ngs, liver, heart, bowels, and spinal column (while I had said, usefully, "E mile sent me" ) he smiled and said, "Come in," and opened the door. He opened the door all right. Lord, I was to hear Bcaut(>rd sing, later, and for many years, open the mmsual door. My running buddy had sent me to the right one, and not a moment too soon. I walked through that door into Bcautord's col ors-on the easel, on the palette, against the wall-so metimes turned to the wall-and sometimes (in limbo?) covered by white sheets. It was a small studio (but it didn't seem small ) with a black pot-bellied stove somewhere ncar the two windows. I rcmcm- 830 THE PRICE OF THE TIC KET ber two windows, there may have been only one: there JVas a fire escape which Beauf ord, simply by his presence, had trans formed, transmuted into the most exclusive terrace in Man hattan or Bombay. I walked into music. I had grown up with music, but, now, on Beauford's small black record player, I began to hear what I had never dared or been able to hear. Beauf ord never gave me any lectures. But, in his studio and because of his presence, I really began to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Louis Arm strong, Bessie Smith, Ethel \Vaters, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Fats Waller. He could inform me about Duke Elling ton and W. C. Handy, and Jo sh White, introduce me to Frankie Newton and tell tall tales about Ethel Waters. And these people were not meant to be looked on by me as celebrities, but as a part of Beauford's lif e and as part of my inheritance. I may have been with Beauf ord, for example, the first time I saw Paul Robeson, in concert, and in Othello: but I know that he bought tickets tor us-re ally, for me-to see and hear Miss Marian Anderson, at Carnegie Hall. Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The Amer ican Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Me morial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her. By this time, I was working for the Army--or the Yankee dollar!-in New Jersey.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  This was exactly what I did, and I felt privileged to know that Dawlish did too. At the same time I was fractionally put out to think that the nature-mysticism I had evolved around the common's numinous gullies and heights was not my private cult, and had other, older adepts. "I feel as if I'm in direct contact with the Muse up there," I said. And when I sat in my special tree and waited for the folding star I did, I did . . . "Direct contact, absolute 'hot-line', I quite agree." I didn't think I could better that. "Have you been writing a great deal, Sir Perry?" I was making it sound as if a new book from him was what I wanted most—we all did. "Well, d'you know, I have? I've got a new selection out next week; and I have enough poems already for two more books after that." "That's wonderful," I said, imagining retailing these potent, probably confidential, pieces of knowledge to Graves and one or two others. "Well"; he shrugged and burbled something about tempus something, which I took with a sympathetic smile. "Things start coming back to you at my age. I've been writing a lot about dead friends—and about my brother Tristram, he would have been a great poet, of course." He gazed at the floor. should I ask about Tristram? "We all jolly well had to be writers, and thank the Lord we all started young. I don't know if you know, but well, Tennyson . . . " And off he went into an account of the Dawlishes, the bishops, the generals, the poets, Swinburne, Henry James, Robert Bridges (his godfather), young T. S. Eliot, that certainly put the Manners Family of Kent in its place, and held me enthralled in the musty gloom. Even so, after twenty minutes, I felt my concentration ebbing, my features locked in a kind of sneer of astonishment, my poems in their plastic folder still clutched in my lap, like the programme to a different concert. I felt painfully ignorant of Swinburne and Henry James; we didn't do T. S. Eliot till next year. I was flattered but also somehow hurt that he had misjudged me and poured this well-rehearsed torrent of stuff over me. Later we went into the kitchen together, as if not quite sure what we'd find there, and managed to make a pot of tea. Again it seemed an honour to be doing these homely things with a great man, and so soon after meeting him: it would have been less impressive if he had had the servants I'd expected. There was no suggestion of cake.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I liked a sexy sense of latent power she had, a cleverness in those large eyes, so colourless they seemed faintly fiendish and barely changed between photo and painting, pupils of grey ice. I knew nothing about her, but I felt she could make her own way, she wasn't just the silent screen of the artist's fantasy—or at least, wasn't meant to be, wouldn't have been if she'd lived. I laid the pictures carefully back in the box-file and looked up at Paul, who swept it away like an attentive waiter. "That was very . . . " I said, able after a few seconds to produce only a rather special smile, which he seemed to find adjective enough. "I knew you'd be fascinated," he said quietly. "I think we should have a few of them in the catalogue, don't you?" "But obviously." It had become our catalogue only in the past week or so, and he appeared to welcome the uninformed certainty with which I saw some matters he had fretted over for years. "Besides they are themselves art-works by Orst," I pronounced. "We—you might even put them all in." "It's not usual," he said crisply, crossing to the print-cabinet, and stooping to tug out one of the wide shallow drawers. "But see what you think later"—in a teasing tone; was I drunk? He came back with a big square folder, and handed it to me carefully. "A la nuit tombante" was written on it in an old-fashioned hand—not Paul's pretty writing, some earlier guardian, perhaps the high-minded Delphine . . . "I just want you to see this," he said. I opened it with a little mime of curiosity, as if it were a present. An expanse of creamy-white, a sheet that was more like a wall, with a small square aperture at the centre—through which you looked at a dark sea and a sky that rose from a rim of light into deepening greys. The image was only four or five inches high, but intensified by a heavy black frame that gave one the impression of looking out from a high-up window in a thick-walled castle—for some reason I thought of Elsinore. At the same time I knew it was the lithograph to which Orst had returned in the simple late panel of the triptych, though there he had dispensed with the heavy masonry of the surround.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was enormously grateful to her, she seemed to speak for me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by abso- 757 758 OTH ER ESS AYS lutely impersonal ambition: she was not trying to "ma ke it" she was trying to keep the faith. We really met, however, in Philadelphia, in 1959 , when A Raisin In The Sttn was at the beginning of its amazing career. Much has been written about this play; I personally feel that it will demand a far less guilty and constricted people than the present-day Americans to be able to assess it at all; as an his torical achievement, anyway, no one can gainsay its impor tance. What is relevant here is that I had never in my lif e seen so many black people in the theatre. And the reason was that never in the history of the American theatre had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theatre because the thea tre had always ig nored them. But, in Raisin, black people recognized that house and all the people in it-the mother, the son, the daughter and the daughter-in- law-and supplied the play with an interpretative element which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created not only by their knowledge of the house but by their knowledge of the streets. And when the curtain came down, Lorraine and I found ourselves in the backstage alley, where she was imme diately mobbed. I produced a pen and Lorraine handed me her handbag and began signing autographs. "It only happens once," she said. I stood there and watched. I watched the people, who loved Lorraine for what she had brought to them; and watched Lorraine, who loved the people for what they brought to her. It was not, fi>r her, a matter of being admired. She was being corroborated and confirmed. She was wise enough and honest enough to recognize that black American artists arc in a very special case. One is not merely an artist and one is not judged merely as an artist: the black people crowding around Lorraine, whether or not they con sidered her an artist, assuredly considered her a witness. This country's concept of art and artists has the eff ect, scarcely worth mentioning by now, of isolating the artist from the people. One can sec the eff ect of this in the irrelevance of so much of the work produced by celebrated white artists; but the cflcct of this isolation on a black artist is absolutely fatal. He is, already, as a black American citizen, isolated from most SWEET LORR AINE 759 of his white countrymen.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The book differs fr om its fellows in that, if the struggle is recounted without distinction or power, it is also relatively fr ee of the condescension and the infantile bitterness which forms the pulpy core of the other novels here. Mr. Brand is not really at ease when writing about the national problem, but one almost admires his occasional honest stiff ness when one considers what nightmares of tolerance he might have evoked instead. On the basis of the work being considered, he is the only man here entitled to be called a novelist at all; and this is not because his novel indicates any very impressive talent or because of any startling insights, but merely because there is at work in Mr. Brand a more sensitive intelligence and a modest honesty and the ability to write a sentence. His story, as a matter of fact, is concerned not so much with Negroes as with the relationship between an ille gitimate adolescent and his strong-willed father; on this level it is more controlled but no more illuminating than most sim ilar studies produced in our time; and on this level it is not worth much discussion. The incident of the Manhurst family, which adds a kind of violent strength, also tears what there is of the novel to pieces, since it never quite fits in and it diverts rather than broadens our sympathy. To be sure, this is not so much Mr. Brand's defection as it is the inherited response of OTHER ESSAYS our generation, which is inclined to see in every Negro a fu rious call to arms. Here, nevertheless, Mr. Brand's novel has a valuable ele ment, one which might one day be explored with some profit: his protagonist, the young Albert, battles on the side of the Negroes with no very clear aim and only because he is guilt ridden and anchorless, rejected fr om that white society in which he was born and with which he struggles to get into step. But his acceptance of the Manhursts is a desperate, tran sient act; it is neither noble nor liberal, it is not "American." His friendship with the Negro family may continue or it may not; in any case, both the battle and the identification have been personal. The Manhursts do not represent a problem to him, their blackness or whiteness is not his concern. They are human beings to whom he has responded, who have afforded him a shelter for a time. (Throughout the book the Manhursts never attain the status of a "problem"; they are a nui sance-niggers who are bringing property values down-and they arc opposed in the usual ugly, shocking ways.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  THEY CAN ' T TURN BACK These students were born at the very moment at which Eu rope's domination of Africa was ending. I remember, for example, the invasion of Ethiopia and Haile Selassie's vain appeal to the League of Nations, but they remember the Ban dung Conf erence and the establ ishment of the Republic of Ghana. 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 hun dred thousand moved North in one year. Some of the 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 freedom 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. In sofar 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 auth ority 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 Before Martin Luther J(in g I FIRST met Martin Luther King, Jr. nearly three years ago now, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was there on a visit from 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 friend 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 friend, 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.

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

  This last remark rang familiar. Karen had said the same. These young people do not want their children to have a childhood like their own. They want something better and are willing to fight for it. I was also very interested that none of the adults who had felt rejected or misused by their fathers as children rejected their importance or denied their longstanding wish to have had a loving, concerned father. How Fathers RateAFTER DECADES OF minutely recording mother-child interactions as if they existed in a “daddy-less” world, researchers have finally discovered fathers and how important they are to a child’s development. Today’s answers to the question “What good are fathers?” would fill a small library. Children with sensitive, involved fathers surge ahead in their cognitive and social development as they explore their environment and play with other children. One important study that followed children for twenty-five years showed that those who were closely involved with their fathers at age five were more empathic as adults and were happier as husbands and as parents than those who had not experienced close relationships with their own fathers a quarter of a century earlier.1 And just to dispel the strange notion that fathers are more important to their sons than to their daughters, a study of young women who excelled in their academic studies at Stanford and Berkeley revealed that they attributed their high ambition to their father’s long-standing encouragement.2 In my own work on good marriages, I found that women who maintain a passionate relationship with their husbands throughout many years of the marriage had a healthy, loving relationship with their fathers as children.3 But in divorced families, father-child relationships run a different course. Because the child lives only part-time or even half-time with her father or sees him according to a set schedule, their interaction is not a given. Coming and going as they do, father and child don’t take one another for granted (this is true for visiting or joint custody arrangements). Instead, their relationship must be created from the more limited interactions they enjoy or, if things are not going well, do not enjoy. The potential for disappointment and hurt, or for misunderstanding on both sides, is omnipresent. The opportunities for making up after a quarrel, for doing better, are more limited. It’s as if the myriad daily interactions of the father-child relationship have to flow through the narrow end of a funnel. Relationships feel constrained by the clock because they are being interrupted constantly.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. He'd been dead so long now that he moved in my mind like a figure from another age, a life in evening dress. Even at the time, when we heard him on the wireless, singing in the Daily Service or in a request for Three-Way Family Favourites, I remember the feeling that his voice was being brought to us from the beyond, from a cavernous other world screened by the tarred muslin of the speakers. We had been early possessors of a stereogram, a monstrous and luxurious teak coffer with discreet lights and grilles and a lid it was impossible to drop: some cushioning mechanism arrested its fall and brought it noiselessly to rest.

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

  “You mean you didn’t date at all?” “Sort of. I wasn’t too interested in wasting my time. Young, ditzy women with no goals or focus never attracted me. I remember that what impressed me about Grace was her serious manner when I first met her.” “What was she like?” Larry’s eyes grew bright as he described meeting the woman who would be his wife. “I met her at Kinks where we both worked through the night. She was a psychology major at San Francisco State and was putting herself through college, just like me. After I got to know her a little, I found out she worked two jobs and went to school. She’d had an early marriage that had been a disaster. After that she hadn’t dated much. In fact, she was kind of shy with men.” “How did you get to know each other?” “One night I gave her a ride home and we began to talk. We liked each other and we got into the habit of stopping for coffee a couple of days a week on the way to work. Then we started making dinner together at her place. Well, she did all the cooking and I’d do the chopping. I remember one night she brought out an apple pie for dessert. I told her she shouldn’t have bought a pie and she said, ‘I didn’t buy it, I made it because I remember you said apple pie was your favorite dessert.’ That’s how she is—just really thoughtful and giving and going the extra mile for you.” I thought to myself how much this consideration, that so many would have taken for granted, must have meant to this lonely man. “Our relationship started as a friendship over those dinners,” Larry said. “We shared things about our lives. She told me about her marriage—how she left when he wouldn’t quit smoking pot and he got violent. I told her about my parents and my dad’s violence. And even about me and how I’d started to hit my girlfriends and how ashamed I was of that part of me. I was afraid that would put her off—and I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she understood how hard I was trying to get that behind me, and she actually said that she appreciated that I’d seen the dark side, as she called it, and that I’d come out a better person for having confronted some of these things. Talking about this with her and getting her reaction was the first time that I’d felt whole, like I could accept all of who I was and even be kind of proud of everything I’d been through. We’re still each other’s best friends. I can tell her anything. It’s incredible. I never thought I’d be able to say this, but I trust her with everything.” “How did the romantic piece get added into your friendship with Grace?” I asked.

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

  A Window of OpportunityI HAVE TOLD LARRY’S story in detail because it’s a remarkable account of the mind of a boy who slowly, painfully, and successfully extricates himself from his violent origins. Larry shows us how divorce can provide a window of opportunity through which the child can climb to freedom—with the proviso that the growing child must provide his or her own energy, resourcefulness, and courage to make it happen. The divorce by itself won’t do it. Larry’s moral and emotional evolution from delinquent boy to loving husband, father, and responsible citizen captures the psychological steps needed. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who relies on the help of the Scarecrow in search of a brain, the Tin Woodsman in want of a heart, and the Cowardly Lion in search of courage, a child growing up in a violent family needs the full use of his intelligence, capacity to love, and courage to climb out of the lower depths to which he has been exposed. He has to put together for himself a value system that rejects violence, respects women, and places decency and human kindness at the core. In his personal relationships, he has to achieve the capacity for love and intimacy without exploitation, loyalty to his family and friends, and responsibility to his professional community and society. Counter to the system in vogue in family courts that emphasizes the importance of continuity in parent-child relationships after the divorce, the child has to find the strength within himself to reject the violent parent and the values and attitudes that that person represents. If the child continues to embrace those values, he will repeat the ugliness that he was exposed to during his most impressionable years. Although Larry rescued himself, he was helped by his mother’s decision to divorce and her love for him and her dignity during the postdivorce years. She set an example of courage and faithfulness to her children that strengthened her son’s ability to leave. The divorce that she undertook despite her fears and misgivings showed him that getting out was a better, braver way, and he learned from her example and found within himself the power to follow her lead and to leave behind the identity that he might very well have embraced had she remained trapped. An Escape Hatch BlockedWHAT ABOUT THE Carols of this world? Without one parent to help her escape the craziness of her family, what’s in store for her? At the end of our interview, Carol eagerly told me how she’d met Tom, a pilot for a major airline company. She recalled in great detail how their acquaintance progressed from smiles and nods to short conversations, to dates in New York and San Francisco, to their present arrangement in which Tom stays with Carol whenever he has layovers in San Francisco.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Later I was reading about Edgard Orst's now demolished villa, which had stood so conspicuous and so secretive on the edge of a suburban housing park. Paul had given me an English journalist's account of a visit to it in 1904: We were privileged last month to be received by M. Edgard Orst at the Villa Hermes, his splendid new residence-cwm-atelier, whose designs our readers will no doubt recall from their publication in these pages some little while since. Indeed, the house has been three years in the building, and though M. Orst has regretted the delay, it cannot be denied that every detail of the structure and its appointments speaks of the most especial care in both design and execution; the artistic visitor will be bound to exclaim with us, "How should it have been done sooner?" In external appearance the Villa is tall and somewhat forbidding, its severity of openings and the plainness of the elevations, however, being mitigated by the fine patterns that are scored into the stucco along the coigns and lintels, the whole being given the most delightful brightness by virtue of being painted a dazzling white. Atop the foremost gable, of course, stands the figure of the alert young deity whom M. Orst has invoked as the guardian of his house—an admirable piece in bronze gilt from his own studio. Arriving a little before the appointed time, and having dwelt on the exterior, we rang the bell and were obliged to wait for some minutes before the opening of the door. This door itself, let it be said, is a thoroughly imposing one, massively enriched with nails and fine furniture; and it gave rise to not a few reflections on the solitude into which M. Orst has chosen to retire, and on the strength, so to speak, of the fortifications which he has thought necessary to protect that solitude from an undeniably curious world. For in M. Orst, unlike other artists of the "Symbolist" school—we think of that exquisite dramatist of the impalpable, M. Maurice Maeterlinck, with his avowed enthusiasms for the beer-hall, the velodrome, and the ring—in M. Orst, we say, we find the aesthete par excellence. As we stood at his door on that April morning (and in a light rain that had just begun to fall) we were at once in possession of the gauge of his claim to be considered the doyen of all the artistic recluses of our time. It was for us to ponder at what cost to his seclusion, and so to his art, an invitation like our own might have been made.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Was she on the level? Did such virtue really exist outside the Dickensian world of Peggotty, Little Dorrit, Tom Pinch, and the Boffins? Psychiatric texts rarely discuss the personality trait of “goodness” except to label it a defense against darker impulses, and at first I questioned her motives while poking around as unobtrusively as possible for flaws and chinks in the facade of saintliness. Finding none, I eventually concluded that it was no facade and, calling off my search, allowed myself to bask in Paula’s grace. Preparation for death, Paula believed, is vital and requires explicit attention. Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen-year-old son for her death by writing him a letter of farewell that moved me to tears. In her final paragraph she reminded him that the lungs in the human fetus do not breathe, nor do its eyes see. Thus, the embryo is being prepared for an existence it cannot yet imagine. “Are we not, too,” Paula suggested to her son, “being prepared for an existence beyond our ken, beyond even our dreams?” I have always been baffled by religious belief. As long as I can remember, I have regarded it as self-evident that religious systems develop in order to provide comfort and soothe the anxieties of our human condition. One day when I was twelve or thirteen and working in my father’s grocery store, I talked of my skepticism about the existence of God with a World War II soldier who had just returned from the European front. In response, he gave me a crinkled, faded picture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that he had carried with him throughout the Normandy invasion. “Turn it over,” he said. “Read the back. Read it aloud.” “’There are no atheists in foxholes,’” I read. “Right! There are no atheists in foxholes,” he repeated slowly, shaking his finger at me with every word. “Christian God, Jew God, Chinese God, any other God—but some god, by God! Can’t do without it.” Given to me by a total stranger, that crinkled picture fascinated me. It had survived Normandy and who knows how many other battles. Perhaps, I thought, it was an omen; perhaps divine providence had finally found me. For two years I carried that picture in my wallet, every so often pulling it out and pondering it. And then one day I asked, “So? What if it is true that there are no atheists in foxholes? If anything, that supports the skeptical position: of course belief increases when fear is greatest. That’s the very point: fear begets belief; we need and want a god, but wishing doesn’t make it so. Belief, no matter how fervent, how pure, how consuming, says nothing whatsoever about the reality of God’s existence.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  As he had; and since, as I have said, King is far fr om gar rulous on the subject of his interior life, it is somewhat ditficult to know what led him to make this switch. He had already taken pre-medical and law courses. But he had been raised by a minister, an extremely strong-minded one at that, and in an extraordinarily peaceful and protected way. "Never," says his father, "has Martin known a fuss or a fight or a strike-back in the home." On the other hand, there are some things from which no Negro can really be protected, for which he can only be prepared; and Martin, Sr. was more successful than most fathers in accomplishing this strenuous and delicate task. "I have never believed," he says, "that anybody was better than I." That this is true would seem to be proved by the career of his son, who ((never went around fighting with himself, like we all did." Here, speculation is really on very marshy ground, for the father must certainly have fought in himself some of the bat tles from which young Martin was protected. We have only to consider the era, especially in the South, to realize that this must be true. And it must have demanded great steadiness of mind, as well as great love, to hide so successfully fr om his children the evidence of these battles. And, since salvation, humanly speaking, is a two-way street, I suggest that, if the father saved the children, it was, almost equally, the children who saved him. It would seem that he was able, with rare success, to project onto his children, or at least onto one of them, a sense of life as he himself would have liked to live it, OTHER ESSAYS and somehow made real in their personalities principles on which he himself must often have found it extremely danger ous and difficult to act. Martin, Sr. is regarded with great ambivalence by both the admirers and detractors of his son, and I shall, alas, shortly have more to say concerning his gen eration; but I do not think that the enormous achievement sketched above can possibly be taken away fr om him. Again, young Martin's decision to become a minister has everything to do with his temperament, tor he seems always to have been characterized by his striking mixture of steadi ness and peace. He apparently did the normal amount of cry ing in his childhood, tor I am told that his grandmother "couldn't stand to sec it." But he seems to have done very little complaining; when he was spanked, "he just stood there and took it"; he seems to have been incapable of carrying grudges; and when he was attacked, he did not strike back.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Inevitably, therefore, and as a direct result, the white pcrt(mner is also scaled off and can never deliver the best that is in him, either. His plight is less obvious, but the results can be even more devastating. The black pcrt(mncr knows, at least, what the odds arc, and CHAPTER THREE 555 knows that he must endure-even though he has done noth ing to deserve-his fate. So does the white performer know this, as concerns himself, his possibilities, his merit, his fate, and he knows this on a somewhat less accessible and more chaotic and intimidating level. James Edwards, dead at the age of fifty-three, in a casting office, was a beautiful actor, and knew, at least, that he was an actor. Veronica Lake was a star, riding very high for a while there: she also died in relative obscurity, but it is doubtful that she knew as much. The moments given us by black performers exist so far beneath, or beyond, the American apprehensions that it is difficult to describe them. There is the close-up of Sidney Poitier's face, for example, in The Defiant Ones, describing how his wife, "she say, be nice. Be nice." Black spectators supply the sub-text-the unspoken-out of their own lives, and the pride and anguish in Sidney's face at that moment strike deep. I do not know what happens in the breasts of the multitudes who think of themselves as white: but, clearly, they hold this anguish far outside themselves. There is the truth to be found in Ethel Waters's face at the end of Member of the Wedding, the Juano Hernandez of Young Man with a Horn and Intruder in the Dust, Canada Lee, in Body and Soul, the Rochester of The Green Pastures and Tales of Manhattan, and Robeson in everything I saw him do. You will note that I am deliberately avoiding the recent spate of so-called black films. I have seen very few of them, and, anyway, it would be vir tually impossible to discuss them as films. I suspect their in tention to be lethal indeed, and to be the subject of quite another investigation. Their entire purpose (apart from mak ing money; and this money is not for blacks; in spite of the fact that some of these films appear to have been, at least in pan, financed by blacks) is to stifle forever any possibility of such moments-or, in other words, to make black experience irrelevant and obsolete.