Anger

Passages

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

Page 198 of 447 · 20 per page

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

  And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body’s hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, dirty: Boccaccio cynical while Ovid leers cold-bloodedly and Zola like Chaucer finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all; but not frank enough even in the noble Song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable! We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed. I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship. I have no divided allegiance and what I preach today amid the scorn and hatred of men will be universally accepted tomorrow; for in my vision, too, a thousand years are as one day. We must unite the soul of Paganism, the love of beauty and art and literature with the soul of Christianity and its human lovingkindness in a new synthesis which shall include all the sweet and gentle and noble impulses in us. What we all need is more of the spirit of Jesus: we must learn at length with Shakespeare: “Pardon’s the word for all!” I want to set this Pagan-Christian ideal before men as the highest and most human too. Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are—a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the world-war.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. • ​ A white academic welcomes the appearance of a collection by non-Black women of Color. * “It allows me to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women,” she says to me. • ​ At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-known white American woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes off to an “important panel.” If women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs and the living contexts of other women. When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to waive the registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible for many women of Color—for instance, Wilmette Brown, of Black Women for Wages for Housework—to participate in this conference. Is this to be merely another case of the academy discussing life within the closed circuits of the academy? To the white women present who recognize these attitudes as familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and survive thousands of such encounters—to my sisters of Color who like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the two most popular accusations)—I want to speak about anger, my anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its dominions. Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction.) * Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women—by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment. The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations. For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us. But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth. My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It has also served me in classrooms without light or learning, where the work and history of Black women was less than a vapor.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The Rockefeller Foundation published shocking pictures of actual hookworm subjects, some pairing boys of similar ages, one normal and the other literally dwarfed and disfigured by the disease. It didn’t help the South’s image that hookworm was spread by the lack of sanitation. Outhouses were rare among the southern poor, let alone toilets. 63 The 10,000 Hookworm Family (1913) from Alabama were presented as poor white celebrities who escaped the “lazy disease.” They stood in contrast to the “fitter family” competitions as a perfect example of the unfit American family. 201 H Alabama, Hookworm, Box 42, Folder 1044, #1107, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York This 1913 photograph from North Carolina shows the disfiguring effects of hookworm. In a shocking contrast, an undersized young man, age twenty-three, is placed alongside a normal boy, two years younger, who towers over him. 236 H North Carolina, Box 53, Folder 1269, #236 Vashti Alexander County, North Carolina, May 29, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York All in all, the rural South stood out as a place of social and now eugenic backwardness. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, wandering the dusty roads with a balky mule, seemed a throwback to eighteenth-century vagrants. The “lazy diseases” of hookworm and pellagra created a class of lazy lubbers. Illiteracy was widespread. Fear of indiscriminate breeding loomed large. The stock of poor white men produced in the South were dismissed as unfit for military service, the women unfit to be mothers. In the two decades before the war, reformers had exposed that many poor white women and children worked long, grueling hours in southern textile factories. Was this another sign of “race suicide,” some asked? Could they possibly produce future generations of healthy, courageous, intelligent, and fertile Americans? For many in the early twentieth century, then, the “new race problem” was not the “negro problem.” It was instead a different crisis, one caused by the “worthless class of anti-social whites.” 64 • • • It was Albert Priddy who called poor white Virginians “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” He was the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. He helped shape the optimal legal test case for sterilization, a case that went to the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927). Priddy began building his case in 1916, targeting prostitutes. He recruited top eugenics experts, including two colleagues of Davenport’s with ties to the Eugenics Record Office and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  3Another dog, the sweet-tempered sire of a ferocious family, a Great Dane not allowed in the house, played a pleasant part in an adventure that took place on one of the following days, if not the very day after. It so happened that my brother and I were left completely in charge of the newcomer. As I reconstitute it now, my mother had probably gone, with her maid and young Trainy, to St. Petersburg (a distance of some fifty miles) where my father was deeply involved in the grave political events of that winter. She was pregnant and very nervous. Miss Robinson, instead of staying to break in Mademoiselle, had gone too—back to that ambassador’s family, about which we had heard from her as much as they would about us. In order to prove that this was no way of treating us, I immediately formed the project of repeating the exciting performance of a year before when we escaped from poor Miss Hunt in Wiesbaden. This time the countryside all around was a wilderness of snow, and it is hard to imagine what exactly could have been the goal of the journey I planned. We had just returned from our first afternoon walk with Mademoiselle and I was seething with frustration and hatred. With a little prompting, I had meek Sergey share some of my anger. To keep up with an unfamiliar tongue (all we knew in the way of French were a few household phrases), and on top of it to be crossed in all our fond habits, was more than one could bear. The bonne promenade she had promised us had turned out to be a tedious stroll near the house where the snow had been cleared and the icy ground sprinkled with sand. She had had us wear things we never used to wear, even on the frostiest day—horrible gaiters and hoods that hampered our every movement. She had restrained us when I induced Sergey to explore the creamy, smooth swellings of snow that had been flower beds in summer. She had not allowed us to walk under the organ-pipelike system of huge icicles that hung from the eaves and gloriously burned in the low sun. And she had rejected as ignoble one of my favorite pastimes (devised by Miss Robinson)—lying prone on a little plush sledge with a bit of rope tied to its front and a hand in a leathern mitten pulling me along a snow-covered path, under white trees, and Sergey, not lying but sitting on a second sledge, upholstered in red plush, attached to the rear of my blue one, and the heels of two felt boots, right in front of my face, walking quite fast with toes slightly turned in, now this, now that sole skidding on a raw patch of ice. (The hand and the feet belonged to Dmitri, our oldest and shortest gardener, and the path was the avenue of oaklings which seems to have been the main artery of my infancy.)

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  "If all those who have intrigued with their valets were compelled to eat such salads," said Parlamente, " I know those who would not be so fond of their gardens as they are, but would pluck up all the herbs in them, to avoid those which save the honour of children at the expense of a wanton mother's life." Hircan, who guessed for whom she meant this, re- plied with great warmth, " A woman of honour should never suspect another of things she would not do her- self." " To know is not to suspect," rejoined Parlamente. " However, this poor woman paid the penalty which many deserve. Moreover, I think that the president, being bent on avenging himself, could not set about it with more prudence and discretion." " Nor with more malice," Longarine subjoined. " It was a cold-blooded and cruel vengeance, which plainly showed that he respected neither God nor his conscience." " What would you have him do, then," said Hircan, " to revenge the most intolerable outrage a wife can ever offer to her husband." " I would have had him kill her," she answered, " in the first transports of his indignation. The doctors say that such a sin is more pardonable, because a man is not master of such emotions ; and consequently, the sin he commits in that state may be forgiven." " Yes," said Geburon, " but his daughters and his descendants would have been disgraced for ever." " He ought not to have poisoned her," said Lon- I Fourth day^ QUEEN OF NA VAKRE. 329 garine, " for since his first great wrath was past, she might have lived with him like an honest woman, and nothing would ever have been said about the mat- ter. " Do you suppose." said Saffredent, " that he was appeased, though he pretended to be so ? For my part, I'm persuaded that the day he mixed his salad his wrath was as hot as on the very first day. There are people whose first emotions never subside until they have accomplished the dictates of their pas- sion." " It is well to ponder one's words," said Parlamente, "when one has to do with people so dangerous as you. What I said is to be understood of an anger so violent that it suddenly engrosses the senses, and hinders rea- son from acting."

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman. I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman’s power. We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction.

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

  The creed we professed and the creed we practised were poles apart. Never I believe in the world’s history was there such confusion in man’s thought about conduct, never were there so many different ideals put forward for his guidance. It is imperatively necessary for us to bring clearness into this muddle and see why we have gone wrong and where. For the world-war is only the last of a series of diabolical acts which have shocked the conscience of humanity. The greatest crimes in recorded time have been committed during the last half century almost without protest by the most civilised nations, nations that still call themselves Christian. Whoever has watched human affairs in the last half century must acknowledge that our progress has been steadily hell-ward. The hideous massacres and mutilations of tens of thousands of women and children in the Congo Free State without protest on the part of Great Britain who could have stopped it all with one word, is surely due to the same spirit that directed the abominable blockade (continued by both England and America long after the Armistice) which condemned hundreds and thousands of women and children of our own kith and kin to death by starvation. The unspeakable meanness and confessed fraud of the Peace of Versailles with its tragic consequences from Vladivostock to London and finally the shameless, dastardly war waged by all the Allies and by America on Russia, for money, show us that we have been assisting at the overthrow of morality itself and returning to the ethics of the wolf and the polity of the Thieves’ Kitchen. And our public acts as nations are paralleled by our treatment of our fellows within the community. For the small minority the pleasures of living have been increased in the most extraordinary way while the pains and sorrows of existence have been greatly mitigated, but the vast majority even of civilised peoples have hardly been admitted to any share in the benefits of our astounding material progress. The slums of our cities show the same spirit we have displayed in our treatment of the weaker races. It is no secret that over fifty per cent of English volunteers in the war were below the pigmy physical standard required and about one half of our American soldiers were morons with the intelligence of children under twelve years of age: “vae victis” has been our motto with the most appalling results. Clearly we have come to the end of a period and must take thought about the future.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. Women who have asked me to set these stories down are asking me for my air to breathe, to use in their future, are courting me back to my life as a warrior. Some offer me their bodies, some their enduring patience, some a separate fire, and still others, only a naked need whose face is all too familiar. It is the need to give voice to the complexities of living with cancer, outside of the tissue-thin assurance that they “got it all,” or that the changes we have wrought in our lives will insure that cancer never reoccurs. And it is a need to give voice to living with cancer outside of that numbing acceptance of death as a resignation waiting after fury and before despair. There is nothing I cannot use somehow in my living and my work, even if I would never have chosen it on my own, even if I am livid with fury at having to choose. Not only did nobody ever say it would be easy, nobody ever said what faces the challenges would wear. The point is to do as much as I can of what I came to do before they nickel and dime me to death. Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. How do I define that survival and on whose terms? So I feel a sense of triumph as I pick up my pen and say yes I am going to write again from the world of cancer and with a different perspective—that of living with cancer in an intimate daily relationship. Yes, I’m going to say plainly, six years after my mastectomy, in spite of drastically altered patterns of eating and living, and in spite of my self-conscious living and increased self-empowerment, and in spite of my deepening commitment to using myself in the service of what I believe, and in spite of all my positive expectations to the contrary, I have been diagnosed as having cancer of the liver, metastasized from breast cancer. This fact does not make my last six years of work any less vital or important or necessary. The accuracy of that diagnosis has become less important than how I use the life I have. November 8, 1986 New York City If I am to put this all down in a way that is useful, I should start with the beginning of the story. Sizable tumor in the right lobe of the liver, the doctors said. Lots of blood vessels in it means it’s most likely malignant. Let’s cut you open right now and see what we can do about it.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Charges of “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” circulated throughout the war, but especially after the Confederate Congress passed the Conscription Act of 1862, instituting the draft for all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Exemptions were available to educated elites, slaveholders, officeholders, and men employed in valuable trades—leaving poor farmers and hired laborers the major target of the draft. Next the draft was extended to the age of forty-five, and by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription. 17 The Union army and Republican politicians advanced a strategy aimed at further exploiting class divisions between the planter elite and poor whites in the South. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, as well as many Union officers, believed they were fighting a war against a slaveholding aristocracy, and that winning the war and ending slavery would liberate not only slaves but also poor white trash. In his memoir, Grant voiced the class critique of the Union command. There would never have been secession, he wrote, if demagogues had not swayed nonslaveholding voters and naïve young soldiers to believe that the North was filled with “cowards, poltroons, and negro- worshippers.” Convinced that “one Southern man was equal to five Northern men,” Confederate soldiers saw themselves as a superior people. (The same five- to-one ratio was used by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper when he defended the Anglo-Saxon race in Land of Gold and claimed that one Kentuckian could trounce five dwarfish and feeble Nicaraguans.) In Grant’s estimation, the war was fought to liberate nonslaveholders, families exiled to poor land, who had few opportunities to better themselves or educate their children. “They too needed emancipation,” he insisted. Under the “old régime,” the prewar South, they were nothing but “poor white trash” to the planter aristocracy. They did as told and were accorded the ballot, but just so long as they parroted the wishes of the elite. 18 • • • By 1861, both sides saw the other as an alien culture doomed to extinction. In a speech delivered in 1858, the same year as Hammond’s famous mudsill oration, William H. Seward, the leading New York Republican who was to serve in Lincoln’s cabinet, coined the term “irrepressible conflict.” For Seward, free labor was a higher form of civilization, practiced by the “Caucasians and Europeans.” He blamed slavery on the Spanish and Portuguese, and reduced all of South America to a land of brutality, imbecility, and economic backwardness. Toppling slavery in the U.S. South, in Seward’s grand historical schema, was merely an extension of the continental march of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The two class systems—slave and free—were locked in a battle for domination, and only one would survive. 19 Of course, southern ideologues argued the exact opposite. Slavery was a vigorous and vibrant system, they insisted, and more effective than free labor. With a docile workforce, the South had eliminated conflict between labor and capital.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Left alone with Sister Marie, he began by lifting up her veil, and bidding her look in his face. Sister Marie replied that her rule forbade her to look at men. "That is well said, my daughter," said the prior, "but you are not to believe that monks are men." For fear, then, of being guilty of disobedience, Sister Marie looked at him, and thought him so ugly that it seemed to her more a penance than a sin to look at him. The reverend father, after talking of the love he bore her, wanted to put his hands on her breasts. She re- 2i8 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Nnel ii. pulsed him as she ought ; and the reverend father, vexed at so unwonted a beginning, exclaimed in great anger, " What business has a nun to know that she has breasts ?" " I know that I have," replied Sister Marie ; " and I am very certain that neither you nor anyone else shall ever touch them. I am neither young enough nor igno- rant enough not to know what is a sin and what is not so." Seeing, then, that he could not compass his designs in that way, he had recourse to another expedient, and said, " I must declare my infirmity to you, my daughter; I have a malady which all the physicians deem incurable, unless I delight myself with a woman whom I passion- ately love. I would not for my life commit a mortal sin ; but even should it come to that, I know that simple fornication is not to be compared to the sin of homicide. So if you love my life, you will hinder me from dying, and save your own conscience." She asked him what sort of diversion it was that he contemplated ; to which he replied that she might rest her conscience on his, and he assured her that he would do nothing which would leave any weight on either. To let her judge by the preliminaries what sort of pastime it was he asked of her, he embraced her and tried to throw her on a bed. Making no doubt then of his wicked intention, she cried out, and defended herself so well that he could only touch her clothes. Seeing, then, that all his devices and efforts were fruitless, like — I will not say a madman, but like a man without conscience or reason, he put his hand under her robe, and scratched all that came under his nails with such fury that the poor girl, shrieking with all her might, fell in a faint. The abbess, hearing her cries, ran to the dormitory, reproaching herself for having left her relation alone with the reverend father. She stood for a moment at Third day \ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 210

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108.† This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981.‡ From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 42.Fourth of July The first time I went to Washington, D.C. was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child. At least that’s what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a Fourth of July trip to Washington, D.C., the fabled and famous capital of our country. It was the first time I’d ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we used to go to the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was cheaper. Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I remember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell.

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

  But in England the rule was Rhadamanthine; the fags’ names on duty were put up on a blackboard, and if you were not on time, ay, and servile to boot, you’d get a dozen from an ash plant on your behind and not laid on perfunctorily and with distaste, as the Doctor did it, but with vim so that I had painful weals on my backside and couldn’t sit down for days without a smart. The fags too, being young and weak, were very often brutally treated just for fun. On Sunday mornings in summer, for instance, we had an hour longer in bed. I was one of the half dozen juniors in the big bedroom; there were two older boys in it, one at each end, presumably to keep order; but in reality to teach lechery and corrupt their younger favorites. If the mothers of England knew what goes on in the dormitories of these boarding-schools throughout England, they would all be closed, from Eton and Harrow upwards or downwards, in a day. If English fathers even had brains enough to understand that the fires of sex need no stoking in boyhood, they too would protect their sons from the foul abuse. But I shall come back to this. Now I wish to speak of the cruelty. Every form of cruelty was practiced on the younger, weaker and more nervous boys. I remember one Sunday morning, the half dozen older boys pulled one bed along the wall and forced all the seven younger boys underneath it, beating with sticks any hand or foot that showed. One little fellow cried that he couldn’t breathe and at once the gang of tormentors began stuffing up all the apertures, saying that they would make a “Black Hole” of it. There were soon cries and strugglings under the bed and at length one of the youngest began shrieking so that the torturers ran away from the prison, fearing lest some master should hear. One wet Sunday afternoon in midwinter, a little nervous “Mother’s darling” from the West Indies who always had a cold and was always sneaking near the fire in the big schoolroom, was caught by two of the Fifth and held near the flames. Two more brutes pulled his trowsers tight over his bottom, and the more he squirmed and begged to be let go, the tighter they held the trowsers and the nearer the flames he was pushed, till suddenly the trowsers split apart scorched through, and as the little fellow tumbled forward screaming, the torturers realized that they had gone too far. The little “Nigger” as he was called, didn’t tell how he came to be so scorched but took his fortnight in sick bay as a respite.

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

  The 10 to 15 percent of couples who do fight in court consume the lion’s share of our attention but they do not represent the norm. 1 Most parents negotiate a divorce settlement, decide on custody arrangements, and go their separate ways. Unfortunately, many of them stay intensely angry with one another. In our study, a third of the couples were fighting at the same high pitch ten years after their divorce was final. Their enduring anger stemmed from continued feelings of hurt and humiliation fueled by new complaints (child support is too burdensome or too little) and jealousy over new, often younger partners. The notion that divorce ends the intense love/hate relationship of the marriage is another myth of our times. Like many divorced people, Karen’s mother frequently called her ex-husband and got into shouting matches. As a result, the children were exposed to the hurt and anger that led to the breakup throughout their growing up years. Millions of children today experience the same unrelenting drama of longing and anger that refuses to die. It is, of course, hard to know how often divorce is precipitated by factors outside the marriage. I have seen a good number of such instances. Indeed, it is one of the common causes—or more precisely, final triggers—of divorce, yet few people seem to recognize its importance. Whenever people are shaken by a serious loss in their lives—be it the termination of a job, death of a parent, serious illness in a child, or any grievous event that can evoke powerful and primitive passions—the bereaved person will turn to their spouse for comfort. If the partner responds with understanding and tenderness, the marriage can be forever enriched. But the tragedy can also split people apart when the bereaved person is deeply disappointed in the partner’s response and feels rejected in his or her hour of greatest need. Grief turns to rage as the two people end up irrationally blaming the other—one for not having empathy, the other for making insatiable demands. The initial loss is soon compounded, anger and accusations take over, and the marriage cascades downward. Mrs. James followed this script to the letter. It’s especially tragic when divorce occurs as the sequel to a serious life crisis. The suffering person loses whatever support there was in the marriage and confronts the transition from marriage to singlehood in a depleted state. The children are badly frightened and apprehensive about what lies ahead. It’s as if the entire family at its weakest point is expected to deal with an earthquake and its aftershocks. What happened to this family is instructive.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  3Another dog, the sweet-tempered sire of a ferocious family, a Great Dane not allowed in the house, played a pleasant part in an adventure that took place on one of the following days, if not the very day after. It so happened that my brother and I were left completely in charge of the newcomer. As I reconstitute it now, my mother had probably gone, with her maid and young Trainy, to St. Petersburg (a distance of some fifty miles) where my father was deeply involved in the grave political events of that winter. She was pregnant and very nervous. Miss Robinson, instead of staying to break in Mademoiselle, had gone too—back to that ambassador’s family, about which we had heard from her as much as they would about us. In order to prove that this was no way of treating us, I immediately formed the project of repeating the exciting performance of a year before when we escaped from poor Miss Hunt in Wiesbaden. This time the countryside all around was a wilderness of snow, and it is hard to imagine what exactly could have been the goal of the journey I planned. We had just returned from our first afternoon walk with Mademoiselle and I was seething with frustration and hatred. With a little prompting, I had meek Sergey share some of my anger. To keep up with an unfamiliar tongue (all we knew in the way of French were a few household phrases), and on top of it to be crossed in all our fond habits, was more than one could bear. The bonne promenade she had promised us had turned out to be a tedious stroll near the house where the snow had been cleared and the icy ground sprinkled with sand. She had had us wear things we never used to wear, even on the frostiest day—horrible gaiters and hoods that hampered our every movement. She had restrained us when I induced Sergey to explore the creamy, smooth swellings of snow that had been flower beds in summer. She had not allowed us to walk under the organ-pipelike system of huge icicles that hung from the eaves and gloriously burned in the low sun. And she had rejected as ignoble one of my favorite pastimes (devised by Miss Robinson)—lying prone on a little plush sledge with a bit of rope tied to its front and a hand in a leathern mitten pulling me along a snow-covered path, under white trees, and Sergey, not lying but sitting on a second sledge, upholstered in red plush, attached to the rear of my blue one, and the heels of two felt boots, right in front of my face, walking quite fast with toes slightly turned in, now this, now that sole skidding on a raw patch of ice. (The hand and the feet belonged to Dmitri, our oldest and shortest gardener, and the path was the avenue of oaklings which seems to have been the main artery of my infancy.)

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

  In vain I pleaded for his life, declared that he ought to be tried, that it was better to let off ten guilty men than hang one innocent one, but my foreign accent robbed my appeal, I think, of any weight and before my eyes the man was strung up. It filled me with rage; it seemed to me a dreadful thing to have done: the cruelty of the executioners, the hard purpose of them, shut me away from my kin. Later I was to see these men from a better angle. By the early morning the fire had destroyed over a mile deep of the town and was raging with unimaginable fury. I went down on the lakeshore just before daybreak. The scene was one of indescribable magnificence: there were probably a hundred and fifty thousand homeless men, women and children grouped along the lake shore. Behind us roared the fire; it spread like a red sheet right up to the zenith above our heads, and from there was borne over the sky in front of us by long streamers of fire like rockets: vessels four hundred yards out in the bay were burning fiercely, and we were, so to speak, roofed and walled by flame. The danger and uproar were indeed terrifying and the heat, even in this October night, almost unbearable. I wandered along the lake shore, noting the kind way in which the men took care of the women and children. Nearly every man was able to erect some sort of shelter for his wife and babies, and everyone was willing to help his neighbor. While working at one shelter for a little while, I said to the man I wished I could get a drink. “You can get one”, he said, “right there”, and he pointed to a sort of makeshift shanty on the beach. I went over and found that a publican had managed to get four barrels down on the beach and had rigged up a sort of low tent above them; on one of the barrels he had nailed his shingle, and painted on it were the words, “What do you think of our hell? No drinks less than a dollar!” The wild humor of the thing amused me infinitely and the man certainly did a roaring trade.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " my worst suffering is to see you the dupe of those whose duty it is to preserve your honour and all that is yours." This made the duke wondrously eager to know what she meant, and he begged her to speak openly, without fear or disguise. " I shall never be surprised," she said at last, after repeated refusals, "if strangers make war on princes, since those who are most bound to them undertake to wage such a horrible war against them that the loss of domains is nothing in comparison with it. I say this, monsieur, with reference to a gentle- man " (here she named her enemy) " whom you have fed, reared, treated more like a relation than a domestic, and who, by way of gratitude, has had the impudence and the baseness to attempt the honour of your wife, on which depends that of your house and your children. Though he long laboured to insinuate to me things that left me no doubt of his black perfidy, yet my heart, which is only for you, and thinks only on you, could not com- prehend him ; but at last he explained himself, and I replied to him as my rank and my honour required. I hate him, however, so that I cannot bear the sight of him ; and this it was, monsieur, which made me keep my room and lose the happiness of your company. I beseech you, monsieur, not to keep such a pestilence near you ; for after such a crime, the fear of your being made acquainted with it might very likely induce him to do something worse. You now know, monsieur, the cause of my grief, which seems to me most just and most worthy that you should right it without delay." The duke, who on the one hand loved his wife and felt himself outraged, and on the other hand loved the gentleman, of whose fidelity he had often had practical proof, could hardly believe this lie was truth. He with- drew to his chamber in great perplexity and anger, and ^26 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Novel '/O.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  It tempered the British announcement with a reminder to readers that some of the Carters in old England were poachers, the American equivalent of would-be moonshiners. Noble blood or hillbilly moonshiners? A spokesman for the British study, Debrett’s Peerage, invoked eugenic thinking when he claimed that the Carter family had produced “intelligent to brilliant” people. The family line had its share of “sleepers,” the expert confided, and it was from those less successful branches that Jimmy’s brother Billy had acquired his less fine attributes. 29 That said, Billy Carter was no sleeper. He became a redneck luminary, and tourists poured into the Carters’ hometown of Plains looking for autographs and photographs with the down-home celebrity. He began producing his own beer, Billy Beer, and hired an agent to coordinate talks he gave around the country. He was known for voicing ornery, uncensored opinions. Billy smoked five packs of Pall Malls a day, and his code name on the CB radio was “Cast Iron,” for his iron-gutted ability to drink anything and a lot of it. He was no “Holy Roller,” no celebrant of the “Lost Cause.” When asked what side he would have fought on in the Civil War, Billy joked, “I’d probably hid out in the swamp.” In 1981, after his brother left office, Billy was peddling mobile homes. 30 Roy Blount said he wished that Jimmy had a bit more of Billy in him, a little more irreverence and sass: “The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy, . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and- awful compound like life in Georgia.” Blount’s Cracker President would have “a richer voice, and a less dismissable smile.” 31 There was probably more redneck in Jimmy than Blount realized. When speechwriter Bob Shrum resigned from the Carter team in 1976, he exposed a less compassionate candidate. The man who publicly advocated for miners when he spoke before a labor audience told Shrum privately that “he opposed increased black-lung benefits for miners, because ‘they chose to be miners.’” Seemingly lacking an understanding of class conditions, Carter right then revealed a mean streak a mile wide. Should miners suffer because they accepted the dangers of the job? He showed his mean side again in 1977 when he endorsed the Hyde Amendment for restricting Medicaid payments to poor women seeking abortions.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  For the satisfaction of justice, the brother-in-law was advised to go and solicit his pardon of King Francis I. To this end, after having honourably interred the father, mother, and child, he set out on one Good Friday, to solicit his pardon at court ; and he obtained it through the favour of Fran9ois Olivier, Chancellor of Alen^on, afterwards, in consideration of his great endowments, chosen by the king to be chancellor of France. I am persuaded, ladies, that after this story, which is the very truth, there is not one of you but will think twice before giving reception to such guests. Let it at least 236 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE {Novel 23. teach you that the more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is. " Surely," said Hircan, " this husband was a great fool to bring such a gallant to sup by the side of such a handsome and virtuous woman." " I have seen the time," said Geburon, "when there was not a house in our country in which there was not a chamber for the good fathers ; but at present people know them so well that they are more feared than ad- venturers." " It seems to me," said Parlamente, " that a woman in bed ought never to let monk or priest into her room except to administer to her the sacraments of the church ; and for my part, when I summon any of them to my bedside, it may be taken for a sure sign that I am very far gone." " If everybody was as austere as you," said Enna- suite, " the poor clergy would no longer be free to see women when and where they pleased, and that would be Vv'orse to them than excommunication." " Have no fear on their account," said Saffredent ; " these worthies will never want for women." " Is this not too bad } " exclaimed Simontault. " It is they who unite us with our wives in the bonds of wed- lock, and they have the wickedness to try to disunite us, and make us break the oath they have imposed upon us." " It is a pity," said Oisille, " that they who have the administration of the sacraments make light of them in this manner. They ought to be burned alive." "You would do better to honour them than to blame them," replied Saffredent, "and to flatter instead of abusing them ; for it is they who have the power to burn and dishonour others, therefore, let them alone ; and let us see, whom does Oisille caJl on ? " Third day:\ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 237 "On Dagoucin," she replied ; "for I see he is so pensive that it strikes me he must have something good at the tip of his tongue."

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Helmholtz, who has put his sensorial attention to the severest tests, by using his eyes on objects which in common life are expressly overlooked, makes some interesting remarks on this point in his chapter on retinal rivalry. [342] The phenomenon called by that name is this, that if we look with each eye upon a different picture (as in the annexed stereoscopic slide), sometimes one picture, sometimes the other, or parts of both, will come to consciousness, hardly ever both combined. Helmholtz now says: "I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of the other system. . . . But it is extremely hard to chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away." And again criticising an author who had treated of attention as an activity absolutely subject to the conscious will, Helmholtz writes: "This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily fixed upon a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted, and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate control." These words of Helmholtz are of fundamental importance. And if true of sensorial attention, how much more true are they of the intellectual variety!