Anxiety

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

  We hired a receptionist and tried to figure out how to survive. I had worked on fund-raising for the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee almost as soon as I started there, so I had some experience asking for money to support our work. I was sure there would be a way to raise enough for the new Alabama office to meet the minimum federal matching requirements. We just needed some time—something, as it turned out, we wouldn’t get at all. A flood of execution dates awaited us. Between the passage of Alabama’s new death penalty statute in 1975 and the end of 1988, there had been only three executions in Alabama. But in 1989, driven by a change in the Supreme Court’s treatment of death penalty appeals and shifts in the political winds, the attorney general’s office began vigorously seeking executions of condemned prisoners. By the end of 1989, the number of people executed by the State of Alabama would double. Months before our center opened, I started visiting Alabama’s death row every month, traveling from Atlanta to see a handful of new clients, including Walter McMillian. They were all grateful for the help, but as the spring of 1989 approached they all made the same request at the end of our meetings: Help Michael Lindsey. Lindsey’s execution was scheduled for May 1989. Later, they would ask me to help Horace Dunkins, whose execution date was scheduled for July 1989. I painfully explained the constraints on resources and time, telling them how frantic we were just trying to get the new office up and running. Although they said they understood, they were clearly anguished about getting legal assistance while other men faced looming executions. Both Lindsey and Dunkins had volunteer lawyers who had reached out to me for help because they were overwhelmed. Lindsey’s lawyer, David Bagwell, was a respected civil attorney from Mobile; he had worked on the case of Wayne Ritter, who’d been executed a year earlier. That experience left Bagwell disillusioned and angry. He wrote a scathing letter published in the state bar association’s journal in which he vowed “never to take another death penalty case, even if they disbar me for my refusal” and urged other civil lawyers not to take death penalty cases. Bagwell’s public complaints made it hard for courts to appoint other civil lawyers for last-stage appeals in a death penalty case, not that they were particularly inclined to do so. But it had another effect as well.

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

  The SPDC was located in downtown Atlanta in the Healey Building, a sixteen-story Gothic Revival structure built in the early 1900s that was in considerable decline and losing tenants. I worked in a cramped circle of desks with two lawyers and did clerical work, answering phones and researching legal questions for staff. I was just getting settled into my office routine when Steve asked me to go to death row to meet with a condemned man whom no one else had time to visit. He explained that the man had been on the row for over two years and that they didn’t yet have a lawyer to take his case; my job was to convey to this man one simple message: You will not be killed in the next year. — I drove through farmland and wooded areas of rural Georgia, rehearsing what I would say when I met this man. I practiced my introduction over and over. “Hello, my name is Bryan. I’m a student with the...” No. “I’m a law student with...” No. “My name is Bryan Stevenson. I’m a legal intern with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and I’ve been instructed to inform you that you will not be executed soon.” “You can’t be executed soon.” “You are not at risk of execution anytime soon.” No. I continued practicing my presentation until I pulled up to the intimidating barbed-wire fence and white guard tower of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center. Around the office we just called it “Jackson,” so seeing the facility’s actual name on a sign was jarring—it sounded clinical, even therapeutic. I parked and found my way to the prison entrance and walked inside the main building with its dark corridors and gated hallways, where metal bars barricaded every access point. The interior eliminated any doubt that this was a hard place. I walked down a tunneled corridor to the legal visitation area, each step echoing ominously across the spotless tiled floor. When I told the visitation officer that I was a paralegal sent to meet with a death row prisoner, he looked at me suspiciously. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and we could both see that it had seen better days. The officer’s eyes seemed to linger long and hard over my driver’s license before he tilted his head toward me to speak. “You’re not local.” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, sir. Well, I’m working in Atlanta.”

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

  As it was, Walter didn’t initially think much of the flirtations of Karen Kelly, a young white woman he’d met at the Waffle House where he ate breakfast. She was attractive, but he didn’t take her too seriously. When her flirtations became more explicit, Walter hesitated, and then persuaded himself that no one would ever know. After a few weeks, it became clear that his relationship with Karen was trouble. At twenty-five, Karen was eighteen years younger than Walter, and she was married. As word got around that the two were “friends,” she seemed to take a titillating pride in her intimacy with Walter. When her husband found out, things quickly turned ugly. Karen and her husband, Joe, had long been unhappy and were already planning to divorce, but her scandalous involvement with a black man outraged Karen’s husband and his entire family. He initiated legal proceedings to gain custody of their children and became intent on publicly disgracing his wife by exposing her infidelity and revealing her relationship with a black man. For his part, Walter had always stayed clear of the courts and far away from the law. Years earlier, he had been drawn into a bar fight that resulted in a misdemeanor conviction and a night in jail. It was the first and only time he had ever been in trouble. From that point on, he had no exposure to the criminal justice system. When Walter received a subpoena from Karen Kelly’s husband to testify at a hearing where the Kellys would be fighting over their children’s custody, he knew it was going to cause him serious problems. Unable to consult with his wife, Minnie, who had a better head for these kinds of crises, he nervously went to the courthouse. The lawyer for Kelly’s husband called Walter to the stand. Walter had decided to acknowledge being a “friend” of Karen. Her lawyer objected to the crude questions posed to Walter by the husband’s attorney about the nature of his friendship, sparing him from providing any details, but when he left the courtroom the anger and animosity toward him were palpable. Walter wanted to forget about the whole ordeal, but word spread quickly, and his reputation shifted. No longer the hard-working pulpwood man, known to white people almost exclusively for what he could do with a saw in the pine trees, Walter now represented something more worrisome. — Fears of interracial sex and marriage have deep roots in the United States.

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

  As we all left the courthouse, we offered each other solemn goodbyes. “We’ll pray for you,” the aunt said as they departed. On the way to my car, I considered asking them to say something to the prosecutor and state lawyers about not wanting Mr. Richardson to be executed, although it was clear that the State wasn’t acting on behalf of these victims. The courtroom had been filled with state lawyers and other officials watching the hearing, but they had long since fled the courthouse without so much as a word to any of the battered souls standing in the back of the room. I was haunted by the tragic irony that they felt I was their best hope for help. The trial judge had denied our request for a stay of execution by the time I got back to Montgomery. He ruled our evidence was “untimely,” meaning that he could not consider it. With less than a week before the execution, the next few days involved one frantic filing after the next. Finally, on the day before the execution, I filed a petition for review and a motion for a stay of execution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in death penalty cases, the Court grants review only in a small percentage of the cases filed. A petition for certiorari, a request to review a lower court’s ruling, is very rarely granted, but I’d known all along that the Supreme Court was our best chance for a stay of execution. Even when lower courts granted a stay, the State would appeal, so the Supreme Court would almost always make the final decision to permit an execution to proceed or not. The execution was scheduled for 12:01 A.M. on August 18. I had finally finished the petition and faxed it to the Court late on the night of August 16 and had spent the next morning in my Montgomery office, waiting anxiously for the Court’s decision. I tried to busy myself by reading files in other cases, including Walter McMillian’s. I didn’t expect we’d hear from the Court until the afternoon, but that didn’t keep me from staring at the phone all morning. Whenever the phone rang, my pulse quickened. Eva and Doris, our receptionist, knew that I was anxiously awaiting the call. We had submitted an extensive clemency petition to the governor with affidavits from family members and color photographs, but I didn’t expect anything in response. The petition detailed Herbert’s military service and explained why military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are worthy of compassion. I wasn’t very hopeful. Michael Lindsey had received a life verdict from the jury and was executed instead; Horace Dunkins was intellectually disabled, and the governor had not spared him, either. Herbert would likely be seen as even less sympathetic.

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

  I was having an increasingly difficult time managing it all. At the same time, Walter’s authorized length of stay at the Montgomery facility was up, so we frantically made arrangements for him to move back home, where his sister would do the best she could to take care of him. It was a worrisome situation for him and his family, for all of us. By the time Jimmy Dill was scheduled for execution in Alabama, the entire EJI staff was exhausted. The execution date couldn’t have come at a more difficult time. We had no prior involvement in Mr. Dill’s case, which meant getting up to speed in the thirty days before his scheduled execution. It was an unusual crime. Mr. Dill was accused of shooting someone during the course of a drug deal after an argument erupted. The shooting victim did not die; Mr. Dill was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. He was in jail for nine months awaiting trial while the victim was released from the hospital and was recovering fine. But after several months of caring for him at home, the victim’s wife apparently abandoned him and he became gravely ill. When he died, state prosecutors changed the charges against Mr. Dill from assault to capital murder. Jimmy Dill suffered from an intellectual disability and had been sexually and physically abused throughout his childhood. He struggled with drug addiction until his arrest. He was appointed counsel who did very little to prepare the case for trial. Almost no investigation was done into the poor medical care the victim had received, care that constituted the actual cause of death. The state made a plea offer of twenty years, but it was never adequately communicated to Mr. Dill, so he went to trial, was convicted, and was sentenced to death. The appellate courts affirmed his conviction and sentence. He couldn’t find volunteer counsel for his postconviction appeals, so most of his legal claims were procedurally barred because he had missed the filing deadlines. When we first looked at Mr. Dill’s case a few weeks before his scheduled execution, no court had reviewed critical issues about the reliability of his conviction and sentence. Capital murder requires an intent to kill, and there was a persuasive argument that there was no intent to kill in this case and that poor health care had caused the victim’s death. Most gunshot victims don’t die after nine months, and it was surprising that the state was seeking the death penalty in this case. And the U.S. Supreme Court had previously banned the execution of people with mental retardation, so Mr. Dill should have been shielded from the death penalty because of his intellectual disability, but no one had investigated or presented evidence in support of the claim.

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

  27. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly. 28. Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him. 29. For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor. 30. He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxii. 1) Our Lord after His twofold promise of assistance to the Apostles in their future labours, remembers that the traitor is cut off from both, and is troubled at the thought: When Jesus had thus said, He was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray Me. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lx. 1) This did not come into His mind’then for the first time; but He was now about to make the traitor known, and single him out from the rest, and therefore was troubled in spirit. The traitor too was now just about to go forth to execute his purpose. He was troubled at the thought of His Passion being so near at hand, at the dangers to which His faithful followers would be brought at the hand of the traitor, which were even now impending over Him. Our Lord deigned to be troubled also, to shew that false brethren cannot be cut off, even in the most urgent necessity, without the troubling of the Church. (Tr. lxi. 1.). He was troubled not in flesh, but in spirit; for on occasion of scandals of this kind, the spirit is troubled, not perversely, but in love, lest in separating the tares, some of the wheat too be plucked up with them. (Tr. lx. 5.). But whether He was troubled by pity for perishing Judas, or, by the near approach of His own death, He was troubled not through weakness of mind, but power: He was not troubled because any thing compelled Him, but He troubled Himself, as was said above. And in that He was troubled, He consoles the weak members of His body, i. e. His Church, that they may not think themselves reprobate, should they be troubled at the approach of death. ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 11.) His being troubled in spirit, was the human part, suffering under the 1excess of the spiritual. For if every Saint lives, acts, and suffers in the spirit, how much more is this true of Jesus, the Rewarder of Saints.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The irreducible inconvenience of the moral choice is that it is, by definition, arbitrary-though it sounds so grandiose and, on the surface, unreasonable, and has no justification but (or in) itself My reaction, in the present instance, was unrea sonable on its face, not only because of my ignorance of the Arab world, but also because I could not aficct their destiny 37 8 NO NAME IN THE STREET in any degree. And yet, their destiny was somehow tied to mine, their battle was not theirs alone but was my battle also, and it began to be a matter of my honor not to attempt to avoid this loaded tact. And, furthermore-though this was truer in principle than it was in fact, as I had had occasion to learn-my life in Paris was to some extent protected by the fact that I carried a green passport. This passport proclaimed that I was a fr ee citizen of a fr ee country, and was not, therefore, to be treated as one of Europe's uncivilized, black possessions. This same passport, on the other side of the ocean, underwent a sea change and proclaimed that I was not an African prince, but a domestic nigger and that no foreign government would be offended if my corpse were to be found clogging up the sewers. I had never had occasion to reflect before on the brilliance of the white strategy: blacks didn't know each other, could barely speak to each other, and, therefore, could scarcely trust each other-and therefore, wherever we turned, we found our selves in the white man's territory, and at the white man's mercy. Four hundred years in the West had certainly turned me into a Westerner-there was no way around that. But t( mr hundred years in the West had also failed to bleach me-there was no way around that, either-and my history in the West had, for its daily effect, placed me in such mortal danger that I had fled, all the way around the corner, to France. And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in yet a tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live? In 1948, no African nation, as such, existed, and could certainly neither have needed, nor welcomed, a penniless black American, with the possible exception of Liberia. But, even with black over seers, I would not have lasted long on the Firestone rubber plantation. I have said that I was almost entirely ignorant of the details of the Algerian-french complexity, but I was endeavoring to correct this ignorance; and one of the ways in which I was going about it compelled me to keep a file of the editorial pronouncements made by M.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the other hand, I couldn't really regret it, since it seemed to me that in this perpetual and bitter fer ment I was learning something which kept me in touch with reality and would deepen the truth of the scenario. Rut I anticipate. People have their environments: the Bev erly Hills Hotel was not mine. For no reason that I could easily name, its space, its opulence, its shapelessness, depressed and fr ightened me. The people in the bar, the lounge, the halls, the walks, the swimming pools, the shops, seemed as rootless as I, seemed unreal. In spite-perhaps because of all my cff<>ns to feel relaxed and fr ee and at home (fix America is my home!) I began to feel unreal-almost as though I were playing an unworthy part in a cheap, unworthy drama. I, who have spent half my life in hotels, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, terrified, wondering where I was. But, though I scarcely realized it, and might even have been ashamed to admit it to myself, I think that this had partly to do with the fact that I was the only black person in the hotel. I must stress that in no way whatever did anyone in the hotel ever make me ted this, nor, indeed, did I ever consciously feel it-it's only now, in looking back, that I suspect it had to be partly that. My presence in the hotel was absolutely unques tioned, even by people who did not know who I was, or who TO BE BAPTIZED 429 thought I was Sammy Davis. It was simply taken for granted that I would not have been in the hotel if I had not belonged there. This, irrationally enough, got to me-did I belong there? In any case, thousands of black people, miles away, did not belong there, though some of them sometimes came to visit me there. (People had to come and get me, or come to visit me, because I do not drive.) The drive from Beverly Hills to Watts and back again is a long and loaded drive-l some times felt as though my body were being stretched across those miles. I don't think I felt anything so trivial as guilt, guilt at what appeared to be my comparative good fortune. I knew more about comparative fortunes than that, but I felt a stunning helplessness.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  This was the moment when the other pawnbrokers had told me to get lost. “Get your thieving ass out of here,” was what the first one had said. I watched her pick things up and set them down again, record players, clarinets, toasters, cameras, whatever came to hand. The shop was long and narrow. Electric guitars hung from the ceiling. Rifles and shotguns were locked in racks against the far wall, beneath a pipe holding up a row of shiny suits with flyaway lapels. “I’m about to close up,” she said. Then she added, as if I had begged her, “All right, maybe I can take a look.” Chuck opened and closed the trunk while I carried the stuff inside. He looked ready to bolt. His face was sickly white and he rolled his eyes like a spooked horse at the people moving past—derelicts, sailors, Indians in cowboy hats, winos doing their wino shuffle and shouting at enemies they alone could see. I was skittish myself. But it took more than a boy with his arms full of firepower to get the attention of these citizens. No one gave us a second look. The pawnbroker ignored me as I went back and forth to the car. I lined everything up on the top of the cabinet and waited. “That it?” she said. I said that was it. She came from around back and locked the door. Then she went behind the counter again. She ran her eyes over the goods. She picked up the double-barreled shotgun, broke it open, held the barrels up to the light and squinted through each of them in turn. Then she snapped the gun shut again, hard, too hard. It was painful to watch. I knew that gun, as I knew the other gun and the rifles. I had used them all and felt respect for them, and something more than respect. I did not like to see them handled as this woman handled them, slapping them around, levering and pumping the actions as if she were trying to break them. But I said nothing. I was unnerved by her big competent hands and her doll’s face that never changed expression, and most of all by her refusal to look at me. The longer she didn’t look at me the more I wanted her to. She made me feel insubstantial, which gave her the edge. And she knew what she was doing. She tore down every gun and rifle without hesitation, checked its barrel, checked its firing mechanism, and put it together again as fast as I could have. Once she’d looked at them all she shrugged and said, “I don’t need this truck.” “But you said you’d look at them.” She turned to the shelf behind her and started lifting things again. “I looked at them.”

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxvii. 2) Or thus: I have said that I lay down My life for you, and that I first chose you. I have said this not by way of reproach, but to induce you to love one another. Then as they were about to suffer persecution and reproach, He bids them not to grieve, but rejoice on that account: If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you: as if to say, I know it is a hard trial, but ye will endure it for My sake. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. lxxxvii. 2) For why should the members exalt themselves above the head? Thou refusest to be in the body, if thou art not willing, with the head, to endure the hatred of the world. For love’s sake let us be patient: the world must hate us, whom it sees hate whatever it loves; If ye were of the world, the world would love his own. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxvii. 2) As if Christ’s suffering were not consolation enough, He consoles them still further by telling them, the hatred of the world would be an evidence of their goodness; so that they ought rather to grieve if they were loved by the world: as that would be evidence of their wickedness.

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

  294 Lecture 44: William Shakespeare—Hamlet William Shakespeare—Hamlet Lecture 44 In this lecture, we’ll take a careful look at Hamlet, which Shakespeare probably wrote in 1600, arguably Shakespeare’s best-known play, unarguably a very great tragedy. There are many ways of looking at this play, and it’s a play of huge complexity. A s in the lecture on Shakespearean comedy, we will focus on Shakespeare’s ability to weave together multiple plots, showing, for example, how the madness of Hamlet is echoed in the madness of Ophelia. The con fl ict in the play between Hamlet’s introspective world and the Machiavellian court of Claudius will provide another central focus for the lecture, as we use this play to make some generalizations about the nature of Shakespearean tragedy. We will look in particular at the play that Hamlet stages to “catch the conscience of the king” as a touchstone both for what is characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy and unique in Hamlet. Just as The Merchant of Venice is representative of Shakespearean comedy, Hamlet is representative of Shakespearean tragedy. Hamlet is a classic tragedy, ending in the deaths of all the main characters. The play begins shortly after the death of Prince Hamlet’s father and the hasty remarriage of Hamlet’s mother to her late husband’s brother, Claudius. Hamlet is brooding over his mother’s marriage. Hamlet is full of self-conscious theatricality. Claudius sends just about everyone to spy on Hamlet, that is, to “act” as if they are Hamlet’s friends. The courtier Polonius spies on Hamlet. Ophelia, Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s love interest, spies on Hamlet. Two of Hamlet’s classmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, also spy on him. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, tells Hamlet that he has been murdered by Claudius, and demands revenge. The plot thickens. Hamlet fi ghts against this sort of theatricality with more theatricality, both feigning madness and employing the theater itself. Hamlet uses a play that recreates the circumstances of his father’s death. This is an

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

  I hadn’t told the officers I was a lawyer or informed them that what they were doing was illegal. Should I have said more to them? Despite the work I’d done assisting people on death row, I questioned how prepared I was to do really difficult things. I even started having second thoughts about going to Alabama to start a law office. I couldn’t stop thinking about how at risk young kids are when they get stopped by the police. My complaint made it through the review process at the Atlanta Police Department. Every few weeks I’d get a letter explaining that the police officers had done nothing wrong and that police work is very difficult. I appealed these dismissals unsuccessfully up the chain of command. Finally, I requested a meeting with the chief of police and the police officers who had stopped me. This request was denied, but the deputy chief met with me. I had asked for an apology and suggested training to prevent similar incidents. The deputy chief nodded politely as I explained what had happened. When I finished, he apologized to me, but I suspected that he just wanted me to leave. He promised that the officers would be required to do some “extra homework on community relations.” I didn’t feel vindicated. My caseload was getting crazy. The lawyers defending the Gadsden City Jail finally acknowledged that Mr. Ruffin’s rights had been violated and that he had been illegally denied his asthma medicine. We won a decent settlement for Mr. Ruffin’s family, so they would at least receive some financial help. I turned the other police misconduct cases over to other lawyers because my death penalty docket was so full. I had no time to make war with the Atlanta Police when I had clients facing execution. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how dangerous and unfair the situation was and how I’d done nothing wrong. And what if I had had drugs in my car? I would have been arrested and then would have needed to convince my attorney to believe me when I explained that the police had entered the car illegally. Would I get an attorney who would take such a claim seriously? Would a judge believe that I’d done nothing wrong? Would they believe someone who was just like me but happened not to be a lawyer? Someone like me who was unemployed or had a prior criminal record? I decided to talk to youth groups, churches, and community organizations about the challenges posed by the presumption of guilt assigned to the poor and people of color. I spoke at local meetings and tried to sensitize people to the need to insist on accountability from law enforcement. I argued that police could improve public safety without abusing people.

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

  He sometimes complained of nightmares. A friend or a relative might say something about how they supported the death penalty—just not for Walter—and he would find himself shaken. All I could tell him was that it would get better. — After a few months, Walter very much wanted to return to the place he’d spent his whole life. It made me nervous, but he went ahead and put a trailer on property he owned in Monroe County and resettled there. He returned to logging work while we made plans to file a civil lawsuit against everyone involved in his wrongful prosecution and conviction. Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time of Walter’s release, only ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. The number has since grown, but even today almost half of all states (twenty-two) offer no compensation to the wrongly imprisoned. Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $20,000; Wisconsin has a $25,000 cap; Oklahoma and Illinois limit the total amount an innocent person can recover to under $200,000, even if the person has spent decades in prison. While other states have caps of more than a million dollars, and many have no cap at all, several states impose onerous eligibility requirements. In some jurisdictions, if the person lacks the support of the prosecuting attorney who wrongly convicted him, compensation will be denied. At the time Walter was set free, Alabama was not among the handful of states that provided aid to innocent people released from prison. The Alabama legislature could pass a special bill granting compensation to a person wrongly convicted, but that almost never happened. A local legislator introduced a bill seeking compensation on Walter’s behalf that prompted the local press to report that Walter was seeking $9 million. The proposed legislation, of which Walter had no prior knowledge, went nowhere. But the news coverage about the possible $9 million payoff outraged people in Monroeville who still questioned his innocence and titillated some of Walter’s friends and family, a few of whom started soliciting him aggressively for financial help. One woman even filed a paternity suit falsely claiming that Walter was the father of her child, a child that was born less than eight months after Walter’s release. DNA tests confirmed that he was not the father.

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

  Realizing that her condition placed burdens on her family, Debbie said, “I worry that having me to take care of has kept my parents from doing other things, especially now that Dad has retired. He plays golf and I know that they’d like to travel more. They make sure there’s someone staying here when they do go away, but I know Mom worries about me and she doesn’t like to stay away too long. But they’ve told me all along that I’m a great gift, not a burden. And most of the time I believe them.” Debbie’s two older siblings, whom I also interviewed, candidly told me that they thought Debbie’s disability had strengthened the marriage of two people whom otherwise seemed somewhat distant and formal in their relationship. This special care does not have to stop because of divorce. In one divorced family, the child lived with the father after the mother left the marriage. But the mother was able to do the shopping and the cooking and to come to the house for several hours a day to stay with her son. Another affluent family hired a housekeeper who went back and forth with the child, who lived in both homes. This arrangement went on for years. When I interviewed the child, who has muscular dystrophy, at age fourteen, he was poised, charming, and well-adjusted. His divorced parents had done a magnificent job. How to Protect the Vulnerable Child after DivorceWHAT PARENTS NEED to know is that all vulnerable children have exceptional trouble with rapid or radical change. The gains that parents work so hard to achieve (a baby finally learns to sit up, a toddler can make it to the toilet, the child is able to travel on the school bus) may be wiped out by divorce. Vulnerable children regress with frightening speed and recovery is painfully slow. Thus families with a vulnerable child who are planning to divorce should carefully plan the transition period. The child’s routines should change as gradually as possible. If one parent has been primary caregiver and the other will now have the child in a separate residence, the caregiver should spend two to three afternoons a week in the child’s new home. The goal is to overlap the old with the new, to enable the child to become slowly used to the new. Obviously, the child’s medical needs take priority, but every effort should be made to maintain familiar interventions, treatments, exercises, and the like so that the child feels comfortable with routines.

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

  After divorce, the drop in income carries other losses that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, like being forced to move away from friends in a familiar neighborhood to less expensive housing, like being exposed to the violence and chaos of a bad neighborhood, like being sent to a more crowded school with overwhelmed teachers. The extras that make life comfortable for a child are lost. Special weekend activities, movies, summer camps, swimming lessons, piano and ballet lessons, uniforms for athletic teams, and other after-school activities, not to mention private schools, are the first to go. Later on, there is the real possibility that children from a father’s second marriage will receive more resources and be given greater opportunities than the child of divorce whose mother does not remarry. The narrowing of educational opportunities and usurping of their place within the family have a chilling effect on children of divorce. Why aim high when you’ve been pushed to the bottom of the ladder with others blocking your way? Loss of Structure I VIVIDLY REMEMBER the first time I saw Paula six months after her parents had separated. A small, wiry child with unkempt, dark curly hair and vivid green eyes, she roamed my playroom restlessly, too anxious to settle down and play. As she picked up and threw down toy after toy, I tried to ask her about her life, her house, her parents, her school, and her sister. Instead, she talked endlessly about her pet dog, Daisy, and ignored all my questions. Then she startled me—for the first of many times—when she suddenly stopped her anxious wandering and said clearly, “I’m going to find a new mommy. ” Here was a child overwhelmed with anxiety. The world had changed overnight into an incomprehensible, unpredictable place in which her central, all-important, caregiving mother had disappeared and was replaced by a series of hastily chosen, low-paid babysitters and a person who resembled her mother but who had little energy or time left over for Paula. Paula’s father, while largely absent from the everyday routines during her early childhood, had brought presents and had played with Paula and her sister when he lived at home. After the separation, his absences grew longer, and after the first year, he disappeared for several years. Paula had lost her place in the world from being a cherished, well-cared-for, protected child who was the centerpiece of the family life to being a child who felt she was a leftover from a failed marriage and a burden around her mother’s neck. At age four these losses cannot be put into words.

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

  Accordingly this text is to be interpreted in the light of the usual style of speech found in the Scriptures, in which God is said to know a thing when He imparts knowledge of that thing, as when He said to Abraham, in Genesis 22:12: “Now I know that you fear God.” The meaning is not that He who knows all things from eternity began to know at that moment, but that He made known Abraham’s devotedness by that declaration. In a similar way the Son is said to be ignorant of the day of judgment, because He did not impart that knowledge to the disciples, but replied to them, Acts 1:7: “It is not for you to know the times or moments which the Father hath put in His own power.” But the Father is not ignorant in this way, since in any case He gave knowledge of the matter to the Son through the eternal generation. Some authors extricate themselves from the difficulty in fewer words, saying that Mark’s expression is to be understood of an adopted son. However that may be, the Lord wished the time of the future judgment to remain hidden, that men might watch with care so as not to be found unprepared at the hour of judgment. For the same reason He also wished the hour of each one’s death to be unknown. For each man will appear at the judgment in the state in which he departs from this world by death. Therefore the Lord admonishes us in Matthew 24:42: “Watch ye therefore, because you know not what hour your Lord will come.” CHAPTER 243 UNIVERSALITY OF THE JUDGMENTAccording to the doctrine thus set forth, Christ clearly has judicial power over the living and the dead. He exercises judgment both over those who are living in the world at present and over those who pass from this world by death. At the Last judgment, however, He will judge the living and the dead together. In this expression the living may be taken to mean the just who live by grace, and the dead may be taken to mean sinners who have fallen from grace. Or else by the living may be meant those who will be found still alive at the Lord’s coming, and by the dead those who have died in previous ages.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  An amazing number of other things were going on at the station too, and I was encouraged not to consider myself special. It took a senior officer, seeing that my father was an ‘Hon’, to make the connection with my grandfather, to enquire if ‘by any chance’ I was related to the former Director of Public Prosecutions whom he remembered, and thence to soften into cautious sycophancy. What was more horrifying, though, was how, in the company of the police, my vulnerable, brutalised state was not soothed but exacerbated; the feeling that anyone might turn on me came over me again as I worried about James. To show my confidence and calm him I had suppressed my vulgar need to know what had happened. Now I began to want calming myself. James’s diaries were always a good read and at Oxford I had made no pretence of not knowing what was in them. Nowadays he kept a more spasmodic record, was often weeks behind, and I found less opportunity to keep up. This was a shame, since they had for me the famous fascination of containing a good deal about myself. They pandered to my heart-throb image—‘Will adorable’, ‘W. looked fabulous’—though there was always a certain risk, as in hesitating at the door of a room where one is being discussed. There were pages—‘W. insufferable’, ‘What a jerk! No regard for my feelings’—where I was obliged to see myself from another point of view. It was like suddenly finding out that someone I knew quite well had been leading a double life: the delectable blond super-stud I loved so much was really a selfish little rich boy, vain, spoilt and even, on one stinging occasion, ‘grotesque’. None of this was quite innocent. Like all diaries it envisaged a reader. The odious Robert Smith-Carson had read long sections of it about himself when James was so infatuated with him, and was both pleased and alarmed by the Wagnerian pitch of the entries (whole paragraphs delirious with exclamations: ‘Weh! Weh! Schmach! Sehnsucht!’ and so on). Other passages had an obscure biblical fervour: one which began ‘His thighs are like bronze doors’ I had subsequently annotated with exclamation marks of my own. My readings were also somehow allowed for, and the baroque candour of the diaries enabled James (who could never bear an argument or cross words) to tell me what he thought of me, without ever letting on in so many words that he was doing so.

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

  466 Lecture 70: Mark Twain telling her to reclaim her property. But then he tears up the note, telling himself that he’ll “go to hell.” Learning that Jim has been captured, Tom conceives a wildly dangerous plan to set him free. Tom’s chief aim is to have as much excitement as possible. In the process, he doesn’t care at all how much he frightens or humiliates Jim or endangers the boys themselves. When Tom reveals that Jim has been legally free for months, he makes us realize that not even the liberal northern conscience is entirely perfect. Since the book was published almost 20 years after slavery was abolished, it gives readers the pleasure of witnessing a moral battle that has already been won by northern morality. But because northern morality required a war that took three-quarters of a million lives, it may not be entirely humane. Beneath the humor of this book lies its merciless revelation of all the harm we may do in the name of good. ■ Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 3 rd ed., edited by Thomas Cooley. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. 1. How does Twain’s portrayal of Huck and Jim complicate or revise your conception of the relation between whites and blacks during the time of slavery? 2. If you could change the ending of Huckleberry Finn, how would you end it? Essential Reading Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

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

  518 Lecture 76: Marcel Proust Marcel Proust Lecture 76 Born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil and raised in Paris, he was the literary equivalent of a hothouse fl ower. Like Flaubert, he was the son of a distinguished doctor; his father made his name as a champion in the war against cholera and pioneered in the fi eld of epidemiology. B ut the single most important in fl uence on Proust came from his mother. Born Jeanne Weil, daughter of a wealthy Jewish Parisian family, she doted on both of her sons, especially the fi rst one, Marcel. Exceptionally sensitive to the value of literature and skilled as a pianist, she and her own mother—Adele Weil, Proust’s grandmother—took personal charge of his early education. Besides hiring tutors and arranging piano lessons for him and his brother, she and her mother taught them languages— chiefl y German and Latin—and nurtured them on what they thought was the best kind of music and literature. With this kind of encouragement, Marcel quickly learned to love reading. Marcel Proust started writing in his teens and at 24 produced his fi rst book, Pleasures and Days (1896). But not until he was nearly 40 did he start work on his semi-autobiographical masterwork of fi ction, In Search of Lost Time. In Swann’ s Way, the fi rst of its many volumes, the deeply introspective narrator—based on Proust himself—meditates at length on memories of his childhood, especially on his sojourns at the house of his grandparents in the fi ctional town of Combray. There, he remembers, he spent evenings waiting anxiously in his bedroom for his mother to come up and kiss him goodnight; there too he fi rst encountered a seemingly inconsequential friend of his grandparents named Charles Swann, who would later be known to the narrator as one of the most elegant members of Parisian high society. But for all his social success, Swann will also prove to be a man of deep sympathy and sensitivity, which will endear him to the narrator even as it distinguishes him from the grand, aristocratic family of the Guermantes. Swann’s way, therefore, will sharply diverge from the Guermantes way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  All over Harlem now there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it. All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut. Yet the white man walki ng through Harlem is not at all likely to find it sinister or more wretched than any other slum . Harlem wears to the casual observer a casual face; no one remarks that-con sidering the history of black men and women and the legends that have sprung up about them, to say nothing of the ever-present policemen, wary on the street corners- the face is, indeed, somewhat excessively casual and may not be as open or as careless as it seems. If an outbreak of more than usual violence occurs, as in 1935 or in 1943, it is met with sorrow and surprise and rage; the social hostility of the rest of the city feeds on this as proof that they were right all along, and the hostility increases; speeches arc made, com mittees arc set up, investigations ensue. Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liabil ity, a process about as helpf ul as make-up to a leper. Thus, we have 42 THE HARLEM GH ETTO 4-3 the Boys' Club on West 1 34-th Street, the playground at West 1 31st and Fifth Avenue; and, since Negroes will not be allowed to live in Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life is thoughtfully erecting a housing project called Riverton in the center of Harlem; however, it is not likely that any but the professional class of Negroes-and not all of them-will be able to pay the rent. Most of these projects have been stimulated by perpetually embattled Negro leaders and by the Negro press. Concerning Negro leaders, the best that one can say is that they are in an impossible position and that the handful motivated by genu ine concern maintain this position with heartbreaking dignity. It is unlikely that anyone acquainted with Harlem seriously assumes that the presence of one playground more or less has any profound effect upon the psychology of the citizens there. And yet it is better to have the playground; it is better than nothing; and it will, at least, make lif e somewhat easier for parents who will then know that their children are not in as much danger of being run down in the streets.