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 Collected Essays (1998)

  And this incoherence which seems to afflict this country is analogous to that. I mean that in order to have a conversation with someone you have to reveal yourself. In order to have a real relationship with somebody you have got to take the risk of being thought, God forbid, "an oddball." You know, you have to take a chance which in some peculiar way we don't seem willing to take. And this is very serious in that it is not so much a writer's problem, that is to say, I don't want to talk about it fr om the point of view of a writer's problem, because, after all, you didn't ask me to become a writer, but it seems to me that the situation of the writer in this country is symptomatic and reveals, says something, very terrifying about this country. If I were writing hypothetically about a Frenchman I would have in a way a fr ame of reference and a point of view and in tact it is easier to write about frenchmen, comparatively speaking, because they interest me so much less. But to try to deal with the American experience, that is to say to deal with this enormous incoherence, these enormous puddings, this shapeless thing, to try and make an American, well listen to them, and try to put that on a page. The truth about dialogue, for example, or the technical side of it, is that you try and make people say what they would say if they could and then you sort of dress it up to look like speech. That is to say that it's really an absolute height, people don't ever talk the way they talk in novels, but I've got to make you believe they do because I can't possibly do a tape recording. But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there arc so many things they do not want to face. And not only the Negro thing which is simply the NOTES FOR A HYPOTHETICAL NOVEL 229 most obvious and perhaps the simplest example, but on the level of private life which is after all where we have to get to in order to write about anything and also the level we have to get to in order to live, it seems to me that the myth, the illusion, that this is a free country, for example, is disastrous. Let me point out to you that fr eedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as fr ee as they want to be.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Both my friend and my brother had a point. I had already read 17Je Devils; now, I forced myself to read Ihe EX01'cist-a ditficult matter, since it is not written; then, I saw the film again, alon e. I tried to be absolutely open to it, suspending judgment as totally as I could. For, after all, if l had once claimed to be "fi lled" with the Holy Ghost, and had once really believed, af ter all, that the Holy Ghost spoke through me, I could not, out of hand, arbitrarily sneer at the notion of demonic possession. The fact that I had been an adolescent boy when I belie Yed all this did not really get me off the hook: I can produce no documents proving that I am not what I was. My friend and I had a drink together, ati:er we had seen the 568 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK film, and we discussed it at some length. He was most struck by the figure of the young priest: he found the key to this personage in a rather strange place, and his observation haunted me for weeks. Father Karras confesses, at one point, that he has lost his faith. "So, we must be careful," David said to me, "lest we lose our faith-and become possessed." He was no longer speaking of the film, nor was he speaking of the chu rch. I carried this somewhat chilling admonition away with me. When I saw the film again, I was most concerned with the audience. I wondered what they were seeing, and what it meant to them. The film, or its ambience, reminded me of The Godfather, both being affiicted with the same pious ambiguity. Ambiguity is not quite the word, for the film's intention is not at all ambiguous; yet, hypocrisy is not quite the word, either, since it suggests a more deliberate and sophisticated level of cun ning. The Exorcist is desperately compulsive, and compulsive, precisely, in the terror of its unbelief.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In spite- perhaps because of all my cff<>ns to feel relaxed and free 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 lif e 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-i t'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 BAPTI ZED 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. These two worlds would never meet, and that fact prefigured disaster for my countrymen, and me. It caused me to look about me with an intensit y of wonder which had no pleasure in it. Perhaps even more than the drive from Beverly Hills to Watts, the effect of this ruthless division was summed up for me by a visit I received from a young, very bright black man whom I had met years before, in Bos ton, after a lecture. The n, he had been very bright indeed, eager, full of ideas for his future, and the future of black peo ple . A few years later, I had run across him, briefly, in Hel sinki-he was studying, and seeing the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Through this delib erate isolation, through lack of numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need to be, as it were, for gotten, the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man. The wariness with which he regards his colored kin is a natural extension of the wariness with which he regards all of his countrymen. At the beginning, certainly, he cherishes rather exaggerated hopes of the French. His white country men, by and large, fail to justifY his fears, partly because the social climate does not encourage an outward display of racial bigotry, partly out of their awareness of being ambassadors, and finally, I should think, because they are themselves re lieved at being no lo nger forced to think in terms of color. There remains, nevertheless, in the encounter of white Amer icans and Negro Americans the high potential of an awkward or an ugly situation. The \\'bite American regards his darker brother through the dis torting sc reen created by a lifetime of conditioning. He is accust omed to regard him either as a needy and deserving martyr or as the soul of rhythm, but he is more than a little intim idated to find this stranger so many miles from home. At first he tends instin ctively, whatever his intelligence may bel atedly clamor, to take it as a reflection on his personal honor and g ood - will ; and at the same time, with that winning generosity, at once good-na tured and uneasy, which charac- ENCO UNTER ON THE SEINE terizes Americans, he would like to establish communication, and sympathy, with his compatriot. "And how do you feel about it?" he would like to ask, "it" being anything-the Russians, Betty Grable, the Place de Ia Concorde. The trouble here is that any "it," so tentatively offered, may suddenly be come loaded and vibrant with tension, creating in the air be tween the two thus met an intolerable atmosphere of danger. The Negro, on the other hand, via the same conditioning which constricts the out ward gesture of the whites, has learned to anticipate: as the mouth opens he divines what the tongue will utter. He has had time, too, long before he came to Paris, to reflect on the absolute and personally expensive futility of taking any one of his countrymen to task for his status in America, or of hoping to convey to them any of his experience.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Elijah was at the head of our table, and I was seated at his left. I can scarcely re member what we ate, except that it was plentiful, sane, and simple-so sane and simple that it made me feel extremely decadent, and I think that I drank, theref ore, two glasses of milk. Elijah mentioned having seen me on television and said 324 THE FIR E NE XT TIME that it seemed to him that I was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become myself. He said this in a cur iously unnerving way, his eyes looking into mine and one hand half hiding his lips, as though he were tryi ng to conceal bad teeth. But his teeth were not bad. Then I remembered hearing that he had spent time in pris on. I supp ose that I JVould like to become myself, whatever that may mean, but I knew that Elijah's meaning and mine were not the same. I said yes, I was trying to be me, but I did not know how to say more than that, and so I waited. Whenever Elijah spoke, a kind of chorus arose from the table, saying "Yes, that's ri ght." This began to set my teeth on edge. And Elijah himself had a further, unnerving habit, which was to ricochet his questions and comments off some one else on their way to you. Now, turning to the man on his right, he began to speak of the white devils with whom I had last appeared on 1V: What had they made him (me) feel? I could not answer this and was not absolutely certain that I was expected to. The people referred to had certainly made me feel exasperated and useless, but I did not think of them as devils. Elijah went on about the cri mes of white people, to this endless chorus of "Yes, that's rig ht." Someone at the table said, "The white man sure is a devil. He proves that by his own actions." I looked around. It was a very young man who had said this, scarcely more than a boy-very dark and sober, very bitter. Elijah began to speak of the Christian relig ion, of Christians, in the same soft, joking way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was impossible, fo r one thing, tor Americans to abandon their beliets, not only because these beliefs alone seemed able to justifY the sacrifices they had endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these beliefs atl()rdcd them their only bulwark against a moral chaos as absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was their destiny to conquer. But in the situation in which Americans t(mnd themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy. Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the bru tality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the world's no tice that those very excesses of which Americans have been STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE 127 guilty imply a certain, unprecedented uneasiness O\'er the idea's life and power, if not, indeed, the idea's ,·alidity. The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of ci\'ilization (the present ci,·ilization, which is the only one that matters; all pre,·ious ci,·ilizations are simply "contributions" to our own) and are therefore ci,· ilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible fo r Americans to accept the black man as one of themseh·es, fo r to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the m·er whelmingly undeniable fo rced Americans into rationalizations so fa ntastic that they approached the pathological. At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Amer icans-lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession-either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usuall�·) to find a way of doing both these things at once.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the evening of the 1 9th I was sitting thinking melan choly thoughts about Christmas and staring at the walls of my room. I imagine that I had sold something or that someone had sent me a Christmas present, for I remember that I had a little money. In those days in Paris, though I floated, so to speak, on a sea of acquaintances, I knew almost no one. Many people were eliminated from my orbit by virtue of the fact that they had more money than I did, which placed me, in my own eyes, in the humiliating role of a free-loa der; and other people were eliminated by virtue of the fact that they enjoyed their poverty, shrilly insisting that this wretched round of hotel rooms, bad food, humiliating concierges, and unpaid bills was the Great Adventure. It couldn't, however, for me, end soon enough, this Great Adventure; there was a real question in my mind as to which would end soonest, the Great Adventure or me. This meant, however, that there were many evenings when I sat in my room, knowing that I 10 + NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON couldn't work there, and not knowing what to do, or whom to sec. On this particular evening I went down and knocked on the American's door. There were two Frenchmen standing in the room, who im mediately introduced themselv es to me as policemen; which did not worl)' me. I had got used to policemen in Paris bob bing up at the most improbable times and places, asking to see one's carte d)identitc. These policemen, however, showed \·el)' little interest in my papers. They were looking for some thing else. I could not imagine what this would be and, since I knew I certainly didn't have it, I scarcely followed the con versation they were having with my friend. I gathered that they were looking for some kind of gangster and since I wasn't a gangster and knew that gangsterism was not, insof ar as he had one, my friend's styl e, I was sure that the two policemen would presently bow and say Merci, messieurs, and leave. For by this time, I remember very clearly, I was dying to have a drink and go to dinner. I did not have a drink or go to dinner for many days after this, and when I did my outraged stomach promptly heaved everything up again. For now one of the policemen began to exhibit the most vivid interest in me and asked, very politely, if he might see my room.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What interracial communication also refers to is that Atlanta is really growing and thri,·ing, and 206 NOBODY KN OWS MY NAM E because it wants to make even more money, it would like to pn.:vcnt incidents that disturb the peace, discourage invest ments, and permit test cases, which the city of Atlanta would certainly lose, to come to the courts. Once this happens, as it certainly will one day, the state of Georgia will be up in arms and the present administration of the city will be out of power. I did not meet a soul in Atlanta (I naturally did not meet any members of the White Citizens' Council, not, anyway, to talk to) who did not pray that the present mayor would be re elected. Not that they loved him particularly, but it is his ad ministration which holds off the holocaust. Now this places Atlanta's wealthy Negroes in a really quite sinister position. Though both they and the mayor are de \'otcd to keeping the peace, their aims and his are not, and cannot be, the same. Many of those lawyers are working day and night on test cases which the mayor is doing his best to keep out of court. The teachers spend their working day at tempting to destroy in their students-and it is not too much to say, in themselv es-those habits of inferiority which form one of the principal cornerstones of segregation as it is prac ticed in the South. Many of the parents listen to speeches by people like Senator Russell and find themselves unable to sleep at night. They are in the extraordinary position of being com pelled to work for the destruction of all they have bought so dearly- their homes, their comfort, the safety of their chil dren. But the satcty of their children is merely comparative; it is all that their comparative strength as a class has bought them so tar; and they arc not sate, really, as long as the bulk of Atlanta's Negroes live in such darkness. On any night, in that other part of town, a policeman may beat up one Negro too many, or some Negro or some white man may simply go berserk. This is all it takes to drive so delicately balanced a city mad. And the island on which these Negroes have built their handsome houses will simply disappear. This is not at all in the interests of Atlanta, and almost c\'cryonc there knows it. Left to itselt� the city might grudg ingly work out compromises designed to reduce the tension and raise the level of Negro lite.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If I were going to be in Hollywood for months, there was no point in raising the odds against me by hating it, or despising it; be sides, such an attitude seemed too obvious a defense against my fear of it. As hotels go, the Beverly Hills is more congenial than most, and certainly everyone there was very nice to me. And so I tried-too hard-to look about me with wonder, and be pleased. But I was already in trouble, and the odds against the venture were very long odds indeed. I was actually in the Beverly Hills until more permanent lodging could be found. This was not easy, since it involved fi nding someone to take care of me-to keep house, cook, and drive. I was no help, since I was still, at the beginning of 1968, committed to various fund-raising functions in the East, and, more particularly, to the question of a lawyer for Tony Maynard, who had been extradited fr om Germany and placed in the Tombs, in New York. He had been extradited very shortly after I left Hamburg, so speedily indeed that I was unable to fly fr om the Coast to meet him in New York, as I had promised. I had engaged, at his suggestion, a lawyer named S. J. Siegel, a very sharp, spry old man, who must have been close to eighty, and who was to teach me a great deal about criminal lawyers. Part of the irreducible conflict which was to drive both Columbia and myself up the wall was already implicit during those early days at the Beverly Hills hotel. The conflict was simply between my life as a writer and my life as-not spokesman exactly, but as public witness to the situ ation of black people. I had to play both roles: there was NO NAME IN THE STREET nothing anyone, including myself, could do about it. This was an unprecedented situation for Columbia, which, after all, had me under exclusive contract and didn't really like my dashing otl� making public appearances. It was an unprecedented sit uation for me, too, since I had never before been under ex clusive contract, and had always juggled my conflicting schedules as best I could. I had lived with my two roles for a long time, and had even, insofar as this is ever true, begun to get used to them-1 accepted, anyway, that the dichotomy wasn't likely to end soon. But it didn't make the Hollywood scene any easier. It wasn't a matter of wiping the slate clean of existing commitments and then vanishing behind the type writer, nor was it even a matter of keeping outside commit ments to a minimum, though I tried: events were moving much faster than that, creating perpetual crises and making ever new demands. Columbia couldn't but be concerned about the time and energy I expended on matters remote fr om the scenario.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The father was at work and the older sister had not vet come home. The boy had looked up once, as I came in, to say, "Good evening, sir," and then left all the rest to his mother. Mrs. R. was a \'cry strong-willed woman, handsome, quiet looking, dressed in black. �othing, she told me, beyond name-calling, had marked G.' s first day at school; but on the second day she received the last of se,·eral threatening phone calls. She was told that if she didn't want her son "cut to ribbons" she had better keep him at home. She heeded this warning to the extent of calling the chief of police. "He told me to go on and send him. He said he'd be there when the cutting started. So I sent him." Even more remark ably perhaps, G. went. No one cut him, in fact no one touched him. The students formed a wall between G. and the entrances, saying only enough, apparently, to make their intention clearly under stood, watching him, and keeping him outside. (I asked him, "What did you feel when they blocked your way?" G. looked up at me, very briefly, with no exp ression on his face, and told me, "Nothing, sir.") At last the principal appeared and took him by the hand and they entered the school, while the chil dren shouted behind them, "�igger-lover!" G. was alone all day at school. "Bu t I thought you already knew some of the kids there," I said. I had been told that he had friends among the white students because of their previous competition in a Soapbox Derby. "Well, none of them are in his classes," his mother told me-a shade too quickly, as though she did not want to dwell on the idea of G.' s daily isolation. "We don't have the same schedule," G. said. It was as though he were coming to his mother's rescue. Then, un willingly, with a kind of interior shrug, "Some of the guys had lunch with me but then the other kids called them names." He went back to his homework. I began to realize that there were not only a great many things G. would not tell me, there was much that he would never tell his mother. "Bu t nobody bothers you, anyway?" 190 NOBOD Y KNOW S MY NAME ":\1 o," he said. "They just-call names. I don't let it bother n1c ." �cvcrthclcss, the principal frequently escorts him through the halls. One day, when G. was alone, a boy tripped him and knocked him down and G. reported this to the principal.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The day’s spasm of emotion for Phil recurred and recurred, and the prospect of the Nantwich book, which was alluring, was also oppressive; suppressed guilt and helplessness over Arthur, as well, added their weight, and as the first light felt its way around the curtains, all the things which showed promise seemed only troublesome, agitating the white sheet of a future imagined without them. I started to fantasise over Phil, but didn’t have the heart for it, had at last no sensation of sex, somehow, in my person. I dozed off, and dreamt of having tea with him in the British Museum; there was a mood of intense restraint between us, and when I woke I could not believe that we could possibly become friends. Uncharacteristically, though the birds were cheeping from four in the morning, I lay in bed slovenly and indecisive until eleven o’clock. By then I had more or less resolved not to write Charles’s memoirs, and to keep my life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people. Even so, the vacuity of a whole wasted morning showed me how much I needed demands to be made. Sleepier for having overslept, I shaved as the bath ran, the steam repeatedly obscuring my image in the mirror. At first flushed with the heat of the water, I sprawled in the bath till it cooled. I remembered sharing a bath at school with the house tart Mountjoy (it rhymed with ‘spongy’) and the long talk with my housemaster, Mr Bast, which had ensued. Mr Bast had taken the opportunity, in that zealous, companionable way which housemasters have when they rediscover the pastoral nature of their vocation, to criticise the lack of one in me. ‘You’ve got a good brain, William,’ he said; ‘you’re good at games—and I can see why the other boys find you attractive (oh yes, I know all about that). But you should have better things to do with your spare time than messing around with Mountjoy. You lack vocation, William, that is what troubles me.’ At that disaffected age, I felt it was a lack to be proud of. In the following weeks I messed around with Mountjoy far more than before. ‘This is my vocation,’ I would tell him, as we met up after books and sloped off over to Meads for a quick one. I was nearly asleep when the phone rang; I lurched dripping into the bedroom, sheltering myself in an enormous bath towel. It was James. ‘There are various references in Waugh’s Diaries ,’ he said. ‘To Nantwich, you mean?’ ‘Yes. They’re mostly only glancing—he must have known him at Oxford, and after. There’s no Oxford diary of course. The most interesting one is before Waugh goes to Africa: “Dinner with Alastair, who returns to Cairo on Sunday. We ran over the Abyssinian plan again.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Most of the pictures, however, derived from his African years. There were predictable snaps of Charles on a camel, with the Sphinx in the background—a tourist memento explained by the inscription on the back, ‘On leave, 1925’. Most of them, though, clearly—or, in many cases, fuzzily—depicted life in the field, and were full of reticent authenticity. Typically, they showed groups of natives, largely or wholly naked, standing round under dead-looking trees, gazing at flocks of goats or herds of cattle. In some Charles appeared, in shorts and sola topi, flanked by robed, shock-headed men of intense blackness. There was one heavily creased photograph of an exquisitely soulful black youth, cropped at an angle, where presumably another figure in the picture had been scissored off. After the scene in Charles’s bedroom this gave me a mild unease, as if it might be a magical act of elimination. In only one picture did a woman appear prominently. This was a very old-fashioned studio item, in which Charles, still young, and beautifully dressed, leant over the back of a little gilt sofa, on which a pretty, thin-lipped woman was sitting. Behind them the balustrade and pillars of the photographer’s set made as if to recede into a romantically hazy background and to confer on the couple the flushed transience of a Fragonard. Such arcadian hints, however, seemed to have been ignored by the sitters, who appeared tense, and though skilfully grouped by the artist, curiously separate. Had there been a woman in Charles’s life, then, an episode of which this was the unhappy reminder? It seemed more probable that it was a sister; and there was a troubled quality about the eyes of both sitters that suggested some family connexion. Did the people in wherever it was that they hailed from talk of the melancholy and ill-starred Nantwiches? It was certainly time to do that basic research which Charles had already several times recommended to me. I returned the photographs to their envelope: most of them had no annotation on the back, and though suggestive and informative in a general sort of way, they did little to enlighten me. I did not know how thoughtfully Charles had collected them for me, but it was quite possible that his had not been a very thoroughly photographed career. Evidently doing this job would be as much a matter of probing his memory for links and identifications, as of reading his personalia and getting up the history of the Sudan.

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

  Whether we should be solicitous about the future?Objection 1: It would seem that we should be solicitous about the future. For it is written (Prov. 6:6–8): “Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways and learn wisdom; which, although she hath no guide, nor master . . . provideth her meat for herself in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” Now this is to be solicitous about the future. Therefore solicitude about the future is praiseworthy. Objection 2: Further, solicitude pertains to prudence. But prudence is chiefly about the future, since its principal part is “foresight of future things,” as stated above ([2829]Q[49], A[6], ad 1). Therefore it is virtuous to be solicitous about the future. Objection 3: Further, whoever puts something by that he may keep it for the morrow, is solicitous about the future. Now we read (Jn. 12:6) that Christ had a bag for keeping things in, which Judas carried, and (Acts 4:34–37) that the Apostles kept the price of the land, which had been laid at their feet. Therefore it is lawful to be solicitous about the future. On the contrary, Our Lord said (Mat. 6:34): “Be not . . . solicitous for tomorrow”; where “tomorrow” stands for the future, as Jerome says in his commentary on this passage. I answer that, No work can be virtuous, unless it be vested with its due circumstances, and among these is the due time, according to Eccles. 8:6, “There is a time and opportunity for every business”; which applies not only to external deeds but also to internal solicitude. For every time has its own fitting proper solicitude; thus solicitude about the crops belongs to the summer time, and solicitude about the vintage to the time of autumn. Accordingly if a man were solicitous about the vintage during the summer, he would be needlessly forestalling the solicitude belonging to a future time. Hence Our Lord forbids such like excessive solicitude, saying: “Be . . . not solicitous for tomorrow,” wherefore He adds, “for the morrow will be solicitous for itself,” that is to say, the morrow will have its own solicitude, which will be burden enough for the soul. This is what He means by adding: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,” namely, the burden of solicitude. Reply to Objection 1: The ant is solicitous at a befitting time, and it is this that is proposed for our example. Reply to Objection 2: Due foresight of the future belongs to prudence. But it would be an inordinate foresight or solicitude about the future, if a man were to seek temporal things, to which the terms “past” and “future” apply, as ends, or if he were to seek them in excess of the needs of the present life, or if he were to forestall the time for solicitude.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic. We may all breathe more easily. Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished? However inaccurate our portraits of them were, these por traits do suggest, not only the conditions, but the quality of their lives and the impact of this spectacle on our consciences. There was no one more forbearing than Aunt Jemima, no one stronger or more pious or more loyal or more wise; there was, at the same time, no one weaker or more faithless or more 22 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON ,·icious and certainly no one more immoral. Uncle Tom, trust \H>rthy and sexless, needed only to drop the title "Uncle" to become \'iolent, crafty, and sullen, a menace to any white woman who passed by. They prepared our feast tables and our burial clothes; and, if we could boast that we understood them, it was far more to the point and far more true that they understood us. They were, moreover, the only people in the world who did; and not only did they know us better than we knew ourselves, but they knew us better than we knew them. This was the piquant flavoring to the national joke, it lay be hind our uneasiness as it lay behind our benevolence: Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, our creations, at the last evaded us; they had a life-their own, perhaps a better life than ours and they would never tell us what it was. At the point where we were driven most privately and painfully to conjecture what depths of contempt, what heights of indifference, what prod igies of resilience, what untamable superiority allowed them so vi,·idly to endure, neither perishing nor rising up in a body to wipe us from the earth, the image perpetually shattered and the word failed. The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace. In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, fi lling the air with flying things and an unenlightened wailing. Wherever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger.

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

  I answer that, We must make a distinction in the matter of giving evidence: because sometimes a certain man’s evidence is necessary, and sometimes not. If the necessary evidence is that of a man subject to a superior whom, in matters pertaining to justice, he is bound to obey, without doubt he is bound to give evidence on those points which are required of him in accordance with the order of justice, for instance on manifest things or when ill-report has preceded. If however he is required to give evidence on other points, for instance secret matters, and those of which no ill-report has preceded, he is not bound to give evidence. On the other hand, if his evidence be required by authority of a superior whom he is bound to obey, we must make a distinction: because if his evidence is required in order to deliver a man from an unjust death or any other penalty, or from false defamation, or some loss, in such cases he is bound to give evidence. Even if his evidence is not demanded, he is bound to do what he can to declare the truth to someone who may profit thereby. For it is written (Ps. 81:4): “Rescue the poor, and deliver the needy from the hand of the sinner”; and (Prov. 24:11): “Deliver them that are led to death”; and (Rom. 1:32): “They are worthy of death, not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them,” on which words a gloss says: “To be silent when one can disprove is to consent.” In matters pertaining to a man’s condemnation, one is not bound to give evidence, except when one is constrained by a superior in accordance with the order of justice; since if the truth of such a matter be concealed, no particular injury is inflicted on anyone. Or, if some danger threatens the accuser, it matters not since he risked the danger of his own accord: whereas it is different with the accused, who incurs the danger against his will. Reply to Objection 1: Augustine is speaking of concealment of the truth in a case when a man is not compelled by his superior’s authority to declare the truth, and when such concealment is not specially injurious to any person.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And, indeed, the at mosphere was strange. No one, black or white, seemed quite to believe what was happening and eYeryone was tense with the question of which direction the conference would take. Hanging in the air, as real as the heat from which we suffered, were the great specters of America and Russia, of the battle going on between them tor the domination of the world. The resolution of this battle might Yery well depend on the earth's non-European population, a population \'astly outnumbering Europe's, and which had suffered such injustices at European hands. With the best will in the world, no one now living could undo what past generations had accomplished. The great question was what, exactly, had they accomplished: whether the evil, of which there had been so much, alone liYed after them, whether the good, and there had been some, had been interred with their bones. Of the messages from well-w ishers which were read NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME immedi ately after Diop's speech, the one which caused the greatest stir came from America's W. E. B. Du Bois. "I am not present at your meeting," he began, "because the U.S. government will not give me a passpor t." The reading was interrupted at this point by great waves of laughter, by no means good-natured, and by a roar of applause, which, as it clearly could not have been intended fo r the State Depart ment, was intended to express admiration fo r Du Bois' plain speaking. "Any American Negro traveling abr oad today must either not care about Negroes or say what the State Depart ment wishes him to say." This, of course, drew more applause. It also very neatly compromised whatever effectiveness the five-man American delegation then sitting in the hall might have hoped to have. It was less Du Bois' extremely ill-consid ered communication which did this than the incontestable fact that he had not been allo wed to leave his country.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Judicial clerkships are one-year stints with federal judges. It’s a fantastic learning experience for young lawyers: Clerks read court filings, research legal issues for a judge, and even help the judge draft opinions. Every former clerk raves about the experience, and private-sector employers often shell out tens of thousands in signing bonuses for recent clerks. That’s what I knew about clerkships, and it was completely true. It was also very superficial: The clerkship process is infinitely more complex. First you have to decide what kind of court you want to work for: a court that does a lot of trials or a court that hears appeals from lower courts. Then you have to decide which regions of the country to apply to. If you want to clerk for the Supreme Court, certain “feeder” judges give you a greater chance of doing so. Predictably, those judges hire more competitively, so holding out for a feeder judge carries certain risks—if you win the game, you’re halfway to the chambers of the nation’s highest court; if you lose, you’re stuck without a clerkship. Sprinkled on top of these factors is the reality that you work closely with these judges. And no one wants to waste a year getting berated by an asshole in black robes. There’s no database that spits out this information, no central source that tells you which judges are nice, which judges send people to the Supreme Court, and which type of work—trial or appellate—you want to do. In fact, it’s considered almost unseemly to talk about these things. How do you ask a professor if the judge he’s recommending you to is a nice lady? It’s trickier than it might seem. So to get this information, you have to tap into your social network—student groups, friends who have clerked, and the few professors who are willing to give brutally honest advice. By this point in my law school experience, I had learned that the only way to take advantage of networking was to ask. So I did. Amy Chua told me that I shouldn’t worry about clerking for a prestigious feeder judge because the credential wouldn’t prove very useful, given my ambitions. But I pushed until she relented and agreed to recommend me to a high-powered federal judge with deep connections to multiple Supreme Court justices. I submitted all the materials—a résumé, a polished writing sample, and a desperate letter of interest. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Maybe, with my Southern drawl and lack of a family pedigree, I felt like I needed proof that I belonged at Yale Law. Or maybe I was just following the herd. Regardless of the reason, I needed to have this credential. A few days after I submitted my materials, Amy called me into her office to let me know that I had made the short list. My heart fluttered. I knew that all I needed was an interview and I’d get the job.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  We meet the story of Paphnutius and the virgin in the Conferences of John Cassian, a later contemporary of Augustine who did more than anyone to translate the lessons of eastern asceticism into a western tradition of cenobitic monasticism. Although Foucault’s work on ancient Christianity was cut short by his death, it is evident from the published fragments that he intended to treat Cassian’s thought as the quintessence of late antique sexual morality. This would have been both a canny and an idiosyncratic choice. Cassian outlines, with the prescriptive clarity of an institutional founder, the place of sexual austerity within a communal monastic regimen. For Cassian, chastity was one element in a complex of interrelated virtues through which the monk sought extraordinary personal transformation. The pursuit of chastity entailed a demanding regimen to control both “the heat of the body” and the “motion of the soul.” For Cassian, the monk could transcend sexual desire only by reaching a state of exalted love for his own purity; to resist pleasure was mere abstinence, but to rebuild the self as a creature untouched by its temptations was true chastity. Cassian outlined six degrees of chastity through which the monk might, with the infusion of divine grace, seek perfection: first, not to be struck down by carnal sin; second, not to let his mind dilate on thoughts of pleasure; third, not to let the sight of a woman move him to lust; fourth, not to suffer a “little movement of the flesh” while awake; fifth, when some occasion for thought of human generation occurred, such as a suggestive passage of the reading, not to give the “slightest assent” to sensual thoughts; and finally, not to be tormented by seductive visions of women while sleeping. For Cassian, a concern with nocturnal emissions that had quietly percolated in ecclesiastical and monastic circles for centuries suddenly lurches into the foreground, as the supreme test of having transcended physical desire. For Cassian, involuntary discharges were not a matter of purity and pollution, in any physical sense. Rather, they were a sign of the monk’s interior state, a privileged window into the murkiness of the self in an intense system of self-scrutiny.3

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Few cultures have been so pervasively fi xated on the limits of human agency within a vast, impersonal cosmos as the inhabitants of the high Roman Empire. Th e Greek novels, on questions of sexuality and cosmology alike, were in direct dialogue with the homiletic and philosophical literature of the age. Th e novels explore the very themes that occupied sages and T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  sophists across the Mediterranean. Freedom in the face of an overwhelming fate was the byword of Stoicism, and Achilles Tatius is, surely, manipulat-ing the Stoic idea of an internal faculty, in de pen dent from any external cause, that Leucippe can exercise regardless of her circumstance. But the allusion to the problem of fate is hardly an endorsement of Stoicism— quite the opposite. Whereas the Stoics advised a carefully studied indiff erence to eros in a universe so vast that mankind’s pleasures were dwarfed by the unfathomable enormity of the heavens, the novels present a world keenly knit by the gods so that mankind might fi nd in erotic fulfi llment nothing short of salvation. Like the Stoic, Achilles appreciates the limited range of motion allotted to the individual by the cosmos; unlike the Stoic, he would locate selfhood and salvation in the movement of erotic energy through the heated clay of the human body. Th e novelist had the discretion to let art speak for itself, but his romance stands as an intricate rebuttal to the gloomy fastidiousness of his philosophical contemporaries. Leucippe’s freedom is a key to the way the novels work and the way they can guide us through the sexual landscape of the high Roman Empire. Her freedom referred at once to her social status and her subjective agency. Of course, the fact that she invokes her freedom at the exact moment when she seems most constrained underscores the extent to which the individual’s agency was limited. Th e novels are fatalistic romances, stories of the overpowering, divine force of erotic love. Th ey are unusually aware of the external forces— nature and society— bearing on the individual and determining his or her fate. Here is the novels’ most authentic level of repre sen ta tion, and the greatest opportunity they aff ord to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. Th ey preserve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second- century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately off ers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achilles Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same- sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life- course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the phi los ophers. Th

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One goes to the unpro tected-those, precisely, who need the law's protection most!-and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person-ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love tor justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. I saw Martin in New York, and we did our Carnegie Hall gig. Everything I had was dirty, and I had to rush out and buy a dark suit for the occasion. Atl:er two or three murder ously crowded days, I was on the plane again, flying West. Each time I left New York, I felt that I had heartlessly aban doned Valerie and Tony, and was always tempted to abandon the script instead, and sec the battle in New York through. But I knew, of course, that I couldn't do that; in a way they were the same battle: yet, I couldn't help wondering if I were destined to lose them both. There is a day in Palm Springs that I will remember forever, a bright day. I had moved there trom the Beverly Hills Hotel, into a house the producer had found for me. Billy Dec Williams had come to town, and he was staying at the house; and a lot of the day had been spent with a very bright, young, lady reporter, who was interviewing me about the film version of Malcolm. I felt very confident that day-I was never to feel so confident again-and I talked very trccly to the reporter. (Too freely, Marvin Worth, the producer, was to tell me later.) I had decided to lay my cards on the table and to state, as clearly as I could, what I felt the movie was about and how I intended to handle it. I thought that this might make things simpler later on, but I was wrong about that. The studio and I were at loggerheads, really, from the moment I stepped otT the plane. Anyway, I had opted for candor, or a reasonable facsimile of same, and sounded as though I were in charge of ++ 6 NO NAME IN THE STREET the film, as, indeed, by my lights, for that moment, certainly, I had to be.