Awe

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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle towards the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer’s stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head. Then there was the protracted and awkward process of getting him along his already repopulated row. James and I were mesmerised, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved. It had become an episode in his past, just as the blessing of Billy Budd was in the memory of the elderly Captain Vere. Indeed, gazing at Pears, who was doubtless embarrassed and uncomfortable as he finally regained his seat, I reacted to him as if he were himself an operatic character—just as I had entered with spurious, or purely aesthetic, emotion into Charles Nantwich’s war-time adolescence, and the loss of his shell-damaged idol in a Hertfordshire mental hospital. It was an irresistible elegiac need for the tendernesses of an England long past. Then the lights went down, my grandfather said curtly, ‘I don’t give him long,’ and we all applauded the orchestra. I didn’t see Phil the following night as he was going for a drink with some friends and I couldn’t face the boredom and frustration of it. Besides, I would have been out of place, and a puzzle to his mates, who didn’t know—it was so soon, they couldn’t yet know—that he was gay. ‘Why don’t you go and see your friends,’ Phil had suggested to me, and I had retorted, ‘But, dearest, I don’t have any friends’—a hyperbole which expressed a surprising truth. There were people I was glad to see, but almost no one I would seek out, or invite for a meal or a drink. Instead, I sat up in the dining-room with a bottle of Scotch and Charles’s Oxford diary:

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  The day following I saw there a great number of persons apparelled in divers colours, having painted faces, mitres on their heads, vestiments coloured like saffron, Surplesses of silke, and on their feet yellow shooes, who attired the goddesse in a robe of Purple, and put her upon my backe. Then they went forth with their armes naked to their shoulders, bearing with them great swords and mightie axes, and dancing like mad persons. After that we had passed many small villages, we fortuned to come to one Britunis house, where at our first entrie they began to hurle themselves hither and thither, as though they were mad. They made a thousand gestures with their feete and their hands, they would bite themselves, finally, every one tooke his weapon and wounded his armes in divers places.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’—making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined. The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring. There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the substantia nigra, an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble. Boys’ boxing, of course, is not nearly so awful. The bouts are short, the refereeing paternal and attentive. Any moderately heavy punch is followed by a standing count, and fights are swiftly brought to an end if there are signs of stunning or bleeding. It maintains too, in some ideal, Greek way, an ethos of sport rather than violence. In the hall tonight the Limehouse supporters far outnumbered the St Albans visitors—and the place was small enough for individual voices shouting their encouragement to be heard, just as they might have been decades before in hymns or prayers in the same building. But when the fights were over, and the referee held the boys’ huge gloved hands in his smaller fingers, jerking aloft the winner’s arm as the result was announced, there was a touching mood of friendship, the boys embracing, patting each other clumsily with their upholstered fists, clasping the hands of the cutmen and the trainers in their gentle paws.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One of the songs we sang comes out of the last of the Egyptian plagues, the death of the firstborn: when I see the blood, I will pass over you. (There is a reason that blacks call each other "blood s.") Another of the songs is, at once, more remote, and yet more present: somebody needs you, Lord, come by here! I had been prayed through, and I, then , prayed others through: had testified to having been born again, and, then, helped others to be born again. The word "belief" has nearly no meaning anymore, in the recognized languages, and ineptly approaches the reality to which I am referring: for there can be no doubt that it is a reality. The blacks had first been claimed by the Christian church, and then excluded from the company of white Chris- 566 THE DE VIL FINDS WORK tians-fro m the fellowship of Christians: which taught us all that we needed to know about white Christians. The blacks did not so much use Christian symbols as recognize them recognize them tor what they were before the Christians came along-and, thus, reinvested these symbols with their original energy. The proof of this, simply, is the continued existence and authority of the blacks: it is through the creation of the black church that an unwritten, dispersed, and violated inher itance has been handed down. The word "revelation" has very little meaning in the recognized languages: yet, it is the only word for the moment I am attempting to approach. This mo ment changes one f(>rever. One is confronted with the agony and the nakedness and the beauty of a power which has no beginning and no end, which contains you, and which you contain, and which will be using you when your bones are dust. One thus confronts a self both limited and boundless, born to die and born to live. The creature is, also, the cre ation, and responsible, endlessly, fi>r that perpetual act of creation which is both the self and more than the self. One is set free, then, to live among one's terrors, hour by hour and day by day, alone, and yet never alone. My soul is a Jvit ness!-so one's ancestors proclaim, and in the deadliest of the midnight hours. To live in connection with a lite beyond this lif e means, in effect-in truth-that, frightened as one may be, and no mat ter how limited, or how lonely, and no matter how the deal, at last, goes down, no man can ever frighten you . This is why blacks can be heard to say, I ain't got to do nothing but stay black, and die!: which is, af ter all, a tar more affirmative ap prehension than I'm free, white, and twent y-one.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Some of the men I am thinking of could be very impressive publi cly, too, and responsible for large events; but it was not this which impressed me. What impressed me was how they went about their daily tasks, in the teeth of the Southern ter ror. The first time I saw Reverend Shut tlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot of the motel where I was staying, his hat perched precariously between the back of his skull and the nape of his neck, al one. It was late at night, and Shuttlesworth was a marked man in Birmingham. He came up into my room, and, while we talked, he kept walking back and forth to the window. I finally realized that he was keeping an eye on his car-making sure that no one put a bomb in it, perhaps. As he said nothing about this, however, 394 NO NAM E IN THE STREE T naturally could not. But I was worried about his driving home alone, and, as he was leaving, I could not resist saying something to this effect. And he smiled-smiled as though I were a novice, with much to learn, which was true, and as though he would be glad to give me a few pointers, which, indeed, not much later on, he did-and told me he'd be all right and went downstairs and got into his car, switched on the motor and drove off into the soft Alabama night. There was no hint of defiance or bravado in his manner. Only, when I made my halting observation concerning his safety, a shade of sorrow crossed his face, deep, impatient, dark; then it was gone. It was the most impersonal anguish I had ever seen on a man's face. It was as though he were wrestling with the mighty fact that the danger in which he stood was as nothing compared to the spiritual horror which drove those who were trying to destroy him. They endangered him, but they doomed themselves. I had never seen this horror, this poverty, before, though I had worked among Southerners, years before, when I was working for the Army, during the war. It was very frightening, disagreeable, and dangerous, but I was not, after all , in their territory-in a sense, or at least as they resentfully supposed, they were in mine. Also, I could, in a sense, protect myself against their depredations and the fear that they inspired in me by considering them, quite honestly, as mad. And I was too young for the idea of my death or destruction really to have taken hold of my mind. It is hard for anyone under twenty to realize that death has already assigned him a num ber, which is going to come up one day. But I was not in my territory now.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was taken into his office to wait fo r him. I welcomed the op portunity of seeing the office without the man. It is a very small office, most of it taken up by a desk. The desk is placed smack in front of the window-not that it could have been placed anyw·here else; this window looks out on the daylight landscape of Bergman's movies. It was gray and glar ing the first day I was there, dry and fiery. Leaves kept fa lling from the trees, each silent descent bringirtg a little closer the long, dark, Swedish winter. The fo rest Bergman's characters are always traversing is outside this window and the ominous carriage fr om which they have yet to escape is still among the properties. I realized, with a small shock, that the landscape of Bergman's mind was simply the landscape in which he had grown up. On the desk were papers, fo lders, a few books, all very neatly arranged. Squeezed between the desk and the wall was a spartan cot; a brown leather jacket and a brown knitted cap were lying on it. The visitor's chair in which I sat was placed at an angle to the door, which proximity, each time that I was NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME there, led to much bumping and scraping and smiling ex changes in Esperanto. On the wall were three photographs of Charlie Chaplin and one of Victor Sjostr(im. Eventually, he came in, bareheaded, wearing a sweater, a tall man, economically, intimidatingly lean. He must have been the gawkiest of adolescents, his arms and legs still seem ing to be very loosely anchored; something in his good natured, self-possessed directness suggests that he would also have been among the most belligerently opinionated: by no means an easy man to deal with, in any sense, any relationship whatever, there being about him the evangelical distance of someone possessed by a vision. This extremely dangerous quality-authority-has never fa iled to incite the hostility of the many. And I got the impression that Bergman was in the habit of saying what he fe lt because he knew that scarcely anyone was listening. He suggested tea, partly, I think, to give both of us time to become easier with each other, but also because he really needed a cup of tea before going back to work. We walked out of the office and down the road to the canteen. I had arrived in Stockholm with what turned out to be the "flu" and I kept coughing and sneezing and wiping my eyes. After a while Bergman began to look at me worriedly and said that I sounded very ill.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was in territory ab solutely hostile and exceedingly strange, and I was old enough to realize that I could be destroyed. It was luck y, oddly enough, that I had been out of the country for so long and had come South from Paris, in effect, instead of from New Yo rk. If I had not come from Paris, I would certainly have attempted to draw on my considerable kit of New Yo rk sur vival tricks, with what results I cannot imagine, for they would certainly not have worked in the South. But I had so far for gotten all my New Yo rk tricks as to have been unable to use TAKE ME TO THE WA TER 395 them in New Yo rk, and now I was simply, helples sly, nakedly, an odd kind of foreigner and could only look on the scene that way. And this meant that, exactly like a foreigner, I was more fascinated than frightened. There was more than enough to fascinate. In the Deep South-Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, for example there is the great, vast, brooding, welcoming and blood stained land, beautiful enough to astonish and break the heart. The land seems nearly to weep beneath the burden of this civilization's unnameable excrescences. The people and the children wander blindly through their forest of billb oards, antennae, Coca-Cola bottles, gas stations, drive-i ns, motels, beer cans, music of a strident and invincible melan chol y, stilted wooden porches, snapping fans, aggressively blue jeaned buttocks, strutting crotches, pint bottles, condoms, in the weeds, rotting automobile corpses, brown as beetles, car rings fl ashing in the gloom of bus stops: over all there seems to hang a miasma of lust and longing and rage. Every South ern city seemed to me to have been but lately rescued from the swamps, which were patiently waiting to reclaim it. The people all seemed to remember their time under water, and to be both dreading and anticipating their return to that free dom from responsibility. Every black man, whatever his styl e, had been scarred, as in some tribal rite; and every white man, though white men, mostly, had no style, had been maimed. And, everywhere, the women, the most fearfully mistreated creatures of this region, with narrowed eyes and pursed lips lips turned inward on a foul aftertaste-watc hed and rocked and waited. Some of them reminded me of a moment in my adolescent lif e when a church sister, not much older than I, who had been my girl friend, went mad, and was incarcerated. I went to visit her, in the women's wing of the asylum, and, coming out into the courtyard, stood there for a moment to catch my breath. Something, eventual ly, made me turn my head.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I think Emile knew it. I had hoped for a reprieve, hoped, on the marked Sunday, to get away, unnoticed: but I was the "young" Brother Bald win, and I sat in the front row, and the pastor did not begin his sermon until about a quarter past one. Well. At one thirty, 1-ti p-t oed-out. The further details of my departure do not concern us here: that was how I left the church. I am fairly certain that the matinee, that Sunday, was Native Son (also directed by Orson Welles) at the St. James Theatre. We were in the balcony, and I remember standing up, abruptly and unwisely, when the play ended, and nearly fal ling headlong from the balcony to the pit. I did not know that I had been hit so hard: I will not forget Canada Lee's perfor mance as long as I live. Canada Lee was Bigger Thomas, but he was also Canada Lee: his physical presence, like the physical presence of Paul Robeson, gave me the right to live. He was not at the mercy of my imagination, as he would have been, on the screen: he was on the stage, in flesh and blood, and I was, therefore, at the mercy of his imagination. 504 THE DE VIL FI NDS WO RK For that long-ago Macbeth had both terrified and exhila rated me. I knew enough to know that the actress (the colored lady!) who played Lady Macbeth might very well be a janitor, or a janitor's wife, when the play closed, or when the curtain came down. Macbeth was a nigger, just like me, and I saw the witches in church, every Sunday, and all up and down the block, all week long, and Banquo's face was a familiar face. At the same time, the majesty and torment on that stage were real: indeed they revealed the play, Macbeth. They were those people and that torment was a torment I recognized, those were real daggers, it was real blood, and those crimes re sounded and compounded, as real crimes do: I did not have to ask, what happens to them now? And, if niggers have rhythm, these niggers had the beat-tomorrow and tomorrow and to morrow, and-thou shalt be King hereafter! It is not accidental that I was carrying around the plot of a play in my head, and looking, with a new wonder (and a new terror) at everyone around me, when I suddenly found myself on the floor of the church, one Sunday, crying holy unto the Lord. Flesh and blood had proved to be too much for flesh and blood. For, they were themselves, these actors-these people were themselves.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Of course, the reason fo r Europe's comparative clarity con cerning the diff-erent timctions of men in society is that Eu ropean society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer con siders himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition of intellectual activity, of letters-and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition docs not exist in America. On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effo rt (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately). An American writer fights his way to one of the lowest rungs on the American social ladder by means of pure bull-headedness and an indescribable series of odd jobs. He probably has been a "regular fe llow" fo r much of his adult lite, and it is not easy tor him to step out of that lukewarm bath. We must, however, consider a rather serious paradox: though An1erican society is more mobile than Europe's, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American lite. Where everyone has status, it is also perfectly possible, atter all, that no one has. It seems inevi table, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what his status is. But Europeans have lived with the idea of status fo r a long NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME time. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and, in neither case, fe el threatened. And this means that the actor and the waiter can have a freer and more genuinely friendly relationship in Europe than they are likely to have here. The waiter does not fe el, with obscure resentment, that the actor has "made it," and the actor is not tormented by the fe ar that he may find himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter. This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to fe el-almost certainly t<>r the first time in his lite-that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary fe eling.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But their importance is, and the importance of writers in this country now is this, that this country is yet to be dis covered in any real sense. There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has 230 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it and almost all of us have one way or another-this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish. Now, I don't want to keep you any longer. But I'd like to leave you with this, I think we have some idea about reality which is not quite true. Without having anything whatever against Cadillacs, refrigerators or all the parapher nalia of American life, I yet suspect that there is something much more important and much more real which produces the Cadillac, refrigerator, atom bomb, and what produces it, after all, is something which we don't seem to want to look at, and that is the person. A country is only as good-! don't care now about the Constitution and the laws, at the moment let us leave these things aside-a country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become. Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me. I don't believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over. ro. The Male Prison T HERE is something immensely humbling in this last doc ument [Madeleine by Andre Gide] from the hand of a writer whose elaborately graceful fiction very often impressed me as simply cold, solemn and irritatingly pious, and whose precise memoirs made me accuse him of the most exasperating egocentricity. He does not, to be sure, emerge in Madeleine as being less egocentric; but one is compelled to see this ego centricity as one of the conditions of his life and one of the elements of his pain.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They could be Macbeth only because they were themselves: my first real apprehension of the mortal challenge. Here, nothing corroborated any of my fantasies: flesh and blood was being challenged by flesh and blood. It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the camera is the language of our dreams. 2 Who Saw Him Die? I, Said The Fly If religion was a thing money could buy, The rich would live, and the poor would die. Traditio nal I Shall Spit on Your Graves is a French look at the black American problem. It is, also, an utterly cynical use of the name of Boris Vian, the young Frenchman who wrote the novel on which the film is emphatically not based. (I am told that Vian never saw the completed film. During the first screening of the film, he had a heart attack, and died. The story may be apocryphal, but I can well believe it.) Vian himself points out, somewhat savagely, that I Shall Spit on Your Graves is not a very good novel: he was enraged (and enlightened) by the vogue it had in France. This vogue was due partly to the fact that it was presented as Vian 's translation of an American novel. But this vogue was due also to Vian himself, who was one of the most striking figures of a long ago Saint-Ge rmain des Pres. I am speaking of the immediate post-war years. Paris was then on bicycles: there were few cars, and gas (along with milk, cheese, and butter) was rationed. Ju liette Greco was in the process of becoming famous in Le Tabou, and was often to be seen driving an ancient automo bile: she was the envy of the neighborhood. Sydney Bechet and Claude Luter were playing together at Le Vieux Co/om bier, Kenny Clar ke was soon to arrive. There were jam sessions over a theater in rue Fontaine which lasted until dawn, and sometimes until noon, at one of which jam sessions I first heard Annie Ross. I was sitting at the Caf e Flore one afternoon when an enor mous car, with baggage piled on the roof, stopped before the cafe. A large woman opened the car door, leaned out, and yelled, "Is Je an- Paul Sartre here today?"

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  For I am not onely of kindred to thy mother by blood, but also by nourice, for wee both descended of the line of Plutarch, lay in one belly, sucked the same paps, and were brought up together in one house. And further there is no other difference betweene us two, but that she is married more honourably than I: I am the same Byrrhena whom you have often heard named among your friends at home: wherfore I pray you to take so much pains as to come with me to my house, and use it as your owne. At whose words I was partly abashed and sayd, God forbid Cosin that I should forsake myne Host Milo without any reasonable cause; but verily I will, as often as I have occasion to passe by thy house, come and see how you doe. And while we were talking thus together, little by little wee came to her house, and behold the gates of the same were very beautifully set with pillars quadrangle wise, on the top wherof were placed carved statues and images, but principally the Goddesse of Victory was so lively and with such excellencie portrayed and set forth, that you would have verily have thought that she had flyed, and hovered with her wings hither and thither. On the contrary part, the image of the Goddesse Diana was wrought in white marble, which was a marvellous sight to see, for shee seemed as though the winde did blow up her garments, and that she did encounter with them that came into the house. On each side of her were Dogs made of stone, that seemed to menace with their fiery eyes, their pricked eares, their bended nosethrils, their grinning teeth in such sort that you would have thought they had bayed and barked. An moreover (which was a greater marvel to behold) the excellent carver and deviser of this worke had fashioned the dogs to stand up fiercely with their former feet, and their hinder feet on the ground ready to fight. Behinde the back of the goddesse was carved a stone in manner of a Caverne, environed with mosse, herbes, leaves, sprigs, green branches and bowes, growing in and about the same, insomuch that within the stone it glistered and shone marvellously, under the brim of the stone hanged apples and grapes carved finely, wherein Art envying Nature, shewed her great cunning. For they were so lively set out, that you would have thought if Summer had been come, they might have bin pulled and eaten; and while I beheld the running water, which seemed to spring and leap under the feet of the goddesse, I marked the grapes which hanged in the water, which were like in every point to the grapes of the vine, and seemed to move and stir by the violence of the streame.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Some of the poetry demanded the use of a marvelously ornate drum, on which were many little bells. It was not the drum it once had been, he told us, but despite whatever mishap had befallen it, I could ha\'e listened to him play it fo r the rest of the afternoon. He was fo llowed by Leopold Senghor. Senghor is a very dark and impressive figure in a smooth, bespectacled kind of way, and he is very highly regarded as a poet. He was to speak on West Mrican writers and artists. He began by invoking what he called the "spirit of Ban dung." In referring to Bandung, he was referring less, he said, to the liberation of black peoples than he was saluting the reality and the toughness of their culture, which, despite the vicissitudes of their history, had refused to perish. We were now witnessing, in fact, the beginning of its renaissance. This renaissance would owe less to politics than it would to black writers and artists. The "spirit ofBandung" had had the effect of "sending them to school to Mr ica." One of the things, said Senghor-perhaps the thing-which distinguishes Mricans fr om Europeans is the comparative ur gency of their ability to fe el. asentir c'est apercevoir": it is perhaps a tribute to his personal fo rce that this phrase then meant something which makes the literal English translation quite inadequate, seeming to leave too great a distance be tween the fe eling and the perception. The fe eling and the perception, fo r Af ricans, is one and the same thing. This is the difference between European and Mrican reasoning: the reasoning of the Mrican is not compartmentalized, and, to illustrate this, Senghor here used the image of the blood stream in which all things mingle and flow to and through 150 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME the heart. He told us that the difference between the fu nction of the arts in Europe and their fu nction in Africa lay in the tact that, in Africa, the fu nction of the arts is more present and pervasive, is infinitely less special, "is done by all, fo r all." Thus, art f(>r art's sake is not a concept which makes any sense in Africa. The division between art and lite out of which such a concept comes does not exist there. Art itself is taken to be perishable, to be made again each time it disappears or is de stroyed. What is clung to is the spirit which makes art possible. And the African idea of this spirit is very ditlerent from the European idea. European art attempts to imitate nature.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the; whi�n could not possibly understand, and that, _i!1deed, he cannot under staOO,untilrog�y. Hecan not afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself , and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long. Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morri son) "sheer intelligence," this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by "hi story"-to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswer able place-if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a lang_!,tag_e,_ I am curious to know what definition ofhngu_;tg<; is to be_tmswi A people at ti-le center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and tran scended by means of what is patronizingly called a "dialect ." We, the blacks, arc in troubk�_ .ce_na inly, but we are not doomed, and we arc not inarticulate because we-a re--nor-com pelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie. BL ACK ENGLISH T.b_e brutal truth is that the bulk of the white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, ex cept as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannpt a,fford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so un trustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a " country unaBle to faa why so many of til e nonwhite are 111 pns'on,Oron the needle, or standing, fll tti-r� less, in�� -g�ets-it may ve!)'_� ell be that both the child, and his elder, have CO!.l(:lll_deg that they ha Y�_!loth ln g whatever to learn from-the people of a country thaLhas._managcd..-t .G Ieams o little �-- The Ne1v York Times, July 29, 1979 Open Letter to the Born Again I MET Martin Luther King Jr. before I met Andrew Yo ung. I know that Andy and I met only because of Martin.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  So far, this description of the male’s theatrical display postures, dramatic as it is, has ignored what is really most remarkable about the “frontal movement” of the Great Argus—the over-the-top patterns on his wing feathers. When he assumes this blown-out-umbrella posture, the male reveals the upper surfaces of the wing feathers, which are largely hidden when his wings are folded and closed. The transformation is unimaginably stunning. Although the hues of his wing feathers are in a subdued palette of black, deep brown, red brown, golden brown, tan, white, and gray, the ornateness and complexity of the pattern in which they are arranged is perhaps the most highly elaborated of any creature on earth. From the tiniest submillimeter-sized dots on individual feathers to the overall pattern of the fully extended four-foot-wide feathery cone, the forty wing feathers of the Argus Pheasant combine to create a paisley effect of such staggering complexity that it simply blows the peacock’s tail away (color plate 3). Nothing else I know in nature can rival the fantastic intricacy of this design. Each individual feather encompasses all the pattern complexity of a zebra, a leopard, a tropical reef butterfly fish, a flock of butterflies, and a bunch of orchids. The overall appearance is as richly worked as the design of a Persian carpet. Each wing feather is so densely packed with varied zones of dotted, striped, and swirling waves of color that it could rightly merit its own monograph. The shorter, primary wing feathers, which are attached to the bones of the “fingers” and “hand” at the tip of the bird wing, form the bottom half of the cone. These feathers have dark shafts, light gray tips, and various zones of tan with intricately spaced brown dots or reddish brown with tiny white speckles. But the most celebrated color patterns are found on the secondary wing feathers, which are attached to the trailing bones of the forewing, or ulnas; they create the top half of the feathery cone. Each secondary feather is over three feet long and nearly six inches wide at its tip. The central shaft, or rachis, of each feather is bright white and divides the feather into two halves that are adorned with entirely distinct color patterns. The inner vanes are an array of blackish dots on a gradient of gray. On the outer vane of each secondary feather, the twisted bars of deep brown and light tan (which camouflage the bird so well when the wings are folded at rest) grade into wavy, striped patterns of tan and black. Nearest the rachis on the outer vane is a series of remarkable golden yellowish-brown spheres outlined heavily in black (color plate 4). It is these spheres—often called ocelli or eyespots—that give the species its name. In 1766, Carl Linnaeus named this pheasant after the all-seeing, hundred-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes. However, the Great Argus has three times as many “eyes” as his namesake!

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He never succeeded quite so brilliantly again. Considering the speed with which we moved from the New Deal to World War II, to Yalta, to the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, to Korea, and the House Un-Ame rican Ac tivities Committee, this may not be his fault. (One of the last of his films, entitled Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, starring Joan Fontaine, Dana Andrews, and Sydney Blackmer, is an utterly shamele ss apology for American justice, the work of a defeated man. But, children, yes, it be's that way sometimes.) Lang's concern, or obsession, was with the fact and the effect of hu man loneliness, and the ways in which we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated mon ster: whom we isolate because we recognize him as living within us. This is what his great German film, M, which launched Peter Lorre, is all about. In the American context, there being no way for him to get to the nigger, he could use only that other American prototype, the criminal, le gangster. The premise of You Only Live Once is that Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-c onvict who wants to go "stra ight": but the society will not allow him to live down, or redeem, his criminal past. This apparently banal situation is thrust upon us with so heavy a hand that one is forced-as I was, even so long ago-to wonder if one is resisting the film or resisting the truth. But, however one may wish to defend oneself THE DEVIL FINDS WORK against Lang's indictment of the small, faceless people, always available for any public ceremony and absent forever from any private one, who are society, one is lef t defenseless bef ore his study of the result, which is the isolation and the doom of the lovers. V cry early in the film we meet the earnest and popular prison chaplai n-a priest: we meet him as he pitches the ball to the men who are playing baseball in the prison courtyard. It is a curiously loaded moment, a disturbing image: perhaps only an exiled German, at that period of our history, would have dreamed of so connecting games and slaughter, thus foreshadowing the fate of the accomplice, who is, in this case, the priest. The film does not suggest that the priest's popu larity has anything to do with the religious instruction he, presumably, brings to the men-his popularity is due to his personal qualities, which include a somewhat overworked cheerfulness: and his function, at bottom, is to prepare the men for death.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (I said that such influence as I had, which wasn't much, would certainly not be used against the March, TO BE BAPTIZED + 39 and, perhaps to proYe this, I led the March on Washington fr om the American Church, in Paris, to the American Em bassy, and brought back fr om Paris a scroll bearing about a thousand names. I wonder where it is now.) In spite of all that one knew, and feared, it was a \'cry stir ring day, and one \'cry nearly dared, in spite of all that one knew, to hope-to hope that the need and the passion of the people, so nakedly and \'i,·idly, and with such dignity re\·ealed, would not be, once again, betrayed. (The People's Republic of China had sent a telegram in our support, which was re pudiated by Roy Wilkins, who said, in efiect, that we \\'ould be glad to accept such a telegram on the day that the Chinese were allowed to petition their go\'ernment for redress of grie\· ances, as we were petitioning ours. I had an uneasy feeling that we might !iYe to hear this boast ring somewhat mockingly in our ears.) But Martin had been quite mm·ing that day. Marlon (car rying a cattle prod, for the purpose of reYealing the depra\'ity of the South) and Sidney Poirier and Harry Belafonte, Charl ton Heston, and some others of us had been called away to do a Voice of America show for Ed Murrow, and so we watched and listened to Martin on tcle\'ision. All of us \\'ere \'cry silent in that room, listening to Martin, teeling the pas sion of the people flowing up to him and transforming him, transforming us. Martin finished with one hand raised: "Free at last, free at last, praise God Almighty, I'm free at last!" That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the belo\'ed community would not foreYer remain that dream one dreamed in agony. The people quietly dispersed at nightfall, as had been agreed. Sidney Poi tier took us out to dinner that night, in a \'cry, ,·cry quiet Washington. The people had come to their capitol, had made themselYes known, and were gone: no one could any longer doubt that their suffering was real. Ironically enough, after Washington, I e\'entually went on the road, on a lecture tour which carried me to Hollywood.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When the yeare was ended, and the goddesse warned me againe to receive this new order and consecration, I marvailed greatly what it should signifie, and what should happen, considering that I was a sacred person already, but it fortuned that while I partly reasoned with my selfe, and partly examining the thing with the Priests and Bishops, there came a new and marvailous thought in my mind, that is to say, I was onely religious to the goddesse Isis, but not sacred to the religion of great Osiris the soveraigne father of all the goddesses, between whom, although there was a religious unitie and concord, yet there was a great difference of order and ceremony. And because it was necessary that I should likewise be a minister unto Osiris, there was no long delay: for in the night after, appeared unto me one of that order, covered with linnen robes, holding in his hands speares wrapped in Ivie, and other things not convenient to declare, which then he left in my chamber, and sitting in my seate, recited to me such things as were necessary for the sumptuous banket of mine entrie. And to the end I might know him againe, he shewed me how the ankle of his left foote was somewhat maimed, which caused him a little to halt. After that I manifestly knew the will of the God Osiris, when mattins was ended, I went from one to another, to find him out which had the halting marke on his foote, according as I learned by my vision; at length I found it true: for I perceived one of the company of the Priests who had not onely the token of his foote, but the stature and habite of his body, resembling in every point as he appeared in the night: he was called Asinius Marcellus, a name not much disagreeing from my transformation. By and by I went to him, which knew well enough all the matter, as being monished by like precept in the night: for the night before as he dressed the flowers and garlands about the head of the god Osiris, he understood by the mouth of the image which told the predestinations of all men, how he had sent a poore man of Madura, to whom he should minister his sacraments, to the end hee should receive a reward by divine providence, and the other glory, for his vertuous studies. When I saw my selfe this deputed unto religion, my desire was stopped by reason of povertie, for I had spent a great part of my goods in travell and peregrination, but most of all in the Citie of Rome, whereby my low estate withdrew me a great while.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was one of those books for which it is difficult to find any satisfactory classification: not a good novel but more than a tract, relentlessly honest, and carried by the fury and the pain of the man who wrote it. It seemed to me then one of the few books written by either whites or Negroes about Negroes which considered the enormous role which white guilt and tension play in what has been most accurately called the American dilemma. Lonely Crusade can almost be considered an expansion of the earlier novel. Much of the rage is gone and with it the impact, and the book is written in what is probably the most uninteresting and awkward prose I have read in recent years. Yet the book is not entirely without an eff ect and is likely to have an importance out of all proportion to its intrinsic merit. For, just as the earlier book was carried by rage, this book is carried by what seems to be a desperate, implacable determi nation to find out the truth, please God, or die. In less than tour hun dred pages Mr. Himes undertakes to consider the ever-present subjective and subconscious terror of a Negro, a dislocation which borders on paranoia; the political morality of American Communists; the psychol ogy of union politics; Uncle Tomism; Jews and Negroes; the vast sexual implications of our racial heritage; the difficulty faced by any Negro in his relationships with both light people and dark; and the position of the American white female in the whole unlovely structure. This is a tall order and if we give Mr. Himes an A for ambition-and a rather awe-stricken gasp for effort-we are forced also to realize that the book's con- 579 sso OTH ER ES SAYS siderable burden never really gets shoulder high. It is written almost as though the author were determined within one book, regardless of style or ultimate effect, to say all of the things he wanted to say about the American republic and the position of the Negro in it. Part of the failure of the book certainly lies in this fact, that far too much is attempted; and the story never really gets under way because of a complete lack of integration.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And by and by, there approached a faire and comely mayden, not much unlike to Juno, for she had a Diademe of gold upon her head, and in her hand she bare a regall scepter: then followed another resembling Pallas, for she had on her head a shining sallet, whereon was bound a garland of Olive branches, having in one hand a target or shield: and in the other a speare as though she would fight: then came another which passed the other in beauty, and presented the Goddesse Venus, with the color of Ambrosia, when she was a maiden, and to the end she would shew her perfect beauty, shee appeared all naked, saving that her fine and dainty skin was covered with a thin smocke, which the wind blew hither and thither to testifie the youth and flowre of the age of the dame. Her colour was of two sorts, for her body was white as descended from heaven, and her smocke was blewish, as arrived from the sea: After every one of the Virgins which seemed goddesses, followed certaine waiting servants, Castor and Pollus went behind Juno, having on their heads helmets covered with starres. This Virgin Juno sounded a Flute, which shee bare in her hand, and mooved her selfe towards the shepheard Paris, shewing by honest signes and tokens, and promising that hee should be Lord of all Asia, if hee would judge her the fairest of the three, and to give her the apple of gold: the other maiden which seemed by her armour to be Pallas, was accompanied with two young men armed, and brandishing their naked swords in their hands, whereof one named Terror, and the other Feare; behind them approached one sounding his trumpet to provoke and stirre men to battell; this maiden began to dance and shake her head, throwing her fierce and terrible eyes upon Paris and promising that if it pleased him to give her the victory of beauty, shee would make him the most strong and victorious man alive. Then came Venus and presented her selfe in the middle of the Theater, with much favour of all the people, for shee was accompanied with a great many of youth, whereby you would have judged them all to be Cupidoes, either to have flowne from heaven or else from the river of the sea, for they had wings, arrowes, and the residue of their habit according in each point, and they bare in their hands torches lighted, as though it had beene a day of marriage.