Bewilderment

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 Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  How wise is it for the Christian leaders of a democratic nation to take their interpretation of God’s purposes in history and their theories about the coming of the kingdom of God from the feeblest and most decadent age of Hebrew thought? We have seen that the true prophets opposed the complacent optimism of the people and of their popular spokesmen, and gave warning of disaster as long as it was coming. If they lived among the present symptoms of social and moral decay, would they sing a lullaby or sound the reveille? No true prophet will copy a prophet. Their garb, their mannerisms of language, the vehemence of their style, belong to their age and not to ours. But if we believe in their divine mission and in the divine origin of the religion in which they were the chief factors, we cannot repudiate what was fundamental in their lives. If any one holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental; or that it is purely personal; or that God is on the side of the rich; or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray; he must prove his case with his eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is with him. For the ordinary reader who may wish to follow up the subject, I know no book more generally accessible and more delightful than the two volumes in the “Expositor’s Bible” on “The Book of the Twelve Prophets,” by George Adam Smith; especially the introductory chapters in each volume. I think it is only honest to state that the Old Testament has never been my professional specialty and the foregoing discussion lays no claim to authority. Doubtless the expert student will notice inaccuracies in detail. But if he differs in fundamentals, the difference is not likely to be due to such minor points of information, but to his general conceptions of history and religon. -------------- CHAPTER II THE SOCIAL AIMS OF JESUS The new social insight into the Gospel A man was walking through the woods in springtime. The air was thrilling and throbbing with the passion of little hearts, with the love-wooing, the parent pride, and the deadly fear of the birds. But the man never noticed that there was a bird in the woods. He was a botanist and was looking for plants. A man was walking through the streets of a city, pondering the problems of wealth and national well-being. He saw a child sitting on the curbstone and crying. He met children at play. He saw a young mother with her child and an old man with his grandchild. But it never occurred to him that little children are the foundation of society, a chief motive power in economic effort, the most influential teachers, the source of the purest pleasures, the embodiment of form and color and grace. The man had never had a child and his eyes were not opened. A man read through the New Testament.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A man may travel, marvel at the world, change, become a stranger to his relatives and friends, but he will always retain within him the hard kernel of his awareness of belonging to some nameless village. Defeated, blind, his imagination will bring him back to that landmark, for his hands and feet know its contours and his nerves are wonderfully attuned to it. And I — well, I am my city’s illegitimate son, the child of a whore of a city whose heart has been divided among all those to whom she has been a slave. And the list of her masters, when I came to know some history, made me giddy: Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantine Greeks, Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks, Italians, French — but I must be forgetting some and confusing others. Walk five hundred steps in my city, and you change civilizations: here is an Arab town, its houses like expressionless faces, its long, silent, shadowed passages leading suddenly to packed crowds. Then, the busy Jewish alleys, so sordid and familiar, lined with deep stalls, shops and eating houses, all shapeless houses piled as best they can fit together. Further on, little Sicily, where abject poverty waits on the doorstep, and then the fondouks, the collective tenements of the Maltese, those strange Europeans with an Arab tongue and a British nationality. The Russian Orthodox church too, its illuminations and domes surely conceived in a night of Muscovite dreams; and the clean little electric streetcar line from Belgium, as neat as a Flemish interior. We have Standard Oil buildings too, and an American airport and cemetery, with improved U.S. equipment, jeeps and trucks at the exclusive disposal of the dead; the Shell Company or British Petrol; the residence of Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassadors, and finally the little homes of retired French rentiers, cottages with red-tiled roofs and gardens, cabbages — all in a row, just as in French songs. And within this great variety, where everyone feels at home but no one at ease, each man is shut up in his own neighborhood, in fear, hate, and contempt of his neighbor. Like the filth and untidiness of this stinking city, we’ve known fear and scorn since the first awakening of our consciousness. To defend or avenge ourselves, we scorned and sneered among ourselves and hoped we would be feared as much as we ourselves experienced fear. This was the atmosphere in which we lived at mealtimes, in school and in the streets. If any youthful ingenuousness or skepticism allowed us still to hope, we were promised nothing but treachery and blood-red dawns. Slowly, as if a poison administered drop by drop had at last had its effect, my sensibility, my sentiments, my entire soul was permeated with it and reshaped; I learned to check the odious inventory of it all. Beyond a ceremonious politeness, everyone remained secretly hostile and was finally horrified by the image of himself that he discovered in the minds of others.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  We are different. I push a swinging door. I was to go ahead to barter over the price. But when I see it is not a house but a café full of people and naked women, I come back to call Hugo, and we walk in. Noise. Blinding lights. Many women surrounding us, calling us, trying to attract our attention. The patronne leads us to a table. Still the women are shouting and signaling. We must choose. Hugo smiles, bewildered. I glance over them. I choose a very vivid, fat, coarse Spanish-looking woman, and then I turn away from the shouting group to the end of the line and call a woman who had made no effort to attract my attention, small, feminine, almost timid. Now they sit before us. The small woman is sweet and pliant. We talk, oh, so politely. We discuss each other’s nails. They comment on the unusualness of my nacreous nail polish. I ask Hugo to look carefully to see if I have chosen well. He does and says I could not have done better. We watch the women dancing. I see only in spots, intensely. Certain places are utter blanks to me. I see big hips, buttocks, and sagging breasts, so many bodies, all at once. We had expected there would be a man for the exhibition. “No,” says the patronne , “but the two girls will amuse you. You will see everything.” It would not be Hugo’s night, then, but he accepts everything. We barter over the price. The women smile. They assume it is my evening because I have asked them if they will show me lesbian poses. Everything is strange to me and familiar to them. I only feel at ease because they are people who need things, whom one can do things for. I give away all my cigarettes. I wish I had a hundred packets. I wish I had a lot of money. We are going upstairs. I enjoy looking at the women’s naked walk. The room is softly lighted and the bed low and ample. The women are cheerful, and they wash themselves. How the taste for things must wear down with so much automatism. We watch the big woman tie a penis on herself, a rosy thing, a caricature. And they take poses, nonchalantly, professionally. Arabian, Spanish, Parisienne, love when one does not have the price of a hotel room, love in a taxi, love when one of the partners is sleepy . . . Hugo and I look on, laughing a little at their sallies. We learn nothing new. It is all unreal, until I ask for the lesbian poses. The little woman loves it, loves it better than the man’s approach. The big woman reveals to me a secret place in the woman’s body, a source of a new joy, which I had sometimes sensed but never definitely—that small core at the opening of the woman’s lips, just what the man passes by.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She gave his hand a little shake.4 Come along, let’s be serious. As I was saying — we’re leaving, we’ve already left. What will you do about over there? Let Charlotte arrange all the settlement details it’s much the wisest - and make her be generous, I beg of you. How will you let them know over there,? A letter, I imagine. None too easy, but the less ink spilled, the better. We’ll see about that between us. Then there’s the question of your luggage. I’ve none of your things here any more. Such little details are far more upsetting than a major decision, but don’t worry too much. ... Will you kindly stop tearing the skin off the side of your toe all the time! That’s the way to get an ingrowing toe-nail!’ Automatically, he let his foot drop to the floor. Under the weight of his sullen taciturnity, he found it a strain to focus his jaded attention on what Lea was saying. He stared at his mistress’s happy, animated, imperious features, and asked himself vaguely: “Why does she look so happy?” His bewilderment became so obvious that Lea stopped in the middle of her monologue on their chances of buying old Berthellemy’s yacht from him. * Could anyone believe that you’ve not got one word of advice to give? Oh, you might still be twelve!* Cheri, snatched from his stupor, put a hand to his forehead and looked at Lea, his eyes filled with melancholy. ‘Being with you, Nounoune, is likely to keep me twelve for half a century.’ She blinked her eyes several times as if he had breathed on their lids, and let silence settle again. ‘What are you trying to say?* she asked at last. ‘Nothing, except what I did say, Nounoune. Nothing but the truth. And can you deny it, you, the most honest person alive? * She decided to laugh, but her gaiety masked a terrible fear. ‘But half your charm lies in your childishness, stupid I Later on it will be the secret of your eternal youth. Why complain of it? And you have the cheek to complain of it to me! * ‘Yes, Nounoune. Do you expect me to complain to anyone but you?’ and he caught hold of the hand she had taken away. ‘My own Nounoune, dearest, darling Nounoune, I’m not only complaining of myself: I’m accusing you!*

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Nothing happened, so he opened his eyes. Once more he had to accept the true picture - in the shape of his stalwart old friend, who, prudently keeping her distance, was bestowing on him a certain degree of benevolence from small and slightly suspicious blue eyes. Disillusioned and bewildered, he looked all over the room for her, except in the very spot where she stood. “ Where is she? "Where is she? This old woman is hiding her from me. She’s bored by me, and she’s waiting for me to go, thinking it all an infernal nuisance, these crowding memories and this returning ghost. ... But if by any chance I did ask for her help, if I beg her to give me back Lea ...” Deep inside him, his kneeling double was still palpitating, like a body from which the life-blood is being drained. With an effort of which he would never have deemed himself capable, Cheri tore himself away from this tortured image. ‘I must be going,’ he said out loud, and he added on a note of rather cheap wit, ‘ and I’m taking my box of cakes with me.’ Lea’s exuberant bosom heaved with a sigh of relief. ‘As you like, my child. But I’m always here, you know, if you’re in any little trouble.’ Though she seemed so obliging, Ch£ri could sense an underlying resentment. Within that vast edifice of flesh crowned with silvery thatch, femininity had for a moment reasserted itself in tones resounding with an intelligent harmony. But Ch6ri could not respond: like a ghost he had come, and with the shyness of a ghost he must vanish, in his own despite. ‘Of course,’ Cheri replied, ‘and I thank you.’ From that moment on, he knew, unerringly and spontaneously, exactly how to manage his exit. All the right words sprang to his lips, fluently, mechanically. ‘You do understand, don’t you, I came here to-day ... why not sooner, you may ask? I know I ought to have come a long while ago. ... But you will forgive me. ...’ * Of course,’ Lea said. ‘I’m even more hare-brained than before the war, you know, so that -’ ‘ I understand, I understand.’

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘ I got mine, of course, through a little deal with my landlady. A jewel of a woman, by the way, married, or as good as. Periwinkle blue eyes, and ahead like a bird; but she bears the mark of Fate on her forehead, and I already know from her cards that she can’t say no to anything, and that -* ‘Yes, yes. You were saying just now that you knew of a flat ‘Yes, but not good enough for you.’ ‘ You don’t think so? * ‘Not for you ... not for the two of you!* The Pal hid a suggestive smile in her whisky, and Cfohi turned from its smell — like wet harness. He put up with her quips about his imaginary conquests, for he saw, round her scraggy neck, a string of large faked pearls which he thought he recognized. Every visual reminder of his past halted him on his downward path, and, during such respites, he felt at peace. ‘Ah!’ sighed the Pal, ‘How I’d love to catch a glimpse of her! What a pair! ... I don’t know her, of course, but I can just see you two together! ... Of course you’ll provide everything yourself?’ ‘ For whom? ’ ‘Why, the furniture in your love-nest, of course!’ He looked at the Pal in bewilderment. Furniture ... What furniture? He had been thinking only of one thing: a refuge of his own, with a door that opened and closed for him and no one else, safe from Edmee, Charlotte, all of them. ... ‘Will you furnish it in period or in modem style? La belle Serrano arranged her entire ground floor with nothing but Spanish shawls, but that was a bit eccentric. You’re old enough, of course, to know your own mind. ...’ He hardly heard her, far away in his dreams of a future home that would be secret, small, warm, and dark. At the same time, he was drinking red-currant syrup, like any young ‘miss’, in the red-andgold, out-of-date, unchanging bar, just as it used to be when, a small boy, Cheri had come there to sip his first fizzy drink through a straw. ... Even the barman himself had not changed, and if the woman sitting opposite Cheri was now a withered specimen, at least he had never known her beautiful, or young. “ They all change, the whole of that set — my mother, my wife, all the people they see — and they live for change. My mother may change into a banker, Edm£e into a town councillor. But I ...” In imagination, he quickly returned to that refuge, existing at some unknown point in space, but secret, small, warm, and ...

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  Our oysters came and we began to eat. Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it. *Well'—with his mouth turned down—'din- ner was awful, of course, since he can make GIOVANNI'S ROOM 83 scenes in his apartment, too. But by this time I knew he owned a bar and was a French citi- zen. I am not and I had no job and no carte de travail So I saw that he could be useful if I coidd only find some way to make him keep his hands off me. I did not, I must say'— this with that look at me—'altogether succeed in re- maining untouched by him; he has more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever, buf— grimly throwing down another oyster and refilling our glasses of wine—1 do now have a carte de travail and I have a job. Which pays very well,' he grinned. It appears that I am good for business. For this reason, he leaves me mostly alone.' He looked out into the bar. 'He is really not a man at all,' he said, with a sorrow and bewilderment at once childlike and ancient, 1 do not know what he is, he is horrible. But I will keep my carte de travail. The job is an- other matter, but'—he knocked wood—'we have had no trouble now for nearly three weeks.' 'But you think that trouble is coming,' I said. 'Oh, yes,' said Giovanni, with a quick, startled look at me, as if he were wondering if I had understood a word of what he had said, 'we are certainly going to have a little trouble soon again. Not right away, of course; that is not his style. But he will invent something to be angry at me about.' Then we sat in silence for awhile, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and fin- ishing the wine. I was all at once very tired. I —

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  These notes I push-pin to the corkboard are intended at the time I make them to restore my ability to function, but have so far not done so. I study the notes again. Who was struck by the train nine days before her wedding? Or was it nine days before his wedding? Who left the house that morning and was killed that afternoon in the crash of the small plane? Who, above all, ran the little coup on the second of January, 1931? And in what country? I abandon the attempt to answer these questions. The telephone rings. Grateful for the interruption, I pick it up. I hear the voice of my nephew Griffin. He feels the need to report that he has been getting calls from “concerned friends.” The focus of their concern is my health, specifically my weight. I am no longer grateful. I point out that I have weighed the same amount since the early 1970s, when I picked up paratyphoid during a film festival on the Caribbean coast of Colombia and by the time I got home had dropped so much weight that my mother had to fly to Malibu to feed me. Griffin says that he recognizes this. He is aware that my weight has not fluctuated since he was old enough to notice it. He is reporting only what these “concerned friends” have mentioned to him. Griffin and I understand each other, which means in this case that we are able to change the subject. I consider asking him if he knows who it was who ran the little coup on the second of January, 1931, and in what country, but do not. In the absence of another subject I tell him about a taxi driver I recently encountered on my way from the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco to SFO. This taxi driver told me that he had been analyzing drill sites around Houston until the oil boom went belly up. His father had been a construction supervisor, he said, which meant that he had grown up on the construction sites of the big postwar high dams and power reactors. He mentioned Glen Canyon on the Colorado. He mentioned Rancho Seco outside Sacramento. He mentioned, when he learned that I was a writer, wanting himself to write a book about “intercourse between the United States and Japan.” He had proposed such a book to Simon & Schuster but Simon & Schuster, he now believed, had passed the proposal on to another writer. “Fellow by the name of Michael Crichton,” he said. “I’m not saying he stole it, I’m just saying they used my ideas. But hey. Ideas are free.” Around San Bruno he began mentioning Scientology. I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story. Weeks pass, then months.

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

  Set in rural Georgia near the South Carolina border, the film, released in 1972, seared into the national imagination its devastating portrait of white trash ugliness and backwoods debauchery. No matter whether it is cast as urban or rural, religious or secular, Anglo- or other hyphenate, the search for national belonging is never new. Despite the nasty cultural memory jarred loose by the retrogressive message in Deliverance (and especially the horrific rape of Ned Beatty’s character), the backcountry of America never completely lost its regenerative associations. Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo- Saxon. Here, in this imaginary country of the past, is where the best of Jefferson’s yeoman “roots” could be traced. Most of all, there was a raw masculinity to be found in the hills. A larger trend was turning America into a more ethnically conscious nation, one in which ethnicity substituted for class. The hereditary model had not been completely abandoned; instead, it was reconfigured to focus on transmitted cultural values over inbred traits. An inherent paradox added to the confusion over the nature of cultural identity. Modern Americans’ largely blind pursuit of the authentic, stable self was taking place in a country where roots could be, and often were, discarded. In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility, which required either adoption of a new identity or assumption of a class disguise in order to insert oneself into the desired category of middle class. Yet by the late 1960s the middle class had become the most inauthentic of places: the suburbs provided indelible images of foil-covered TV dinners, banal Babbittry, and bad sitcoms. People took part in staid dinner parties, evocatively portrayed in The Graduate, where the talk was of a career-making investment in plastics—and what better stood for inauthenticity than unnatural products invented by chemists? There was a growing awareness that middle-class comfort was an illusion. Two sociologists ironically concluded that the few authentic identities still claimable in 1970 existed in the isolated pockets of the rural poor: Appalachian hillbillies in Tennessee, marginal dirt farmers in the upper Midwest, and “swamp Yankees” in New England. 2 The broadcast of An American Family on PBS in 1973 gave millions of viewers a palpable sense of middle-class life.

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

  917. But on the other hand, if one were to posit those principles which are thought to be the most unchangeable, namely, being and unity, then, first, if each of these does not signify a particular thing or a substance, how will they be separable and exist of themselves? Yet the eternal and primary principles for which we are looking must be such. But if each of these does signify a particular thing or a substance, all beings will be substances; for being is predicated of all things, and unity is predicated of some. But it is false that all beings are substances. 918. Again, how can the statement of those be true who say that unity is the first principle and a substance, and who generate number as the first thing produced from the unit and matter and say that it is substance? For how are we to understand that the number two and each of the other numbers composed of units is one? For they say nothing about this, nor is it easy to do so. 919. But if someone maintains that lines and what is derived from these (I mean surfaces) are the first principles of things, these are not separable substances but sections and divisions; the former of surfaces, and the latter of bodies (and points are the sections and divisions of lines); and further they are the limits of these same things. And all of these exist in other things, and none are separable. 920. Again, how are we to understand that the unit and the point have substance. For every substance is generated but not the point; for the point amounts to a division (266-283). 921. There is also the problem that, while every science must be about universals and about such and such a universal, a substance is not a universal but is rather a particular and separable thing. Hence, if there is a science of principles, how are we to understand substance to be a principle (288-293) ? 922. Again, the question arises whether or not there is any principle apart from the concrete whole? And by this I mean the matter and what is joined to it. For if not, then everything that is in matter is corruptible. But if there is some principle, it must be the specifying principle or form. Therefore it is difficult to determine in what cases this exists apart and in what not; for in some cases it is evident that the form is not separable, for example, in that of a house (235-247). 923. Again, there is the question whether principles are the same specifically or numerically? For if they are the same numerically, all things will be the same (248-249).

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

  I was thunderstruck and this amazement has always illumined for me the abyss of Protestant bigotry, but I wouldn’t break with Howard who was two years older than I and who taught me many things. He taught me to like Fenians, though I hardly knew what the word meant. One day I remember he showed me posted on the Court House a notice offering 5000 Pounds sterling as reward to anyone who would tell the whereabouts of James Stephen, the Fenian Head-Centre. “He’s travelling all over Ireland”, Howard whispered, “everybody knows him”, adding with gusto, “but no one would give the Head-Centre away to the dirty English.” I remember thrilling to the mystery and chivalry of the story. From that moment Head-Centre was a sacred symbol to me as to Howard. One day we met Strangways and somehow or other began talking of sex. Howard knew all about it and took pleasure in enlightening us both. It was Cecil Howard who first initiated Strangways and me too in self-abuse. In spite of my Novel reading, I was still at eleven too young to get much pleasure from the practice; but I was delighted to know how children were made and a lot of new facts about sex. Strangways had hair about his private parts, as indeed Howard had, also, and when he rubbed himself and the orgasm came, a sticky milky fluid spirted from Strangway’s cock which Howard told us was the man’s seed, which must go right into the woman’s womb to make a child. A week later, Strangways astonished us both by telling how he had made up to the nursemaid of his younger sisters and got into her bed at night. The first time she wouldn’t let him do anything, it appeared, but after a night or two he managed to touch her sex and assured us it was all covered with silky hairs. A little later he told us how she had locked her door and how the next day he had taken off the lock and got into bed with her again. At first she was cross, or pretended to be, he said, but he kept on kissing her and begging her, and bit by bit she yielded, and he touched her sex again: “it was a slit”, he said. A few nights later, he told us he had put his prick into her and “Oh! by gum, it was wonderful, wonderful!”

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

  Here he ordered hash and I, hot coffee and when I came to pay I was agreeably surprised to find that the bill was only forty cents and we could talk in our corner undisturbed as long as we liked. In ten minutes’ chat the hobo had upset all my preconceived ideas and given me a host of new and interesting thoughts. He was a man of some reading if not of education and the violence of his language attracted me almost as much as the novelty of his point of view. All rich men were thieves, all workmen, sheep and fools, was his creed. The workmen did the work, created the wealth, and the employers robbed them of nine-tenths of the product of their labor and so got rich. It all seemed simple. The tramp never meant to work; he lived by begging and went wherever he wanted to go. “But how do you get about?” I cried. “Here in the middle west,” he replied, “I steal rides in freight cars and box-cars and on top of coal wagons, but in the real west and south I get inside the cars and ride, and when the conductor turns me off I wait for the next train. Life is full of happenings—some of ’em painful,” he added, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw again. He appeared to be a tough little man whose one object in life it was to avoid work and in spite of himself, he worked hard in order to do nothing. The experience had a warning, quickening effect on me. I resolved to save all I could. When I stood up to go the hobo grinned amicably: “I guess I’ve earned that dollar?” I could not help laughing. “I guess you have,” I replied, but took care to turn aside as I stripped off the bill. “So long,” said the tramp as we parted at the door and that was all the thanks I ever got. Another experience of this time told a sadder story. One evening a girl spoke to me; she was fairly well-dressed and as we came under a gas-lamp I saw she was good-looking with a tinge of nervous anxiety in her face. “I don’t buy love,” I warned her: “but how much do you generally get?” “From one dollar to five,” she replied; “but tonight I want as much as I can get.” “I’ll give you five,” I replied; “but you must tell me all I want to know.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It takes the cultural identity of a widespread but definite group and makes it a generic identity for many culturally diverse peoples, all on the basis of a shared oppression. This runs the risk of providing a convenient blanket of apparent similarity under which our actual and unaccepted differences can be distorted or misused. This blanket would diminish our chances of forming genuine working coalitions built upon the recognition and creative use of acknowledged difference, rather than upon the shaky foundations of a false sense of similarity. When a Javanese Dutch woman says she is Black, she also knows she goes home to another cultural reality that is particular to her people and precious to her—it is Asian, and Javanese. When an African-American woman says she is Black, she is speaking of her cultural reality, no matter how modified it may be by time, place, or circumstances of removal. Yet even the Maori women of New Zealand and the Aboriginal women of Australia call themselves Black. There must be a way for us to deal with this, if only on the level of language. For example, those of us for whom Black is our cultural reality relinquishing the word in favor of some other designation of the African diaspora, perhaps simply African. [The first half of 1985 spins past: a trip to Cuba with a group of Black women writers, a reading tour through the Midwest, the great workspace I created from my son’s old room, the beginning of a new collection of poems, my daughter’s graduation from college. My general health seemed stable, if somewhat delicate. I removed the question of cancer from my consciousness beyond my regular Iscador treatments, my meager diet, and my lessened energies. In August and September I spent six weeks traveling and giving poetry readings in Australia and New Zealand, a guest of women’s groups at various community organizations and universities. It was an exciting and exhausting time, one where thoughts about cancer were constant but never central.] May 28, 1985 Cambridge, Massachusetts My daughter Beth’s graduation from Harvard this weekend was a rite of passage for both of us. This institution takes itself very seriously, and there was enormous pomp and circumstance for three days. I couldn’t help but think of all the racist, sexist ways they’ve tried through the last four years to diminish and destroy the essence of all the young Black women enrolled here. But it was a very important moment for Beth, a triumph that she’d survived Harvard, that she’d made it out, intact, and in a self she can continue living with. Of course, the point of so much of what goes on at places like Harvard—supposed to be about learning—is actually geared to either destroying these young people, or altering their substance into effigies that will be pliant, acceptable, and nonproblematic to the system.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  202 James Baldwin ing,in abargetied up alongthe river. News- paperspeculation had already placed him in Argentina, soitwas agreatshock to discover thathe had got nofarther than the Seine. This lack, onhis part,of'dash' did nothing to endear him tothe public. Hewas acriminal, Giovanni, ofthe dullestkind, abungler; robbery, for ex- ample, had been insisted on asthe motive for Guillaume's murder; but, though Giovanni had taken all the money Guillaume had in his pock- ets, hehad not touched the cash register and had not even suspected, apparently, that Guil- laume had over one hundred thousand francs hidden in another wallet at the bottom of his closet. The money he had taken from Guillairaie was still in his pockets when he was caught; he had not been able to spend it. He had not eaten for two or three days and was weak and pale and unattractive. His face was on newsstands all over Paris. Helooked young, bewildered, ter- rij&ed, depraved; as though he could not believe that he, Giovanni, had come to this, had come tothis and would go no further, his short road ending in a common knife. He seemed already tobe rearing back, every inch of his flesh re- volting before that icy vision. And it seemed, as it had seemed so many times, that he looked to mefor help. The newsprint told the unforgiving world how Giovanni repented, cried for mercy, called on God, wept thathe had not meant to do it. And told us, too, in delicious detail, how hehaddone it:but notwhy. Why was too black GIOVANNI'S ROOM 203 for the newsprintto carry and too deep for Gio- vannito tell. I may have beenthe only manin Pariswho knew that he hadnot meant todo it,who could read why he haddone it beneath the details printedinthe newspapers. I remembered again the evening I hadfound himat homeandhe toldme how Guillaume had fired him. I heard hisvoiceagainand saw the vehemenceof his bodyandsaw histears. Iknew his bravado, how he liked tofeelhimself debrouillard,morethan equal toany challenge, and saw him swagger into Guillaume*sbar.He must have felt that, having surrendered toJacques, his apprentice- ship wasover, lovewas over,and he coulddo withGuillaume anythinghe liked. He could,in- deed, have done withGuillaume anything at all — but he could notdo anythingaboutbeingGio- vanni. Guillaume certainlyknew, Jacques would have lost notime in tellinghim, thatGiovanni was no longer with le jeune Americain; perhaps Guillaume had even attended oneor two of Jacques'parties, armed withhis own entourage; andhe certainly knew, all his circle knew, that Giovanni's new freedom, his loverless state, would turn into license, into riot — it had hap- pened to every one ofthem. It must have been agreat evening for the bar when Giovanni swaggered in alone. I could hear the conversation: *Alors, tu es revenuT This from Guillaume, with a seductive, sardonic, speaking look.

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

  PSEUDO-JEROME. Oftentimes also the origin of a man brings him contempt, as it is written, (1 Sam. 25:10. Ps. 138:6) Who is the son of Jesse? for the Lord hath respect unto the lowly; as to the proud, He beholdeth them afar off. THEOPHYLACT. Or again, if the prophet has noble relations, his countrymen hate them, and on that account do not honour the prophet. There follows, And he could there do no mighty work, &c. What, however, is here expressed by He could not, we must take to mean, He did not choose, because it was not that He was weak, but that they were faithless; He does not therefore work any miracles there, for he spared them, lest they should be worthy of greater blame, if they believed not, even with miracles before their eyes. Or else, for the working of miracles, not only the power of the Worker is necessary, but the faith of the recipient, which was wanting in this case: therefore Jesus did not choose to work any signs there. There follows, And he marvelled at their unbelief. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Not as if He Who knows all things before they are done, wonders at what He did not expect or look forward to, but knowing the hidden things of the heart, and wishing to intimate to men that it was wonderful, He openly shews that He wonders. And indeed the blindness of the Jews is wonderful, for they neither believed what their prophets said of Christ, nor would in their own persons believe on Christ, Who was born amongst them. Mystically again; Christ is despised in His own house and country, that is, amongst the people of the Jews, and therefore He worked few miracles there, lest they should become altogether inexcusable. But He performs greater miracles every day amongst the Gentiles, not so much in the healing of their bodies, as in the salvation of their souls. 6:6–136. —And he went round about the villages, teaching. 7. And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits; 8. And commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse: 9. But be shod with sandals; and not put on two coats. 10. And he said unto them, In what place soever ye enter into an house, there abide till ye depart from that place. 11. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. 12. And they went out, and preached that men should repent. 13. And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  It may well be said that, for the great majority of modern readers, reading the little letter of Jude is a bewildering rather than a profitable undertaking. There are two verses which everyone knows - the resounding and magnificent doxology with which it ends: Now to him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. But, apart from these two great verses, Jude is largely unknown and seldom read. The reason for its difficulty is that it is written out of a background of thought, against the challenge of a situation, in pictures and with quotations, which are all quite strange to us. Without doubt, it would hit those who read it for the first time like a hammer-blow. It would be like a trumpet-call to defend the faith. James Moffatt calls Jude `a fiery cross to rouse the churches'. But, as J. B. Mayor, one of its greatest editors and commentators, has said, `To a modern reader it is curious rather than edifying with the exception of the beginning and the end.' This is one of the main reasons for addressing ourselves to the study of Jude; for, when we understand Jude's thought and disentangle the situation against which he was writing, his letter becomes of great interest for the history of the earliest Church and by no means without relevance for today. There have indeed been times in the history of the Church, and especially in its revivals, when Jude was not far from being the most relevant book in the New Testament. Let us begin by simply setting down the substance of the letter without waiting for the explanations which must follow later. Meeting the Threat It had been Jude's intention to write a treatise on the faith which all Christians share; but that task had to be laid aside in view of the emergence of people whose conduct and thought were a threat to the Christian Church (verse 3). In view of this situation, the need was not so much to expound the faith as to rally Christians in its defence. Certain individuals who had insinuated themselves into the Church were busily engaged in turning the grace of God into an excuse for open immorality and were denying the only true God and Jesus Christ the Lord (verse 4). These people were immoral in life and heretical in belief. The Warnings

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  21AS FAR back as I remember myself (with interest, with amusement, seldom with admiration or disgust), I have been subject to mild hallucinations. Some are aural, others are optical, and by none have I profited much. The fatidic accents that restrained Socrates or egged on Joaneta Darc have degenerated with me to the level of something one happens to hear between lifting and clapping down the receiver of a busy party-line telephone. Just before falling asleep, I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever—an English or a Russian sentence, not even addressed to me, and so trivial that I hardly dare give samples, lest the flatness I wish to convey be marred by a molehill of sense. This silly phenomenon seems to be the auditory counterpart of certain praedormitary visions, which I also know well. What I mean is not the bright mental image (as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead) conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will; that is one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make. Nor am I alluding to the so-called muscae volitantes—shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field. Perhaps nearer to the hypnagogic mirages I am thinking of is the colored spot, the stab of an afterimage, with which the lamp one has just turned off wounds the palpebral night. However, a shock of this sort is not really a necessary starting point for the slow, steady development of the visions that pass before my closed eyes. They come and go, without the drowsy observer’s participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing flou quality, and then I see—projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid—gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  2Our spelling master was a carpenter’s son. In the magic-lantern sequence that follows, my first slide shows a young man we called Ordo, the enlightened son of a Greek Catholic deacon. On walks with my brother and me in the cool summer of 1907, he wore a Byronic black cloak with a silver S-shaped clasp. In the deep Batovo woods, at a spot near a brook where the ghost of a hanged man was said to appear, Ordo would give a rather profane and foolish performance for which my brother and I clamored every time we passed there. Bending his head and flapping his cloak in weird, vampiric fashion he would slowly cavort around a lugubrious aspen. One wet morning during that ritual he dropped his cigarette case and while helping to look for it, I discovered two freshly emerged specimens of the Amur hawkmoth, rare in our region—lovely, velvety, purplish-gray creatures—in tranquil copulation, clinging with chinchilla-coated legs to the grass at the foot of the tree. In the fall of that same year, Ordo accompanied us to Biarritz, and a few weeks later abruptly departed, leaving a present we had given him, a Gillette safety razor, on his pillow, with a pinned note. It seldom happens that I do not quite know whether a recollection is my own or has come to me secondhand, but in this case I do waver, especially because, much later, my mother, in her reminiscent moods, used to refer with amusement to the flame she had unknowingly kindled. I seem to remember a door ajar into a drawing room, and there, in the middle of the floor, Ordo, our Ordo, crouching on his knees and wringing his hands in front of my young, beautiful, and dumbfounded mother. The fact that I seem to see, out of the corner of my mind’s eye, the undulations of a romantic cloak around Ordo’s heaving shoulders suggests my having transferred something of the earlier forest dance to that blurred room in our Biarritz apartment (under the windows of which, in a roped-off section of the square, a huge custard-colored balloon was being inflated by Sigismond Lejoyeux, a local aeronaut).

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  We must now examine the questions regarding the date and the authorship of Jude. Jude had some difficulty in getting into the New Testament at all; it is one of the books whose position was always insecure and which were late in gaining full acceptance as part of the New Testament. Let us briefly set out the opinions of the great fathers and scholars of the early Church about it. Jude is included in the Muratorian Canon, which dates to about AD I7o and may be regarded as the first semi-official list of the books accepted by the Church. The inclusion of Jude is strange when we remember that the Muratorian Canon does not include in its list Hebrews and i Peter. But, for a long time thereafter, Jude is spoken of with some doubt. In the middle of the third century, the biblical scholar Origen knew and used it, but he was well aware that there were many who questioned its right to be Scripture. Eusebius, the great scholar of the middle of the fourth century, made a deliberate examination of the position of the various books which were in use, and he classed Jude among the books which were disputed. Jerome, who completed the Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, in the early years of the fifth century, had his doubts about Jude; and it is in him that we find one of the reasons for the hesitation which was felt towards it. The strange thing about Jude is the way in which it quotes as authorities books which are outside the Old Testament. It uses as Scripture certain books which were written between the Old and the New Testaments and were never generally regarded as Scripture. Here are two definite instances. The reference in verse 9 to Michael arguing with the devil about the body of Moses is taken from an apocryphal book called The Assumption of Moses. In verses 14-15, Jude confirms his argument with a quotation from prophecy, as, indeed, is the habit of all the New Testament writers; but Jude's quotation is, in fact, taken from the Book of Enoch, which he appears to regard as Scripture. Jerome tells us that it was Jude's habit of using non-Scriptural books as Scripture which made some people regard him with suspicion; and, towards the end of the third century in Alexandria, it was from the very same charge that the blind theologian Didymus defended him. It is perhaps the strangest thing in Jude that he uses these nonScriptural books as other New Testament writers use the prophets; and in verses 17-18 he makes use of a saying of the apostles which is not identifiable at all. Jude, then, was one of the books which took a long time to gain an assured place in the New Testament; but, by the fourth century, its place was secure. The Date

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

  The phenomena are very intricate, and are only just beginning to be studied in a proper scientific way. The lowest phase of mediumship is automatic writing, and the lowest grade of that is where the Subject knows what words are coming, but feels impelled to write them as if from without. Then comes writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged in reading or talk. Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instruments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases of possession, in which the normal self is not excluded from conscious participation in the performance, though their initiative seems to come from elsewhere. In the highest phase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and everything are changed, and there is no after-memory whatever until the next trance comes. One curious thing about trance-utterances is their generic similarity in different individuals. The 'control' here in America is either a grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage ('Indian' controls, calling the ladies 'squaws,' the men 'braves,' the house a 'wigwam,' etc., etc., are excessively common); or, if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly as if one author composed more than half of the trance-messages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I know not; but this is obviously the case with the secondary selves which become 'developed' in spiritualist circles. There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistinguishable from effects of hypnotic suggestion. The subject assumes the role of a medium simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are present; and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity proportionate to his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is that persons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way when they become entranced, speak in the name of the departed, go through the motions of their several death-agonies, send messages about their happy home in the summer-land, and describe the ailments of those present. I have no theory to publish of these cases, several of which I have personally seen. As an example of the automatic writing performances I will quote from an account of his own case kindly furnished me by Mr. Sidney Dean of Warren, R. I., member of Congress from Connecticut from 1855 to 1859, who has been all his life a robust and active journalist, author, and man of affairs.