Confusion

Passages

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

Page 44 of 112 · 20 per page

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I sat there for a minute, the room reverberating with my scream, and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. The house was still. Then I reached for my bathrobe and slippers and went off in search of Lalah and Chloe. I was determined to get out of Lebanon as soon as possible. Leave the Middle East and never darken its door again. I picked my way down the little hill to the house where they were staying, nearly stumbling over rocks and roots of trees at every step. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness and I could see the rooftops of Karkabi, dominated by the electricity tower. Civilization! In half the barns and pastures of Karkabi, boys were probably fucking sheep or their sisters at this very minute. And what was wrong with it? Nothing really, I supposed, but I just couldn’t do it. Was I a prude? Why such a moral dilemma over a lousy little blow job? Because if you start blowing your sister’s husband, the next thing you know you’ll be blowing your mother’s husband—and good grief—that’s Daddy! But your shrink insists that it’s Daddy you really want. So why is having him so unthinkable? Maybe you should blow Daddy and be done with it? Maybe that’s the only way to overcome the fear? I sneaked past the front room in Aunt Simone’s house (past Aunt Simone and Uncle George who were both snoring musically), and found Chloe and Lalah sitting up in bed together reading aloud from a porno paperback called Orgy Girls. On the bed were about ten other books with titles like Teenage Incest; Swapping: Family Style; My Sister and Me; My Daughter, My Wife; Cherry Willing; The Long and the Short; Puddicat Lane; Entered in All Places; A Trip Around the World; and Letters of Lust. Lalah was reading aloud from a particularly poetic passage. Neither of them took any notice of my arrival. His hips began to move faster [Lalah read in a histrionic voice] as the urgency of climax approached. I felt his body pounding against mine, his stiff prick was filling every inch of my womanly canal and I could have screamed with pleasure. I felt the explosions starting within me and my cunt juices began to flow down the length of my love passage, lubricating his hot pole and letting it slip more easily…. …Why was it that the people in porno paperbacks were never bothered by any of the scruples which bothered me? They were nothing but enormous sexual organs thrusting blindly at each other in the dark. “Could you cut that stuff for a while and talk to me?” I demanded. “Isn’t this too much?” Lalah said, waving the book.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We were both learning how to fish the unconscious. Bennett was sitting almost motionless in the living room pondering his father’s death, his grandfather’s death, all the deaths that had been heaped on his shoulders when he was barely old enough to grasp his own life. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. I began two novels in Heidelberg. Both of them had male narrators. I just assumed that nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view. Besides, I didn’t want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: “clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope.” I wanted to write about the whole world. I wanted to write War and Peace—or nothing. No “lady writer” subjects for me. I was going to have battles and bullfights, and jungle safaris. Only I didn’t know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were “trivial” and “feminine"—while the subjects I knew nothing of were “profound” and “masculine.” No matter what I did, I felt I was bound to fail. Either I would fail by writing or fail by not writing. I was paralyzed. Thanks to my luck, my sadness, my strange relationship with my husband, my stubborn determination (which I did not at all believe in then), I managed to write three books of poems in the next three years. I scrapped two and the third was published. Then a whole new set of problems began. I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing, and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure. If I had learned how to write, mightn’t I also learn how to live? Adrian, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to live. Bennett, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to die. And I didn’t even know which I wanted. Or maybe I had pegged them wrong. Maybe Bennett was life and Adrian death. Maybe life was compromise and sadness, while ecstasy ended inevitably in death. Manichean though I was, I couldn’t even tell the players without a score card. If I could tell good from evil, maybe I could choose, but I was more baffled now than I’d ever been. EIGHTTales from the Vienna Woods

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Using the thin rubber edges of the sliding doors as support, she hauled her body up off the ground. A squirrel, whose progress she’d been following, finally succeeded in tearing open the netted ball of fat and nuts Kiki had left for the birds, and now stood just where she’d hoped he would half an hour earlier, right on the flagstones before her, with his question-mark of a tail quivering in the northeaster. ‘Zoor, look at this little guy.’ ‘I never understand that – how do eggs not go in the fridge? You’re the only person I have ever met who believes that. Eggs – fridge. It’s so basic .’ Kiki closed the sliding doors and went over to the cork notice board, where bills and birthday cards, photos and newspaper clippings, were pinned. She began lifting the layers of paper, looking under receipts and behind the calendar. Nothing ever got taken down from here. There was still a picture of the first Bush with a dartboard superimposed over his face. Still, in the top left-hand corner, a huge button bought in New York’s Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat . Long ago someone  On Beauty had spilled something on it, and the quote had yellowed and curled like parchment, shrinking between its plastic and metal covers. ‘Zoor, do we still have the pool guy’s number? I should call him. It’s getting out of hand out there.’ Zora shook her head quickly, a vibration of perplexed disinterest. ‘Eyeano. Ask Dad.’ ‘Honey, put the extractor fan on. The smoke alarm’ll go.’ Kiki, fearing her daughter’s infamous clumsiness, raised her hands to her cheeks as Zora unhooked a frying pan from the collection of same hanging from a rack above the oven. Nothing was dropped. Now the fan machine started up, conveniently loud and insensitive to nuance – mechanical background noise to fill up all the gaps in the room, in the conversation. ‘Where is everybody? It’s late.’ ‘I don’t even think Levi came home last night. Your dad’s asleep, I think.’ ‘You think ? You don’t know?’ They looked at each other, the older woman closely examining the younger face. She struggled to find a route through this cool, featureless irony Zora and her friends seemed to cherish so. ‘What?’ said Zora, archly innocent, repelling genuine inquiry. ‘I don’t know these things. I don’t know what’s happening with the sleeping arrangements.’ She turned away again and opened the double doors of the fridge, taking a step forward into its cavernous interior. ‘I just prefer to leave you two to have your little soap opera. If the drama must continue, it must continue.’ ‘There’s no drama.’ Zora used both hands to lift up a massive carton of juice, high and away from her body, like a cup she’d won.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  There wasn’t any institution in the country that Lydia couldn’t reorganize and make more efficient, and in a few years, when she was done with Wellington, she knew in her heart of hearts that she would go on to Harvard and from there to anywhere she liked, maybe even the Pentagon. She had the skills, and skills took you places in Lydia’s America. You started out with something as lowly as creating a filing system for a Back Bay drycleaning firm, and you ended with organizing and managing one of the most complex databases in the country for the President himself. Lydia knew how she’d got where she was today, and also where she was going. What she didn’t get was how Claire Malcolm had got where she was today. How was it possible that a woman who lost her own office keys sometimes three times in a week and did not know where the supplies cupboard was after five years at the college could yet hold a title as grandiose as Downing Professor of Comparative Literature and be paid what Lydia knew she was paid because it was Lydia who sent out the pay stubs? And then, on top of it all, have an inappropriate workplace affair. Lydia knew it had something to do with art, but, personally, she didn’t buy it. Academic degrees she understood – Jack’s two Ph.D.s, in Lydia’s mind, made up for the all times he tipped coffee into his own filing cabinet. But poetry? ‘Now, would you have any idea which classroom she’s assigned to, Liddy?’ ‘Jack – give me a minute on that. I got it on the computer  the anatomy lesson somewhere . . . Remember that time she took a class on a bench by the river? She gets some crazy ideas sometimes. Is it an emergency?’ ‘No . . .’ murmured Jack, ‘Not an emergency . . . as such.’ ‘It’s the Chapman block, Jack, Room C. You want that I get a message to her? I can send one of the kids.’ ‘No, no . . . I’ll go and . . .’ said Jack, lost for a minute in pressing the tip of a ballpoint into the soft, giving blackness at the centre of his desk. ‘Jack, I got a kid just come in my office looking like someone killed his dog – you OK, honey? Jack, call me later if you need anything.’ ‘Will do, Liddy.’ Jack eased his blazer off the back of his chair and put it on. His hand was on the doorknob when the phone rang. ‘Jack? Liddy. Claire Malcolm just ran by my office faster than Carl Lewis. She’ll be in front of yours in about three seconds. I’ll send someone over to her class and tell them she’s going to be late.’

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Well, Dan was out the door before the second hand had completed its first revolution. He may well hold the world record for the shortest therapy session. My point here isn’t to knock the mental-health profession but to illustrate the false confidence that one’s perceptions of other people’s mental states are —or ever can be—“right.” It comes from the classical view, which proposes that Dan broadcasts anger with a distinct fingerprint and the therapist detects it, even if Dan is unaware. If you want to gain mastery at perceiving other people’s emotional experiences, you must let go of this essentialist assumption. What happened during Dan’s minute in therapy? He constructed an experience of concentration, and the therapist constructed a perception of anger. Both constructions were real, not in the objective sense but in the social sense. Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism. 45 To improve at emotion perception, we must all give up the fiction that we know how other people feel. When you and a friend disagree about feelings, don’t assume that your friend is wrong like Dan’s ex-therapist did. Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right. So, if our perceptions are just guesses, how do we ever communicate with each other? If you tell me that you’re proud of your child’s accomplishments in school, and “Pride” is a population of diverse instances with no consistent fingerprint, how can I know which “Pride” you mean? (This question doesn’t arise in the classical view, where pride has a distinct essence; you simply broadcast pride and I recognize it.) You and I communicate emotion, in the face of huge variability, by way of the brain’s predictive machinery. Your emotions are guided by your predictions. And as I observe you, the emotions I perceive are guided by my predictions. Emotional communication happens, therefore, when you and I predict and categorize in synchrony. 46 Scientists and bartenders know that people synchronize in various ways when they communicate, especially if they like or trust each other. I nod, then you nod. You touch my arm and a moment later I touch yours. Our nonverbal behaviors coordinate. There’s also biological synchrony; a mother’s and child’s heart rates will synchronize if they are securely bonded, and the same can happen to anyone during an engaging conversation. The mechanism is still a mystery. I suspect it’s because their breathing synchronizes as they unconsciously observe each other’s chests rising and falling.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It’s really twisted.’ ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Levi, and they were all silent for a  the anatomy lesson minute looking out over the deserted back lot, a non-place where nothing happened except lines of trash cans overflowing with discarded polythene packaging and a basketball hoop that no one was allowed to use. A pink-streaked winter sky, with the clarity of heatless sunlight, gave a sting to the bleak prospect of returning to work in the next thirty seconds. The sound of the fire door’s bar being shunted downwards ended this quiet. Tom went to help pull it open, thinking it was tiny Gina, but it was Bailey pushing against him, sending him back three steps. ‘Sorry – I didn’t realize – ’ said Tom, releasing his own hand from the spot where Bailey’s psoriatic fingers were pressing. Bailey came blinking into the sun like a cave animal. He had his mega-store cap on backwards. There was a strong streak of perversity in Bailey, born of his isolation, which pushed him to pursue these feeble eccentricities. It was his way of at least knowing the cause of, and therefore in some way controlling, the contempt directed at him. ‘So here’s where all my staff is at,’ he said, his manner, as ever, vaguely autistic, speaking to a point just over their heads. ‘I was wondering about that. Everybody come out to smoke at the same time?’ ‘Yeah . . . yep,’ said Tom, throwing his smoke to the floor and stepping on it. ‘Kill you dead, that will,’ said Bailey sombrely, seeming to predict not warn. ‘And you too, young lady – kill you dead.’ ‘It’s a calculated risk,’ said Candy quietly. ‘Excuse me?’ Candy shook her head and put her Marlboro out against the cement wall. ‘So,’ said Bailey, smiling strainedly, ‘I hear you been organizing a coop against me. Grapevine – little bird told me. Organizing a coop. And here you all are.’ Tom looked confusedly at Mike and vice versa. ‘Sorry, Mr Bailey,’ said Tom. ‘Sorry – what did you say?’ ‘A coop, you’re organizing one. Plotting against me out here. I just came to see how that’s working out for you.’  On Beauty ‘ A coup – ’ said Tom, very quietly correcting Bailey for his own comprehension. ‘Like a revolution.’ Levi, who heard him, and had not understood the initial mistake or known the word ‘coup’ until this moment, laughed loudly. ‘Coop? Bailey, that’s like some thing for chickens, man. We organizing a coop? How’s that work?’ Candy and Mike sniggered. Tom turned away to gulp his laugh down like an aspirin. Bailey’s hopeful face, hopeful a moment earlier of triumph, broke down into confusion and anger. ‘You know what I mean. Anyway – ain’t nothing can be changed about store policy, so if anybody here don’t like it, they more than welcome to leave this current employment.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  18 * Aliquantum processeramus et iam iubaris exortu cuncta collustrantur, et ego curiose sedulo arbitrabar iugulum comitis, qua parte gladium delapsum videram, et mecum ‘ Vesane,' aio ‘Qui poculis et vino sepul- tus extrema somniasti. Ecce Socrates integer, sanus, incolumis. Ubi vulnus? Spongia ubi? Ubi pos- tremum cicatrix tam alta, tam recens ?' et ad illum ‘Ne’ inquam ‘Immerito medici fidi cibo et crapula distentos saeva et gravia somniare autumant: mihi denique quod poculis vesperi minus temperavi, nox acerba diras et truces imagines obtulit, ut adhuc me credam cruore humano aspersum atque impiatum,’ 30 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK I * Then I rose up joyful, as I hoped not to be, with a merry countenance, saying: ‘Behold, good ostler, my friend, my companion and my brother whom thou being drunken in the night didst falsely affirm to be murdered by me.’ And therewithal I embraced my friend Socrates and kissed him; but he smelling the stink wherewith those hags had embrued me, thrust me away and said: ‘Away with thee with thy filthy odour, and then he began gently to enquire how that noisome scent happened unto me, but I (with some light jest feigning and colouring the matter for the time) did break off his talk into another path, and take him by the hand and said: ‘ Why tarry we? Why leave we the pleasure of this fair morning? Let us go. And so I took up my packet, and paid the charges of the house, and we departed. * We had not gone a mile out of the town but it was broad day, and then I diligently looked upon Socrates’ throat to see if I could espy the place where Meroe thrust in her sword, and I thought with myself : * What a madman am I, that (being overcome with wine yesternight) have dreamed such terrible things! Behold, I see Socrates is sound, safe and in health. Where is his wound? Where is the sponge? Where is his great and new cut?’ And then I spake to him and said: ‘Verily it is not without occasion that physicians of experience do affirm, that such as fill their gorges abundantly with meat and drink shall dream of dire and horrible sights, for I myself (not restraining mine appetite yesternight from the pots of wine) did seem to see in this bitter night strange and cruel visions, that even yet I think myself sprinkled and wet with human blood’ ; whereunto Socrates laughing, made answer and said : 31 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  But such curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures in Rome. Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance. Perhaps sometime in the last few hundred years, smiling became a universal, stereotyped gesture symbolizing happiness. * Or . . . perhaps smiling in happiness is simply not universal. 1 8 … Emotion concepts are the secret ingredient behind the success of the basic emotion method. These concepts make certain facial configurations appear universally recognizable as emotional expressions when, in fact, they’re not. Instead, we all construct perceptions of each other’s emotions. We perceive others as happy, sad, or angry by applying our own emotion concepts to their moving faces and bodies. We likewise apply emotion concepts to voices and construct the experience of hearing emotional sounds. We simulate with such speed that emotion concepts work in stealth, and it seems to us as if emotions are broadcast from the face, voice, or any other body part, and we merely detect them . A perfectly reasonable question for you to ask at this point is: how can my colleagues and I have the audacity to claim that our handful of experiments disconfirm hundreds of others that found evidence that emotions are universally recognized in expressions? The psychologist Dacher Keltner, for example, estimates that “there are a zillion data points on a perspective that conforms to Ekman.” 1 9 The answer is that most of these zillion experiments use the basic emotion method, which you have just seen contains a secret stash of concept knowledge about emotion. If humans actually had an inborn ability to recognize emotional expressions, then removing the emotion words from the method should not matter . . . but it did, every single time. There is very little doubt that emotion words have a powerful influence in experiments, instantly casting into doubt the conclusions of every study ever performed that used the basic emotion method. 2 0 To date, my lab has made two expeditions to Namibia and one to Tanzania (visiting a hunter-gatherer group called the Hadza) with consistent results. The social psychologist José-Miguel Fernández-Dols has also replicated our results in an isolated culture on the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea. So, science now has a reasonable, alternative explanation for those “zillions of data points.” The basic emotion method guides people to construct perceptions of Western-style emotions. That is, emotion perception is not innate but constructed. 2 1 If you look closely at the original cross-cultural experiments from the 1960s, you can see clues that the conceptual elements within the basic emotion method pushed the results toward the appearance of universality.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Concept learning does not stop in childhood—it continues throughout life. Sometimes a new emotion word appears in your primary language, engendering a new concept. For example, schadenfreude, a German emotion word meaning “pleasure from someone else’s misfortune,” has now been incorporated into English. Personally, I’d like to add the Greek word stenahoria to English, which refers to a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction. I can think of a few romantic relationships where this emotion concept would have come in handy.41 Other languages commonly have emotion words whose associated concepts have no equivalent in English. For example, Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call “Anger.” German has three distinct “Angers” and Mandarin has five. If you were to learn any of these languages, you’d need to acquire these new emotion concepts to construct perceptions and experiences with them. You’ll develop these concepts faster if you live with native speakers of the new language. The new concepts are affected by the older ones from your primary language. Native speakers of English who learn Russian, for example, must learn to distinguish between anger at a person, called serdit’sia, and anger for more abstract reasons such as the political situation, known as zlit’sia. The latter concept is more similar to the English concept of “Anger,” but Russian speakers use the former more frequently; as a result, English speakers use serdit’sia more frequently as well and wind up misapplying it. This is not an error in a biological sense, since neither concept has a biological fingerprint, but in a cultural sense.42 New emotion concepts from a second language can also modify those of your primary language. A research scientist in my lab, Alexandra Touroutoglou, came from Greece to learn neuroscience. As she became more proficient at speaking English, her Greek and English emotion concepts began to blend. For example, Greek has two concepts for “Guilt,” one for minor infractions and another for serious transgressions. English covers both situations with the single word “guilty.” When Alex would speak with her sister who was still in Greece, Alex would use the “major” guilt word (enohi) when describing, say, that she ate too much pie at our lab’s beach party. To her sister, Alex came across as overly dramatic. In this case, Alex constructed her dessert experience using the English concept for guilt.43 I hope by now you appreciate the drama that is going on here. Emotion words are not about emotional facts in the world that are stored like static files in your brain. They reflect the varied emotional meanings you construct from mere physical signals in the world using your emotion knowledge. You acquired that knowledge, in part, from the collective knowledge contained in the brains of those who cared for you, talked to you, and helped you to create your social world. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world. …

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was necessary, tor ex ample, before one could relate the culrure of Haiti to that of Africa, to know what the Haitian culrure was. Within Haiti there were a great many culrures. Frenchmen, �egroes, and Indians had bequeathed it quite dissimilar ways of lite; Cath olics, voodooists, and animists cut across class and color lines. Alexis described as "pockets" of culrure those related and yet quite specific and dissimilar ways of lite to be fo und ''ithin the borders of any country in the world and \\ished to know by what alchemy these opposing ways of lite became a national cultur e. i\nd he ''ished to know, too, what relation national culrure bore to national independence-was it possible. really, to speak of a national culture when speaking of nations which were not free? Senghor remarked, apropos of this question, that one of the great difficulties posed by this problem of c-alrures ''ithin cul tures, particularly ''ithin the borders of Africa herselt: was the difficulty of establishing and maintaining contact with the people if one's language had been to rmed in Europe. And he went on, somewhat later, to make the point that the heritage of the American Negro was an African heritage. He used, as proof of this, a poem of Richard Wright's which was, he said, im·olved \\ith African tensions and symbols. even though Wright himself had not been aware of this. He suggested that the �rudy of African sources might pro,·e extremely iUuminat ing for American Negroes. For. he suggested, in the same way 15 + NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME that white classics exist-classic here taken to mean an endur ing revelation and statement of a specific, peculiar, cultural sensibility-black classics must also exist. This raised in my mind the question of whether or not white classics did exist, and, with this question, I began to sec the implications of Scnghor's claim. For, if white classics existed, in distinction, that is, to merely French or English classics, these could only be the classics produced by Greece and Rome. If Black Boy, said Senghor, were to be analyzed, it would undoubtedly reveal the African heritage to which it owed its existence; in the same way, I supposed, that Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities, would, upon analysis, reveal its debt to Aeschylus. It did not seem very important. And yet, I realized, the question had simply never come up in relation to European literature. It was not, now, the Euro pean necessity to go rummaging in the past, and through all the countries of the world, bitterly staking out claims to its cultural possessions. Y ct Black Boy owed its existence to a great many other fa c tors, by no means so tenuous or so problematical; in so hand somely presenting Wright with his African heritage, Senghor rather seemed to be taking away his identity.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafes. This made it rather difficult to look me up, for as soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took note book and fountain pen off to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather a lot of coffee and, as evening ap proached, rather a lot of alcohol, but did not get much writing done. But one night, in one of the cafes of St. Germain des 101 102 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON Pres, I was discovered by this New Yorker and only because we found ourselves in Paris we immediately established the illusion that we had been fast friends back in the good old U.S.A. This illusion proved itself too thin to support an eve ning's drinking, but by that time it was too late. I had com mitted myself to getting him a room in my hotel the next day, tor he was living in one of the nest of hotels near the Gare St. Lazare, where, he said, the propriitaire was a thief, his wife a repressed nymphomaniac, the chambermaids "pigs," and the rent a crime. Americans are always talking this way about the French and so it did not occur to me that he meant what he said or that he would take into his own hands the means of avenging himself on the French Republic. It did not occur to me, either, that the means which he did take could possibly have brought about such dire results, results which were not less dire for being also comic-opera. It came as the last of a series of disasters which had perhaps been made inevitable by the fact that I had come to Paris originally with a little over forty dollars in my pockets, nothing in the bank, and no grasp whatever of the French language. It developed, shortly, that I had no grasp of the French char acter either. I considered the French an ancient, intelligent, and cultured race, which indeed they are.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I could not be certain whether I was really rich or really poor, really black or really white, really male or really female, really talented or a fraud, really strong or merely stubborn. In short, I had become an American. I had stepped into, I had walked right into, as I inevitably had to do, the bottomless confusion which is both public and private, of the American republic. Now we've brought this hypothetical hero to this place, now what are we going to do with him, what does all of this mean, what can we make it mean? What's the thread that unites all these peculiar and disparate lives, whether it's from Idaho to San Francisco, from Idaho to New York, from Bos ton to Birmingham? Because there is something that unites all of these people and places. What does it mean to be an American? What nerve is pressed in you or me when we hear this word? Earlier I spoke about the disparities and I said I was going to try and give an example of what I meant. Now the most obvious thing that would seem to divide me from the rest of my countrymen is the fact of color. The fact of color has a relevance objectively and some relevance in some other way, some emotional relevance and not only for the South . I mean that it persists as a problem in American lif e because it means something, it fulfills something in the American personality. It is here because the Americans in some peculiar way believe or think they need it. Maybe we can find out what it is that this problem fulfills in the American personality, what it cor roborates and in what way this peculiar thing, until today, helps Americans to tee) safe. When I spoke about incoherence I said I'd try to tell you what I meant by that word. It's a kind of incoherence that occurs, let us say, when I am frightened, I am absolutely 228 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME frightened to death, and there's something which is happen ing or about to happen that I don't want to face, or, let us say, which is an even better example, that I have a friend who has just murdered his mother and put her in the closet and I know it, but we're not going to talk about it. Now this means very shortly since, after all, I know the corpse is in the closet, and he knows I know it, and we're sitting around having a few drinks and trying to be buddy-buddy together, that very shortly, we can't talk about anything because we can't talk about that. No matter what I say I may inadvertently stumble on this corpse. And this incoherence which seems to afflict this country is analogous to that. I mean that in order to have a conversation with someone you have to reveal yourself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Now it is easy enough to state flatly that Faulkner's middle of the road does not-cannot-exist and that he is guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty in pretending that it does. I think this is why he clings to his fantasy. It is easy enough to accuse him of hypocrisy when he speaks of man being "indestructible because of his simple \\ill to freedom." But he is not being hypocritical; he means it. It is only that Man is one thing-a rather unlud .. ·- y abstraction in this case and the Negroes he has always known, so fatally tied up in his mind \\ith his grandfather's slaYes, are quite another. He is at his best, and is perfectly sincere, when he declares, in Hmpe1·s, "To liYe anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like liYing in Alaska and being agai nst snow. We ha,·e already got snow. And as \\'ith the Alaskan, merely to li,·e in armistice with it is not enough. Like the Alaskan, we had better use it." And though this seems to be flatly opposed to his statement (in an interYiew printed in T11e Repo1·te1·) that, if it came to a contest between the federal gm·ernment and Mississippi, he would fight for Mississippi, "eYen if it meant going out into the streets and shooting � e groes," he means that, too. Faulkner means eYerything he says, means them all at once, and with ,·ery nearly the same intensitY. This is wh,· his statements demand our attention. He has . perhaps nne � before more concretely expressed what it means to be a Southerner. \Vhat seems to define the Southerner, in his own mind at 2I2 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME any rate, is his relationship to the North, that is to the rest of the Republic, a relationship which can at the very best be described as uneasy. It is apparently very difficult to be at once a Southerner and an American; so difficult that many of the South's most independent minds arc forced into the American exile; which is not, of course, without its aggravating, circular effect on the interior and public life of the South. A Bosto nian, say, who leaves Boston is not regarded by the citizenry he has abandoned with the same venomous distrust as is the Southerner who leaves the South. The citizenry of Boston do not consider that they have been abandoned, much less be trayed .

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We were at an afternoon party, Norman was standing in the kitchen, a drink in his hand, holding forth fo r the benefit of a small group of people. There seemed something different about him, it was the belligerence of his stance, and the really rather pontifical tone of his voice. I had only seen him, re member, in Malaquais' living room, which Malaquais indefat igably dominates, and on various terraces and in various dives in Paris. I do not mean that there was anything unfriendly about him. On the contrary, he was smiling and having a ball. And yet-he was leaning against the refrigerator, rather as though he had his back to the wall, ready to take on all comers. Norman has a trick, at least with me, of watching, some what ironically, as you stand on the edge of the crowd around him, waiting fo r his attention. I suppose this ought to be ex asperating, but in fa ct I find it rather endearing, because it is so transparent and because he gets such a bang out of being the center of attention. So do I, of course, at least some of the time. We talked, bantered, a little tensely, made the usual, doomed effort to bring each other up to date on what we had been doing. I did not want to talk about my novel, which was only just beginning to seem to take shape, and, therefore, did not dare ask him if he were working on a novel. He seemed very pleased to see me, and I was pleased to see him, but I also had the fe eling that he had made up his mind about me, adversely, in some way. It was as though he were saying, Okay, so now I know who you are, baby. I was taking a boat in a fe w days, and I asked him to call me. "Oh, no," he said, grinning, and thrusting that fo refinger at me, "you call me." "That's fa ir enough," I said, and I left the party and went on back to Paris. While I was out of the country, Norman published Advertisements for Myself, which presently crossed THE BLACK BOY LOOKS AT THE WHITE BOY 281 the ocean to the apartment of James Jones. Bill Styron was also in Paris at that time, and one evening the three of us sat in Jim's living room, reading aloud, in a kind of drunken, masochistic fa scination, Norman's judgment of our personal ities and our work. Actually, I came off best, I suppose; there was less about me, and it was less venomous. But the con descension infuriated me; also, to tell the truth, my fe elings were hurt.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black lite and wealth; and blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried Ameri can guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair-to all of which may now be added the bitter need to find a head on which to place the crown of Miss America. freaks are called freaks and arc treated as they are treated-in the main, abominably-because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks-though we arc rarely what we appear to be. We are, t(>r the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment. But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but be cause each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other male in female, tCmale in male, white in black and black in white. We arc a part of each other. Many of my countrymen FREAKS AND AMERIC AN IDE AL OF MA NHOOD 829 appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do any thing about it. Playboy, January 1985 The Price of the Ticket M Y SOUL looks back and wonders how I got over-i ndeed: but I find it unex pectedly ditlicult to remember, in detail, how I got started. I will never, tor example, forget Saul Lcvitas, the editor of The New Leader, who gave me my first book review assignment sometime in 1946, nor Mary Greene, a wonderful woman, who was his man Friday: but I do not remember exactly how I met them. I do remember how my lif e in Greenwich Village began which is, essentially, how my career bcgan-t(>r it began when I was fifteen. One day, a DeWitt Clinton H. S. running buddy, Emile Ca pouya, played hookey without me and went down to Green wich Village and made the acquaintance of Bcautord Delaney. The next day, he told me about this wonderful man he had met, a blac k-th en, Negro, or Colored- painter and said that I must meet him: and he gave me Beauford Delancy's address. I had a Dickensian job, after school, in a sweat shop on Canal Street, and was getting on so badly at home that I dreaded going home: and, so, sometime later, I went to 181 Greene Street, where Beauford lived then, and introduced myself I was terrified, once I had climbed those stairs and knocked on that door. A short, round brown man came to the door and looked at me. He had the most extraordinary eyes I'd ever seen.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lamming was interrupted at about this point, however, fo r it had lately been decided, in view of the great number of reports still to be read, to limit everyone to twenty minutes. 162 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME This quite unrealistic rule was not to be observed very closely, especially as regarded the French-speaking delegates. But Lamming put his notes in his pocket and ended by saying that it� as someone had remarked, silence was the only common language, politics, tor Negroes, was the only common ground. The evening session began with a film, which I missed, and was followed by a speech tram Cheik Anta Diop, which, in sum, claimed the ancient Egyptian empire as part of the Negro past. I can only say that this question has never greatly exer cised my mind, nor did M. Diop succeed in doing so-at least not in the direction he intended. He quite refused to remain within the twenty-minute limit and, while his claims of the deliberate dishonesty of all Egyptian scholars may be quite well fo unded tor all I know, I cannot say that he convinced me. He was, however, a great success in the hall, second only, in tact, to Aimc Cesaire. He was followed by Richard Wright. Wright had been act ing as liaison man between the American delegation and the Africans and this had placed him in rather a difficult position, since both factions tended to claim him as their spokesman. It had not, of course, occurred to the Americans that he could be anything less, whereas the Africans automatically claimed him because of his great prestige as a novelist and his reputation fo r calling a spade a spade-particularly if the spade were white. The consciousness of his peculiar and cer tainly rather grueling position weighed on him, I think, rather heavily. He began by contCssing that the paper he had written, while on his fa rm in Normandy, impressed him as being, after the events of the last tcw days, inadequate. Some of the things he had observed during the course of the conference had raised questions in him which his paper could not have foreseen. He had not, however, rewritten his paper, but would read it now, exactly as it had been written, interrupting himself whenever what he had written and what he had since been made to fe el seemed to be at variance. He was exposing, in short, his con science to the conference and asking help of them in his confusion. PRINCES AND POWERS There was, first of all, he said, a painful contradiction in being at once a Westerner and a black man. "I see both worlds from another, and third, point ofview." This fact had nothing to do with his will, his desire, or his choice. It was simply that he had been born in the West and the West had fo rmed him.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is the question of Bigger's hu manity which is at stake, the relationship in which he stands to all other Americans-and, by implication, to all people and it is precisely this question which it cannot clarify, with which it cannot, in fact, come to any coherent terms. He is the monster created by the American republic, the present awful sum of generations of oppression; but to say that he is a monster is to fall into the trap of making him subhuman and he must, therefore, be made representative of a way of life which is real and human in precise ratio to the degree to which it seems to us monstrous and strange. It seems to me that this idea carries, implicitly, a most remarkable confession: that is, that Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims; and, further, that the use to which Wright puts this idea can only proceed fr om the assumption not entirely unsound-that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of NOTES OF A NATIVE SON assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing thcmsch·cs in relation to any way of life which is not their own. The privacy or obscurity of Negro life makes that life capable, in our imaginations, of producing anything at all; and thus the idea of Bigger's monstrosity can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice. It is an idea, which, in the framework of the novel, is dignified by the possibility it promptly affords of presenting Bigger as the herald of disaster, the danger signal of a more bitter time to come when not Bigger alone but all his kindred will rise, in the name of the many thousands who have perished in fire and flood and by rope and torture, to demand their rightful vengeance. But it is not quite fair, it seems to me, to exploit the na tional innocence in this way. The idea of Bigger as a warning boomerangs not only because it is quite beyond the limit of probability that Negroes in America will ever achieve the means ofwreaking vengeance upon the state but also because it cannot be said that they have any desire to do so. Native Son docs not convey the altogether savage paradox of the American Negro's situation, of which the social reality which we prefer with such hopeful superficiality to study is but, as it were, the shadow.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, fo r (I said to myself, but not to Elijah), "I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn't love more important than color?" Elijah looked at me with great kindness and affection, great 3 28 THE FIRE NEXT TIME pity, as though he were reading my heart, and indicated, skep tically, that I might have white fr iends, or think I did, and they might be trying to be decent-now-but their time was up. It was almost as though he were saying, "They had their chance, man, and they goofed!" And I looked around the table. I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah's authority or the evidence of their own lives or the reality of the streets outside. Yes, I knew two or three people, white, whom I would trust with my life, and I knew a few others, white, who were strug gling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human. But how could I say this? One cannot argue with anyone's experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, fo r I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout re corded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed. Was this true? Had they fa iled? How much depended on the point of view? For it would seem that a certain category of exceptions never fa iled to make the world worse-that category, precisely, fo r whom power is more real than love. And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it. In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they arc trying to prove that Negroes arc not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, "Well, take my friend Mary," and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads sol emnly and say, at least, "Well, she's all right-but the others!"

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One of the things that sur prised him in the last few days had been the realization that most of the dele gates to the conference did not feel as he did. He felt, nevertheless, that, though Europeans had not realized what they were do ing in freeing Africans from the "rot" of their past, they had been accomplishing a good. And yet-he was not certain that he had the right to say that, having fo rgotten that Africans NOBOD Y KNOWS MY NAME arc not American Negroes and were not, theref ore , as he somewhat mysteriously consider ed American Negroes to be, fl·ce from their "irrational" past. In sum, Wright said, he felt that Europe had brought the Enlightenment to Africa and that "what was good fo r Europe was good f(>r all mankind." I tCit that this was, perhaps, a tactless way of phrasing a debatable idea, but Wright went on to expr ess a notion which I fo und even stranger. And this was that the West, having created an Mri can and Asian elite, should now "give them their heads" and "refuse to be shocked" at the "methods they will feel compelled to usc" in unifYing their countries. We had not, ourselves, used very pretty methods. Pre sumably, this left us in no position to throw stones at Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, etc., should they de cide, as they almost surely would, to usc dictatorial methods in order to hasten the "social evoluti on ." In any case, Wright said, these men, the leaders of their countries, once the new social order was established, would voluntarily surrender the "personal pow er." He did not say what would happen then, but I supposed it would be the second coming. Saturday was the last day of the conference, which was scheduled to end with the invitation to the audience to engage with the delegates in the Euro-African dialogue. It was a day mar ked by much confusion and excitement and discon tent this last on the part of people who felt that the conference had been badly ru n, or who had not been allo wed to read their reports. (They were often the same peop le.) It was marked, too, by rather a great deal of plain speaking, both on and otl� but mostly of f, the record . The hall was even more hot and crowded than it had been the first day and the pho tographers were back. The entire morning was taken up in an attempt to agree on a "cultur al inventor y." This had to be done before the con terence could draf t those reso lutions which they were, today, to present to the worl d.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One hasn't got to have an enormous military machine in order to be unfree when it's simpler to be asleep, when it's simpler to be apathetic, when it's simpler, in fact, not to want to be fr ee, to think that some thing else is more important. And I'm not using fr eedom now so much in a political sense as I'm using it in a personal sense. It seems to me that the confusion is revealed, for example, in those dreadful speeches by Eisenhower, those incredible speeches by Nixon, they sound very much, after all, like the jargon of the Beat generation, that is, in terms of clarity. Not a pin to be chosen between them, both levels, that is, the highest level presumably, the administration in Washington, and the lowest level in our national life, the people who are called "beatniks" are both involved in saying that something which is really on their heels does not exist. Jack Kerouac says "Holy, holy" and we say Red China docs not exist. But it really does. I'm simply trying to point out that it's the symp tom of the same madness. Now, in some way, somehow, the problem the writer has which is, after all, his problem and perhaps not yours is some how to unite these things, to find the terms of our connection, without which we will perish. The importance of a writer is continuous; I think it's socially debatable and usually socially not terribly rewarding, but that's not the point; his impor tance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe. It is a function, let's face it, it's a special function. There is no democracy on this level. It's a very difficult thing to do, it's a very special thing to do and people who do it cannot by that token do many other things.