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.

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

  ARISTOTLE ’ S TEXT Chapter 5: 1009a 38-1009b 12357. And similarly the theory that truth consists in appearances comes to some thinkers from sensible things. For they think that the truth should not be judged by the large or small number who uphold some view; and they point out that the same thing appears to be sweet to some when they taste it and bitter to others. Hence, if all men were ill or all were mad, and only two or three were healthy or in possession of their wits, the latter would appear ill or mad and not the former. Further, they say that the impressions made upon many of the other animals are contrary to those made upon us, and that to the senses of each person things do not always appear to be the same. Therefore it is not always evident which of these views is true or which is false, but both appear equally so. And it is for this reason that Democritus says that either nothing is true or it is not evident to us. COMMENTARY669. Having solved the difficulty which led the ancient philosophers to maintain that contradictories are true at the same time, the Philosopher now dispels the difficulty which led some thinkers to maintain that every appearance is true. This part is divided into two. First (351:C 669), he gives the difficulties which led some thinkers to hold the position mentioned above. Second (363:C 685), he dispels these difficulties ( “ But in reply ” ). In regard to the first he does two things. First, he gives the reason which led these men to maintain that every appearance is true. Second (358:C 672), he explains why they reasoned in this way ( “ In general ” ). He therefore says, first (357), that, just as the opinion which maintained that contradictories are true at the same time came from certain sensible things in which it happens that contradictories come from the same thing, so too “ the theory that truth consists in appearances, ” or the opinion about the truth of appearances, is derived from certain sensible things; that is, by those who are not perverse but are drawn into this position because of difficulties. This occurs because they find that different men hold contrary opinions about the same sensible things; and they give three reasons in support of their position. First, they point out that the same thing appears to taste sweet to some atid bitter to others, so that men have contrary opinions about all sensible things. Second, they note that many animals make judgments about sensible things which are contrary to ours; for what seems tasty to the ox or to the ass is judged by man to be unpalatable. Third, they say that the same man at different times makes different judgments about sensible things; for what now appears to be sweet and palatable to him at another time seems bitter or tasteless.

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

  HILARY. (vii. de Trin) A declaration so new startled Philip. Our Lord is seen to be man. He confesses Himself to be the Son of God, declares that, if He were known, the Father would be known, that, if He is seen, the Father is seen. The familiarity of the Apostle therefore breaks forth into questioning our Lord, Philip saith unto Him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.He did not deny He could be seen (non visum negavit), but wished to be shewn him; nor did he wish to see with his bodily eyes, but that He whom he had seen might be made manifest to his understanding. He had seen the Son in the form of man, but how through that form He saw the Father, he did not know. This he wants to be shewn him, shewn to his understanding, not set before his eyes; and then he will be satisfied: And it sufficeth us. AUGUSTINE. (i. de Trin. c. viii) For to that joy of beholding His face, nothing can be added. Philip understood this, and said, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. But he did not yet understand that he could in the same way have said, Lord, shew us Thyself, and it sufficeth us. But our Lord’s answer enlightens him, Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lxx. 1) But how is this, when our Lord said that they knew whither He was going, and the way, because they knew Him? The question is easily settled by supposing that some of them knew, and others not; among the latter, Philip. HILARY. (vii. de Trin) He reproves the ignorance of Philip in this respect. For whereas his actions had been strictly divine, such as walking on the water, commanding the winds, remitting sins, raising the dead, He complained that in His assumed humanity, the Divine nature was not discerned. Accordingly to Philip’s request, to be shewn the Father, Our Lord answers, He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lxx) When two persons are very like each, we say, If you have seen the one, you have seen the other. So here, He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father; not that He is both the Father, and the Son, but that the Son is an absolute likeness of the Father.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave, but it had never entered my mind that any one would look at me and expect me to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people. I acted in New Jer sey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself-I had to act that way-with results that were, simply, unbelievable. I had scarcely arrived bdc>re I had earned the enmity, which was extraor dinarily in- NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON genious, of all my supe riors and nearly all my co-workers. In the beginning, to make matters worse, I simply did not know what was happening. I did not know what I had done, and I shortly began to wonder what anyone could possibly do, to bring about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostilit y. I knew about jim-crow but I had never experienced it. I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time bef ore anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up. Negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was always the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time . But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were sub sequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again. It was the same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live. I was always being forced to leave, silently, or with mutual imprecations. I very shortly became notorious and children giggled behind me when I passed and their elders whispered or shouted-they really believed that I was mad. And it did begin to work on my mind, of course; I began to be afraid to go anywhere and to compensate for this I went places to which I really should not have gone and where, God knows, I had no desire to be. My reputation in town naturally enhanced my reputation at work and my work ing day became one long series of acrobatics designed to keep me out of trou ble.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  For one thing, it becomes impossible, the moment one thinks about it, to predicate the existence of a common experie1� The momerlt one thinks about it, it be come s apparent that there-Is-no such thing. That experience is ·�cprivai:e;�arid a very Ia rgCly speechless affair is the principal i:rutn-;-perhaps, to which the colony under discussion bear s witness-though the aggressively unreadable face which they, collectively, present also suggests the more disturbing possi bility that experience may perfectly well be meaningless. This loaded speculation aside, it is certainly true that whatever this experience has done to them, or for them, whatever the effect has been, is, or will be, is a question to which no one has yet given any strikingly coherent answer. Military experience does not, furthermore, necessarily mean experience of battle, so that the student colony's common denomina tor reduces itself to nothing more than the fact that all of its member s have spent some time in uniform. This is the common denomina tor of their entire generation, of which the majority is not to be found in Paris, or, for that matter, in Eur ope. One is at the outset, therefore, forbidden to assume that the fact of having surrendered to the necessary anonymit y of uniform, or of hav ing undergone the shock of battle, was enough to occasion this flight from home. The best that one can do by way of uniting these so disparate identities is simply to accept, with out comment, the fact of their mil itary experience, without questioning its extent; and, further, to suggest that they form, by virtue of their presence here, a somewhat unexpected mi- 91 92 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON nority. Unlike the majorit y of their fellows, who were simply glad to get back home, these have elected to tarry in the Old World, among scenes and people unima ginably removed from anything they have known. They arc willing, apparently, at least for a season, to endure the wretched Parisian plumbing, the public baths, the Paris age, and dirt-to pursue some end, mysterious and largely inarticulate, arbitrarily summed up in the verb to study. Arbitrarily, because, however hard the cx-GI is studying, it is very difficult to believe that it was only fi:>r this reason that he traveled so far. He is not, usually, studying .anything which he couldn't study at home, in far greater com fOrt. (We arc limiting ourselves� for the moment, to those people who arc more or less seriously-studying, as opposed to those, to be considered later, who arc merely gold-bricking.) The people, ti:>r example, who arc studying painting, which seems, until one looks around, the best possible subject to be studying here, arc not studying, after all, with Picasso, or Matisse they arc studying with teachers of the same caliber as those they would have found in the States.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "I don't, anyway," I said, finally, "think about it a great deal." Elijah said, to his right, "I think he ought to think about it all the deal," and with this the table agreed. But there was nothing malicious or condemnatory in it. I had the stifling feeling that they knew I belonged to them but knew that I did not know it yet, that I remained unre ady, and that they were simply waiting, patiently, and with assura nce, for me to dis cover the truth for myself. For where else, after all, could I go? I was black, and theref ore a part of Islam, and would be saved from the holocaust awaiting the white world whether I would or no. My weak, deluded scruples could avail nothing against the iron word of the prophet. I felt that I was back in my father's house-as, indeed, in a way, I was-and I told Elijah that I did not care if white and black people marri ed, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, for (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 328 THE FIRE NE XT TIME pity, as though he were reading my heart, and indicated, skep tically, that I might have white friends, 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 out weigh Elijah's au thority 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, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the ju stice 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?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Men who had had homosexual adventures in CO camps, or in the service, could not accept what had happened to them, could not forget it, dared not discover if they desired to repeat it, and lapsed into a paralysis from which neither men nor women could rouse them. It was a time of the most terrifying personal anarchy. If one gave a party, it was virtually certain that someone, quite possibly oneself , would have a crying jag or have to be re strained from murder or suicide. It was a time of experimen tation, with sex, with marijuana, and minor infringements of the law, such as "boosting" from the A&P and stealing elec tricity from Con Edison. I knew some people who had a sto len refrigerator for which they had no room and no usc, and which they could not sell; it was finally shipped, I believe, of all places, to Cuba. But, finally, it seems to me that lif e was beginning to tell us who we were, and what lif e was-news no one has ever wanted to hear: and we fought back by cling ing to our vision of ourselves as innocent, of love perhaps imperfect but reciprocal and enduring. And we did not know that the price of this was experience. We had been raised to believe in fimnulas. In retrospect, the discovery of the orgasm-or, rather, of the orgonc box-seems the least mad of the formulas that came to hand. It seemed to me-though I was, perhaps, al ready too bitterly innoculatcd against groups or panaceas that people turned from the idea of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting. And I doubted that their conversion was any more to be trusted than that. The con \'erts, indeed, moved in a certain euphoric aura of well-being, which would not last. They had not become more generous, but less, not more open, but more closed. They ceased, to tally, to listen and could only proselytize; nor did their private lives become discernibly less tangled. There arc no formulas THE NE W LOS T GEN ER ATION 663 for the impro,·ement of the private, or any other, lif e-cer tainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who de cides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other up with razors on Sat urday nights.

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

  A fourth difficulty arises from the fact that the bread and wine have the same action, and undergo the same changes, after the consecration, as before. Thus the wine, if it were taken in great quantity, would heat and inebriate: the bread would strengthen and nourish. Moreover, if they be kept for a long time and carelessly, they are liable to putrefy, and to be consumed by mice. Again, they can be burnt and turned into ashes and steam. All these things are incompatible with Christ’s body, which according to faith is impassible. Therefore it would seem that the substance of Christ’s body cannot be present in this sacrament. A fifth difficulty regards especially the breaking of the bread: since this breaking is apparent to the senses; and is impossible without a subject. And it is absurd to say that the subject of that breaking is Christ’s body. Therefore, seemingly, Christ’s body is not there, but the substance of bread and wine. For these and like reasons the teaching of Christ and the Church appears to be hard. CHAPTER LXIII SOLUTION OF THE FOREGOING DIFFICULTIES: AND FIRST WITH REGARD TO THE CHANGING OF THE BREAD INTO CHRIST’S BODYALTHOUGH the operation of the divine power in this sacrament is too sublime and hidden for human research, lest unbelievers should deem the teaching of the Church on this question to be impossible, we must endeavour to show that it involves no impossibility whatsoever. The first point to consider, then, is how Christ’s body begins to be present under this sacrament. It is, in fact, impossible for this to take place by local movement of Christ’s body: both because it would follow that it ceases to be in heaven, whenever this sacrament is enacted; and because then this sacrament could only be celebrated in one place at a time, since the same local movement cannot terminate in more than one place; and because local movement cannot be instantaneous but needs time, whereas the consecration is effective in the last instant of the pronouncement of the words. It remains, therefore, to be said that the true body of Christ begins to be present in this sacrament, through the substance of the bread being changed into the substance of His body, and the substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. Hence we see how false are the opinions of those who say that in this sacrament the substance of the bread exists together with the substance of Christ’s body, as well as the opinion of those who say that the substance of the bread is annihilated, or that it is reduced to primal matter. In either case it follows that, in this sacrament, Christ’s body begins to be present by local movement: and we have proved this to be impossible.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is the diffcrencc2 �1 11 _ply, be_t\_\'een what one desires and what the reality--Insists_ o.n which difference we will not pursue except. to _ _ ohs.en'.e.Jb.a.b sin e the reasons which brought the student here are so ro mantic, and incoherent, he as come, m e e , a c1 which exists only in his rom . e cus Ions 1m se , so it would seem, against the shock of realit y, by refusing for a very long time to recognize Paris at all, but clinging instead to its image. This is the reason, perhaps, that Paris for so long fails to make any mark on him; and may also be why, when the tension between the real and the ima gined can no longer be supported, so many people undergo a species of breakdown, or take the first boat home. For Paris is, according to its legend, the city where everyone lo�es his_he!J.d, and h1s morals, !jv,·s tbroug-li..at--Wa&t�.:Oae-his t!!} re d'amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Pw:.itans-thu:i.ty..;JiL.fii:u:� all be�Qmr dmoken on the fine old air of fi:ecdom .. ·This legend, in the fashion of legends, has this much to support it, that it is not at all difficult to sec how it got started. It is limited, as le ends are limited, by being-literally -unlivable, and� e ferring tO t e pas . IS per aps not amazmg, t erefore, that this legend appears to have virtuallv nothing to do with the life of Paris itself, with the lives, that is, of the natives, __ to whom the city, no less than the le end s;long .The diarm of this legen proves 1tse capable of withstanding the most 9+ NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON improbable excesses of the French bureaucracy, the weirdest ,·agarics of the con cierge, the fantastic rents paid ti:>r uncom t(>rtable apartments, the discomf ort itselt� and, even, the great confusion and despair which is reflected in French politics and in French faces. More, the legend operates to place all of the inconveniences endured by the foreigner, to say nothing of the downright misery which is the lot of many of the na tives, in the gentle glow of the picturesque, and the absurd; so that, finally, it is perfectly possible to be enam ored of Paris while remaining totally inditlerent, or even hostile to the French. And this is made possible by the one person in Paris whom the legend seems least to atlect, who is not living it at all, that is, the Parisian himsel[ He, with his imp enetrable politesse, and with techniques unspeakably more direct, keeps the traveler at an unm istakable arm's length. Unlucky indeed, as well as rare, the traveler who thirsts to know the lives of the people-the people don't want him in their lives.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Between these two extremes, the student who embraces Home, and the student who embraces The Continent-both embraces, as we have tried to indicate, being singularly devoid of contact, to say nothing of love-there are far more grada tions than can be suggested here. The American in Europe__js ec�l}rwhcre confronted with th<: q��s!ion (>fhis identity, and this may be taken as the key to all the contradictions one encounters when attempting to discuss him. Certainly, for the student colony one finds no other common denominat or this is all, really, that they have in common, and they are dis tinguished from each other by the ways in which they come to terms, or fail to come to terms with their confusion. This prodigious question, at home so little recognized, seems, germ-like, to be vivified in the European air, and to grow disproportionately, displacing previous assurances, and pro ducing tensions and bewilderments entirely unlooked for. It is not, moreover, a question which limits itself to those who arc, so to speak, in traffic with ideas. It confronts everyone, finding everyone unprepared; it is a question with implica tions not easily escaped, and the attempt to escape can precipitate disaster. Our perfectly adapted student, fc:>r example, should his strongbox of custom break, may find himself hurled into that coterie of gold-bricks who form such a spectacular cle- A QUES TION OF ID ENTI TY 99 ment of the Paris scene that they are often what the Parisian has in the foreground of his mind when he wonderingly mut ters, Cht vmiment /es America ins. The great majority of this group, ha,ing attempted, on more or less personal le,·els, to lose or disguise their antecedents, are reduced to a kind of rubble of compulsion. HaYing cast off all pre,·ious disciplines, they haYe also lost the shape which these disciplines made for them and have not succeeded in finding any other. Their re jection of the limitations of American society has not set them free to function in any other society, and their illusions, there fore, remain intact: they have yet to be corrupted by the no tion that society is ne,·er anything less than a perfect labyrinth of limitations. They are charmed by the reflection that Paris is more than two thousand years old, but it escapes them that the Parisian has been in the making just about that long, and that one does not, theretore, become Parisian by virtue of a Paris address. This little band of bohemians, as grimly single minded as any eYangelical sect, illustrate, by the ,·ery ferocity \\ith which they disa\·ow American attitudes, one of the most American of attributes, the inability to belie,·e that time is real.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The newspaper accounts reported his suicide as the result of overwork: he put his whole heart into the book, we are told, and suffered a complete breakdown. Overworked suicides are by no means rare in what is known as the literary world; the history of writing is crammed with vignettes of the lone ly, starving artist rushing gratefully to death; but it is not the kind of thing one expects from a young, superbly successful American novelist, certainly not the kind of thing predicted f(>r the author of the Great American Novel . It must have been a savage blo w to Mr. Adams. R.aintree Coztn�1' is nothing if not affirmative. It elects to weld into an inviolable unity these sprawling United States. (One is tempted to remark here: but the unity has always been taken f(>r granted. Why the need now to prove that the United States of America is actually that?) In encompassing this aim Mr. Lockridge makes it apparent that he loves his country; and it becomes apparent that he does not really understand it and that he is disturbed. The disturbance-man ifested, fi>r in stance, by those long tortured philosophical discussions be tween the Hero and Professor Webster Stil es-is perhaps the healthiest aspect of R.aintree County. Here the disturbance is anterior and hidden; the author stacks his cards as best he can against the cynical Professor. It is as though the Professor were there to espouse the darkness so that Mr. Shawnessy can argue f(>r the light. It is always apparent that one is expected to like the Professor but never to agree with him; he has, after all, renounced those virtues and those aspirations which form the blood and skeleton of the good lif e. And these virtues, aspirations? We have all grown up with them; we learned them in Sunday School and in Boy Scout meetings; they have f(Jrmed the basis f(>r countless vale- LOCKRI DGE: 'THE AM ERIC AN MY TH' 593 dietaries. These precepts are designed for our instruction and protection; they are designed to prove that lif e in the Republic is always green and fertile, that our hopes and our strivings form the noblest dream of all. Why, the n, are we so loath to come to terms with it? The gulf between our dream and the realities that we live with is something that we do not understand and do not wish to admit. It is almost as though we were asking that others look at what we want and turn their eyes, as we do, away from what we are.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience. Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, de signed by and tor all the other people, and experience is noth ing more than sensation-so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, giYe one the rich, full life. They thus lose what it was they so bra,·ely set out to find, their own personalities, which, ha\ing been depriYed of all nourishment, soon cease, in effect, to exist; and they arrive, finally, at a dangerous dis respect tor the personalities of others. Though they persist in belie,·ing that their present shapelessness is treedom, it is ob sen·able that this present freedom is unable to endure either silence or pri,•acy, and demands, for its ultimate expression, a rootless wandering among the cates. Saint Germain"des Pres, the hean of the American colony, so far from ha,ing absorbed the American student, has been itself transtormed, on spring, summer, and fall nights, into a replica, very nearly, of Times Square. But if this w ere all one tound in the American student roo NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON colony, one would hardly have the heart to discuss it. If the American found in Europe only confusion, it would obviously be infinitely wiser tor him to remain at home. Hidden, how ever, in the heart of the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking: the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the world. This, which has so grandiose and general a ring, is, in fact, most personal-the American confusion seeming to be based on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the per son apart from all the forces which have produced him. This assumpt ion, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears. What is overwhelmin gly clear, it seems, to everyone but ourselves is that this history has created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and individual past. It is, indeed, this past which has thrust upon us our present, so troubling role. It is the past lived on the American continent, as against that other past, irrecover able now on the shores of Europe, which must sustain us in the present. The truth about that past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our taces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give. It is this demand which the American student in Paris is forced, at length, to make, for he has oth erwise no identity, no reason for being here, nothing to sus tain him here. From the vantage point of Europe he discovers his own country.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I didn't quite see the importance of it—I tried to do justice to Paul's sense of a moral conundrum whilst wondering who in the busy outside world gave a fuck about Edgard Orst anyway. Who were the Orst admirers? I imagined them like the fans of some eccentric minor composer, the Delius-nuts who turned out when my father did A Mass of Life at the Fairfield Hall—snuff-stained old sex-maniacs who sat conducting in their laps and collected bulging leather shopping-bags from the cloak-room afterwards. You couldn't tell from the rare bewintered visitors to the Museum, but the Orstians must be a similarly dodgy lot, joss-scented fantasists, nineties queens in velvet—perhaps still flared—suits. It was fairly clear to me that Paul himself wasn't one of them. He had admitted yesterday that Orst was something of a come-down after Rembrandt, that brilliant though he could be he lacked the range and sympathy of a major artist, that his was a "world of impossibilities". But that only seemed to make his personal loyalty firmer. I thought about what he'd said of their meetings, though in retrospect his words seemed cautious and inconclusive: Orst and his last days remained as yet in the deep shadow of his reticence. I felt sure some primary promise had been made to the blind old man by this clever teenager who came to talk to him or (as Helene had evoked it for me) to go through the print-drawers describing the pictures. Paul had come back to him decades later without much enthusiasm, but it may have seemed like destiny. There was a deep slow tempo to it, the half-hidden line of another life, that demanded respect and acceptance, and could never be changed. On reflection I saw that yesterday's lesson had been as much about the pleasure of having a pupil as about Orst's techniques and preoccupations. It wasn't that Paul was lonely exactly, but that the painter's secrets were offered, very deftly and instructively, as symbolic of secrets—or not even secrets, discomforts—of his own. There was a sense, as he locked the nude pictures back in the drawer, that something else had been revealed; and he gave me an optimistic smile. I was surprised, slow-witted, had the feeling of some benign plan unfolding in which I played a useful part without knowing quite what it was—the younger person who mysteriously performs what an older one despairs of. Not that I minded—I enjoyed being distracted by the Orst world and its nice problems, it had become a wonderful shadowy refuge from my own.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Helene was telling me about the white pictures," I said, not without a certain nervousness. I saw his twinge of weary annoyance. "Yes, I'm afraid that's all a lot of nonsense," he said, as though determined to be reasonable. "I refuse to show them as finished works—they're only prepared canvases in many cases. Helene, bless her, was very taken in by a young art-historian from Paris who worked here for a while and started giving them titles like 'Dans la Neige'. The fact is, Orst couldn't see. As you must have realised he was riddled with syphilis, he tried bravely to keep on painting, almost as a kind of optical experiment, while the fog closed in. If they do have any interest then it's purely medical." "I see. I'd no idea—that he had syphilis." "He could still paint, with vision, as it were, up until about '33. The other two panels can be dated much earlier, as they're both copied from known photographs. As for the syphilis, yes, of course." "I suppose I should have worked it out," I said uncertainly. "I don't think you mention it in the guide, do you?" "I've never laboured the point. I mean, it's known, obviously. I'm afraid I'm of the school that rather disapproves of publicising artists' private lives," he said, with an unhappy stiffness that was quite at odds with his normal shy cleverness. "I'm not sure." "You forget that I knew him; and—I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm lecturing you. It's simply a matter I have strong views on." I spread my hands to deny any wish to contradict him; though it was surprising to learn that the monkish Orst, the exquisite recluse, had been the victim of this quaint, almost romantic, sexual disease. I thought Paul could tell from my expression that I was going to want to know more. "It's ironic of course", he went on, "that he could never see very well anyway—at least from about Marcel's age onwards." "Really. Well, I've noticed the thickness of his glasses. But his work is usually so incredibly fine." "Oh, close up he was all right, his sight was superhuman, but anything more than a few feet away gave him increasing trouble. He was just very myopic, as so many artists of all kinds are." Paul squinted sympathetically at the pictures against the wall, and I felt as if my own short sight had been flatteringly vindicated and explained. "I remember he said to me when he was completely blind how strange it was that into his fifties he had had an eye like a microscope." "So what about the portraits, and the landscapes even?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I think it did all give him a feeling of life being unaccountable, of not having much idea about what even those closest to him were thinking and going through. As well as being a dreadful shock, of course. But when he'd settled down and kept on coming back to her over and over again I assume it was his way of asking those simple questions, the how and where and why." "And not coming up with the answers." "Well, he never came up with answers. It was fortunate", said Paul with a giggle, "that he had always made something of a point of that." He was holding a battered manula envelope to his chest—the next part of the demonstration. I remembered Helene's account of after-hours tours of the Museum, the child's sense of privilege almost regardless of what she was being shown. "I'll leave you with these a moment", he said, "whilst I go and er . . ." When Paul had hurried off through the wall I got up and stretched at the window—just at the moment a few drops striped it. I looked lazily out, as I had often done before, at the inscrutable houses opposite, seen clearly now that the trees were bare. The houses Orst had looked at as a boy, that his sister had seen each day throughout those later years. It was possible to believe, in the yawning after-lunch stillness, that the same people lived there still, a minimal ghost existence of creaking boards and early dusks, looking out from time to time at our dark gables through the rain. I thought of my own view of the old doctor's house, with its shuttered upper floor, its air of professional secrecy, the occasional faint escape of an hour's silver chime. Then a window flew open, and a man in a cap dropped a sack of rubbish into the street. I shook the contents of the envelope on to the table, and quickly spread them out. It was photographs again, and bits of photographs—of women, I thought at first, but then saw that it was just one woman, who like Jane was put through a number of hoops. There were the same velled close-ups, the hieratic poses, the flaked-out half-lit reveries. The pictures were smaller, printed I supposed in Orst's own dark-room, "the dark crucible of his art" as his impressionable English visitor had called it. Unlike the others, ' though, they included a lot of nudes, or near-nudes, the long hair hanging in falls that hid, or nearly hid, the woman's outward turning breasts.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Washington less than I knew about my father's mother, who had been born a slave, and who died in our house when I was little: a child cannot make the con nection between slave and grandmother, and it was to take me a while (mainly because I had discovered the Schomburg col lection at the 1 35 th Street Library) to read Up From Slavery: but, when I read it, I no longer knew which way was up. As tor The Cotton Club, I knew only that it was a dance hall which gave out fr ee Thanksgiving dinners every Thanksgiving (!) tor which my brother, George, and I, stood in line. Which means that I knew that I was poor, and knew that I was black, but did not yet know what being black really meant, what it meant, that is, in the history of my country, and in my own history. Bill could instruct me as to how poverty came about and what it meant and what it did, and, also, what it was meant to do: but she could not instruct me as to blackness, except obliquely, feeling that she had neither the right nor the authority, and also knowing that I was certain to find out. CHAPTER ONE + 8 5 Thus, she tried to suggest to me the extent to which the world's social and economic arrangements are responsible for (and to) the world's victims. But a victim may or may not have a color, just as he may or may not have virtue: a difficult, not to say unpopular notion, for nearly everyone prefers to be defined by his status, which, unlike his virtue, is ready to wear. The 193 6 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of A Tale of TJVo Cities ends with this enormity sprawled across the screen: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he JVere dead, yet shall he live: and he that believeth in me shall never die. I had lived with this text all my life, which made encoun tering it on the screen of the Lincoln Theater absolutely astounding: and I had lived with the people of A Tale of TJVo Cities for very nearly as long.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw hated Mom’s various love interests and allowed none of them in Kentucky. In Ohio, I had grown especially skillful at navigating various father figures. With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool—so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of “girlieness,” I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things were really true. I hated earrings, I hated police cars, and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The trees were budding, and that odd inside-out logic was evolving whereby the Park, just at the time it becomes hot and popular, shuts itself off from the outside world of buildings and traffic with the shady density of its foliage. But I felt the threat too of some realisation about life, something obscurely disagreeable and perhaps deserved. Though I didn’t believe in such things, I was a perfect Gemini, a child of the ambiguous early summer, tugged between two versions of myself, one of them the hedonist and the other—a little in the background these days—an almost scholarly figure with a faintly puritanical set to the mouth. And there were deeper dichotomies, differing stories—one the ‘account of myself’, the sex-sharp little circuits of discos and pubs and cottages, the sheer crammed, single-minded repetition of my empty months; the other the ‘romance of myself’, which transformed all these mundanities with a protective glow, as if from my earliest days my destiny had indeed been charmed, so that I was both of the world and beyond its power, like the pantomime character Wordsworth describes, with ‘Invisible’ written on his chest. At times my friend James became my other self, and told me off and tried to persuade me that I was not doing all I might. I was never good at being told off, and when he insisted that I should find a job, or even a man to settle down with, it was in so intimate and knowledgeable a way that I felt as if one half of me were accusing the other. It was from him, whom I loved more than anyone, that I most often heard the account of myself. He had even said lately in his diary that I was ‘thoughtless’—he meant cruel, in the way I had thrown off a kid who had fallen for me and who irritated me to distraction; but then he got the idea into his head: does Will care about anybody? does Will ever really think? and so on and so forth. ‘Of course I fucking think,’ I muttered, though he wasn’t there to hear me. And he gave a horrid little diagnosis: ‘Will becoming more and more brutal, more and more sentimental.’ I was certainly sentimental with Arthur, deeply sentimental and lightly brutal, at one moment caressingly attentive, the next glutting him with sex, mindlessly—thoughtlessly. It was the most beautiful thing I could imagine—all the more so for our knowledge that we could never make a go of it together. Even among the straight lines of the Park I wasn’t thinking straight—all the time I looped back to Arthur, was almost burdened by my need for him, and by the oppressive mildness of the day.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I have never been able to convey the confusion and horror and heartbreak and contempt which every black person I then knew felt. Oh, we dissembled and smiled as we groaned and cursed and did our duty. (And we did our duty.) The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have. (Think about it.) Treason draws its enerb'Y fr om the conscious, deliberate betrayal of a trust-as we were not trusted, we could not be tray. And we did not wish to be traitors . We wished to be citizens. We: the black people of this country, then, with particular emphasis on those serving in the Armed Forces. The way THE PRICE OF THE TICKET 83 7 blacks were treated in, and by, an American Army spreading freedom around the globe was the reason for the heartbreak and contempt. Daddy's youngest son, by his first marriage, came home, on furlough, to help with the funeral. When these young men came home, in uniform, they started talking: and one sometimes trembled, for their sanity and for one's own. One trembled, too, at another depth, another incoherence, when one wondered-as one could not fail to wonder-what nation they represented. My brother, describing his life in uni form, did not seem to be representing the America his uni form was meant to represent-: he had never seen the America his uniform was meant to represent. Had anyone? did he know, had he met, anyone who had? Did anyone live there? judging from the great gulf fixed between their conduct and their principles, it seemed unlikely. Was it worth his life? For he, certainly, on the other hand, represented something much larger than himself and something in him knew it: oth erwise, he would have been broken like a match-stick and lost or have surrendered the power of speech. A nation within a nation: this thought wavered in my mind, I think, all those years ago, but I did not know what to make of it, it frightened me. We: my family, the living and the dead, and the children coming along behind us. This was a complex matter, for I was not living with my family in Harlem, after all, but "down town," in the "white world," in alien and mainly hostile ter ritory. On the other hand, for me, then, Harlem was almost as alien and in a yet more intimidating way and risked being equally hostile, although for very different reasons.

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

  Do you understand that?” “If you mean did I hit her, I never laid a hand on her.” “Perhaps she felt trapped.” “I never thought of that.” “Do you think she was frustrated by having nothing to do except wait for an exhausted man to return home in time for sleep?” “I never thought of that, either. She complained, but look, I’m used to women complaining.” The men in this study who divorced had experiences much like Billy’s, although not as savage in their impact. In every case except one, the woman left in anger and the man was stunned. These young men genuinely liked their wives and wanted the marriage to continue. They later tried to explain what happened with platitudes—“she was too young,” “she wanted somebody else”—but basically they had no idea why their wives had deserted them. Billy was one of the very few who honestly said, “I didn’t hear her.” None of these men had been violent in their marriages nor was infidelity a big issue, although it happened occasionally. They knew their wives had complaints but did nothing to deal with the problems. One man told me that he didn’t notice that his wife had left a week earlier because he was working on a big computer assignment. When he realized she was gone, he went into an acute depression. Most recovered slowly. Several did not have any contact with another woman for years after. One man whose wife left when he was twenty-four was still not dating ten years later. He’d decided to remain alone rather than take another chance. “Once is enough,” he stated. Why don’t these young men hear their wives’ complaints? The men are intelligent and competent at work. They are decent people. But they are blind and deaf to their women and taken entirely by surprise when they leave. I think they don’t hear their wives because in large measure they don’t hear themselves. They’ve told me many times that their own feelings are muted or shut down in situations that evoke strong feelings. They learned long ago in childhood that feelings are painful and that it’s better and safer to shut down feelings and not respond to their own or to others. But sadly, people who are inhibited in acknowledging their own feelings also have trouble in recognizing the feelings of others. They’re especially clueless about how to gauge the quality of a woman’s feelings, needs, and wishes or how to assess the importance of her complaints. 4 It’s as if everything is experienced in the same monotone key. Such men are hardly able to read a woman’s facial expressions or her body language or to distinguish a minor upset from a serious grievance. They have no good models in their head for a good relationship between a man and a woman, and the subtleties of the interaction is a foreign language to them. Billy and the other young men in this group understood concrete requests.

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

  The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace. Chapter One Mockingbird Players T he temporary receptionist was an elegant African American woman wearing a dark, expensive business suit—a well-dressed exception to the usual crowd at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta, where I had returned after graduation to work full time. On her first day, I’d rambled over to her in my regular uniform of jeans and sneakers and offered to answer any questions she might have to help her get acclimated. She looked at me coolly and waved me away after reminding me that she was, in fact, an experienced legal secretary. The next morning, when I arrived at work in another jeans and sneakers ensemble, she seemed startled, as if some strange vagrant had made a wrong turn into the office. She took a beat to compose herself, then summoned me over to confide that she was leaving in a week to work at a “real law office.” I wished her luck. An hour later, she called my office to tell me that “Robert E. Lee” was on the phone. I smiled, pleased that I’d misjudged her; she clearly had a sense of humor. “That’s really funny.” “I’m not joking. That’s what he said,” she said, sounding bored, not playful. “Line two.” I picked up the line. “Hello, this is Bryan Stevenson. May I help you?” “Bryan, this is Robert E. Lee Key. Why in the hell would you want to represent someone like Walter McMillian? Do you know he’s reputed to be one of the biggest drug dealers in all of South Alabama? I got your notice entering an appearance, but you don’t want anything to do with this case.” “Sir?” “This is Judge Key, and you don’t want to have anything to do with this McMillian case. No one really understands how depraved this situation truly is, including me, but I know it’s ugly. These men might even be Dixie Mafia.” The lecturing tone and bewildering phrases from a judge I’d never met left me completely confused. “Dixie Mafia”? I’d met Walter McMillian two weeks earlier, after spending a day on death row to begin work on five capital cases. I hadn’t reviewed the trial transcript yet, but I did remember that the judge’s last name was Key. No one had told me the Robert E. Lee part.