Contempt

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)

  Here he gives a second argument, which pertains to the deity. He says that, since Empedocles would hold that hate is not a constituent of the divine composition, it follows, according to his arguments, that God, who is said by all men to be most happy, and consequently most knowing, is less prudent than all other beings who have knowledge. For according to Empedodes ’ position it follows that God does not know the elements because He does not contain hate. Hence He does not know himself. And like knows like according to the opinion of Empedodes, who said that by earth we know earth, by water water, “ and by affection, ” i.e., love or concord, we know affection, or love or concord. And in a similar way we know “ hate by hate, ” which is sadness, whether unpleasant or evil, according to the text of Boethius, who says that “ by evil discord we know discord. ” It is evident, then, that Aristotle thought this untenable and contrary to the position that God is most happy because He himself would not know some of the things that we know. And since this argument seemed to be beside the point, therefore, returning to his principal theme, he says (259) that, in returning to the point from which the first argument began, it is evident, so far as Empedocles is concerned, that hate is no more a cause of corruption than of being. 477. Nor, similarly, is love (260). Here he gives the third argument, which pertains to love. He says that in like manner love is noe the cause of generation or being, as Empedocles claimed, if another position of his is considered. For he said that, when all the elements are combined into a unity, the corruption of the world will then take place; and thus love corrupts all things. Therefore, with respect to the world in general, love is the cause of corruption, whereas hate is the cause of generation. But with respect to singular things, hate is the cause of corruption and love of generation. 478. Moreover, he does (261). Here he shows that Empedocles ’ argument is not adequate. For Empedodes said that there exists in the world a certain alternation of hate and friendship, in such a way that at one time love unites all things and afterwards hate separates them. But as to the reason why this alternation takes place, so that at one time hate predominates and at another time love, he said nothing more than that it was naturally disposed to be so.

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

  Thus he says, first , that certain men deem it fitting, i.e., they wish, to demonstrate this principle; and they do this “ through want of education, ” i.e., through lack of learning or instruction. For there is want of education when a man does not know what to seek demonstration for and what not to; for not all things can be demonstrated. For if all things were demonstrable, then, since a thing is not demonstrated through itself but through something else, demonstrations would either be circular (although this cannot be true, because then the same thing would be both better known and less well known, as is clear in Book I of the Posterior Analytics, or they would have to proceed to infinity. But if there were an infinite regress in demonstrations, demonstration would be impossible, because the conclusion of any demonstration is made certain by reducing it to the first principle of demonstration. But this would not be the case if demonstration proceeded to infinity in an upward direction. It is clear, then, that not all things are demonstrable. And if some things are not demonstrable, these men cannot say that any principle is more indemonstrable than the above-mentioned one. 608. But even in this case (331). Here he shows that the above-mentioned principle can be demonstrated in a certain respect. He says that it may be demonstrated by disproof. In Greek the word is evlegktikw/j, which is better translated as by refutation, for an e;legkoj is a syllogism that establishes the contradictory of a proposition, and so is introduced to refute some false position. And on these grounds it can be shown that it is impossible for the same thing both to be and not be. But this kind of argument can be employed only if the one who denies that principle because of difficulties “ says something, ” i.e., if he signifies something by a word. But if he says nothing, it is ridiculous to look for a reason against one who does not make use of reason in speaking; for in this dispute anyone who signifies nothing will be like a plant, for even brute animals signify something by such signs. 609. For it is one thing to give a strict demonstration of this principle, and another to demonstrate it argumentatively or by refutation. For if anyone wished to give a strict demonstration of this principle, he would seem to be begging the question, because any principle that he could take for the purpose of demonstrating this one would be one of those that depend on the truth of this principle, as is clear from what has been said above (330:C 607). But when the demonstration is not of this kind, i.e., demonstration in the strict sense, there will then be disproof or refutation at most.

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

  GREGORY. (ubi sup.) But the Pharisee beholding these things despises them, and finds fault, not only with the woman who was a sinner, but with the Lord who received her, as it follows, Now when the Pharisee who had bidden him saw it, he spake within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is which toucheth him. We see the Pharisee really proud in himself, and hypocritically righteous, blaming the sick woman for her sickness, the physician for his aid. The woman surely if she had come to the feet of the Pharisee would have departed with the heel lifted up against her. For he would have thought that he was polluted by another’s sin, not having sufficient of his own real righteousness to fill him. So also some gifted with the priests’ office, if perchance they have done any just thing outwardly or slightly, forthwith despise those who are put under them, and look with disdain on sinners who are of the people. But when we behold sinners, we must first bewail ourselves for their calamity, since we perhaps have had and are certainly liable to a similar fall. But it is necessary that we should carefully distinguish, for we are bound to make distinction in vices, but to have compassion on nature. For if we must punish the sinner, we must cherish a brother. But when by penance he has himself punished his own deed, our brother is no more a sinner, for he punished in himself what Divine justice condemned. The Physician was between two sick persons, but the one preserved her faculties in the fever, the other lost his mental perception. For she wept at what she had done; but the Pharisee, elated with a false sense of righteousness, overrated the vigour of his own health. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. But the Lord not hearing his words, but perceiving his thoughts, shewed Himself to be the Lord of Prophets, as it follows, And Jesus answering said unto him, Simon, I have something to say unto thee. GLOSS. (non occ. v. Lyra in loc.) And this indeed He spake in answer to his thoughts; and the Pharisee was made more attentive by these words of our Lord, as it is said, And he saith, Master, say on. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) A parable concerning two debtors is opposed to him, of whom the one owed more, the other less; as it follows, There was a certain creditor which had two debtors, &c. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. As if He said, Nor art thou without debts. What then! If thou art involved in fewer debts, boast not thyself, for thou art still in need of pardon. Then He goes on to speak of pardon, And when they had nothing to pay, he freely forgave them both. GLOSS. (non occ.) For no one can of himself escape the debt of sin, but only by obtaining pardon through the grace of God.

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

  462. The second argument runs thus: unity itself or being itself must be numerically one. And by unity itself or being itself he means unity or being in the abstract. Hence, if the principles of things are not one numerically but only specifically, it will follow that neither unity itself or being itself will subsist of themselves. 463. The third argument is this: science is had of things because there is found to be a one-in-many, as man in common is found in all men; for there is no science of singular things but of the unity [i.e., common attribute] found in them. Moreover, all science or cognition of things which are composed of principles depends on a knowledge of these principles. If, then, principles are not one numerically but only specifically, it will follow that there is no science of beings. 464. But, on the other hand (249). Here he argues the opposite side of the question in the following fashion. If principles are numerically one so that each of the principles considered in itself is one, it will be impossible to say that the principles of beings exist in the same way as the principles of sensible things. For we see that the principles of different sensible things are numerically different but specifically the same, just as the things of which they are the principles are numerically different but specifically the same. We see, for example, that syllables which are numerically distinct but agree in species have as their principles letters which are the same specifically though not numerically. And if anyone were to say that this is not true of the principles of beings, but that the principles of all beings are the same numerically, it would follow that nothing exists in the world except the elements, because what is numerically one is a singular thing. For what is numerically one we call singular, just as we call universal what is in many. But what is singular is incapable of being multiplied, and is encountered only as a singular. Therefore, if it is held that numerically the same letters are the principles of all syllables, it will fd1low that those letters could never be multiplied so that there could be two of them or more than two. Thus a could not be found in these two different syllables ba or da. And the argument is the same in the case of other letters. Therefore, by the same reasoning, if the principles of all beings are numerically the same, it will follow that there is nothing besides these principles. But this seems to be untenable; because when a principle of anything exists it will not be a principle unless there is something else besides itself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In the film there is no brother, there are no brothers, there are no women, no passion, and no pain: there is the guilty, furtive, European notion of sex, a notion which oblit erates any possibility of communion, or any hope of love. There is also the European dream of America-w hich, af ter all, is how we got America: a dream full of envy, guilt, condescension, and terror, a dream which began as an adventure in real estate. 510 THE DEVI L FIND S WORK That song which Europe let out of its heart so long ago, to be sung on ships, and to cross all that water, is now coming back to Europe, perhaps to drive Europe mad: the return of the song will certainly render Europe obsolete, and return the North American wilderness-yet to be conquered!-to a truth which has nothing to do with Europe. The Birth of a Nation is based on a novel I will almo st certainly never read, The Clansman, by a certain Thomas Dixon, who achieved it sometime after the Civil War. He did not, oddly enough, write the 1952 film, Storm Warning, also about the Klan, starring Ginger Rogers, Steve Cochran, Ronald Reagan, and Doris Day. Unlike, and quite unjustly, Storm Warning (possibly because the Ginger Rogers film speaks courageously for the Union, and against the Conf ed eracy), The Birth of a Nation is known as one of the great classics of the American cinema: and indeed it is. It is impossible to do justice to the story, such story as attempts to make an appearance being immediately sub merged by the tidal wave of the plot; and, in Griffith's han dling of this fable, anyway, the key is to be found in the images. The film cannot be called dishonest: it has the Niagara force of an obsession. A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal : the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have noth ing-at least not deliberately-to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose. In the Heat of the Night, for ex ample, turns on a plot, a plot designed to camouflage exceed ingly bitter questions; it can be said, for The Defiant Ones, that it attempts to tell a story. The Book of Job is a story, the proof being that the details of Job's affliction never, for an instant, obscure Job from our view. This story has no reso lution. We end where we began: everything Job has lost has been returned to him.

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

  24. I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxviii. 2) In accordance with what was just, He said that no man laid hands on Him, because His hour was not yet come; He now speaks to the Jews of His passion, as a free, and not a compulsory sacrifice on His part: Then said Jesus again unto them, I go My way. Death to our Lord was a return to the place whence He had come. BEDE. The connexion of these words is such, that they might have been spoken at one place and one time, or at another place and another time: as either nothing at all, or some things, or many may have intervened. ORIGEN. (tom. xix. in Joan. s. 3.) But some one will object: If this was spoken to men who persisted in unbelief, how is it He says, Ye shall seek Me? For to seek Jesus is to seek truth and wisdom. You will answer that it was said of His persecutors, that they sought to take Him. There are different ways of seeking Jesus. All do not seek Him for their health and profit: and only they who seek Him aright, find peace. And they are said to seek Him aright, who seek the Word which was in the beginning with God, in order that He may lead them to the Father. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxviii. 2) Ye shall seek Me, then, He says, not from compassionate regret, but from hatred: for after He had departed from the eyes of men, He was sought for both by those who hated, and those who loved Him: the one wanting to persecute, the other to have His presence. And that ye may not think that ye shall seek Me in a good sense, I tell you, Ye shall die in your sin. (ἁμαρτίᾳ plural in our Transl.) This is to seek Christ amiss, to die in one’s sin: this is to hate Him, from Whom alone cometh salvation. He pronounces sentence on them prophetically, that they shall die in their sins. BEDE. Note: sin is in the singular number, your in the plural; to express one and the same wickedness in all. ORIGEN. (tom. xix. in Joan. s. 3.) But I ask, as it is said below that many believed on Him, whether He speaks to all present, when He says, Ye shall die in your sins? No: He speaks to those only, whom He knew would not believe, and would therefore die in their sins, not being able to follow Him. Whither I go, He says, ye cannot come; i. e. there where truth and wisdom are, for with them Jesus dwells. They cannot, He says, because they will not: for had they wished, He could not reasonably have said, Ye shall die in your sin.

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

  402. The Philosopher answers this question in Book IV (570) of this work, saying that it is also the office of that science which is concerned with the study of substance and being to consider the proper accidents of substance and being. Yet it does not follow that it would consider each in the same way, i.e., by demonstrating substance as it demonstrates accidents, but by defining substance and by demonstrating that accidents either belong to or do not belong to it, as is explained more fully at the end of Book IX (1895) of this work. LESSON 7 Are There Certain Other Substances Separate from Sensible Things? Criticism of the Different Opinions Regarding the Objects of Mathematics ARISTOTLE ’ S TEXT Chapters 2 & 3: 997a 34-998a 21208. Furthermore, there is the problem whether sensible substances alone must be said to exist, or others besides these. And whether there is one genus or many genera of substances, as is held by those who speak of the Forms and the intermediate entities with which they say the mathematical sciences deal. 209. Now the way in which we say that the Forms are both causes and substances in themselves has been treated in our first discussions concerning all of these things (69). 210. But while they involve difficulty in many respects, it is no less absurd to say that there are certain other natures besides those which exist in the heavens, and that these are the same as sensible things, except that the former are eternal whereas the latter are corruptible. For they [i.e., the Platonists] say nothing more or less than that there is a man-in-himself and horse-in-itself and health-in-itself, which differ in no respect [from their sensible counterparts]; in which they act like those who say that there are gods and that they are of human form. For just as the latter made nothing else than eternal men, in a similar way the former make the Forms nothing else than eternal sensible things.

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

  664. Others adopt the foregoing positions, not because of any difficulty which leads them to such positions, but only because they want to argue “ for the sake of argument, ” i.e., because of a certain insolence, inasmuch as they want to maintain impossible theories of this kind for their own sake since the contrary of these cannot be demonstrated. The cure for these men is the refutation or rejection “ of what they express in speech and in words, ” i.e., on the grounds that the word in a statement has some meaning. Now the meaning of a statement depends on the meaning of the words, so that it is necessary to return to the principle that words signify something. This is the principle which the Philosopher used above (332:C 611). 665. Those who (354). Since the Philosopher met the difficulties above on this point by considering the meaning of words, he begins here to meet those who are in difficulties by solving their problems. First (354), he deals with those who held that contradictories are true at the same time; and second (357:C 669), he deals with those who held that everything which appears so is true ( “ And similarly ” ). In regard to the first he does two things. First, he sets forth the difficulty which led some men to admit that contradictories are true at the same time. Second (355:C 667), he clears up this difficulty ( “ Concerning those ” ). He says, then, that the opinion on this point, that the parts of a contradiction may be true at the same time, was formed by some men as a result of a difficulty which arose with regard to sensible things, in which generation and corruption and motion are apparent. For it seemed that contraries were generated from the same thing; for example, air, which is warm, and earth, which is cold, both come from water. But everything which is generated comes from something that existed before; for non-being cannot come into being, since nothing comes from nothing. A thing therefore had to have in itself contradictories simultaneously, because if both the hot and the cold are generated from one and the same thing, then it turns out to be hot and not-hot itself. 666. It was because of such reasoning that Anaxagoras claimed that everything is mixed in everything else. For from the fact that anything at A seemed to come from anything else he thought that one thing could come from another only if it already existed in it. Democritus also seems to have agreed with this theory, for he claimed that the void and the full are combined in any part of a body. And these are like being and non-being, because the full has the character of being and the void the character of non-being. 667. Concerning those (355).

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  384 Lecture 58: Denis Diderot believed that knowledge and its acquisition were in a constant process of evolution and could not be con fi ned to a closed system. The process of writing the Encyclopedia was itself an experiment in testing this philosophy of knowledge. Diderot was the chief architect, writer, and often scapegoat of the Encyclopedia, but it is dif fi cult to distinguish his individual creativity within such a collaborative work. We must look to his individual works to discover his identity and personal preoccupations, speci fi cally Rameau’ s Nephew. Ironically, those individual works, the ones for which he is known today, were unpublished during his lifetime. These include The Nun , an erotic, fi rst-person narrative; a long series of critical essays on the Paris art salons that mark the birth of the speci fi cally French genre of art criticism; dramatic criticism and a discussion of the art of acting; and a text that cannot be classi fi ed according to any recognizable genre, Rameau’ s Nephew. In this dramatic dialogue, two characters, Him (Rameau’s nephew) and Me (Diderot?), wander conversationally through various social, musical, literary, moral apolitical, and philosophical subjects. It is possible to identify two distinct strains of argument that run through this dialogue: ● The debate over the moral purpose of art ● The debate over two fundamentally 18 th-century beliefs: on the one hand, the emotional belief in perfectibility, moral progress, and the essential goodness of man and, on the other, the position of the absolute materialist, which eventually results in an amoral determinism and utter cynicism. The debate opens with a solitary walker in the center of Paris. His intellectual life seems as cynical as that of Rameau’s nephew. What does separate the two exactly? How would one judge their relative value to society? The conversation of the two characters is a kind of chess game, and this reminds us that their relative moral values are necessary to enable them both to be “players.” The ample evidence that Rameau’s nephew provides of his complete lack of moral or ethical standards is matched by the fact that his interlocutor, Me ( Moi), fi nds him amusing at least as much as he fi nds him repulsive. The con fl ict generated by Moi’s recognition that even

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  386 Lecture 59: William Blake William Blake Lecture 59 Poet, engraver, visionary, William Blake called the God of institutionalized Christianity “Nobodaddy” and asserted that Newton’s scientifi c insights, unleavened by poetic inspiration, had produced a world of darkness. F or Blake, the scientifi c rationalism of the Enlightenment and its belief in the idea of progress did not herald, as it did for Neoclassical writers, the dawn of a new age but the gradual dimming of the emotional and spiritual light (the “imagination”) that infused the material world with meaning. Newton’s “single vision,” argued Blake, was limited by logic and empiricism; Blake’s vision found its expression in both verbal and visual forms that pierced the mundane. In this lecture, we will study Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), deceptively simple and deeply ironic poems and their accompanying plates, that represent, on the one hand, a world that appears to know nothing of the oppressive weight of social laws or the restrictions of the rational and, on the other, the world that has been exposed to the corrupting infl uences of industry and an excessive reliance on reason. We will fi rst explore Blake and the Enlightenment. The difference between the Neoclassical view of scientifi c thought and reason and Blake’s view may be neatly summed up in the difference between Pope’s account of Newton and Blake’s. For Pope, Newton shined the light of science on the world of nature, whereas Blake condemned Newton’s “single vision” as like a sleep. The limitations and constraints of an over-reliance on mathematical and empirical reason are represented in Blake’s 1795 illustration of Newton, curled in on himself, backed against a rock, measuring reality. Newton’s science, like Locke’s and Bacon’s, threatened to deprive the world of mystery (God) and, thus, was Satanic. In his rejection of the precepts of order and rationality that typifi ed Neoclassicism, Blake was the fi rst major fi gure in the movement that would be retroactively designated as Romanticism, with its emphasis on the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the visionary, and the transcendent.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  508 Lecture 74: Joseph Conrad promptly cared for by his uncle. In spite of all his faults, his uncle believed that he might become “a real man.” In the summer of 1878, he went to work on an English schooner and started learning English. By 1895, he had become a master mariner, quit the life of the sea, and established himself as a British writer. At age 29, he quali fi ed as a master mariner, became a British subject, and started writing fi ction. Three years later, he started work on his fi rst novel. In 1895, two years after he quit the sea, Almayer’ s Folly appeared under his new pen name, Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s experience in the Congo in 1890 laid the groundwork for Heart of Darkness. Like his character Marlow, Conrad as a boy hoped that he could explore the unknown territory of Africa when he grew up. As a young man in 1890, Conrad voyaged by steamboat to Stanley Falls, the highest navigable point on the Congo River, where the Belgian company that employed him ran a trading center for allegedly noble purposes. Supposedly, King Leopold II of Belgium aimed to liberate the Congo natives from enslavement by Arabs and to civilize them. The Belgians actually sought to colonize the Congo, monopolize its trade, and exploit its resources. But in Conrad’s story, Kurtz fascinates Marlow because—by reputation at least—he promises to “redeem” the sordid enterprise of conquest by acting on his “moral ideas.” During his own time in the Congo, Conrad quickly discovered that there was nothing noble about the Belgians’ work there. He was ravaged by sickness for much of his time there. Even when healthy, he loathed most of the people he met for their greed, stupidity, and duplicity. He bitterly regretted going to the Congo He deplored the clumsiness of the natives. Though Conrad’s ignorant contempt for native rituals has provoked the charge that he is racist, his story chie fl y aims to expose the hypocrisy of European colonizers. Although Marlow—like Conrad himself—af fi rms Though Conrad’s ignorant contempt for native rituals has provoked the charge that he is racist, his story chiefl y aims to expose the hypocrisy of European colonizers.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  541 Young Bayard Sartoris inherits a family tradition made up of violence, aristocratic grandeur, and reckless heroism. He indulges in daredevil driving and riding, injuring himself and causing at one point the death of his grandfather. His wild driving becomes a kind of heroism in the eyes of Narcissa Benbow, who marries him. Even though his death in a plane crash seems to end the Sartoris line, she keeps his name alive by producing a child at just about the time he dies. In late October 1929, four months after marrying Estella Franklin and just after publication of his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury , Faulkner started writing As I Lay Dying. At the time, he was working a 12-hour night shift at the University of Mississippi power station. He learned that he had nothing to do between midnight and 4:00 A.M. He decided to write during those hours. By this means, he wrote As I Lay Dying in just six weeks. He knew beforehand just where he was going. He resolved to write a book that would make his reputation if he never again touched pen and ink. As I Lay Dying is a novel with a bizarre format: The central fi gure is a corpse traveling to a burial ground on a journey menaced by fi re and fl ood and narrated from 15 different points of view, including that of the corpse itself. Like Joyce in Ulysses, which he very much admired, Faulkner creates distinctive narrators with severely limited points of view. He sometimes enters a character’s head to give the reader all that passes through it in a stream of consciousness . This technique exempli fi es Modernism, which spotlights the radical subjectivity of the isolated self. But rather than using distinctive narrators for just some of the chapters, Faulkner makes his characters do all of the storytelling from their mutually exclusive points of view. Paradoxically, the family is mostly composed of tight-knit loners who don’t understand each other. The only one who understands the others is Darl, who is fi nally sent to a lunatic asylum. Though its title recalls the word of a betrayed husband in Homer’s Odyssey, the counterpart of that husband in Faulkner’s novel is an adulterous wife. In Book 11 of The Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the realm of the dead, the shade of Agamemnon says that his murderous, adulterous wife would not even close his eyes “as I lay dying.” Addie’s life with her husband, Anse,

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  509 the humanity of African natives, he believes they display a primitive state of humanity. The “prehistoric” men he saw on a riverbank struck him as “not being inhuman.” Embodying “truth stripped of its cloak of time,” they manifest the primitive condition from which—according to Darwin— civilized humans evolved. Conrad’s treatment of the natives in his story has provoked the charge that he is racist. The natives never speak a language that is said to be comprehensible. Marlow makes no effort to understand tribal culture and at one point calls native rituals fi endish. But Conrad chie fl y aims to expose the savagery latent in “civilized” men. In the natives, primitivism can take the form of an exhilarating vitality. But the underside of this wild vitality is the uninhibited savagery of murderous aggression. Marlow discovers this kind of savagery in Kurtz. By exposing the savagery of Kurtz, his story implicitly attacks the whole imperial project and the globalizing assumption that “developed” nations are uniquely equipped to civilize the world. Taking a steamer up the Congo to the Inner Station (the fi ctional counterpart of Stanley Falls), Marlow learns that Kurtz’s grand design of civilizing the natives has somehow led him to barbarous acts. While the natives are pitiable and at times touching, Kurtz is powerful. For the most part, Marlow treats the natives not as brutes but as victims of white colonizers and even, at one point, partners in Marlow’s own work. But in the eyes of Marlow, Kurtz combines the greatest hope of achieving good with the greatest capacity for doing evil. Before meeting Kurtz, Marlow comes to think of him as remarkable. He sends in as much ivory as all the other agents put together. He supposedly combines the sensitivity of an artist with the learning of a scholar and the eloquence of an orator. In spite of another agent’s contempt for Kurtz’s idealistic aims, Marlow wants to see what will become of them in the jungle. Though Kurtz controls others chie fl y by his “civilized” eloquence, which is underscored by the voice of the narrator in this story, Kurtz reveals the savagery beneath his eloquence. While Dickens’s Pip writes the story of

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  544 Lecture 81: Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht Lecture 81 Born in the Bavarian city of Augsburg in 1898, he was the eldest son of a paper factory clerk who worked his way up to sales director by the time Bertolt was 14 and who thus exempli fi ed the bourgeois respectability that his son would come to loathe. B ut his mother touched his heart and took charge of his early education. Though his father was a Catholic working in a predominantly Catholic city, Bertolt and his younger brother were raised as Protestants by their Protestant mother, who steeped them both in the Lutheran Bible and sent them to a Protestant elementary school. All of this may help to explain Brecht’s fascination with Scripture and wars of religion. His fi rst play, which he wrote at the age of 16, was called simply The Bible. He scarcely stopped writing thereafter. His best known works include The Threepenny Opera, which he wrote in the late 1920s with the composer Kurt Weill, and Mother Courage, which he wrote just after the Second World War broke out in the fall of 1939. In 12 scenes, this play stages a dozen years sliced from the middle of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17 th century, when the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestant nations of the north. The title fi gure is a canteen woman named Mother Courage who profi ts from the war by selling goods from a covered wagon that she hauls around behind the troops. But as one after another of her three grown children are drawn into the war and killed, we see how futile are her hopes of gaining anything but misery from the war. As a confi rmed Marxist, Brecht sought to show not just the folly of trying to profi t from small trading during the war but also the dehumanizing effect of a preoccupation with business. In this play about the Thirty Years’ War, Brecht focuses on the characters that history typically overlooks. In the early 17 th century, the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestant nations of the north for 30 years. The title character in Brecht’s play is a canteen woman who follows

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  No promise was kept with th em, no promise was kept with me, nor can I counsel those coming after me, nor my global kinsmen, to believe a word uttered by my mor ally bankrupt and desperately dishonest countrymen. aAnd, '' says Doris Lessing, in her preface to African Stories, awhile the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest count s in the indictment against human ity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the at rophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing our selves in every creature that breathes under the sun. " Amen. En avant . I8 April 1984 Amherst, Massachuse tts Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood T o BE ANDR OGYNOUS, Webster's informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in eve!)' woman and a woman in eve!)' man. Sometimes this is recognized only when the chips are, bru tally, down-when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love benveen any t\Vo human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes. To be androgynous does not imply both male and female sexual equipment, which is the state, uncommon, of the her maphrodite. However, the existence of the hermaphrodite re veals, in intimidating exa ggeration, the truth concerning eve!)' human being- which is why the hermaphrodite is called a freak. The human being does not, in general, enjoy being intimidated by what he/she finds in the mirror. The hermaphrodite, therefore, may make his/her living in side shows or brothels, whereas the merely androgynous are running banks or filling stations or maternity wards, churches, armies or countries. The last time you had a drink, whether you were alone or with another, you were having a drink with an androgynous human being; and this is true for the last time you broke bread or, as I have tried to suggest, the last time you made love. There seems to be a vast amount of confusion in the West ern world concerning these matters, but love and sexual ac tivity arc not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend that they are. The mare is not obliged to love the stall ion, nor is the bull required to love the cow. They are doing what comes naturally. But this by no means sums up the state or the possibilities of the human being in whom the awakening of desire fuels imagination and in whom imagination fuels desire.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Without attempting to track my way through any more 512 THE DEVIL FIND S WO RK of what we will call the pre-plot: the War comes. The South is shamefully defeated-or, not so much defeated, it would appear, as betrayed: by the influe nce of the mulattoes. For the previously noted eminent and now renegade Southern poli tician has also, as it turns out, a mulatto protege (we do not know how this happened, but we are allowed to suspect the worst) and this mulatto protege is maneuvered into the pre viously all-white Congress of the United States. At which point the Carpetbaggers arrive, and the movie begins. For the film is concerned with the Reconstmction, and how the birth of the Ku Klux Klan overcame that dismal and mistaken chap ter in our- American-history. The first image of the film is of the Mrican slave's arrival. The image and the title both convey the European terror be fore the idea of the black and white, red and white, saved and pagan, confrontation. I think that it was Freud who suggested that the presence of the black man in America foreshadowed America's doom-wh ich America, if it could not civilize these savages, would deserve: it is certainly the testimony of such disparate witnesses as William Faulkner and Isadora Duncan. For Marx and Engels, the presence of the black man in Amer ica was simply a usefi.il crowbar for the lib eration of whites: an idea which has had its issue in the history of American labor unions. The Founding Fathers shared this view, eminently, Thomas Jef ferson, and The Great Emancipator freed those slaves he could not reach, in order to create, hopefully, a fifth column behind the Conf ederate lin es. This ambivalence con tains the key to American literature-in a way, it can be said to be American literature-all the way from The Scarlet Letter to The Big Sleep. In any case, what Europe really felt about the black presence in America is revealed by the stratagems the European-Americans have used, and use, to avoid it: that is, by American history, or the actual, present condition of any American city. The first image, then, of The Birth of a Nation is immensely and unconsciously revealing. Were it not for their swarthy color-or not even that, so many immigrants having been transformed into white men only upon arrival, and, as it were, by decree-were it not for the title preceding the image: they CHAPTER TWO 51 3 would look exactly like European passengers, huddled, silent, patient, and hopeful, in the sha dow of the Statue of Liberty. (G ive us your poor! Many of the poor, not only in America, but all over the world, are beginning to find that these tamous lines have a somewhat sinister ring.) These slaves look as though they want to enter the Promised Land, and are re garding their imminent masters in the hope of being bought.

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

  Secondly, by taking with violence, and this is an even greater injury: “They have violently robbed the fatherless” [Job 24:9]. Among such that do such things are wicked kings and rulers: “Her princes are in the midst of her as roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves, they left nothing for the morning” [Zeph 3:3]. They act contrary to God’s will who wishes a rule according to justice: “By Me kings reign and lawgivers decree just things” [Prov 8:15]. Sometimes they do such things stealthily and sometimes with violence: “Your princes are faithless companions of thieves, they all love bribes, they run after rewards” [Is 1:23]. At times they steal by enacting laws and enforcing them for profit only: “Woe to those who make wicked laws” [Is 10:1]. And St. Augustine says that every wrongful usurpation is theft when he asks: “What are thrones but forms of thievery?”[City of God IV, 4]. Thirdly, theft is committed by not paying wages that are due: “The wages of him whom you have hired shall not abide by you until the morning” [Lev 19:13]. This means that a man must pay every one his due, whether he be prince, prelate, or cleric, etc.: “Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due, custom, to whom custom” [Rm 13:7]. Hence, we are bound to give a return to rulers who guard our safety. The fourth kind of theft is fraud in buying and selling: “You shall not have divers weights in your bag, a greater and a less” [Deut 25:13]. And again: “Do no unjust thing in judgment, in rule, in weight, or in measure” [Lev 19:35-36]. All this is directed against the keepers of wine-shops who mix water with the wine. Usury is also forbidden: “Who shall dwell in your tabernacle, or who shall rest in your holy hill?... He who has not put his money out to usury” [Ps 14:1,5]. This is also against money-changers who commit many frauds, and against the sellers of cloth and other goods. Fifthly, theft is committed by those who buy promotions to positions of temporal or spiritual honor. “The riches which he swallowed, he shall vomit up, and God shall draw them out of his belly” [Job 20:15], has reference to temporal position. Thus, all tyrants who hold a kingdom or province or land by force are thieves, and are held to restitution. Concerning spiritual dignities: “Amen, amen, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the sheepfold but climbs up another way is a thief and a robber” [Jn 10:1]. Therefore, they who commit simony are thieves.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What has always been missing from George Gershwin's ON CATFISH ROW 619 opera is what the situation of Porgy and Bess says about the white world. It is because of this omission that Americans are so proud of the opera. It assuages their guilt about Negroes and it attacks none of their fantasies. Since Catfish Row is clearly such a charming place to live, there is no need for them to trouble their consciences about the fact that the people who live there are still not allo wed to move anywhere else . Neither need they probe within their own lives to discover what the Negroes of Catfish Row really mean to them. But I am certainly not the first person to suggest that these Negroes seem to speak to them of a better lif e-better in the sense of being more honest, more open, and more free: in a word, more sexual. This is the cruelest fantasy of all , hard to forgive. It means that Negroes arc penalized, and hideously, for what the general guilty imagination makes of them. This fantasy is at the bottom of almost all violence against Negroes; it is the reason they arc not to be mixed in buses, houses, schools, jobs; they arc to remain instead in Catfish Row, to have fish fries and make love. It is a fantasy which is tearing the nation to pieces and it is surely time we snapped out of it. For no body in Catfish Row is having fish fries these days, and love is as rare and as difficult there as it has always been everywhere else. They struggle to pay the rent, the lif e insurance, the note due on the bedroom suite, the TV set, the refrigerator, the car. They worry about their children. They begin to hate each other, they turn to mysticism or to dope, they die there. Obviously, neither Samuel Goldwyn nor Otto Preminger nor most of the audience for Pot;gy and Bess knows this, or wants to know it; and they would defend their production, I suppose, in the words of Mr. Preminger, as taking place in "a world which does not really exist." This is an entirely illegit imate defense, and, in any case, the people in front of the camera keep reminding one, most forcefully, of a real Catfish Row, real agony, real despair, and real love. Many of them have been there, after all, and they know. Out of one Catfish Row or another came the murdered Bessie Smith and the dead Billie Holiday and virtually every Negro performer this country has produced. Until today, no one wants to hear the story, and the Negro performer is still in battle with the white man's image of the Negro-which the white man clings to in 620 OTH ER ESS AYS order not to be forced to revise his image of himself.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “You weren’t a piece of shit,” mumbled Susan. “And anyway, I feel like you’re doing the same thing to me now.” “What?” “All we ever talk about is you. You don’t seem interested in my relationship with Jonathan or my wedding or my therapy. Those are the things I’m doing in my life. I’m trying very hard to get well and to have a good relationship and get married.” Her voice became a tremulous squeak, tears appeared, her face crumpled delicately and she pecked at it with her napkin. Susan scowled at her cold cup of chamomile tea. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she despised Jonathan, that she thought their relationship was a farce, that she hated traditional weddings and that she thought Leisha used therapy the same way she had used Eddie—to distract herself from her own life. A wave of classical music surged through the room, loudly enough to knock over a table, aggressively soothing the eaters of cannoli and cute cakes. “And the way you talk about Stef all the time—” Stef was the man Susan had met in a public rest room. “I don’t talk about Stef all the time.” “It seems like you do. And what you say is so horrible, even if you talk about him a little it’s a lot.” How could we have pretended to be friends for so long, Susan thought. “Especially when you talk about him and that Italian girl, it’s so awful it makes me hurt inside. Don’t you see how they’re using you?” “They’re not using me,” Susan said stiffly. “Oh no, what about the time they tried to shoot you up in the bathroom at Area, or wherever the fuck you were?” “They didn’t shoot me up.” “They tried.” “Not very hard, obviously. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they’re using me, I don’t care. I’m doing this thing with them because I want to. I can take care of myself, and I’m not trying to make you a part of it.” “But when you tell me stories like that nipple-piercing thing, you are making me part of it. Why do you put yourself in positions where you have to take care of yourself?” They stared at each other with what seemed painfully close to hate. A raw feeling traveled up Susan’s throat. She was sweating. Leisha spoke slowly and deliberately. “I think you’re involved with them because you don’t have anything else to do. I think you think it’s interesting.” This last word was sarcastic enough for two or three words. “And it’s not interesting at all. It is sordid and disgusting.” Her nostrils dilated. “How dare you?” said Susan. “How dare you judge me?” —

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind. The people, however, who believe that this democratic an guish has some consoling value are always pointing out that So-and-So, white, and So-and-So, black, rose from the slums into the big time. The existence-the public existence--of, say, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., proves to them that America is still the land of opportunity and that inequalities vanish before the determined will. It proves nothing of the sort. The determined will is rare-at the moment, in this country, it is unspeakably rare-and the inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few. A few have always risen-in every country, every era, and in the teeth of regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as free. Not all of these people, it is worth remem bering, left the world better than they found it. The deter mined will is rare, but it is not invariably benevolent. Furthermore, the American equation of success with the big times reveals an awful disrespect for human lif e and human achievement. This equation has placed our cities among the most dangerous in the world and has placed our youth among the most empty and most bewildered. The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at list ening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immo rality, our disrespect for the pain of others. All other slum dwellers, when the bank account permits it, can move out of the slum and vanish altogether from the eye of persecution. No Negro in this country has ever made that much money and it will be a long time before any Negro does. The Negroes in Harlem, who have no money, spend what they have on such gimcracks as they are sold. These include "wider" TV screens, more "f aithful" hi-f i sets, more "pow erful" cars, all of which, of course, are obsolete long before they are paid for. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expens ive it is to be poor; and if one is NOBODY KNOW S MY NAME a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.