Despair

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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I hate you! Stop it, Kris. Don’t ruin his birthday with your hysterics. Pull yourself together. I ran the sink and submerged my hands in ice-cold water to shock my system back into submission. Still no composure. I prayed to the God who had clearly forgotten me, but that only made me wail more. I tried deep breathing. The air refused to fill my lungs. With each sob, I felt like I was being ripped apart from seam to seam. Something had to save me before total annihilation. That’s when rage kicked in. Before I knew what hit me, my hand was slapping my face. What the hell are you doing? Finally, the pain from my stinging cheeks overtook the anguish in my heart. At last, relief. Field note from grief: always carry a good tube of concealer and some powder. You’ll need it. I fixed my makeup and returned to the table. Shocked, stunned, but pulled together. I acted like nothing happened. I made light conversation. How good is this lightly floured zucchini blossom? I laughed when appropriate and drank wine (but not too much, fearing I might lose it again). Despite the disturbing interlude of self-abuse, I even enjoyed much of the remaining evening. Grandma wouldn’t have approved of my methods, but at least she’d give me points for carrying cover-up and getting on with a grand old time. A COCKTAIL OF SHAME The next morning I woke up with a big AR (agonizing reappraisal) hangover. Even though I was the only one who witnessed my unhinged spectacle, I was sick with shame. Why couldn’t I be the type of person who didn’t do insane things like that? Instead, I felt like Annette Bening’s character in the film American Beauty. A positive-thinking, obsessed Realtor who breaks down in a self-slapping fit when she fails to sell a house. “You big baby! Stop it!” she screams, before collecting herself and silently walking out. But like Annette’s character, this house was my everything, too. At least no one saw me, I thought. I can keep this pathetic meltdown to myself. Lock it up. Throw away the key. Smile. Yeah, right. Who was I kidding? A few weeks later, our Bucket List Tour brought us all to Newport, to celebrate my birthday. By this time, I really thought I could keep a lid on any outbursts. I’d talked about it in therapy. Did a bunch of energy work, yada yada. In my mind, I was all set. After a lovely dinner (with no interludes), I was standing outside the restaurant waiting for the valet to bring the car around. My parents were using the restroom; Brian was searching through his pockets for a tip. I’m so grateful we’re here together, I thought. And bonus points for not losing my shit. Clearly, I believed I was growing. Not so fast, Speed Racer. As the car pulled up, three drunk dudes tumbled out of the lobby.

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

  It was easy to see that the boom and inflation period had been based at first on the extraordinary growth of the country through the immigration and trade that had followed the Civil War. But the Franco-German war had wasted wealth prodigiously, deranged trade too, and diverted commerce into new channels. France and then England first felt the shock: London had to call in monies lent to American railways and other enterprises. Bit by bit even American optimism was overcome for immigration in 1871 and 1872 fell off greatly and the foreign calls for cash exhausted our banks. The crash came in 1873; nothing like it was seen again in these States till the slump of 1907 which led to the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank. Willie’s fortune melted almost in a moment: this mortgage and that, had to be met and could only be met by forced sales with no buyers except at minimum values. When I talked to him, he was almost in despair; no money: no property: all lost; the product of three years’ hard work and successful speculation all swept away. Could I help him? If not, he was ruined. He told me then he had drawn all he could from my father: naturally I promised to help him; but first I had to pay the Gregorys and to my astonishment he begged me to let him have the money instead. “Mrs. Gregory and all of ’em like you”, he pleaded, “they can wait, I cannot; I know of a purchase that could be made that would make me rich again!” I realised then that he was selfish through and through, conscienceless in egotistic greed. I gave up my faint hope that he would ever repay me: henceforth he was a stranger to me and one that I did not even respect, though he had some fine, ingratiating qualities. I left him to walk across the river and in a few blocks met Rose. She looked prettier than ever and I turned and walked with her, praising her beauty to the skies and indeed she deserved it; short green sleeves, I remember, set off her exquisite, plump, white arms. I promised her some books and made her say she would read them; indeed I was astonished by the warmth of her gratitude: she told me it was sweet of me, gave me her eyes and we parted the best of friends, with just a hint of warmer relationship in the future. That evening I paid the Gregorys, Willie’s debt and my own and—did not send him the balance of what I possessed as I had promised; but instead, a letter telling him I had preferred to cancel his debt to the Gregorys.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  James Baldwin 208 this. Jacques, who was in constant touch with Giovanni's lawyer and in constant touch with me, had seen Giovanni once. He told me what I knew already, that there was nothing I, or anyone, could do for Giovanni anymore. Perhaps he wanted to die. He pleaded guilty, with robbery as the motive. The circumstances under which Guillaume had fired him received great play in the press. And from the press one received the impression that Guillaume had been a good-hearted, a perhaps somewhat er- ratic philanthropist who had had the bad judg- ment to befriend the hardened and ungrateful adventurer, Giovanni. Then the case drifted downward from the headlines. Giovanni was taken to prison to await trial. And Hella and I came here. I may have thought— I am sure I thought in the begin- ning— that, though I could do nothing for Gio- vanni, I might, perhaps, be able to do some- thing for Hella. I must have hoped that there would be something Hella could do for me. And this might have been possible if the days had not dragged by, for me, like days in prison. I could not get Giovanni out of my mind, I was at the mercy of the bulletins which sporadically arrived from Jacques. All that I remember of the autumn is waiting for Giovanni to come to trial. Then, at last, he came to trial, was found guilty, and placed under sentence of death. All winter long I counted the days. And the night- mare of this house began. GIOVANNI'S ROOM 209 Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.

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

  GREGORY. (Hom. 39. in Ev.) Or else; The evil spirits lay siege to the soul, as it goes forth from the body, for being seized with the love of the flesh, they caress it with delusive pleasures. They surround it with a trench, because bringing all its wickedness which it has committed before the eyes of its mind, they close confine it to the company of its own damnation, that being caught in the very extremity of life, it may see by what enemies it is blockaded, yet be unable to find any way of escape, because it can no longer do good works, since those which it might once have done it despised. On every side also they inclose the soul when its iniquities rise up before it, not only in deed but also in word and thought, that she who before in many ways greatly enlarged herself in wickedness, should now at the end be straitened every way in judgment. Then indeed the soul by the very condition of its guilt is laid prostrate on the ground, while its flesh which it believed to be its life is bid to return to dust. Then its children fall in death, when all unlawful thoughts which only proceed from it, are in the last punishment of life scattered abroad. These may also be signified by the stones. For the corrupt mind when to a corrupt thought it adds one more corrupt, places one stone upon another. But when the soul is led to its doom, the whole structure of its thoughts is rent asunder. But the wicked soul God ceases not to visit with His teaching, sometimes with the scourge and sometimes with a miracle; that the truth which it knew not it may hear, and though still despising it, may return pricked to the heart in sorrow, or overcome with mercies may be ashamed at the evil which it has done. But because it knows not the time of its visitation, at the end of life it is given over to its enemies, that with them it may be joined together in the bond of everlasting damnation. 19:45–4845. And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought; 46. Saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves. 47. And he taught daily in the temple. But the Chief Priests and the Scribes and the chief of the people sought to destroy him, 48. And could not find what they might do: for all the people were very attentive to hear him. GREGORY. (ut sup.) When He had related the evils that were to come upon the city, He straightway entered the temple, that He might cast out them that bought and sold in it. Shewing that the destruction of the people arose chiefly from the guilt of the priests.

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

  I answer: it is rightly said that God predestines men. We have shown that all things are ruled by divine providence (Q. 22, Art. 4), and that providence ordains things to their end (Q. 22, Arts. 1 and 2). Now the end to which God ordains creatures is twofold. There is, first, the end which exceeds the proportion and the capacity of created nature. This is eternal life, which consists in the vision of the divine essence, which is beyond the nature of any creature, as we said in Q. 12, Art. 4. There is, secondly, the end which is proportionate to created nature, which a created thing may attain by means of its own natural power. Now when a thing cannot attain something by its own natural power, it must be directed to it by another, as an arrow is directed to its mark by an archer. Properly speaking, then, although a rational creature is capable of eternal life, he is brought to this life by God. The reason why he is brought to eternal life must therefore pre-exist in God, since the reason why anything is ordained to its end lies in God, and we have said that this is providence. The reason which exists in the mind of an agent is, as it were, a pre-existence in him of the the thing which he intends to do. We give the name of “ predestination ” to the reason why a rational creature is brought to eternal life, because to destine means to bring. It is plain, then, that predestination is a part of providence, if we consider it in relation to its objects. On the first point: by predetermination the Damascene means the imposition of a necessity such as occurs in natural things predetermined to a single end. His next words make this clear —“ God does not will malice, nor compel virtue. ” This does not make predestination impossible. On the second point: irrational creatures are not capable of the end which exceeds the capacity of human nature. Hence they are not properly said to be predestined, although we do speak loosely of predestination in relation to other ends. On the third point: predestination applies to angels as well as to men, even though they have never known misery. A movement is defined by its terminus ad quem, not by its terminus a quo. To be made white means the same thing whether one who is made white was formerly black, pale, or red. Predestination also means the same thing whether or not one is predestined to eternal life from a state of misery. On the fourth point: their predestination is revealed to some by special privilege. But to reveal it in every case would be improvident. Those who are not predestined would despair, and security would engender negligence in those who are. ARTICLE TWO

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

  It was easy to see that the boom and inflation period had been based at first on the extraordinary growth of the country through the immigration and trade that had followed the Civil War. But the Franco-German war had wasted wealth prodigiously, deranged trade too, and diverted commerce into new channels. France and then England first felt the shock: London had to call in monies lent to American railways and other enterprises. Bit by bit even American optimism was overcome for immigration in 1871 and 1872 fell off greatly and the foreign calls for cash exhausted our banks. The crash came in 1873; nothing like it was seen again in these States till the slump of 1907 which led to the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank. Willie’s fortune melted almost in a moment: this mortgage and that, had to be met and could only be met by forced sales with no buyers except at minimum values. When I talked to him, he was almost in despair; no money: no property: all lost; the product of three years’ hard work and successful speculation all swept away. Could I help him? If not, he was ruined. He told me then he had drawn all he could from my father: naturally I promised to help him; but first I had to pay the Gregorys and to my astonishment he begged me to let him have the money instead. “Mrs. Gregory and all of ’em like you”, he pleaded, “they can wait, I cannot; I know of a purchase that could be made that would make me rich again!” I realised then that he was selfish through and through, conscienceless in egotistic greed. I gave up my faint hope that he would ever repay me: henceforth he was a stranger to me and one that I did not even respect, though he had some fine, ingratiating qualities. I left him to walk across the river and in a few blocks met Rose. She looked prettier than ever and I turned and walked with her, praising her beauty to the skies and indeed she deserved it; short green sleeves, I remember, set off her exquisite, plump, white arms. I promised her some books and made her say she would read them; indeed I was astonished by the warmth of her gratitude: she told me it was sweet of me, gave me her eyes and we parted the best of friends, with just a hint of warmer relationship in the future. That evening I paid the Gregorys, Willie’s debt and my own and—did not send him the balance of what I possessed as I had promised; but instead, a letter telling him I had preferred to cancel his debt to the Gregorys.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  When he arrived for a week’s visit in June 1914 (now sixteen and a half to my fifteen, and the interval was beginning to tell), the first thing he did, as soon as we found ourselves alone in the garden, was to take out casually an “ambered” cigarette from a smart silver case on the gilt inside of which he bade me observe the formula 3 × 4 = 12 engraved in memory of the three nights he had spent, at last, with Countess G. He was now in love with an old general’s young wife in Helsingfors and a captain’s daughter in Gatchina. I witnessed with a kind of despair every new revelation of his man-of-the-world style. “Where can I make some rather private calls?” he asked. So I led him past the five poplars and the old dry well (out of which we had been rope-hauled by three frightened gardeners only a couple of years before) to a passage in the servants’ wing where the cooing of pigeons came from an inviting windowsill and where there hung on the sun-stamped wall the remotest and oldest of our country-house telephones, a bulky boxlike contraption which had to be clangorously cranked up to educe a small-voiced operator. Yuri was now even more relaxed and sociable than the mustanger of former years. Sitting on a deal table against the wall and dangling his long legs, he chatted with the servants (something I was not supposed to do, and did not know how to do)—with an aged footman with sideburns whom I had never seen grin before or with a kitchen flirt, of whose bare neck and bold eyes I became aware only then. After Yuri had concluded his third long-distance conversation (I noticed with a blend of relief and dismay how awful his French was), we walked down to the village grocery which otherwise I never dreamed of visiting, let alone buying there a pound of black-and-white sunflower seeds. Throughout our return stroll, among the late afternoon butterflies that were preparing to roost, we munched and spat, he showing me how to perform it conveyer-wise: split the seed open between the right-side back teeth, ease out the kernel with the tongue, spit out the husk halves, move the smooth kernel to the left-side molars, and munch there, while the next seed which in the meantime has already been cracked on the right, is being processed in its turn. Speaking of right, he admitted he was a staunch “monarchist” (of a romantic rather than political nature) and went on to deplore my alleged (and perfectly abstract) “democratism.” He recited samples of his fluent album poetry and proudly remarked that he had been complimented by Dilanov-Tomski, a fashionable poet (who favored Italian epigraphs and sectional titles, such as “Songs of Lost Love,” “Nocturnal Urns,” and so on), for the striking “long” rhyme “vnemlyu múze ya” (“I hearken to the Muse”) and “lyubvi kontúziya” (“love’s contusion”), which I countered with my best (and still unused) find: “zápoved’ ” (commandment) and “posápïvat’ ” (to sniffle). He was boiling with anger over Tolstoy’s dismissal of the art of war and burning with admiration for Prince Andrey Bolkonski—for he had just discovered War and Peace which I had read for the first time when I was eleven (in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our somberly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever).

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

  I answer: as we said in Q. 17, Art. 1, and in 12ae, Q. 40, Art. 1, the object of hope is a good which is arduous, and also possible to obtain. There are accordingly two ways in which one may fail in the hope of obtaining blessedness. One may fail to look upon it as an arduous good, and one may fail to look upon it as a good which it is possible to obtain, whether by oneself or through the help of another. It is especially through corruption of our affection by love of bodily pleasures, particularly those of sexuality, that we are brought to the point where spiritual goods do not savour of good, or do not seem to be very good. For it is due to love of such things that a man loses his taste for spiritual goods, and does not hope for them as arduous goods. In this way, despair arises from lust. But it is owing to excessive dejection that one fails to look upon an arduous good as possible to obtain, whether by oneself or through the help of another. For when dejection dominates a man ’ s affection, it seems to him that he can never rise to anything good. In this way, despair arises from listlessness, since listlessness is the kind of sadness which casts down the spirit. Now the proper object of hope is this — that a thing is possible to obtain. For to be good, or to be arduous, pertains to the object of other passions also. It is therefore from listlessness that despair arises the more especially, although it can also arise from lust, for the reason which we have stated. From this the reply to the first point is plain. On the second point: as the philosopher says in 1 Rhetoric 11, just as hope creates joy, so do men have greater hope when they live joyously. So likewise do they fall the more readily into despair when they live in sadness, according to II Cor. 2:7: “ lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. ” The object of hope is a good to which the appetite tends naturally, and from which it will not turn aside naturally, but only if some obstacle intervenes. Hence joy is more directly the result of hope, and despair more directly the result of sadness. On the third point: neglect to think of the divine blessings is itself the result of listlessness. For a man who is affected by a passion thinks especially of the things which pertain to it. Hence it is not easy for a man who lives in sadness to contemplate any great and joyful things. He thinks only of things that are sad, unless he turns away from them by a great effort. QUESTION TWENTY-ONE OF PRESUMPTIONWe must now consider presumption, concerning which there are four questions. 1 . What is the object of presumption, on which it relies.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  132 18 Joan of Arc: Peasant-General J oan of Arc was a peasant, a general, a visionary, a politician, and a heretic. In the modern age, she has become a national hero of France, a saint, and a feminist icon. It’s difficult to peel back all of those layers and get at the historical person at their core. Fortunately, the profusion of chronicles that came out of late medieval France can be accessed, as well as Joan’s own words through her letters, her extensive testimony at her heresy trial, and the testimony of those who knew her from a later trial. They reveal a young woman who defied categorization: neither peasant nor noble, feminine and masculine by turn, and simple yet expert in ways that defied her humble origins. 133 18. Joan of Arc: Peasant-General Contest for the French Throne Joan was born in 1412, during the final stages of the Hundred Years’ War. It began in 1337 with a dispute between the new king of France and the king of England over English-held lands in France, and it eventually became a contest for the French throne. The pendulum of victory swung slowly. At first, the English had the advantage, but in the second half of the 14th century, the war stalled. France suffered a series of tragedies that drove it to despair by 1429: the deaths of two princes, two assassinations, a major military defeat, and a ruinous treaty. In the spring of 1420, King Charles VI of France signed the Treaty of Troyes, along with King Henry V of England and the new duke of Burgundy. This incredible document disinherited the dauphin—the French king’s son, also named Charles—and acknowledged Henry V as Charles’s heir. Henry married Charles’s daughter, Princess Catherine. The dauphin f led to the lands still under his control, south of the Loire. Henry V died in 1422, leaving an infant son behind. The duke of Bedford became the English regent and the leader of their force in France. He pressed young Henry VI’s claim to the French throne. A stalemate ensued as the dauphin dug into his position in the south while the Burgundians held the traditional coronation site, the city of Reims, which the dauphin needed to bolster the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. It became clear that Orléans, gateway between the north and south, was the fulcrum upon which the war would turn. But by early 1429, the fall of Orléans and the dauphin’s ultimate defeat seemed imminent. This was the desperate situation in which Joan of Arc arrived in the early spring of 1429. Her family had suffered for many generations under the prolonged war, and aided by God, she was on a mission to bring the suffering of the French people to an end.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It’s the nights after Frances goes back to the hotel that are the hardest. I spend my day racing around between those dreadful public meals and the eurhythmics and painting and baths and tests and running over to Frances’ hotel for a quick cuddle then back here for a liver compress or to take my temperature or something else equally vital in this half-seen scheme of things that feels like a pact I’ve made with myself to do as they believe is best for a stated period of time—three weeks. In other words, to give the Lukas Klinik my best shot because it is the only thing I have going for me right now, and tomorrow the results from all my liver tests and other diagnostic analyses will be back. I haven’t really thought about what they will be because I just can’t spend any more energy in being scared. What I have to fight the hardest against here is feeling that it is just not worth it—too much fight for too little return, and I hurt all the damn time. Something is going on inside me, and it’s interfering with my life. There is a persistent and pernicious despair hovering over me constantly that feels physiological, even when my basic mood is quite happy. I don’t understand it, but I do not want to slip or fall into any kind of resignation. I am not going to go gently into anybody’s damn good night! December 23, 1985, 10:30 a.m. Arlesheim I have cancer of the liver. Dr. Lorenz just came in and told me. The crystallization test and the liver sonogram are all positive. The two masses in my liver are malignant. He says I should begin an increased Iscador program and antihormone therapy right away, if I decide that is the way I want to go. Well. The last possibility of doubt based on belief is gone. I said I’d come to Lukas because I trusted the anthroposophic doctors, and if they said it was malignant then I would accept their diagnosis. So here it is, and all the yelling and head-banging isn’t going to change it. I guess it helps to finally know. I wish Frances were here. I cannot afford to waste any more time in doubting, or in fury. The question is, what do I do now? Listen to my body, of course, but the messages get dimmer and dimmer. In two weeks I go back home. Iscador or chemotherapy or both? How did I ever come to be in this place? What can I use it for? December 24, 1985 Arlesheim

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  One day I slipped in the snowy gutter of Brighton Beach and the booted feet passing me by on the curb squished my laundry ticket into the slush and I thought oh fuck it now I’ll never get my clean sheet and I cried bitter tears into the snow under my cheek in that gutter in Brighton Beach Brooklyn where I was living because it was cheap In a furnished room with cooking privileges and there was an old thrown-away mama who lived down the hall a yente who sat all day long in our common kitchen weeping because her children made her live with a schwartze and while she wept she drank up all my Cream Soda every day before I came home. Then she sat and watched me watching my chicken feet stewing on the Fridays when I got paid and she taught me to boil old corn in the husk to make it taste green and fresh. There were not many pleasures in that winter and I loved Cream Soda there were not many people in that winter and I came to hate that old woman. The winter I got fat on stale corn on the cob and chicken foot stew and the day before Christmas having no presents to wrap I poured two ounces of Nux Vomica into a bottle of Cream Soda and listened to the old lady puke all night long. When spring came I crossed the river again moving up in the world six and half stories and one day on the corner of eighth street across from Wanamakers which had burned down while I was away in Brooklyn— where I caught the bus for work every day a bus driver slowed down at the bus stop one morning— I was late it was raining and my jacket was soaked— and then speeded past without stopping when he saw my face. I have been given other doses of truth— that particular form of annihilation— shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city but oh that captain marvel glance brushing up against my skull like a steel bar in passing and my heart withered sheets in the gutter passing passing booted feet and bus drivers and old yentes in Brighton Beach kitchens SHIT! said the king and the whole court strained passing me out as an ill-tempered wind lashing around the corner of 125th Street and Lenox. Keyfood In the Keyfood Market on Broadway a woman waits by the window daily and patient the comings and goings of buyers neatly labeled old like yesterday’s bread her restless experienced eyes weigh fears like grapefruit testing for ripeness. Once in the market she was more comfortable than wealthy more black than white more proper than friendly more rushed than alone all her powers defined her like a carefully kneaded loaf rising and restrained working and making loving behind secret eyes.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Here is your granddaughter mother give us your blessing before I sleep what other secrets do you have to tell me how do I learn to love her as you have loved me? Sequelae Because a burning sword notches both of my doorposts because I am standing between my burned hands in the ashprint of two different houses midnight finds weave a filigree of disorder I figure in the dreams of people who do not even know me the night is a blister of stars pierced by nightmares of a telephone ringing my hand is the receiver threatening as an uncaged motor seductive as the pain of voiceless mornings voiceless kitchens I remember cornflakes shrieking like banshees in my throat while I battle the shapes of you wearing old ghosts of me hating you for being black and not woman hating you for being white and not me in this carnival of memories I name you both the laying down of power the separation I cannot yet make after all these years of blood my eyes are glued like fury to the keyholes of yesterday rooms where I wander solitary as a hunting cheetah at play with legends call disaster due all women who refuse to wait in vain; In a new room I enter old places bearing your shape trapped behind the sharp smell of your anger in my voice behind tempting invitations to believe your face tipped like a pudding under glass and I hear the high pitch of your voice crawling out from my hearts deepest culverts compromise is a coffin nail rusty as seaweed tiding through an august house where nobody lives beyond choice my pathways are strewn with old discontents outgrown defenses still sturdy as firebrick unlovely and dangerous as measles they wither into uselessness but do not decay. Because I do not wish to remember but love to caress the deepest bone of me begging shes that wax and wane like moonfire to absolve me at any price I battle old ghosts of you wearing the shapes of me surrounded by black and white faces saying no over and over becoming my mother draped in my fathers bastard ambition growing dark secrets out from between her thighs and night comes into me like a fever my hands grip a flaming sword that screams while an arrogant woman masquerading as a fish plunges it deeper and deeper into the heart we both share like beggars on this moment of time where the space ships land I have died too many deaths that were not mine. A Litany for Survival For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours; For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  James Baldwin 144 ished I could not say anything and all the time his voice was rising and people were beginning to listen and, suddenly, mon cher, I felt that I was falling, falling from a great, high place. For a long while I could not get angry and I could feel the tears, Uke fire, coming up. I could not get my breath, I could not believe that he was really doing this to me. I kept saying, what have I done? What have I done! And he would not answer and then he shouted, very loud, it was like a gun going off, 'Mais tu le sais, salopi You know very wellT And nobody knew what he meant, but it was just as though we were back In that theatre lobby again, where we met, you remember? Everybody knew that Guillaume was right and I was wrong, that I had done some- thing awful. And he went to the cash register and took out some money—but I knew that he knew that there was not much money in the cash register at such an hour— and pushed it at me and said. Take it! Take it! Better to give it to you than have you steal it from me at night! Now go!' And, oh, the faces in that bar, you should have seen them. They were so wise and tragic and they knew that now they knew every- thing, that they had always known it, and they were so glad that they had never had anything to do with me. *Ah! Les encules! The dirty sons of bitches! Les gonzessesT He was weeping again, with rage this time. 'Then, at last, I struck him and then many hands gxabbed me and now I hardly know what happened, but by T CIOVANNI'S ROOM 145 and by I was in the street, with all these torn bills in my hand and everybody staring at me. I did not laiow what to do, I hated to walk away but I knew if anything more happened, the po- lice would come and Guillaume would have me put in jail. But I will see him again, I swear it, and on that day— He stopped and sat down, staring at the wall. Then he turned to me. He watched me for a long time, in silence. Then, If you were not here,' he said, very slowly, *this would be the end of Giovanni.' I stood up. T)on't be silly,' I said. It's not so tragic as all that.' I paused. 'Guillaume's disgust- ing. They all are. But it's not the worst thing that ever happened to you. Is it?'

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  Tou are not leaving me for her,' he said. Tou are leaving me for some other reason. You He so much, you have come to beUeve all your own lies. But I, I have senses. You are not leaving me for a woman. If you were really in love with this little girl, you would not have had to be so cruel to me.' 'She's not a Uttle girl,' I said. 'She's a woman and no matter what you think, I do love her— Tou do not,' cried Giovanni, sitting up, love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will I You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little vir- GIOVANNrS ROOM 187 gin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to any- body, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap— and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime/ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once, saliva spraying from his Ups and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. Tou want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Gio- vanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my Ufe. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?' 'Giovanni, stop it! For God's sake, stop it! What in the world do you want me to do? I can't help the way I feel.' T)o you know how you feel? Do you feel? What do you feel?' 1 feel nothing now,' I said, 'nothing. I want to get out of this room, I want to get away from you, I want to end this terrible scene.' — 188 James Baldwin Tou want to get away from me/ He laughed; he watched me; the look in his eyes was so bottomlessly bitter it was almost benevolent. 'At last you are beginning to be honest. And do you know why you want to get away from me?' Inside me something locked. 1—I cannot have a life with you/ I said.

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

  He leaves his beloved wife, hoping she will marry a normal man. 79 The rising generation of a new, modern century saw little of enduring substance in family dynasties of the Gilded Age. All they had to speak of was their money. In place of America’s imperfect aristocracy, progressive reformers were eager to rear a cognitive elite, one that could deal with modern technology and bureaucracy. Class continued to matter greatly, but it wasn’t going to be the flamboyant aristocracy of the effete Old World that would monitor modernity; hope lay instead with a cadre of men in white lab coats and bureaucrats in tailored suits. Professional expertise would be convincing enough evidence of inborn merit. 80 It should seem odd to us that the high tide of eugenics coexisted with the storied glamour of the Roaring Twenties: Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, lighthearted flappers, and unpoliced speakeasies. Yet even the flappers were warned that their daring dancing style too closely resembled the ways of those who had “gypsy” (i.e., black) blood; they would be better served to settle down with a eugenically suitable mate. If ever there was time when class consciousness sank deep roots, this was it. The 1920s saw social exclusiveness masquerade as science and disdain for rural backwardness and the mongrel taint intensify. In a culture under siege, white trash meant impure, and not quite white. Like the moron who somehow passed into the middle class, the ill-bred bastard gave a watchful people a new set of social hazards to look out for, while they listened to the stock ticker and marched off a cliff with the market crash in 1929. 81 CHAPTER NINE Forgotten Men and Poor Folk I Downward Mobility and the Great Depression Shall then this man go hungry, here in lands Blest by his honor, builded by his hands? Do something for him: let him never be Forgotten: let him have his daily bread: He who has fed us, let him now be fed. Let us remember his tragic lot— Remember, or else be ourselves forgot! —Edwin Markham, “The Forgotten Man” (1932) n 1932, three years after the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, Warner Brothers released I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the gripping story of a World War I veteran transformed into a beast of burden while working on a southern chain gang. It is a strangely powerful film that celebrates the redemptive power of work. Through no fault of their own, 20 percent of the American labor force was out of work by 1932. Average men woke to find themselves as outcasts, without the emblems of American male identity: jobs, homes, the means to provide for their families. The film’s fugitive, James Allen, became a powerful symbol of the country’s decline. His story is that of a patriotic, ambitious, creative, suddenly jobless northerner who becomes, in turn, a tramp, a convict, and a fugitive.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Have you ever risen in the night bursting with knowledge and the world dissolves toward any listening ear into which you can pour whatever it was you knew before waking Only to find all ears asleep or drugged perhaps by a dream of words because as you scream into them over and over nothing stirs and the mind you have reached is not a working mind please hang up and die again? The mind you have reached is not a working mind Please hang up And die again. Talking to some people is like talking to a toilet. One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle If we hate the rush hour subways who ride them every day why hasn’t there been a New York City Subway Riot some bloody rush-hour revolution where a snarl goes on from push to a shove that does not stop at the platform’s edge the whining of automated trains will drown out the screams of our bloody and releasing testament to a last chance or hope of change. But hope is counter-revolutionary. Pressure cooks but we have not exploded flowing in and out instead each day like a half-digested mass for a final stake impales our dreams and watering down each trip’s fury is the someday foolish hope that at the next stop some door will open for us to fresh air and light and home. When we realize how much of us is spent in rush hour subways underground no real exit it will matter less what token we pay for change. The Workers Rose On May Day Or Postscript To Karl Marx Down Wall Street the students marched for peace Above, construction workers looking on remembered how it was for them in the old days before their closed shop white security and daddy pays the bills so they climbed down the girders and taught their sons a lesson called Marx is a victim of the generation gap called I grew up the hard way so will you called the limits of a sentimental vision. When the passion play was over and the dust had cleared on Wall Street 500 Union workers together with police had mopped up Foley Square with 2000 of their striking sons who broke and ran before their fathers chains. Look here Karl Marx the apocalyptic vision of amerika! Workers rise and win and have not lost their chains but swing them side by side with the billyclubs in blue securing Wall Street against the striking students. Cables to Rage or I’ve Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time This is how I came to be loved by loving myself loveless.

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

  Nor do they offer advice to parents for preparing the child to handle the transitions that she will be called upon to make. It appears, in fact, that the mediation outcome continues many of the disadvantages of court judgment—locking children and parents into rigid agreements that ignore how children change as they grow up. Parents are told that they can return to mediation if the arrangements are not working. But that is not the same as giving an older child a place at the table and recognizing her voice as a participant. Nor is it the same as building in a review process that, after an appropriate time interval, would see how the child is faring. Another difficult issue that I mentioned earlier bears elaboration. The central model of public policy as implemented by the courts and mediation has been that the child’s relationships with both parents should be continued and if possible strengthened. Courts distribute booklets to parents with the slogan “Parents Are Forever,” by which they mean that parent-child relationships in the predivorce family are expected to endure. The moral dilemma is that many people divorce because they have come to abhor the lifestyle and values of their partner. They leave because they don’t want their children to be subjected to the toxic influences of the other. Men and women alike leave marriages because of their partners’ dishonesty, manipulative relationships, violent behavior, drinking, infidelity, or overall irresponsibility. They divorce for serious reasons to escape a delinquent or demeaning life only to find themselves in a system that reinstates and even strengthens the values and lifestyle they fled from. I don’t have an alternative solution short of enabling the courts or the mediators to play the role of moral arbiter—an idea I strongly reject. Nor do I think we should conduct prolonged investigations of every alleged misdeed. We would create a witch-hunting society that would probably be worse than the present system. But I do want to point out that the courts’ neutral position has serious consequences. It does not rescue the child or even purport to do so. On the contrary, it rescues the parent. As we saw in Larry’s continued adoration of his violent father, it can and often does lock the child into troubled and immoral relationships. As a result, it imposes on the child the task of rescuing herself from identifying with a troubled or an immoral parent. This can be an enormous burden. Many divorced parents are preoccupied with these issues for good reason. Joint Physical Custody I ASKED PAULA how the joint custody was working out and she gave me a soliloquy on how frustrating the situation was in her eyes. Racer has a hard time making transitions between the two homes—hers in Berkeley, his in San Jose.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  How could I not still need that child with me? I feel impelled to locate, by way of establishing at least one survivor of the period, a recent photograph of Sophia Loren. I type her name into Google Images. I find such a photograph: Sophia Loren arriving at some kind of publicity event, one of those red-carpet arrivals during which the PR people hover close, alerting the photographers to the approach of the celebrity. As I check the caption on the photograph I notice in passing that Sophia Loren was born in 1934, the same year in which I myself was born. I am spellbound: Sophia Loren, too, is seventy-five years old. Sophia Loren is seventy-five years old and no one on that red carpet, to my knowledge, is yet suggesting that she is making an inadequate adjustment to aging. This entirely meaningless discovery floods me with restored hope, a revived sense of the possible. W 35 hen we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day’s mail with real enthusiasm—maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to staying alive—yet the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney’s and Armani or on Park past the Council on Foreign Relations and we are not even glancing at their windows. One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing.

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

  When she returned to Jamestown, she was told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her husband’s former master. Unable to pay, she would be forced to work off her dead husband’s unmet obligations. She appealed to the governor, writing that her treatment was identical to the “slavery” she experienced among the “cruel savages.” Had English civilization been sacrificed in this colonial wasteland? That was Dickenson’s unspoken message. Nor was her treatment unusual. John Smith acknowledged in his Generall Historie that “fatherless children” were left “in little better condition than slaves, for if their Parents die in debt, their children are made bondmen till the debt be discharged.” 35 The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children a collateral asset. It was a world not unlike the one Shakespeare depicted in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock demanded his pound of flesh. Virginia planters felt entitled to their flesh and blood in the forms of the innocent spouses and offspring of dead servants. 36 If civilization was to be firmly planted, Jamestown would have to be given the look of a normal English village, along with efforts to promote good habits among the people. The colony needed to shed its image as a penal colony and to plant firmer roots. It needed more than tobacco. It needed herds of cattle, fields of crops, and improved relations between masters and servants. Most of all, it needed many more marriageable women. In 1620 the Virginia Company sent to the colony fifty-seven “young, handsome, and honestlie educated Maides.” Over the next three years, 157 more women made the crossing. They were thought of as emissaries of a new moral order. Company records hint at something else as well: the “greatest hindrances” to “Noble worke” rested on “want of comforts”; men deserved to “live contentedlie.” The transportation of female cargo would “tye and roote the Planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children.” Sexual satisfaction and heirs to provide for would make slothful men into more productive colonists. All that was required of the women was that they marry. Their prospective husbands were expected to buy them, that is, to defray the cost of passage and provisions. Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was “corrupt,” and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Dead mouse, dead mouse, dead mouse! . . . Distraction created, crisis averted. At least temporarily. While my mind games may seem odd, we humans are wired weird for good reason. In psychology, there’s a theory known as mortality salience. It suggests that when our evolutionary drive to survive collides with our inevitable realization that we will all eventually die, we freak the fuck out. Terror ensues. And because terror is, well, terrifying, we develop clever ways to distract ourselves from it. There are millions of ways to divert attention from this terror—buy a midlife-crisis sports car, get your helicopter mom pilot’s license, hoover all the Ho Hos in a threestate radius, the list goes on and on. But my tried-and-true diversion remains two syllables long: Dead mouse! TICK. TICK. BOOM!In October of 2018, Dad’s cancer returned, and technically, it wasn’t a recurrence; it was a new diagnosis of pancreatic cancer—as if lightning had struck twice in the same frickin’ place. Within days, he was back at the hospital for another surgery, followed a few months later by more chemo. By that summer, the cancer would spread to his liver, and he would be told that his disease had become terminal. “I really thought I’d be one of the 10 percent who makes it,” he shared, as he began to wrap his mind around what that actually meant, since curing was no longer an option. Suddenly, Dad found himself walking the precarious line between living fully and actively dying, between making the most of the time he had left and simultaneously winding it all down. As this new phase set in, Dad’s behavior might not have looked different to our extended circle of family and friends, but I noticed the changes. He paused longer in conversations, smiling in wonder and awe as if he were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, taking in the majesty of it all while he still could. Mom and I helped him create a bucket list, and I took it upon myself to be our event planner. (The recovering perfectionist in me was thrilled at the opportunity to relapse.) Dad wanted to go to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks one more time, to sit at the water’s edge and do jigsaw puzzles by the fire. To visit his brother in Cape Cod and reminisce about the old days “and have a few good chuckles.” And to celebrate his 72nd birthday on Martha’s Vineyard and my 48th “somewhere nice.” We set out to make as many memories as possible and as quickly as possible, trip by trip. That summer was “brutiful,” as Glennon Doyle would say, both beautiful and brutal.