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

  She angered the residents when she featured the insides of homes, contrasting a poor white hovel of “Shedtown” with the opulent parlor of one of the wealthiest families. Her critics charged that she was focused on the upper crust and “soaked bottom,” while ignoring the “middle filling” of the “community pie.” But that was her point. There was no single representative American way of life. 12 The stock market’s “crash” and ensuing “Depression” invoked obvious metaphors of physical collapse. One highly cynical observer compared the bottoming out of Wall Street to a buried Egyptian tomb, “filled with the debris of delusions and false hopes.” Town and country supplied competing images of ruin: boarded-up stores and banks in ghost towns, city breadlines—both symbols of idleness. In rural settings, once-prosperous farms had either dried up or become buried in dust, and fertile fields were scarred by cavernous gullies. “Depression” was another word for what the eighteenth-century governor of Virginia called his impoverished neighbor North Carolina: a “sinkhole.” 13 In the writings that suffused 1930s periodicals as well as government reports, economic failure was associated with the old notion of wasteland. When Roy Stryker was put in charge of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration in 1935, he hired a team of talented photographers to record images of barren land dotted with abandoned farms and long stretches of terrain destroyed by dust storms, floods, and gullies—all caused by destructive farming, irresponsible lumbering, and traditional mining techniques. In this literary and visual construction of reality on the ground, class identity was not just a slippery slope; it was closer in nature to the erratically formed, man-made furrows of the gully. People were seen in the numerous images of the FSA as scattered and anonymous, squatting along roads, worn, beaten, set adrift, washed up. The absence of active laborers conveyed its own unmistakable message—a Life story explained that it was hard to “see” depression because of “business not being done.” Documentary photographer Arthur Rothstein took a haunting picture of an Ohio farm community. Only a few buildings were visible, and there were no people present. His camera focused on a sign planted in the frozen mud, marking the identity of this unincorporated town. It read, “Utopia.” 14 Arthur Rothstein’s powerful image of erosion and wasteland (1937). Here the Alabama land is scarred by massive gullies as a forlorn tenant farmer stands helplessly by his barn. Eroded land on tenant’s farm, Walker County, Alabama (Arthur Rothstein, 1937), LC-USF34-025121, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC Henry Wallace, FDR’s secretary of agriculture, argued that what had always made America unique was the constant “pressing upon social resources” and the general belief in a “limitless and inexhaustible soil.”

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

  Defenders of the Virginia Company of London published tracts, sermons, and firsthand accounts, all trying to explain away the many bizarre occurrences that haunted Jamestown. Social mores were nonexistent. Men defecated in public areas within the small garrison. People sat around and starved. Harsh laws were imposed: stealing vegetables and blasphemy were punishable by death. Laborers and their children were virtual commodities, effectively slaves. One man murdered his wife and then ate her. 26 After the miscarriage of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke, Jamestown was christened England’s first infant child. Bidding the English patience with Jamestown, the poet John Donne sermonized in 1622, “Great Creatures lye long in the Wombe.” Jamestown’s was a slow, painful birth, attended by scant confidence in its future. That year, a lopsided Indian attack nearly wiped out the entire population. 27 The pervasive traumas throughout Jamestown’s early years are legend. Before 1625, colonists dropped like flies, 80 percent of the first six thousand dying off. Several different military commanders imposed regimes of forced labor that turned the fledgling settlement into a prison camp. Men drawn to Jamestown dreamt of finding gold, which did little to inspire hard work. Not even starvation awoke them from the dream. A new group arrived in 1611, and described how their predecessors wallowed in “sluggish idlenesse” and “beastiall sloth.” Yet they fared little better. 28 There were few “lusty men” in Virginia, to repeat Hakluyt’s colorful term. It remained difficult to find recruits who would go out and fell trees, build houses, improve the land, fish, and hunt wild game. The men of early Jamestown were predisposed to play cards, to trade with vile sailors, and to rape Indian women. A glassblower was sent to make colored beads—trinkets to sell to the Indians. This was Hakluyt’s idea. But where were the husbandmen needed to raise food? 29 Impracticality, bad decisions, and failed recruitment strategies left the colony with too few ploughmen and husbandmen to tend the fields and feed the cattle that were being shipped from England. Jamestown lost sight of the English creed expressed in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): that every productive society prized its tillers of the earth. More wrote that in failing to promote husbandry, “no commonwealth could hold out a year.” 30 John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas, took these words to heart. In 1609 he introduced the strain of tobacco from Bermuda that Virginia’s settlers succeeded with, and tobacco quickly became the new gold—the ticket to wealth. Its discovery led to a boom economy, bringing high prices for the “filthy weed.” Tobacco was at once both a boom and bane. Though it saved the colony from ruin, it stunted the economy and generated a skewed class system.

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

  Constantly it seemed as if my legs did not belong to me. It was almost as bad with my arms. As for my head, it seemed no longer to exist. . . . I appeared to myself to act automatically, by an impulsion foreign to myself. . . . There was inside of me a new being, and another part of myself, the old being, which took no interest in the new-comer. I distinctly remember saying to myself that the sufferings of this new being were to me indifferent. I was never really dupe of these illusions, but my mind grew often tired of incessantly correcting the new impressions, and I let myself go an lived the unhappy life of this new entity. I had an ardent desire to see my old world again, to get back to my old self. This desire kept me from killing myself. . . . I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form and assumed my functions." [304] In cases similar to this, it is as certain that the I is unaltered as that the me is changed. That is to say, the present Thought of the patient is cognitive of both the old me and the new, so long as its memory holds good. Only, within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself so simply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic appropriation, strange perplexities have arisen. The present and the past both seen therein will not unite. Where is my old me? What is this new one? Are they the same? Or have I two? Such questions, answered by whatever theory the patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the beginning of his insane life. [305] A case with which I am acquainted through Dr. C. J. Fisher of Tewksbury has possibly its origin in this way. The woman, Bridget F., "has been many years insane, and always speaks of her supposed self as 'the rat,' asking me to 'bury the little rat,' etc. Her real self she speaks of in the third person as 'the good woman,' saying, 'The good woman knew Dr. F. and used to work for him,' etc. Sometimes she sadly asks: 'Do you think the good woman will ever come back?' She works at needlework, knitting, laundry, etc., and shows her work, saying, 'Isn't that good for only a rat?' She has, during periods of depression, hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and under boxes. 'She was only a rat, and wants to die,' she would say when we found her."

• From The Hours (1998)

  When she looks in the medicine-cabinet mirror, she briefly imagines that someone is standing behind her. There is no one, of course; it’s just a trick of the light. For an instant, no more than that, she has imagined some sort of ghost self, a second version of her, standing immediately behind, watching. It’s nothing. She opens the medicine cabinet, puts the toothpaste away. Here, on the glass shelves, are the various lotions and sprays, the bandages and ointments, the medicines. Here is the plastic prescription bottle with its sleeping pills. This bottle, the most recent refill, is almost full—she can’t use them, of course, while she’s pregnant. She takes the bottle off the shelf, holds it up to the light. There are at least thirty pills inside, maybe more. She puts it back on the shelf. It would be as simple as checking into a hotel room. It would be as simple as that. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer matter. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer worry, or struggle, or fail. What if that moment at dinner—that equipoise, that small perfection—were enough? What if you decided to want no more? She closes the medicine-cabinet door, which meets the frame with a solid, competent metallic click. She thinks of everything inside the cabinet, on the shelves, in darkness now. She goes into the bedroom, where her husband is waiting. She removes her robe. “Hi,” he says confidently, tenderly, from his side of the bed. “Did you have a nice birthday?” she asks. “The greatest.” He pulls back the sheet for her but she hesitates, standing at the side of the bed, wearing her filmy blue nightgown. She can’t seem to feel her body, though she knows it’s there. “That’s good,” she says. “I’m glad you had a nice time.” “You coming to bed?” he says. “Yes,” she answers, and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghost might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It’s a little like reading, isn’t it—that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer. “So,” Dan says after a while. “Are you coming to bed?” “Yes,” she says. From far away, she can hear a dog barking. Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa puts her hand on the old woman’s shoulder, as if to prepare her for some further shock. Sally, who has preceded them down the hallway, opens the door. “Here we are,” Clarissa says. “Yes,” Laura replies. When they enter the apartment, Clarissa is relieved to see that Julia has put away the hors d’oeuvres. The flowers, of course, remain—brilliant and innocent, exploding from vases in lavish, random profusion, for Clarissa dislikes arrangements. She prefers flowers to look as if they’ve just arrived, in arm-loads, from the fields.

• From The Hours (1998)

  But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open: Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages. It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she— how anyone—can make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied—it announces itself inside her head, faintly but distinctly, like a voice crackling from a distant radio station. She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid. Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren’t they? It’s possible—perhaps even likely—that someone has ended his or her life right here, in this room, on this bed. Someone said, Enough, no more; someone looked for the last time at these white walls, this smooth white ceiling. By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange. It could, she thinks, be deeply comforting; it might feel so free: to simply go away. To say to them all, I couldn’t manage, you had no idea; I didn’t want to try anymore. There might, she thinks, be a dreadful beauty in it, like an ice field or a desert in early morning. She could go, as it were, into that other landscape; she could leave them all behind—her child, her husband and Kitty, her parents, everybody—in this battered world (it will never be whole again, it will never be quite clean), saying to one another and to anyone who asks, We thought she was all right, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones. We had no idea. She strokes her belly. I would never. She says the words out loud in the clean, silent room: “I would never.” She loves life, loves it hopelessly, at least at certain moments; and she would be killing her son as well. She would be killing her son and her husband and the other child, still forming inside her. How could any of them recover from something like that? Nothing she might do as a living wife and mother, no lapse, no fit of rage or depression, could possibly compare. It would be, simply, evil. It would punch a hole in the atmosphere, through which everything she’s created—the orderly days, the lighted windows, the table laid for supper—would be sucked away. Still, she is glad to know (for somehow, suddenly, she knows) that it is possible to stop living. There is comfort in facing the full range of options; in considering all your choices, fearlessly and without guile.

• From The Hours (1998)

  It seems, at that moment, that Richard begins truly to leave the world. To Clarissa it is an almost physical sensation, a gentle but irreversible pulling-away, like a blade of grass being drawn out of the ground. Soon Clarissa will sleep, soon everyone who knew him will be asleep, and they’ll all wake up tomorrow morning to find that he’s joined the realm of the dead. She wonders if tomorrow morning will mark not only the end of Richard’s earthly life but the beginning of the end of his poetry, too. There are, after all, so many books. Some of them, a handful, are good, and of that handful, only a few survive. It’s possible that the citizens of the future, people not yet born, will want to read Richard’s elegies, his beautifully cadenced laments, his rigorously unsentimental offerings of love and fury, but it’s far more likely that his books will vanish along with almost everything else. Clarissa, the figure in a novel, will vanish, as will Laura Brown, the lost mother, the martyr and fiend. Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so. Here, then, is the party, still laid; here are the flowers, still fresh; everything ready for the guests, who have turned out to be only four. Forgive us, Richard. It is, in fact, a party, after all. It is a party for the not-yet-dead; for the relatively undamaged; for those who for mysterious reasons have the fortune to be alive. It is, in fact, great good fortune. Julia says, “Do you think I should make a plate for Richard’s mother?” “No,” Clarissa says. “I’ll go get her.” She returns to the living room, to Laura Brown. Laura smiles

• From The Hours (1998)

  It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she— how anyone—can make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied—it announces itself inside her head, faintly but distinctly, like a voice crackling from a distant radio station. She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid. Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren’t they? It’s possible—perhaps even likely—that someone has ended his or her life right here, in this room, on this bed. Someone said, Enough, no more; someone looked for the last time at these white walls, this smooth white ceiling. By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange. It could, she thinks, be deeply comforting; it might feel so free: to simply go away. To say to them all, I couldn’t manage, you had no idea; I didn’t want to try anymore. There might, she thinks, be a dreadful beauty in it, like an ice field or a desert in early morning. She could go, as it were, into that other landscape; she could leave them all behind—her child, her husband and Kitty, her parents, everybody—in this battered world (it will never be whole again, it will never be quite clean), saying to one another and to anyone who asks, We thought she was all right, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones. We had no idea. She strokes her belly. I would never. She says the words out loud in the clean, silent room: “I would never.” She loves life, loves it hopelessly, at least at certain moments; and she would be killing her son as well. She would be killing her son and her husband and the other child, still forming inside her. How could any of them recover from something like that? Nothing she might do as a living wife and mother, no lapse, no fit of rage or depression, could possibly compare. It would be, simply, evil. It would punch a hole in the atmosphere, through which everything she’s created—the orderly days, the lighted windows, the table laid for supper—would be sucked away. Still, she is glad to know (for somehow, suddenly, she knows) that it is possible to stop living. There is comfort in facing the full range of options; in considering all your choices, fearlessly and without guile. She imagines Virginia Woolf, virginal, unbalanced, defeated by the impossible demands of life and art; she imagines her stepping into a river with a stone in her pocket. Laura keeps stroking her belly. It would be as simple, she thinks, as checking into a hotel. It would be as simple as that. Mrs. Woolf She sits in the kitchen with Vanessa, drinking her tea.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Also by Michael Cunningham A Home at the End of the World (1990) Flesh and Blood (1995) Farrar, Straus and Giroux 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 Copyright © 1998 by Michael Cunningham All rights reserved Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1998 Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in The New Yorker. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cunningham, Michael, 1952– The hours / Michael Cunningham. p. cm. ISBN 0-374-17289-7 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS3553.U484H68 1998 813'.54 – dc21 98-34188 Excerpt from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II; 1920-1924, copyright © 1978 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company. Excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, copyright © 1925 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Virginia Woolf ’s letter to Leonard Woolf (no. 3702) taken from The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume VI: 1936-1941, copyright © 1980 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company. This book is for Ken Corbett We’ll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one too will be a form of what I dream, a structure of words, and not the flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. I know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest, and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse. — J. L. Borges, The Other Tiger , 1960 I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. — Virginia Woolf, in her diary, August 30, 1923 Prologue She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can’t see them. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She opens the medicine cabinet, puts the toothpaste away. Here, on the glass shelves, are the various lotions and sprays, the bandages and ointments, the medicines. Here is the plastic prescription bottle with its sleeping pills. This bottle, the most recent refill, is almost full—she can’t use them, of course, while she’s pregnant. She takes the bottle off the shelf, holds it up to the light. There are at least thirty pills inside, maybe more. She puts it back on the shelf. It would be as simple as checking into a hotel room. It would be as simple as that. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer matter. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer worry, or struggle, or fail. What if that moment at dinner—that equipoise, that small perfection—were enough? What if you decided to want no more? She closes the medicine-cabinet door, which meets the frame with a solid, competent metallic click. She thinks of everything inside the cabinet, on the shelves, in darkness now. She goes into the bedroom, where her husband is waiting. She removes her robe. “Hi,” he says confidently, tenderly, from his side of the bed. “Did you have a nice birthday?” she asks. “The greatest.” He pulls back the sheet for her but she hesitates, standing at the side of the bed, wearing her filmy blue nightgown. She can’t seem to feel her body, though she knows it’s there. “That’s good,” she says. “I’m glad you had a nice time.” “You coming to bed?” he says. “Yes,” she answers, and does not move. She might, at this moment, be nothing but a floating intelligence; not even a brain inside a skull, just a presence that perceives, as a ghost might. Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It’s a little like reading, isn’t it—that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular part beyond that of the willing observer. “So,” Dan says after a while. “Are you coming to bed?” “Yes,” she says. From far away, she can hear a dog barking. Acknowledgments I was helped enormously in the revising of this book by Jill Ciment, Judy Clain, Joel Conarroe, Stacey D’Erasmo, Bonnie Friedman, Marie Howe, and Adam Moss. Research, technical advice, and other forms of aid were generously provided by Dennis Dermody, Paul Elie, Carmen Gomezplata, Bill Hamilton, Ladd Spiegel, John Waters, and Wendy Welker. My agent, Gail Hochman, and my editor, Jonathan Galassi, are secular saints. Tracy O’Dwyer and Patrick Giles have provided more in the way of general inspiration than they may know, by reading as widely, discerningly, and voluptuously as they do. My parents and sister are great readers too, though that does not begin to account for their contributions.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  I want to sleep and know nothing more. I want to die, Kai!... No, it's nothing with me. I can't want anything. I don't even want to be famous. I'm scared of it, just like there's a wrong in it! Nothing can become of me, be sure. The other day after confirmation, Pastor Pringsheim said to someone that I had to be given up, I came from a rotten family..." "Did he say that?" Kai asked with tense interest... “Yes, he means my uncle Christian, who is in an asylum in Hamburg. - He's probably right. You should just give up on me. I would be so grateful for that!... I have so many worries and everything is so difficult for me. Let's say I cut my finger, hurt me somewhere... it's a wound, which would have been cured in another in eight days. For me it takes four weeks. It won't heal, it gets inflamed, it gets bad and causes me excessive discomfort... Recently Herr Brecht told me that my teeth looked miserable, almost all of them were already undermined and worn out, not to mention the ones that have been undressed. That's how it is now. And what will I bite with when I'm thirty, forty years old? I have no hope at all..." "So," said Kai and took a faster pace; “Now tell me a little about your piano playing. Because I want to write something wonderful now, something wonderful... Maybe I'll start in drawing class later. Do you want to play this afternoon?' Hanno was silent for a moment. Something cloudy, confused, and hot had come into his eyes. 'Yes, I shall play,' he said, 'though I ought not to. I should practice my etudes and sonatas and then stop. But I'll play, I can't help it, although it makes things worse." "Worse?" Hanno said nothing. "I know what you're playing about," Kai said. And then they both fell silent. They were of a strange age. Kai had blushed and looked down without lowering his head. Hanno looked pale. He was terribly serious and kept his veiled eyes turned sideways. Then Herr Schlemiel rang and they went upstairs. The geography lesson came and with it the extemporal, a very important extemporal about the Hesse-Nassau area. A man with a red beard and a brown skirt came in. His face was pale and not a single hair grew on his hands, the pores of which were wide open. This was the witty head teacher, Doctor Mühsam. He suffered at times from hemorrhages from the lungs, and constantly spoke ironically, considering himself as witty as he was ailing. At home he owned a kind Heine Archive, a collection of papers and objects related to the impudent and ailing poet. Now he fixed the borders of Hesse-Nassau on the blackboard and then, with a smile that was both melancholy and scornful, asked the gentlemen to draw in their notebooks what strange things the country had to offer.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Here on Mt. Ararat Road Virginia passes a stout woman, a familiar figure from the shops, a hale and suspicious old wife who walks two pugs on brandy-colored leashes, who carries an immense tapestry handbag in her other hand, and who, by her ostentatious ignoring of Virginia, clearly indicates that Virginia has, again, been talking aloud without quite realizing it. Yes, she can practically hear her own muttered words, scandalize the aunts, still streaming like a scarf behind her. Well, what of it? Brazenly, after the woman has passed, Virginia turns, fully prepared to stare down the woman’s surreptitious glance backward. Virginia’s eyes meet those of one of the pugs, which stares over its fawn-colored shoulder at her with an expression of moist, wheezing bafflement. She reaches Queen’s Road and turns back toward home, thinking of Vanessa, of decapitated flowers floating in bowls of water. Although it is among the best of them, Richmond is, finally and undeniably, a suburb, only that, with all the word implies about window boxes and hedges; about wives walking pugs; about clocks striking the hours in empty rooms. Virginia thinks of the love of a girl. She despises Richmond. She is starved for London; she dreams sometimes about the hearts of cities. Here, where she has been taken to live for the last eight years precisely because it is neither strange nor marvelous, she is largely free of the headaches and voices, the fits of rage. Here all she desires is a return to the dangers of city life. On the steps of Hogarth House, she pauses to remember herself. She has learned over the years that sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one’s own convictions. She is the author; Leonard, Nelly, Ralph, and the others are the readers. This particular novel concerns a serene, intelligent woman of painfully susceptible sensibilities who once was ill but has now recovered; who is preparing for the season in London, where she will give and attend parties, write in the mornings and read in the afternoons, lunch with friends, dress perfectly. There is true art in it, this command of tea and dinner tables; this animating correctness. Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature’s only subjects; but if men’s standing in the world could be toppled by an ill advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.

• From Push (1996)

  Where is Little Mongo now? What is going to be the best thing for you in this situation? Ms Rain Mss, Rinas lot qu u ask Hoo? (lot of questions you ask) (Who?) Nbi (nobody) aln (alone) no Frknm (no Farrakhan) no mmam (no mama) no gr muver fther fucktz mefrJ (no grandmother father fucks me years) lii Mongl with my gr (Little Mongo -with my grandmother) bes four mi tostop breev i sm tim tik (best for me to stop breathing I sometimes think) aso i want to b god muvther (also I wants to be good mother) Precious Jones Dear Dear Precious, Being a good mother might mean letting your baby be raised by someone who is better able than you to meet the child's needs. Ms Rain Mz Rain Dan frget rite day Ms R (Don't forget to write the date Ms Rain.) I is be bt meet cldls ed. (I is best able to meet my child's need.) Ms Precious Dear Ms Precious, 1/22/88 When you are raising a small infant you need help. Who is going to help you? How will you support yourself? How will you keep learning to read and write? Ms Rain Ms Rain th wfr hip mma it help mi (The welfare help Mama. It help me?) Precious Mi Dear Precious Miss, When you get home from the hospital look and see how much welfare has helped your mother. You could go further than your mother. You could get your G.E.D. and go to college. You could do anything Precious but you gotta believe it. Love Blue Rain Dear Blu I lie tah nme Ms Ran. I ty/ty) (I like that name Ms. Rain. Vm tired tired.) Well I honestly did wanna jus' take Abdul home 'n rest so I could hurry up 'n go back to school. But when I git home from the hospital Mama try to kill me. I had told myself if she ever come at me like that again I will stab her to def. But when it happen, when she git up off that couch 'n charge toward me like fifty niggers, I ran. I just grab Abdul, my bags, 'n hit the door. I got new baby boy in my arms 'n she calling me bitch hoe slut say she gonna kill me 'cause I ruin her life. Gonna kill me wif her "BARE HANDS!" It's like a black wall gonna crash down on me, nuthin' to do but run. "First you steal my husband! Then you get me cut off welfare!" She MAD! No time to say nothin'. Once I'm outside the door I stop at top of the stairs, look hard at her. She still foaming at mouf, talking about her husband I spoze to steal. I do tell her one thing as I going down the stairs.

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

  Still others ventured to America to leave tarnished reputations and economic failures behind. As all students of history know, slaves eventually became one of the largest groups of unfree laborers, transported from Africa and the Caribbean, and from there to the mainland British American colonies. Their numbers grew to over six hundred thousand by the end of the eighteenth century. Africans were found in every colony, especially after the British government gave full encouragement to the slave trade when it granted an African monopoly to the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1663. The slave trade grew even faster after the monopoly ended, as the American colonists bargained for lower prices and purchased slaves directly from foreign vendors. 20 To put class back into the story where it belongs, we have to imagine a very different kind of landscape. Not a land of equal opportunity, but a much less appealing terrain where death and harsh labor conditions awaited most migrants. A firmly entrenched British ideology justified rigid class stations with no promise of social mobility. Certainly, Puritan religious faith did not displace class hierarchy either; the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves. Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward. So, welcome to America as it was. The year 1776 is a false starting point for any consideration of American conditions. Independence did not magically erase the British class system, nor did it root out long-entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor. An unfavored population, widely thought of as waste or “rubbish,” remained disposable indeed well into modern times. Part I TO BEGIN THE WORLD ANEW CHAPTER ONE Taking Out the Trash I Waste People in the New World Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States; to drayne away the filth. —John White, The Planters Plea (1630) n the minds of literate English men and women, as colonization began in the 1500s, North America was an uncertain world inhabited by monstrous creatures, a blank territory skirted by mountains of gold. Because it was a strange land that few would ever see firsthand, spectacular tales had more appeal than practical observation. England’s two chief promoters of American exploration would never set foot on the continent. Richard Hakluyt the elder (1530–91) was a lawyer at Middle Temple, a vibrant center of intellectual life and court politics in the London metropolis. His much younger cousin with the identical name (1552–1616) trained at Christ Church, Oxford, and never hazarded a voyage beyond the shores of France.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven’t they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won’t let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. She wades awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her. The yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. Almost involuntarily (it feels involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward, and the stone pulls her in. For a moment, still, it seems like nothing; it seems like another failure; just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but then the current wraps itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to his chest. It feels personal. More than an hour later, her husband returns from the garden. “Madame went out,” the maid says, plumping a shabby pillow that releases a miniature storm of down. “She said she’d be back soon.” Leonard goes upstairs to the sitting room to listen to the news. He finds a blue envelope, addressed to him, on the table. Inside is a letter.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Something else, something new came over him, took possession of him and drove his weary thoughts before him... Namely, as soon as he no longer regarded his temporal end as a distant, theoretical and inconsiderable necessity, but as something very close and tangible for which it was imminent When there were preparations to be made, he began to brood, to search within himself, to examine his relationship to death and unearthly questions... and even with the first such attempts he found as a result a hopeless immaturity and unwillingness of his spirit to die. The literal faith, the enthusiastic Bible Christianity, which his father knew how to combine with a very practical business sense, and which his mother later adopted, had always been alien to him. On the contrary, ever since he was alive he had shown his grandfather's urbane skepticism about first and last things; but too deep, too witty, and too needy of metaphysics to find satisfaction in the comfortable superficiality of old Johann Buddenbrook, he had historically answered the questions of eternity and immortality and said to himself that he had lived in his ancestors and in his descendants will live. This had not been his alone A sense of family, his patrician self-confidence, his historical piety, it had also supported and strengthened him in his work, his ambition, and his whole way of life. But now, before the near and penetrating eye of death, it appeared to be sinking and dying, unable to produce even an hour of repose and readiness. Although Thomas Buddenbrook had played with a slight inclination towards Catholicism here and there in his life, he was quite imbued with the serious, deep, to the point of self-torment severe and unrelenting sense of responsibility of the true and passionate Protestant. No, there was no help from outside towards the highest and last, no mediation, absolution, numbness and consolation! Quite alone, independently and under one's own steam, one had to work hard and hard to unravel the riddle before it was too late and gain a clear willingness, or drive away in desperation ... And Thomas Buddenbrook turned away disappointed and hopelessly from his only son, in which he had hoped to live on strong and rejuvenated, and began to seek the truth in haste and fear, It was midsummer in the year seventy-four. Silver-white, rounded clouds moved in the deep blue sky over the delicate symmetry of the city garden, in the branches of the walnut tree the birds chirped with questioning emphasis, the fountain splashed amidst the ring of tall purple irises that surrounded it, and the scent of lilacs mingled unfortunately with the smell of syrup that a warm breeze carried over from the nearby sugar distillery. To the astonishment of the staff, the senator would now often leave the office at full time to stroll with his hands behind his back in his garden, raking the gravel, fishing the mud from the fountain, or supporting a rose branch...

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Yes, there are assistant teachers and there are head teachers, you know, but there are no teachers. Now this is something that is not easy to understand because it is only for fully grown ups and those who have matured from life. One could say: someone is a teacher or he is not; I don't understand how someone can be a head teacher. One could stand up to God or Herr Marotzke and explain it to them. what would happen They would take it as an insult and destroy you for insubordination, They went for a walk in the yard and Hanno listened happily to what Kai was saying to make him forget his rebuke. “See, here is a door, a courtyard door, it is open, the street is out there. How about we step outside and walk around the sidewalk for a bit? It's break time, we have six minutes left; and we could return on time. But the thing is, it's impossible. Do you understand that? Here's the door, it's open, there's no fence in front of it, nothing, no obstacle, here's the threshold. And yet it is impossible, even the thought is impossible, to step outside for even a second... Well, let's put that aside! But let's take another example. It would be entirely wrong to say that the clock is now about eleven-thirty. No, it's now the turn of the geography lesson: that's how it is! But now I ask everyone: is this a life? Everything is distorted... Ah, Lord God, did the institution just want to release us from its loving embrace!« "Yes, and then what? No, never mind, Kai, then it would still be like this: What should one start with? Here you are at least safe. Ever since my father died, Mr. Stephan Kistenmaker and Pastor Pringsheim have taken it upon themselves to ask me every day what I want to be. I dont know. I can't answer anything. I can't become anything. I'm afraid of it all..." "No, how can one speak so despondently! You with your music..." »What about my music, Kai? It's nothing. Should I travel and play? First, they wouldn't let me, and second, I'll never get enough of it. I can't do almost anything, I can only fantasize a little when I'm alone. And then I imagine traveling around being awful too... It's so different with you. you have more courage You're walking around laughing at the whole thing and you have something to say to them. You want to write, you want to tell people beautiful and strange things, good: that's something. And you will be famous for sure, you are so skilled. Why is it? you are funnier Sometimes during the lesson we look at each other, like just a moment ago, with Herr Mantelsack, when Petersen was reprimanded by everyone who had read. we think the same but you make a face and you're proud... I can't do this. I get so tired of this.

• From The Hours (1998)

  As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night’s rain. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they’ve gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. The headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she not conjuring them herself ?) that the bombers have appeared again in the sky. She reaches the embankment, climbs over and down again to the river. There’s a fisherman upriver, far away, he won’t notice her, will he? She begins searching for a stone. She works quickly but methodically, as if she were following a recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it’s to succeed at all. She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig’s skull. Even as she lifts it and forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur collar tickles her neck), she can’t help noticing the stone’s cold chalkiness and its color, a milky brown with spots of green. She stands close to the edge of the river, which laps against the bank, filling the small irregularities in the mud with clear water that might be a different substance altogether from the yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road, that extends so steadily from bank to bank. She steps forward. She does not remove her shoes. The water is cold, but not unbearably so. She pauses, standing in cold water up to her knees. She thinks of Leonard. She thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines around his mouth. She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven’t they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won’t let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. She wades awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Here I lie... do you have the heart to tell me: I detest you -? I leave you -?" Tony cried. It was just like that time in the landscape room. Again she saw that face contorted with fear, those pleading eyes fixed on her, and again she saw with amazement and emotion that that fear and pleading were genuine and unfeigned. "Get up, Greenish," she said, sobbing. "Please stand up!" And she tried to lift him by the shoulders. I don't despise you! How can you say such a thing!...' Without knowing what else to say, she turned to her father, completely helpless. The consul took her hand bowed to his son-in-law and went with her to the corridor door. "Are you going?" called Herr Grünlich and jumped to his feet... 'I've already told you,' said the Consul, 'that I can't justify leaving my child to the misery through no fault of my own, and I'll add that you can't do the same either. No, sir, you forfeited my daughter's property. And thank your Maker for keeping this child's heart so pure and clueless that she will part with you without disgust! Good luck for the future." But here Herr Grünlich lost his head. He could have spoken of a brief separation, of a return and a new life, and perhaps saved the inheritance; but his reflection, his activity and resourcefulness were at an end. He could have taken the large unbreakable bronze plate that stood on the mirrored shelf, but he took the thin vase painted with flowers that was close by and threw it on the floor so that it shattered into a thousand pieces... "Ha! Beautiful! Good!' he shouted. "Just go! Do you think I'll cry after you, goose? Oh no, you are mistaken, my dearest! I only married you for your money, but since it wasn't enough, just make sure you come home again! I'm tired of you... tired... tired...!" Johann Buddenbrook silently led his daughter out. But he himself returned once more, walked up to Herr Grünlich, who was standing at the window with his hands behind his back and staring out at the rain, gently touched his shoulder and spoke softly and admonishingly: "Compose yourself. Pray .” Tenth Chapter The big house on Mengstrasse was filled with a subdued mood for a long time after Madame Grünlich moved in there again with her little daughter. one went cautiously about and did not like to talk "of it" ... except for the protagonist of the whole affair himself, who, on the contrary, spoke of it with passion and truly felt in her element. Tony and Erika moved into the room on the second floor that their parents had occupied in the days of the old Buddenbrooks.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of these terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I dont think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I cant fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I cant even write this properly. I cant read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me & incredibly good. I want to say that— everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been. V. Leonard races from the room, runs downstairs. He says to the maid, “I think something has happened to Mrs. Woolf. I think she may have tried to kill herself. Which way did she go? Did you see her leave the house?” The maid, panicked, begins to cry. Leonard rushes out and goes to the river, past the church and the sheep, past the osier bed. At the riverbank he finds no one but a man in a red jacket, fishing. She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats, heavily, through shafts of brown, granular light. She does not travel far. Her feet (the shoes are gone) strike the bottom occasionally, and when they do they summon up a sluggish cloud of muck, filled with the black silhouettes of leaf skeletons, that stands all but stationary in the water after she has passed along out of sight. Stripes of green-black weed catch in her hair and the fur of her coat, and for a while her eyes are blindfolded by a thick swatch of weed, which finally loosens itself and floats, twisting and untwisting and twisting again.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  I think you understand me ..." "Greenish going bankrupt...?" asked Tony softly, half rising from her pillows and quickly grasping the Consul's hand... "Yes, my child," he said seriously. "You didn't suspect that?" "I didn't suspect anything in particular..." she stammered. 'So Kesselmeyer wasn't kidding...?' she continued, staring at the brown carpet at an angle in front of her... ' Oh God !' she suddenly blurted out and sank back in her seat. It was only at that moment that everything that lay hidden in the word "bankruptcy" dawned on her, everything that had made her feel vague and dreadful about it even as a small child... "bankruptcy"... that was something more hideous than death, it was Riot, breakdown, ruin, disgrace, shame, despair and misery... "He's going bankrupt!" she repeated. She was so defeated and devastated by this fateful word that she thought of no help, not even one that could come from her father. He looked at her with raised brows, with his small, deep-set eyes, which looked sad and tired and yet betrayed an extraordinary tension. 'So I asked you,' he said softly, 'my dear Tony, are you prepared to follow your husband into poverty?...' Immediately afterwards he admitted to himself that he instinctively understood the harsh word 'poverty' deterrent, adding, "He can work his way back up..." 'Certainly, papa,' replied Tony. But that didn't stop her from bursting into tears. She sobbed into her lace-trimmed cambric with the initials AG . She was still crying like a child: completely uninhibited and unadorned. Her upper lip made an unspeakably touching impression. Her father continued to examine her with his eyes. "Are you serious, my child?" he asked. He was just as clueless as she was. "Don't I have to..." she sobbed. "I have to..." "Not at all!" he said briskly; but guiltily he immediately corrected himself: 'I wouldn't necessarily force you to, my dear Tony. Unless your feelings did not bind you inexorably to your husband..." She looked at him with tearful and uncomprehending eyes. "Why, Dad...?" The consul tossed and turned a little and found a source of information. 'My good child, you may believe that I should feel it very painful to subject you to all the hardships and embarrassments which are about to be brought about by your husband's misfortune, and by the dissolution of business and household... I have that We wish to evade these first inconveniences and to take you and our little Erika home with us for the time being. I think you'll thank me for that...?" Tony was silent for a moment while she dried her tears. She breathed awkwardly on her handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes to prevent infection. Then she asked in a decisive tone, without raising her voice: "Papa, is Grünlich guilty! he comes to misfortune out of carelessness and dishonesty!« "Most likely!..." said the Consul. “That is to say… no, I do not know, my child.