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 The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ In the Netherlands, sphere sovereignty was actually meant to grant people more freedoms. That’s because in the Netherlands, those separate communities tended to break down along the lines of belief: Protestants, Catholics, atheists, socialists. The idea of sphere sovereignty was supposed to enhance civil liberties for each group. õ But in South Africa, the most obvious lines to white Afrikaners were racial. They drew on these Dutch Reformed ideas to create a powerful ideology of Christian nationalism. The result was a lot of freedom for whites and very little freedom for blacks. THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION TRADITION õ Black South African clergy and activists saw that many, if not most, white-dominated churches had decided to place themselves at the service of apartheid. But some South Africans looked to Christianity’s prophetic tradition. A number of anti-apartheid activists took the egalitarian, social justice strand of Christianity that inspired the American civil rights activists and combined it with African traditions. õ One man who spent most of his life trumpeting this prophetic call to South Africans was Desmond Tutu. Tutu was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1961 after he abandoned a career in education as a protest against a new law relegating black students to the worst schools. õ He combined the Christian notion that all humans are equal as creatures made in the image of God with the Bantu idea of ubuntu, which means “I am, because you are.” In other words: I deserve the same consideration as you, but we are also dependent on each other; we’re in this together. õ In the early years, the possibility that nonviolent protest could dismantle the apartheid regime probably seemed even more remote than its potential to end the Jim Crow laws in America. For example, bus boycotts in Johannesburg only won a small fare decrease and a vague promise that the government would take a look at low wages in the future. 298 The History of Christianity II õ Nonviolence seemed even more foolish after police gunned down 69 protestors at the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960—an event that led to a ban on the African National Congress, or ANC, which was the main organized voice of protest against apartheid. õ The ban on the ANC persuaded many anti-apartheid leaders, like Nelson Mandela, that nonviolent reform was a pipe dream. Mandela helped found a group called uMkhonto we Sizwe, meaning “Spear of the Nation” in the Xhosa language. This group carried out several bombings in the 1960s and 1970s. One killed 19 and wounded more than 200 people. Lecture 30—The Gospel and Global Civil Rights 299

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  298The History of Christianity II õIn the Netherlands, sphere sovereignty was actually meant to grant people more freedoms. That’s because in the Netherlands, those separate communities tended to break down along the lines of belief: Protestants, Catholics, atheists, socialists. The idea of sphere sovereignty was supposed to enhance civil liberties for each group. õBut in South Africa, the most obvious lines to white Afrikaners were racial. They drew on these Dutch Reformed ideas to create a powerful ideology of Christian nationalism. The result was a lot of freedom for whites and very little freedom for blacks. THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION TRADITION õBlack South African clergy and activists saw that many, if not most, white-dominated churches had decided to place themselves at the service of apartheid. But some South Africans looked to Christianity’s prophetic tradition. A number of anti-apartheid activists took the egalitarian, social justice strand of Christianity that inspired the American civil rights activists and combined it with African traditions. õOne man who spent most of his life trumpeting this prophetic call to South Africans was Desmond Tutu. Tutu was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1961 after he abandoned a career in education as a protest against a new law relegating black students to the worst schools. õHe combined the Christian notion that all humans are equal as creatures made in the image of God with the Bantu idea of ubuntu, which means “I am, because you are.” In other words: I deserve the same consideration as you, but we are also dependent on each other; we’re in this together. õIn the early years, the possibility that nonviolent protest could dismantle the apartheid regime probably seemed even more remote than its potential to end the Jim Crow laws in America. For example, bus boycotts in Johannesburg only won a small fare decrease and a vague promise that the government would take a look at low wages in the future. 299Lecture 30—The Gospel and Global Civil Rights õNonviolence seemed even more foolish after police gunned down 69 protestors at the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960—an event that led to a ban on the African National Congress, or ANC, which was the main organized voice of protest against apartheid. õThe ban on the ANC persuaded many anti-apartheid leaders, like Nelson Mandela, that nonviolent reform was a pipe dream. Mandela helped found a group called uMkhonto we Sizwe, meaning “Spear of the Nation” in the Xhosa language. This group carried out several bombings in the 1960s and 1970s. One killed 19 and wounded more than 200 people.

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

  Almost all of them were at Angola, a notoriously difficult place to do time, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when many had first arrived. For many years, violence was so bad at Angola that it was almost impossible to be incarcerated and not get disciplinaries—additional punishments or time tacked onto your sentence—due to conflicts with another inmate or staff. Prisoners were required to do manual labor in very difficult work environments or face solitary confinement or other disciplinary action. It was not uncommon for inmates to be seriously injured, losing fingers or limbs, after working long hours in brutal and dangerous conditions. For years, Angola—a slave plantation before the end of the Civil War—forced inmates to work in the fields picking cotton. Prisoners who refused would receive “write-ups” that went into their files and face months of solitary confinement. The horrible conditions of confinement and their constantly being told that they would die in prison no matter how well they behaved meant that most of our clients had long lists of disciplinaries. At the resentencing hearings we were preparing, state lawyers were using these prior disciplinaries to argue against favorable new sentences. Remarkably, several former juvenile lifers had developed outstanding institutional histories with very few disciplinaries, even though they did their time with no hope of ever being released or having their institutional history reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, and advocates against violence among inmates. Others had become law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Angola evolved over time to have some excellent programs for incarcerated people who stayed out of trouble, and many of our clients took full advantage. We decided to prioritize resentencing hearings in Louisiana for the “old-timers,” juvenile lifers who had been there for decades. Joshua Carter and Robert Caston were the first two cases we decided to litigate. In 1963, when he was sixteen, Joshua Carter was accused of a rape in New Orleans and quickly given the death penalty. A condemned black child awaiting execution in those days had little reason to hope for relief. But to coerce a confession from him, police officers had beaten Joshua so brutally that even in 1965 the Louisiana Supreme Court felt the need to overturn his conviction. Mr. Carter was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole and sent to Angola. After struggling for years, he became a model prisoner and trustee. In the 1990s, he developed glaucoma and didn’t get the medical care he needed, and he soon lost his sight in both eyes. We tried to persuade New Orleans prosecutors that Mr. Carter, blind and in his sixties, should be released after nearly fifty years in prison. Robert Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “Ts this really it?” I asked her. She nodded. We kissed each other as deeply as we could. Then we parted physically. I walked outside the door and turned to look back at her. She smiled, almost apologetically. I nodded. She closed the door. Suddenly I thought of things I needed to say to her, but I knew she didn’t need to hear them just then. I sat on the landing for a while. But it occurred to me Theresa might call a friend to console her and I didn’t want to be on our stairs. I went downstairs and out into the backyard. I overturned a wooden milk crate and sat down on it. The sky was black and strewn with stars. I felt alone on the planet. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I couldn’t even figure out what direction to begin walking. I sat on that crate all night long, looking up into the sky. Sometimes I cried, sometimes I just sat. I strained to look into my future, trying to picture the road ahead of me, searching for a glimpse of who I would become. All I could see was the night sky and the stars above me. 166 = Leslie Feinberg THE NIGHT SKY LIGHTENED FROM black to indigo. I was still sitting on the crate in our backyard. Soon the sun would tise. I didn’t want to be there when Theresa and the rest of the world began their day. I swung my leg over my Norton and kick-started it. As the engine roared to life between my legs, I fastened my helmet and flipped down the visor. Now this was the place I found my mobility and my safety—on this bike, under this helmet. As dawn streaked the sky I rode through a maze of silent city streets. Mist clung to the asphalt, suspended like smoke. A light rain began to fall. I rode into my own future as though it was only a dream. Rain fell harder, pelting me. Water beaded on my helmet, ran in little rivulets down the back of my neck, and soaked my shirt beneath my leather jacket. Wet denim stretched taut and cold across my thighs. Every street corner was a new crisis. Turn left? Turn right? Go straight? Hunger finally pulled me off the streets and into Loblaw’s supermarket. I called Jan’s house. No answer. I didn’t want to call Ed this early because Darlene would be sleeping. I filled a plastic bag with bing cherries and walked up and down the aisles eating them. My jeans stuck to my legs as I moved. I followed women who pushed shopping carts filled with cereals and children. Those who stared at me made sure I registered their disgust before they turned away. I did.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death—it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That’s what I want to say, Mr. John Doe. I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul’s atavistic struggle. A bridge in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Coming out of lush tobacco fields, low cabins everywhere and the smell of fresh wood burning. The day passed in a thick lake of waving green. Hardly a soul in sight. Then suddenly a clearing and I’m over a big gulch spanned by a rickety wooden bridge. This is the end of the world! How in God’s name I got here and why I’m here I don’t know. How am I going to eat? And if I ate the biggest meal imaginable I would still be sad, frightfully sad. I don’t know where to go from here. This bridge is the end, the end of me, the end of my known world. This bridge is insanity: there is no reason why it should stand there and no reason why people should cross it. I refuse to budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge. Nearby is a low wall which I lie against trying to think what to do and where to go. I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am—the need I have for people, conversation, books, theater, music, cafés, drinks, and so forth. It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs. And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn’t need a thing. All day I had been moving through tobacco fields, and growing more and more uneasy. What have I to do with all this tobacco? What am I heading into? People everywhere are producing crops and goods for other people—and I am like a ghost sliding between all this unintelligible activity.

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

  ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 16.) Our Lord then said to Judas, That thou doest, do quickly, and the traitor this once obeyed his Master. For having received the sop, he started immediately on his work: He then having received the sop, went, immediately out. And indeed he did go out, not only from the house in which he was, but from Jesus altogether. It would seem that Satan, after he had entered into Judas, could not bear to be in the same place with Jesus: for there is no agreement between Jesus and Satan. Nor is it idle enquiring why after he had received the sop, it is not added, that he ate it. Why did not Judas cat the bread, after he received it? Perhaps because, as soon as he had received it, the devil, who had put it into his heart to betray Christ, fearful that the bread, if eaten, might drive out what he had put in, entered into him, so that he went out immediately, before he ate it. And it may be serviceable to remark, that as he who eateth our Lord’s bread and drinketh His cup unworthily, eateth and drinketh to his own damnation; so the bread which Jesus gave him was eaten by the rest to their salvation, but by Judas to his damnation, inasmuch as after it the devil entered into him. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxii. 2.) It follows: And it was night, to shew the impetuosity of Judas, in persisting in spite of the unseasonableness of the hour. ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 16.) The time of night corresponded with the night which overspread the soul of Judas. GREGORY. (ii. Mor. 11) By the time of the day is signified the end of the action. Judas went out in the night to accomplish his perfidy, for which he was never to be pardoned. 13:31–3231. Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 32. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  106The History of Christianity II õIn the millet system, each religious minority religious community was a millet. The Jews were recognized as one millet and the Orthodox Christians were recognized as another millet. Each millet had a lot of autonomy in handling administration and settling internal disputes. õIn return for a modest amount of self-government, the patriarch had to ensure that Christians obeyed the law. The sultan continued many of the old taxes and restrictions practiced by earlier Muslim rulers and imposed a host of new rules meant to keep Christians in their place. õOne of the first things Mehmed did was confiscate the magnificent Hagia Sophia church and turn it into a mosque. Christian worship could only happen quietly, behind closed doors. So even if the patriarch acquired quite a bit of power, life for ordinary Christians became more difficult. õOther legal restrictions included that Christians couldn’t use Muslim- style saddles, or engrave Arabic on their signet rings, or sell wine. They couldn’t wear crosses or carry icons or any other kind of Christian symbol in public. õPerhaps the harshest penalty on Christians was this: The sultan had the right to seize Christian children at any time if he decided he needed more soldiers or servants in his court. In European territories of the empire like Bulgaria, families had to turn over a certain number of their male children to the state. Unlucky children ended up as slaves; luckier ones turned into court scholars or the sultan’s special bodyguards, called the Janissaries. õThe idea was to create a private army of foreigners who would be highly skilled but docile, with no political power. These boy-soldiers were circumcised, housed with Turkish families, and forced to convert to Islam, at least outwardly. Christians called this policy of stealing children the boy tribute or the blood tax, and it went on until the late 17 th century. 107Lecture 11—Christians under Muslim Rule õRecently, historians have argued that everyday life was often different from legal theory; that despite anti-Christian prejudice and this oppressive edifice of legal restrictions, in many cases Muslims and Christians mingled pretty freely in their neighborhoods, buying and selling goods at market, and even seeking common justice in the Islamic courts. õOttoman rulers were often pragmatists who never would have been able to hold onto a vast and diverse empire for centuries if they hadn’t allowed non-Muslim subjects some breathing room. At the same time, it wasn’t for nothing that the sultan also took the title of caliph—that is, he claimed to be the head of the Muslim world, supreme in both religious and worldly power. õHe drew much of his authority from Islam. Islam could provide a framework for relative tolerance when the sultan and his Muslim subjects were feeling confident about the state of the empire, and it could encourage persecution and oppression when they were feeling nervous and insecure.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She put her hand on his ankle. Her desire to abase herself had been completely frustrated. She had pulled him to the rug certain that if only they could fuck, he would enter her with overwhelming force and take complete control of her. Instead she had barely felt him, and what she had felt was remote and cold. Somewhere on her exterior he’d been doing some biting thing that meant nothing to her and was quite unpleasant. Despairing, she held his ankle tighter and put her forehead on the carpet. At least she could stay at his feet, worshiping. He twisted free and walked away. “Come on,” he said. — The car was in the parking lot. It was because of the car that this weekend had come about. It was his wife’s car, an expensive thing that her ex-husband had given her. It had been in Washington for over a year; he was here to retrieve it and drive it back to New York. Beth was appalled by the car. It was a loud yellow monster with a narrow, vicious shape and absurd doors that snapped up from the roof and out like wings. In another setting it might have seemed glamorous, but here, behind this equally monstrous building, in her unsatisfactory clothing, the idea of sitting in it with him struck her as comparable to putting on a clown nose and wearing it to dinner. They drove down a suburban highway lined with small businesses, malls and restaurants. It was twilight; several neon signs blinked consolingly. “Do you think you could make some effort to change your mood?” he said. “I’m not in a bad mood,” she said wearily. “I just feel blank.” Not blank enough, he thought. He pulled into a Roy Rogers fast food cafeteria. She thought: He is not even going to take me to a nice place. She was insulted. It seemed as though he was insulting her on purpose. The idea was incredible to her. She walked through the line with him, but did not take any of the shiny dishes of food displayed on the fluorescent-lit aluminum shelves. He felt a pang of worry. He was no longer angry, and her drawn white face disturbed him. “Why aren’t you eating?” “I’m not hungry.” They sat down. He picked at his food, eyeing her with veiled alarm. It occurred to her that it might embarrass him to eat in front of her while she ate nothing. She asked if she could have some of his salad. He eagerly passed her the entire bowl of pale leaves strewn with orange dressing. “Have it all.” He huddled his shoulders orphanlike as he ate; his blond hair stood tangled like pensive weeds. “I don’t know why you’re not eating,” he said fretfully. “You’re going to be hungry later on.” Her predisposition to adore him was provoked. She smiled. “Why are you staring at me like that?” he asked.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  One should not say Yes, No, Yes, No, even seated in the highest place. One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even for the sake of becoming a Master. One must beat with his own rhythm—at any price. I accumulated thousands of years of experience in a few short years, but the experience was wasted because I had no need of it. I had already been crucified and marked by the cross; I had been born free of the need to suffer—and yet I knew no other way to struggle forward than to repeat the drama. All my intelligence was against it. Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily. Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability. The whole drama which the man of today is acting out through suffering does not exist for me: it never did, actually. All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo- tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten. Another thing . . . the mystery which enveloped my behavior grew deeper the nearer I came to the circle of uterine relatives. The mother from whose loins I sprang was a complete stranger to me. To begin with, after giving birth to me she gave birth to my sister, whom I usually refer to as my brother. My sister was a sort of harmless monster, an angel who had been given the body of an idiot. It gave me a strange feeling, as a boy, to be growing up and developing side by side with this being who was doomed to remain all her life a mental dwarf. It was impossible to be a brother to her because it was impossible to regard this atavistic hulk of a body as a “sister.” She would have functioned perfectly, I imagine, among the Australian primitives. She might even have been raised to power and eminence among them, for, as I said, she was the essence of goodness, she knew no evil. But so far as living the civilized life goes she was helpless; she not only had no desire to kill but she had no desire to thrive at the expense of others. She was incapacitated for work, because even if they had been able to train her to make caps for high explosives, for example, she might absent-mindedly throw her wages in the river on the way home or she might give them to a beggar in the street.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. By simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and eternal possessed by a ragged beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy? What is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horsepower fiends; in order to break their insane rhythm, their death rhythm, I had to resort to a wave length which, until I found the proper sustenance in my own bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set up. Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the parlor; certainly I didn’t need twelve empty chairs placed around it in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practicer of magic. Such a man is beyond religion—it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I want to do some good in the world first. That may sound silly to you, but it’s true. I’d like to do something for others. . . .” He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile. It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to hope for, he was powerless to kill himself. That hopelessness was something quite alien to me. I thought to myself—if only we could change skins! Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more than anything was the thought that he wouldn’t even enjoy the funeral—his own wife’s funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes and some hearty belly laughs. Maybe I was too young to appreciate the sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and wept. But that never meant much to me because after the funeral, sitting in the beer garden next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer despite the black garments and the crepes and the wreaths. It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were really trying to establish some sort of communion with the dead person. Something almost Egyptian-like, when I think back on it. Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch of hypocrites. But they weren’t. They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for life. Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you went only by what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts. But they really didn’t grasp it at all—not the way the Jew does, for example. They talked about the life hereafter but they never really believed in it. And if any one were so bereaved as to pine away they looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane person. There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the impression they gave me. And at the extreme limits there was always the stomach which had to be filled—with limburger sandwiches and beer and kümmel and turkey legs if there were any about. They wept in their beer, like children.

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

  But the soil was not limitless, and the frontier was officially closed by the government in 1934. Writers of all stripes, not just agricultural experts, lamented how valuable topsoil was washing down America’s rivers, the resulting waste made worse by levees. In this way, the Depression was an upheaval that portrayed class leveling with disordered images of land erosion. The washing away of topsoil and debris was relatedly seen in the washing away of different classes of people, churned up and let loose in mass migrations caused by economic disaster. In Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus (1939), a photo-essay book, images capture the turning of the landscape into wasteland. The middle American Dust Bowl swept up clouds of soil, and dislodged humans were driven down the road “like particles of dust.” 15 Poor whites remained at the forefront of the American consciousness in the thirties. The Bonus Army’s Hooverville was an urban manifestation of the old squatter’s shack. Tenant farmers in the southern states continued to reside in run- down cabins, a highly mobile, migratory labor force that was the very antithesis of self-sufficiency. After the drought and dust bowls that hit during the middle years of the decade, “Okies” and “Arkies” captured the media. Families in old jalopies crammed with everything they owned headed west to California; en route, they set up camps along major highways. They were visible on the roads in the Golden State, taking seasonal jobs as crop pickers. As migrant workers, they called themselves “Migs,” while others labeled them “rubber tramps” or “shantytowns on wheels.” In his “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie expressed the mobile-home theme with the lyric “I swapped my farm for a Ford machine.” Like the refugees from Arkansas who poured into Missouri during the Civil War, the Migs formed a modern-day caravan of vagrants and nomads. John Steinbeck and John Ford made this cross- country trek famous, Steinbeck in his bestselling 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, and Ford in his dark and disquieting 1941 Hollywood film of the same name about the Joads’ pilgrimage. 16 Another chaotic migration was the “Back to the Land” movement that led to numerous rural communes. Some of these had outspoken leaders. Ralph Borsodi, who set up a subsistence homestead on the outskirts of New York City, helped to organize a cooperative village near Dayton, Ohio. Similar ventures appeared in other states. The southern journalist Charles Morrow Wilson described these folks as “American peasants,” but they are perhaps better described as the heirs of James Oglethorpe’s eighteenth-century Georgia colonists. One such group from Tulsa established a community in the Ozark hills. They founded a corporation, much like the older joint-stock companies, and adopted a set of bylaws, in which each member was a shareholder and had a vote. They sold timber, raised hogs and chickens, repaired the lumbering shanties on the property, and set up a school.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  'Go home? What for?' 'What are we staying here for? How long do you want to sit in this house, eating your heart out? And what do you think it's doing to me?' GIOVANNI'S ROOM 213 She rose and came to me. Tlease. I want to go home. I want to get married. I want to start having kids. I want us to live someplace, I want you. Please David. What are we marking time over here for?' I moved away from her, quickly. At my back she stood perfectly still. 'What's the matter, David? What do you want?'" 1 don't know. I don't know/ 'What is it you're not telling me? Why don't I turned and faced her. *Hella—bear with me, you tell me the truth? Tell me the truth.' bear with me— a little while.' 1 want to,' she cried, T)ut where are you? You've gone away somewhere and I can't find you. If you'd only let me reach you— !' She began to cry. I held her in my arms. I felt nothing at all. I kissed her salty tears and murmured, mur- mured I don't know what. I felt her body strain- ing, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long fall down. I stepped away from her. She swayed where I had left her, like a puppet dangling from a string. David, please let me be a woman. I don't care what you do to me. I don't care what it costs. I'll wear my hair long, 111 give up ciga- rettes, I'll throw away the books.' She tried to smile; my heart turned over. 'Just let me be a woman, take me. It's what I want. It's all I James Baldwin 214 want. I don't care about anything else/ She moved toward me. I stood perfectly still. She touched me, raising her face, with a desperate and terribly moving trust, to mine. 'Don't throw me back into the sea, David. Let me stay here with you.' Then she kissed me, watching my face. My lips were cold. I felt nothing on my lips. She kissed me again and I closed my eyes, feel- ing that strong chains were dragging me to fire. It seemed that my body, next to her warmth, her insistence, under her hands, would never awaken. But when it awakened, I had moved out of it. From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger's arms. It was that evening, or an evening very soon thereafter, that I left her sleeping in the bed- room and went, alone, to Nice.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the parlor; certainly I didn’t need twelve empty chairs placed around it in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practicer of magic. Such a man is beyond religion—it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth, wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which you have made of him, he will stand forth as a man in his own right and all the powers of the world will be of no avail against him. Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There is no magic in this wave length any more than there is magic in the womb. Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too—after life . Only one like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death as a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown and shield, yes! But not death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them with a will which can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm, is Yes!

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I felt mechanical. I wanted to get that dumb paralegal out of the office so I could come back to the bathroom and masturbate. Susan completed her errand and left. I masturbated. I retyped the letter. The lawyer sat in his office all day. When my mother picked me up that afternoon, she asked me if I was all right. “Why do you ask?” “I don’t know. You look a little strange.” “I’m as all right as I ever am.” “That doesn’t sound good, honey.” I didn’t answer. My mother moved her hands up and down the steering wheel, squeezing it anxiously. “Maybe you’d like to stop by the French bakery and get some elephant ears,” she said. “I don’t want any elephant ears.” My voice was unexpectedly nasty. It almost made me cry. “All right,” said my mother. — When I lay on my bed to take my nap, my body felt dense and heavy, as though it would be very hard to move again, which was just as well, since I didn’t feel like moving. When Donna banged on my door and yelled “Dinner!” I didn’t answer. She put her head in and asked if I was asleep, and I told her I didn’t feel like eating. I felt so inert, I thought I’d go to sleep, but I couldn’t. I lay awake through the sounds of argument and TV and everybody going to the bathroom. Bedtime came, drawers rasped open and shut, doors slammed, my father eased into sleep with radio mumble. The orange digits on my clock said 1:30. I thought: I should get out of this panty hose and slip. I sat up and looked out into the gray, cold street. The shrubbery on the lawn across the street looked frozen and miserable. I thought about the period of time a year before when I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking that someone was going to break into the house and kill everybody. Eventually that fear went away and I went back to sleeping again. I lay back down without taking off my clothes, and pulled a light blanket tightly around me. Sooner or later, I thought, I would sleep. I would just have to wait. But I didn’t sleep, although I became mentally incoherent for long, ugly stretches of time. Hours went by; the room turned gray. I heard the morning noises: the toilet, the coughing, Donna’s hostile muttering. Often, in the past, I had woken early and lain in bed listening to my family clumsily trying to organize itself for the day. Often as not, their sounds made me feel irrational loathing. This morning, I felt despair and a longing for them, and a sureness that we would never be close as long as I lived. My nasal passages became active with tears that didn’t reach my eyes. My mother knocked on the door. “Honey, aren’t you going to be late?” “I’m not going to work. I feel sick.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I could give the danger signal but I was powerless to avert catastrophe. I breathed danger and catastrophe. At times the sensation of it was so strong that it belched like fire from my nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the lighthouse itself—secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly. This eye so wide-awake seemed to have made all my other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take in the drama of the world. If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard—and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  just nodded. The four of us sat in silence around the table in the backroom of a neighborhood bar on the West Side. It was pretty empty. Jan, Grant, Edwin, and I didn’t look at each other. We stared at our beer bottles as though the answers we searched for could be found there. “T’ve been dreaming a lot lately,” I said. “I had this nightmare last night that I was being chased by something to the edge of a cliff. I’m scared of what’s coming behind me; I don’t know what’s ahead of me. And suddenly I decide I'd rather jump than wait for it to catch up to me.” “What’s it mean?” Grant asked me. “You know,” I told her. Grant shrugged. “I know how it feels. I don’t know what it means.” I looked at Ed. She knew what I was talking about. I knew she did. “I’ve been thinking about Rocco,” I said. Jan sighed and nodded. She used her thumbnail to scrape the label off her beer bottle. “I knew that’s what you were talking about.” I nodded. “T can’t help thinking maybe I’d be safe, you know?” Ed still wouldn’t look at me. Grant nodded. “God help me, I’ve been thinking about it, too. You know Ginni? She got on a sex- change program, now she calls herself Jimmy.” Edwin glared at Grant. “He asked us to call him he—remember? We ought to do it.” Jan put her beer bottle down on the table. “Yeah, but I’m not like Jimmy. Jimmy told me he knew he was a guy even when he was little. ’m not a guy.” Grant leaned forward. “How do you know that? How do you know we aren’t? We aren’t real women are we?” Edwin shook her head. “I don’t know what the hell I am.” I leaned over and put my arm around her shoulder. “You’re my friend.” Ed laughed sardonically. “Oh, great. Like I can really pay my rent with that.” I smacked her on the shoulder. “Fuck you.” Grant went to the bar to get another round of drinks; Jan went to the bathroom. I watched as she opened the door marked Ladies. No women ran out, and no men ran in to drag her out, so I figured she was OK. Ed punched me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “How long we been friends, Ed?” She dropped her eyes. “So how come you can’t tell me what’s going on with you? You know I’ve figured it out, but you won't talk to me.” Stone Butch Blues 155 Ed shrugged. “I feel ashamed.” “Ashamed you're doing it, or just ashamed?” Grant came back to the table balancing four beers. Jan returned a moment later. Ed rubbed her eyes over and over again. “What’s going on?” Grant asked. T looked at Ed. “It’s no shame,” I told her. Ed nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses called Fear, Pallor and Fever. I saw no “Asian luxury,” as had St. Augustine, or as he imagined he had. Nor did I see “the two twins born, so near together, that the second held the first by the heel.” But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it. For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone for twenty years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart of America’s emptiness. If you have only seen Essen or Manchester or Chicago or Levallois-Perret or Glasgow or Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have seen nothing of the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment. Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize how far into the future Dante saw. You must believe me that on this street, neither in the houses which line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, nor the elevated structure which cuts it atwain, neither in any creature that bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any animal, bird or insect passing through it to slaughter or already slaughtered, is there hope of “lubet,” “sublimate” or “abominate.” It is a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a vacuum, emptier than the word God in the mouth of an unbeliever. I said I did not know a word of French then, and it is true, but I was just on the brink of making a great discovery, a discovery which would compensate for the emptiness of Myrtle Avenue and the whole American continent. I had almost reached the shore of that great French ocean which goes by the name of Elie Faure, an ocean which the French themselves had hardly navigated and which they had mistaken, it seems, for an inland sea. Reading him even in such a withered language as English has become I could see that this man who had described the glory of the human race on his cuff was Father Zeus of Atlantis whom I had been searching for. An ocean I called him, but he was also a world symphony. He was the first musician the French have produced; he was exalted and controlled, an anomaly, a Gallic Beethoven, a great physician of the soul, a giant lightning rod. He was also a sunflower turning with the sun, always drinking in the light, always radiant and blazing with vitality.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I said good-by nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man. The next morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life. The new life was also a fiasco. I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista, the most miserable man that ever walked the earth. There was this girl I loved and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity. I had been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like a lifetime. I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six. Every time I looked at her I said to myself—when I am thirty she will be forty-five, when I am forty she will be fifty-five, when I am fifty she will be sixty-five. She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but wrinkles just the same. When I kissed her they were magnified a dozen times. She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad. They were Armenian eyes. Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde. Otherwise she was adorable—a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal, lovable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was fifteen years older. The fifteen years’ difference drove me crazy. When I went out with her I thought only—how will it be ten years hence? Or else, what age does she seem to have now? Do I look old enough for her? Once we got back to the house it was all right. Climbing the stairs I would run my finger up her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse. If her son, who was almost my age, were in bed we would close the doors and lock ourselves in the kitchen. She’d lie on the narrow kitchen table and I’d slough it into her. It was marvelous. And what made it more marvelous was that with each performance I would say to myself—This is the last time . . . tomorrow I will beat it! And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the cellar and roll the ash barrels out for her. In the morning, when the son had left for work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding. Both she and the son had T.B. . . . Sometimes there were no table bouts. Sometimes the hopelessness of it all got me by the throat and I would put on my things and go for a walk. Now and then I forgot to return. And when I did that I was more miserable than ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for me with those large sorrowful eyes. I’d go back to her like a man who had a sacred duty to perform.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the center of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars. In the moment all is clear to me, clear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs, to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the corners of time.