Disappointment

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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He knows they are not kestrels. It would be too much to hope for peregrines. Perhaps they are sparrowhawks. White’s hawks in the wood weren’t sparrowhawks. They were hobbies: tiny dark-hooded migratory falcons with rust-red trousers and thin white brows. Fantastically rare in the 1930s, they are much commoner today. They catch small birds and insects in mid-air: it would have been impossible to trap one with a blackbird tethered to the ground. But White thought they were sparrowhawks, and out in the wood he built a hide of poles and branches and pegged the trap fifteen feet away, strewing it with dust and leaves to hide it. He was neglecting Gos, and he knew it. The sparrowhawks were a new craze, his ‘insensate El Dorado’. He told himself he was catching one for Peter Low, a boy he’d taught who’d lost a pet sparrowhawk. He told himself he was catching them because training Gos was too easy, and he had to test himself against something harder. I think now that White’s quest for the hawks was his final test of Gos: he was behaving like a fearful man who has finally won someone’s love and, unsure whether that love can be trusted, decides it is safer to obsess about someone else. But when I was small his actions were incomprehensible. ‘WHY?’ I’d howled. ‘Why did he abandon his goshawk? I would never have done that!’ My mother was wiping the bathroom mirror. I could see her face in it, and behind it my own, pale and outraged. It was my first reading of the book. I’d reached the bit about the sparrowhawks and I was too upset to read any more. I’d jumped from my bed and gone looking for reassurance. ‘Is this the Goshawk book you’ve been telling me about?’ ‘Yes! He’s got his hawk ready to fly free but then he starts making traps to try and catch some sparrowhawks and goes off and leaves the hawk behind and it’s stupid.’ A long pause. ‘Maybe he was tired of his hawk,’ she said, the hand with the cloth in it now pressed to the sink. This made no sense at all. ‘But how could he be tired of a hawk?’ And now she saw I was upset, and she put down the cloth and drew me into a hug. ‘I don’t know, Helen. Perhaps he was a silly man.’ Gos’s small feral head, tipped and streaked and patterned like a cat’s, looks about in puzzlement. This is not what normally happens. His sharp black beak opens and closes. He is hungry. He hops along the railing around the well, gripping it tight with toes and claws. Flakes of rust fall. Hungry. He hops further, looking down the long line of the creance and still not finding the man at the end of it where he always is. Where was he? Gos needed vantage to see.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Nothing. The hawk rouses again and begins to preen her covert feathers. The running deer and the running hare. Legacies of trade and invasion, farming, hunting, settlement. Hares were introduced, it is thought, by the Romans. Fallow deer certainly were. Pheasants, too, brought in their burnished hordes from Asia Minor. The partridges possessing this ground were originally from France, and the ones I see here were hatched in game-farm forced-air incubators. The squirrel on the sweet chestnut? North America. Rabbits? Medieval introductions. Felt, meat, fur, feather, from all corners. But possessing the ground, all the same. We set off, again, homeward this time. But now the rain in the air is harder, and the rabbits are so close to their holes that Mabel’s not able to get a foot to them before they disappear. After one hair’s-breadth miss in a rocky quarryhole by a bank of wild rose stems, I call her back and feed her up. She is tired. Beads of water spot her head and tiny eyelash feathers. We stroll back to the car park. I’m tired too, and glad to see people walking towards us. I’ve met them before: a retired couple from my mother’s village, walking their white-muzzled terrier on a long lead. They’re all wrapped up with scarves and snap-fastened country jackets and their shoulders are set a little against the cold and wet. I meet them here quite often. I’ve always been delighted to see them. I don’t know their names, and they don’t know mine, though they know my hawk’s called Mabel. I wave, and they stop and wave back. ‘Hello’, I say. ‘Hello! How’s the hawk?’ they ask. ‘She’s good,’ I say happily. ‘But tired. She’s been flying all over the place. It’s beautiful out here today. I saw the deer!’ I went on, glad to have someone to tell. ‘A big herd of them, dark-coated, down in the bottom of the valley.’ ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The deer. Special, aren’t they, those ones. Rare. We see them quite often.’ He is smiling; we’re all enjoying our shared secrets of a place. She’s nodding too. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she says. ‘We counted them once, didn’t we?’ He nods. ‘There’re usually between twenty-five and thirty.’ ‘Thirty exactly!’ I say. ‘They’re a lovely sight.’ I agree. She tucks her scarf more tightly around her as a squall begins. Her husband nods vigorously, rain darkening his shoulders. ‘A herd of deer,’ he says, beaming, then his expression folds into something I don’t recognise. ‘Doesn’t it gives you hope?’ he says suddenly. ‘Hope?’ ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’ I don’t know what to say. His words hang and all the awkwardness is silence. The leaves rattle in the hazel stems. And I nod a goodbye, sad as hell, and my hawk and I trudge home through the rain.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  92 Lecture 26: Pietists and the Turn to Experience Because of the requirement of reÀ ective faith, Puritan faith is not necessarily a form of certainty, but must strive to acquire certainty and assurance. The “Westminster Confession” says believers may have a long, hard struggle before they attain assurance of salvation. This helps explain the Puritans’ immense ethical seriousness and their insistence on righteousness. To indulge in sin is to remove the evidence of the grace in your heart, and thus undermines your assurance that you are saved. With Pietism, the turn to experience enters the Lutheran tradition in 17 th- century Germany. The beginning of Pietism is typically traced to Jacob Philip Spener’s Pia Desideria (“Pious Desires” for a new reformation of the Protestant church) in 1675. Spener’s proposals were mainly about increased learning of scripture by the laity, including in small groups outside the church service, later criticized as conventicles. Spener’s book is serious about the life of piety but says little about emotion. Spener is a leading German Lutheran pastor concerned with the pastoral failures of Protestant scholasticism. Spener draws on themes from Johann Arndt’s powerful devotional work, True Christianity (1606). Protestant scholasticism is the theology that grew out of systematic attempts to prove the truth and certainty of Protestant doctrine. Protestant scholasticism is a university-based discipline—in 17 th-century terms, a science—designed to give a system of proofs of Protestant doctrine. Scholastic sermons were not proclamations of the Gospel meant to change people’s lives, but proofs of Protestant doctrine. Pietism is in large part a reaction against the aridity of Protestant scholasticism. One of Spener’s key complaints was that Lutheran ministers were mostly careerists, training at German universities to get a prestigious pastorate, not by building up the À ock in faith but by skill in scholastic reasoning. One of his key af ¿ rmations was that the true theology required not so much argumentation as piety. Later this was described as the contrast between head-knowledge and the religion of the heart. Pietism is in large part a reaction against the aridity of Protestant scholasticism.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  It was only now, as I began to adjust to an indefinite stay and watched my grandparents in the rhythm of their schedules, that I realized how much the two of them had changed. After my mother and I left, they had sold the big, rambling house near the university and now rented a small, two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise on Beretania Street. Gramps had left the furniture business to become a life insurance agent, but as he was unable to convince himself that people needed what he was selling and was sensitive to rejection, the work went badly. Every Sunday night, I would watch him grow more and more irritable as he gathered his briefcase and set up a TV tray in front of his chair, following the lead of every possible distraction, until finally he would chase us out of the living room and try to schedule appointments with prospective clients over the phone. Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda, and I could hear the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the other end explained why Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps’s heavy sigh after he had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a cardplayer who’s deep in the hole. Eventually, a few people would relent, the pain would pass, and Gramps would wander into my room to tell me stories of his youth or the new joke he had read in Reader’s Digest. If his calls had gone especially well that night, he might discuss with me some scheme he still harbored—the book of poems he had started to write, the sketch that would soon bloom into a painting, the floor plans for his ideal house, complete with push-button conveniences and terraced landscaping. I saw that the plans grew bolder the further they receded from possibility, but in them I recognized some of his old enthusiasm, and I would usually try to think up encouraging questions that might sustain his good mood. Then, somewhere in the middle of his presentation, we would both notice Toot standing in the hall outside my room, her head tilted in accusation. “What do you want, Madelyn?” “Are you finished with your calls, dear?” “Yes, Madelyn. I’m finished with my calls. It’s ten o’clock at night!” “There’s no need to holler, Stanley. I just wanted to know if I could go into the kitchen.” “I’m not hollering! Jesus H. Christ, I don’t understand why—” But before he could finish, Toot would have retreated into their bedroom, and Gramps would leave my room with a look of dejection and rage.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Some tenants in Altgeld would tell me that Mr. Anderson didn’t repair the apartments of anybody who opposed Mrs. Reece and her slate of candidates during LAC elections, that Mrs. Reece was in turn controlled by Reverend Johnson, that Reverend Johnson owned a security guard service under contract with CHA. I couldn’t say that any of this was true, nor in the end did it seem to matter much. The three of them only reflected the attitudes of most of the people who worked in Altgeld: teachers, drug counselors, policemen. Some were there only for the paycheck; others sincerely wanted to help. But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility—their own, that of others—slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations. In a sense, then, Will was right: I did feel that there was something to prove—to the people of Altgeld, to Marty, to my father, to myself. That what I did counted for something. That I wasn’t a fool chasing pipe dreams. Later, when I tried to explain some of this to Will, he would laugh and shake his head, preferring to attribute my grumpy attitude that day at the ribbon cutting to a case of youthful jealousy. “See, you like the young rooster, Barack,” he told me, “and Harold’s like the old rooster. Old rooster came in, and the hens gave him all the attention. Made the young rooster realize he’s got a thing or two to learn.” Will seemed to enjoy the comparison, and I had laughed along with him. But secretly I knew he had misunderstood my ambitions. More than anything, I wanted Harold to succeed; like my real father, the mayor and his achievements seemed to mark out what was possible; his gifts, his power, measured my own hopes. And in listening to him speak to us that day, full of grace and good humor, all I had been able to think about was the constraints on that power. At the margins, Harold could make city services more equitable. Black professionals now got a bigger share of city business. We had a black school superintendent, a black police chief, a black CHA director. Harold’s presence consoled, as Will’s Jesus consoled, as Rafiq’s nationalism consoled. But beneath the radiance of Harold’s victory, in Altgeld and elsewhere, nothing seemed to change.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  He is a Bible character few people can forget once they have encountered Matthew’s vision of him. He still draws a crowd. But why? The funny thing about John is not his message, but his popularity. After all, John is the only prophet in the whole Bible who got it all wrong. Even Matthew admits that. In the eleventh chapter of his gospel, Matthew inserts this amazing little vignette: “When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one to come, or should we expect someone else?’”3 John was asking Jesus if he had made a mistake. By the banks of the Jordon River he had thought of Jesus as “the one,” the Messiah, but now in prison and facing execution, he is not so sure because of what “Christ was doing.” Or, in John’s case, not doing. John had told people that when the Messiah came he would be hacking down the dead wood of humanity. John’s fire-filled idea of God on Earth was wrath and retribution, a house cleaning of judgment against sin and disbelief. What Jesus was doing was something entirely different. As the Christ, the expected one, Jesus was telling people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. Instead of throwing the sinners into lakes of fire, he was having dinner with them. He was not using his winnowing fork to separate human beings into the saved and the damned, but going into the brood of vipers to tell them they were loved. For John, Jesus must have been an enormous disappointment. Why else would John have sent his own disciples to ask Jesus the question about being “the one?” Therefore, the funny thing is, even by his own admission, John is the one prophet in the Bible whom we should ignore. Without his message of doom and destruction, we see him in a different light. John becomes a character of pathos. He stands flailing his arms by the banks of the Jordon, wearing his outrageous outfit, making much ado about nothing. In short, John comes off looking a little odd, a little strange, even a little funny. And that is exactly the point. We should remember John, not because he was a very good prophet, which he was not, but because he was a very good clown. To non-Native people this description of one of the great figures of the New Testament may sound terribly offensive. To call John a “clown” seems disrespectful in the extreme. And yet, from the theology of the Native Covenant, it is perfectly accurate because a “clown” in Native American tradition has a different meaning than it carries in European-based cultures. For Native people clowns are not just buffoons whose job is to make us laugh. They are spiritual teachers whose job is to make us think. There are, as always in Native tradition, many variations on the theme.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Instead, Muslim soldiers lived in new “garrison towns” ( amsar, singular: misr ) built in strategic locations: Kufah in Iraq, Basra in Syria, Qum in Iran, and Fustat in Egypt; Damascus was the only old city to become a misr. Umar believed that the ummah, still in its infancy, could retain its integrity only by living apart from the more sophisticated cultures. The Muslims’ ability to establish and maintain a stable, centralized empire was even more surprising than their military success. Both the Persians and the Byzantines imagined that after their initial victories, the Arabs would simply ask to settle in the empires they had conquered. This, after all, was what the barbarians had done in the western provinces, and they now ruled according to Roman law and spoke Latin dialects. 51 Yet when their wars of expansion finally ceased in 750, the Muslims ruled an empire extending from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees, the largest the world had yet seen, and most of the conquered peoples would convert to Islam and speak Arabic. 52 This extraordinary achievement seemed to endorse the message of the Quran, which taught that a society founded on the Quranic principles of justice would always prosper. Later generations would idealize the Conquest Era, but it was a difficult time. The failure to defeat Constantinople was a bitter blow. By the time Uthman, the Prophet’s son-in-law, became the third caliph (r. 644–56), Muslim troops had become mutinous and discontented. The distances were now so vast that campaigning was exhausting, and they were taking less plunder. Far from home, living perpetually in strange surroundings, soldiers had no stable family life. 53 This disquiet is reflected in the hadith (plural: ahadith ) literature, in which the classical doctrine of jihad began to take shape. 54 The ahadith (“reports”) recorded sayings and stories of the Prophet not included in the Quran. Now that he was no longer with them, people wanted to know how Muhammad had behaved and what he had thought about such subjects as warfare. These traditions were collected and anthologized during the eighth and ninth centuries and became so numerous that criteria were needed to distinguish authentic reports from the obviously spurious. Few of the ahadith date back to the Prophet himself, but even the more dubious ones throw light on attitudes in the early ummah as Muslims reflected on their astounding success. Many ahadith saw the wars as God’s way of spreading the faith. “I have been sent to the human race in its entirety,” the Prophet says; “I have been commanded to fight the people until they bear witness: ‘There is no god but Allah.’ ” 55 Empire building works best when soldiers believe that they are benefiting humanity, so the conviction that they had a divine mission would cheer flagging spirits. There is also contempt for the “ laggers” who “stayed at home”; these soldiers probably resented those Muslims who benefited from the conquests but did not share their hardships.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  That’s how my grandparents had come to live. They still prepared sashimi for the now-infrequent guests to their apartment. Gramps still wore Hawaiian shirts to the office, and Toot still insisted on being called Toot. Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity—of schedules and pastimes and the weather—became their principal consolation. They would occasionally grumble about how the Japanese had taken over the islands, how the Chinese controlled island finance. During the Watergate hearings, my mother would pry out of them that they had voted for Nixon, the law-and-order candidate, in 1968. We didn’t go to the beach or on hikes together anymore; at night, Gramps watched television while Toot sat in her room reading murder mysteries. Their principal excitement now came from new drapes or a stand-alone freezer. It was as if they had bypassed the satisfactions that should come with the middle years, the convergence of maturity with time left, energy with means, a recognition of accomplishment that frees the spirit. At some point in my absence, they had decided to cut their losses and settle for hanging on. They saw no more destinations to hope for. As the summer drew to a close, I became increasingly restless to start school. My main concern was finding companions my own age; but for my grandparents, my admission into Punahou Academy heralded the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let everyone know. Started by missionaries in 1841, Punahou had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites. Its reputation had helped sway my mother in her decision to send me back to the States: It hadn’t been easy to get me in, my grandparents told her; there was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps’s boss, who was an alumnus (my first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race). I had gone for several interviews with Punahou’s admissions officer the previous summer. She was a brisk, efficient-looking woman who didn’t seem fazed that my feet barely reached the floor as she grilled me on my career goals. After the interview, the woman had sent Gramps and me on a tour of the campus, a complex that spread over several acres of lush green fields and shady trees, old masonry schoolhouses and modern structures of glass and steel. There were tennis courts, swimming pools, and photography studios. At one point, we fell behind the guide, and Gramps grabbed me by the arm. “Hell, Bar,” he whispered, “this isn’t a school. This is heaven. You might just get me to go back to school with you.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I shall be leaving this post in a couple of days, and I am to help with the running of a hostel, at Stratford. It is better for me, since it’s nearer where I live, and I know the local people; but it means I shall be spending most of my days down East...’‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And shall you never be coming into town, at all, after that?’She hesitated; then: ‘Well, I do sometimes come in, in the evenings. I go to the theatre, or to the lectures at the Athenaeum Hall. You might come with me, to one of those places ...’I only went to the theatre, now, as a renter; I wouldn’t sit in a velvet seat before a stage again, even for her. I said, ‘The Athenaeum Hall? I know that place. But lectures - what do you mean? Church stuff?’‘Political stuff. You know, the Class Question, the Irish Question...’I felt my heart sink. ‘The Woman Question.’‘Exactly. They have speakers, and readings, and afterwards debates. Look here.’ She reached into her satchel and drew forth a slim blue pamphlet. The Athenaeum Hall Society Lecture Series, it said; Women and Labour: An Address by Mr- and it gave a name I now forget, followed by a little piece of explanatory text, and a date that was for four or five days ahead.I said, ‘Lord!’ in an ambiguous sort of way. She lifted her head, took the pamphlet back from me, and said: ‘Well, perhaps, after all, you would prefer the ice-cream cart in Kensington Gardens ...’ There was a hint of rustiness about the words, that I found I could not bear to hear. I said at once, ‘Good heavens, no: this looks a treat!’ But I added, that if they really didn’t sell ices in the hall, then I thought we ought to take some refreshment first. There was, I had heard, a little public-house at the King’s Cross corner of Judd Street with a ladies’ room at the back of it, where they did a very nice, very inexpensive supper. The lecture began at seven - would she meet me there beforehand? At, say, six o’clock?

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I’d been feeling this way all through my stay in Europe—edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers. I hadn’t planned it that way. I had thought of the layover there as nothing more than a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I had never been before. For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies; and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear, listening to the wind and its whispers of mortality. And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine—stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation—I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there. Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness? The folks back in Chicago thought so. It’ll be just like Roots, Will had said at my going-away party. A pilgrimage, Asante had called it. For them, as for me, Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land, full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and talking drums. With the benefit of distance, we engaged Africa in a selective embrace—the same sort of embrace I’d once offered the Old Man. What would happen once I relinquished that distance? It was nice to believe that the truth would somehow set me free. But what if that was wrong? What if the truth only disappointed, and my father’s death meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a name, a blood type, or white people’s scorn?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We wanted it back, our grief—we wanted it real—but grief was just another thing we lost, another thing she took from us. _ Sometimes I thank shangdi you won’t ever leave home for a man. You can leave me for anyone but a man. Jie gets married two weeks after her graduation. The boy is nineteen and Cantonese and works as an auto mechanic at his father’s garage, which is where they first meet. Jie is a serial roadkiller, collecting smashed pigeons on her windshield, daily scraping the dogs and raccoons and squirrels off the fender. When I’m riding with her, that’s how I calculate our speed: in miles per dead thing. Jie finally decides that something must be wrong with the car. Maybe it’s some kind of animal magnet. Maybe she needs new brakes. So she drives it down to the garage, and the boy is there with a wrench, looking at her in the reflection of his greased hands. Jie gets married on a Saturday. She stole a bolt of sateen from her second factory job and I sewed her dress from it: It was sheer as rain, the kind of blue that looked green in indoor light, a border color. The morning of her wedding, Ma and Ba and I walk to the Baptist church and sit on the ass-dented pews and wait for the priest to speak. It’s morning and the boy’s family is also there, his three little sisters identically dressed in red sweaters and jean skirts. The sisters all stole a different part of their mother’s face: The youngest one took the flat eyebrows, the middle one got the mouth, the third one’s hair is already silver. The father is there too, in his mechanic uniform with a wrench in one hand, like he’s waiting for something to use it on. Ma refuses to meet them, so we sit on opposite sides of the church and don’t look for too long. Ma says, Don’t marry a man with more oil in his hands than blood. Ba’s hands are so greasy from the restaurant, he can’t work open our doorknob. Jie says that engine oil is different from food oil, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the boy is smart and going to college, and his oldest brother is a surgeon who once saved a girl with a hook-shaped heart. Jie gets married in a month without rain. From the kitchen, Ma says it’s an omen, says something about no children, but Jie says she doesn’t want kids anyway. At night, kneeling in the bathroom, she once tried to insert rat poison into herself, but she got it up the wrong hole. Now your ass is rat-free, I said, and she laughed.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood. There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had left. They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative. An attractive prop—the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl—but a prop nonetheless. I don’t really blame my mother or grandparents for this. My father may have preferred the image they created for him—indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin upon his graduation, he appears guarded and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent. He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding—a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little casual about your future?” she said. “What do you mean?” “You know exactly what I mean. One of your friends was just arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven’t even started on your college applications. Whenever I try to talk to you about it you act like I’m just this great big bother.” I didn’t need to hear all this. It wasn’t like I was flunking out. I started to tell her how I’d been thinking about maybe not going away for college, how I could stay in Hawaii and take some classes and work part-time. She cut me off before I could finish. I could get into any school in the country, she said, if I just put in a little effort. “Remember what that’s like? Effort? Damn it, Bar, you can’t just sit around like some good-time Charlie, waiting for luck to see you through.” “A good-time what?” “A good-time Charlie. A loafer.” I looked at her sitting there, so earnest, so certain of her son’s destiny. The idea that my survival depended on luck remained a heresy to her; she insisted on assigning responsibility somewhere—to herself, to Gramps and Toot, to me. I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed. Instead of shouting, I laughed. “A good-time Charlie, huh? Well, why not? Maybe that’s what I want out of life. I mean, look at Gramps. He didn’t even go to college.” The comparison caught my mother by surprise. Her face went slack, her eyes wavered. It suddenly dawned on me, her greatest fear. “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “That I’ll end up like Gramps?” She shook her head quickly. “You’re already much better educated than your grandfather,” she said. But the certainty had finally drained from her voice. Instead of pushing the point, I stood up and left the room. Billie had stopped singing. The silence felt oppressive, and I suddenly felt very sober. I rose from the couch, flipped the record, drank what was left in my glass, poured myself another. Upstairs, I could hear someone flushing a toilet, walking across a room. Another insomniac, probably, listening to his life tick away. That was the problem with booze and drugs, wasn’t it? At some point they couldn’t stop that ticking sound, the sound of certain emptiness. And that, I suppose, is what I’d been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn’t overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  He says that who knows, maybe someday they will let me launch the online magazine, but for now this is what the team needs. At a place like HubSpot it’s important to be a team player. Zack tries to spin it. He says that in a way I’m getting what I asked for. I’m going to have my own project. Along those lines, I now will have my own monthly traffic goal, a number that I have to hit. Wingman will set the number. There’s not much I can do here. I could confront Wingman and Cranium, and demand to know why they’re ignoring a direct order from their bosses. I could go back to Halligan and Dharmesh and ask them to intercede on my behalf. But I’m starting to think that Halligan and Dharmesh don’t really have much juice around here. And they have bigger things to worry about. As Spinner told me, Halligan probably forgot everything we talked about the minute he walked out of our meeting. Spinner was right. I played it wrong. I thought I could jump over Cranium and Wingman, but they have leapt up and blocked my shot. I tell myself that at least I tried, and now I know that I’ll just have to wait out a year and then leave. It’s over. I’m done. I force a smile. I tell Zack thanks for the update. I tell him I’m sorry about my outburst, and I can’t wait to get started on this new project. “Oh,” Zack says, “there’s one more thing.” The content factory has been getting overcrowded, he tells me. So in addition to getting my own little blog, I am going to be moving to a new location, away from the blog team, in the telemarketing call center. It’s the loudest room in the building. People call it the spider monkey room. Zack assures me that this move will only be temporary. HubSpot is renovating space on the fourth floor, and eventually our team will move up there. Once again I give him my best “team player” smile and tell him this all sounds great. “You know,” I say, “I could really use your advice on how to set up this new blog. Do you think you could help me out? I love your writing. Would you be willing to maybe write some articles for the blog? I think we can do something really great with this.” Zack says sure, he’d love to do that. I tell him I’ll get on his calendar and set a meeting so we can discuss some ideas. A few days later, I arrive at the office and find that my desk is empty.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Carefully briefed by the French Institut d’Égypte, he addressed the sheikhs of the Azhar madrassa in Arabic, expressing his deep respect for the Prophet and promising to free Egypt from the oppression of the Ottomans and their Mamluk agents. Accompanying the French army was a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The ulema were not impressed: “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery,” they said, “to entice us.” 86 They were right. Napoleon’s invasion, exploiting Enlightenment scholarship and science to subjugate the region, marked the beginning of Western domination of the Middle East. To many it seemed that the French Revolution had failed. The systemic violence of Napoleon’s empire betrayed revolutionary principles, and Napoleon also reinstated the Catholic Church. For decades the hopes of 1789 were dashed by one disillusioning event after another. The glory days of the fall of the Bastille were followed by the September Massacres, the Reign of Terror, the Vendée genocide, and a military dictatorship. After Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814, Louis XVIII (the brother of Louis XVI) was returned to the throne. But the republican dream refused to die. The republic was revived for two brief periods, during the Hundred Days before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and for a brief period between 1848 and 1852. In 1870 it was restored yet again, this time lasting until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example. The French Revolution may have changed the politics of Europe, but it did not affect the agrarian economy. Modernity came of age in Britain’ s Industrial Revolution, which began in the later eighteenth century, though its social effects would not be truly felt until the early nineteenth. 87 It started with the invention of the steam engine, which provided more energy than the country’s entire workforce put together, so the economy grew at an unprecedented rate. It was not long before Germany, France, Japan, and the United States followed Britain’s lead, and all these industrialized countries were forever transformed. To man the new machines, the population had to be mobilized for industry instead of agriculture; economic self-sufficiency now became a thing of the past. The government also began to control the lives of ordinary folk in ways that had been impossible in agrarian society.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  After it was over, he came up and put a hand on my shoulder. “Feels like shit, huh?” It did. He helped me clean up, then took me out for coffee and pointed out some of my mistakes. The problem of gangs was too general to make an impression on people—issues had to be made concrete, specific, and winnable. I should have prepared Ruby more carefully—and set out fewer chairs. Most important, I needed to spend more time getting to know the leaders in the community; flyers couldn’t pull people out on a rainy night. “That reminds me,” he said as we stood up to go. “Whatever happened to those pastors you were supposed to be meeting with?” I told him about Reverend Smalls. He started to laugh. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t tag along, huh?” I wasn’t amused. “Why didn’t you warn me about Smalls?” “I did warn you,” Marty said, opening the door to his car. “I told you Chicago’s polarized and that politicians use it to their own advantage. That’s all Smalls is—a politician who happens to wear a collar. Anyway, it’s not the end of the world. You should just be glad you learned your lesson early.” Yes, but which lesson? Watching Marty drive away, I thought back to the day of the rally: the sound of Smitty’s voice in the barbershop; the rows of black and white faces in the school auditorium, there because of the factory’s desolation and Marty’s own sense of betrayal; the cardinal, a small, pale, unassuming man in a black robe and glasses, smiling onstage as Will swallowed him up in a big bear hug; Will, so certain that the two men understood each other. Each image carried its own lesson, each was subject to differing interpretations. For there were many churches, many faiths. There were times, perhaps, when those faiths seemed to converge—the crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Freedom Riders at the lunch counter. But such moments were partial, fragmentary. With our eyes closed, we uttered the same words, but in our hearts we each prayed to our own masters; we each remained locked in our own memories; we all clung to our own foolish magic. A man like Smalls understood that, I thought. He understood that the men in the barbershop didn’t want the victory of Harold’s election—their victory—qualified. They wouldn’t want to hear that their problems were more complicated than a group of devious white aldermen, or that their redemption was incomplete. Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s. I realized then, standing in an empty McDonald’s parking lot in the South Side of Chicago, that I was a heretic. Or worse—for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt. CHAPTER NINE

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Such irrational and spontaneous acts of violence were an essential part of the mystique that held his subjects in thrall. 124 Thus while the ruler and the military lived by the “extraordinary,” the Confucians promoted the predictable, routinized orthodoxy of wen, the civil order based on benevolence (ren), culture, and rational persuasion. They performed the invaluable task of convincing the public that the emperor really had their interests at heart. They were not mere lackeys—many of the ru were executed for reminding the emperor too forcibly of his moral duty—but their power was limited. When Dong Zhongshu objected that the imperial usurpation of land caused immense misery, Emperor Wu seemed to agree, but ultimately Dong had to compromise, settling for a moderate limitation of land tenure. 125 The fact was that while the administrators and bureaucrats championed Confucianism, the rulers themselves preferred the Legalists, who despised the Confucians as impractical idealists; in their view, King Zhao of Qin had said it all: “The ru are no use in running a state.” In 81 BCE, in a series of debates about the monopoly of salt and iron, the Legalists argued that the uncontrolled, private “free enterprise” advocated by the ru was wholly impractical. 126 The Confucians were nothing but a bunch of impoverished losers: See them now present us with nothing and consider it substance, with “emptiness” and call it plenty! In their coarse gowns and cheap sandals they walk gravely along, sunk in meditation as though they had lost something. These are not men who can do great deeds and win fame. They do not even rise above the vulgar masses. 127 The ru could therefore only bear witness to an alternative society. The word ru is related etymologically to ruo (“mild”), but some modern scholars argue that it meant “weakling” and was first used in the sixth century to describe the impoverished shi who had eked out a meager living by teaching. 128 In imperial China, Confucians were political “softies,” economically and institutionally weak. 129 They could keep the benevolent Confucian alternative alive and make it a presence in the heart of government, but they would always lack the “teeth” to push their policies through. That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check. Even if he had wanted to, Emperor Wu could not afford to rule entirely by ren. The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare, wholesale slaughter, and the annihilation of one state after another; it retained its power by military expansion and internal oppression and developed religious mythologies and rituals to sacralize these arrangements. Was there a realistic alternative?

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  We returned to the living room, and I sank down into an old sofa. In the kitchen, Zeituni directed the younger women in cleaning the dishes; a few of the children were now arguing about the chocolate I’d brought. I let my eyes wander over the scene—the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men. We said our good-byes around ten, promising to visit each and every relative in turn. As we walked to the door, Jane pulled us aside and lowered her voice. “You need to take Barry to see your Aunt Sarah,” she whispered to Auma. And then to me: “Sarah is your father’s older sister. The firstborn. She wants to see you very badly.” “Of course,” I said. “But why wasn’t she here tonight? Does she live far away?” Jane looked at Auma, and some unspoken thought passed between them. “Come on, Barack,” Auma said finally. “I’ll explain it to you in the car.” The roads were empty and slick with rain. “Jane is right, Barack,” Auma told me as we passed the university. “You should go see Sarah. But I won’t go with you.” “Why not?” “It’s this business with the Old Man’s estate. Sarah is one of the people who has disputed the will. She’s been telling people that Roy, Bernard, myself—that none of us are the Old Man’s children.” Auma sighed. “I don’t know. A part of me sympathizes with her. She’s had a hard life. She never had the chances the Old Man had, you see, to study or go abroad. It made her very bitter. She thinks that somehow my mum, myself, that we are to blame for her situation.” “But how much could the Old Man’s estate be worth?”

• From The Art of Memoir

  I’m not trying to make lie-sniffing bloodhounds out of memoir fans, nor to silence would-be memoirists who give up the art, fearing their minds aren’t as steadfast as computer files and video footage. I don’t yearn for some golden age of objective truth when the fact police patrolled dialogue in memoir, demanding it be excised unless the writer had recorded backup. But the popular, scoffing presumption that memory’s solely concocted by self-serving fantasy and everyone’s trying to scudge has perhaps helped to bog down our collective moral machinery. Our reigning suspicion has extended the practiced liars’ motives to everyone, including the well-intentioned truth seeker. In so doing, we’ve let a small cadre of schemers take over. Disgraced con men have helped to author the dominant notion that a thinking person can’t possibly discern between a probable truth and a hyperembellished swindle. Based on their antics, we’ve begun to abandon all judgment, thinking instead, Oh, who knows, anything’s possible, everybody lies anyway. My heroes in the fields of memoir and journalism don’t find the line so indeterminate. Hilary Mantel still shoots for undiluted reality: “I have an investment in accuracy. I would never say, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s history now.’” And David Carr outlined this once-simple standard in “Journalist Dancing on the Edge of Truth,” where he indicts shamed New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer for making up quotes from Bob Dylan: “Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. I once lost a job I dearly wanted because I had misspelled the name of the publisher of the publication I was about to go to work for. Not very smart, but I learned a brutal lesson that stayed with me.” (New York Times, August 19, 2012) However often the airwaves wind up clotted with false memories and misidentified criminal culprits and folks dithering about what they recall, I still think a screw has come loose in our culture around notions of truth, a word you almost can’t set down without quotes around it anymore. Sometimes it strikes me that even when we

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “And then that silly custom of eating bon-bons, that brutal gluttony for sweetmeats, those abominable preparations for the wedding, those discussions with mamma upon the apartments, upon the sleeping-rooms, upon the bedding, upon the morning-gowns, upon the wrappers, the linen, the costumes! Understand that if people married according to the old fashion, as this old man said just now, then these eiderdown coverlets and this bedding would all be sacred details; but with us, out of ten married people there is scarcely to be found one who, I do not say believes in sacraments (whether he believes or not is a matter of indifference to us), but believes in what he promises. Out of a hundred men, there is scarcely one who has not married before, and out of fifty scarcely one who has not made up his mind to deceive his wife. “The great majority look upon this journey to the church as a condition necessary to the possession of a certain woman. Think then of the supreme significance which material details must take on. Is it not a sort of sale, in which a maiden is given over to a débauché, the sale being surrounded with the most agreeable details?” CHAPTER XI. “All marry in this way. And I did like the rest. If the young people who dream of the honeymoon only knew what a disillusion it is, and always a disillusion! I really do not know why all think it necessary to conceal it. “One day I was walking among the shows in Paris, when, attracted by a sign, I entered an establishment to see a bearded woman and a water-dog. The woman was a man in disguise, and the dog was an ordinary dog, covered with a sealskin, and swimming in a bath. It was not in the least interesting, but the Barnum accompanied me to the exit very courteously, and, in addressing the people who were coming in, made an appeal to my testimony. ‘Ask the gentleman if it is not worth seeing! Come in, come in! It only costs a franc!’ And in my confusion I did not dare to answer that there was nothing curious to be seen, and it was upon my false shame that the Barnum must have counted. “It must be the same with the persons who have passed through the abominations of the honeymoon. They do not dare to undeceive their neighbor. And I did the same. “The felicities of the honeymoon do not exist. On the contrary, it is a period of uneasiness, of shame, of pity, and, above all, of ennui,—of ferocious ennui. It is something like the feeling of a youth when he is beginning to smoke. He desires to vomit; he drivels, and swallows his drivel, pretending to enjoy this little amusement. The vice of marriage . . .” “What! Vice?” I said. “But you are talking of one of the most natural things.”