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 The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In Washington, D.C. we had one large room with two double beds and an extra cot for me. It was a back-street hotel that belonged to a friend of my father’s who was in real estate, and I spent the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson had sung after the D.A.R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was Black. Or because she was “Colored,” my father said as he told us the story. Except that what he probably said was “Negro,” because for his times, my father was quite progressive. I was squinting because I was in that silent agony that characterized all of my childhood summers, from the time school let out in June to the end of July, brought about by my dilated and vulnerable eyes exposed to the summer brightness. I viewed Julys through an agonizing corolla of dazzling whiteness and I always hated the Fourth of July, even before I came to realize the travesty such a celebration was for Black people in this country. My parents did not approve of sunglasses, nor of their expense. I spent the afternoon squinting up at monuments to freedom and past presidencies and democracy, and wondering why the light and heat were both so much stronger in Washington, D.C. than back home in New York City. Even the pavement on the streets was a shade lighter in color than back home. Late that Washington afternoon my family and I walked back down Pennsylvania Avenue. We were a proper caravan, mother bright and father brown, the three of us girls step-standards in between. Moved by our historical surroundings and the heat of the early evening, my father decreed yet another treat. He had a great sense of history, a flair for the quietly dramatic and the sense of specialness of an occasion and a trip. “Shall we stop and have a little something to cool off, Lin?” Two blocks away from our hotel, the family stopped for a dish of vanilla ice cream at a Breyer’s ice cream and soda fountain. Indoors, the soda fountain was dim and fan-cooled, deliciously relieving to my scorched eyes. Corded and crisp and pinafored, the five of us seated ourselves one by one at the counter. There was I between my mother and father, and my two sisters on the other side of my mother. We settled ourselves along the white mottled marble counter, and when the waitress spoke at first no one understood what she was saying, and so the five of us just sat there. The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. “I said I kin give you to take out, but you can’t eat here. Sorry.” Then she dropped her eyes looking very embarrassed, and suddenly we heard what it was she was saying all at the same time, loud and clear.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I knew about his love of finding defects, because of all he had written about June. We were reading my red journal. He came to an entry where Fred had said that I was beautiful. “You see,” said Henry. “Fred thinks you are beautiful. I don’t. I think you have great charm, yes.” I was sitting close to him. I looked at him with bewilderment and then swiftly put my head on the pillow and cried. When he put his hand on my face and felt the tears, he was amazed. “Oh, Anaïs, I never thought that could mean anything to you. I hate myself for having said it so cruelly. But you remember, I also told you I didn’t think June was beautiful. The most powerful women have not been the most beautiful. But to think I could make you cry, that I could do that, when it is one thing I never wanted to do to YOU. ” He now sat in front of me, and I lay sunk in the pillows, hair rumpled and eyes swimming in tears. At that moment I remembered what the painters thought of me, and I told him. And suddenly I kicked him. I pawed him, like a cat, he said. And when that was over, which amused him, we felt strangely closer, until I said teasingly, in the train—because he was telling me that he had thought me beautiful the first day he had seen me, but had begun to think not because Fred insisted on it so much; and because of June, too—I said, “You’ve got bad taste!” But all the wonderful things he had said to me about my journal paled now. My confidence wavered. It did not heal me to think what a relative thing beauty is and that each man has his own individual response to it. It is unnatural to be so hurt. Yet I took this hurt into myself and said, “I’m going to bear it. I’m going to live it down, I’m not going to care.” And for a few hours I waved my courage about, until we were undressing that night and Henry said, “I want to watch you undress. I’ve never done that.” I sat on his bed, and I was overcome by a feeling of timidity. I did something to distract his attention from my undressing, and I slipped into the bed. I wanted to cry. Only two moments before, he said, “I have the feeling that I am a very ugly man. I never want to look at myself in the mirror.” And I found something evasive and lovely to say. I told him what I liked about him. I didn’t say to him, “I have needed Eduardo’s beauty these days as never before.” At three-thirty the next day I was in Allendy’s salon, in terrible need of him. I went to Henry and found him at work. He received me with a joyous kiss. We worked together.

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

  The haste of this narrative has many unforeseen drawbacks: it makes it appear as if I had had conquest after conquest and little or no difficulty in my efforts to win love. In reality my half dozen victories were spread out over nearly as many years, and time and again I met rebuffs and refusals quite sufficient to keep even my conceit in decent bounds. But I want to emphasize the fact that success in love, like success in every department of life, falls usually to the tough man unwearied in pursuit. Chaucer was right when he makes his Old Wyfe of Bath confess: And by a close attendance and attention Are we caught, more or less the truth to mention. It is not the handsomest man or the most virile who has most success with women, though both qualities smooth the way; but that man who pursues them most assiduously, flatters them most constantly and cleverly, and always insists on taking the girl’s “No” for consent, her reproofs for endearments and even a little crossness for a new charm. Above all, it is necessary to push forward after every refusal, for as soon as a girl refuses, she is apt to regret and may grant then what she expressly denied the moment before. Yet I could give dozens of instances where assiduity and flattery, love-looks and words were all ineffective, so much so that I should never say with Shakespeare: “he’s not a man who cannot win a woman.” I have generally found, too, that the easiest to win were the best worth winning for me, for women have finer senses for suitability in love than any man. Now for an example of one of my many failures which took place when I was still a student and had fair opportunity to succeed. It was a custom in the University for every professor to lecture for forty-five minutes, thus leaving each student fifteen minutes at least free to go back to his private class-room to prepare for the next lecture. All the students took turns to use these classrooms for their private pleasure. For example, from 11:45 to noon each day I was supposed to be working in the Junior Class-room and no student would interfere with me or molest me in any way. One day, a girl Fresher, Grace Weldon by name, the daughter of the owner of the biggest department store in Lawrence, came to Smith when Miss Stevens and I were with him, about the translation of a phrase or two in Xenophon. “Explain it to Miss Weldon, Frank!” said Smith and in a few moments I had made the passage clear to her. She thanked me prettily and I said, “If you ever want anything I can do, I’ll be happy to make it clear to you, Miss Weldon; I’m in the Junior class-room from 11:45 to noon always.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  My mother knew well how hurtful a broken illusion could be. The most trifling disappointment took on for her the dimensions of a major disaster. One Christmas Eve, in Vyra, not long before her fourth baby was to be born, she happened to be laid up with a slight ailment and made my brother and me (aged, respectively, five and six) promise not to look into the Christmas stockings that we would find hanging from our bedposts on the following morning but to bring them over to her room and investigate them there, so that she could watch and enjoy our pleasure. Upon awakening, I held a furtive conference with my brother, after which, with eager hands, each felt his delightfully crackling stocking, stuffed with small presents; these we cautiously fished out one by one, undid the ribbons, loosened the tissue paper, inspected everything by the weak light that came through a chink in the shutters, wrapped up the little things again, and crammed them back where they had been. I next recall our sitting on our mother’s bed, holding those lumpy stockings and doing our best to give the performance she had wanted to see; but we had so messed up the wrappings, so amateurish were our renderings of enthusiastic surprise (I can see my brother casting his eyes upward and exclaiming, in imitation of our new French governess, “Ah, que c’est beau!”), that, after observing us for a moment, our audience burst into tears. A decade passed. World War One started. A crowd of patriots and my uncle Ruka stoned the German Embassy. Peterburg was sunk to Petrograd against all rules of nomenclatorial priority. Beethoven turned out to be Dutch. The newsreels showed photogenic explosions, the spasm of a cannon, Poincaré in his leathern leggings, bleak puddles, the poor little Tsarevich in Circassian uniform with dagger and cartridges, his tall sisters so dowdily dressed, long railway trains crammed with troops. My mother set up a private hospital for wounded soldiers. I remember her, in the fashionable nurse’s gray-and-white uniform she abhorred, denouncing with the same childish tears the impenetrable meekness of those crippled peasants and the ineffectiveness of part-time compassion. And, still later, when in exile, reviewing the past, she would often accuse herself (unjustly as I see it now) of having been less affected by the misery of man than by the emotional load man dumps upon innocent nature—old trees, old horses, old dogs.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Once the war was over, and we were again home in Sacramento, this laissez-faire approach continued. I remember getting my learner’s driving permit at age fifteen-and-a-half and interpreting it as a logical mandate to drive from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe after dinner, two or three hours up one of the switchbacked highways into the mountains and, if you just turned around and kept driving, which was all we did, since we already had whatever we wanted to drink in the car with us, two or three hours back. This disappearance into the heart of the Sierra Nevada on what amounted to an overnight DUI went without comment from my mother and father. I remember, above Sacramento at about the same age, getting sluiced into a diversion dam while rafting on the American River, then dragging the raft upstream and doing it again. This too went without comment. All gone. Virtually unimaginable now. No time left on the schedule of “parenting” for tolerating such doubtful pastimes. Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. Judith Shapiro, when she was president of Barnard, was prompted to write an op-ed piece in The New York Times advising parents to show a little more trust in their children, stop trying to manage every aspect of their college life. She mentioned the father who had taken a year off from his job to supervise the preparation of his daughter’s college applications. She mentioned the mother who had accompanied her daughter to a meeting with her dean to discuss a research project. She mentioned the mother who had demanded, on the grounds that it was she who paid the tuition bills, that her daughter’s academic transcript be sent to her directly. “You pay $35,000 a year, you want services,” Tamar Lewin of The New York Times was told by the director of “the parents’ office” at Northeastern in Boston, an office devoted to the tending of parents having become a virtually ubiquitous feature of campus administration. For a Times piece a few years ago on the narrowing of the generation gap on campus, Ms. Lewin spoke not only to the tenders of the parents but also to the students themselves, one of whom, at George Washington University, allowed that she used well over three thousand cellphone minutes a month talking to her family. She seemed to view this family as an employable academic resource. “I might call my dad and say, ‘What’s going on with the Kurds?’ It’s a lot easier than looking it up. He knows a lot. I would trust almost anything my dad says.” Asked if she ever thought she might be too close to her parents, another George Washington student had seemed only puzzled: “They’re our parents,” she had said. “They’re supposed to help us.

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

  “I’ll tell him we love each other and he won’t be angry for long”, whispered Jessie; but I was doubtful. As she got up to go my naughty hand went up her dress behind and felt her warm, smooth buttocks. Ah, the poignancy of the ineffable sensations; her eyes smiled over her shoulder at me and she was gone—and the sunlight with her. I still remember the sick disappointment as I sat in the boat alone. Life then like school had its chagrins, and as the pleasures were keener, the balks and blights were bitterer. For the first time in my life vague misgivings came over me, a heart-shaking suspicion that everything delightful and joyous in life had to be paid for—I wouldn’t harbor the fear. If I had to pay, I’d pay; after all, the memory of the ecstasy could never be taken away while the sorrow was fleeting. And that faith I still hold. Next day the Chief Steward allotted me a berth in a cabin with an English midshipman of seventeen going out to join his ship in the West Indies. William Ponsonby was not a bad sort, but he talked of nothing but girls from morning till night and insisted that negresses were better than white girls: they were far more passionate, he said. He showed me his sex; excited himself before me, while assuring me he meant to have a Miss LeBreton, a governess who was going out to take up a position in Pittsburg. “But suppose you put her in the family way?” I asked. “That’s not my funeral”, was his answer, and seeing that the cynicism shocked me, he went on to say there was no danger if you withdrew in time. Ponsonby never opened a book and was astoundingly ignorant: he didn’t seem to care to learn anything that hadn’t to do with sex. He introduced me to Miss LeBreton the same evening. She was rather tall, with fair hair and blue eyes, and she praised my reciting. To my wonder she was a woman and pretty, and I could see by the way she looked at Ponsonby that she was more than a little in love with him. He was above middle height, strong and good-tempered, and that was all I could see in him. Miss Jessie kept away the whole evening and when I saw her father on the “upper deck”, he glowered at me and went past without a word. That night I told Ponsonby my story, or part of it, and he declared he would find a sailor to carry a note to Jessie next morning if I’d write it.

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

  We covered about thirty miles a day: Bob sat in the wagon and drove the four mules, while Bent and Charlie made us coffee and biscuits in the morning and cooked us sow-belly and any game we might bring in for dinner and supper. There was a small keg of rye whisky on the wagon; but we kept it for snake-bite or some emergency. I became the hunter to the outfit, for it was soon discovered that by some sixth sense I could always find my way back to the wagon on a bee-line, and only Bob of the whole party possessed the same instinct. Bob explained it by muttering “No Americano!” The instinct itself which has stood me in good stead more times than I can count, is in essence inexplicable: I feel the direction; but the vague feeling is strengthened by observing the path of the sun and the way the halms of grass lean, and the bushes grow. But it made me a valuable member of the outfit instead of a mere parasite midway between master and man, and it was the first step to Bob’s liking which taught me more than all the other haps of my early life. I had bought a shotgun and and a Winchester rifle and revolver in Kansas City and Reece had taught me how to get weapons that would fit me and this fact helped to make me a fair shot almost at once. But soon to my grief I found that I would never be a great shot; for Bob and Charlie and even Dell could see things far beyond my range of vision. I was shortsighted in fact through astigmatism and even glasses I discovered later, could not clear my blurred sight. It was the second or third disappointment of my life the others being the conviction of my personal ugliness and the fact that I should always be too short and small to be a great fighter or athlete. As I went on in life I discovered more serious disabilities but they only strengthened my deep-seated resolve to make the most of any qualities I might possess and meanwhile the life was divinely new and strange and pleasureful.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He talks marvelously about Samuel Putman and Eugene Jolas, and his work, and my work and Fred’s. But then the Pernod affects him and he tells me of sitting in a cafe with Fred last night after work, and of whores talking to him, and of Fred’s looking at him severely, because he had been with me that afternoon and shouldn’t have been talking to those women; and they were ugly. “But Fred is wrong,” I say, to Henry’s surprise. “The whores complement me. I understand the relief a man must feel to go to a woman without demands on his emotions or feelings.” And Henry adds, “You don’t have to write them letters!” As I laugh he realizes that I understand completely. I even understand his preference for Renoiresque bodies. Voilà. Yet I keep this picture of an outraged Fred worshiping me. And Henry says, “That’s the nearest I came to being unfaithful to you.” I don’t know that I so much want Henry’s faithfulness, because I am beginning to realize that the very word “love” tires me today. Love or no love. Fred’s saying Henry doesn’t love me. I understand the need for relief from complications, and I desire it for myself, only women cannot achieve such a state. Women are romantic. Suppose I don’t want Henry’s love. Suppose I say to him, “Listen, we are two adults. I’m sick of fantasies and emotions. Don’t mention the word ‘love.’ Let’s talk as much as we want and fuck only when we want it. Leave love out of it.” They are all so serious. Just this moment I feel old, cynical. I’m tired of demands, too. For an hour today I feel unsentimental. In a moment I could destroy the entire legend, from beginning to end, destroy everything, except the fundamentals: my passion for June and my worship of Hugo. Perhaps my intellect is playing another prank. Is that what it is to feel a sense of reality? Where are yesterday’s feelings and this morning’s, and what about my intuition that Henry instead of Fred would meet me? And what has it all got to do with the fact that Henry was drunk, and that I, not realizing it, read to him about his power to “break” me. He didn’t understand, of course, while swimming in the sulphur-colored Pernod. The burlesque of that hurt me. I asked him, “What is Fred like when he is drunk?” “Merry, yes, but always a bit contemptuous with the whores. They feel it.” “Whereas you get friendly?” “Yes, I talk to them like a cart driver.” Well, I had no joy from all this. It makes me cold and blank inside. Once, I joked and said that someday I would send him a telegram saying: “Never meet again because you don’t love me.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Nor do I mention it to the new neurologist. Actually the new neurologist offers, in addition to gaining weight and doing physical therapy, a third, although equally wishful, answer: the exclusionary diagnosis I received in my late twenties notwithstanding, I do not have multiple sclerosis. He is vehement on this point. There is no reason to believe that I have multiple sclerosis. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique not yet available when I was in my late twenties, conclusively demonstrates that I do not have multiple sclerosis. In that case, I ask, trying to summon an appearance of faith in whatever he chooses to answer, what is it that I do have ? I have neuritis, a neuropathy, a neurological inflammation. I overlook the shrug. I ask what caused this neuritis, this neuropathy, this neurological inflammation. Not weighing enough, he answers. It does not escape me that the consensus on what is wrong with me has once again insinuated the ball into my court. I am referred to a dietitian on this matter of gaining weight. The dietitian makes (the inevitable) protein shakes, brings me freshly laid eggs (better) from a farm in New Jersey and perfect vanilla ice cream (better still) from Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue. I drink the protein shakes. I eat the freshly laid eggs from the farm in New Jersey and the perfect vanilla ice cream from Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue. Nonetheless. I do not gain weight. I have an uneasy sense that the consensus solution has already failed. I find, on the other hand, somewhat to my surprise, that I actively like physical therapy. I keep regular appointments at a Columbia Presbyterian sports medicine facility at Sixtieth and Madison. I am impressed by the strength and general tone of the other patients who turn up during the same hour. I study their balance, their proficiency with the various devices recommended by the therapist. The more I watch, the more encouraged I am: this stuff really works , I tell myself. The thought makes me cheerful, optimistic. I wonder how many appointments it will take to reach the apparently effortless control already achieved by my fellow patients. Only during my third week of physical therapy do I learn that these particular fellow patients are in fact the New York Yankees, loosening up between game days. 19 “ W hat we need here is a montage, music over. How she: talked to her father and xxxx and xxxxx— “xx,” he said. “xxx,” she said. “ How she: “ How she did this and why she did that and what the music was when they did x and x and xxx— “How he, and also she—” T he above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted .

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

  As soon as I began to take note of things, I remarked that Lizzie no longer came near my room. One day I asked my sister what had become of her. To my astonishment my sister broke out in passionate dislike of her: “while you were lying unconscious”, she cried, “and the doctor was taking your pulse every few minutes, evidently frightened: he asked me could he get a prescription made up at once: he wanted to inject morphia, he said, to stop or check the racing of your heart. He wrote the prescription and I sent Lizzie with it and told her to be as quick as she could for your life might depend on it. When she didn’t come back in ten minutes, I got the Doctor to write it out again and sent Father with it. He brought it back in double-quick time. Hours passed and Lizzie didn’t return: she had gone out before ten and didn’t get back till it was almost one. I asked her where she had been? Why she hadn’t got back sooner? She replied coolly that she had been listening to the Band. I was so shocked and angry I wouldn’t keep her another moment. I sent her away at once. Think of it! I have no patience with such heartless brutes!” Lizzie’s callousness seemed to me even stranger than it seemed to my sister. I have often noticed that girls are less considerate of others than even boys, unless their affections are engaged, but I certainly thought I had half won Lizzie at least! However, the fact is so peculiar that I insert it here for what it may be worth. During my convalescence which lasted three months, Molly went for a visit to some friends: at the time I regretted it; now looking back I have no doubt she went away to free herself from an engagement she thought ill-advised. Missing her I went about with her younger, prettier sister Kathleen who was more sensuous and more affectionate than Molly. A little later, Molly went to Dresden to stay with an elder married sister: thence she wrote to me to set her free and I consented as a matter of course very willingly. Indeed I had already more real affection for Kathleen than Molly had ever called to life in me. As I got strong again I came to know a young Oxford man who professed to be astonished at my knowledge of literature and one day he came to me with the news that Grant Allen, the writer, had thrown up his job as Professor of Literature at Brighton College: “why should you not apply for it: it’s about two hundred pounds a year and they can do no worse than refuse you.”

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

  5. Empress Irene and the Veneration of Images 38 Irene’s Final Years Irene announced she would not remarry but would rule alone. This meant there was no clear heir to the throne, and Irene was approaching 50. Almost immediately, her favored eunuchs began jostling for position. One, Aetius, sought to put his brother on the throne, while Stauracius led the other main faction. Irene became sick, and her reputation began to suffer, both from the eunuchs’ constant plotting and from events overseas. In the wake of Constantine’s death, Pope Leo III had granted the title Holy Roman emperor to Charlemagne, which dealt a blow to Byzantium’s imperial prestige. Irene issued laws and coinage in her own name. She built and restored many churches, and she created dining halls, residences, and cemeteries for the poor; hospices for the sick; and retirement homes for the elderly. She also reduced the burden of taxes. Among Irene’s chief administrators, Stauracius died in 800, and Aetius soon ran amok. In October 802, chief finance minister Nicephorus launched an uprising and seized the throne for himself. Irene’s long, improbable tenure on the throne had come to an end. We know little about her life in exile. She died the following year. Irene is commemorated as a savior of images and a saint in the Byzantine Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Her feast day is August 9. Reading Garland, Lynda. Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527–1204. New York: Routledge, 2 011. Herrin, Judith. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Interestingly for an iconophile ruler, Irene’s coins did not use the Isaurian symbol of a cross, but neither did she adopt a portrait of Christ or the Virgin Mary; instead, she broke convention by depicting herself on both sides of the coin. 39 6 Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess R adegund began and ended her life as one might expect of a medieval queen: Born into a royal family, she died a powerful abbess and respected patroness of arts and politics. But in the interim, she was a child captive, a political pawn, an unwilling bride, a fugitive, and a diplomat. This lecture details how Radegund cleverly negotiated treacherous political and religious currents to forge her own path and become a new exemplar of powerful female sanctity.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  5Near the intersection of two carriage roads (one, well-kept, running north-south in between our “old” and “new” parks, and the other, muddy and rutty, leading, if you turned west, to Batovo) at a spot where aspens crowded on both sides of a dip, I would be sure to find in the third week of June great blue-black nymphalids striped with pure white, gliding and wheeling low above the rich clay which matched the tint of their undersides when they settled and closed their wings. Those were the dung-loving males of what the old Aurelians used to call the Poplar Admirable, or, more exactly, they belonged to its Bucovinan subspecies. As a boy of nine, not knowing that race, I noticed how much our North Russian specimens differed from the Central European form figured in Hofmann, and rashly wrote to Kuznetsov, one of the greatest Russian, or indeed world, lepidopterists of all time, naming my new subspecies “Limenitis populi rossica.” A long month later he returned my description and aquarelle of “rossica Nabokov” with only two words scribbled on the back of my letter: “bucovinensis Hormuzaki.” How I hated Hormuzaki! And how hurt I was when in one of Kuznetsov’s later papers I found a gruff reference to “schoolboys who keep naming minute varieties of the Poplar Nymph!” Undaunted, however, by the populi flop, I “discovered” the following year a “new” moth. That summer I had been collecting assiduously on moonless nights, in a glade of the park, by spreading a bedsheet over the grass and its annoyed glowworms, and casting upon it the light of an acytelene lamp (which, six years later, was to shine on Tamara). Into that arena of radiance, moths would come drifting out of the solid blackness around me, and it was in that manner, upon that magic sheet, that I took a beautiful Plusia (now Phytometra) which, as I saw at once, differed from its closest ally by its mauve-and-maroon (instead of golden-brown) forewings, and narrower bractea mark and was not recognizably figured in any of my books. I sent its description and picture to Richard South, for publication in The Entomologist. He did not know it either, but with the utmost kindness checked it in the British Museum collection—and found it had been described long ago as Plusia excelsa by Kretschmar. I received the sad news, which was most sympathetically worded (“… should be congratulated for obtaining … very rare Volgan thing … admirable figure …”) with the utmost stoicism; but many years later, by a pretty fluke (I know I should not point out these plums to people), I got even with the first discoverer of my moth by giving his own name to a blind man in a novel.

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

  In answer to a question from Judy Woodruff of NBC, the president did not defend his position on strictly moral grounds, but made a class argument instead: “Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t. But I don’t believe that the federal government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, when there is a moral factor involved.” He basically held that the federal government should be able to deny poor women benefits because they were poor. The wealthy could do as they please, and the poor had to be disciplined. Carter was prone to the fatalistic view: poor women deserve their destiny, and coal miners must endure black-lung disease. In effect, the message was: don’t expect equality or compassion if you can’t help yourself. 32 America’s love affair with Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, faded fairly rapidly. By 1979, his declining popularity was summed up in the parable of the swamp rabbit. It was a story the media refused to let go of, in part because the president’s staff refused to release images of the encounter until pressed. Carter told his own tale of the swamp adventure. Paddling a canoe, he saw a wild rabbit chasing his small craft and “baring his teeth.” He thought it was curious, and also funny. Reporters turned it into a modern version of the frontiersman’s vaunted boasting session. Instead of “Daniel Boone wrestling with bears,” one journalist chided, Carter was taking on “Peter Rabbit.” Others had the president sparring with Banzai Bunny, or the killer rabbit of Monty Python fame. It became a metaphor for a wimpy presidential leadership style, feeding the legend of the country boy who turned coward in what should have been familiar terrain —the marshy wilds of the Georgia backcountry. Jimmy Carter was not the hero of Deliverance; he was closer to Jimmy Stewart of Harvey, a feebleminded man unable to prove that the supernatural bunny existed or quash a story that made him look like a country bumpkin. 33 In 1980, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, a man who understood precious little about southern culture, but knew all he needed to about image making. His White House took on the trappings of a glamorous Hollywood set. Reagan could play the Irishman when he visited Ballyporeen, County Tipperary; he could wear a cowboy hat and ride a horse, as he did in one of his best-known films, Santa Fe Trail.

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

  “I’ll tell him we love each other and he won’t be angry for long”, whispered Jessie; but I was doubtful. As she got up to go my naughty hand went up her dress behind and felt her warm, smooth buttocks. Ah, the poignancy of the ineffable sensations; her eyes smiled over her shoulder at me and she was gone—and the sunlight with her. I still remember the sick disappointment as I sat in the boat alone. Life then like school had its chagrins, and as the pleasures were keener, the balks and blights were bitterer. For the first time in my life vague misgivings came over me, a heart-shaking suspicion that everything delightful and joyous in life had to be paid for—I wouldn’t harbor the fear. If I had to pay, I’d pay; after all, the memory of the ecstasy could never be taken away while the sorrow was fleeting. And that faith I still hold. Next day the Chief Steward allotted me a berth in a cabin with an English midshipman of seventeen going out to join his ship in the West Indies. William Ponsonby was not a bad sort, but he talked of nothing but girls from morning till night and insisted that negresses were better than white girls: they were far more passionate, he said. He showed me his sex; excited himself before me, while assuring me he meant to have a Miss LeBreton, a governess who was going out to take up a position in Pittsburg. “But suppose you put her in the family way?” I asked. “That’s not my funeral”, was his answer, and seeing that the cynicism shocked me, he went on to say there was no danger if you withdrew in time. Ponsonby never opened a book and was astoundingly ignorant: he didn’t seem to care to learn anything that hadn’t to do with sex. He introduced me to Miss LeBreton the same evening. She was rather tall, with fair hair and blue eyes, and she praised my reciting. To my wonder she was a woman and pretty, and I could see by the way she looked at Ponsonby that she was more than a little in love with him. He was above middle height, strong and good-tempered, and that was all I could see in him. Miss Jessie kept away the whole evening and when I saw her father on the “upper deck”, he glowered at me and went past without a word. That night I told Ponsonby my story, or part of it, and he declared he would find a sailor to carry a note to Jessie next morning if I’d write it.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  An innocent beginner, I fell into all the traps laid by the singing epithet. Not that I did not struggle. In fact, I was working at my elegy very hard, taking endless trouble over every line, choosing and rejecting, rolling the words on my tongue with the glazed-eyed solemnity of a tea-taster, and still it would come, that atrocious betrayal. The frame impelled the picture, the husk shaped the pulp. The hackneyed order of words (short verb or pronoun—long adjective—short noun) engendered the hackneyed disorder of thought, and some such line as poeta gorestnïe gryozï, translatable and accented as “the poet’s melancholy daydreams,” led fatally to a rhyming line ending in rozï (roses) or beryozï (birches) or grozï (thunderstorms), so that certain emotions were connected with certain surroundings not by a free act of one’s will but by the faded ribbon of tradition. Nonetheless, the nearer my poem got to its completion, the more certain I became that whatever I saw before me would be seen by others. As I focused my eyes upon a kidney-shaped flower bed (and noted one pink petal lying on the loam and a small ant investigating its decayed edge) or considered the tanned midriff of a birch trunk where some hoodlum had stripped it of its papery, pepper-and-salt bark, I really believed that all this would be perceived by the reader through the magic veil of my words such as utrachennïe rozï or zadumchivoy beryozï. It did not occur to me then that far from being a veil, those poor words were so opaque that, in fact, they formed a wall in which all one could distinguish were the well-worn bits of the major and minor poets I imitated. Years later, in the squalid suburb of a foreign town, I remember seeing a paling, the boards of which had been brought from some other place where they had been used, apparently, as the inclosure of an itinerant circus. Animals had been painted on it by a versatile barker; but whoever had removed the boards, and then knocked them together again, must have been blind or insane, for now the fence showed only disjointed parts of animals (some of them, moreover, upside down)—a tawny haunch, a zebra’s head, the leg of an elephant.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Lorde gave these remarks in 1979 after being invited to an academic conference where there was only one panel with a black feminist or lesbian perspective and only two black women presenters. Forty years later, such meager representation is still an issue in many supposedly feminist and inclusive spaces. The essay is pointed, identifying pernicious issues marginalized people face in certain oppressive spaces —having to be the sole representative of their subject position, having to use their intellectual and emotional labor to address oppression instead of any of their other intellectual interests as if the marginalized are only equipped to talk about their marginalization. This is a reality we often lose sight of when we surrender to assimilationist ideas about social change. There is, for example, a strain of feminism that believes if only women act like men, we will achieve the equality we seek. Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire. In Lorde’s body of work, we see her defying this idea of the dominant culture as the default, this idea that she should only write about her oppression, but while doing so she never abandons her subject position. She is empathetic, curious, critical, intuitive. She is as open about her weaknesses as she is about her strengths. She is an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last. We are rather attached to the notion of truth as singular, but the best writing reminds us that truth is complex and subjective. The best writing reminds us that we need not relegate the truth to the narrow perimeters of right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. I have thought about how narrow the perimeters of change really are when we insist on using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. This narrow brand of thinking has only intensified since the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump was elected. Whatever progress it seemed like we were making during the Obama era has retracted sharply, painfully. We live in a very fractured time, one where difference has become weaponized, demonized, and where discourse demands allegiance to extremes instead of nuanced points of view.

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

  Doubtless Lisa, a sensitive and loving daughter, understood this. As a result it was a dreaded secret, a ghost that stood between them that Lisa, during their many hours together, took great pains never to mention. Like many young people from divorced families, Lisa is preoccupied with the morality of her parents’ behavior. I was startled the first time a teenager walked into my office and demanded to know if her mother was a good woman. But as I have since learned, this is a common concern among children of divorce. Siblings spend years speculating over the probability that there were affairs during or after the marriage. As adults, children of divorce are influenced by their moral judgment of who was wronged by the divorce. No-fault divorce is a legal concept. It was never intended to mean no moral responsibility. Children never subscribe to the idea that no one is to blame for the divorce, although they are too protective of themselves and their parents to say so. As young children they blame themselves, and when they dare, they blame one or both parents. But as adolescents in search of moral values, suspicion of infidelity, other mistreatment, or exploitation can be a serious obstacle to developing a close or honest relationship with the parent they think behaved immorally. For thousands of children and parents the undiscussed past hangs heavily over both generations, keeping them emotionally distant from each other. These moral issues are also kept alive by what happens to each parent in the postdivorce years. The discrepancy between her mother’s loneliness and her father’s happiness broke Lisa’s heart. Thus, despite the lack of overt fighting in this family, Lisa has placed herself years later exactly in the middle. Ironically, this is what both parents sought to avoid by “not fighting.” The ways of a child’s heart are unpredictable and cannot be orchestrated from the outside. Children make moral judgments about their parents. They want and need virtuous parents. They are willing to forgive if asked, but when this fails to happen, they find the silence deafening. After finally breaking up with Jim, Lisa told me that she had several boyfriends but no relationships that lasted more than a year or two at the most. “Look at my life,” she said heatedly. “I have a great career and plenty of money. I’ve always had close women friends. I get along with all my parents. But for some reason I don’t understand, my relationships with men are still bad news. I’m getting pretty discouraged. I have nothing at all against marriage, but it’s not for me.” Although Lisa’s message was troubling, her directness was utterly appealing.

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

  True, he freed his family from debt and fed his four children with canned goods, but the homestead model only served to double the labor of families like his, rather than to ease their burdens. 40 The publicity generated by the RA and FSA contributed to unrealistic expectations and time-mangled appearances. Some photographs of Palmerdale, and Penderlea in North Carolina, showed sharp-looking homes, ornamented with children on bicycles; another showed a man with a mule-drawn stone-boat (or it might have been a plow)—an apt scene in an 1840s daguerreotype, perhaps, but out of place in depicting a modern home. Barely hanging on to his symbolic existence, the yeoman had become a quaint (and contrived) artifact of a once- pristine American life. 41 Penderlea Homesteads in North Carolina was showcased as the government’s solution to tenancy. The residents were not wealthy, but they were happy amid “pleasant, congenial, and beautiful surroundings.” But perfect homes did not make perfect communities. Sabotage emerged from within the ranks of residents. Cliques formed in Penderlea, leading some to refuse to participate in community activities and to ridicule those who tried to do things “by the book.” Tensions flared as residents failed—or refused—to adjust to a middle-class environment: detailed records had to be kept, parliamentary rules had to be used at meetings, and household conveniences that wives had never seen before were included in the residences. Bureaucratic missteps explained some of these troubles, but it was the artificially imposed class structure that most disturbed the peace. Middle-class behavior was not easy to teach. 42 An iconic image of Penderlea Homesteads (1936), which oddly juxtaposes a modern home and a mule-drawn stone-boat. Homestead, Penderlea, North Carolina (1936): LC-USF33-000717-M2, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC It took more than a village. Cooperative farming was no part of southern practice, and especially among small (or tenant) farmers. Tugwell understood the problem. Americans in general were not hostile to planned communities, which explains the popularity of Tugwell’s favorite projects. The “Greenbelt towns” of Maryland (just outside Washington, DC), Milwaukee, and Cincinnati attracted an amazing twelve million visitors in 1936–37. Here, federal housing revolutionized methods of prefabrication, laying a strong foundation for the growth of suburbia in the aftermath of World War II. However, the federal government could not bridge the North-South divide when it came to standards of public rural housing; southern projects were administered by southerners who were loath to spend on amenities—such as indoor plumbing.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Eusebius, the great scholar of Caesarea, investigated the position of the various books in the New Testament or on its fringe mid-way through the fourth century. He classes James among the books which are `disputed', and he writes of it: `The first of the epistles called Catholic is said to be his [James']; but it must be noted that some regard it as spurious; and it is certainly true that very few of the ancient writers mention it.' Here again, there is evidence of doubt. Eusebius himself accepted James, but he was well aware that there were those who did not. The turning point in the Greek-speaking church came in AD 367. In that year, Athanasius, the theologian and Bishop of Alexandria, issued his famous Easter Letter in Egypt. Its purpose was to inform his people what books were Scripture and what were not, because apparently their reading had become too wide, or, at least, too many books were being regarded as holy writ. In that Letter, James was included without qualification, and its position from that point onwards was safe. So, in the early Church, no one really questioned the value of James, but in every branch of it the letter was late in emerging and had to go through a period when its right to be considered a New Testament book was under dispute. In fact, the history of James is still to be seen in its position in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1546, the Council of Trent once and for all laid down the Roman Catholic Bible. A list of books was given to which none could be added and from which none could be subtracted, and which had to be read in the Vulgate version and in no other. The books were divided into two classes: those which were proto-canonical, that is to say, those which had been unquestioningly accepted from the beginning; and those which were deutero -canonical, that is to say, those which only gradually won their way into the New Testament. Although the Roman Catholic Church never had any doubts about James, it is nonetheless in the second class that it is included. Luther and James In our own day, it is true to say that James, at least for most people, does not occupy a position in the forefront of the New Testament. Few would mention it in the same breath as John or Romans, or Luke or Galatians. There is still for many a kind of reservation about it. Why should that be? It cannot have to do with the doubt about James in the early Church, for the history of the New Testament books in those distant days is not known to many people in the modern Church. The reason lies in this.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 119 faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected. I took my place in the mail line behind two girls who had decided that they wanted to stay on in Europe and who were hoping to find jobs with the American government in Germany. One of them had fallen in love with a Swiss boy; so I gathered, from the low, intense, and troubled conversation she was having with her friend. The friend was urging her to 'put her foot down'—on what principle I could not dis- cover; and the girl in love kept nodding her head, but more in perplexity than agreement. She had the choked and halting air of someone who has something more to say but finds no way of saying it. Tou mustn't be a fool about this,' the friend was saying. 1 know, I know,' said the girl. One had the impression that, though she certainly did not wish to be a fool, she had lost one definition of the word and might never be able to find another. There were two letters for me, one from my father and one from Hella. Hella had been sending me only postcards for quite awhile. I was afraid her letter might be important and I did not want to read it. I opened the letter from my father first. I read it, standing just beyond reach of the sunlight, beside the end- lessly swinging double doors. Dear Butch, my father said, aren't you ever 120 James Baldwin coming home? DorCt think Ym only being sel- fish but it's true Td like to see you, I think you have been away long enough, God knows I don't know what you're doing over there, and you don't write enough for me even to guess. But my guess is you're going to be sorry one of these fine days that you stayed over there, looking at your navel, and let the world pass you by. There's nothing over there for you. You're as American as pork and beans, though maybe you don't want to think so anymore. And maybe you won't mind my saying that you're getting a little old for studying, after all, if that's what you're doing. You're pushing thirty, I'm getting along, too, and you're all I've got. I'd like to see you. You keep asking me to send you your money and I guess you think I'm being a bastard about it, I'm not trying to starve you out and you know if you really need anything, I'll be the first to help you but I really don't think I'd be doing you a favor by letting you spend what little money you've got over there and then coming home to nothing. What the hell are you doing? Let your old man in on the secret, can't you? You may not believe this, but once I was a young man, too.