Fear

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

  March 18, 1984 En route to St. Croix, Virgin Islands I’ve written nothing of the intensity with which I’ve lived the last few weeks. The hepatologist who tried to frighten me into an immediate liver biopsy without even listening to my objections and questions. Seeing the growth in my liver on the CAT scan, doing a face-off with death, again. Not again, just escalated. This mass in my liver is not a primary liver tumor, so if it is malignant, it’s most likely metastasized breast cancer. Not curable. Arrestable, not curable. This is a very bad dream, and I’m the only person who can wake myself up. I had a talk before I left with Peter, my breast surgeon. He says that if it is liver cancer, with the standard treatments—surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—we’re talking four or five years at best. Without treatment, he says, maybe three or four. In other words, western medicine doesn’t have a very impressive track record with cancer metastasized to the liver. In the light of those facts, and from all the reading I’ve been doing these past weeks (thank the goddess for Barnes & Noble’s medical section), I’ve made up my mind not to have a liver biopsy. It feels like the only reasonable decision for me. I’m asymptomatic now except for a vicious gallbladder. And I can placate her. There are too many things I’m determined to do that I haven’t done yet. Finish the poem “Outlines.” See what europe’s all about. Make Deotha Chambers’ story live. If I have this biopsy and it is malignant, then a whole course of action will be established simply by their intrusion into the suspect site. Yet if this tumor is malignant, I want as much good time as possible, and their treatments aren’t going to make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of extended time. But they’ll make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of my general condition and how I live my life. On the other hand, if this is benign, I believe surgical intervention into fatty tissue of any kind can start the malignant process in what otherwise might remain benign for a long time. I’ve been down that road before. I’ve decided this is a chance I have to take. If this were another breast tumor, I’d go for surgery again, because the organ comes off. But with the tie- in between estrogens, fat cells, and malignancies I’ve been reading about, cutting into my liver seems to me to be too much of a risk for too little return in terms of time. And it might be benign, some little aberrant joke between my liver and the universe. Twenty-two hours of most days I don’t believe I have liver cancer. Most days.

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

  The Boss produced a glass of whisky and told me to drink it: I didn’t want to take it; but he insisted and I drank it off. “Did it burn?” he asked: “No, ’twas just like water!” I replied and noticed that the Boss and Reece exchanged a meaning look. At once the Boss declared I must walk up and down and each taking an arm they walked me solemnly round and round for half an hour. At the end of that time I was half asleep; the Boss stopped and gave me another jorum of whisky: for a moment it awakened me, then I began to get numb again and deaf. Again they gave me whisky: I revived but in five minutes I sagged down and begged them to let me sleep. “Sleep be d—d!” cried the Boss, “you’d never wake. Pull yourself together,” and again I was given whisky. Then, dimly I began to realise that I must use my will-power and so I started to jump about and shake off the overpowering drowsiness. Another two or three drinks of whisky and much frisking about occupied the next couple of hours, when suddenly I became aware of a sharp, intense pang of pain in my left thumb. “Now you can sleep,” said the Boss, “if you’re minded to; I guess whisky has wiped out the rattler!” The pain in my burnt thumb was acute: I found too I had a headache for the first time in my life. But Peggy gave me hot water to drink and the headache soon disappeared. In a day or two I was as well as ever, thanks, to the vigorous regimen of the Boss; in the course of a single year we lost two young men just through the little prairie snakes that seemed so insignificant. The days passed quickly till we came near the first towns in southern Texas: then every man wanted his arrears of salary from the Boss and proceeded to shave and doll up in wildest excitement. Charlie was like a madman. Half an hour after reaching the chief saloon in the town, everyone of them save Bent was crazy drunk and intent on finding some girl with whom to spend the night. I didn’t even go to the saloon with them and begged Charlie in vain not to play the fool. “That’s what I live for”, he shouted, and raced off.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  While I watched this movie I was also thinking about the course of my own life, the paths I feel bound for inside myself, the way of life that feels most real to me. And I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen—no matter how difficult—the world as I see it, people as I feel them. And I wonder what I will have to pay someday for that privilege, and in whose coin? Will those forces which serve non-life in the name of power and profit kill me too, or merely dismember me in the eyes of whoever can use what I do? When I stand in the radiance of a place like the Sapphire Sapphos dinner, with the elegant food and abundance of love and beautiful dark women, when I stand in that moment of sweetness, I sometimes become almost afraid. Afraid of their warmth and loving, as if that same loving warmth might doom me. I know this is not so, but it can feel like it. As if so long as I remained too different from my own time and surroundings I was safe, if terribly lonely. But now that I am becoming less lonely and more loved, I am also becoming more visible, and therefore more vulnerable. Malcolm saying to Martin in the film, “I love you, Martin, and we are both dead men.” February 9, 1984 New York City So. No doubt about where we are in the world’s story. It has just cost $32,000 to complete a government-commissioned study that purports to show there is no rampant hunger in the U.S.A. I wonder if they realize rampant means aggressive. So. The starving old women who used to sit in broken-down rooming houses waiting for a welfare check now lie under park benches and eat out of garbage bins. “I only eat fruit,” she mumbled, rummaging through the refuse bin behind Gristedes supermarket, while her gnarled Black hands carefully cut away the rotted parts of a cantaloupe with a plastic Burger King knife. February 18, 1984 Ohio How does it feel, Ms. L., to be a fifty-year-old Black woman who is still bleeding! Cheers to the years! Doing what I like to do best.

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

  His nurses had basically said as much, alerting us to “expect the unexpected,” which is something we were already growing used to. His once-flush complexion was now a constant state of pale. His previously athletic body had withered down to nearly half his regular body weight. Seemingly overnight, he’d started retaining fluid in his abdomen, something the lean golfer in him would have hated in “normal” times. For the physical changes alone, death by cancer can be a mindfuck. Patients can go from “bad” to “actively dying” in the blink of an eye. Whatever happened, I was not about to let him leave this planet listening to the earsplitting sounds of a piston hitting a striker plate up to 1,800 times per minute. If you’ve ever watched as a loved one gets ready to leave this world, you can understand the ferocious mama bear instincts that instantly took over me. Dad does not need construction right now. He needs Enya! (Or maybe I needed Enya.) His pain had risen to levels that required round-the-clock morphine. Though I couldn’t experience his physical agony firsthand, his pain sure felt like my pain every time I heard him groan. In the coming days, he would no longer be able to communicate with us. His language would go from a few words to hand squeezes to nothing. Step-by-step, he walked closer to his transition. I watched helplessly as Dad straddled an unfamiliar divide between holding on and completely letting go of control. For me, being in control has always been like wrapping myself in a warm, safe woobie. I dress-rehearse worstcase scenarios all the time, just to make sure that I’m never caught off guard. Yeah, I’m that person. But you know what totally ambushed me as Dad’s days started to dwindle? How there was absolutely nothing I could do to protect him. No amount of wishful thinking (If I never drop f-bombs again, maybe Dad will suddenly get better) or desperate prayer (Dude, can we work with the timeline here?) would help me stop his organs from slowly shutting down, right before my eyes. What I could control, though, was putting an immediate stop to the thunderous mechanical appliances shaking our house and messing up our hospice zen. Twenty seconds later, I was marching past the “Danger. No Trespassing” sign on the neighbor’s lawn and approaching the crew of dust-covered construction workers. “Excuse me? Excuuuse me! Hi. Hello there!” I shouted to no one in particular. “Could you please stop jackhammering? My dad is dying in the house next door. He doesn’t have much time left, and I need you to help me make sure that a jackhammer isn’t the last sound he hears.” “Uh . . .” They looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and disbelief, before a brawny dude with a gentle soul softly said, “You bet, ma’am. Sorry.” Then there was quiet. Ahhh . . . “May God bless you, fellas!” I yelled on my way out.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-american festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia—self-determination—the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima—collective work and responsibility—the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together. Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 53. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign. But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action. In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Superimposed skull-like across her trim square shoulders dioxin-smear the stench of napalm upon growing cabbage the chug and thud of Corsairs in the foreground advance like a blush across her cheeks up the unpaved road outside Grenville, Grenada An M–16 bayonet gleams slashing away the wooden latch of a one-room slat house in Soubise mopping upweapons searchpockets of resistance ImeldayoungBlackin a tattered headcloth standing to one side on her left foot takes notice one wrist behind her hip the other palm-up beneath her chinwatching armed men in moss-green jumpsuits turn out her shack watchingmashed-up nutmeg trees the trampled cocoa pods graceless broken stalks of almost ripe banana her sister has been missing now ten days Beside the shattered waterpipe downroad Granny Lou’s consolations If it was only kill they’d wanted to kill we many more would have died look at Lebanon so as wars go this was an easy one But for we here who never woke up before to see plane shitting fire into chimney it was a damn awful lot! The baby’s father buried without his legs burned bones in piles along the road “any Cubans around here, girl? any guns?” singed tree-ferns curl and jerk in the mortar rhythms strumming up from shoreuphill a tree explodes showering the house with scraps of leaves the sweetish smell of unseen rotting flesh. For a while there was almost enough waterenough riceenough quinine the child tugs at her waistband but she does not move quickly she has heard how nervous these green men are with their grenades and sweaty helmets who offer cigarettes and chocolate but no bread free batteries and herpes but no doctors no free buses to the St. Georges market no reading lessons in the brilliant afternoons bodies strewn along Telescope Beach these soldiers say are foreigners but she has seen the charred bits of familiar cloth and knows what to say to any invader with an M–16 rifle held ready while searching her cooking shed overturning the empty pots with his apologetic grin Imelda steps forward the child pressing against her knees “no guns, man, no guns here. we glad you come. you carry water?”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign. But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action. In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  *Eh hien," he said, *il te plait?' *CommentT I said, I really was not sure I had heard him right, though the bright, bright eyes, looking, it seemed, at something amusing within the recess of my skull, did not leave much room for doubt. Tou like him— the barman?' I did not know what to do or say. It seemed impossible to hit him; it seemed impossible to get angry. It did not seem real, he did not seem real. Besides—no matter what I said, those eyes would mock me with it. I said, as drily as I could: 'How does that concern you?' *But it concerns me not at all, darling. Je rrCen fou: Then please get the hell away from me.' He did not move at once, but smiled at me again. *ll est dangereux, tu sais. And for a boy like you—he is very dangerous.' I looked at him. I almost asked him what he meant. 'Go to hell,' I said, and turned my back. 'Oh, no,' he said— and I looked at him again. He was laughing, showing all his teeth— there were not many. 'Oh, no,' he said, 1 go not to hell,' and he clutched his crucifix with one large hand. 'But you, my dear friend—I fear that you 56 James Baldwin shall bum in a very hot fire/ He laughed again. 'Oh, such firer He touched his head. 'Here/ And he writhed, as though in torment. 'Everywhere.' And he touched his heart. 'And here/ And he looked at me with malice and mockery and something else; he looked at me as though I were very far away. 'Oh, my poor friend, so young, so strong, so handsome—will you not buy me a drink?' "Va te faire foutre/ His face crumpled in the sorrow of Infants and of very old men—the sorrow, also, of cer- tain, aging actresses who were renowned in their youth for their fragile, childlike beauty. The dark eyes narrowed in spite and fury and the scarlet mouth turned down like the mask of tragedy. Taura du chagrin/ he said. Tou will be very unhappy. Remember that I told you so/ And he straightened, as though he were a princess and moved, flaming, away through the crowd. Then Jacques spoke, at my elbow. 'Everyone in the bar/ he said. Is talking about how beauti- fully you and the barman have hit it off.' He gave me a radiant and vindictive smile. 1 trust there has been no confusion?' I looked down at him. I wanted to do some- thing to his cheerful, hideous, worldly face which would make it impossible for him ever again to smile at anyone the way he was smUing at me. Then I wanted to get out of this bar, out GIOVANNI'S ROOM 57 into the air, perhaps to find Hella, my suddenly so sorely menaced girl. There's been no confusion/ I snapped. 'Don't you go getting confused, either/

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

  He allowed non-citizens in the provinces to worship himself, but he did not permit citizens to do so; and he made no attempt to enforce this worship. (2) Tiberius (AD 14-37) could not halt Caesar-worship. He forbade temples to be built and priests to be appointed for his own worship; and, in a letter to Gython, a Laconian city, he definitely refused divine honours for himself. So, far from enforcing Caesar-worship, he actively discouraged it. (3) Caligula (AD 37-41), the next emperor, was an epileptic, a madman and a megalomaniac. He insisted on divine honours. He attempted to enforce Caesar-worship even on the Jews, who had always been and who always were to remain exempt from it. He planned to place his own image in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, a step which would certainly have provoked unyielding rebellion. Mercifully, he died before he could carry out his plans. But, in his reign, we have an episode when Caesar-worship became an imperial demand. (4) Caligula was succeeded by Claudius (AD 41-54), who completely reversed his insane policy. He wrote to the governor of Egypt - there were 1,ooo,ooo Jews in Alexandria - fully approving the Jewish refusal to call the emperor a god and granting them full liberty to enjoy their own worship. On his accession to the throne, he wrote to Alexandria saying: `I deprecate the appointment of a high priest to me and the erection of temples, for I do not wish to be offensive to my contemporaries, and I hold that sacred fanes [temples] and the like have been by all ages attributed to the immortal gods as peculiar honours.' (5) Nero (AD 54-68) did not take his own divinity seriously and did nothing to insist on Caesar-worship. It is true that he persecuted the Christians; but this was not because they would not worship him, but because he had to find scapegoats for the great fire of Rome. (6) On the death of Nero, there were three emperors in eighteen months - Galba, Otho and Vitellius - and in such a time of chaos the question of Caesar- worship did not arise. ('7) The next two emperors, Vespasian (AD 69-79) and Titus (AD 79-81), were wise rulers, who made no insistence on Caesar-worship. (8) The coming of Domitian (AD 81-96) brought a complete change. He was a devil. He was the worst of all things - a cold-blooded persecutor. With the exception of Caligula, he was the first emperor to take his divinity seriously and to demand Caesar-worship. The difference was that Caligula was an insane devil; Domitian was a sane devil, which is much more terrifying. He erected a monument to `the deified Titus, son of the deified Vespasian'. He began a campaign of bitter persecution against all who would not worship the ancient gods - `the atheists', as he called them.

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

  The Republicans were mimicking the pride of the winners of the “fitter family” contests held at county fairs in the early twentieth century. A reporter joked that Jon Huntsman’s and Mitt Romney’s children should breed, “creating a super-race of astonishingly beautiful Mormons.” There remains in America a cultural desire to breed one’s “own kind.” As with the nepotistic practices that continue in a variety of fields, class is reproduced in ways that are not dissimilar to the past. 4 Some things never change. More than one generation has deluded itself by buying into the notion of an American dream. A singular faith exists today that is known and embraced as American exceptionalism, but it dates back centuries to the projections made and policies put in place when the island nation of Great Britain began to settle the American continent. It was Richard Hakluyt’s fantastic literature that graduated to a broader colonial drive for continental domination. The same ideology fueled the theories of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. (Meanwhile, London economist William Petty’s idea of political arithmetic gave force to a long fascination with demographic growth.) Teddy Roosevelt had a dream, too, of rewarding parents with large families, encouraging eugenically sound marriages, and recognizing the American as the healthiest member of the Anglo-Saxon family. This brings us to the slavery/free labor corollary. It was James Oglethorpe in Georgia who first put into practice a sensitive and sensible idea: allowing slavery to thrive would retard economic opportunity and undermine social mobility for average white men and their families. In this way, racial dominance was intertwined with class dominance in the southern states, and the two could never be separated as long as a white ruling elite held sway over politics and rigged the economic system to benefit the few. We now know, of course, that slavery and repression of African-American talent was tragically wrong. So why do we continue to ignore the pathological character of class-centered power relations as part of the American republic’s political inheritance? If the American dream were real, upward mobility would be far more in evidence. • • • Let’s get it right, then. Because there was never a free market in land, the past saw as much downward as upward mobility. Historically, Americans have confused social mobility with physical mobility. The class system tracked across the land with the so-called pioneering set. We need to acknowledge that fact. Generally, it was the all-powerful speculators who controlled the distribution of good land to the wealthy and forced the poor squatter off his land. Without a visible hand, markets did not at any time, and do not now, magically pave the way for the most talented to be rewarded; the well connected were and are preferentially treated. Liberty is a revolving door, which explains the reality of downward mobility. The door ushers some in while it escorts others out into the cold.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better. This turns out to have been “the situation” for most of us. And yet: And still: Despite all evidence: Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have: Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply: Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity: Despite all that: Nonetheless: That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different “it,” did not until recently occur to me. S 27 omething happened to me early in the summer. Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon. I still have no idea what time it was when it happened, or why it was that it happened, or even in any exact way what it was that happened. All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness. The diagnostic term for what had happened (I was to learn before the night ended) was “syncope,” fainting, but discussions of syncope, centering as they did on “pre-syncope symptoms” (palpitations, light-headedness, dizziness, blurred or tunnel vision), none of which I could identify, seemed not to apply. I had been alone in the apartment. There were thirteen telephones in the apartment, not one of which was at that moment within reach. I remember lying on the floor and trying to visualize the unreachable telephones, count them off room by room. I remember forgetting one room and counting off the telephones a second and then a third time. This was dangerously soothing. I remember deciding in the absence of any prospect of help to go back to sleep for a while, on the floor, the blood pooling around me. I remember pulling a quilt down from a wicker chest, the only object I could reach, and folding it under my head. I remember nothing else until I woke a second time and managed on this attempt to summon enough traction to pull myself up. At which point I called a friend.

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

  In particular, he launched his hatred against the Jews and the Christians. When he arrived in the theatre with his empress, the crowd were urged to rise and shout: `All hail to our Lord and his Lady!' He behaved as if he himself were a god. He informed all provincial governors that government announcements and proclamations must begin: `Our Lord and God Domitian commands ...' Everyone who addressed him in speech or in writing must begin: `Lord and God.' Here is the background of Revelation. All over the Empire, men and women had to call Domitian god - or die. Caesarworship was the deliberate policy; all must say: `Caesar is Lord.' There was no escape. What were the Christians to do? What hope did they have? Not many of them were wise, and not many of them were powerful. They had no influence or status. Against them had risen the might of Rome, which no nation had ever resisted. They were confronted with the choice - Caesar or Christ. It was to encourage men and women in such times that Revelation was written. John did not shut his eyes to the terrors; he saw dreadful things, and he saw still more dreadful things on the way; but beyond them he saw glory for those who defied Caesar for the love of Christ. Revelation comes from one of the most heroic ages in all the history of the Christian Church. It is true that Domitian's successor Nerva (AD 96-8) repealed the savage laws; but the damage was done, the Christians were outlaws, and Revelation is a clarion call to be faithful to death in order to win the crown of life. The Book Worth Studying We cannot shut our eyes to the difficulty of Revelation. It is the most difficult book in the Bible; but its study brings infinite rewards, for it contains the blazing faith of the Christian Church in the days when life was an agony and people expected the end of the heavens and the earth as they knew them but still believed that beyond the terror was the glory and above human raging was the power of God. Scripture Index Subject Index

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

  The Mother’s RoleIN LEAVING VIOLENT marriages, many women manage to escape. Unfortunately, their children continue to be trapped by internal images and memories of violence. Direct intervention with such children is critical. Here a mother has a very important responsibility in helping her children understand why she is leaving the abusive relationship. Her tender loving feelings will go far in soothing the trauma that they have witnessed. But even this is not enough. After she musters the courage to leave and faces the rigors of reconstructing her life, she owes her children the story of what really happened. It is their history as well as hers. Through telling it, she needs to convey the moral message of why violence is not acceptable. Most of all, she needs to help her children understand what love between a man and a woman is about and how it can go awry, how it can lead to hurt and eventually to destruction. Hard as it is, she needs to explain to her daughters, when they are old enough to understand, how she was misled. Many women who marry violent men are aware of the behavior during courtship. One of the wives in our study was beaten with a whip during her engagement and married the man anyway. She hoped that her love would change him and help curb his violent temper, but of course it did not. He carried the whip into the marriage. Other women have warning signs—glimpses of a violent temper, paranoid jealousy that seems flattering during courtship, details of a family history of violence—but they fail to listen to their intuition and brush away their doubts. Mothers also have an important obligation to their sons. One woman made the serious mistake of saying to her son, “Your father beat me and you will beat your wife.” This message haunted him for years, casting a dark cloud on all his relationships with women. What if her prediction came true? Sons need special guidance from their mothers that says violence is the opposite of true manliness. It destroys the relationships that people want and value. Most of all, mothers need to tell their sons and daughters that they are not fated to follow in violent footsteps, as abuser or victim, and that they are free to make better choices for themselves. (We’ll see how Larry and his sister dealt with their violent past in terms of their future relationships in coming chapters.)

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

  If parents decide on divorce, they have to find the courage to accept the anger and sadness of their children and not deny it or slough it off or—worst of all—drive it underground. How can a child’s suffering be so invisible in a family where both parents are trying their best to ease the divorce for the child? We know how parents are preoccupied with the huge task of reorganizing their own lives and reshaping their relationships. But at the same time, both parents fully expect their children to accept the immense changes in their lives without protest and without serious distress. If the truth be told (and it’s not a truth that people want to hear) parents want their children to conform and not give them any trouble. Many parents are worried about the rightness of their decision and don’t want their children to make them feel even worse. The problem of numb feelings among grown children of divorce is serious and more widespread than I initially realized. A thirty-two-year-old scientist put it very clearly in a letter: “It’s taken me fifteen years to acknowledge that I felt anything during my parents’ divorce. In fact, it’s taken a chunk of my life to let myself feel anything at all—especially anger, pain, fear, and sexual pleasure.” An architect in his late thirties said, “I frequently spend time not investing in relationships. I keep myself back from emotional involvement. When people first meet me, they think of me as open. Only the people who are close to me know this about me. I’m still the schoolboy I was when they broke up. I’m afraid to express myself and too vulnerable to feel. I’ve learned that lots of times it’s better not to feel at all. Feelings can hurt. It’s better not to have them.” The numbness reported by children of divorce who were raised in families that did not fight points to a troubling conclusion. The “don’t fight” rule does not protect children from feeling anxious and worried when they grow up and go in search of love and intimacy. In this arena, they are no different from children raised in high-conflict families. Thus we are wrong to tell parents that not fighting will protect their children against the long-term effects of divorce that come into play in adulthood. The safety net that good postdivorce coparenting provides for children is irrelevant in adulthood. The sense that a faithful, lasting, and loving relationship remains out of reach is a residue of divorce that is unrelated to the conflict at the breakup.

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

  As soon as I got to Liverpool, I drove to the Adelphi Hotel and looked out the steamers and soon found one that charged only four pounds for a steerage passage to New York, and to my delight this steamer was starting next day about two o’clock. By four o’clock I had booked my passage and paid for it. The Clerk said something or other about bedding; but I paid no attention. For just on entering his office I had seen an advertisement of “The Two Roses”, a “romantic drama” to be played that night, and I was determined to get a seat and see it. Do you know what courage that act required? More than was needed to cut loose from everyone I loved and go to America. For my father was a Puritan of the Puritans and had often spoken of the theatre as the “open door to Hell.” I had lost all belief in Hell or Heaven, but a cold shiver went through me as I bought my ticket and time and again in the next four hours I was on the point of forfeiting it without seeing the play. What if my father was right? I couldn’t help the fear that came over me like a vapour. I was in my seat as the curtain rose and sat for three hours enraptured; it was just a romantic love-story but the heroine was lovely and affectionate and true and I was in love with her at first sight. When the play was over I went into the street, resolved to keep myself pure for some girl like the heroine: no moral lesson I have received before or since can compare with that given me by that first night in a theatre. The effect lasted for many a month and made self-abuse practically impossible to me ever afterwards. The preachers may digest this fact at their leisure. The next morning I had a good breakfast at the Adelphi Hotel and before ten was on board the steamer, had stowed away my trunk and taken my station by my sleeping place traced in chalk on the deck. About noon the Doctor came round, a young man of good height with a nonchalant manner, reddish hair, roman nose and easy, unconventional ways. “Whose is this berth?” he asked, pointing to mine. “Mine, Sir” I replied. “Tell your father or mother”, he said curtly, “that you must have a mattress like this”, and he pointed to one, “and two blankets”, he added. “Thank you, Sir”, I said and shrugged my shoulders at his interference. In another hour he came round again. “Why is there no mattress here and no blanket?” he asked. “Because I don’t need ’em”, I replied. “You must have them”, he barked, “it’s the rule, d’ye understand?” and he hurried on with his inspection. In half an hour he was back again. “You haven’t the mattress yet”, he snarled. “I don’t want a mattress”, I replied.

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

  One of the wives in our study was beaten with a whip during her engagement and married the man anyway. She hoped that her love would change him and help curb his violent temper, but of course it did not. He carried the whip into the marriage. Other women have warning signs—glimpses of a violent temper, paranoid jealousy that seems flattering during courtship, details of a family history of violence—but they fail to listen to their intuition and brush away their doubts. Mothers also have an important obligation to their sons. One woman made the serious mistake of saying to her son, “Your father beat me and you will beat your wife.” This message haunted him for years, casting a dark cloud on all his relationships with women. What if her prediction came true? Sons need special guidance from their mothers that says violence is the opposite of true manliness. It destroys the relationships that people want and value. Most of all, mothers need to tell their sons and daughters that they are not fated to follow in violent footsteps, as abuser or victim, and that they are free to make better choices for themselves. (We’ll see how Larry and his sister dealt with their violent past in terms of their future relationships in coming chapters.) Unfortunately, many women in this position run into the “don’t criticize” policies of our legal system and are constrained from giving their children the moral guidance they need. Most judges prefer “the friendly parent” who encourages frequent and regular contact with the other parent. If a parent complains about the misbehavior of the other, attorneys argue that the offending parent is deliberately trying to alienate the children against their client. One woman whose husband held a loaded pistol to her head during the marriage was faulted in the custody report for not encouraging her child to have a friendly relationship with her father. A serious unintended result of the “don’t criticize” rule is that it’s very difficult for a parent with serious grievances to tell the child what really happened or to defend the child’s interests in court or with a mediator. As a consequence, children are kept from learning the moral implications of the breakup and they are unprotected. These policies, which reflect the court’s giving priority to parents’ rights, are further damaging to already traumatized children. Alliances ONE OTHER SCENARIO can play out after divorce in families where there is high conflict or where enmity overshadows good sense. In these cases one parent and one child form an alliance, with all their energy and criticism aimed viciously against the second parent. Larry and his father formed such an alliance. They were bound by their shared feeling that Larry’s mother had betrayed her family capriciously and that she, like all women, was a fool. What brings these parent-child alliances about? How long do they last?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.” In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson —that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-american festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia—self-determination—the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima—collective work and responsibility—the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  202 James Baldwin ing, in a barge tied up along the river. News- paper speculation had already placed him in Argentina, so it was a great shock to discover that he had got no farther than the Seine. This lack, on his part, of 'dash' did nothing to endear him to the public. He was a criminal, Giovanni, of the dullest kind, a bungler; robbery, for ex- ample, had been insisted on as the motive for Guillaume's murder; but, though Giovanni had taken all the money Guillaume had in his pock- ets, he had not touched the cash register and had not even suspected, apparently, that Guil- laume had over one hundred thousand francs hidden in another wallet at the bottom of his closet. The money he had taken from Guillairaie was still in his pockets when he was caught; he had not been able to spend it. He had not eaten for two or three days and was weak and pale and unattractive. His face was on newsstands all over Paris. He looked young, bewildered, ter- rij&ed, depraved; as though he could not believe that he, Giovanni, had come to this, had come to this and would go no further, his short road ending in a common knife. He seemed already to be rearing back, every inch of his flesh re- volting before that icy vision. And it seemed, as it had seemed so many times, that he looked to me for help. The newsprint told the unforgiving world how Giovanni repented, cried for mercy, called on God, wept that he had not meant to do it. And told us, too, in delicious detail, how he had done it: but not why. Why was too black GIOVANNI'S ROOM 203 for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Gio- vanni to tell.

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

  There’s just something about writing this stuff out that gives me perspective. The goal here is to give your inner critic kinder thoughts to ponder so you can take care of your feelings. Investigate the facts: Remember, both fear and anxiety are very imaginative. The stories they tell can be over-the-top. Be a detective and look for the evidence. For example, if Neighbor Nan didn’t invite you to her party, could there be a valid reason that has nothing to do with her suddenly hating you? More often than not, you won’t find any shred of evidence to back up your anxiety- and fear-driven stories. And if you do find that there was some truth, it’s probably nowhere close to as dire as what your imagination would have you believe. Here’s an example of how this has played out in my life: Perhaps my tumors grew a little between scans, but did they multiply like horny bunnies? No. Have they ever? No. So what’s the chance they will this time? The facts after 20 years of living with cancer are pretty consistent. But in times of high stress, my imagination still needs to be reminded. Questions for you to ponder as you investigate the facts: Do you know for certain that the scary movie you’re playing in your mind will happen? Is there evidence to the contrary? Or is there someone you can call to verify facts? Could variables such as timing be in play? Or perhaps there is a more benign reason for what you’ve observed (for example, the tumor in my arm that turned out to not be cancerous)? And if the worst-case scenario did happen, could you handle it? How have you been able to handle difficult situations successfully in the past? Bonus tip: Give the scary movie you’re playing in your mind a funny or absurd title. Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Winds Up Fine—and Accidentally Loving Life Oops, I Farted in Yoga in Front of My New Partner and Now My Life Is Over I’m Gonna Fall Flat on My Face and Become a Social Outcast: A Musical Humor disarms us. It breaks the tension, creating some distance between us and the unhelpful thoughts that threaten to consume us. It can even make us smile, God forbid . Get out of your head and into your body: Research shows that it’s hard to solve the problems of the mind with the mind. When we’re flooded with fear and anxiety, it’s really challenging to mentally strong-arm ourselves back to calm. We need help changing our mental channel so we can choose a better path. No shame in that game. Have you watched a dog go into brain rot—incessantly barking or licking a hot spot? Changing that behavior requires changing their physical state, perhaps getting the dog to play ball, go for a walk, or otherwise redirect their energy.