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 Collected Essays (1998)

  I am suggesting that the nature of the lies the Christian Church has always helplessly told about me are only a reflection of the lies the Christian Church has always helplessly told itself, to itself, about itself. I am saying that when a person, when a people, are able to persuade themselves that another group or breed of men are less than men, they themselves become less than men and have made it almost impossible for themselves to confront reality and to change it. If I deny what I know to be true, if I deny that that white child next to me is simply another child, and if I pretend that that child, because its colour is white, de serves destruction, I have begun the destruction of my own personality and I am beginning the destruction of my own children. I think that if we have a future, we must now begin to tremble for some of the children of some of our contem poraries. I tremble fr ankly for the children of all white South Africans, who will not deserve their fate. I tremble for that day that is coming when some non-white nations, for example Vietnam, are able to pay the West back-they have a long and bloody bill to pay. I tremble when I wonder if there is left in the Christian civilizations (and only these civilizations can an swer this question-! cannot) the moral energy, the spiritual daring, to atone, to repent, to be born again; if it is possible, if there is enough leaven in the loaf, to cause us to discard our actual and historical habits, to cause us to take our places with that criminal Jew, for He was a criminal, who was put to death by Rome between two thieves, because He claimed to be the Son of God. That claim was a revelation and a rev olution because it means that we are all the sons of God. That is a challenge, that's the hope. It is only by attempting to face that challenge that one can begin to expand and transform God's nature which has to be forever an act of creation on the part of every human being. It is important to bear in mind that we arc responsible for our soul's salvation, not the Bishop, not the priest, not my mother, ultimately it is each 756 OTHER ESSAYS man's responsibility alone in his own chamber before his own gods to deal with his health and his sickness, to deal with his lite and his death. When people cannot do this with them selves, they very quickly cannot do it with others.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I found myself incapable of saying a word, not because I was afraid I would cry but because I was afraid I would vomit. And I did not think any longer ofthe city of Paris but my mind flew back to that home from which I had fled . I was sure that I would never see it 11 0 NO TES. OF A NA TIVE SON any more. And it must have seemed to me that my flight from home was the cruelest trick I had ever played on myself, since it had led me here, down to a lower point than any I could ever in my lite have imagined-lower, tar, than anything I had seen in that Harlem which I had so hated and so loved, the escape from which had soon become the greatest direction of my lite. Ati:er we had been here an hour or so a functionary came and opened the door and called out our names. And I was sure that this was my release. But I was handcuffed again and led out of the Prefecture into the streets-it was dark now, it was still raining-and before the steps of the Prefec ture stood the great police wagon, doors facing me, wide open. The handcuffs were taken off, I entered the wagon, which was peculia rly constructed. It was divided by a narrow aisle, and on each side of the aisle was a series of narrow doors. These doors opened on a narrow cubicle, beyond which was a door which opened onto another narrow cubicle: three or tour cubicles, each private, with a locking door. I was placed in one of them; I remember there was a small vent just above my head which let in a little light. The door of my cubicle was locked from the outside. I had no idea where this wagon was taking me and, as it began to move, I began to cry. I suppose I cried all the way to prison, the prison called Fresnes, which is twelve kilometers outside of Paris. For reasons I have no way at all of understanding, prisoners whose last initial is A, B, or C are always sent to Fresnes; everybody else is sent to a prison called, rather cynically it seems to me, La Sante. I will, obviously, never be allowed to enter La Sante, but I was told by people who certainly seemed to know that it was infinitely more unbearable than Fresnes. This arouses in me, until today, a positive storm of curiosity concerning what I promptly began to think of as The Other Prison. My colleague in crime, occurring lower in the alpha bet, had been sent there and I contcss that the minute he was gone I missed him. I missed him because he was not French and because he was the only person in the world who knew that the story I told was true.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I feared, feared-like a thief in the night, as one of my brothers would put it-to connect all this with my father and mother and everyone I knew, and with myself, and to connect all this with black Uncle Tom: no more than I had wished to be that fleeing fugitive on that moving train did I desire to endure his destiny or meet his end. Uncle Tom really believed vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, for he believed in the Lord, as I flattered myself I did not: this inconvenient faith (de scribed, furthermore, by a white woman) obscured the fact that Tom allowed himself to be murdered for refusing to dis close the road taken by a runaway slave. Because Uncle Tom would not take vengeance into his own hands, he was not a hero for me. Heroes, as far as I could then sec, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection: I despised and feared those heroes because they did take vcn gcancc into their own hands. They thought that vengeance was theirs to take. This difficult coin did not cease to spin, it had neither heads nor tails: for what white people took into their hands could scarcely even be called vengeance, it was something less and something more. The Scottsboro boys, for example-for the Scottsboro Case has begun-were certainly innocent of anything requiring vengeance. My father's young est son by his first marriage, nine years older than I, who had vanished from our lives, might have been one of those boys, now being murdered by my fellow Americans on the basis of + 92 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK the rape charge delivered by two white whores: and I was reading Angelo Herndon's Let Me LiJJe. Yes. I understood that: my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already be gun to hate them from the bottom of my heart. Angelo Herndon was a young, black labor organizer in the Deep South, railroaded to prison, who lived long enough, at least, to write a book about it-the George Jackson of the era. No one resembling him, or anyone resembling any of the Scottsboro Boys, nor anyone resembling my father, has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene.

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

  “I guess it was about a year after we met. Grace went to Arizona to visit her folks for a month and I really missed her. I realized how much we had grown to share with each other and it also hit me how much lighter and more fun my life was when she was there. She’s a really optimistic, positive person and she has a great sense of humor. I started to think then that she might be the one for me. When she got back it turned out she’d missed me, too, and so we started to date more seriously. We were inseparable for about a year and then we moved in together.” “How did it come about that you decided to marry?” Larry’s response confirmed my expectation that commitment is really hard for these young men. He said, “It took a long time. There was no way I was going to take getting married lightly. And that caused some of our earliest friction. I realized I loved her and that she was important to me but I was unable to make a decision. I was afraid because of the divorce. I was afraid of being left and I think that is why I was afraid of making a commitment to her. Somehow that brought up the sadness I felt when I was seven. That same sadness came back every time I was about to say ‘Let’s do it.’ It just stopped me cold.” He looked chilled as he described these events. “What happened was that we’d been living together for about three years and Grace gave me an ultimatum. It was on Valentine’s Day. She said, ‘Are we or are we not getting married? I don’t feel that we are getting anywhere.’ I just sat there, tongue-tied. I couldn’t say a word. So she packed her stuff and moved out. She was right. She wanted to get married, and if I wouldn’t, she needed to move on with her life. But that didn’t make a difference. I just wasn’t ready. And frankly, I was resentful about being put on the spot like that.” “What happened?” I was engrossed in the drama of their coming together. I knew the ending but the twists and turns were astonishing. How long would the testing of each other go on? How much could these young people stand? What kept them from tragically going their own separate ways? “I told her to give me another year and then we’d decide for sure. But Grace wouldn’t go for this anymore. She decided to take a job offer in L.A. and she moved south.” “And so you lost her?” “Almost. Within a week I knew we’d made a terrible mistake. I missed her more than I could stand. So I flew down, got on my knees, and begged her to marry me.” He smiled broadly. “And she accepted.” “Were you sure after all your waiting?”

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

  Following the Court’s decision, more states passed racial integrity laws that made it illegal for African Americans, and sometimes Native Americans and Asian Americans, to marry or have sex with whites. While the restrictions were aggressively enforced in the South, they were also common in the Midwest and West. The State of Idaho banned interracial marriage and sex between white and black people in 1921 even though the state’s population was 99.8 percent nonblack. It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, but restrictions on interracial marriage persisted even after that landmark ruling. Alabama’s state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986 when Walter met Karen Kelly. Section 102 of the state constitution read: The legislature shall never pass any law to authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro. * No one expected a relatively successful and independent man like Walter to follow every rule. Occasionally drinking too much, getting into a fight, or even having an extramarital affair—these weren’t indiscretions significant enough to destroy the reputation and standing of an honest and industrious black man who could be trusted to do good work. But interracial dating, particularly with a married white woman, was for many whites, an unconscionable act. In the South, crimes like murder or assault might send you to prison, but interracial sex was a transgression in its own unique category of danger with correspondingly extreme punishments. Hundreds of black men have been lynched for even unsubstantiated suggestions of such intimacy. Walter didn’t know the legal history, but like every black man in Alabama he knew deep in his bones the perils of interracial romance. Nearly a dozen people had been lynched in Monroe County alone since its incorporation. Dozens of additional lynchings had taken place in neighboring counties—and the true power of those lynchings far exceeded their number. They were acts of terror more than anything else, inspiring fear that any encounter with a white person, any interracial social misstep, any unintended slight, any ill-advised look or comment could trigger a gruesome and lethal response. Walter heard his parents and relatives talk about lynchings when he was a young child. When he was twelve, the body of Russell Charley, a black man from Monroe County, was found hanging from a tree in Vredenburgh, Alabama. The lynching of Charley, who was known by Walter’s family, was believed to have been prompted by an interracial romance. Walter remembered well the terror that shot through the black community in Monroe County when Charley’s lifeless, bullet-ridden body was found swinging in a tree. And now it seemed to Walter that everyone in Monroe County was talking about his own relationship with Karen Kelly.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: Evil as such is to be avoided: and that one has to withstand it is accidental; in so far, to wit, as one has to suffer an evil in order to safeguard a good. But good as such is to be desired, and that one avoids it is only accidental, in so far, to wit, as it is deemed to surpass the ability of the one who desires it. Now that which is so essentially is always of more account than that which is so accidentally. Wherefore the difficult in evil things is always more opposed to firmness of mind than the difficult in good things. Hence the virtue of fortitude takes precedence of the virtue of magnanimity. For though good is simply of more import than evil, evil is of more import in this particular respect. Whether confidence belongs to magnanimity?Objection 1: It seems that confidence does not belong to magnanimity. For a man may have assurance not only in himself, but also in another, according to 2 Cor. 3:4,5, “Such confidence we have, through Christ towards God, not that we are sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of ourselves.” But this seems inconsistent with the idea of magnanimity. Therefore confidence does not belong to magnanimity. Objection 2: Further, confidence seems to be opposed to fear, according to Is. 12:2, “I will deal confidently and will not fear.” But to be without fear seems more akin to fortitude. Therefore confidence also belongs to fortitude rather than to magnanimity. Objection 3: Further, reward is not due except to virtue. But a reward is due to confidence, according to Heb. 3:6, where it is said that we are the house of Christ, “if we hold fast the confidence and glory of hope unto the end.” Therefore confidence is a virtue distinct from magnanimity: and this is confirmed by the fact that Macrobius enumerates it with magnanimity (In Somn. Scip. i). On the contrary, Tully (De Suv. Rhet. ii) seems to substitute confidence for magnanimity, as stated above in the preceding Question (ad 6) and in the prologue to this.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Erotic intimacy is an act of generosity and self-centeredness, of giving and taking. We need to be able to enter the body or the erotic space of another, without the terror that we will be swallowed and lose ourselves. At the same time we need to be able to enter inside ourselves, to surrender to self-absorption while in the other’s presence, believing that the other will still be there when we return, that he or she won’t feel rejected by our momentary absence. We need to be able to connect without the terror of obliteration, and we need to be able to experience our separateness without the terror of abandonment. The Selfishness of Intimate Pleasures I have always been interested in the people who are able to achieve balance between self and other on an emotional level but who repeatedly fail to achieve it physically. The threat of merging in the physical act of sex, and the ensuing loss of self, is so intense for these people that they defend against it either by shutting down sexually or by taking their desire elsewhere. The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin writes, “The child’s struggle for autonomy takes place within the realm of the body and its pleasures.” It is no different for the adult. The first time James walked into my office, he sat down and said, “Stella and I have a very good marriage, but sex has always been a problem.” James feels sexually inhibited with Stella, and their erotic misfit fills him with tension. Whatever initial excitement he may feel when Stella approaches him invariably turns into a preoccupation with his own performance. Will I stay hard? Will I come too soon? Will Stella have an orgasm? Sex becomes a race to the finish line—can he get there before he loses his erection? His ability to enjoy himself is massively curtailed by this narrow focus. He can’t be playful, can’t try out new things, because anything that strays from the routine might jeopardize his capacity to perform. These anxieties always have a ripple effect, and James’s inhibitions have also stifled Stella. She senses his absence, laments his lack of attention, and has complained about it bitterly over the years. “Tell me about your mother,” I ask James. “My mother? You don’t waste a minute, do you? A few years ago I went to see a therapist, and she also wanted me to talk about my mother. It didn’t change a thing. My wife is nothing like my mother.” “In due diligence I always go back to the source. I promise I won’t tell you that you married your mother. But the first place we learn about love and relationships is in our original family. None of the others—friends, flings, teachers, lovers—can carry this kind of emotional resonance. So, tell me about your mother.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The shock waves lifted Sharon into the air, violently throwing her on top of a crushed, bloody body. An off-duty police detective discovered her, dazed and disoriented, atop the dead man. He helped her find her way out of the wreckage and away from the site, through absolutely thick, pitch-blackness. She met a few other survivors sitting in front of a church, and together they gave thanks to be alive. In the weeks following her miraculous survival, a dense yellow fog enveloped her in a deadening numbness. Sharon felt indifferent by day, merely going through the motions of living with little passion, direction or pleasure. Just a week before she had loved classical music; now it no longer interested her: she “couldn’t stand listening to it.” Numb most of the time, she was periodically assaulted by panic attacks. Sleep became her enemy; at night she was awakened by her own screaming and sobbing. For the first time in her life, this once highly motivated executive could not imagine a future for herself; terror had become the organizing principle of her life. § Sharon’s terror was not focused on anything in particular; it appeared everywhere, projected “out there”—onto a world that felt threatening, even when everything was objectively safe and predictable. It kept her from flying, riding the subway or being in public places. She was constantly on guard, whether awake or asleep. Sharon saw me on a television interview, tracked me down through my institute and then traveled four days and nights, by train, to see me in Los Angeles, where I was teaching. On December 1, 2001, we did the session summarized below. When she enters the room, dressed smartly in an orange business suit, Sharon walks straight to a chair and sits down without seeming even to notice me. It makes me eerily uncomfortable when, almost before I had introduced myself, she begins talking about the horrors of the event, blandly, as though it had happened to someone else. ‖ Had I not comprehended her words, I might have thought she was talking about a boring office party rather than a personal confrontation with death and dismemberment. Listening to her emotionally disconnected narrative left me squirming, wanting to get up and leave the room. I am unsettled at what lies hidden underneath her blandness. My introspection is interrupted, drawn to the intimation of a slight, expansive gesture made by Sharon’s arms and hands as she speaks; it’s as though she were reaching toward something to hold on to. Is Sharon’s body telling another story, a story that is hidden from her mind?

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I had been developing some body awareness–based relaxation and stress-reduction procedures that the psychiatrist thought might be beneficial to her. Nancy entered my office, clinging nervously to her husband’s arms. She was fidgeting with his hands; he was transparently burdened by her complete dependence. I noticed how tight her neck was, pulling in like an injured turtle, while her eyes were wide with the startled look of a deer in the headlights. Her posture was stooped, conveying a pervasive sense of fear and defeat. Nancy’s resting heart rate was high—almost 100 beats per minute (which I was able to surmise from the pulsing of the carotid artery in her neck). Her breathing was so shallow as to seem barely able to sustain life. At first I taught Nancy to become aware of, and then to release, her chronically tense neck and shoulder muscles. She appeared to be relaxing deeply. Her heart rate decreased to a more normal range as her breathing deepened. However, moments later she abruptly became intensely agitated. Her heart, pounding wildly, shot up to approximately 130 beats per minute. Her breath was rapid and shallow as she gasped erratically. Then, as I watched helplessly, she abruptly froze in terror. Her face turned deathly white. She appeared paralyzed and barely able to breathe. Her heart seemed to almost stop, dropping precipitately to about 50 beats per minute (an action of the heart I will discuss later in Chapter 6 ). Fighting my own impending panic, I was at a loss as to what to do. “I’m dying. Don’t let me die,” she pleaded in a small taut voice. “Help me, help me! Please don’t let me die.” Her disturbing helplessness evoked, in my subconscious, an archetypal solution. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, a dreamlike image appeared: a tiger, crouched in readiness to strike, materialized out of the far wall of the room. “Run, Nancy!” I commanded without thinking, “A tiger is chasing you. Climb those rocks and escape.” Bewildered by my own outburst, I gazed in amazement as Nancy’s legs began to tremble and then move up and down in what appeared to be spontaneous running movements. Her whole body started shaking—first convulsively, then more softly. As the shaking gradually subsided (over the better part of an hour), she experienced a feeling of peacefulness that, in her own words, “held her in warm tingling waves.” (See Figure 2.1a and 2.1b .) Fear/Immobility Cycle Figure 2.1a This shows the vicious cycle by which fear and immobility feed off each other. It is what engulfs and traps us in the “black hole” of trauma. Later, Nancy reported that during the session she had seen nightmarish images of herself as a four-year-old child, struggling to escape the grasp of the doctors who held her down in order to administer ether anesthesia for a “routine” tonsillectomy. Until now, she recounted, this event had been “long forgotten.” To my utter amazement, these unusual gyrations turned Nancy’s life around.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings. —Rumi (1207–1273) All God’s children got rhythm, who could ask for anything more? —Porgy and Bess While trauma is about being frozen or stuck, pendulation is about the innate organismic rhythm of contraction and expansion. It is, in other words, about getting unstuck by knowing (sensing from the inside), perhaps for the first time, that no matter how horrible one is feeling, those feelings can and will change. Without this (experienced) knowledge, a person in a state of “stuckness” does not want to inhabit his or her body. In order to counter the seemingly intractable human tendency to avoid horrible and unpleasant sensations, effective therapy (and the promotion of resilience in general) must offer a way to face the dragons of fear, rage, helplessness and paralysis. The therapist must inspire trust that their clients will not be trapped and devoured by first giving them a little “taste treat” of a pleasant internal experience. This is how our clients move toward self-empowerment. Confidence builds with the skill of pendulation. One surprisingly effective strategy in dealing with difficult sensations involves helping a person find an “opposite” sensation: one located in a particular area of the body, in a particular posture, or in a small movement; or one that is associated with the person’s feeling less frozen, less helpless, more powerful and/or more fluid. If the person’s discomfort shifts even momentarily, the therapist can encourage him to focus on that fleeting physical sensation and so bring about a new perception; one where he’s discovered and settling on an “island of safety” that feels, at the very least, OK. Discovering this island contradicts the overarching feelings of badness, informing the person that somehow the body may not be the enemy after all. It might actually be grasped as an ally in the recovery process. When enough of these little islands are found and felt, they can be linked into a growing landmass, capable of withstanding the raging storms of trauma. Choice and even pleasure become a possibility with this growing stability as new synaptic connections are formed and strengthened. One gradually learns to shift one’s awareness between regions of relative ease and those of discomfort and distress. This shifting evokes one of the most important reconnections to the body’s innate wisdom: the experience of pendulation, the body’s natural restorative rhythm of contraction and expansion that tells us that whatever is felt is time-limited … that suffering will not last forever. Pendulation carries all living creatures through difficult sensations and emotions. What’s more, it requires no effort; it is wholly innate. Pendulation is the primal rhythm expressed as movement from constriction to expansion—and back to contraction, but gradually opening to more and more expansion (see Figure 5.2 ).

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Disclosure is not a necessary part of working with fantasy. I don’t advocate a tell-all approach; not everyone would choose to live in an atmosphere of True Confessions . We may like to keep our imaginings to ourselves, not out of shame but out of an inchoate awareness that exposure to bright light will cause them to wither on the vine. Alternatively, we may be wise to dream alone, for we may not be on the same erotic wavelength as our beloved. Let’s take Nat and his girlfriend, Amanda, as an example. Nat’s fantasy life isn’t tucked away neatly in the privacy of his head; it’s evident in the tapes stacked in plain view on his video rack: Gang Bang 1, Gang Bang 2, Gang Bang 17, Gang Bang 50. His taste in pornography is unmistakable. He’s never felt a need to hide it, but neither has he felt a desire to share it. “It’s kind of a fetish for me. I don’t think people always understand their fetishes. Why do some people like shoes? I have no clue. I’ve tried to understand it, but I don’t. I’m not being coy. It’s been a long-standing thing for me, right back to when I was a teenager, regardless of my actual sex life.” Nat might have coasted along comfortably in his private meanderings were it not for the fact that Amanda is bothered by the tapes. (Still, he must have suspected that leaving them out in plain view would raise this issue.) “I don’t get the violence. It scares me. It taps into my own vulnerability as a woman,” she says. “I mean, there’s something kind of sick about it all, right?” Amanda sees lustful men with absolute power taking advantage of defenseless women. But Nat is watching a very different movie. When I ask him, “Who has the power here?” he is quick to reply, “The woman, without a doubt.” For Nat, the turn-on is the insatiable woman, the sexually powerful woman who incorporates several men at once. There is neither force nor hurt associated with his pleasure. “She wants it, and she likes it. If she didn’t, it would stop me cold.” Nat’s explanations are a relief to Amanda in that they make the movies seem less creepy, but she’s still hurt by the fact that the women on the screen are nothing like her. “I can’t compete with these women. If this is what he likes, then how can he possibly be satisfied with me?” she asks. When Amanda watches the movies, she thinks only of what they imply about her, not what they convey about Nat, and she feels rejected. “I do find these women sexy,” he admits. “I see a girl walking down the street in a bustier and short leather mini skirt and come-fuck-me boots and, yeah, that turns me on. But do I want to spend the rest of my life with that person?

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  This fertile arrangement worked reasonably well until the day it didn’t. As so often happens, there is a moment when we recognize that what we’re doing is no longer working. Often it follows significant events that make us review the meaning and the structure of our lives. Suddenly, the compromises that worked so well yesterday become sacrifices we no longer want to brook today. For Charles, a succession of losses—the death of his mother, the death of a close friend, and a scare regarding his own health—have made him keenly aware of his own mortality. He wants to charge at life, to ply his vitality, to reconnect with the exuberance that he’s kept in check in order to be with Rose. He can no longer bear to keep that part of himself tucked away, even in exchange for the solid ground Rose offers. But every time he tries to talk about this hunger, Rose feels threatened and dismisses him. “You’re having another midlife crisis? What are you going to do, buy a red Trans-Am?” Rose and Charles have both had their nonmonogamous interludes over the years. The facts were known, the details were not; and they put these episodes behind them. Or at least Rose did. “I thought we were past our turbulent years. We’re in our sixties, for God’s sake,” she moans. “And that precludes what?” I ask her. “Hurting me! Risking our marriage! I’ve come to accept the terms of our relationship. Why can’t he?” “And those terms are?” “When we married, we loved each other very much. We still do. But, shall we say, we had both known stronger passions. Charles came out of it disillusioned—the high intensity was always short-lived, and he was left with women he didn’t have much in common with. I came out of it relieved. I got too lost in it. We talked about it back then, that we were both looking for something more enduring and a little calmer.” Rose goes on to explain that she and Charles had other goals for their marriage—companionship, intellectual stimulation, physical and emotional care, support. “We really valued what we had found with each other.” Rose grew up poor. Her father ran a junkyard in rural Tennessee. Today she has a corner office on the fifty-sixth floor overlooking Madison Avenue in Manhattan. “My hillbilly town wasn’t exactly supportive of girls with ambition, and I had a lot. When I met Charles, I knew he was different. I could be with him and he would let me do my own thing. In the early 1960s, that was a big deal.” “What did you think was going to happen sexually? That was a big deal in the sixties, too,” I say. “I was OK with our sex life. I thought it was fine, even nice,” she tells me. “I’ve always known that for Charles it wasn’t enough, but I expected him to deal with it.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The Harlem audience was outraged, and yelled, Get back on the train, you fool! And yet, even at that, recognized, in Sidney's face, at the very end, as he sings "Sewing Machine," something noble, true, and ter rible, something out of which we come: I have heard exas perated black voices mutter, more than once, Lord, have merCJ ' on these children, have mercy-! they just don't know. There is an image in The Defiant Ones which suggests the truth it can neither face nor articulate; and there is a sequence 526 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK which gives the film completely away. The image occurs when the little boy has been disarmed, and, accidentally, knocked unconscious. The two fugitives arc anxiously trying to revive him. When the boy comes to, he looks up and sees Sidney's black face over him: and we see this face fr om the boy's point of view, and as the boy sees it: black, unreadable, not quite in focus-and, with a moving, and, as I take it, deliberate irony, this image is the single most beautiful image in the film. The boy screams in terror, and turns to the white man for protec tion; and the white man assures him that he needs no protec tion fr om the black man he was cursing when the boy came along. We arc trembling on the edge of confession here, for, of course, the way the little boy sees the black face is exactly the way the man sees it. It is a presence vaguely, but mightily threatening, partly because of its strangeness and privacy, but also because of its beauty: that beauty which lives so tor mentcdly in the eye of the white beholder. The film cannot pursue this perception, or suspicion, without bringing into focus the question of white maturity, or white masculinity. This is not the ostensible subject of Ihe Defiant Ones. Yet, the dilemma with which we arc confronted in the film can only begin to be unlocked on that level, precisely, which the film is compelled to avoid. In the next sequence, they go along to the home of the boy's mother, who lives alone with her child. The husband, or the tather, has been long gone. This sequence is crucial, containing the only justification fix the ending of the film, and it deserves a little scrutiny. The woman who now enters the picture has already been abandoned; and, in quite another sense, once she sees the white boy, is anxious to be abandoned.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And white men couldn't bear it-knowing that they knew: it is not only in the Orient that white is the color of death. I remember the Reverend S., for example, a small, pale man, with hair resembling charred popcorn, and his tiny church, in a tiny town, where every black man was owned by a white man. In democratic parlance, of course, one says that every black man JVorked for a white man, and the democratic myth wishes us to believe that they worked together as men, and respected and honored and loved each other as men. But the democratic circumlocution pretends a level of liberty which docs not exist and cannot exist until slavery in America comes to an end: in those towns, in those days, to speak only of the towns, and only of those days, a black man who displeased his employers was not going to cat for very long, which meant that neither he, nor his wife, nor children, were intended to live for very long. Yet, here he was, the Reverend S., every Sunday, in his pulpit, with his wife and children in the church, TAKE ME TO THE WATER 403 and bullet holes in the church basement, urging the people to move, to march, and to vote. For we believed, in those days, or made ourselves believe, that the black move to the registrar's office would be protected from Washington. I re member a Reverend D., who was also a grocer, and the night he described to me his conversion to nonviolence. A black grocer in the Deep South must also, like all grocers every where, purchase somewhere, somehow, the beans he places on his shelves to sell. This means that a black grocer who is one of the guiding spirits of a voting registration drive and who is also, virtually, a one-man car pool, can find remaining in business, to say nothing of his skin, an exceedingly stren uous matter. This was a big, cheerful man, as strong as an ox and stubborn as a mule, a fly not destined for the fly-paper, and he stayed in business. It cost him something. Bombing was not yet the great Southern sport which it was to become: they simply hurled bricks through his windows.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not a Western idea, but fathers and sons arrive at that relationship only by claiming that relationship: that is, by paying for it. If the relationship offather to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. (But to pursue this further carries us far beyond the confines of the present discussion.) In the novel, A Tale of Two Cities, it had been Madame Dctarge who most struck me. I recognized that unrelenting hatred, for it was all up and down my streets, and in my fath er's face and voice. The wine cask, shattered like a walnut shell, shattered every Saturday night on the corner of our street, and, yes, Dickens was right, the gutters turned a bright and then a rusty red. I understood the knitted registers as hope and fate , for I knew that everything (including my own name) had long been written in The Book: you may run on a great long time but great God Almighty's going to cut you down! I understood the meaning of the rose in the turban of Madame Defarge as she sits knitting in the wine shop, the flower in the headdress meant to alert the neighborhood to the presence of a spy. We lived by such signals, and long before it was safe to say there is a rose in Spanish Harlem! When, at last, in the film, the people rise and fill the streets and alleys and hurl themselves onto the drawbridge of the Bastille, I was tremendously stirred and fr ightened. I did not CHAPTER ONE really know who these people were, or why they were in the streets-they were white: and a white mob can be in no way reassuring to a black boy (even though, or if, he cannot say why). If, in the novel, it was Madame Defarge who most held me, in the film two images and one moment stand out, even fr om this distance. The first is a long climb up an outside staircase, in Paris, when Lucie Manette and Dr. Lorry and Ernest Defarge go to retrieve Lucie's father, Dr. Manette: for I knew about staircases. The second is when the carriage of the Marquis races headlong through a provincial village. We are confronted with the speeding wheels of the carriage, the relentless hooves of the horses, and a small, running, ragged boy, trying to get out of the way.

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

  Obviously this problem is not confined to children of divorce. But it’s fair to say that the men in divorced families are conscious of this difficulty long before any woman brings it to their attention. They’ve known for years that they have inexpressible feelings and that their anxiety stops them from reaching out. They have rehearsed in their minds a hundred times the things they wanted to say to their parents. And then they couldn’t do it. I would venture to say that many of the men raised in divorced families were conscious of their inhibitions and badly disappointed in themselves when they failed to break out of them. Some said they mastered the ploy of silent withdrawal because they had to protect themselves from becoming their mother’s confidant as young adolescents. Used to a life of pulling away and hiding feelings, they could not break the habit even within a loving marriage. Residues of Violence W ALKING BACK TO Larry’s office after lunch, I asked a question that had been bothering me since the interview began. “Larry, how gone are the memories of your dad’s violence?” His steps slowed, the pain returned. “The fact that my folks got a divorce does not erase those memories. Not in the least. I try not to think about what happened between my parents but it’s there, inside me. It’s not really buried. And then I think about how close I came to being just like my father.” He sighed deeply. “It’s something that haunts me.” “Explain to me how.” “Violence is like hard wiring. If I don’t keep fighting it, it can take over. Every time I lose my temper, I have to remember to keep my hands at my sides. Sometimes I walk away or leave the room. If I don’t, I might explode. It’s a silly thing but I used to wrestle with Grace for fun and I stopped because if we got into a certain clutch, I would worry that I would go too far. Like here’s a woman I adore and I might hurt her. I would die before I hit her but I have to be careful. So to answer your question, it never goes away. I have to stay on guard.” He came to an abrupt stop on the sidewalk and caught my arm. “Which reminds me. Grace made me promise to ask you about my teasing Alex. She’s worried that I get too rough.” “She doesn’t like you to tease Alex?” I asked, a little bewildered. “It’s one of the few things that Grace and I haven’t been able to resolve between us. Grace wants me to ask you about it. Alex is a sensitive kid. I don’t want to ridicule him or punish him for being sensitive so I tease him, to teach him to fight back. I have to admit I think it’s pretty funny because the little guy does get angry when I tease him.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  This last detail, as if to give verisimilitude to an otherwise incoherent narrative, had been something he had learned at school. But the other details, produced with fluctuating expressions of sulkiness and hopelessness, a lurid compendium of miseries, were unstable from day to day. I felt I pressed him to the edge of his articulacy, and at the same time as I sought to protect him appeared to him dangerously inquisitive, threatening to topple the beliefs and superstitions which were the private structure of his life, and which had never before been exposed. The one thing I did not question was that he had killed this man, Tony; but to accept this was to admit that I knew nothing about how murder worked in the real world. No reports in the papers? No newsflash on the radio? Arthur knew about these things from experience: Tony was a wanted man, a criminal treated with violence by the police and revulsion by the older community. And then it seemed that violence against a black would rarely reach the national press, that radio silence could envelop the tragedies of the world from which he came. This silence also intensified his fear. It made the prospects now as uncertain to him as the background of the event was to me. Were the police looking for Arthur? How had Arthur’s parents reacted? Would they, while throwing him off, silently thwart the course of justice? Or would they, or Harold at least, independently seek him out to administer some justice of their own? It did not take me long to fear the consequences to myself of any of these possible events. If it had not been for our week of love I would perhaps have been frightened of Arthur too; but I was never even critical of his crime. A rare, unjustified trust kept me on his side. Even so, that part of the road, with its parked cars and spring trees, which could be seen from the windows took on an ominous feel. I scanned it as one looks at a photograph with a glass to make out half-decipherable details, but its mundanity was unaltered: it rained and dried, wind blew scraps of litter across, children walked dogs—dawdling, looking in at the houses, nosey for details, but only as people always, routinely are. I’m not sure what form I expected the threat to take; a police car actually stopping outside, a powerfully built black man darting up the drive?

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

  She was right. She wanted to get married, and if I wouldn’t, she needed to move on with her life. But that didn’t make a difference. I just wasn’t ready. And frankly, I was resentful about being put on the spot like that.” “What happened?” I was engrossed in the drama of their coming together. I knew the ending but the twists and turns were astonishing. How long would the testing of each other go on? How much could these young people stand? What kept them from tragically going their own separate ways? “I told her to give me another year and then we’d decide for sure. But Grace wouldn’t go for this anymore. She decided to take a job offer in L.A. and she moved south.” “And so you lost her?” “Almost. Within a week I knew we’d made a terrible mistake. I missed her more than I could stand. So I flew down, got on my knees, and begged her to marry me.” He smiled broadly. “And she accepted.” “Were you sure after all your waiting?” “To be honest, no. I was still hesitating. I was more certain than I’d ever been but I knew that I’d lose her if I kept this up. I wanted to be sure but finally understood that there are no guarantees in life. By then I was ready to take the risk. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to take a chance on love.’” These were Karen’s words exactly. Larry and Karen had to bring themselves to take a chance, whereas both wanted an ironclad guarantee. Who doesn’t? But these young people are terrified at the start. I shook my head. “What an ordeal for both of you.” Larry nodded his assent. Here was a courtship that had lasted seven years. First they establish a friendship and learn to trust each other. Within that friendship they tell each other about their past and their mutual trust deepens. Having passed that hurdle, they become lovers and live together. But they are still miles away from commitment. It’s only when Grace insists that Larry is able to overcome the last obstacles to his decision. Think how great his fear was for it to have taken seven years to make this decision, knowing how much he loved her. Think how much patience and love Grace had to give in letting Larry have the time he needed. How easy it would have been for one or both to quit in frustration—for Larry to give in to his fears and run or for Grace to turn elsewhere . Fear of Commitment in Children of Divorce T HE TWO CENTRAL tasks of adulthood are loving and working.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I hadn’t had anything like it all summer, and gorged on it happily. But Gabriel’s own performance was becoming off-putting. Every few seconds he would make some coarse exhortation, some dumbly repeated catchphrase, and I came to realise with dismay that this trick too he had picked up from crudely dubbed American porn films. ‘Yeah,’ he would croon, ‘suck that dick. Yeah, take it all. Suck it, suck that big dick.’ I took a pause to say, ‘Um—Gabriel. Do you think you could leave out the annunciations?’ But it wasn’t the same for him without them, and I felt unbelievably stupid appearing to respond to them. ‘Okay,’ he said brightly, as I abandoned the job. ‘You like to fuck with me?’ ‘Of course.’ There was after all some charm in his childlike openness. ‘But in silence …’ ‘Wait a minute,’ he said and kicking off shoes and tugging off trousers and pants, ambled into the bathroom, his dick bouncing with a kind of mock-majesty before him. I slipped off my own shoes and jeans and lay playing with myself on the bed. Gabriel took his time getting ready and after a couple of minutes I called through to ask if he was all right. He came in almost at once, now completely naked except for his cock-ring, the pale gold wafer of his watch and—which I should somehow I suppose have expected—a black leather mask which completely covered his head. There were two neat little holes beneath the nostrils, and zipped slits for the eyes and mouth. He knelt on the bed beside me and was perhaps looking to me for approval or amusement—it was impossible to tell. Close to I could see only his large brown pupils and the whites of his eyes, blurred for a split second if he blinked, like the lens of a camera. It was hard and disturbing the way the eyes could not vary their expression isolated from the rest of the frowning or smiling face. I felt that childhood fear of rubber party masks, and of the idiot amiability of clowns who you knew, as they bent down to pinch your cheeks, were fearful old drunks. Gabriel held my head to look at me closely, and I unzipped his mouth and breathed in his hot breath and the expensive smell of leather. His body was supple though slightly gone to seed—but I liked it and bit it. There wasn’t much he could do in his mask, and when I had nosed around him for a while he hoiked me over and pushed my legs apart. I was anxious not to take all that raw, and had begun to complain, when I felt something cold and wet, like a dog’s nose, trailing up my thigh. I looked over my shoulder to find that from somewhere this madman had produced a gigantic pink dildo, slippery with Crisco. I heard him giggle tensely inside the mask. ‘Do you want to smell some poppers?’ he asked.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I panicked again under the huge sweep of sky that opened up. The city was suddenly behind us; I looked back, and above the warehouses and estates the cluster of extravagant towers rose into view again; they became the city; then they dwindled and were blurred in haze. We were leaving fast, the engine was shouting, the wind tore over the windshield and whipped the hair about on top of my head. I wanted to be back where we'd come from, late in bed or strolling out for a pre-pre-lunch beer. We overtook lorries and family cars with luggage on the roof, new from the ferry. Here was all the rest of the world, and my old world too, the Brits still cautious on the blind side of the road, looming ahead and then for a few seconds alongside, the roped tarpaulins jabbering loose, the drivers anxiously alert to the flashy blast of the jeep. But I was a Continental by now, and looked on them with pity and dismay as they fell behind. There was a certain brown obscurity in the sky ahead, like rain falling out to sea. Matt was wearing bottle-green dark glasses and frowned as he drove. A few miles later it lifted and dissolved; and the further we went the more radiant and old-masterly the air became, so that the whole mad, worrying escapade began already to feel out of time, steeped in a dream-ether of its own. When we crossed into France, and Matt turned off and pulled over in a country road to check the map, my goose-flesh smoothed and the October sun was almost hot on my forearms. We went on the last four miles more stealthily, my left hand tucked for childish comfort under Matt's thigh. Then we dropped to a wide view of current-silvered sea, with several big ships standing off; and a sharp turn of the road presented us all at once with a straggle of houses, a massive, squat church with a spire, and the sign—St Ernest-aux-Sablonnières. We dawdled along the street, me slunk down in my seat with one of Matt's baseball caps not disguising me much, dreading to be seen or for us even to be noticed, and the jeep farting uproariously at each touch on the accelerator. There was a grocer's, a bar, a novelty shop, a few old stone houses and at either end new brick ones with steel security blinds and unmade gardens just as the builders might have left them. Between them you saw the sea, and other houses lower down, and when we turned and came back we took a narrow lane to the left and emerged on a sand-blown track that I knew was where we had to be.