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

  A Generation Stays Single L ISA WAS RIGHT. She has lots of company. Forty percent of the men and women in this divorce study have never married, a figure that exceeds the national average for adults in this age group raised in intact families. 1 This never-married group is a mix, including people like Lisa who are cohabiting, those who have serial lovers, and those who lead solitary lives. The increase in unmarried adults nationwide is a trend that shows no signs of abating and is probably an inevitable consequence of our divorce culture. 2 Children of divorce know the script when it comes to marriage. So do adults from intact marriages. Why take that risk? One young woman said scornfully, “You spend a fortune on the wedding and then when you’re broke, you divorce.” But most who choose not to marry frankly say they are scared by what they know from their own history and from the number of broken marriages they have seen. Like Lisa they hope for a loving commitment and have been disappointed or hurt in relationships. While they don’t like living alone or in a cohabitation that is going nowhere, they say that they reluctantly but firmly change their expectations. A few of the still single young women said that they hoped to marry and to have children some day. Several were living with men and had these plans in mind. But most had firmly decided against marriage and motherhood. They gave many reasons that mostly boiled down to a distrust of men. They felt safer without legal marriage to keep them tied. A few talked about the great advantages of lifelong freedom. They said cohabitation was safer than marriage because escape was easier if they needed to get out or if the man left. I thought to myself that everything Lisa had said was logical, but it just wasn’t very convincing. I couldn’t help thinking how distressed I would feel if Lisa were my daughter and had decided to forgo ever finding a man she could love. Having been in a happy marriage for fifty-three years, I knew how much she would be missing. Of course, men and women can live rich and interesting lives without ever getting married, but Lisa’s decision was coming not so much from disinterest in an intimate relationship as from her fear that trust and love were beyond her reach. Compared to Lisa, young people raised within the protection of good intact marriages hold very different expectations about the future. Lisa’s best friend, Bettina, grew up down the street in a home with parents who were among the happiest in our study. These were people content with their lives who didn’t hesitate to show mutual affection and love for their two children. They went out of their way to make their children’s friends feel welcome in their home. Lisa loved spending time with this family and accompanied them on several camping trips in the Sierras.

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

  Inside the chamber, he will be strapped to a gurney, the same one that held him for hours as he endured excruciating pain just over a year ago. Nitrogen gas will begin to flow into the mask. Under these conditions Mr. Smith’s undisputed posttraumatic stress disorder, which no one contests is causing him to persistently vomit, will be at its absolute peak. At the same time, he will experience oxygen deprivation, a known effect of which is vomiting. If Mr. Smith vomits, his executioners will not intervene—they have told us so—even as vomit fills the mask and flows into Mr. Smith’s nose and mouth. Then, at last, Mr. Smith’s body will succumb to the effects of oxygen deprivation, asphyxiation, or both. He will die. The cost, I fear, will be Mr. Smith’s human dignity, and ours. Despite these concerns, the United States Supreme Court once again allowed the execution to proceed. As feared, multiple witnesses to Mr. Smith’s second execution reported that he appeared to suffer terribly. When nitrogen started flowing into the mask, Mr. Smith began to writhe in pain, his body thrashing against the straps that bound him to the gurney. Some media witnesses observed “his whole body and head violently jerking back and forth for several minutes,” followed by “heaving and retching inside the mask.” Mr. Smith clenched his fists and his legs shook. As Mr. Smith gasped for air, his body lifted against the restraints, shaking the gurney several times. Witnesses observed saliva or tears on the inside of the mask. The execution lasted more than thirty minutes; Mr. Smith showed visible signs of distress and pain during much of that time. After he was declared dead, state officials announced that Mr. Smith’s execution was “flawless” and had gone “exactly as planned.” This was contradicted by witnesses and advocates who described it as horrific torture. The execution drew international condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union, faith leaders, and human rights groups. But Alabama almost immediately sought to execute more people using this new method and offered its assistance to other states to do the same. — Since the release of Just Mercy ten years ago, I’ve often been asked whether the administration of justice has improved in America. Mr. Smith’s distressing execution would strongly suggest it has not. But it’s a more complicated question than this tragic event reveals. Over the last ten years, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of executions in the United States and a similar decline in the number of death sentences imposed. Washington, Colorado, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Virginia have all abolished the death penalty in the last decade. Oregon’s governor has commuted the death sentences of everyone on death row in that state. Other states with very large death-row populations, like California and Pennsylvania, have declared moratoriums on executions. Support for the death penalty is waning even as people are still being executed.

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

  When I was really sick and so depressed I tried to commit suicide, he told me that my problems were all in my head. So you might say being a father is not something that comes naturally to me. How can you give somebody something you never had or saw?” “So you don’t think you can be a good stepfather to Kristi’s son?” “You may think that I’m being selfish but I’m afraid that the kid will come between Kristi and me and I’m not sure I can take that. My heart is not in any great shape. I’ve had some really rough years. So did she. But bottom line is that I really need for her to be there for me. I can’t do with a handout now and then.” “And you think that you’ll get less from Kristi after her son moves in.” “Yes, I do. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope that I am. But my whole life I’ve had to divide what I got into neat parcels. After my folks divorced, I always got what was left. I don’t want that to happen to me in my marriage.” Spoken very clearly, I said to myself, and alas utterly realistic. There’s no question that a child has first dibs on the mother, and unless the father can join in the giving there’s serious trouble ahead. As Billy recognizes, he’s not in the giving line. His own long-postponed needs are too great and too pressing. I was finding more and more confirmation for his prophecy of trouble ahead. I wondered if he had other worries and asked, “How stable is your relationship with Kristi?” “Stable relationship?” He snorted his reply. “I’ve never had a stable relationship with a woman, not ever. Even when I think it’s stable, it blows up from under me.” “Billy,” I sighed, settling back in my chair. “You’ve had a hard time with the women in your life. Can you bring me up to date from the start?” “It’s not a happy story and it’s not a short one. But here goes. The truth is that when other guys in high school or later were dating or partying or screwing, I wasn’t. I know you’re going to ask me why so let me tell you short and sweet. I had no confidence that I would find a woman who would like me. Love I never even dreamed about. I figured anyone who went out with me was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Like she was desperate. I figured I was just not in the human race, sort of a mule supposed to pull his load and shut up. And if I ever found someone, she’d end up betraying me anyway, so why try?” I was appalled at his terrible self-image and very distressed by his loneliness. “How did you spend all those years in your early twenties?” “You know, it’s too painful to remember.

• 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 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 Folding Star (1994)

  "I found them quite frightening, but also very fascinating. You know how you make Yourself look at horrid things to burn out the horridness—some of them were all right of course, the wonderful portraits; but the Medusa with all the snakes in her collar made it hard for me to enter that room really until quite recently. Some of the others were less sensational, but I thought they were even more disturbing by being vague about what was going on." "It did seem quite odd to me when I saw a whole party from St Narcissus in the Museum." "Oh, we were always coming in front St Opportune, as well, with Miss Van der Menge, our mad art mistress. We had to choose something in a picture and copy it and write about it. I remember I was very keen to get my own Chimera. Then you had to do some research: what is a Chimera, what does the artist mean by it etc, what does it eat?" "You really are much better qualified." "I always had an advantage, because I was shown round with my parents sometimes after hours, and Paul would get out beautiful drawings and prints the other girls had certainly never seen. He even showed us some of the white paintings then." "The white?" "It's what I call these very late pictures I was telling you about, which are in different shades of white, just verging into yellow or pale blue. Don't you think it's a good expression?" "I can see that it could be offputting . . ." We had come out into Trumpet Street, to my surprise, a few yards away from Helene's parked car. Away to the right the carillon of the great belfry began the maundering Catholic hymn with which it made its devotions before striking the important hour of six. "I'll see you next week." "All right," I said. "I'll look forward to that." "I've got to go home and work on my dress." "Oh . . ." "Mummy and I are making a fantastic wedding-dress. You can hardly see us when we're doing it, with all the yards of stuff. It's like being in a cloud." "A cloud with pins in, I should imagine." She gave her funny laugh, shuffled forward and let me kiss her on both cheeks. Wedding-dresses, white ones, made me think in old-fashioned terms: had she kept herself for Jan? Had she kept herself from him? How unimaginable to walk in trembling purity through the tearful, admiring crowd. Chapter 11 The next time I went to Luc's house, the door was opened by an anxious girl like a cockney parlour-maid, who eyed me up and down before standing aside: I stepped in over various boxes and the flex of a floor-polisher. Luc was trotting down the stairs. "Frightful bore," he said, in his most startling Englishism so far. "My father's coming to visit us, and all is on its ears."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In my childhood, at least until my adolescence, my playmates had called me a sissy. It seemed to me that many of the people I met were making fun of women, and I didn't see why. I certainly needed all the friends I could get, male or female, and women had nothing to do with whatever my trouble might prove to be. At the same time, I had already been sexually involved with a couple of white women in the Village. There were virtually no black women there when I hit those streets, and none who needed or could have afforded to risk herself with an odd, raggedy-assed black boy who clearly had no future. (The first black girl I met who dug me I fell in love with, lived with and almost married. But I met her, though I was only 22, many light-years too late.) The white girls I had known or been involved with-dif ferent categories-had paralyzed me, because I simply did not know what, apart from my sex, they wanted. Sometimes it was great, sometimes it was just moaning and groaning; but, ul timately, I found myself at the mercy of a double tear. The fear of the world was bearable until it entered the bedroom. 824 OTHER ESSAYS But it sometimes entered the bedroom by means of the mo ti\·es of the girl, who intended to civilize you into becoming an appendage or who had found a black boy to sleep with because she wanted to humiliate her parents. Not an easy scene to play, in any case, since it can bring out the worst in both parties, and more than one white girl had already made me know that her color was more powerful than my dick. Which had nothing to do with how I found myself in the gay world. I would have found myself there anyway, but per haps the very last thing this black boy needed were clouds of imitation white women and speculations concerning the size of his organ: speculations sometimes accompanied by an at tempt at the laying on of hands. "Ooo! Look at him! He's cute-he doesn't like you to touch him there!" In short, I was black in that world, and I was used that way, and by people who truly meant me no harm. And they could not have meant me any harm, because they did not see me. There were exceptions, of course, for I also met some beautiful people. Yet even today, it seems to me (possibly because I am black) very dangerous to model one's opposition to the arbitrary definition, the imposed ordeal, merely on the example supplied by one's oppressor.

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

  The first upheaval occurs at the breakup. Children are frightened and angry, terrified of being abandoned by both parents, and they feel responsible for the divorce. Most children are taken by surprise; few are relieved. As adults, they remember with sorrow and anger how little support they got from their parents when it happened. They recall how they were expected to adjust overnight to a terrifying number of changes that confounded them. Even children who had seen or heard violence at home made no connection between that violence and the decision to divorce. The children concluded early on, silently and sadly, that family relationships are fragile and that the tie between a man and woman can break capriciously, without warning. They worried ever after that parent-child relationships are also unreliable and can break at any time. These early experiences colored their later expectations. As the postdivorce family took shape, their world increasingly resembled what they feared most. Home was a lonely place. The household was in disarray for years. Many children were forced to move, leaving behind familiar schools, close friends, and other supports. What they remember vividly as adults is the loss of the intact family and the safety net it provided, the difficulty of having two parents in two homes, and how going back and forth cut badly into playtime and friendships. Parents were busy with work, preoccupied with rebuilding their social lives. Both moms and dads had a lot less time to spend with their children and were less responsive to their children’s needs or wishes. Little children especially felt that they had lost both parents and were unable to care for themselves. Children soon learned that the divorced family has porous walls that include new lovers, live-in partners, and stepparents. Not one of these relationships was easy for anyone. The mother’s parenting was often cut into by the very heavy burdens of single parenthood and then by the demands of remarriage and stepchildren . Relationships with fathers were heavily influenced by live-in lovers or stepmothers in second and third marriages. Some second wives were interested in the children while others wanted no part of them. Some fathers were able to maintain their love and interest in their children but few had time for two or sometimes three families. In some families both parents gradually stabilized their lives within happy remarriages or well-functioning, emotionally gratifying single parenthood. But these people were never a majority in any of my work. Meanwhile, children who were able to draw support from school, sports teams, parents, stepparents, grandparents, teachers, or their own inner strengths, interests, and talents did better than those who could not muster such resources. By necessity, many of these so-called resilient children forfeited their own childhoods as they took responsibility for themselves; their troubled, overworked parents; and their siblings. Children who needed more than minimal parenting because they were little or had special vulnerabilities and problems with change were soon overwhelmed with sorrow and anger at their parents.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: As the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 5), “fear makes us take counsel”: wherefore a mean man is careful in his reckonings, because he has an inordinate fear of spending his goods, even in things of the least account. Hence this is not praiseworthy, but sinful and reprehensible, because then a man does not regulate his affections according to reason, but, on the contrary, makes use of his reason in pursuance of his inordinate affections. Reply to Objection 3: Just as the magnificent man has this in common with the liberal man, that he spends his money readily and with pleasure, so too the mean man in common with the illiberal or covetous man is loth and slow to spend. Yet they differ in this, that illiberality regards ordinary expenditure, while meanness regards great expenditure, which is a more difficult accomplishment: wherefore meanness is less sinful than illiberality. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 2) that “although meanness and its contrary vice are sinful, they do not bring shame on a man, since neither do they harm one’s neighbor, nor are they very disgraceful.” Whether there is a vice opposed to meanness?Objection 1: It seems that there is no vice opposed to meanness. For great is opposed to little. Now, magnificence is not a vice, but a virtue. Therefore no vice is opposed to meanness. Objection 2: Further, since meanness is a vice by deficiency, as stated above [3396](A[1]), it seems that if any vice is opposed to meanness, it would merely consist in excessive spending. But those who spend much, where they ought to spend little, spend little where they ought to spend much, according to Ethic. iv, 2, and thus they have something of meanness. Therefore there is not a vice opposed to meanness. Objection 3: Further, moral acts take their species from their end, as stated above [3397](A[1]). Now those who spend excessively, do so in order to make a show of their wealth, as stated in Ethic. iv, 2. But this belongs to vainglory, which is opposed to magnanimity, as stated above (Q[131], A[2] ). Therefore no vice is opposed to meanness. On the contrary, stands the authority of the Philosopher who (Ethic. ii, 8; iv, 2) places magnificence as a mean between two opposite vices.

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

  If you were to tell me right now that my lover died, I would not have feeling until tomorrow.” “This protected you? ” “One thing you learn very quickly as a child of divorce is that feelings are painful. It’s a lot easier if you can learn to turn them off. It’s not simple, but otherwise you spend a lot of time worrying about your family. You see, just because my parents didn’t fight doesn’t mean that I didn’t know the truth about how they felt about each other. I knew every waking hour. My father and stepmother hated my mom and wished that she would disappear. My mom was jealous of my stepmom and felt that their happiness was built on the ruins of her life. All of these feelings went on my whole life. We all pretended they weren’t there, but we all knew different. The divorce was like a skeleton that everyone pretended wasn’t there.” Faced with high expectations for conformist behavior, with no shelter from the storm, four-year-old Lisa quickly learned not to show her feelings and to expect less from her parents. She became the unsmiling, courteous, supervigilant little girl described by her teachers. Her spontaneity ceased like an extinguished flame. And the nightmares erupted. Feelings that Lisa could not express during the day surfaced as terrors at night, as bad dreams that lasted for years. I thought again how the child of divorce is shaped by what goes on in the postdivorce family. Paula and Larry were angry. Karen took care of everyone but herself. Billy turned passive. Lisa, however, is numb. I sat back and thought of Lisa as I had known her for so many years—the charming child with ribbons in her hair who realized in sheer terror that her home was breaking apart. She tried with all her might to keep her anger and fear from erupting. At sixteen, she was cloistered with schoolwork and surrounded by wholesome activities and girlfriends. Her main problem was in maintaining the precarious balance between her two homes. And now I see a very distressed young woman who is facing serious problems in achieving intimacy and fulfilling sexual relationships. I realized then one of the hidden dynamics in Lisa’s family. In their struggle to suppress their own angry feelings at the time of the breakup, Lisa’s parents made the mistake of conveying to the child that she should not express her feelings, either. Again, it’s all too easy to confuse the parents’ agenda with that of the child. Of course parents should try to control their anger, but it’s not advisable or beneficial to keep the child from giving vent to hers. Children naturally restrain themselves at the time of the breakup and don’t express their full anger and terror at what is happening in their lives. They don’t wish to burden their troubled parents and push them further over the brink. But parents need to comfort children, not silence them.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He counsels the young man to "live, live all you can; it is a mistake not to." \Vhich I translate as meaning "trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know." Jazz musicians know this. The old men and women of Montgomery-those who waved and sang and wept and could not join the marching, but had brought so many of us to the place where we could march-know this. But white Americans do not know this. Barricaded inside their history, they remain trapped in that factory to which, in Henry James' novel, the son returns. We never know what this fac tory produces, for James never tells us. He only <;.g.n_vey,s to us that the factory, at an unbelievable human expense, pro<fuces unnameable objects. Ebony, August 1965 A Report fr om Occupied Te rritory 0 N APRIL 17, 1 9 6 4 , in Harlem, New York City, a young salesman, father of two, left a customer's apartment and went into the streets. There was a great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring day, involved many people, including running, fr ightened, little boys. They were running fr om the police. Other people, in windows, left their windows, in terror of the police because the police had their guns out, and were aiming the guns at the roofs. Then the salesman noticed that two of the policemen were beating up a kid: "So I spoke up and asked them, 'why are you beating him like that?' Police jump up and start swinging on me. He put the gun on me and said, 'get over there.' I said, 'what for?' " An unwise question. Three of the policemen beat up the salesman in the streets. Then they took the young salesman, whose hands had been handcuffed behind his back, along with four others, much younger than the salesman, who were handcuffed in the same way, to the police station. There: "About thirty-five I'd say came into the room, and started beating, punching us in the jaw, in the stomach, in the chest, beating us with a padded dub-spit on us, call us niggers, dogs, ani mals-they call us dogs and animals when I don't see why we arc the dogs and animals the way they are beating us. Like they beat me they beat the other kids and the elderly fellow. They throw him almost through one of the radiators. I thought he was dead over there." "The elderly fellow" was Fecundo Acion, a 47 -year-old Puerto Rican seaman, who had also made the mistake of want ing to know why the police were beating up children. An adult eyewitness reports, "Now here come an old man walking out a stoop and asked one cop, 'say, listen, sir, what's going on out here?'

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I couldn’t possibly see how destructive that mentality was until I escaped it. The Marine Corps replaced it with something else, something that loathes excuses. “Giving it my all” was a catchphrase, something heard in health or gym class. When I first ran three miles, mildly impressed with my mediocre twenty-five-minute time, a terrifying senior drill instructor greeted me at the finish line: “If you’re not puking, you’re lazy! Stop being fucking lazy!” He then ordered me to sprint between him and a tree repeatedly. Just as I felt I might pass out, he relented. I was heaving, barely able to catch my breath. “That’s how you should feel at the end of every run!” he yelled. In the Marines, giving it your all was a way of life.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Therefore, the Negro col lege president has literally nothing more whatever to offer his students-except his support; if he gives this, of course, he promptly ceases to be a Negro college president. This is the death rattle of the Negro school system in the South. It is easy to judge those Negroes who, in order to keep their jobs, are willing to do everything in their power to subvert the student movement. But it is more interesting to consider what the present crisis reveals about the system under which they have worked so long. for the segregated school system in the South has always been used by the Southern states as a means of controlling Negroes. When one considers the lengths to which the South has gone to prevent the Negro fr om ever becoming, or even feeling like, an equal, it is clear that the Southern states could not have used schools in any other way. This is one of the reasons, deliberate or not, that facilities were never equal. The demoralizing Southern school system also says a great deal about the indifference and irresponsibility of the North. The Negro presidents, principals and teachers would not be nearly so frightened of losing their jobs if the possibility of working in Northern schools were not almost totally closed to them. Richard Haley found a room for me in town and introduced THEY CAN ' T TURN BACK 62 7 me to the Tallahassee Inter-Civic Council, an organization that makes no secret of its intention to remain in business exactly as long as segregation does. It was called into existence by a bus boycott in 195 6. The Tallahassee boycott began five months after the boycott in Montgomery, and in a similar way, with the arrest of two Negro coeds who refused in a crowded bus to surrender their seats to whites on the motor man's order. The boycott ran the same course, from cross burning, fury and intransigence on the part of the city and bus officials, along with almost total and unexpected unanim ity among the Negroes, to reprisal, intimidation and near bankruptcy of the bus company, which took its buses otr the streets for a month. The Reverend C. K. Steele, president of the ICC, remem bers that "those were rough days. Every time I drove my car int o the garage, I expected a bullet to come whizzing by my head." He was not being fanciful: there are still bullet holes in his living room window. The Reverend Daniel Speed, a heavy, rough-looking man who might be completely terrifYing if he did not love to laugh and who owns a grocery store in Tallahassee, organized the boycott motor pool, with the result that all the windows were blown out of his store. The Speed and Steele children are among the state's troublesome stu dents. And Speed and Steele, along with Haley, are the people whom the students most trust.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is one of the reasons, as it seems to me, that we are so badly educated, for to become educated (as all tyrants have always known) is to become inaccessibly independent, it is to acquire a dangerous way of assessing danger, and it is to hold in one's hands a means of changing reality. This is not at all the same thing as "adjusting" to reality: the effort of "adjusting" to reality sim ply has the paradoxical effect of destroying reality, since it substitutes for one's own speech and one's own voice an 7 0 4 OTHER ESSAYS interiorized public cacophony of quotations. People are de feated or go mad or die in many, many ways, some in the silence of that valley, JVhe1·e I couldn't hear nobody pray, and many in the public, sounding horror where no cry or lament or song or hope can disentangle itself from the roar. And so we go under, \'ictims of that universal cruelty which lives in the heart and in the world, victims of the universal indiffer ence to the fate of another, victims of the universal fear of love, proof of the absolute impossibility of achieving a life without love. One day, perhaps, unimaginable generations hence, we will evolve into the knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate and will permit this knowledge to become the ruling principle of our lives. For I do not for an instant doubt, and I will go to my grave be lieving, that we can build Jerusalem, if we will. 4 The light that's in your eyes/Reminds me of the skies/That shine above us every day--so wrote a contemporary lover, out of God knows what agony, what hope, and what despair. But he saw the light in the eyes, which is the only light there is in the world, and honored it and trusted it; and will always be able to find it; since it is always there, waiting to be found. One discm·ers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith. Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and ha\'e never had the remotest desire to \'isit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love.

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

  Her serious expression had not faded. “It works some of the time.” Karen’s story is fascinating because it illustrates how even a happy marriage carries a residue of the past that can ricochet into the present at any time. Such triggers can be an unexpected absence, a moderate disagreement, or a flash of anger. The child of divorce thinks, “This is the other shoe dropping. Here it comes. I always knew it couldn’t last. The man is gone. The marriage is over. I am alone and abandoned, just like I always knew I would be.” Karen’s logic is impeccable: if you’re afraid of loss, you’re safe only if you have nothing to lose. But if you have a happy marriage, a loving man, a beautiful child, then you’re in danger. One young woman stated it plainly: “No matter how much I love someone, no matter how much I trust him, no matter how good and trustworthy he is, there is a tiny corner of me that does not believe he will stay. I will never believe it.” Many grown children of divorce ask me: Why do I feel the way I do? Why am I having so much trouble finding someone to love me and someone I can trust? What’s wrong with me? Why am I so afraid of change? Why am I so afraid of loss? If my wife is thirty minutes late, I wonder who she’s with. Why, if my husband is delayed, do I panic and think I’ll never see him again? Why does getting close to someone I love and having sex seem so scary? I get anguished letters from all over the country every week that pose the same questions, asking for advice. One that came yesterday is typical. “Dear Dr. Wallerstein, I am a child of divorce. I’m thirty-nine and have a loving husband and two wonderful sons. Yet I go to bed every night worried that when I wake up, they’ll be gone. Can you help me?” I think I can. The key phrase they all use is, “I am a child of divorce.” I hear it repeatedly when I talk to people in their thirties, forties, or even sixties. What exactly does it mean? Divorce in childhood creates an enduring identity. Because it typically occurs when a child is young and impressionable and the effects last throughout her growing up years, divorce leaves a permanent stamp. That identity is made up of the childhood fears that you can’t shake despite all the successes and achievements you’ve made as an adult. These are the consequences of the broken template I talked about earlier. You were a little child when your parents broke up and it frightened you badly, more than you have ever acknowledged.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A man was standing about thirty yards away, staring at the tent. I thought he hadn't yet seen me, despite the little eminence I was on: the khaki glow of the canvas and the bobbing rump-shaped shadows thrown across it from inside held his attention entirely. He stepped forward cautiously, stopped—turned his head to catch any sound. I was fascinated by his thinking himself the observer, unguessed in the dark; and chilled by the freedom it gave him, the unhindered time he had to spy on us or to do us worse harm. He saw me, seemed to ponder for a while what to do, then started slowly in my direction. I thought it would be absurd to move away, but stood up, as if I had been spotted in a game of hide and seek, and waited with my heart thumping in my chest. I thought he might be a kind of night-ranger who could tell us to move on, frighteningly without a uniform, so that we wouldn't know whether to obey him or not. He stopped again a few feet away, slightly stooping forward to mime his curiosity. "Hi," he said, tentatively. A loud owl-call came from the wood, and then another, further off. I couldn't tell if they were real or people signalling—I knew real ones always sounded like imitations. He turned his head towards them and the faint cloud-gleam showed steel-rimmed spectacles, a white square face with swept-back dark hair. "Someone's making a night of it," he said. The voice was troublingly cultured, with a hint of drinkblur—he wasn't aware of the long pause that followed as I worked out how I could escape him in the dark. I'd played and stood about all over here, but the dimensions and positions were vague at this moment. "Looks rather tempting, don't you think?" He felt slowly, amusedly, in his breast pockets, and brought out cigarettes and a lighter. "Do you smoke?" "No"—it was a little anxious collgh. "No," I said again. When the lighter flared I saw him lit up for several seconds; black leather jacket, grey jeans a bit tight around the midriff, the ghoulish chiaroscuro of the face above the flustered flame, wishful dark eyes lifting to make out what they could of me. The image floated on the moment's blackness that followed, suspended in the dry warmth of French tobacco smoke. "How old are you?" he asked. "Eighteen," I said, adding on a year as if I had been challenged in a pub. And then, with a tenuous politeness I thought would protect me, "How old are you?" "Thirty." He exhaled ponderingly. "Three." Even more than I'd expected. I felt it like a sinister disgrace, being out in the night with this person, the menacing vagueness of his intentions, the seedy self-confidence of the queers out in their secret element. I'd better walk off quietly towards the tent.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When I glanced up again Luc seemed shaken himself. He had the hunch of new responsibility that team-mates have when the ambulance trundles from the pitch and they jog back to their positions, one man down, amid instinctive brief applause. Something had touched him. He started talking about car-accidents. He said you never had accidents if you thought you might have one, because it was the essence of the accident to be a surprise. I said you could drive down the wrong side of a motorway and be pretty sure of causing an accident, but he maintained that it wouldn't be an accident for you, because you did it on purpose—though of course it would be for the totally unsuspecting persons that you drove straight into. He seemed to feel fairly confident that this sophistical state of readiness would protect him on the roads, and I couldn't quite get him to see through it. And in a way I agreed—rather as one imagines terrible losses, as I sometimes, with prickling scalp and hot tears, imagined his death or disappearance, as a charm against its happening. I said, "I hope you're right", and even so was filled with a superstitious fear of one or other of us being squashed by a lorry the next time we ventured out. One of us will go first, I thought later, as I sat in the Cassette waiting for Cherif to turn up, drinking keenly to heal over the morning and the gape of the quickly darkening afternoon. A year from now I won't be here and nor will he. I was by the window for a change, looking out through its brown wrinkled glass at the wonky street—it was hard to tell who figures were as they loomed and flowed under the stained street-lamps. A raw air from the sea filled the squares and alleys this evening, as it did the phantasmal nightscape of the coast and Channel and boats wrecked on the Dorset rock-stacks that was all I could see of the future. Well, let him go. I'd backed out of the house after twenty minutes, with minimal politeness, pleading his ill health as if it were mine. I didn't even go to the bathroom. Cherif came in about five and I was lifted by his reckless grin and ignorant confidence. We kissed and his jerkin was cold and slippery. When he came back from the loo I watched him approaching down the length of the bar—his cock looked lovely and lively the way he had it, middle and leg inclined to leg, I thought, transporting him for a second to the alien field of cricket. He sat down as it nudged into a major hard-on—a fact not wasted on the bar's arch-bore Harold, whose window franchise we had strayed into. He leant between us in a jet of pipe-smoke and said, "You're very lucky to have this young man, you know"—a remark which seemed both insulting and in some ways unquestionably true.