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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  Meanwhile, the life of my family had completely changed. Except for a few jewels astutely buried in the normal filling of a talcum powder container, we were absolutely ruined. But this was a very minor matter. The local Tatar government had been swept away by a brand-new Soviet, and we were subjected to the preposterous and humiliating sense of utter insecurity. During the winter of 1917–18 and well into the windy and bright Crimean spring, idiotic death toddled by our side. Every other day, on the white Yalta pier (where, as you remember, the lady of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Lapdog” lost her lorgnette among the vacational crowd), various harmless people had, in advance, weights attached to their feet and then were shot by tough Bolshevik sailors imported from Sebastopol for the purpose. My father, who was not harmless, had joined us by this time, after some dangerous adventures, and, in that region of lung specialists, had adopted the mimetic disguise of a doctor without changing his name (“simple and elegant,” as a chess annotator would have said of a corresponding move on the board). We dwelt in an inconspicuous villa that a kind friend, Countess Sofia Panin, had placed at our disposal. On certain nights, when rumors of nearing assassins were especially strong, the men of our family took turns patrolling the house. The slender shadows of oleander leaves would cautiously move in the sea breeze along a pale wall, as if pointing at something, with a great show of stealth. We had a shotgun and a Belgian automatic, and did our best to pooh-pooh the decree which said that anyone unlawfully possessing firearms would be executed on the spot.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The poor lady, fearing to lose his friendship, began to cry, and vowed to him that she would rather die than marry the gentleman in question; that he was so impor- tunate that she could not hinder his entering her room at the hours when everyone else visited her. " I do not speak of those hours," said the prince, " for I can visit you then as well as he, and everyone sees what you do ; but I have been told that he comes to you after you are in bed, which I think so bad, that if you continue it without declaring that he is your husband, I look upon you as the woman most ruined in reputation that ever was." She assured him with all the oaths she could think of that she regarded the man neither as husband nor Sixlfi Jay.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 439 lover, but as the most importunate person in the world. " Since that is the case," said the prince, " I promise that I will rid you of him." " What ! " replied the widow, " would you put him to death .? " "No, no," said the prince; " but I will let him know that he must not give occasion in this way for people to s^eak ill of ladies in the king's residence, I swear to you, by the love I bear you, that if he does not correct himself after I have spoken to him, I will correct him in such a manner that he shall be an example for others." With these words the prince went away, and on leav- ing the room he met the Seigneur des Cheriots coming thither, and spoke to him to the same purpose, assuring him that the first time he found him there at any other hour than one in which it was proper for gentlemen to visit ladies, he would give him such a fright as he should not forget as long as he lived, and would teach him not to trifle with a lady whose relations were persons of such consequence. The gentleman protested that he had never been there except like other visitors ; and that it the prince found him transgressing in that respect, he would give him leave to do the worst he could.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  [image file=image_rsrc131.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc132.jpg] This photograph, taken in 1955 by an obliging American tourist, shows the Nabokov house, of pink granite with frescoes and other Italianate ornaments, in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, 47, Morskaya, now Hertzen Street. Aleksandr Ivanovich Hertzen (1812–1870) was a famous liberal (whom this commemoration by a police state would hardly have gratified) as well as the talented author of Bïloe i Dumï (translatable as “Bygones and Meditations”), one of my father’s favorite books. My room was on the third floor, above the oriel. The lindens lining the street did not exist. Those green upstarts now hide the second-floor east-corner window of the room where I was born. After nationalization the house accommodated the Danish mission, and later, a school of architecture. The little sedan at the curb belongs presumably to the photographer. 11THE cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated. Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

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

  50 The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy’s central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash. CHAPTER SEVEN Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills I Civil War as Class Warfare You have shown yourselves in no respect to be the degenerate sons of our fathers. . . . It is true you have a cause which binds you together more firmly than your fathers. They fought to be free from the usurpations of the British Crown, but they fought against a manly foe. You fight against the offscourings of the earth. —President Jefferson Davis, January 1863 n February 1861, Jefferson Davis, the newly elected president of the Confederacy, traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, for his inauguration. Greeted by an excited crowd of men and women, he gave a brief speech outside the Exchange Hotel. Addressing his people as “Fellow Citizens and Brethren of the Confederate States of America,” he invoked a tried-and-true metaphor to describe his new constituency: “men of one flesh, one bone, one interest, one purpose, and of identity of domestic institutions.” As it happens, his was the same biblical allusion his vice president, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, had commandeered in Congress in 1845 when he rose in support of the annexation of Texas and its Anglo-Saxon population. 1 The one-flesh marital trope had both a racial and a sexual dimension, presenting the desirable image of a distinct breed. Davis echoed the words of his namesake, Thomas Jefferson, when he described his new country as one that embodied “homogeneity.” In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had made native-born stock and shared cultural values the basis of national unity and security. The idea of an “American breed” was firmly entrenched. 2 Expositors of the “American breed” model all gravitated to an “us versus them” calculus, which became useful as territorial expansion unfolded and cultures collided. As the South seceded, further distinctions needed to be made.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  A Litany for Survival For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours; For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive. Artisan In workshops without light we have made birds that do not sing kites that shine but cannot fly with the speed by which light falls in the throat of delicate working fire I thought I had discovered a survival kit buried in the moon’s heart flat and resilient as turtles a case of tortoise shell hung in the mouth of darkness precise unlikely markings carved into the carapace sweet meat beneath. I did not recognize the shape of my own name. Our bed spread is a midnight flower coming all the way down to the floor there your craft shows. Contact Lenses Lacking what they want to see makes my eyes hungry and eyes can feel only pain. Once I lived behind thick walls of glass and my eyes belonged to a different ethic timidly rubbing the edges of whatever turned them on.

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

  Degenerates, he warned, must not be permitted to “reproduce their kind.” 50 It was during the eugenic craze that reformers called for government incentives to ensure better breeding. This was when the idea of tax exemptions for children emerged. Theodore Roosevelt criticized the new income tax law for allowing exemptions for only two children, discouraging parents from having a third or fourth. He wanted monetary rewards for breeding, akin to the baby bonuses established in Australia in 1912. He also promoted mothers’ pensions for widows—an idea that caught on. As one defender of pensions claimed in 1918, the widowed mother was “as much a servant of the State as a judge or general.” Her child-rearing duties were no less a public service than if she had toiled on the battlefield. Like Selective Service, which weeded out inferior soldiers, the pensions were allotted exclusively to “a fit mother.” 51 Roosevelt was far from alone. Academics, scientists, doctors, journalists, and legislators all joined the “eugenic mania,” as one California doctor termed the movement. Advocates believed that the way to encourage procreation of the fit was to educate the middle class on proper marriage selection. Eugenic thinking found expression in a flood of books and popular public lectures, as well as “better baby” and “fitter family” competitions at state fairs. Eugenics courses were added to college curricula. Such efforts resulted in the passage of laws imposing marriage restrictions, institutional sexual segregation of defectives, and, most dramatically, state-enforced sterilization of those designated “unfit.” 52 • • • Charles Davenport established a research facility at Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor in 1904. His facility grew into the Eugenics Record Office. A Harvard- trained biologist and professor, Davenport, along with his team, collected inheritance data. Not surprisingly, he was also an influential member of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, a group of agricultural breeders and biologists. This group included many prominent figures, including the famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Davenport’s second in command, Harry H. Laughlin, became the eugenics expert for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, and played a crucial role in shaping the 1924 Immigration Act, one of the most sweeping and restrictive pieces of legislation in American history. 53 When eugenicists thought of degenerates, they automatically focused on the South. To make his point, Davenport said outright that if a federal policy regulating immigration was not put in place, New York would turn into Mississippi. In Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), he identified two breeding grounds for diseased and degenerate Americans: the hovel and the poorhouse. The hovel was familiar, whether one identified it with the cracker’s cabin, the low-downer’s shebang, or the poor white pigsty. Echoing James Gilmore’s Down in Tennessee (1864), Davenport’s work expressed a grave concern over indiscriminate mating that occurred in isolated shacks. Brothers slept with sisters, fathers with daughters, and the fear of an inbred stock seemed very real.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sitting with Black women from all over the earth has made me think a great deal about what it means to be indigenous, and what my relationship as a Black woman in North America is to the land-rights struggles of the indigenous peoples of this land, to Native American Indian women, and how we can translate that consciousness into a new level of working together. In other words, how can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future? All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children. November 21, 1985 New York City It feels like the axe is falling. There it is on the new CAT scan—another mass growing in my liver, and the first one is spreading. I’ve found an anthroposophic doctor in Spring Valley who suggests I go to the Lukas Klinik, a hospital in Switzerland where they are conducting the primary research on Iscador, as well as diagnosing and treating cancers. I’ve known something is wrong from the returning pains and the dimming energies of my body. My classes have been difficult, and most days I feel like I’m going on sheer will power alone which can be very freeing and seductive but also very dangerous. Limited. I’m running down. But I’d do exactly what I’m doing anyway, cancer or no cancer. A. will lend us the money to go to Switzerland, and Frances will come with me. I think they will be able to find out what is really wrong with me at the Lukas Klinik, and if they say these growths in my liver are malignant, then I will accept that I have cancer of the liver. At least there they will be able to adjust my Iscador dosage upward to the maximum effect, because that is the way I have decided to go and I’m not going to change now. Obviously, I still don’t accept these tumors in my liver as cancer, although I know that could just be denial on my part, which is certainly one mechanism for coping with cancer. I have to consider denial as a possibility in all of my planning, but I also feel that there is absolutely nothing they can do for me at Sloane [ sic ] Kettering except cut me open and then sew me back up with their condemnations inside me. December 7, 1985 New York City My stomach x-rays are clear, and the problems in my GI series are all circumstantial. Now that the doctors here have decided I have liver cancer, they insist on reading all their findings as if that were a fait accompli.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  When Blanche had her mastectomy last year, it was the first time that I had to face, in a woman I loved, feelings and fears I had faced within my own self, but never dealt with externally. Now I had to speak to these feelings in some way that was meaningful and urgent in the name of my love. Somehow I had known for the past eight years that someday it would be this way, that personal salvation of whatever kind is never just personal. I talked with Blanchie today over the phone about this feeling I have that I must rally everything I know, made alive and immediate with the fire of what is. I have always been haunted by the fear of not being able to reach the women I am closest to, of not being able to make available to the women I love most dearly what I can make available to so many others. The women in my family, my closest friends. If what I know to be true cannot be of use to them, can it ever have been said to be true at all? On the other hand, that lays a terrible burden on all of us concerned, doesn’t it? It is a matter of learning languages, or of learning to use them with precision to do what needs to be done with them, and it is the Blanchie in myself to whom I need to speak with such urgency. It’s one of the great things friends are for each other when you’ve been very close for a long time. And of course cancer is political—look at how many of our comrades have died of it during the last ten years! As warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. Our battle is to define survival in ways that are acceptable and nourishing to us, meaning with substance and style. Substance. Our work. Style. True to our selves. What would it be like to be living in a place where the pursuit of definition within this crucial part of our lives was not circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in america? Here the first consideration concerning cancer is not what does this mean in my living, but how much is this going to cost? April 22, 1986 St. Croix I got a letter from Ellen Kuzwayo this morning. Her sister in Botswana has died. I wish I were in Soweto to put my arms around her and rest her head on my shoulder. She sounds so strong and sanguine in her unshakable faith, yet so much alone.

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

  We have quoted that passage in full because it is proof that by the time of Nero the punishment of Christians had become an ordinary police affair. It is abundantly clear that we do not need to wait until the time of Trajan for the mere fact of being a Christian to be a crime. Any time after Nero, Christians were liable to punishment and death simply for the name they bore. This does not mean that persecution was constant and consistent, but it does mean that any Christian was liable to execution at any time, purely as a police matter. In one area, a Christian might live a whole lifetime at peace; in another, there might be outbreaks of persecution every few months. It depended very largely on two things. It depended on the governor himself, who might either leave the Christians alone or equally set the processes of the law in action against them. It depended on informers. The governor might not want to act against the Christians, but if information was laid against a Christian he had to; and there were times when the mob was out for blood, information was presented and Christians were butchered as entertainment for a Roman holiday. To compare small things with great, the legal position of the Christians and the attitude of the Roman law can be paralleled in Britain today. There are certain actions which are illegal - to take a very small example, parking a car in a restricted area - but which for a while may be permitted. But if the authorities decide to institute a drive against such an action, or if it develops into too blatant a breaking of the law, or if someone lodges a complaint and produces evidence, the law will go into action, and due penalty and punishment will be exacted. That was the position of the Christians in the empire. Technically they were outlaws; in actual fact no action might be taken against them, but a kind of sword of Damocles was always there, suspended over them. They never knew when information would be produced against them, or when a governor would take action. They never knew when they might have to die. And that was the situation consistently after the action of Nero. Up to that time, the Roman authorities had not realized that Christianity was a new religion, but from then on Christians were automatically outlaws.

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

  Till the trial came, everyone would have said that Charlie was far and away the better man, younger too and astonishingly powerful. But Bent evidently was no novice at the game. He side-stepped Charlie’s rush and hit out straight and hard and Charlie went down; but was up again like a flash, and went for his man in a wild rush: soon he was down again and everyone realized that sooner or later Bent must win. Fighting, however, has a large element of chance in it and as luck would have it just when Bent seemed most certain of winning, one of Charlie’s wild swings caught him on the point of the jaw and to our amazement he went, down like a log and could not be brought to for some ten minutes. It was the first time I had seen this blow and naturally we all exaggerated the force of it not knowing that a light blow up against the chin jars the spinal cord and knocks any man insensible, in fact, in many cases, such a blow results in partial paralysis and life-long weakness. Charlie was inclined to brag of his victory but Bob told him the truth and on reflection Bent’s purpose and fighting power made the deeper impression on all of us and he himself took pains next day to warn Charlie: “Don’t get in my way again”, he said to him drily, “or I’ll make meat of you.” The dire menace in his hard, face was convincing. “Oh, Hell”, replied Charlie, “who wants to get in your way!” Reflection teaches me that all the worst toughs on the border in my time were ex-soldiers: it was the Civil war that had bred those men to violence and the use of the revolver; it was the civil war that produced the “Wild Bills” and Bents who forced the good-humored Westerners to hold life cheaply and to use their guns instead of fists. One evening we noticed a large increase in the force of Indians besieging us: one chief too on a piebald mustang appeared to be urging an immediate attack and soon we found some of the “braves” stealing down the creek to outflank us, while a hundred others streamed past us at four hundred yards’ distance firing wildly. Bob and I went under the creek banks to stop the flankers while Bent and Charlie and Jo brought down more than one horse and man and taught the band of Indians that a direct attack would surely cost them many lives. Still there were only five of us and a chance bullet or two might make the odds against us desperate.

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

  Here, then, is a picture of these Gnostic heretics. They talked of being born of God, of walking in the light, of having no sin, of dwelling in God, of knowing God. These were their catchphrases. They had no intention of destroying the Church and the faith; by their way of thinking, they were going to cleanse the Church of dead wood and make Christianity an intellectually respectable philosophy, fit to stand beside the great systems of the day. But the effect of their teaching was to deny the incarnation, to eliminate the Christian ethic and to make fellowship within the Church impossible. It is little wonder that John seeks, with such fervent pastoral devotion, to defend the churches he loved from such an insidious attack from within. This was a threat far more perilous than any persecution from outside; the very existence of the Christian faith was at stake. The Message of John The First Letter of John is a short letter, and we cannot look within it for a systematic exposition of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, it will be of the greatest interest to examine the basic underlying beliefs with which John confronts those threatening to wreck the Christian faith. The Object of Writing John's object in writing is twofold; yet the two aspects are one and the same. He writes that the joy of his people may be completed (1:4), and that they may not sin (2:1). He sees clearly that, however attractive the wrong way may be, it is not in its nature to bring happiness. To bring his people joy and to preserve them from sin are one and the same thing. The Idea of God John has two great things to say about God. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all (r:5). God is love, and that made him love us before we loved him, and made him send his Son as a remedy for our sins (4:7-To, i6). John's conviction is that God is self-revealing and self-giving. He is light, and not darkness; he is love, and not hate. The Idea of Jesus Because the main attack of the false teachers was on the person of Christ, this letter, which is concerned to answer them, is specially rich and helpful in what it has to say about him. (i) Jesus is the one who was from the beginning (i : i, 2:14). When we are confronted with Jesus, we are confronted with the eternal. (2) Another way of putting this is to say that Jesus is the Son of God, and for John it is essential to be convinced of that (4:15, 5:5). The relationship of Jesus to God is unique, and in him is seen God's ever-seeking and ever-forgiving heart.

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

  We have been blinded to this fact by the sheer numbers of people affected and by the speed at which our society has been transformed. Many people today think divorce is a perfectly normal experience. It’s so common, children hardly notice it. No stigma. No big deal. After all, if half the child’s schoolmates come from divorced families, how could divorce be so traumatic? And isn’t it true, they say, that children raised in bad intact families are no better off? Everyone who grows up in America today is affected directly or indirectly by divorce, so everyone has the same worries. In other words, they argue that divorce places no special burdens on individuals (remember, it’s a normal experience). Indeed, if researchers were to compare groups of eighteen-year-olds from divorced and intact homes and then groups of twenty-two-year-olds and so forth they would probably find that most children of divorce and children from intact homes often hold similar views. It’s true that most young people are worried about similar things. But I have found what I think are deeper truths to this superficial impression. First, each child experiences divorce single file. Just because others are suffering does not reduce their suffering. Would it lessen a widow’s sorrow to have five other widows on the same street? Would that make her feel less pain? Numbers provide no consolation for children or adults in many of life’s traumas. People who believe that numbers mute the individual child’s suffering have simply not talked to the children. Each child in a classroom half full of children of divorce cries out, “Why me?” Moreover, by following the life of one child of divorce, and then another and another, from early childhood through adolescence and into the challenges of adulthood, I can say without a doubt that they have worries apart from their peers raised in intact homes. These worries are reshaping our society in ways we never dreamt about. That is the subject of this book and a challenge to all of us in coming years. THE PAGES THAT follow contain many themes that are entirely new to our understanding of the long-term effects of divorce. For example, Karen was the first grown child of divorce who described that she lived with the fear that disaster was always waiting to strike without warning, especially when she was happy. As I soon found out, these fears were common among young adults who grew up in divorced families. If happiness increases one’s odds of experiencing loss, think how dangerous it must be to simply feel happy. Contrary to what we have long thought, the major impact of divorce does not occur during childhood or adolescence. Rather, it rises in adulthood as serious romantic relationships move center stage.

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

  A little later it occurred to me that our cattle might possibly burn, so I went out and hurried back to the Michigan Street stockyards. An old Irishman was in charge of the yard, but though he knew me perfectly well, he refused to let me take out a steer. The cattle were moving about wildly, evidently in a state of intense excitement. I pleaded with the man and begged him, and at length tied my mare up to the lamp-post at the corner and went back and got into the stockyard when he wasn’t looking. I let down two or three of the bars and the next moment started the cattle through the opening. They went crazy wild and choked the gateway. In five minutes there were ten or twelve dead cattle in the entrance and the rest had to go over them. Suddenly, just as I got through the gap, the mad beasts made a rush and carried away the rails on both sides of the gateway. The next moment I was knocked down and I had just time to drag myself through the fence and so avoid their myriad trampling heels. A few minutes later, I was on Blue Devil, trying to get the cattle out of the town and on to the prairie. The herd broke up at almost every corner but I managed to get about six hundred head right out into the country. I drove them on the dead run for some miles. By this time it was daybreak and at the second or third farmhouse I came to, I found a farmer willing to take in the cattle. I bargained with him a little and at length told him I would give him a dollar a head if he kept them for the week or so we might want to leave them with him. In two minutes he brought out his son and an Irish helper and turned the cattle back and into his pasture. There were six hundred and seventy-six of them, as near as I could count, out of practically two thousand head. By the time I had finished the business and returned to the hotel, it was almost noon and as I could get nothing to eat, I wandered out again to see the progress of the fire. Already I found that relief trains were being sent in with food from all neighboring towns and this was the feature of the next week in starving Chicago.

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

  There is no mention of any question of the law, a question which always arose when there was a Jewish background. Their previous condition had been one of physical passions (r:14, 4:3-4) which fits Gentiles far better than Jews. At one time, they were not a people - Gentiles outside the covenant - but now they are the people of God (2:9-Io). The form of his name which Peter uses also shows that this letter was intended for Gentiles, for Peter is a Greek name. Paul calls him Cephas (i Corinthians 1:12, 3:22, 9:5, 15:5; Galatians 1:18, 2:9, 2:11, 2:14); among his fellow Jews, he was known as Simeon (Acts 15:14), which is the name by which he is called in 2 Peter (i:i). Since he uses his Greek name here, it is likely that he was writing to Greek people. The Circumstances behind the Letter That this letter was written in a time when persecution threatened is abundantly clear. They are going through various trials (1:6). They are likely to be falsely accused as evildoers (3:16). A fiery ordeal is going to try them (4:12). When they suffer, they are to commit themselves to God (4:19). They may well have to suffer for doing what is right (3:14). They are sharing in the afflictions which Christians throughout the world are called upon to endure (5:9). Behind this letter lie fiery trial, a campaign of slander and suffering for the sake of Christ. Can we identify this situation? There was a time when the Christians had little to fear from the Roman government. In Acts, it is repeatedly the Roman magistrates and the Roman soldiers and officials who save Paul from the fury of Jews and Gentiles alike. As the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, had it, the tribunal of the Roman magistrate proved the most assured refuge against the fury of the synagogue. The reason was that in the early days the Roman government was not able to distinguish between Jews and Christians. Within the empire, Judaism was what was called a religio licita, a permitted religion, and Jews were completely free to worship in their own way. It was not that the Jews did not try to enlighten the Romans as to the true facts of the situation; they did so in Corinth, for example (Acts 18:12-17). But, for some time, the Romans simply regarded the Christians as a Jewish sect and, therefore, did not molest them. The change came in the days of Nero, and we can trace almost every detail of the story. On 19th July, AD 64, the great fire of Rome broke out.

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

  I don’t want to look like her or live my life that way.” “How did you meet Nick?” She sighed as she answered, “Well, we hardly knew each other in high school. We were never lovers or even friends. I think that he had a crush on me from afar. Then in my junior year I broke my ankle and during the six weeks that I was hobbling around, he was very kind to me, carrying my stuff and visiting me. He was the only one who took any care of me. He also comes from a divorced family with lots of troubles. When he dropped out of school, I felt very sorry for him.” “Then how did he come back into your life?” “I was having a real bad time. My brother was getting into serious trouble with the law and my dad wouldn’t do anything to help. I pleaded with him but he was totally indifferent. I was frantic and beginning to realize that all my efforts to hold my family together were wasted. So when Nick asked me to move in with him, I said yes. Anything to get away, even though I knew from the outset he had no plans for the future, no training, no formal education. After the first day, I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’ But at least I know he won’t betray me. At least I’m safe from that.” “Karen, this fear of betrayal is pretty central to you. You keep mentioning it.” “It’s been central to my life,” she agreed. “Both my parents played around. I saw it all around me. They felt that if you are not getting what you want, you just look elsewhere.” (I’ve never heard anyone put the alternative morality of our divorce culture so succinctly.) Karen took her hands away from her face and silently ripped the tissue in half. “There’s another reason I moved in with him,” she whispered. “It will probably distress you.” Karen spoke hesitantly, clasped her hands in her lap, and elaborated slowly, as if every word were painful and she had to extract them one by one. “I figured that this is one man who will never leave me.” Silence. “Because he has no ambitions, he will always have fewer choices than me. So if I stay with him and even marry him someday, I won’t ever have to worry about his walking out.” Karen was right about my being distressed. Her statement was chilling. How utterly tragic that this lovely woman would begin her adult journey so burdened down with fears. What kind of life could she build on such fragile foundations? Like a good caregiver child, Karen reinstalled her troubled relationships with her mother and father into her early relationships with men.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  After classes, I ascertained that the magazine belonged to one of my best friends. I charged him with betrayal and mockery. In the ensuing fight, he crashed backward into a desk, catching his foot in a joint and breaking his ankle. He was laid up for a month, but gallantly concealed from his family and from our teachers my share in the matter. The pang of seeing him carried downstairs was lost in my general misery. For some reason or other, no car came to fetch me that day, and during the cold, dreary, incredibly slow drive home in a hired sleigh I had ample time to think matters over. Now I understood why, the day before, my mother had been so little with me and had not come down to dinner. I also understood what special coaching Thernant, a still finer maître d’armes than Loustalot, had of late been giving my father. What would his adversary choose, I kept asking myself—the blade or the bullet? Or had the choice already been made? Carefully, I took the beloved, the familiar, the richly alive image of my father at fencing and tried to transfer that image, minus the mask and the padding, to the dueling ground, in some barn or riding school. I visualized him and his adversary, both bare-chested, black-trousered, in furious battle, their energetic movements marked by that strange awkwardness which even the most elegant swordsmen cannot avoid in a real encounter. The picture was so repulsive, so vividly did I feel the ripeness and nakedness of a madly pulsating heart about to be pierced, that I found myself hoping for what seemed momentarily a more abstract weapon. But soon I was in even deeper distress. As the sleigh crept along Nevski Avenue, where blurry lights swam in the gathering dusk, I thought of the heavy black Browning my father kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. I knew that pistol as well as I knew all the other, more salient, things in his study; the objets d’art of crystal or veined stone, fashionable in those days; the glinting family photographs; the huge, mellowly illumined Perugino; the small, honey-bright Dutch oils; and, right over the desk, the rose-and-haze pastel portrait of my mother by Bakst: the artist had drawn her face in three-quarter view, wonderfully bringing out its delicate features—the upward sweep of the ash-colored hair (it had grayed when she was in her twenties), the pure curve of the forehead, the dove-blue eyes, the graceful line of the neck.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  And I wonder what I will have to pay someday for that privilege, and in whose coin? Will those forces which serve non-life in the name of power and profit kill me too, or merely dismember me in the eyes of whoever can use what I do? When I stand in the radiance of a place like the Sapphire Sapphos dinner, with the elegant food and abundance of love and beautiful dark women, when I stand in that moment of sweetness, I sometimes become almost afraid. Afraid of their warmth and loving, as if that same loving warmth might doom me. I know this is not so, but it can feel like it. As if so long as I remained too different from my own time and surroundings I was safe, if terribly lonely. But now that I am becoming less lonely and more loved, I am also becoming more visible, and therefore more vulnerable. Malcolm saying to Martin in the film, “I love you, Martin, and we are both dead men.” February 9, 1984 New York City So. No doubt about where we are in the world’s story. It has just cost $32,000 to complete a government-commissioned study that purports to show there is no rampant hunger in the U.S.A. I wonder if they realize rampant means aggressive . So. The starving old women who used to sit in broken-down rooming houses waiting for a welfare check now lie under park benches and eat out of garbage bins. “I only eat fruit,” she mumbled, rummaging through the refuse bin behind Gristedes supermarket, while her gnarled Black hands carefully cut away the rotted parts of a cantaloupe with a plastic Burger King knife. February 18, 1984 Ohio How does it feel , Ms. L., to be a fifty-year-old Black woman who is still bleeding! Cheers to the years! Doing what I like to do best. Last night I gave a talk to the Black students at the university about coming to see ourselves as part of an international community of people of Color, how we must train ourselves to question what our Blackness—our Africanness—can mean on the world stage. And how as members of that international community, we must assume responsibility for our actions, or lack of action, as americans. Otherwise, no matter how relative that power might be, we are yielding it up to the opposition to be used against us, and against the forces for liberation around the world. For instance, what are our responsibilities as educated Black women toward the land-rights struggles of other people of Color here and abroad? I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country.

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

  But in England the rule was Rhadamanthine; the fags’ names on duty were put up on a blackboard, and if you were not on time, ay, and servile to boot, you’d get a dozen from an ash plant on your behind and not laid on perfunctorily and with distaste, as the Doctor did it, but with vim so that I had painful weals on my backside and couldn’t sit down for days without a smart. The fags too, being young and weak, were very often brutally treated just for fun. On Sunday mornings in summer, for instance, we had an hour longer in bed. I was one of the half dozen juniors in the big bedroom; there were two older boys in it, one at each end, presumably to keep order; but in reality to teach lechery and corrupt their younger favorites. If the mothers of England knew what goes on in the dormitories of these boarding-schools throughout England, they would all be closed, from Eton and Harrow upwards or downwards, in a day. If English fathers even had brains enough to understand that the fires of sex need no stoking in boyhood, they too would protect their sons from the foul abuse. But I shall come back to this. Now I wish to speak of the cruelty. Every form of cruelty was practiced on the younger, weaker and more nervous boys. I remember one Sunday morning, the half dozen older boys pulled one bed along the wall and forced all the seven younger boys underneath it, beating with sticks any hand or foot that showed. One little fellow cried that he couldn’t breathe and at once the gang of tormentors began stuffing up all the apertures, saying that they would make a “Black Hole” of it. There were soon cries and strugglings under the bed and at length one of the youngest began shrieking so that the torturers ran away from the prison, fearing lest some master should hear. One wet Sunday afternoon in midwinter, a little nervous “Mother’s darling” from the West Indies who always had a cold and was always sneaking near the fire in the big schoolroom, was caught by two of the Fifth and held near the flames. Two more brutes pulled his trowsers tight over his bottom, and the more he squirmed and begged to be let go, the tighter they held the trowsers and the nearer the flames he was pushed, till suddenly the trowsers split apart scorched through, and as the little fellow tumbled forward screaming, the torturers realized that they had gone too far. The little “Nigger” as he was called, didn’t tell how he came to be so scorched but took his fortnight in sick bay as a respite.

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

  Talking it over we came to the conclusion that one man should ride to Fort Dodge for help and I was selected as the lightest save Bob and altogether the worst shot besides being the only man who would certainly find his way. Accordingly I brought up Blue Devil at once, took some pounds of jerked beef with me and a goat-water skin I had bought in Taos; a girth and stirrups quickly turned a blanket into a makeshift, light saddle and I was ready. It was Bob’s uncanny knowledge both of the Trail and of Indian ways that gave me my chance. All the rest advised me to go North out of our bay and then ride for it. He advised me to go south where the large body of Indians had stationed themselves. “They’ll not look for you there”, he said and “you may get through unseen; half an hour’s riding more will take you round them; then you have one hundred and fifty miles north on the Trail—you may pick up a herd—and then one hundred and twenty miles straight west. You ought to be in Dodge in five days and back here in five more; you’ll find us”, he added significantly. The little man padded Blue Devil’s hooves with some old garments he cut up and insisted on leading her away round the bight and far to the south, and I verily believe beyond the Indian camp. There he took off the mare’s pads, while I tightened the girths and started to walk keeping the mare between me and the Indians and my ears cocked for the slightest sound. But I heard nothing and saw nothing and in an hour more had made the round and was on the Trail for the north determined in my own mind to do the two or three hundred miles in four days at most.... On the fourth day I got twenty troopers from the Fort with Lieutenant Winder and was leading them in a bee-line to our Refuge. We got there in six days; but in the mean time the Indians had been busy. They cut a way through the scrub-oak brush that we regarded as impassable and stampeded the cattle one morning just at dawn and our men were only able to herd off about six or seven hundred head and protect them in the extreme north corner of the bend. The Indians had all drawn off the day before I arrived with the U. S. Cavalry troopers.... Next morning we began the march northwards and I had no difficulty in persuading Lieutenant Winder to give us his escort for the next four or five days....

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Finding that entreaties, arguments, and tears were useless, Florida had recourse to what she feared as much as the loss of life, and screamed out as loudly as she could to her mother. The countess, on hearing her cries, at once suspected the truth, and hastened to her with the utmost promptitude. Amadour, who was not so near dying as he said, let go his hold so quickly that the countess, on opening the cabinet, found him at the door, and Florida far enough away from him. " What is the matter, Amadour .'' " said the countess. "Tell me the truth." Amadour, who was prepared beforehand, and was never at a loss for an expedient at need, answered, with a pale and woebegone countenance, "Alas ! madam, I no longer recognize Florida. Never was man more surprised than I am. I thought, as I told you, that I had some share in her goodwill, but now I see plainly I have no longer any. Methinks, madarn, that whilst she lived with you she was neither less discreet nor less vir- tuous than she is now ; but she had no squeams of con- science to hinder her from talking to people and looking them in the face. I wanted to look at her, but she would not allow it. Seeing this, I thought I must be in a dream or a trance, and I asked leave to kiss her hand, according to the custom of the country, but she abso- lutely refused it. It is true, madam, I have done wrong, and I crave your pardon for it, in taking her hand and kissing it in a manner by force. I asked nothing more of her, but I see plainly that she is resolved upon my death, and that, I believe, is why she called you. Per- haps she was afraid I had some other design upon her. Be that as it may, madam, I acknowledge I was wrong ; for though she ought to love all your good servants, such is my ill-luck, that I have no part in her goodwill. My heart will not change for all that, with regard either ta 1 First day\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 99 her or to you ; and I entreat you, madam, to let me re- tain your goodwill, since I have lost hers without deserv- nig it.