Grief

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.

Page 142 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Jesus is black because blackness has historically been the color of oppression in this country; thus Christ's blackness is his ultimate expression of solidarity with marginality. For all readers, the Scriptures are normally interpreted on the basis of the social location of the interpreter, in light of the interpreter's privilege or lack thereof. African Americans, more so than the dominant culture, identify with Jesus’ humanity, specifically the communal aspects of the suffering Messiah, who suffered like so many African Americans did and do today. Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection become salvific motifs for the black experience. Yet this same Jesus, who willingly shares in the death-causing plight of the marginalized, also rose from the ultimate conclusion of oppression, death. This same Jesus is present in the lives of today's sufferers and will return to judge those who benefit from the unjust social structures that cause suffering. A black Christ thus stands in contrast to a white Christ and to a focus on the resurrection as “the beginning of a triumphalist church tradition that protects the status quo.”17 A FEMALE CHRIST In the previous chapter we reviewed how women in the Hebrew Bible were perceived as possessions who existed to meet the physical, emotional, economic, and sexual needs of men. They could be readily sacrificed for the sake of men's survival. Their ultimate function was to become vessels that carried the seeds of men. Hence the greatest shame a woman could ever bear was barrenness. This is evident in the story of Hannah as recorded in 1 Samuel 1. Because Hannah was barren, she was taunted by her husband's other wife. Bitter in her soul, she wept and refused to eat. She entered the Temple to ask for the only thing that would make her humanity whole, a man-child. Women find their fulfillment in life by the process of birthing great holy men (not women). If not, the shame of barrenness becomes so great that it leads women like Rachel, Jacob's wife, to exclaim in Genesis, “Give me sons, and if there are none, I shall die!” (30:2). Good women are blessed with fertility. The so-called bad girls of the Bible are those who lacked the seriousness to be used by God to birth great men, heirs of God's promise. Even when women chose to break out of the restricted social space designated for them, as in the case of Mary of Magdala, we question their reputation. For example, what was Mary of Magdala's prior profession? Did you say she was a prostitute? If you did, you are not alone. Yet nowhere in the Bible does it say Mary of Magdala was a prostitute. Where then did we get this idea? According to all three Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 27:55–56; Mark 15:40–41; Luke 24:10), Mary of Magdala is mentioned first among Jesus’ female disciples. Her role (along with other women) must have been important enough to be included as equal to the twelve male apostles.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  153 Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past Lecture 36 In this lecture, we’re going to take a look at a novel which helped to abandon Realism, to reject the rubrics of Realism and in the process, set a brand new course for the novel for the 20 th century. We’re talking about Marcel Proust’s the Remembrance of Things Past. T he ¿ rst word in the novel is longtemps (“for a long time”) and the last is temps (“time”), so the novel is in many ways about time: about the time in which Proust lived, the time in which he wrote the novel, the effects of the passage of time, and the enemy the protagonist hopes to defeat by ¿ nishing the book. Time and the havoc it wreaks on everything is a standard theme in literature. Here, as in most cases in literature, this kind of voice is a lament. Remembrance of Things Past is a heroic battle fought againt time. It has an elegiac tone, because the battle against time is always doomed. The novel is a search for some absolute that can oppose the À ow of time. The protagonist will try many things—friendship, romantic love, ideas—all of which turn out to be subject to time themselves. Even the self, which we think of as enduring across time, changes from day to day. This is an idea which may derive from Henri Bergson’s concept of time as duration, and we will encounter it again in Pirandello; here, it is the theme. For Proust, our old selves live on in the subconscious, returning in dreams, so that waking up each morning, having spent the night with other selves, we need to recover our current identities. While we are asleep we have access to levels of memory usually blocked by our conscious mind, and we can be any self we have ever been. Waking, we have to reorient ourselves to this room and this self. Inside each of us is something permanent and unchangeable that cannot be destroyed by time; hence the title of the book, which in French means In Search of Lost Time. In the novel Proust distinguishes between two kinds of memory: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary memory is that of the conscious mind, the memory of the intellect, which is what we use when we are awake, and which the

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Although it’s only three in the morning, the lampshade makes the room feel like the last moments of a sinister sunset. Under the bulb’s electric hum, Paul and I spot each other through the doorway. He wipes his eyes with the palm of one hand and waves me over with the other. He slips the photo into his chest pocket and puts on his glasses, blinking hard. I sit on the cherrywood armchair beside him. “You okay, Grandpa?” I say, still foggy from sleep. His smile has a grimace underneath it. I suggest that I go back to bed, that it’s still early anyway, but he shakes his head. “It’s alright.” He sniffles and straightens up in the chair, serious. “It’s just—well, I just keep thinking about that song you sang earlier, the uh . . .” He squints at the floor. “Ca trù,” I offer, “the folk songs—the ones Grandma used to sing.” “That’s right.” He nods vigorously. “Ca trù. I was lying there in the damn dark and I swear I kept hearing it. It’s been so long since I heard that sound.” He glances at me, searching, then back at the floor. “I must be going crazy.” Earlier that night, after dinner, I had sung a few folk songs for Paul. He had inquired about what I had learned during the school year and, already steeped in summer and drawing a blank, I offered a few songs I had memorized from Lan. I sang, in my best effort, a classic lullaby Lan used to sing. The song, originally performed by the famous Khánh Ly, describes a woman singing among corpses strewn across sloping leafy hills. Searching the faces of the dead, the singer asks in the song’s refrain, And which of you, which of you are my sister? Do you remember it, Ma, how Lan would sing it out of nowhere? How once, she sang it at my friend Junior’s birthday party, her face the shade of raw ground beef from a single Heineken? You shook her shoulder, telling her to stop, but she kept going, eyes closed, swaying side to side as she sang. Junior and his family didn’t understand Vietnamese—thank god. To them it was just my crazy grandma mumbling away again. But you and I could hear it. Eventually you put down your slice of pineapple cake—untouched, the glasses clinking as the corpses, fleshed from Lan’s mouth, piled up around us. Among the empty plates stained from the baked ziti, I sang that same song as Paul listened. After, he simply clapped, then we washed up. I had forgotten that Paul, too, understands Vietnamese, having picked it up during the war. “I’m sorry,” I say now, watching the red light pool under his eyes. “It’s a stupid song anyway.” Outside, the wind is driving through the maples, their rinsed leaves slap against the clapboard siding. “Let’s just make some coffee or something, Grandpa.”

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  199 The ending of the novel illustrates Yeats’s thesis. The forces that loose anarchy into the Igbo village come from the Evil Forest, the place where excluded values have been gathering strength. The missionaries emphasize personal relations versus the communal ones of the culture, and those are the values that break down the walls of the Igbo construct and bring about “the second coming.” When one of the elders lashes out at the English commissioner at the novel’s end, he laments not just the death of Okonkwo, one of their best, but of an entire culture. There is an irony in the book’s ending—an irony of which Achebe is himself very much aware. Achebe himself is a post-colonial writer writing in English, which makes him a descendent not so much of Okonkwo as of Nwoye, since Nwoye is the one who takes the ¿ rst step that will allow an Igbo writer to record his people’s history in English. Nwoye’s movement away from tribal values is the ¿ rst step in the journey of the Western-educated Nigerians of Achebe’s generation, making Achebe the inheritor of Nwoye’s revolt. He can celebrate the Igbo culture, but he does so through tools gained by its destruction. Ŷ Achebe, Things Fall Apart. Innes and Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe. Ironically, Okonkwo’s success in embodying the virtues of his culture leads to his destruction, while Nwoye’s failures … ensure his survival in a changed world. Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 200 Lecture 45: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 1. Why are the masculine virtues so important in traditional Igbo society? Why is it said that “yams are a man’s crop”? Why is the man taking care of a child who opens the gate allowing a cow into the yam ¿ eld given a stiff ¿ ne by the elders? Why is calling someone an agbala an insult? 2. Can you identify the stages of Nwoye’s realization that his people’s ideals are not his own? What might have become of him had the missionaries not shown up when they did? To what extent is his father responsible for Nwoye’s unhappiness and sense of alienation? To what extent do you share Nwoye’s emerging values as opposed to those of his people? Questions to Consider

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  They say everything happens for a reason—but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living. I can’t tell you why some monarchs, on their way south, simply stop flying, their wings all of a sudden too heavy, not entirely their own—and fall away, deleting themselves from the story. I can’t tell you why, on that street in Saigon, as the corpse lay under the sheet, I kept hearing, not the song in the drag singer’s throat, but the one inside my own. “Many men, many, many, many, many men. Wish death ’pon me.” The street throbbed and spun its shredded colors around me. In the commotion, I noticed the body had shifted. The head fell to one side, pulling the sheet with it and revealing the nape of a neck—already pale. And there, just under the ear, no larger than a fingernail, a jade earring dangled, then stopped. “Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me. Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.” — I remember you grabbing my shoulders. How it was pouring rain or it was snowing or the streets were flooded or the sky was the color of bruises. And you were kneeling on the sidewalk tying my powder-blue shoes, saying, “Remember. Remember. You’re already Vietnamese.” You’re already. You’re all ready. Already gone. I remember the sidewalk, how we pushed the rusty cart to the church and soup kitchen on New Britain Ave. I remember the sidewalk. How it started to bleed: little drops of rouge appearing beneath the cart. How there was a trail of blood ahead of us. And behind us. Someone must have been shot or stabbed the night before. How we kept going. You said, “Don’t look down, baby. Don’t look down.” The church so far away. The steeple a stitch in the sky. “Don’t look down. Don’t look down.” I remember Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hands wet over mine. Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hand so hot. Your hand my own. I remember you saying, “Little Dog, look up. Look up. See? Do you see the birds in the trees?” I remember it was February. The trees were black and bare against an overcast sky. But you kept talking: “Look! The birds. So many colors. Blue birds. Red birds. Magenta birds. Glittered birds.” Your finger pointed to the twisted branches. “Don’t you see the nest of yellow chicks, the green mother feeding them worms?” I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn’t stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on the back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use. A chance. I nodded, grinning. The cart was so full by then I no longer saw what was ahead of me. The time with the kitchen knife—the one you picked up, then put down, shaking, saying quietly, “Get out. Get out.” And I ran out the door, down the black summer streets. I ran until I forgot I was ten, until my heartbeat was all I could hear of myself. — The time, in New York City, a week after cousin Phuong died in the car wreck, I stepped onto the uptown 2 train and saw his face, clear and round as the doors opened, looking right at me, alive. I gasped—but knew better, that it was only a man who resembled him. Still, it upended me to see what I thought I’d never see again—the features so exact, heavy jaw, open brow. His name lunged to the fore of my mouth before I caught it. Aboveground, I sat on a hydrant and called you. “Ma, I saw him,” I breathed. “Ma, I swear I saw him. I know it’s stupid but I saw Phuong on the train.” I was having a panic attack. And you knew it. For a while you said nothing, then started to hum the melody to “Happy Birthday.” It was not my birthday but it was the only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the phone pressed so hard to my ear that, hours later, a pink rectangle was still imprinted on my cheek. — I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast. — The time, at the nail salon, I overheard you consoling a customer over her recent loss. While you painted her nails, she spoke, between tears. “I lost my baby, my little girl, Julie. I can’t believe it, she was my strongest, my oldest.”

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I stand, the laptop held out in front of me, and point Paul’s face to Lan’s grave, which is embossed with a photo of her when she was twenty-eight, roughly the age when they first met. I wait from behind the screen as this American veteran Skypes with his estranged Vietnamese ex-wife, just buried. At one point, I think the signal had cut out, but then I hear Paul blowing his nose, his sentences amputated, struggling through his goodbyes. He’s sorry, he says to the smiling face on the grave. Sorry that he went back to Virginia in ’71 after he received notice that his mother was ill. How it was all a ploy to get him home, how his mother faked her tuberculosis until weeks turned to months, until the war began to close and Nixon stopped deploying troops and Americans started pulling out. How all the letters Lan sent were intercepted by Paul’s brother. How it wasn’t until one day, months before Saigon fell, a soldier, just home, knocked on his door and handed him a note from Lan. How Lan and their daughters had to leave the capital after the fall. How they’ll write again. He said sorry that it took so long. That by the time the Salvation Army called him to let him know there was a woman with a marriage certificate with his name on it looking for him in a Philippine refugee camp, it was already 1990. He had, by then, been married to another woman for over eight years. He says all this in a flood of stuttered Vietnamese—which he picked up during his tour and kept at through their marriage—until his words are barely coherent under his heaving. A few children from the village had gathered at the edge of the graves, their curious and perplexed stares hover on the periphery. I must look strange to them, holding the pixelated head of a white man in front of a row of tombs. As I look at Paul’s face on the screen, this soft-spoken man, this stranger turned grandfather turned family, I realize how little I know of us, of my country, any country. Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop. —

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  You sit beside your mother, your hands, finally empty, lie in your lap. Mai points to Lan’s toes. “They’re turning purple,” she says with eerie calm. “The feet, they go first—and they’re purple. Only a half hour now, at most.” I watch Lan’s life begin to recede from itself. Purple, Mai had said, but Lan’s feet don’t look purple to me. They’re black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an opaque yellowish tint—like bone itself. But it’s the word purple, and with it that lush deep hue, that floods me. That’s what I see as I watch the blood pull out of Lan’s black feet, the green surrounded by clusters of violet in my mind, and realize the word is dragging me into a memory. Years ago, when I was six or seven, while walking with Lan along a dirt path that hugged the highway off Church St., she abruptly stopped and shouted. I couldn’t hear her over the traffic. She pointed out the chain-link fence that divided the interstate from the sidewalk, eyes pupil-wide. “Look, Little Dog!” I stooped down, examined the fence. “I don’t get it, Grandma. What’s wrong?” “No,” she said, annoyed, “get up. Look past the fence—there—those purple flowers.” Just beyond the fence, on the highway side, lay a spill of violet wildflowers, each blossom no larger than a thumbnail with a tiny yellow-white center. Lan crouched, held my shoulders, leveling her eyes with mine, serious. “Will you climb it, Little Dog?” Her gaze narrowed in mock skepticism, waiting. Of course, I nodded eagerly. And she knew that I would. “I’ll boost you up and you just grab them quick, alright?” I latched on to the fence as she lifted my hips. After wavering a bit, I made it to the top, straddled it. I looked down and immediately felt sick, the flowers somehow tiny, faint brushstrokes on a whir of green. The wind from the cars blasted my hair. “I don’t know if I can!” I shouted, near tears. Lan grabbed my calf. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said over the traffic. “If you fall, I cut open the fence with my teeth and save you.” I believed her and jumped, landed in a roll, got up, and brushed myself off. “Get them by the roots with both hands.” She grimaced as she clung to the fence. “You have to be quick or we’ll get in trouble.” I pulled one bush up after the other, the roots bursting from the dirt in ashy clouds. I tossed them over the fence, each passing car made a gust so strong I almost fell over. I pulled and pulled and Lan stuffed them all in a plastic 7-Eleven bag.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I remember the walls curling like a canvas as the fire blazed. The ceiling a rush of black smoke. I remember crawling to the table, how it was now a pile of soot, then dipping my fingers into it. My nails blackening with my country. My country dissolving on my tongue. I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page. How there’s ash on this very page. How there’s enough for everyone. You straighten up, dust off your pants. Night drains all colors from the garden. We walk, shadowless, toward the house. Inside, in the glow of shaded lamps, we roll up our sleeves, wash our hands. We speak, careful not to look too long at one another—then, with no words left between us, we set the table. I hear it in my dream. Then, eyes open, I hear it again—the low wail swooping across the razed fields. An animal. Always it is an animal whose pain is this articulate, this clear. I’m lying on the barn’s cool dirt floor. Above me, rows of tobacco hang, their limbs brushing against one another in a lone draft—which means it’s the third week of August. Through the slats, a new day, already thick with summer’s heat. The sound comes back and this time I sit up. It’s not until I see him that I know I’m fifteen again. Trevor’s asleep beside me. On his side, his arm a pillow, he looks more lost in thought than in sleep. His breath slow and eased, cut with hints of the Pabst we drank a few hours ago; the empties lined along on the bench above his head. A few feet away lies the metal army helmet, tipped back, the morning light, powder blue, collected in the bowl. Still in my boxers, I walk out into the vast haze. The howl returns, the sound deep and vacuous, as if it had walls, something you could hide in. It must be wounded. Only something in pain could make a sound you could enter. I search the flattened fields; mist wafts across the brown and tarnished soil. Nothing. It must be coming from the next farm. I walk, the humidity rises, my temples itch with new sweat. In the next field, the last of the tobacco, fat and dark green, a week away from harvest, rises on all sides—somehow higher than usual, their tips just above my head. There’s the oak where we’ll total the Chevy in two weeks. The crickets have yet to unhinge their legs and now serrate the dense air as I go deeper, stopping each time the bellow shoots up, louder, closer. Last night, under the rafters, our lips raw and spent from use, we lay, breathing. The dark quiet between us, I asked Trevor what Lan had asked me the week before.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I reach back, clutching two of your fingers, and press my face into the dark slot under the bed. On the far end, near the wall, too far for anyone to reach, beside an empty water bottle, a single sock crumpled and filmed with dust. Hello. Dear Ma— Let me begin again. I am writing because it’s late. Because it’s 9:52 p.m. on a Tuesday and you must be walking home after the closing shift. I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain. For the first time in a long time, I’m trying to believe in heaven, in a place we can be together after all this blows over up. They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned. I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed. — You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes. Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore. Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss—the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them—never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven-hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard-issue apron. Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen. OxyContin, first mass-produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is an opioid, essentially making it heroin in pill form. I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work. Take it or leave it. The body, I mean. Take a left on Harris St., where all that’s left of the house that burned down that summer during a thunderstorm is a chain-linked dirt lot. The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language. After a month on the Oxy, Trevor’s ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict. —

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  an engineer and I liked the sound of the word. I got out as much of the mustard as I could. It made a brown and yellow smudge where I’d scraped it off on the edge of my plate. “All right,” Dwight said. “Now—was it empty?” “Yes,” I said. He leaned across the table and slapped my face. He didn’t swing hard but the slap was loud. Pearl started yelling at him, and while he was yelling back I got up and left the house. I wandered around feeling sorry for myself. Then I decided to buy a Coke from the machine on the loading ramp of the main warehouse. There was also a phone booth on the ramp, and as I drank the Coke I formed the idea of calling my brother. I didn’t know how to do it, but the operator was amused by my helplessness and steered me through. She got Geoffrey’s number from Princeton information, then calmed me when I panicked at her request for money. “We’ll just make it collect,” she said. I listened to the muffled signal ring through the static. I was quaking. And then I heard his voice. I had not heard it for six years, but I knew it right away. He accepted the call and said, “Hello, Toby.” I tried to say hello back but the word got stuck in my throat. Every time I tried to speak I seized up again. It wasn’t self-pity; it was hearing my brother’s voice and, for the first time in all these years, the sound of my own name. But I couldn’t explain any of this. Geoffrey kept asking me what was wrong, and when I found my voice I told him the first thing that came to mind—that Dwight had hit me. “He hit you! What do you mean, he hit you?” It took me a while to get the story out. The word mustard resists serious treatment, and as I described what had happened I began to fear that Geoffrey would find the episode ridiculous, so I made it sound worse than it had been. Geoffrey listened without interrupting me. Once I was finished he said, “Let me get this straight. He hit you because of a little mustard?” I said that he had. “Where was Mom?” “Working.” Geoffrey was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again he sounded

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I’m on the train from New York City. In the window my face won’t let me go, it hovers above windswept towns as the Amtrak slashes past lots stacked with shelled cars and farm tractors shot through with rust, backyards and their repeating piles of rotted firewood, the oily mounds gone mushy, pushed through the crisscross of chain-link fences, then hardened in place. Past warehouse after warehouse graffitied, then painted white, then graffitied again, the windows smashed out for so long glass no longer litters the ground below, windows you can look through, and glimpse, beyond the empty dark inside, the sky, where a wall used to be. And there, just beyond Bridgeport, sits the one boarded house in the middle of a parking lot the size of two footballs fields, the yellow lines running right up to the battered porch. The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The light on the Connecticut River is the brightest thing in the afternoon’s overcast. I’m on this train ’cause I’m going back to Hartford. I take out my phone. And a barrage of texts floods the screen, just like I expected. u hear abt trev? check fb it’s about Trevor pick up fuck this si horrifc call me if u want I just saw. damn i’ll call ashley to make sure just lmk ur good the wakes on sunday its trev this time? I knew it For no reason, I text him: Trevor I’m sorry come back, then turn off the phone, terrified he’d answer. — It’s already night by the time I get off at Hartford’s Union Station. I stand in the greasy parking lot as people hurry through the drizzle into waiting taxis. It’s been five years and three months since Trevor and I first met, since the barn, the Patriots game through radio static, the army helmet on the dusty floor. I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself. I did not tell anyone I was coming. I was in the Italian American Lit class at a city college in Brooklyn when I saw, on my phone, a Facebook update from Trevor’s account, posted by his old man. Trevor had passed away the night before. I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two. I picked up my bag and left the class. The professor, discussing a passage from Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, stopped, looked at me, waiting for an explanation. When I gave none she continued, her voice trailing behind me as I fled the building. I walked all the way uptown, along the East Side, following the 6 train up to Grand Central.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Being a high-ranking colonel, Phong was captured by the North Vietnamese authorities thirty-nine days after Saigon was taken. He was sent to a reeducation camp where he was tortured, starved, and committed to forced labor. A year later, at age forty-seven, Phong died while in detainment. His grave would not be discovered until a decade later, when his children unearthed his bones for reburial near his home province—the final gravestone reading Vuong Dang Phong. But to Earl Woods, his friend was known as none other than “Tiger Phong”—or simply Tiger, a nickname Woods had given him for his ferocity in battle. On December 30, 1975, a year before Tiger Phong’s death and across the world from Phong’s jail cell, Earl was in Cypress, California, cradling a newborn boy in his arms. The boy already had the name Eldrick but, staring into the infant’s eyes, Earl knew the boy would have to be named after his best friend, Tiger. “Someday, my old friend would see him on television . . . and say, ‘That must be Woody’s kid,’ and we’d find each other again,” Earl later said in an interview. Tiger Phong died of heart failure, most likely brought on by poor nutrition and exhaustion at the camp. But for a brief eight months in 1975 and 1976, the two most important Tigers in Earl Woods’s life were alive at once, sharing the same planet, one at the fragile end of a brutal history, the other just beginning a legacy of his own. The name “Tiger,” but also Earl himself, had become a bridge. When Earl finally heard news of Tiger Phong’s death, Tiger Woods had already won his first Masters. “Boy, does this ever hurt,” Earl said. “I’ve got that old feeling in my stomach, that combat feeling.” — I remember the day you went to your first church service. Junior’s dad was a light-skinned Dominican, his ma a black Cuban, and they worshipped at the Baptist church on Prospect Ave., where no one asked them why they rolled their r’s or where they really came from. I had already gone to the church with the Ramirezes a handful of times, when I’d sleep over on Saturday and wake up attending services in Junior’s borrowed Sunday best. That day, after being invited by Dionne, you decided to go—out of politeness but also because the church gave out nearly expired groceries donated by local supermarkets. You and I were the only yellow faces in the church. But when Dionne and Miguel introduced us to their friends, we were received with warm smiles. “Welcome to my father’s house,” people kept saying. And I remember wondering how so many people could be related, could all come from the same dad.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We passed the tenement building on New Britain Ave. where we lived for three years. Where I rode my pink bike with training wheels up and down the linoleum halls so the kids on the block wouldn’t beat me up for loving a pink thing. I must’ve ridden down those halls a hundred times a day, the little bell clinking as I hit the wall at each end. How Mr. Carlton, the man who lived in the last apartment, kept coming out and yelling at me each day, saying, “Who are you? What are you doing here? Why don’t you do that outside? Who are you? You’re not my daughter! You’re not Destiny! Who are you?” But all that, the whole building, is gone now—replaced by a YMCA—even the tenement parking lot (where nobody parked since no one had cars), busted through with weeds nearly four feet high, is gone, all of it bulldozed and turned into a community garden with scarecrows made from mannequins thrown out by the dollar store off Bushnell. Entire families are swimming and playing handball where we used to sleep. People are doing butterfly strokes where Mr. Carlton eventually died, alone, in his bed. How no one knew for weeks until the whole floor started to reek and the SWAT team (I don’t know why) had to come bust down the door with guns. How for a whole month Mr. Carlton’s things were left out in a big iron dumpster out back, and a wooden hand-painted pony, its tongue-lolled face, peeked out of the dumpster’s top in the rain. Trevor and I kept riding, past Church St. where Big Joe’s sister OD’d, then the parking lot behind the MEGA XXXLOVE DEPOT where Sasha OD’d, the park where Jake and B-Rab OD’d. Except B-Rab lived, only to be caught, years later, stealing laptops from Trinity College and got four years in county—no parole. Which was heavy, especially for a white kid from the suburbs. There was Nacho, who lost his right leg in the Gulf War and whom you could find on weekends sliding under jack-raised cars with a skateboard at the Maybelle Auto Repair where he worked. Where he once pulled a beautiful screaming red-faced baby from the trunk of a Nissan left in the back of the shop during a blizzard. How he let his crutches fall and cradled the baby with both hands and the air held him up for the first time in years as the snow came down, then rose back up from the ground so bright that, for a blurred merciful hour, everyone in the city forgot why they were trying to get out of it.

• From Post Office (1971)

  His whole body shook in spasms. He wouldn’t stop. I ran down the steps, past all the carriers, and up to The Stone’s desk. “Hey, hey, Stone! Jesus Christ, Stone!” “What is it?” he asked. “G.G. has flipped out! Nobody cares! He’s upstairs crying! He needs help!” “Who’s manning his route?” “Who gives a damn? I tell you, he’s sick! He needs help!” “I gotta get somebody to man his route!” The Stone got up from his desk, circled around looking at his carriers as if there might be an extra one somewhere. Then he hustled back to his desk. “Look, Stone, somebody’s got to take that man home. Tell me where he lives and I’ll drive him home myself—off the clock. Then I’ll carry your damned route.” The Stone looked up: “Who’s manning your case?” “Oh, God damn the case!” “GO MAN YOUR CASE!” Then he was talking to another supervisor on the phone: “Hello, Eddie? Listen, I need a man out here …” There’d be no candy for the kids that day. I walked back. All the other carriers were gone. I began sticking in the circulars. Over on G.G.’s case was his tie-up of unstuck circs. I was behind schedule again. Without a dispatch. When I came in late that afternoon, The Stone wrote me up. I never saw G.G. again. Nobody knew what happened to him. Nor did anybody ever mention him again. The “good guy.” The dedicated man. Knifed across the throat over a handful of circs from a local market—with its special: a free box of a brand name laundry soap, with the coupon, and any purchase over $3. 17After three years I made “regular.” That meant holiday pay (subs didn’t get paid for holidays) and a 40-hour week with two days off. The Stone was also forced to assign me as relief man to five different routes. That’s all I had to carry—five different routes. In time, I would learn the cases well plus the shortcuts and traps on each route. Each day would be easier. I could begin to cultivate that comfortable look. Somehow, I was not too happy. I was not a man to deliberately seek pain, the job was still difficult enough, but somehow it lacked the old glamour of my sub days—the not-knowing-what-the-hell was going to happen next. A few of the regulars came around and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” they said. “Yeh,” I said. Congratulations for what? I hadn’t done anything. Now I was a member of the club. I was one of the boys. I could be there for years, eventually bid for my own route. Get Xmas presents from my people. And when I phoned in sick, they would say to some poor bastard sub, “Where’s the regular man today? You’re late. The regular man is never late.” So there I was. Then a bulletin came out that no caps or equipment were to be placed on top of the carrier’s case.

• From Post Office (1971)

  There wasn’t any answer to my knock. “Betty! Betty! Are you all right?” I turned the knob. The door was open. The bed was turned back. There was a large bloodspot on the sheet. “Oh shit!” I said. I looked around. All the bottles were gone. Then I looked around. There was a middle-aged Frenchwoman who owned the place. She stood in the doorway. “She’s at County General Hospital. She was very sick. I called the ambulance last night.” “Did she drink all that stuff?” “She had some help.” I ran down the stairway and got into my car. Then I was there. I knew the place well. They told me the room number. There were three or four beds in a tiny room. A woman was sitting up in hers across the way, chewing an apple and laughing with two female visitors. I pulled the drop sheet around Betty’s bed, sat down on the stool and leaned over her. “Betty! Betty!” I touched her arm. “Betty!” Her eyes opened. They were beautiful again. Bright calm blue. “I knew it would be you,” she said. Then she closed her eyes. Her lips were parched. Yellow spittle had caked at the left corner of her mouth. I took a cloth and washed it away. I cleaned her face, hands and throat. I took another cloth and squeezed a bit of water on her tongue. Then a little more. I wet her lips. I straightened her hair. I heard the women laughing through the sheets that separated us. “Betty, Betty, Betty. Please, I want you to drink some water, just a sip of water, not too much, just a sip.” She didn’t respond. I tried for 10 minutes. Nothing. More spittle formed at her mouth. I wiped it away. Then I got up and pulled the drop sheet back. I stared at the three women. I walked out and spoke to the nurse at the desk. “Listen, why isn’t anything being done for that woman in 45-C? Betty Williams.” “We’re doing all we can, sir.” “But there’s nobody there.” “We make our regular rounds.” “But where are the doctors? I don’t see any doctors.” “The doctor has seen her, sir.” “Why do you just let her lay there?” “We’ve done all we can, sir.” “SIR! SIR! SIR! FORGET THAT ‘SIR’ STUFF, WILL YOU? I’ll bet if that were the president or governor or mayor or some rich son of a bitch, there would be doctors all over that room doing something! Why do you just let them die? What’s the sin in being poor?” “I’ve told you, sir, that we’ve done ALL we can.” “I’ll be back in two hours.” “Are you her husband?” “I used to be her common-law husband.” “May we have your name and phone number?” I gave her that, then hurried out. 10The funeral was to be at 10:30 a.m. but it was already hot. I had on a cheap black suit, bought and fitted in a rush.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Trying to hush my mounting fear that the group session had indeed been destructive, I said gently, “Magnolia, do your tears have anything to do with our group meeting yesterday?” “The group?” She looked at me incredulously. “Doctah Yalom, you ain’t forgotten what Ah tol’ you at the end of that meetin’? Today’s the day mah momma died—one yeah ago today.” “Oh, of course. Sorry, I’m a little slow at the moment. Guess too much is going on in my own life, Magnolia.” Relieved, I downshifted quickly into my professional gear. “You miss her a lot, don’t you?” “Ah do. And you remembah Rosa tol’ you mah momma was gone when Ah was growin’ up—she jes’ showed up one day after being away for fifteen years.” “But then, when she came back, she took care of you? Gave you a lot of momma comfort?” “A momma’s a momma. Ain’t got but one of ’em. But you know, Momma didn’t take care of me much—other way around—she was ninety when she passed away. No, it weren’t that at all—it was more jes’ that she was there. Ah don’ know .. . guess she stood for somethin’ Ah needed. You know what Ah mean?” “I know exactly what you mean, Magnolia. I do indeed.” “Maybe it ain’t mah place to say, Doctah, but Ah think you’re like me—you miss your momma too. Doctahs need mommas too, jes’ like mommas need mommas.” “You’re right about that, Magnolia. You’ve got a good sixth sense—like Rosa said. But you said you were wanting to talk to me? “Well, like I already said—about you missing your momma. Dat was one thing. And then about dat group meetin’. Ah jes’ wanted to thank you—thas all. I got a lot from that meetin’.” “Can you tell me what you got from it?” “Ah learned something urgent. Ah learned that Ah’m done with rearin’ children. Ah’m done with that—fo’ever. ...” Her voice trailed off and she looked away, peered down the corridor. Urgent? Forever?—Magnolia’s unexpected words intrigued me. I wanted to keep on talking to her and was disappointed to hear her say, “Oh, look theh, it’s Claudia, comin’ for me.” Claudia wheeled Magnolia out the front door to the van that was to take her to the nursing home to which she was being discharged. I followed her out to the curb and watched her and her chair being hoisted inside by the lift on the back of the van. “Good-bye, Doctah Yalom,” she said, waving to me. “Take care of yo’self.” Strange, I mused as I watched the van drive away, that I, who have devoted my life to apprehending the world of the other, have not, until Magnolia, truly understood that those whom we transform into myth are themselves myth-ridden. They despair; they mourn the death of a mother; they search for the exalted; they too rage against life and may need to maim themselves to be done with giving. 4

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  “Okay. Okay! That’s good enough.” She waved me back over. I leapt up the fence. Lan reached up and pulled me down into her arms, clutching me. She began to shudder, and not until she put me down did I realize she was giggling. “You did it, Little Dog! You’re my flower hunter. The best flower hunter in USA!” She held up one of the bushes in the chalky ochre light. “These will be perfect on our windowsill.” It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for. That night, when you came home, you pointed at our harvest foaming across the brown, dirt-polluted windowsill, their tendrils lacing along the dining table, and asked, impressed, how we got them. Lan gave a dismissive wave, saying we had found them, thrown out on the curbside by a flower shop. I peered from my toy soldiers at Lan, who placed a finger over her lips and winked as you took off your coat, your back to us. Her eyes smiled. I would never know those flowers by name. Because Lan never had one for them. To this day, every time I see small, purple flowers, I swear they’re the flowers I had picked that day. But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear. Clear and purple, the color that climbs now to Lan’s shins as we sit, waiting for it to run through her. You stay close to your mother and brush away the hair matted on her emaciated, skullish face. “What do you want, Ma?” you ask, your mouth at her ear. “What do you need from us? You can have anything.” Outside the window, the sky is a mocking blue. “Rice,” I remember Lan saying, her voice somewhere deep inside her. “A spoonful of rice.” She swallows, takes another breath. “From Go Cong.” We eye each other—the request impossible. Still, Mai gets up and disappears behind the beaded kitchen curtain. Half an hour later she kneels beside her mother, a steaming bowl of rice in her hand. She holds the spoon to Lan’s toothless mouth. “Here, Ma,” she says, stoic, “it’s Go Cong rice, just harvested last week.” Lan chews, swallows, and something like relief spreads across her lips. “So good,” she says, after her one and only bite. “So sweet. That’s our rice—so sweet.” She motions at something far away with her chin and dozes off. Two hours later, she stirs awake. We crowd around her, hear the single deep inhale pull down her lungs, as if she was about to dive underwater, and then, that’s it—no exhale. She simply stills, like someone had pressed pause on a movie.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  178 Lecture 41: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem the isolation of the individual, even within a community or family. T. S. Eliot suggests in The Waste Land a disease pervading all of culture and society, as do many other writers of the period, including Akhmatova. In Requiem, Akhmatova is not speaking only as an individual, but ¿ rst for all the women standing outside all the prisons in Russia in the late 1930s, and then for all women in all times and places, watching as their fathers, husbands, and sons are executed, imprisoned, or disappear. Speaking out for the oppressed is part of the literary tradition everywhere, but it seems especially the case in Russian literature. The poems that make up Requiem were written between 1935 and 1961, but they could not be published because for almost 40 years Akhmatova had been forbidden to write or publish poetry. In 1922, Akhmatova was declared an “unsatisfactory poet” whose work did not advance the revolution. She was forbidden to publish and was made an internal émigré; her only published writing for 18 years was a series of essays on Pushkin. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 could she begin to publish these poems, and then she received a series of international awards, including the Etna-Taormina Poetry Prize in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965. These poems in fact were not kept during all these years as written manuscripts, but memorized and remembered by Akhmatova and her novelist friend Lydia Chukovskaya, since it would have been too dangerous to have written copies around—or even to speak the poems out loud. Requiem is made up of 10 poems, prefaced by four pieces: three in poetry and one in prose. The cycle ends with two epilogues. In the second epilogue she asks that if a monument ever be put up for her, it be placed outside this prison as a memorial to the women who waited there with her and for whom she has woven this “mantle”—her poem. In the epilogues there are many cross-references to images and events from earlier in the poem, one of which suggests Niobe, forever weeping for the deaths of her children.The four prefaces and two epilogues speak with a larger voice for the millions of women who waited outside prisons. For them, the world has narrowed down to the prison gates, and in a brilliant image, Akhmatova sees all of Leningrad dangling uselessly from its prisons.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Conversion for him ceased to be a simple profession of faith; rather conversion became an act or process by which one came to know Christ through seeking solidarity with the marginalized. This led him to write, “I leave in the Indies Jesus Christ, our God, scourged and afflicted and beaten and crucified not once, but thousands of times, when the Spaniards devastated and destroyed its people.”8 Over 450 years later, during the 1989 visit of Pope John Paul II to the Shrine of the Canadian Martyrs in Midland, Ontario, the Pope concluded his remarks by stating, “Not only is Christianity relevant to the Indian peoples, but Christ, in the members of his body, is himself Indian.”9 The invading Europeans are not the ones who brought Christ to the so-called New World because Christ was already there. For both Las Casas and Pope John Paul II, Christ could be found among Amerindians, partly because of the oppression they suffer. Jesus Christ exists among an indigenous people who have historically been scourged by those wanting their land. Native American Christians believe that the Amerindian Christ reveals himself in the brokenness and suffering of all Amerindians who are lost between the world of their traditional habitat, from which they were separated by the Europeans, and Western culture. Amerindian Christians seek to find harmony between the biblical text, the teachings of Jesus, and the traditional wisdom of their elders.10 These Christian Amerindians insist that if we want to find Christ, we need to look into the faces of the people that were systematically decimated. But how could Amerindians have Christ among them before they heard the story of Jesus? In Acts 17:16–34, Paul encountered an altar in Athens with the inscription “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.” He addressed the Athenians, stating that he had come to introduce them to this God whom they worship but do not yet know. Paul explained that because God created the world and all that is within it, God is Lord of all the earth and does not reside in any temple or church made by human hands. Because this Creator “made every nation of one blood to dwell on all the face of the earth,” God determined the bounds and time for their habitation. Hence, all people should “seek the Lord if perhaps they may feel God and find God, for God is never far from any one person.” In God all humanity lives, moves, and has its being, and at the appointed time, God will bring people to a fuller revelation of Godself. Like the Athenians, Amerindians knew God prior to learning God's name, because Christ is for all people, incarnated in the history and religious ceremonies of the indigenous people. For example, among the Montagnais Nations located in Canada, the Amerindian Christ is a Christ who comes to save all people who open their hearts to Jesus.