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.

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• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I gazed at the white blur of a marble bust in the shadow; a chant in honor of Epona, goddess of horses, which used to be sung by my Spanish nurse, a tall, somber woman who looked like a Fate, came back to me from the depths of more than half a century's time. The long days, and after them the nights, seemed measured out not by the clepsydra but by the brown drops which Hermogenes counted one by one into a cup of glass. At evening I mustered my strength to listen to Rufus' report: the war was nearing its end; Akiba, who had ostensibly retired from public affairs since the outbreak of hostilities, was devoting himself to the teaching of rabbinic law in the small city of Usfa in Galilee; his lecture room had become the center of Zealot resistance; secret messages were transcribed from one cipher to another by the hands of this nonagenarian and transmitted to the partisans of Simon; the fanatic students who surrounded the old man had to be sent off by force to their homes. After long hesitation Rufus decided to ban the study of Jewish law as seditious; a few days later Akiba, who had disregarded that decree, was arrested and put to death. Nine other Doctors of the Law, the heart and soul of the Zealot faction, perished with him. I had approved all these measures by nods of assent. Akiba and his followers died persuaded to the end that they alone were innocent, they alone were just; not one of them dreamed of admitting his share in responsibility for the evils which weighed down his people. They would be enviable if one could envy the blind. I do not deny these ten madmen the title of heroes, but in no case were they sages. Three months later, from the top of a hill on a cold morning in February, I sat leaning against the trunk of a leafless fig-tree to watch the assault which preceded by only a few hours the capitulation of Bethar. I saw the last defenders of the fortress come out one by one, haggard, emaciated, hideous to view but nevertheless superb, like all that is indomitable. At the end of the same month I had myself borne to the place called Abraham's Well, where the rebels in the urban centers, taken with weapons in hand, had been assembled to be sold at auction: children sneering defiance, already turned fierce and deformed by implacable convictions, boasting loudly of having brought death to dozens of legionaries; old men immured in somnambulistic dreams; women with fat, heavy bodies and others stern and stately, like the Great Mother of the Oriental cults; all these filed by under the cool scrutiny of the slave merchants; that multitude passed before me like a haze of dust.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But each passing is different; my attempts to picture his last agony came to no more than mere fabrication, for he had died alone. I fought against my grief, battling as if it were gangrene: I recalled his occasional stubbornness and lies; I told myself that he would have changed, growing older and heavy. [Hadrian 204a.jpg] Hadrian at Middle Age Alexandria, Greco-Roman Museum [Hadrian 204bc.jpg] Panorama of Ruins of Antino�polis Engraving by Jomard, in Description de L�Egypt [Hadrian 204d.jpg] Antinous as Osiris Dresden, Albertinum Museum Such efforts proved futile; instead, like some painstaking workman who toils to copy a masterpiece, I exhausted myself in tasking my memory for fanatic exactitude, evoking that smooth chest, high and rounded as a shield. Sometimes the image leaped to mind of itself, and a flood of tenderness swept over me: once again I caught sight of an orchard in Tibur, and the youth gathering up autumn fruits in his tunic, for lack of a basket. I had lost everything at once, the companion of the night's delights and the young friend squatting low to his heels to help Euphorion with the folds of my toga. If one were to believe the priests, the shade was also in torment, regretting the warm shelter of its body and haunting its familiar habitations with many a moan, so far and yet so near, but for the time too weak to signify his presence to me. If that were true my deafness was worse than death itself. But after all had I so well understood, on that morning, the living boy who sobbed at my side? One evening Chabrias called me to show me a star, till then hardly visible, in the constellation of the Eagle; it flashed like a gem and pulsated like a heart. I chose it for his star and his sign. Each night I would follow its course until utterly wearied; in that part of the sky I have seen strange radiance. Folk thought me mad, but that was of little consequence. Death is hideous, but life is too. Everything seemed awry. The founding of Antino�polis was a ludicrous endeavor, after all, just one more city to shelter fraudulent trading, official extortion, prostitution, disorder, and those cowards who weep for a while over their dead before forgetting them. Apotheosis was but empty ceremony: such public honors would serve only to make of the boy a pretext for adulation or irony, a posthumous object of cheap desire, or of scandal, one of those legends already tainted which clutter history's recesses. Perhaps my grief itself was only a form of license, a vulgar debauch: I was still the one who profited from the experience and tasted it to the full, for the beloved one was giving me even his death for my indulgence.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Gi was the one with the father who had broken Cookie’s heart. In this way, I might have been luckiest. My father didn’t break Cookie’s heart—he just went to prison. And when he got out of there, he was murdered before he could break her heart. In all of that, through all of that, no, we rarely cried. Until this day, when Gi just couldn’t stop. My sister put me down and busied herself by sorting through my scavenged clothes, which she’d previously arranged on the floor by color. “This will be the perfect outfit for when you meet your foster parents.” Gi sniffed back her tears as she lifted a pair of purple velour pants with a matching top that had lilies embroidered around the neckline. The outfit was spotless and shiny clean. In spite of the chaos in our lives, in spite of the fact that our mother wouldn’t buy tampons for herself and instead used dirty washcloths that she left around the house, in spite of the uncountable rodents and their droppings that filled every crack in every house we lived in (like a grubby brown confetti thrown as a hurrah each time we moved in), my sisters kept things clean. They scrubbed, they organized, they folded . . . and they picked. The year we had lice, Gi, Camille, and Cherie tore through our scalps until we bled red polka dots. Like most of our houses, there was no hot water, and so no way to wash away the lice. We threw out our clothing, and at night we went to the Salvation Army, where we rummaged through the Dumpster until we’d found enough to replace what had been tossed away. This was how we got our clothes every season, every year. This is how I got my pretty velour outfit. “Here we go.” Gi pulled the top over my head and then stood there, her chest chugging up and down as she cried some more. It never occurred to me then that this had likely been some girl’s outgrown Easter outfit, worn on a day when a bunny delivered baskets of candy and there was a ham for dinner—two things I’d never yet had. “My arms.” I wagged my hands inside as if I were trapped. Gi laughed, still crying, and helped thread my limbs into the sleeves. “You’re going to look perfect for your new family.” Gi tucked my hair behind each ear and then held the elastic-waist pants open so I could step into them. “I don’t need a new family.” My family was the only one I wanted. There was no difference between the heart that beat inside me and the hearts of my sisters and brother, beating outside of me. We were a single entity. Gi cried harder now. She kissed me on my forehead and cheeks and then loaded my folded clothes into the Hefty bag.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  prevent us from getting split up and placed in separate foster homes. And we knew how to run from our mother when she was drunk as a rabid raccoon and ready to focus her heft and her misery on any one of us who got in her way. Especially Gi. Gi was the one with the father who had broken Cookie’s heart. In this way, I might have been luckiest. My father didn’t break Cookie’s heart—he just went to prison. And when he got out of there, he was murdered before he could break her heart. In all of that, through all of that, no, we rarely cried. Until this day, when Gi just couldn’t stop. My sister put me down and busied herself by sorting through my scavenged clothes, which she’d previously arranged on the floor by color. “This will be the perfect outfit for when you meet your foster parents.” Gi sniffed back her tears as she lifted a pair of purple velour pants with a matching top that had lilies embroidered around the neckline. The outfit was spotless and shiny clean. In spite of the chaos in our lives, in spite of the fact that our mother wouldn’t buy tampons for herself and instead used dirty washcloths that she left around the house, in spite of the uncountable rodents and their droppings that filled every crack in every house we lived in (like a grubby brown confetti thrown as a hurrah each time we moved in), my sisters kept things clean. They scrubbed, they organized, they folded . . . and they picked. The year we had lice, Gi, Camille, and Cherie tore through our scalps until we bled red polka dots. Like most of our houses, there was no hot water, and so no way to wash away the lice. We threw out our clothing, and at night we went to the Salvation Army, where we rummaged through the Dumpster until we’d found enough to replace what had been tossed away. This was how we got our clothes every season, every year. This is how I got my pretty velour outfit. “Here we go.” Gi pulled the top over my head and then stood there, her chest chugging up and down as she cried some more. It never occurred to me then that this had likely been some girl’s outgrown Easter outfit, worn on a day when a bunny delivered baskets of candy and there was a ham for dinner—two things I’d never yet had. “My arms.” I wagged my hands inside as if I were trapped. Gi laughed, still crying, and helped thread my limbs into the sleeves. “You’re going to look perfect for your new family.” Gi tucked my hair behind each ear and then held the elastic-waist pants open so I could step into them. “I don’t need a new family.” My family was the only one I wanted. There was no difference between the heart that beat inside me and the hearts of my sisters

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  and me away; the other was for Gi and Camille. After Gi learned that Social Services was snooping around, she called Camille at her friend’s house. Camille rushed home to take care of us. “There are too many of us to fit in the same car, love bug.” Gi was as skinny as a piece of licorice, losing her hair from malnutrition and the stress of having to steal food just to make sure Norm and I would keep growing. “But we always fit in one car!” “Not this time,” Gi said. Tears streaked down her face. I grabbed Gi’s licorice leg and said, “But you always said that we are so skinny we can all be folded up to fit anywhere. And we are really skinny now. We can fit in the same car!” “Well, maybe we can, but the home that you’re going to prefers little kids like you and Norm because you’re cuter, sweeter, and easier to hug.” Gi picked me up and squished me in her arms. I could feel her bones and muscles and all her love coming out at me. Cookie, our mother, had arms as big as my belly. All that bubbling flesh, and she never used any of it to love us. There were boyfriends, however, men who got a charming, purring version of Cookie reserved just for them. Sometimes Cookie paid the rent with her flesh. Watching Cookie, I absorbed a quick lesson, barely understood at the time but later fully digested, of just how much utility the female form can hold. “I’m not a baby,” I told Gi. She brushed my hair with her darting fingers and said, “You will always be my baby, mia bambina.” Gi stopped talking for a minute, as if something were stuck in her throat. Her lumpy face was wet with tears. And then finally she said, “I’m so sorry, mia bambina. I’m so, so sorry.” “But you didn’t do anything wrong! You were protecting me!” I started to touch my sister’s face but pulled my hand away when I remembered how much those walnut bruises had hurt when I’d touched them last. “I was supposed to take care of you forever,” Gi said, and she began crying again. With everything we’d endured, and everything we’d seen, you’d think we’d also seen a lot of crying. But we were scrappy, willful, and driven. We knew how to get a loaf of bread out of a grocery store with no cash in less than sixty seconds. We knew how to manage landlords, bill collectors, our mother’s old boyfriends, enraged wives (whose husbands had slept with Cookie), and nosy neighbors as they hunted down Cookie. We could convince an entire school system that we had a mother and a house—the only two things that could

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If there was authentic dissent, it surely resided among those whose life condition exposed them to systemic exploitation. The high Roman Empire was a genuine slave society, consuming slaves as ferociously as any previous period, and perhaps on a wider, Mediterranean scale. Women accounted for at least half of the slave population, and they bore the brunt of sexual abuse. Without legal or social protection, they were devastatingly vulnerable. Sexual abuse was simply presumptive, and many slave girls probably experienced sexual initiation traumatically early. The slave woman’s life course was undifferentiated by the great threshold between childhood and marriage that marked the stages of a free woman’s development. Slaves in the house may have been more integrated into the rhythms of the free family’s life, but at the same time proximity meant vulnerability and close control. The slave’s public behavior could be seen as a reflection of the free family’s honor; “the morals of the mistress are judged by those of the slave girls.” Many slaves were owned in small numbers and surreptitiously sought companionship outside the home. In larger households, the slave staff may have offered its own opportunities. Rural slaves might have had the greatest chance of stability and privacy, but our ignorance of their lives is profound. When Leucippe was made a field slave, she was viciously threatened by the sexual advances of her overseer. Although slave marriages were afforded virtually no legal protections, slaves married nonetheless. We hear casually of “slave weddings.” Plutarch knew that a slave girl who was married would suddenly become more resistant to her master’s advances, but slave marriages were not protected under the adultery laws. Slaves were entirely cut off from their male relatives, and the surviving documents of sale are a chilling reminder that the slave family existed only at the master’s will.46 As blurry as our perception of the slave’s life is, the realities of prostitution are possibly even more obscure. Slaves haphazardly appear in our upper-class sources because they inhabited the same walls, because they inevitably intruded upon the daily affairs of their masters. Prostitutes, by contrast, represented “the most impure part of humankind,” and hence real consideration of their existence has been exiled from all literature with pretension to gentility. When prostitutes do appear in the sources, it is thus usually as a cipher for pure sexual indecency. Like the miserable creature whose unfortunate destiny is lost in the brilliant glare of Leucippe’s invincible sexual modesty, the prostitutes we know are mostly nameless, faceless distortions of an inconceivably brutal existence. But like slaves, prostitutes were in reality ubiquitous, and the sexual economy of the Roman Empire directly depended on the exploitation of their available bodies.47

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This man, so nobly parsimonious for his personal needs, was now seized by a passion for expenditure. Barbarian gold raised from the bed of the Danube, the five hundred thousand ingots of King Decebalus, had sufficed to defray the cost of a public bounty and donations to the army (of which I had had my part), as well as the wild luxury of the games and initial outlays for the tremendous venture in Asia. These baneful riches falsified the true state of the finances. The fruits of war were food for new wars. Licinius Sura died at about that time. He was the most liberal of the emperor's private counselors, so his death was a battle lost for our side. He had always been like a father in his solicitude for me; for some years illness had left him too little strength to fulfill any of his personal ambitions, but he had always enough energy to aid a man whose views appeared to him sane. The conquest of Arabia had been undertaken against his advice; he alone, had he lived, would have been able to save the State the gigantic strain and expense of the Parthian campaign. Ridden by fever, he employed his hours of insomnia in discussing with me plans for reform; they exhausted him, but their success was more important to him than a few more hours of life. At his bedside I lived in advance, and to the last administrative detail, certain of the future phases of my reign. This dying man spared the emperor in his criticisms, but he knew that he was carrying with him to the tomb what reason was left in the regime. Had he lived two or three years longer, I could perhaps have avoided some tortuous devices which marked my accession to power; he would have succeeded in persuading the emperor to adopt me sooner, and openly. But even so the last words of that statesman in bequeathing his task to me were one part of my imperial investiture. If the group of my followers was increasing, so was that of my enemies. The most dangerous of my adversaries was Lusius Quietus, a Roman with some Arab blood, whose Numidian squadrons had played an important part in the second Dacian campaign, and who was pressing fiercely for the Asiatic war. I detested everything about him, his barbarous luxury, the pretentious swirl of his white headgear bound with cord of gold, his false, arrogant eyes, and his unbelievable cruelty toward the conquered and to those who had offered their submission.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  And he will come and go around those who love him for millions of days. . . . Sometimes, after long intervals, I have thought to feel the slight stir of an approach, a touch as light as the contact of eyelashes and warm as the hollow of a hand. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles' side. ... I shall never know if that warmth, that sweetness, did not emanate simply from deep within me, the last efforts of a man struggling against solitude and the cold of night. But the question, which arises also in the presence of our living loves, has ceased to interest me now; it matters little to me whether the phantoms whom I evoke come from the limbo of my memory or from that of another world. My soul, if I possess one, is made of the same substance as are the specters; this body with swollen hands and livid nails, this sorry mass almost half-dissolved, this sack of ills, of desires and dreams, is hardly more solid or consistent than a shade. I differ from the dead only in my faculty to suffocate some moments longer; in one sense their existence seems to me more assured than my own. Antinous and Plotina are at least as real as myself. Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is no longer what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. Death's approach re-establishes between us a kind of close complicity: the living beings who surround me, my devoted if sometimes importunate servitors, will never know how little the world interests the two of us now. I think with disgust of those doleful symbols of the Egyptian tombs: the hard scarab, the rigid mummy, the frog which signifies eternal parturition. To believe the priests, I have left you at the place where the separate elements of a person tear apart like a worn garment under strain, at that sinister crossroads between what was and what will be, and what exists eternally. It is conceivable, after all, that such notions are right, and that death is made up of the same confused, shifting matter as life. But none of these theories of immortality inspire me with confidence; the system of retributions and punishments makes little impression upon a judge well aware of the difficulties of judging. On the other hand, the opposite solution seems to me also too simple, the neat reduction to nothingness, the hollow void where Epicurus' disdainful laughter resounds.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The great Eleusiac symbols continued to exert upon me their calming effect; the world has no meaning, perhaps, but if it does have one, that meaning is expressed at Eleusis more wisely and nobly than anywhere else. It was under this woman's influence that I undertook to plan the administrative divisions of Antino�polis, its demes, its streets, its city blocks, on the model of the world of the gods, and at the same time to include therein a reflection of my own life. All the deities were to be represented, Hestia and Bacchus, divinities of the hearth and of the orgy, the gods of the heavens and those of the underworld. I placed my imperial ancestors there, too, Trajan and Nerva, now an integral part of that system of symbols. Plotina figured; the good Matidia was there, in the likeness of Demeter; my wife herself, with whom at the time my relations were cordial enough, made one of that procession of divinities. Some months later I bestowed the name of my sister Paulina upon a district of Antino�polis; I had finally broken off with her as the wife of Servianus, but she had now died and thus had regained her unique position of sister in that city of memories. The site of sorrow was becoming the ideal center for reunions and recollections, the Elysian Fields of a life, the place where contradictions are resolved and where everything, within its rank, is equally sacred. Standing at a window in Arrian's house under night skies alive with stars, I thought of those words which the Egyptian priests had had carved on Antinous' tomb: He has obeyed the command of heaven. Can it be that the sky intimates its orders to us, and that only the best among us hear them while the remainder of mankind is aware of no more than oppressive silence? The priestess of Eleusis and Chabrias both thought so. I should have liked them to be right. In my mind I could see the palm of that hand again, smoothed by death, as I had looked on it for the last time that morning at the embalmers'; the lines which had previously disquieted me were no longer visible; the surface was like a wax tablet from which an instruction, once carried out, had been erased. But such lofty affirmations enlighten without rewarming us, like the light of stars, and the night all around us is darker still. If the sacrifice of Antinous had been thrown into the balance in my favor in some divine scale, the results of that terrible gift of self were not yet manifest; the benefits were neither those of life nor even those of immortality. I hardly dared seek a name for them. Sometimes, at rare intervals, a feeble gleam pulsed without warmth on my sky's horizon; but it served to improve neither the world nor myself; I continued to feel more deteriorated than saved.

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

  The trial judge had denied our request for a stay of execution by the time I got back to Montgomery. He ruled our evidence was “untimely,” meaning that he could not consider it. With less than a week before the execution, the next few days involved one frantic filing after the next. Finally, on the day before the execution, I filed a petition for review and a motion for a stay of execution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in death penalty cases, the Court grants review only in a small percentage of the cases filed. A petition for certiorari, a request to review a lower court’s ruling, is very rarely granted, but I’d known all along that the Supreme Court was our best chance for a stay of execution. Even when lower courts granted a stay, the State would appeal, so the Supreme Court would almost always make the final decision to permit an execution to proceed or not. The execution was scheduled for 12:01 A.M . on August 18. I had finally finished the petition and faxed it to the Court late on the night of August 16 and had spent the next morning in my Montgomery office, waiting anxiously for the Court’s decision. I tried to busy myself by reading files in other cases, including Walter McMillian’s. I didn’t expect we’d hear from the Court until the afternoon, but that didn’t keep me from staring at the phone all morning. Whenever the phone rang, my pulse quickened. Eva and Doris, our receptionist, knew that I was anxiously awaiting the call. We had submitted an extensive clemency petition to the governor with affidavits from family members and color photographs, but I didn’t expect anything in response. The petition detailed Herbert’s military service and explained why military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are worthy of compassion. I wasn’t very hopeful. Michael Lindsey had received a life verdict from the jury and was executed instead; Horace Dunkins was intellectually disabled, and the governor had not spared him, either. Herbert would likely be seen as even less sympathetic. I spoke with Herbert regularly during the day by phone to let him know there was no news. I couldn’t rely on the prison to get a message to him if the Court ruled, so I asked him to call me every two hours. Whatever the news, I wanted him to hear it from someone who cared about him. Herbert had met a woman from Mobile with whom he had corresponded over the years. They had decided to get married a week before the execution.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He’d turn the corner on Hamilton Avenue, roaring off down Broadway to the high school, leaving the rest of us still jumping up and down at the bus stop trying to stay warm. Peter Weber and Castiglia also drove to school every morning or got rides with their new friends. I remember for a long time Mike and Bobby Zimmer were a lot taller than me and Castiglia. Then all of a sudden I was taller than all three of them. We’d stand back to back over at Kenny’s house as his mother checked to see who was the tallest and it was so good for little guys like me and Castiglia to be taller than the other guys. And when we weren’t trying to see who was the tallest, we’d be out on the lawns still playing tag and wrestling on the grass. Steve Jacket was still throwing screwdrivers into his front lawn across from Pete’s house on Hamilton Avenue, telling us all he was going to become a TV sports announcer just like Mel Allen, and Pete was still coming over to my house every once in a while after school to steal beer out of my father’s locker in the garage. Little Tommy Law was hanging out with Billy Meyers, trying to stay out of trouble and graduate from high school like the rest of us. High school was just about over for me and the rest of the guys. We had been on the block together for almost twelve years, running and moving from Toronto Avenue to Lee Place to Hamilton Avenue. No one could remember how we all first got together back then, but we had become friends, “as close as real brothers,” Peter told me one afternoon, and we wanted to believe it would always be that way. * * * President Kennedy got killed that last year and we played football in the huge snowdrifts that had settled on the Long Island streets that afternoon. We played in silence, I guess because you’re supposed to be silent when someone dies. I truly felt I had lost a dear friend. I was deeply hurt for a long time afterward. We went to the movies that Sunday. I can’t remember what was playing, but how ashamed I was that I was even there, that people could sit through a movie or have the nerve to want to go to football games when our president had been killed in Dallas. The pain stuck with me for a long time after he died. I still remember Oswald being shot and screaming to my mother to come into the living room. It all seemed wild and crazy like some Texas shootout, but it was real for all of us back then, it was very real. I remember Johnson being sworn in on the plane and the fear in the eyes of the woman judge from Texas. And then the funeral and the casket.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The bear was beautiful: massive and shaggy and radiant. The squid, heartbroken, knew she could not even begin to compare. When the queen and the bear departed for a picnic, the squid asked a chambermaid to take her into town. When the queen discovered that her squid was gone, she was enraged. But once her anger receded, she knew what she needed to do. So the queen sat down and wrote the squid a letter. “My dearest creature,” she wrote. “Before I begin, I must ask you to keep an open mind and an open heart about the following missive. “I love you, and I will always love you . The fact that you refuse to come to my chambers, even just as a companion and not as a lover, stills my heart. You seem to believe that the fact that our love has ended means we can never be in proximity to each other, and I beg you to reconsider. I have loved many creatures in my lifetime—a goat, a honeybee, an owl—and despite the fact that our love did not endure, I still see them regularly. We are still friends. Just because I have found happiness in the companionship of a bear does not mean that our time together meant nothing. “I am sorry that things did not work out between us. I have, as I hope you would agree, behaved honorably and beyond reproach . I am filled with grief and sorrow that you do not believe in amicable partings. I would have thought that you—intelligent creature that you are—would know better. “The truth is that you have been with me during a very difficult period of my life, and I am sorry that I have not been on my best behavior. But such is love! What we have will transcend this messy business, and we will be in each other’s lives forever. Does that not please you? None of this jealousy or betrayal; just a friendship based on mutual trust. I hope one day we can meet each other in some neutral space, our pain limned with understanding, with all of this behind us. I faithfully await your reply.” When the squid did not reply, the queen wrote another letter: “Sweet squid! The mistakes that I have made number in the thousands, I think. I have spent many days meditating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you. The truth is, you are my past and my future. I miss you. I wish I could suckle your tentacles and kiss your cool mantle, and that we could travel like we used to. I’m so sorry about the bear. The bear is beautiful and very special in her own right but she is nothing like you. She is still here in the castle but when I pass by her I have a strong desire to turn and run in the opposite direction. It is only you I want, my little cabbage.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  As I was completing this book in the summer of 2010, my beautiful, hilarious kid sister Lisa went to sleep one night and the next morning never woke up. Time tames the pain, but can never heal the loss. I miss her every day. In peace her sleep, and may her memory be for a blessing. NotesAuthor Note: Throughout this book I frequently use italics to emphasize certain words or passages in the texts quoted; all such emphases are my own. Prologue1. For a recent though very different treatment, spanning the Jewish scriptures in Hebrew to a classic of medieval Christian theology, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, see Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History. In that study, Anderson traces the shift in the Old Testament’s metaphors for sin from “burden” to “debt,” and then follows developments around that particular concept in the New Testament through to later rabbinic and Christian thought.Chapter 1. God, Blood, and the Temple: Jesus and Paul on Sin1. On John’s role as Jesus’ mentor, the most recent full study is John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 2.19–233; see, in short, Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 184–97. Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus, 204–20, reviews à la loupe the similarities and differences between the two prophetic figures.2. Meier, A Marginal Jew, argues that John’s immersions were a one-time event (2:56), and that they “implicitly” challenged the traditional cultic means of atonement and sacrifice at the temple (2:75, n.52). I question both of these conclusions. First, nothing in the gospel material—or in Josephus’ report about John’s activities (Antiquities 18.116–19)—indicates how many times a person could immerse, and common practice at the time was multiple immersions. (Even in the much later Christian context, when single immersions were desirable in principle, people might receive baptism a number of times: when moving between different Christian sects, for example; or if the authority and bona fides of the person administering the immersion were in question, as occurred during the fourth-century Donatist controversy.) Second, immersion was never a substitute for sacrifice; on this point, see Joan Taylor, The Immerser, 31, 95, 111.On apocalyptic Jewish traditions about the Kingdom of God, and how these figure in traditions from and about John and Jesus, see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 77–119, 222–41. On purity, sacrifice, and atonement, see n. 11 below.

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

  It was the kind of wordless testimony of struggle and anguish I heard all the time growing up in a small rural black church. “Just about everybody in here was standing next to him, talking to him, laughing with him, eating with him. Then the police come along months later, say he killed somebody miles away at the same time we were standing next to him. Then they take him away when you know it’s a lie.” She was now struggling to speak. Her hands were trembling and the emotion in her voice was making it hard to get her words out. “We were with him all day! What are we supposed to do, Mr. Stevenson? Tell us, what are we supposed to do with that?” Her face twisted in pain. “I feel like I’ve been convicted, too.” The small crowd responded to each statement with shouts of “Yes!” and “That’s right!” “I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?” I sat on the crowded sofa in my suit, staring into the face of a lot of pain. I hadn’t expected to have such an intense meeting when I arrived. Folks were desperate for answers and trying to reconcile themselves to a situation that made no sense. I was struggling to think of something appropriate to say when a younger woman spoke up. “Johnny D could have never done this no kind of way, whether we was with him or not,” she said, using the nickname Walter’s family and friends had given him. “He’s just not like that.” The younger woman was Walter’s niece. She continued with her rebuttal to the very idea that Walter would need an alibi, which seemed to generate support among the crowd. I was relieved to have the pressure off me for a moment, as Walter’s large family seemed to be moving toward some sort of debate over whether Walter’s character rendered an alibi unnecessary—or even insulting. It had been a long day. I was no longer sure what time it was, but I knew it was very late, and I was wearing down. I’d spent several intense hours on death row earlier in the day with Walter going over his trial transcript. Before my meeting with Walter, I spent time with other new clients on the row. Their cases weren’t active, and there were no deadlines on the horizon, but I hadn’t seen them since the Richardson execution and they had been anxious to talk. Now that Walter’s case record was complete, appeal pleadings would be due soon, and time was critical.

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

  The Dunkins family called frequently, trying to figure out what could be done with only days to go before his execution, but there were very few options. When it became clear there was no way to stop the execution, the family turned their attention to what would happen to Mr. Dunkins’s body after his death. They seemed particularly concerned, for religious reasons, with preventing the state from performing an autopsy on their son’s body. The date of the execution arrived, and Horace Dunkins was killed in a botched execution that made national news. Correctional officials had plugged the electrodes into the chair incorrectly, so only a partial electrical charge was delivered to Mr. Dunkins’s body when the electric chair was activated. After several agonizing minutes, the chair was turned off but Mr. Dunkins was still alive, unconscious but breathing. Officials waited several more minutes “for the body to cool” before realizing that the electrodes had not been connected properly. They made alterations and electrocuted Mr. Dunkins again, and this time it worked. They killed him. Following this cruelly mishandled execution, the state performed an autopsy—against the family’s repeated requests. I received a call from Mr. Dunkins’s distraught father after the execution. He said, “They could take his life, even though he didn’t get a fair trial and he didn’t deserve that, but they had no right to mess with his body and soul, too. We want to sue them.” We provided some aid to the volunteer lawyer on the case and a suit was filed, although there wasn’t much hope. There were a few depositions but no judgment of relief. The civil suit failed to slow down the State of Alabama, which moved ahead aggressively with more execution dates. — We relocated to our new office in Montgomery in the shadow of these two executions. The men on death row were more agitated and unnerved than ever. When Herbert Richardson received word in July that his execution was scheduled for August 18, he called me collect from death row: “Mr. Stevenson, this is Herbert Richardson, and I’ve just received notice that the state plans to execute me on August 18. I need your help. You can’t say no. I know you’re helping some of the guys and y’all are opening an office, so please help me.” I replied, “I’m really sorry to hear about your execution date. It’s been a very tough summer. What does your volunteer lawyer say?” I was still working on the best way to talk to condemned people about how to respond to news of an execution date. I wanted to say something reassuring like, “Don’t worry,” but of course that would be a remarkable request to make of anyone—news of a scheduled execution was nothing if not unimaginably worrisome. “Sorry” didn’t seem quite right either, but it tended to be the best I could think of.

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

  Herbert, watching the house from across the street, was devastated. He had planned to run to his girlfriend’s aid when the bomb exploded to reinforce his readiness to protect her and to keep her safe. When the child picked up the bomb and it detonated, Herbert ran across the street and found himself in a circle of grieving neighbors. It didn’t take long for police to make an arrest. They found pipes and other bomb-making materials in Herbert’s car and front yard. Because the victims were black and poor, this wasn’t the kind of case that would usually be prosecuted as a capital crime, but Herbert wasn’t local. His identity as an outsider, a Northerner, and the nature of the crime seemed to generate heightened contempt from law enforcement officials. Placing a bomb anywhere in Dothan, even in a poor section of town, posed a different kind of threat than “typical” domestic violence. The prosecutor argued that Herbert was not just tragically misguided and reckless; he was evil. The State sought the death penalty. After striking all of the black prospective jurors in a county that is 28 percent black, the prosecutor told the all-white jury in his closing argument that a conviction was appropriate because Herbert was “associated with Black Muslims from New York City” and deserved no mercy. Alabama’s capital statute requires that any murder eligible for the death penalty be intentional, but it was clear that Herbert had no intent to kill the child. The State decided to invoke an unprecedented theory of “transferred intent” to make the crime eligible for the death penalty. But Herbert had no intention to kill anyone. Herbert was advised to deny any culpability but ultimately argued that this was reckless murder, not capital murder, which could be punished with life imprisonment but not the death penalty. During the trial, the appointed defense lawyer presented no evidence about Herbert’s background, his military service, his trauma from the war, his relationship with the victim, his obsession with the girlfriend—nothing. Alabama’s statute at the time limited what court-appointed lawyers could be paid for their out-of-court preparation time to $1,000, so the lawyer spent almost no time on the case. The trial lasted just over a day, and the judge quickly condemned Herbert to death. Following the imposition of the death sentence, Herbert’s appointed lawyer, who was later disbarred for poor performance in other cases, told Herbert that he didn’t see any reason to appeal the conviction or sentence because the trial had been as fair as he could expect. Herbert reminded him that he’d been sentenced to death. He wanted to appeal no matter how unlikely the prospects, but his lawyer filed no brief. Herbert was confined on death row for eleven years, until it was his time to face “Yellow Mama.” A volunteer lawyer had challenged the intent questions in a desperate appeal but was unsuccessful. Herbert’s execution was now set for August 18, just three weeks away.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This time there was only her funeral urn, placed in the chamber below Trajan's Column. I attended in person the ceremonies for her apotheosis, and contrary to imperial custom wore mourning for the full nine days. But death made little change in an intimacy which for years had dispensed with mere presence; the empress remained for me what she always had been, a mind and a spirit with which mine had united. Some of the great works of construction were nearing completion: the Colosseum, restored and cleansed of reminders of Nero which still haunted its site, was no longer adorned with the image of that emperor, but with a colossal statue of the Sun, Helios the King, in allusion to my family name of Aelius. They were putting the last touches to the Temple of Venus and Rome, erected likewise on the site of the scandalous House of Gold, where Nero had grossly displayed a luxury ill acquired. Roma, Amor: the divinity of the Eternal City was now for the first time identified with the Mother of Love, inspirer of every joy. It was a basic concept in my life. The Roman power was thus taking on that cosmic and sacred character, that pacific, protective form which I aspired to give it. At times it occurred to me to identify the late empress with that wise Venus, my heavenly counselor. More and more the different gods seemed to me merged mysteriously in one Whole, emanations infinitely varied, but all equally manifesting the same force; their contradictions were only expressions of an underlying accord. The construction of a temple of All Gods, a Pantheon, seemed increasingly desirable to me. I had chosen a site on the ruins of the old public baths given by Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law, to the people of Rome. Nothing remained of the former structure except a porch and a marble plaque bearing his dedication to the Roman citizens; this inscription was carefully replaced, just as before, on the front of the new temple. It mattered little to me to have my name recorded on this monument, which was the product of my very thought. On the contrary, it pleased me that a text of more than a century ago should link this new edifice to the beginning of our empire, to that reign which Augustus had brought to peaceful conclusion. Even in my innovations I liked to feel that I was, above all, a continuator.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  When I left the empty body it was no more than an embalmer's preparation, the first stage of a frightful masterpiece, a precious substance treated with salt and gum of myrrh, and never again to be touched by sun or air. On the return I visited the temple near which the sacrifice had been consummated; I spoke with the priests. Their sanctuary would be renovated to become a place of pilgrimage for all Egypt; their college, enriched and augmented, would be consecrated hereafter to the service of my god. Even in my most obtuse moments I had never doubted that that young presence was divine. Greece and Asia would worship him in our manner, with games and dances, and with ritual offerings placed at the feet of a nude, white statue. Egypt, who had witnessed the death agony, would have also her part in the apotheosis: it would be the most secret and somber part, and the harshest, for this country would play the eternal role of embalmer to his body. For centuries to come priests with shaven heads would recite litanies repeating that name which for them had no value, but for me held all. Each year the sacred barge would bear that effigy along the river; the first of the month of Athyr mourners would walk on that shore where I had walked. Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others: the problem of the moment was to defend from death the little that was left to me. Phlegon had assembled on the shore the architects and engineers of my suite, as I had ordered; sustained by a kind of clearsighted frenzy I made them follow me along the stony hills; I explained my plan, the development of forty-five stadia of encircling wall, and I marked in the sand the position of the triumphal arch and that of the tomb. Antino�polis was to be born; it would already be some check to death to impose upon that sinister land a city wholly Greek, a bastion which would hold off the nomads of Erythrea, a new market on the route to India. Alexander had celebrated the funeral of Hephaestion with devastation and mass slaughter of prisoners.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I preferred to offer to the chosen one a city where his cult would be forever mingled with the coming and going on the public square, where his name would be repeated in the casual talk of evening, where youths would toss crowns to each other at the banqueting hour. But on one point my thought fluctuated: it seemed impossible to abandon this body to foreign soil. Like a man uncertain of his next stop who reserves lodgings in several hostelries at a time, I ordered a monument for him at Rome, on the banks of the Tiber near my own tomb, but thought also of the Egyptian chapels which I had had built at the Villa by caprice, and which were suddenly proving tragically useful. A date was set for the funeral at the end of the two months demanded by the embalmers. I entrusted Mesomedes with the composition of funeral choruses. Late into the night I went back aboard; Hermogenes prepared me a sleeping potion. The journey up the river continued, but my course lay on the Styx. In prisoners' camps on the banks of the Danube I had once seen wretches continually beating their heads against a wall with a wild motion, both mad and tender, endlessly repeating the same name. In the underground chambers of the Colosseum I had been shown lions pining away because the dog with which their keepers had accustomed them to live had been taken away. I tried to collect my thoughts: Antinous was dead. As a child I had wept and wailed over the corpse of Marullinus torn to shreds by crows, but had cried as does a mere animal, in the night. My father had died, but a boy orphaned at the age of twelve noticed no more than disorder in the house, his mother's tears, and his own terror; he knew nothing of the anguish which the dying man had experienced. My mother had died much later, about the time of my mission in Pannonia; I do not recall the exact date. Trajan had been only a sick man who must be made to make a will. I had not seen Plotina die. Attianus had died; he was old. During the Dacian wars I had lost comrades whom I had believed that I loved ardently; but we were young, and life and death were equally intoxicating and easy. Antinous was dead. I remembered platitudes frequently heard: "One can die at any age," or "They who die young are beloved by the gods." I myself had shared in that execrable abuse of words; I had talked of dying of sleep, and dying of boredom.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  And I pass also in silence over the experiences of illness, and over other, more profound experiences which they bring in their train; and over the perpetual search for, or presence of, love. Never mind. That disjunction, that break in continuity, that "night of the soul" which so many of us experienced at the time, each in his own way (and so often in far more tragic and final form than did I), was essential, perhaps, in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from my true self. Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit. During those years in an unfamiliar land I had kept on with the reading of authors from classical antiquity: the red or green cloth-bound volumes of Loeb-Heinemann editions had become a country of my own. Thus, since one of the best ways to reconstruct a man's thinking is to rebuild his library, I had actually been working for years, without knowing it, to refurnish the bookshelves at Tibur in advance. Now I had only to imagine the swollen hands of a sick man holding the half-rolled manuscripts. Do, from within, the same work of reconstruction which the nineteenth-century archaeologists have done from without. In December of 1948 I received from Switzerland a trunk which I had stored there during the war, with its contents of family papers and letters some ten years old. I sat down by the fire to work my way through the debris, as if to take some gloomy inventory after a death. I passed several evenings alone at the task, undoing the separate packets and running through them before destroying that accumulation of correspondence with people whom I had forgotten, and who had forgotten me, some of them still alive, others dead. A few of the pages bore dates of a generation ago, and even the names had quite gone from my mind. As I unfolded and threw mechanically into the fire that exchange of dead thoughts between a Marie and a Francois or a Paul, long since disappeared, I came upon four or five typewritten sheets, the paper of which had turned yellow. The salutation told me nothing: "My dear Mark . . ." Mark. . . . What friend or love, what distant relative was this? I could not recall the name at all. It was several minutes before I remembered that Mark stood here for Marcus A urelius, and that I had in hand a fragment of the lost manuscript. From that moment there was no question but that this book must be taken up again, whatever the cost. That same night I re-opened two of the volumes which had also just been returned to me, remnants of a library in large part lost.