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 My People (2022)

  And the term for one who has transitioned is ancestor , and when that ancestor is being remembered, you end with the phrase “Long live!” And so it was that spirit I tried to evoke when I had to write about people I knew or admired. I tried to share their lives and capture their spirit, those I knew like Julian Bond and William Haywood Burns, as well as the pioneering Dr. Kenneth Edelin, who was a brave and committed obstetrician/gynecologist, and the great poet Langston Hughes. I never thought I would be writing a postscript about Julian Bond, for Julian and I were contemporaries, long before we became elders. We had been close friends since the early days of the civil rights movement in Atlanta in 1961, when I was attending the University of Georgia. Julian was working with the Atlanta Student Movement as one of its main theoreticians and later as the managing editor of the Atlanta Inquirer . I continued to follow him in his various iterations with great interest, if not pride, including his service in elective office in Georgia, as well as when he moved on but not away from the causes he championed: freedom and justice for all . . . up until the day he joined like-minded ancestors who preceded him. So, as hard as it was for me emotionally, with Julian’s spirit in my head and heart, I got it done. And while we have a new generation of conscious, activist young people who are drawing the world’s attention to some of the same issues Julian fought for, I think they can learn from his example, not least his recalling the heritage of dissent going back to the creation of what he and all those who joined him were committed to. His is still relevant advice to those who are protesting, and that is to appreciate the need to carry their energy into work at the local level. Julian also gave another bit of advice, and with the exception of the new terminology for the race he was speaking about, he said: “Negroes must not forget race consciousness as long as they are victims of racism.” It was during this time that I also met another man who would become an ancestor far too early. So, on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death, I wanted to help in some small way to keep his dream alive. I wrote about the one time we met, and one of the things I learned that day that helped make him so very special—his humility. I was not as close to another civil rights activist who, like Julian and Dr. King, was dedicated to achieving justice for all, and that is all, no matter their color. That was civil rights attorney William Haywood Burns. But I would see him occasionally at events like the fund-raising dinners for civil rights causes, mostly in New York.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In 1996, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq was justified: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more than died in Hiroshima.... Is the price worth it?” “I think this is a very hard choice,” Albright replied, “but the price, we think the price is worth it.” 104 On October 24, 2012, Mamana Bibi, a sixty-five-year-old woman picking vegetables in her family’s large open land in northern Waziristan, Pakistan, was killed by a U.S. drone aircraft. She was not a terrorist but a midwife married to a retired schoolteacher, yet she was blown to pieces in front of her nine young grandchildren. Some of the children have had multiple surgeries that the family could ill afford because they lost all their livestock; the smaller children still scream in terror all night long. We do not know who the real targets were. Yet even though the U.S. government claims to carry out thorough poststrike assessments, it has never apologized, never offered compensation to the family, nor even admitted what happened to the American people. CIA director John O. Brennan had previously claimed that drone strikes caused absolutely no civilian casualties; more recently he has admitted otherwise while maintaining that such deaths are extremely rare. Since then, Amnesty International reviewed some forty-five strikes in the region, finding evidence of unlawful civilian deaths, and has reported several strikes that appear to have killed civilians outside the bounds of law. 105 “Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breed more terrorism,” said Bibi’s son. “No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.” 106 “Am I my brother’s guardian?” Cain asked after he had killed his brother, Abel. We are now living in such an interconnected world that we are all implicated in one another’s history and one another’s tragedies. As we—quite rightly—condemn those terrorists who kill innocent people, we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died or been mutilated in our modern wars simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Afterword We have seen that, like the weather, religion “does lots of different things.” To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action. In the Hebrew Bible, the Deuteronomists and the Priestly authors all meditated on the same stories, but the Deuteronomists turned virulently against foreign peoples, while the Priestly authors sought reconciliation.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  There the painful intelligence reached him of the death of his beloved Basil, A.D. 379. On this occasion be wrote to Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa: "Thus also was it reserved for me still in this unhappy life to hear of the death of Basil and the departure of this holy soul, which is gone out from us, only to go in to the Lord, after having already prepared itself for this through its whole life." He was at that time bodily and mentally very much depressed. In a letter to the rhetorician Eudoxius he wrote: "You ask, how it fares with me. Very badly. I no longer have Basil; I no longer have Caesarius; my spiritual brother, and my bodily brother. I can say with David, my father and my mother have forsaken me. My body is sickly, age is coming over my head, cares become more and more complicated, duties overwhelm me, friends are unfaithful, the church is without capable pastors, good declines, evil stalks naked. The ship is going in the night, a light nowhere, Christ asleep. What is to be done? O, there is to me but one escape from this evil case: death. But the hereafter would be terrible to me, if I had to judge of it by the present state." But Providence had appointed him yet a great work and in exalted position in the Eastern capital of the empire. In the year 379 he was called to the pastoral charge by the orthodox church in Constantinople, which, under the oppressive reign of Arianism, was reduced to a feeble handful; and he was exhorted by several worthy bishops to accept the call. He made his appearance unexpectedly. With his insignificant form bowed by disease, his miserable dress, and his simple, secluded mode of life, he at first entirely disappointed the splendor-loving people of the capital, and was much mocked and persecuted.1979 But in spite of all he succeeded, by his powerful eloquence and faithful labor, in building up the little church in faith and in Christian life, and helped the Nicene doctrine again to victory. In memory of this success his little domestic chapel was afterwards changed into a magnificent church, and named Anastasia, the Church of the Resurrection. People of all classes crowded to his discourses, which were mainly devoted to the vindication of the Godhead of Christ and to the Trinity, and at the same time earnestly inculcated a holy walk befitting the true faith. Even the famous Jerome, at that time already fifty years old, came from Syria to Constantinople to hear these discourses, and took private instruction of Gregory in the interpretation of Scripture. He gratefully calls him his preceptor and catechist.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  What the honest coarseness of Epiphanius failed to effect, was accomplished by the cunning of Theophilus, who now himself travelled to Constantinople, and immediately appeared as accuser and judge. He well knew how to use the dissatisfaction of the clergy, of the empress Eudoxia, and of the court with Chrysostom on account of his moral severity and his bold denunciations.1539 In Chrysostom’s own diocese, on an estate "at the oak"1540 in Chalcedon, he held a secret council of thirty-six bishops against Chrysostom, and there procured, upon false charges of immorality, unchurchly conduct, and high treason, his deposition and banishment in 403.1541 Chrysostom was recalled indeed in three days in consequence of an earthquake and the dissatisfaction of the people, but was again condemned by a council in 404, and banished from the court, because, incensed by the erection of a silver statue of Eudoxia close to the church of St. Sophia, and by the theatrical performances connected with it, he had with unwise and unjust exaggeration opened a sermon on Mark vi. 17 ff., in commemoration of John the Baptist with the personal allusion: "Again Herodias rages, again she raves, again she dances, and again she demands the head of John [this was Chrysostom’s own name] upon a charger."1542 From his exile in Cucusus and Arabissus he corresponded with all parts of the Christian world, took lively interest in the missions in Persia and Scythia, and appealed to a general council. His opponents procured from Arcadius an order for his transportation to the remote desert of Pityus. On the way thither he died at Comana in Pontus, A.D. 407, in the sixtieth year of his age, praising God for everything, even for his unmerited persecutions.1543 Chrysostom was venerated by the people as a saint, and thirty years after his death, by order of Theodosius II. (438), his bones were brought back in triumph to Constantinople, and deposited in the imperial tomb. The emperor himself met the remains at Chalcedon, fell down before the coffin, and in the name of his guilty parents, Arcadius and Eudoxia, implored the forgiveness of the holy man. The age could not indeed understand and appreciate the bold spirit of Origen, but was still accessible to the narrow piety of Epiphanius and the noble virtues of Chrysostom. In spite of this prevailing aversion of the time to free speculation, Origen always retained many readers and admirers, especially among the monks in Palestine, two of whom, Domitian and Theodorus Askidas, came to favor and influence at the court of Justinian I. But under this emperor the dispute on the orthodoxy of Origen was renewed about the middle of the sixth century in connection with the controversy on the Three Chapters, and ended with the condemnation of fifteen propositions of Origen at a council in 544.1544 Since then no one has ventured until recent times to raise his voice for Origen, and many of his works have perished.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The crab was for him alone, *13 wearing a wedding veil of salt, its body cradled in the steamer, glistening with sea-sweat. Old Guang began to pray, and his wife startled at his voice, which now had a sea’s accent. Up and down and up, rocking her ears to ecstasy. He told the story one tooth at a time: Ah Zheng was defeated. The fleet was folded up at the bottom of the sea. They’d met an old warship full of coolies. Ordinarily, they never attacked British ships, which were even better armed than the Portuguese. Even outnumbered, the British had their tricks. So Ah Zheng’s men stayed away. But this time, Ah Zheng’s fleet had gotten close enough to see the coolies, *14 the ropes around their necks and feet. Ah Zheng had heard of the many men tricked into contracts or ripped from their sleep, thrown into the bellies of ships and collared. The men who harvested sugar in Cuba or scraped seabird shit from caves in Peru. Cantonese men—the very men that had banned his people from Hong Kong—were now the ones being dragged through the sea on leashes. Ah Zheng believed this was karma. But he also believed in divine intervention, *15 so he steered his ship straight into the British cargo hold. A hole bloomed open, and the water threaded in, sinking that first ship. The British veered away and fired their guns at Ah Zheng’s pirates, felling rows and rows of them. Oh shit, Ah Zheng said. Fuck this. *16 Remember, the coolies were quarantined together in the cargo holds. And most of them could not swim. Remember, too, that Ah Zheng never meant to save the coolies. He meant to drown them, which of course was the only way to save them. Better dead than kuli . Ah Zheng whistled, summoning whales and sharks to head-butt the British fleet. Two of the six coolie ships were sinking quick, and a fourth was injured. Old Guang and Ah Zheng, of course, resolved to die together. All the other pirates chose suicide-by-sea, flinging themselves over the side. Better dead than captured. In the end, there wasn’t a lot to see: gusts of gunpowder, cannonballs burrowing into Ah Zheng’s fleet, shards of ships embedded in the sea like shrapnel. Ah Zheng kissed Old Guang a last time, the water already past their hips. It was true: Ah Zheng’s blood was fish blood, completely clear. Or maybe the wetness was his tears. Either way, the salt of that last kiss scoured my grandfather’s tongue, cleared his ears. He knew then. He remembered the crab’s name, the crab he still kept below deck. He whistled with three fingers in his mouth, prayed the crab’s name in his mind.

• From My People (2022)

  I will also suggest, if she plans to post a birthday greeting to Nelson Mandela on her Facebook page or elsewhere, that she might do so with the words that he and his fellow freedom fighters often used when they spoke about freedom and those who fought for it—here and there: “Long live!” Postscript: Julian BondThe New Yorker AUGUST 17, 2015 The opening lyric from that old civil rights song—“Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom”—may not have been written with Julian Bond in mind, but he personified it. As a member of the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate, as a leader of the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, as an activist and a professor and a friend, he answered the call of justice every day. Julian passed away over the weekend, at the age of seventy-five. I will miss him terribly. He and I were children of the civil rights movement and, in a way, grew up in it together. I first met Julian in the summer of 1960, at one of the informal gatherings of the burgeoning Atlanta Student Movement. (Well, it might have been a party, which was one of the ways that the demonstrators de-stressed.) I was home in Atlanta, waiting for my desegregation lawsuit against the University of Georgia to work its way through the courts, and Julian was a rising senior at Morehouse College. Even then, his style of writing and thinking was evident in his work. In March of that year, he had helped draft an article called “An Appeal for Human Rights,” which ran as a full-page advertisement in several Atlanta-area newspapers. The document was forthright, elegant, powerful. “Today’s youth will not sit by submissively while being denied all the rights and privileges and joys of life,” it read. “We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time.” Segregation, it concluded, was “robbing not only the segregated but the segregator of his human dignity.” (As Julian made clear in 1967, when I interviewed him for “Talk of the Town,” he didn’t have much patience for embellishment. One of the hardest things about serving in the Georgia legislature, he told me then, “was getting used to the flowery language.”) Although Julian’s main brief was as a theoretician and tactician, he also spent time on the front lines. He took to heart the teachings of Ella Baker, a leader from the older generation of black activists, who, in 1960, convened the meeting from which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) emerged, with Julian as a cofounder.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  One event above all others symbolized the tragic conflict between the inherent violence of the state and Muslim ideals. After Ali’s death, the Shii had pinned their hopes on Ali’s descendants. Hasan, Ali’s elder son, came to an agreement with Muawiyyah and retired from political life. But in 680, when Muawiyyah died, he passed the caliphate to his son Yazid. For the first time, a Muslim ruler had not been elected by his peers, and there were Shii demonstrations in Kufa in favor of Husain, Ali’s younger son. This uprising was ruthlessly quashed, but Husain had already set out from Medina to Kufa, accompanied by a small band of his followers and their wives and children, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching to end imperial injustice would remind the ummah of its Islamic priorities. But Yazid sent out the army, and they were massacred on the plain of Karbala, outside Kufa; Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms. All Muslims lament the murder of the Prophet’s grandson, but for the Shiah, Karbala epitomized the Muslim dilemma. How could Islamic justice be realistically implemented in a belligerent imperial state? Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), the wars of expansion gained new momentum, and the Middle East began to assume an Islamic face. The Dome of the Rock, built by Abd al-Malik in Jerusalem in 691, was as magnificent as any of Justinian’s buildings. Yet the Umayyad economy was in trouble: it was too reliant on plunder, and its investment in public buildings was not sustainable. Umar II (r. 717–20) tried to rectify this by cutting down on state expenditure, demobilizing surplus military units, and reducing the commanders’ allowances. He knew that the dhimmis resented the jizya tax, which they alone had to pay, and that many Muslims believed this arrangement violated Quranic egalitarianism. So even though it meant a drastic loss of income, Umar II became the first caliph to encourage the conversion of the dhimmis to Islam. He did not live long enough to see his reform through, however. Hisham I (724–43), his successor, launched new military offensives in Central Asia and North Africa, but when he tried to revive the economy by reimposing the jizya, there was a massive revolt of Berber converts in North Africa.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  There was also gossip that the Apollo was involved in drug trafficking and prostitution, or that it was part of a pornography ring. In December 1972, the Scientologists were expelled from the country, leaving a trail of confusion and recrimination behind them.6 PAULETTE COOPER WAS studying comparative religion for a summer at Harvard in the late 1960s when she became interested in Scientology, which was gaining attention. “ A friend came to me and said he had joined Scientology and discovered he was Jesus Christ,” she recalled. She decided to go undercover to see what the church was about. “I didn’t like what I saw,” she said. The Scientologists she encountered seemed to be in a kind of trance. When she looked into the claims that the church was making, she found many of them false or impossible to substantiate. “I lost my parents in Auschwitz,” Cooper said, explaining her motivation in deciding to write about Scientology at a time when there had been very little published and those who criticized the church came under concentrated legal and personal attacks. A slender, soft-spoken woman, Cooper published her first article in Queen , a British magazine, in 1970. “I got death threats,” she said. The church filed suit against her. She refused to be silent. “I thought if, in the nineteen-thirties people had been more outspoken, maybe my parents would have lived.” The following year, Cooper published a book, The Scandal of Scientology , that broadly attacked the teachings of Hubbard, revealing among other things that Hubbard had misrepresented his credentials and that defectors claimed to have been financially ripped off and harassed if they tried to speak out. Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and Sara Hubbard’s daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that Alexis bring substantial identification to prove who she was, but when she opened the door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled, twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron and Sara’s marriage certificate. Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her for four days. He identified himself as an FBI agent and said he had several pages of a letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It was clearly written by Hubbard. “ Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to fire Sara because she was a “ street-walker” and a Nazi spy. “ In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie,” the letter continues.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "But why?" I demand and am given the reason: the poor man is expiring and is no longer occupied with anyone save his God. However, he exonerates me, he gives assurance of my innocence; he expressly forbids that I be pursued; he dies. Hardly has he closed his eyes when his associate hastens to bring me the news and begs me to be easy. Alas I how could I be? how was I not to weep bitterly for the loss of a man who had so generously offered to extricate me from misery! how was I not to deplore a theft which forced me back into the wretchedness whence I had only a moment before emerged! Frightful creature! I cried; if 'tis to this your principles lead you, is it any wonder they are abhorred and that honest folk punish them! But I was arguing from the injured party's viewpoint and Dubois, who had only reaped happiness therefrom and saw nothing but her interest in what she had undertaken, Dubois, I say, had doubtless reached a very different conclusion. To Dubreuil's associate, whose name was Valbois, I divulged everything, both what had been concerted against the man we had lost and what had happened to me. He sympathized with me, most sincerely regretted Dubreuil and blamed the overly nice scruples which had prevented me from lodging a complaint instantly I had been advised of Dubois' schemes; we agreed that this monster who needed but four hours to get to another country and security would arrive there before we would be able to organize her pursuit, that to follow her would involve considerable expense, that the inn-keeper, heavily compromised by the proceedings we would launch, by defending himself with vehemence might perhaps end by having me crushed, I... who seemed to be living in Grenoble as one who had missed the gallows by a hairsbreadth. These reasons convinced me and even terrified me to the point I resolved to leave the town without even saying farewell to my protector, Monsieur S * * *. Dubreuil's friend approved the idea; he did not conceal from me that if the entire adventure were to be revealed he would be obliged to make depositions which, his precautions notwithstanding, would involve me as much by my intimacy with Dubreuil as in reason of my last outing with his friend; in the light of which he urged me to leave at once without a word to anyone, and I could be perfectly sure that, on his side, he would never take steps against me, whom he believed innocent, and, in all that had just occurred, whom he could only accuse of weakness.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  You yourself wanted to murder me; you dazed me by terrible blows and, profiting from my half-unconscious state, you snatched from me what I prized most highly; through an unexampled refinement of cruelty, you plundered me of the little money I possessed quite as if you had desired to summon humiliation and misery to complete your victim's obliteration! And great was your success, barbaric one! indeed, it has been entire; 'tis you who precipitated me into desolation; 'tis you who made the abyss to yawn, and 'tis thanks to you I fell into it and have not ceased to fall since that accursed moment. "Nevertheless, Monsieur, I would forget it all, yes, everything is effaced from my memory, I even ask your pardon for daring to upbraid you for what is past, but can you hide from yourself the fact that some recompense, some gratitude is owing to me? Ah, deign not to seal up your heart when the wing of death brushes its shadow over my unhappy days; 'tis not death I fear, but disgrace; save me from the dread horror of a criminal's end: all I demand from you comes to that single mercy, refuse me it not, and both Heaven and my heart will reward you someday." I was weeping, I was upon my knees before this ferocious man and, far from reading upon his face the effect I thought I should be able to expect from the disturbances I flattered myself I was producing in his soul, I distinguished nothing but a muscular alteration caused by that sort of lust whose germinal origins are in cruelty. Saint-Florent was seated opposite me; his wicked dark eyes considered me in a dreadful manner, and I noticed his hand glide to a certain sector and his fingers begin to perform those certain motions which indicated I was putting him in a state which was by no means that of pity; he concealed himself withal, and, getting to his feet: "Look here," he said, "your case rests entirely in the hands of Monsieur de Cardoville; I need not tell you what official post he occupies; it suffices that you know your fate depends absolutely upon him; he and I have been intimate friends since childhood; I shall speak to him; if he agrees to a few arrangements, you will be called for at sunset and in order that he may see you, you'll be brought to either his home or mine; such an interrogation, wrapped in secrecy, will make it much simpler to turn matters in your favor, which could not possibly be done here.

• From The Art of Memoir

  And what an audience. There was the herd of poets I’d been busily padding around behind like a puppy. (Name-drop alert: Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Robert Hass, Ellen Bryant Voigt—even Charles Simic ́ visited.) They all wrote psychologically sharp stuff drawn in varying degrees of transparency from their own life events. On the prose side was Ray Carver, whose first paperback I’d lugged around Europe the year before, as well as Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson. Geoffrey’s brother Toby was there. He hadn’t yet written This Boy’s Life, but alongside him sat Frank Conroy, whose Stop-Time was a cult classic excerpted in the New Yorker, where it showed up as fiction. With those teachers at hand, it’s small wonder that chums Mark Doty and Jerry Stahl would join me in writing memoir. After grad school, I vanished into a job in the telecommunications business, writing at night and publishing as I could, but my poems strayed as far from my natural abilities as I could steer them. On my thirtieth birthday, I flew back from a San Francisco business trip on the red-eye to Boston—a flight briefly aborted by a bomb scare. This afforded me some bar time. I spent every bit of change I could rifle from my cheap briefcase before I sloshed aboard, then pounded the champagne they doled out clear back to Boston. It was a dark time in my family—when wasn’t it? I couldn’t forget the specter of my shriveling daddy in a Texas nursing home. He’d be dead within the year, and part of me knew it. The red-eye flew east toward the arcing sun. And all night, across the spiral notebook, my hand hardly stopped moving. A great, mournful cry poured out, page after page. I gripped the pen so hard my thumb hurt when I got off at dawn. Once home, I emptied my briefcase, slapping the notebook on the kitchen counter. Then I set off for the mind-numbing task of faking a business career. Had I been scrawling all night on loose paper, I’d have tossed what I’d written in the trash. That’s how wretched I figured it was. Later, my husband bent over the pages. A reserved guy, he had a keen look. “I was wondering when you’d get around to writing this,”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The memory still gnaws at my soul, I never think back upon that scene without shuddering.... In me, Religion is the effect of sentiment; all that offends or outrages it makes my very heart bleed. The end of the month was close at hand when one morning toward nine Severino entered our chamber; he appeared greatly aroused; a certain crazed look hovered in his eyes; he examines us, one after the other, places us in his cherished attitude, and especially lingers over Omphale; for several minutes he stands, contemplating her in the posture she has assumed, he excites himself, mutters dully, secretly, kisses what is offered him, allows everyone to see he is in a state to consummate, and consummates nothing; next, he has her straighten up, casts upon her glances filled with rage and wickedness; then, swinging his foot, with all his strength he kicks her in the belly, she reels backward and falls six yards away. "The company is retrenching you, whore," he says, "we are tired of you, be ready by this afternoon. I will come to fetch you myself." And he leaves.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I wished to reply with some reproaches for the levity of this beginning, but Saint-Florent imposed silence upon me. " 'Tis water under the bridge," says he, "a purely emotional episode, and my principles support the belief I have, that no brake should be applied to passion; when the appetites speak, they must be heard: that's my law. When I was captured by the thieves with whom you were, did you see me burst into tears? Swallow the bitter pill and act with diligence if one is weak, enjoy all one's rights if powerful: that's my doctrine. You were young and pretty, Therese, we found ourselves in the middle of a forest, nothing so arouses me sensually as the rape of a young virgin girl; such you were, I raped you; I might perhaps have done worse had what I attempted not met with success and had you put up any resistance. But I raped you, then left you naked and robbed in the middle of the night, upon a perilous road: two motives gave rise to that further villainy: I needed money and had none; as for the other reason which drove me to do this, 'twould be in vain were I to explain it, Therese, it would surpass your understanding. Only those spirits who are deep-learned in the heart of man, who have studied its innermost recesses, gained access to the most impenetrable nooks of this dim-lit labyrinth, they alone might be able to account for this consequence of an aberration." "What, Monsieur! the money I gave you... the service I had just rendered you... to be paid for what I did in your behalf by the blackest treachery... that may, you think, be understood, justified ?" "Why yes, Therese! yes indeed! the proof an explanation exists for all I did is that, having just pillaged you, molested you... (for, Therese, I did beat you, you know), why! having taken twenty steps, I stopped and, meditating upon the state in which I had left you, I at once found strength in these ideas, enough to perpetrate additional outrages I might not have committed had it not been for that: you had lost but one maidenhead.... I turned, retraced my steps, and made short work of the other.... And so it is true that in certain souls lust may be born from the womb of crime! What do I say? it is thus true that only crime awakes and stiffens lust and that there is not a single voluptuous pleasure it does not inflame and improve...." "Oh Monsieur! what horror is this?" "Could I not have acquitted myself of a still greater? I was close enough to it, I confess, but I was amply sure you were going to be reduced to the last extremities: the thought satisfied me, I left you. Well, Therese, let's leave the subject and continue to my reason for desiring to see you.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  “Hell, Nan don’t have to talk to me. I done know what’s the matter. He done killed Buck Neelan’s all.” But Poppa gets on up. He come easing right along them porch boards where me and A.D. supposed to be sleeping. Kept our bunk beds out there all summer. Course we’d heard them dogs start worrying around before Nan even hit the gate. Moon was big around as a skillet. So we seen Poppa come outside in his drawers. “Tom,” Nan says, “they tell me Mr. Bishop’s coming after me.” Beaver Bishop was the sheriff of Jasper County at that time. “Aw, Mr. Bishop’s ass,” Poppa said. “Why didn’t you just come on in here and lay down the couch. Then you’d a been here if Mr. Bishop is coming.” Nan said that’d be okay too. That Monday morning Beaver Bishop calls to say the circuit judge’ll be coming up to our end of the county in a week or so. Wonders was Nan fixing to run off before then. Poppa tells him, “Hell, Nan ain’t going nowheres.” Sure enough, a week or so later, a black Model T come pulling up in front the sawmill. Was a great big fellow driving it. Hands big around as pie tins. Had the prettiest head of red hair you ever seen on anybody, man or woman. I mean a big mess of it curly. Wore a black suit like a undertaker. Drove that Ford right up to where them rough trees was stacked yea high and still running sap so strong you couldn’t get a whiff of your lunch bucket less you went upwind. “Nan Crocket,” he says, “you know I can send you to the penitentiary for killing people?” “Yessir,” Nan said. “But they can also haul me to the cemetery for Buck Neelan whittling on me.” Last thing Nan says, ain’t nobody ever did him nothing but Buck. And that was the end of it. Never will forget it. They was a killing ever now and again. They always come to my daddy with it. I can see Poppa right now. That silly-assed hat stuck on his head. I can see him. … I woke to the brown tape unwinding silence. I’d gone to Houston when Daddy’s old commanding officer came to call. The man we knew as Captain Pearse had retired a colonel out west. The D-Day stuff on TV got him tracking down guys he’d served with. Soon as he heard Daddy was sick, he booked flights down and a room in the Holiday Inn. Lecia was there when the rented Pinto pulled up a few days later. She said Pearse had probably done a lot of sit-ups in his life. He was wearing one of those yellow golf shirts with an alligator over the heart. He actually pulled off kissing Mother’s hand when she came out on the porch to greet him. Daddy saluted him with a sharp right hand.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  We didn’t even have to beg to sleep with him, just bounce twice and say please once before he said okay. First, he lit the gas stove in the bedroom with a whump , then smoothed my socks over the top, so they’d be warm come morning. Lecia buttoned our dresses up on hangers while he stripped off his khakis. His legs were white and skinny poking out of blue-patterned boxers. The pinched fingernails he ran all along his pants crease, to sharpen it, made a stuttery noise in the cloth, rrrrr. After, he draped them over a chair back and hit the light. Lecia and I lay down in the vast bed with Daddy in the middle. He slept on top of the covers because he couldn’t stand anything binding his feet. And from the second Lecia and I slid our legs under the sheet on either side of him, he was crying. It’s a fine trait of Texas working men that they cry. My daddy cried at parades and weddings. Watching the American flag slide up the pole before a Little League game could send tears down his leathery face. That night, I stoppered my ears against it. Still, I could make it out under the seashell noise of my own skull. Sniff and sniff and a deep-chested moan of grief rising from him. Through the window, the refinery towers burned, sending out black strands of smoke against the acid-green sky, so many threads weaving around each other. I finally unplugged my ears and the sobs rushed in with gale force. I squeezed his broad hand in both my smaller ones till I thought the finger bones would snap like twigs. I only let go when he needed to reach under his pillow for a red bandana to wipe his nose on. Long after I thought he’d drifted off, his cracked voice rose up to ask if we’d say a prayer that Mother would come on home. He had to say it, of course, for such a request struck us wordless. I’d never heard Daddy pray. He’d only gone to church for funerals, when he was toting somebody in a box. “Lord,” Daddy started, “please bring these babies’ momma back—” Then he broke down crying some more. We patted on either side of him till he quieted and Lecia threw in a big hearty amen. I lay awake a long time listening, Daddy with his arm over my shoulder, Lecia behind him. We warped together like planed lumber. At least, that’s the thought I had. We were just like the three curved boards for the hull bottom of some boat that only needed gluing and caulking together. When Mother did come back, she arrived unannounced in a rented yellow Karmann Ghia sports car with Hector behind the wheel. She unfolded from the car’s low-slung seat. Her alligator heels sank in the spongy ground, leaving holes like a crawfish makes.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  We blubbered in a wild chorus behind bobbing headlights all the way home. Maybe all my snubbing kept me from seeing clear. Or maybe, as Mother always contended, I just drove too damn fast, for when the car finally surged in the garage, there was a dull thump under the rear axle, a hollow sound like a dropped cantaloupe. I threw the car in park and crawled around in the exhaust fumes looking for what I’d hit. By the back tire on the shotgun side, there was a blood smear. It looked black as an inkblot in the red taillights. Of course, Bumper didn’t come when called. He was nowhere in evidence. Mother later believed she saw some animal’s white hindquarters slithering off into a field of saw grass and blackberries in back of the garage. But there were snakes galore in those weeds, Mother said. Maybe even nutria rats. She found him bloody and panting shallow on the back porch at dawn. She wrapped him in a lemon-colored bath towel and fetched him to the animal hospital. We only had a hundred dollars between us and planned to put him to sleep. But the vet offered to try some surgery for free. He put pins in the cat’s hips and wired his broken jaw shut. For years the doctor had heard outrageous tales in bars about this animal’s unlikely survival. The old cat might just make it.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  We were safe, for a while. We read her dad’s Stephen King novels and played Scrabble and marbles and cards. We kissed, sometimes. “In January we figured out her spiro wasn’t working. Something was wrong with it. We were already snowed in and she kept getting this low-grade fever. She had lesions on her arms. She doubled up her dosage, but it wouldn’t go away. She made me…” He stopped for a moment, nearly breathless with the weight of the truth caught in his throat. He swallowed. “She made me take her to the cellar. There was a bike lock. “I tried to get into town, but it was too far, and the storm was getting worse. The snow … I had to go back. My fingers were numb. I thought I’d lose the tip of my nose. I listened to her change. All that night I lay in bed, snow piling up against the walls, and I listened to her screaming in the cellar. In the morning I went down and shot her. That was about five years ago, and I thought I’d never have another friend as long as I lived.” She took his hand and held it for a long time as the wind howled and the ocean boomed and crashed at their back. He was so capable; she hadn’t seen the frightened, vulnerable man behind the rifle that had saved Beth’s life, and hers. Indi had told her. He’s scared, she’d said in the living room of her lost house, cluttered and smelling of mushrooms and mildew and home. Fran hadn’t listened. She’d seen what she wanted to see. After a little while he pulled the blanket up to his chin and leaned his head on her shoulder. “Thanks for asking me to stay.” Maine was cold. The November wind cut straight through the thick wool of Ramona’s coat and uniform as she trudged along the coastal trail a few steps behind Teach. They’d come up through Kennebunkport and past Derry to the coast of Bath, where slopes of crumbling rock ran down to surging breakers and, ahead, vast stretches of virgin sand across which the ocean breathed in its slow tidal rhythm. “This place makes me miss Cuba,” Teach sighed, looking out at the bay. “The water there, you didn’t even shiver walking in. It felt like a warm bath. Do you like to swim, Pierce?” “I was on a team in high school, ma’am.” She’d thought Teach would be disappointed in her, that the disaster of her tenure as Raymond’s governor would have exhausted the older woman’s interest in her as a protégé, but it seemed only to have sharpened it. Maybe she sees herself in me , Ramona thought, a dull, leaden numbness spreading through her body. These problems she’s having with the Matriarchy.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Chocolate milk on plump pink lips. “Sophie, I mean.” “Dead,” Robbie said shortly, turning and starting back through the wreckage of the camp. Fran followed him in silence, looking back toward the city only once as approaching headlights flashed and shivered through the trees in the forest below. They took the van and the two pickups Zia and her people had come down in northwest along a muddy logging road on which they became mired twice and had to get out to lay down planks and heave the rusted vehicle out of dark, sucking muck that spattered them as the tires spun. Then onto Route 125, cutting back northeast through Raymond and Epping, where there was an uncleared jam at the exit for Route 4 that forced them to rumble offroad down a steep hill overgrown with briars and leafless saplings draped in strangler vines. Beth, with a thoroughly stoned Indi snoring softly against her shoulder, watched the rusted-out tangle of cars go by through one of the van’s tiny cross-hatched windows. They were jammed in rail to rail, a landslide of metal from back when the roads were intact and people had thought there was somewhere to run to. Princess, a trans girl she knew who’d used to grow weed with her partners on a little farm outside Seabrook, had told her once that at the Canadian border there were rivers of abandoned cars, miles and miles of them left to rust and ruin by frantic women who’d found themselves caught between checkpoint guards and an oncoming swarm of men. It made her think of V’s broken skull, remembering the early days of t. rex. Of Tara seized up stiff, eyes staring at nothing, stinking of piss and vomit in their motel room’s bathtub. Back then it had seemed like there was no bottom to the horror, as though passing houses where men had turned and killed their families in the night and now rampaged around inside, smashing furniture and shattering dishes as they tried to find a way out of their mausoleums, would be all she ever did for as long as she lived. It had never stopped. Not really. They hit level ground with a grinding scrape as the van bottomed out for a moment, wheels spraying gravel and loose chunks of pavement before it thumped back onto the road just past the edges of the pileup. Beth imagined being caught in that, trying to worm your way through tangles of hot, twisted metal and broken glass, trying to herd your screaming kids, maybe with a broken arm dangling at your side, as the men who had been your father, your brother, your husband, your son, every man you’d ever fucked or kissed or held or screamed at, closed in from all sides in an unthinking avalanche of teeth and muscle. She rested her head atop Indi’s. Half the other women in the back were sleeping, too.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  is a puff of wind. Why be afraid then, since sooner or later death must come?… But whether you come along or not, I will cut down the tree, I will kill Humbaba, I will make a lasting name for myself, I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.45 Gilgamesh’s mother blames his “restless heart” for this harebrained project.46 A leisured class has a lot of time on its hands; collecting rents and supervising the irrigation system is tame work for a species bred to be intrepid hunters. The poem indicates that already young men were chafing against the triviality of civilian life that, as Chris Hedges explained, would lead so many of them to seek meaning on the battlefield.47 The outcome was tragic. There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour. Humbaba turns out to be a very reasonable monster, who pleads for his life and offers Gilgamesh and Enkidu all the wood they want, but still they hack him brutally to pieces. Afterward a gentle rain falls from heaven, as though nature itself grieves for this pointless death.48 The gods show their displeasure with the expedition by striking Enkidu down with a fatal illness, and Gilgamesh is forced to come to terms with his own mortality. Unable to assimilate the consequences of warfare, he turns his back on civilization, roaming unshaven through the wilderness and even descending into the underworld to find an antidote to death. Finally, weary but resigned, he is forced to accept the limitations of his humanity and return to Uruk. On reaching the suburbs, he draws his companion’s attention to the great wall surrounding the city: “Observe the land it encloses, the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and market-places, the houses, the public squares.”49 He personally will die, but he will achieve an immortality of sorts by cultivating the civilized arts and pleasures that are enabling humans to explore new dimensions of existence. Gilgamesh’s famous wall was now essential for the survival of Uruk, though, because after centuries of peaceful cooperation, the Sumerian city-states had begun to fight one another. What caused this tragic development?

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Epilogue: Garland EPILOGUE: GARLAND Beth fell asleep that night as soon as her head hit the pillow, and when she woke thrashing, half-tangled in the sheets, and began at once to sob, Indi stirred from her own exhausted sleep and held her, her tears falling hot onto Beth’s brow and cheek. They kissed and Beth thought how good the fine, dark stubble on Indi’s upper lip felt against her mouth, how right her salty tears were as they dissolved into her saliva. “You taste like licorice,” Indi whispered. The ocean of that soft, fat body in her arms, clawing for release, and afterward her own voice, muffled and congested in the dark. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Robbie couldn’t sleep. By the wrecked wing of the caretaker’s house he sat among the dead. There were others around him. They clung to the bodies covered in sheets, whispering in grief-choked voices, keening low and urgent. A woman he didn’t know screamed and beat her head against the muddy earth. There were still men out there in the night, but there were guards on the wall and floodlights bathing the forest verge and the wrecked trucks and bodies in their sodium-white glare. It was safe to feel the day, now. He gripped Fran’s hand where it stuck out from beneath the bloody sheet someone had used to cover her. Are you leaving? she’d asked, standing there in her nightgown in Indi’s backyard. He closed his eyes, crying now in silent, gulping sobs. I don’t want you to. Beth crossed the lawn just after sunrise. The others were burning the dead men and TERFs, dumping kerosene on stacks of bodies. By the sea wall, a few Legion survivors sat huddled together under armed guard, uniforms crusted with blood and salt, faces scratched, bruised, cut. Robbie had come to get her not long after dawn. One of the prisoners wanted to talk to her, he’d said. The one Fran had fucked. Zia and some of the others had found Ramona Pierce shot up and half-drowned by the rising tide, a hole in her head, and brought her into the custodian’s house, thinking to let her die in comfort. Instead, impossibly, she’d lived. She lay on a narrow canvas cot in the surviving part of the house, Robbie’s gray tom curled up in the crook of her arm. “You look good,” Beth joked from the doorway to the living room, beyond which she didn’t feel like stepping. “I’m sorry,” croaked the pale girl in the cot. The scabbed-over bullet hole in her skull looked like someone had used one of those hydraulic cow-slaughtering things on her. Stupid fucking tattoos. Dumbass septum piercing. She paused to take a labored breath. “Are you the one … one I shot? The woods, off the highway…” Beth tapped her scar, a funny ringing in her ears. “That’s me. You have something you want to say?” “This place,” Ramona wheezed. “It’s … I don’t know.