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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I went round & round the room, mastering my feelings & then yielding to them again. I fetched up in front of the chrysanthemums, which he had arranged in the tall Tang vase that used to be in the hall at Polesden. They were utterly immaculate, ripe yet dry & glossy, the colour of their great clustering heads autumnal while their leaves were green. They might almost have been lacquered art-works, & one had to squeeze them or pinch their petals to prove that they were perishable. I ran over the brief scene of a few minutes before again & again in my mind, each time with renewed pain, & recognised the unspeakable deference with which he had as it were offered the flowers & suppressed his own excitement. He showed, as so often, his tender & acute intimation of my feelings while not altogether being able to contain his own. I understood too in time why he had been so cocky for the last few days, pulled as he must have been between gaiety & apprehension. So the chrysanthemums—in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis—swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future, now elegiac, now heartlessly splendid. I pulled myself together & went into the study & swallowed a large glass of whisky. I tried to get on with the proofs of my Sudan book, as a mechanic exercise, but of course the merest table of figures seemed to speak of my sweet Taha & our past together, & sent the memory ferreting around for the tenderest spots, the purest moments of selflessness & mutual service. Perhaps these inspired me in a way—for I wrote him a cheque for £200, then thinking better of it wrote him one for £100 instead; then I tore them both up & wrote another for £500 and put it in an envelope, and trotted up to the attic to leave it in his room. It’s a room I’ve so rarely been into, & I had to hold myself back from maudlin pillow-stroking reverie. It reminded me too of a room in the Sudan, since there is nothing in it save the bed covered with its beautiful shawl, a rug on the bare boards, & a little table with a photograph of Murad, and that other taken just before we left Khartoum, outside the Sudan Club—he & I standing side by side, smiling against the sun. But I cd scarcely bear to look at it, & hurried out again. Such simple, reassuring things were turning against me.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Paper Cuts You tore apart, my paper heart with words that I was dreading. Now all that’s left, of love unsaid, is dead and made for shredding. Like cursed confetti, tossed and thrown, at a doomed and dismal wedding. Gratitude Take nothing for granted. Even a rock will eventually surrender to the sea and love can slip away like sand through fingers. Wordplay It is upon a pale skin, I write these words to you. A story told with ticklish pen, of all that we must do. To be in love with words my love, and all that they depict, the dirty pretty things I wrote, each little box we ticked. Unravel I want to feel your fingers unclip my bra, she said, and unravel the last thread of decency I possess. Deception I fell in love with love it seems, for what was real is not. The lies you spun when we begun, you thought would be forgot. Time heals all wounds — you said to me, well this I say to you — The scar I wear, I cannot bear, for it is my heart you broke in two.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 147 < Lecture 22  Imperial Christianity after Constantine yThe route was to take him just to the north of Palestine, and he had planned to use the occasion to be baptized in the Jordan River, just as Jesus had been three centuries earlier. yBut he never made it that far. He took ill soon after the journey had just begun and was forced to stop in Nicomedia in the western part of what is now Turkey. yHe called in the local bishop of Nicomedia. Constantine was duly baptized, and his reign passed on to his sons. `Nasty and brutal events happened next within the imperial household. They are important not only for understanding the secular course of Roman history but also for religious affairs within the Christian church. yConstantine had earlier ordered his eldest son and heir, Crispus, executed. Three sons were left: Constantius II, Constans, and Constantine II. This was not a peaceful family, committed to the endearing expression of Christian familial love. yOn the contrary, political power and concerns about imperial succession had their all-too-familiar horrible effects. In the wake of Constantine’s death came a bloodbath. yIn addition to the three sons, there were 11 other male relatives of Constantine in the line of succession. Following a long tradition of Roman imperial tyranny, Constantine’s sons, or at least one of them, arranged for nine of the 11 relatives to be slaughtered. yThe only two who were spared were young cousins who, because they were just boys, appeared to pose no threat, Gallus and Julian. Much later, as an adult, Julian claimed that it was Constantius II who had ordered the murders, and he was probably right. yWhen Constantius II learned of his father’s death, he was the first of the brothers to arrive in Constantinople, the capital city that Constantine had earlier built. Constantius probably gave the instructions for the massacre to his military commanders. This was to eliminate any possible contenders to the throne. < 148 < Lecture 22  Imperial Christianity after Constantine `With no serious rivals remaining, the three sons of Constantine divided the empire among themselves. But none of them was particularly satisfied with the arrangement. `Tensions rose significantly. Three years after the division of power, Constantine II attempted to seize control of Italy from his younger brother Constans but died in battle. A decade later in 350, Constans was murdered by a usurper. `The remaining brother, Constantius II, took out the usurper, and so he was the last man standing, the sole ruler of the empire in 350 CE. By this time the two younger cousins had grown, and Constantius elevated the elder, Gallus, to be a major administrative figure and general. `But when the emperor suspected that Gallus had an eye on the throne, he had him executed. By 354 CE, there were only two remaining of the original 14 male relatives of Constantine: the emperor Constantius II and his young cousin Julian.

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

  I answer that, Idolatry had a twofold cause. One was a dispositive cause; this was on the part of man, and in three ways. First, on account of his inordinate affections, forasmuch as he gave other men divine honor, through either loving or revering them too much. This cause is assigned (Wis. 14:15): “A father being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of his son, who was quickly taken away: and him who then had died as a man he began to worship as a god.” The same passage goes on to say (Wis. 14:21) that “men serving either their affection, or their kings, gave the incommunicable name [Vulg.: ‘names’],” i.e. of the Godhead, “to stones and wood.” Secondly, because man takes a natural pleasure in representations, as the Philosopher observes (Poet. iv), wherefore as soon as the uncultured man saw human images skillfully fashioned by the diligence of the craftsman, he gave them divine worship; hence it is written (Wis. 13:11–17): “If an artist, a carpenter, hath cut down a tree, proper for his use, in the wood . . . and by the skill of his art fashioneth it, and maketh it like the image of a man . . . and then maketh prayer to it, inquiring concerning his substance, and his children, or his marriage.” Thirdly, on account of their ignorance of the true God, inasmuch as through failing to consider His excellence men gave divine worship to certain creatures, on account of their beauty or power, wherefore it is written (Wis. 13:1,2): “All men . . . neither by attending to the works have acknowledged who was the workman, but have imagined either the fire, or the wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the great water, or the sun and the moon, to be the gods that rule the world.” The other cause of idolatry was completive, and this was on the part of the demons, who offered themselves to be worshipped by men, by giving answers in the idols, and doing things which to men seemed marvelous. Hence it is written (Ps. 95:5): “All the gods of the Gentiles are devils.” Reply to Objection 1: The dispositive cause of idolatry was, on the part of man, a defect of nature, either through ignorance in his intellect, or disorder in his affections, as stated above; and this pertains to guilt. Again, idolatry is stated to be the cause, beginning and end of all sin, because there is no kind of sin that idolatry does not produce at some time, either through leading expressly to that sin by causing it, or through being an occasion thereof, either as a beginning or as an end, in so far as certain sins were employed in the worship of idols; such as homicides, mutilations, and so forth. Nevertheless certain sins may precede idolatry and dispose man thereto.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Paper Cuts You tore apart, my paper heart with words that I was dreading. Now all that’s left, of love unsaid, is dead and made for shredding. Like cursed confetti, tossed and thrown, at a doomed and dismal wedding. Gratitude Take nothing for granted. Even a rock will eventually surrender to the sea and love can slip away like sand through fingers. Wordplay It is upon a pale skin, I write these words to you. A story told with ticklish pen, of all that we must do. To be in love with words my love, and all that they depict, the dirty pretty things I wrote, each little box we ticked. Unravel I want to feel your fingers unclip my bra, she said, and unravel the last thread of decency I possess. Deception I fell in love with love it seems, for what was real is not. The lies you spun when we begun, you thought would be forgot. Time heals all wounds— you said to me, well this I say to you— The scar I wear, I cannot bear, for it is my heart you broke in two.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Mitko slowed his pace as he approached them, looking at the little girl with interest, the yogurt still raised to his ear though he had stopped shaking it, and I saw him lean toward the child a little, saying something, though of course I couldn’t make out the words. I had witnessed this many times here, the freedom with which people addressed small children, leaning in as Mitko did now, calling them milichka , sweetness, as I imagined him doing; no one took offense, as though it were granted that children were a kind of public property, something to be cherished in common. There was a crisis, every few months there were alarming articles in the newspapers about the falling birthrate; though there were many children in my neighborhood the country as a whole was imperiled, people couldn’t afford children, or they saw no point in having them, and as everyone who has the chance flees abroad—like my own students, I thought, who are so eager to escape—the population declines and the warnings in the papers grow more strident and the nation itself becomes a little less real, fading away, some fear, to nothing. There’s no hope for it, some of my students have said, not in class but in private, whispering as though it shouldn’t be said out loud, it is a dying country. Small children are a shared joy, then, their parents bask in it, the stroked cheeks and milichka s, but this mother didn’t welcome Mitko’s joy at the sight of the child; she turned from him just slightly, not rudely but insistently, as if shielding the girl from his interest, and then the father was beside them, ushering them toward their building’s door. Mitko stood for a moment, as if perplexed, and again I was filled with grief for him, seeing him standing alone on the street. He had always been alone, I thought, gazing at a world in which he had never found a place and that was now almost perfectly indifferent to him; he was incapable even of disturbing it, of making a sound it could be bothered to hear. Suddenly I was enraged for him, I felt the anger I was sure he must feel, that futile anger like a dry grinding of gears.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He was not certain who, long, long after the event, had sent him the news—he had the feeling that it had to be Cass. It could scarcely have been Vivaldo, who was made too uneasy by what he knew of Eric’s relation to Rufus—knew without being willing to admit that he knew; and it would certainly not have been Richard. No one, in any case, had written very often; he had not really wanted to know what was happening among the people he had fled; and he felt that they had always protected themselves against any knowledge of what was happening in him. No, Rufus had been his only friend among them. Rufus had made him suffer, but Rufus had dared to know him. And when Eric’s pain had faded, and Rufus was far away, Eric remembered only the joy that they had sometimes shared, and the timbre of Rufus’ voice, his half-beat, loping, cocky walk, his smile, the way he held a cigarette, the way he threw back his head when he laughed. And there was something in Yves which reminded him of Rufus—something in his trusting smile and his brave, tough vulnerability. It was a Thursday when the news came. It was pouring down rain, all of Paris was wavering and gray. He had no money at all that day, was waiting for a check which was mysteriously entangled in one of the bureaucratic webs of the French cinema industry. He and Yves had just divided the last of their cigarettes and Yves had gone off to try and borrow money from an Egyptian banker who had once been fond of him. Eric had then lived on the Rue de la Montagne Ste. Geneviève, and he labored up this hill, in the flood, bareheaded, with water dripping down his nose and eyelashes and behind his ears and down his back and soaking through his trench-coat pocket, where he had unwisely placed the cigarettes. He could practically feel them disintegrating in the moist, unclean darkness of his pocket, not at all protected by his slippery hand. He was in a kind of numb despair and intended simply to get home and take off his clothes and stay in bed until help came; help would probably be Yves, with the money for sandwiches; it would be just enough help to enable them to get through yet another ghastly day. He traversed the great courtyard and started up the steps of his building; and behind him, near the porte-cochère , the bell of the concierge’s loge sounded, and she called his name.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  The Drowning I fell into a sea of tears and sank beneath its waves, each breath I lost, became the cost, I paid for wasted years. To sink or swim a question posed, an answer lost within, a sorrow kept, drowned by regret, I cry for you again. Desire I never understood desire until I felt your hands around my throat. Suggestion I love thinking about your mouth on my nipples and your hand up my skirt, she said, in fact the very suggestion of you makes me want to pull my panties down. Playing with Matches I lit this fire, burning fierce, and all-consuming. My desperate tears, useless, against flames that leap, turning my breaking heart to blackened cinders. Lipstick Grab my hair and bring me to my knees. Smudge my lipstick and ruin my pretty lips. My Girl Who Writes I watch you write, my love, my life, my start of everything. Each little sigh, a pen run dry, another painful page begins. Your fingers bleed, I do concede, for a sentence of your making. To which you say, on sunshine days, it is for words my heart is breaking. A Question for Anna Do you know what a palindrome is, madam? Bonsai What could be a love so fierce, in your hands so gently trimmed. Each little cut you take with caution, a love suspended but never grown. Book Put your hands on my knees, she said, and think of me as a book you’ve been dying to read. Her Little Secret I know it’s wrong, but the very thought of your hands, reaching up under my skirt, and touching me, makes me blush in all the right places. Love Story To read in books of love well told, leaves nothing in the meaning. For the love we have is barely held, between pages of our reading. True Love True love is elusive, she said. Sometimes I think it’s as rare as a red moon on a cloudless night. First Love Petals unfurl from a delicate flower, closer to picked with each passing hour, losing the I and gaining an our. Hypnotized I am hypnotized. Sleepwalking to the rhythm of your words, Never wishing to wake — Love Letters The kind of love letters I write are the ones you read in bed, stretched out under the sheets with one hand between your legs. Dreams She turns her mind to countless things, then back again where it begins. This restless urge, and all it brings, to be someone — to do something. The Gift Her eyes were beautifully gift-wrapped; long black lashes of velvet ribbon — and every time she opened them, it felt like Christmas. Poetic Now’s not the time to be poetic, she said. Just pull my panties down and do me up against this tree. The End I could taste the sting of whiskey on your lips , a final kiss, before we said our last good-bye, without a word being said.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He was being held in a prison downtown called the Tombs (the name made her heart turn over), and she could see him to-morrow. The state, or the prison, or someone, had already assigned him a lawyer; he would be brought to trial next week. But the next day, when she saw him, she wept. He had been beaten, he whispered to her, and he could hardly walk. His body, she later discovered, bore almost no bruises, but was full of strange, painful swellings, and there was a welt above one eye. He had not, of course, robbed the store, but, when he left her that Saturday night, had gone down into the underground station to wait for his train. It was late, and trains were slow; he was all alone on the platform, only half awake, thinking, he said, of her. Then, from the far end of the platform, he heard a sound of running; and, looking up, he saw two coloured boys come running down the steps. Their clothes were torn, and they were frightened; they came up the platform and stood near him, breathing hard. He was about to ask them what the trouble was when, running across the tracks towards them, and followed by a white man, he saw another coloured boy; and at the same instant another white man came running down the underground steps. Then he came full awake, in panic; he knew that whatever the trouble was, it was now his trouble also; for these white men would make no distinction between him and the three boys they were after. They were all coloured, they were about the same age, and here they stood together on the underground platform. And they were all, with no questions asked, herded upstairs, and into the wagon and to the station-house. At the station Richard gave his name and address and age and occupation. Then for the first time he stated that he was not involved, and asked one of the other boys to corroborate his testimony. This they rather despairingly did. They might, Elizabeth felt, have done it sooner, but they probably also felt that it would be useless to speak. And they were not believed; the owner of the store was being brought there to make the identification. And Richard tried to relax: the man could not say that he had been there if he had never seen him before. But when the owner came, a short man with a bloody shirt—for they had knifed him—in the company of yet another policeman, he looked at the four boys before him and said: ‘Yeah, that’s them, all right.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was a time of incessantly recurrent images of my sweet dead friend, and of a thousand memories fanned into the air by this cold draught. I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner’s Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan—how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the First Cataract and the visionary beauty of Aswan. And I went further back, prone and defenceless, to Oxford and Winchester, shrinking from the world, curling up in the warm leaf-mould of earlier and earlier times, drawing some wan, nostalgic sustenance from those dead days. My life seemed to go into reverse, and for a month, two months, I was a thing of shadows. It was in vain to tell myself that this was not my way: I was impotent with misery and deprivation. Then, as the end came in sight—it was the dead of winter—something hardened in me. I saw the imaginary verdure beyond the frosted glass. I began to think of the world I must go back to, with its brutal hurry and indifference. I would have to take on a new man. I would have to move again in the company of my captors and humiliators and be glanced at critically for signs of the scars they had inflicted. I would have to do something for others like myself, and for those more defenceless still. I would have to abandon this mortal introspection and instead steel myself. I would even have to hate a little.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He stood, stupid with bewilderment and grief, a few inches from the bed. ‘But me,’ she said, ‘I got to go.’ She walked to the centre of the room again, and picked up her bag. ‘Girl,’ Gabriel whispered, ‘ain’t you got no feelings at all? ’ ‘ Lord! ’ her mother cried; and at the sound her heart turned over; she and Gabriel, arrested, stared at the bed. ‘Lord, Lord, Lord! Lord, have mercy on my sinful daughter! Stretch out your hand and hold her back from the lake that burns forever! Oh, my Lord, my Lord!’ and her voice dropped, and broke, and tears ran down her face. ‘Lord, I done my best with all the children what you give me. Lord, have mercy on my children, and my children’s children.’ ‘Florence,’ said Gabriel, ‘please don’t go. Please don’t go. You ain’t really fixing to go and leave her like this?’ Tears stood suddenly in her own eyes, though she could not have said what she was crying for. ‘Leave me be,’ she said to Gabriel, and picked up her bag again. She opened the door; the cold, morning air came in. ‘Good-bye,’ she said. And then to Gabriel: ‘Tell her I said good-bye.’ She walked through the cabin door and down the short steps into the frosty yard. Gabriel watched her, standing frozen between the door and the weeping bed. Then, as her hand was on the gate, he ran before her, and slammed the gate shut. ‘Girl, where you going? What you doing? You reckon on finding some men up North to dress you in pearls and diamonds?’ Violently, she opened the gate and moved out into the road. He watched her with his jaw hanging, and his lips loose and wet. ‘If you ever see me again,’ she said, ‘I won’t be wearing rags like yours.’ All over the church there was only the sound, more awful than the deepest silence, of the prayers of the saints of God. Only the yellow, moaning light shone above them, making their faces gleam like muddy gold. Their faces, and their attitudes, and their many voices rising as one voice made John think of the deepest valley, the longest night, of Peter and Paul in the dungeon cell, one praying while the other sang; or of endless, depth-less, swelling water, and no dry land in sight, the true believer clinging to a spar. And, thinking of to-morrow, when the church would rise up, singing, under the booming Sunday light, he thought of the light for which they tarried, which, in an instant, filled the soul, causing (throughout those iron-dark, unimaginable ages before John had come into the world) the new-born in Christ to testify: Once I was blind and now I see. And then they sang: ‘Walk in the light, the beautiful light. Shine all around me by day and by night, Jesus, the light of the world.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation. I was a kind of ruminant there. Even so, it did not turn out in quite the way that—in the first numbed and degraded hours—I had imagined it would. Indeed, for several weeks the time rushed by, and it was really only in the final month, when freedom grew palpably close, that every minute took on a crabwise, cunctatory manner, came near to stalling altogether. I was haunted then by an image, a visionary impression of young spring greenery—birches and aspens—quickened by breeze but seen as if through frosted glass, blurred and silent. But by then a real atrocity had happened, something more than my freedom had been taken away from me. My early days there called on my resilience. It was like being pitched again into the Gothic and arcane world of school, learning again to absorb or deflect the vengeful energies which governed it. But a difference soon emerged, for while the schoolboys were bound to struggle for supremacy, and in doing so to align themselves with authority, thus becoming educated and socially orthodox at once, we in the prison were joined by our unorthodoxy: we were all social outcasts. The effects of this were often ambiguous. Many of the distinctions of the outside world survived: respect for class, disgust at certain violent or inhumane crimes, and the ostracising of those who had been convicted of them. But at the same time, since we were all criminals, a layer of social pretence had been removed. There could be no question of pretending one was not a lover of men; and since many of the inmates of my wing were sex criminals—or ‘nonces’ in the nonce-word of the place—there was between us a curiously sustaining mood of sympathy and understanding. Of course guilt and shame were not magically annulled by this, but a goodish number of us—by no means all first offenders—had been caught for soliciting or conspiring to perform indecent acts, or for some intimacy (often fervently reciprocated) with underage boys. And many of the prisoners themselves, of course, were little more than children, old enough only to know the dictates of their hearts and to be sent to prison. The place was fuller than it ever had been with our people, as a direct result of the current brutal purges, and many were the tales of treachery and deceit, of bribed and lying witnesses, and false friends turning Queen’s Evidence, and going free. Such tales circulated constantly among us—and I added my own mite to this worn and speaking currency.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  All the State qualifiers’ names wind up on that wall eventually. They’ll have to figure out some way to take the thing with them when they move. This is a cold little room when empty, and it gets hot too fast when it’s filled with wrestlers; and Bridgewater already is in the midst of a fund-raising drive to build an entirely new workout space that is going to cost something like $150,000, which, strictly speaking, is the kind of money nobody has. “We’re getting there,” Brad says. Considering the memories that have been built in here, it is probably just as well with the traditionalists of North-Linn if that all happens later rather than sooner. By the winter of 2006, the workout room, wherever it is, will contain three LeCleres: Dan’s two younger brothers and his father. Dan himself will be the latest memory, gone on to his next phase, a college wrestler. In fact, even as he pursues the greatest prize of his sporting life, it is apparent that a part of Dan already has left. It isn’t the part that wrestles; it is the part that finds the future. And it won’t be long before the future arrives. Doug sees that moment of separation coming; in his mind’s eye, perhaps, it is already here. Doug knows the drill. He is a farmer and a wrestler and a coach of young men, and seasons change. Doug has experienced loss here and there, beginning with his first son Michael’s baffling decision to quit the sport. Doug already has had the recurring dream in which he walks into the wrestling room, looks around and asks, “Where’s Kyle?”—searching for Kyle Burkle, one of his favorite former wrestlers. In the dream, it is either Bridgewater or assistant coach Larry Henderson who finally comes over and says quietly, “Coach, he’s gone,” and only then does Doug begin to realize that Kyle has actually moved on a year ago. It is time for Doug to start measuring his loss. And perhaps it will be that way with his own son. A year from now, Dan—and his success or failure in this final push—will be one more brushstroke of paint on the wall. In some of the important ways, Doug already has braced himself for that reality. Whether Dan sees it or not, Doug is slowly but inexorably shifting his emotion and his passion over to Nick, a tenth-grader and the next LeClere in the wrestling bloodline. Doug pays his attentions to Nick now, reserves his fury for Nick’s mistakes and his occasional sloth. He fiercely hangs on to Nick’s triumphs and openly worries through Nick’s injuries and setbacks. Chris, an eighth-grader, is waiting in the wings. Michael is long gone. Dan is next. But for now, the North-Linn wrestling room is his. When Dan enters it, he is in his world. It’s a small one.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  We’re just so serious about it—we want to excel at it. And it really bothers me when we don’t, or when we lose, because it’s the thing we do. It’s right in the middle of everything we do in our family.” Thus, it made no sense to Doug that his son Michael would leave the family business. It took a long time to get over it. It took years, even after the rest of the story came out, about the depression that Mike had been dealing with, and suffering from, in that time. And it took Mary figuring out even that. Mary was the one who put the warning signs together. She could see that her son was continuing to excel in school, pull down great grades. He obviously still had friends. He was seldom, if ever, in trouble. But he had begun to change, especially around the farmhouse. Mike was suddenly moody, and quite a lot of the time. He began to rebel. He got annoyed so easily. He stopped smiling. To Doug, the changes were subtle enough to warrant no further remarks. Doug had been a handful as a teenager himself. He still considers it a wonder that he and his father, Dwight, have remained so close (and, in fact, living almost side-by-side on separate family parcels) after all these years. It was Mary who finally got Michael to a doctor and received the diagnosis, and Mary who went on and got the antidepressants and always made sure the prescription was filled. Now she sees her oldest son happy and thriving, a young man who traveled the country as a student-manager of the Iowa football team, an artistic person who studied English and was considering a future in architecture. It is the Michael she knew all along, and the one who left her briefly during those high school years, before she realized what it was that was dragging him down. Doug and Michael patched things up a while back. “I never want Mike to feel out of the loop because he quit the sport,” Doug says now. “I told him, ‘It’s hard, if you love the sport, to wrestle, but if you don’t like it, you just can’t do it and ever do yourself or your team justice.’” When it happened to Dan, he was almost exactly as old as Mike, a tenth-grader trying to deal with everything at once. His body was growing, and as a wrestler he was actively fighting that. He already had won a state championship, and the clamor for a repeat already was building around North-Linn. And, as Mary knows now, there was a family tendency toward depression. Looking in upon the wrestling life, it’s amazing that more kids aren’t in full-blown depressions themselves. Theirs is a months-long experiment in deprivation: of food; of hydration sometimes; of normal interaction; of life-sustaining forces.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He shakes Riniker’s hand, jogs downstairs, reaches the North-Linn warm-up area and collapses into Brad Bridgewater’s arms. Ben’s shoulders heave as his emotions come all the way to the surface. It isn’t merely that he believes he could beat Riniker; it’s that there are no more chances to make that true. It is officially time for Ben to put wrestling aside and get on with his life. Only later, when he returns to his hotel room and finds a handwritten note from his father, the one that conveys in loving language the pride with which Mike Fisher watched his son fight through his fears to complete the season, does Ben receive the real payoff for his year of work. Mike will almost come to tears talking about writing the note. It’s the finality of it all that hurts. Some things you never do get fully prepared for. A few moments later, the quality and depth of Bridgewater’s North-Linn team asserts itself one final time. Nick wrestles the last match of his fractured, injury-abbreviated sophomore season, and he does so with his father and his brother in his corner. Having looked out of sorts the day before, Nick comes back strong and in control, and it is a great finish, the best that Doug could have hoped for. Nick dominates in a 7–0 victory that earns him fifth place in the state and the raucous applause of the fans in the stands. Tyler Burkle, meanwhile, completes one of the brilliant comebacks in the tournament, albeit one that almost nobody outside of the North-Linn cheering section notices. His dominant 8–1 victory in the consolation finals gives him a third-place finish and marks his fifth straight win through the weekend, following that crushing pin by Joey Verschoor. Tyler has his medal and the admiration of his coaches, who still recognize the real deal when they see it. Put Tyler and Nick together with the rising young talent on this team, with Madison Sackett and Ryan Mulnix and Ben Morrow and the rest, and the Lynx will be ready to wrestle again in the winter of 2006. Doug LeClere is already making plans: He will have Alex Burkle, Tyler’s talented brother, in ninth grade by then. Chris LeClere will be a freshman, too. Another Burkle and another LeClere. It’s probably worth sticking around to see. Between the afternoon and evening sessions on the final day, the State Tournament gets dressed up and formalized, and the eight mats that have been handling nonstop action all weekend are now stripped down to a bare three. They are placed side-by-side, across the middle of the cavernous auditorium; and it is there that the state champions will be decided, one weight class at a time, the 1A, 2A and 3A finals being wrestled simultaneously. On the floor, TV cameras are slid into position. Along that far tile wall near the entrance, the hand-lettered brackets all have been removed; the wall again is bare.

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

  JEROME. For many who leave their riches do not therefore follow the Lord; and it is not sufficient for perfection that they despise money, unless they also follow the Saviour, that unless having forsaken evil, they also do what is good. For it is easier to contemn the hoard than quit the propensityb; therefore it follows, And come and follow me; for he follows the Lord who is his imitator, and who walks in his steps. It follows, And when the young man had heard these words, he went away sorrowful. This is the sorrow that leads to death. And the cause of his sorrow is added, for he had great possessions, thorns, that is, and briars, which choked the holy leaven. CHRYSOSTOM. For they that have little, and they that abound, are not in like measure encumbered. For the acquisition of riches raises a greater flame, and desire is more violently kindled. AUGUSTINE. (Ep. 31, 5.) I know not how, but in the love of worldly superfluities, it is what we have already got, rather than what we desire to get, that most strictly enthrals us. For whence went this young man away sorrowful, but that he had great possessions? It is one thing to lay aside thoughts of further acquisition, and another to strip ourselves of what we have already made our own; one is only rejecting what is not ours, the other is like parting with one of our own limbs. ORIGEN. But historically, the young man is to be praised for that he did not kill, did not commit adultery; but is to be blamed for that he sorrowed at Christ’s words calling him to perfection. He was young indeed in soul, and therefore leaving Christ, he went his way. 19:23–2623. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. 24. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. 25. When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? 26. But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible. GLOSS. (ap. Anselm.) The Lord took occasion from this rich man to hold discourse concerning the covetous; Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, &c. CHRYSOSTOM. What He spoke was not condemning riches in themselves, but those who were enslaved by them; also encouraging His disciples that being poor they should not be ashamed by reason of their poverty. HILARY. To have riches is no sin; but moderation is to be observed in our havings. For how shall we communicate to the necessities of the saints, if we have not out of what we may communicate?

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  When I read this I looked helplessly at the woman next to me, unable to speak. She reached out her hand, saying It’s all right, go, I’ll stay with them, that’s why I came, speaking in Bulgarian as she always did in front of students, she was embarrassed of her English. I managed to thank her, I think, and I murmured something to the class, an apology perhaps, I’m not sure, and then I left the room, the woman, the students eager for news, the sentence that now would never be taken back up; I left the room and descended the broad stairs and stepped out into the scorching day. Though it was September and fall already the sun beat like a bell upon the streets, the grass was dry, the trees seemed withered in their shells; but I walked without thinking, barely noticing the heat. I must have passed the august, slightly crumbling buildings of my school, the Soviet blocks of the police academy, the gate with its guards, the dogs curled in the shade beside it; I must have passed them though I have no memory of them now. I was seeing something else, images that burst in on me, scenes from a childhood I hadn’t thought of for years; I had worked hard to forget them but now they came all at once, too quickly to make any sense of them. It was only after I reached Malinov, the main boulevard, with its lanes of cars stalled miserably in the heat, that this procession of images began to slow and settle, resolving into more distinct scenes of the life I had left behind. I saw my grandparents’ farm, my father lying in a large field used as pasture, I saw myself lying beside him. It was late, and I think it was summer, the night was cool but I could feel the ground releasing the day’s heat beneath me, its long exhalation. I remember the freedom I felt, awake far past my bedtime, and my father too was free, having set aside for once the work that filled his days and nights. He was the only one in his family who had gone to college, he studied law and moved to the city, and though it wasn’t far from where he and my mother had been born, it was a different world. He hated going back to their small town, to the poverty and dirt he had worked so hard to escape; he only visited once or twice a year, though my mother took us to see her family often, it was important to know where we came from, she said.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  But my sister insisted, something in how he told it convinced her it was true, or that he believed it was true. And after all, I thought, his belief was what mattered, and I wondered when he had been given this account of his father, of the absence of his father, whether he was still a child, and I wondered too how the absence had weighed on him, how he had explained it to himself until then. I wanted to know who had told him and why, whether his mother to make him angry or his grandfather to make him afraid. Besides, my sister said, it explains what happened to her, to my father’s mother, she meant, who seemed to seek out not just other men but the least acceptable men, as if she gave herself to them not just to defy her father but to injure him, and increasingly to injure herself. Often they were violent men, my sister said, repeating what she had been told; from as early as he could remember my father was scared of them, and he was frightened of his grandfather, too, who lashed out at him and his brothers without warning. And they fought with one another, as kids and as adults, these boys with different fathers; one of them died a soldier before I was born and we hardly knew the others, we saw them so seldom. Two or three times when I was very young my father took us to a reunion, and each time there was a fight, a quick flare of violence that left one or more of them in the dirt. When they were children they felt no loyalty to one another, my father and his brothers; they shifted their allegiances whenever it suited, teaming up against one and then another, or making friends with one or another of the men who appeared as if from nowhere and never stayed for long. Most of all they courted their grandfather, whom they hated but needed, too, especially as their mother sought out more and more brutal men. It was like she wanted to be hurt by them, my sister said, and didn’t care what happened to her sons. One day, she went on, when our father was still a boy, maybe eight or nine, he heard his mother shouting and ran to find her standing with one of his brothers in a field. In front of them was the boy’s father, who was enraged past all restraint, my father realized; he wasn’t surprised when he struck their mother, first with his open hand and then with his fist.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He settled back, and holding the cards on his lap he began to write, in large block capitals copying out the three words, BUSINESS REPLY MAIL , again and again, practicing the alphabet, I realized, the letters uncertain in his childish hand, a Cyrillic Б replacing the Latin as often as not. I can’t say why it affected me as it did, his studiousness, the quiet earnestness with which he worked, but it was heartbreaking, the more so when he turned to the woman and said When I’m finished, he will read it, inclining his head toward me. Maybe now that I saw Mitko in the boy, any future I could imagine for him gave me something to grieve. Should he fail in his studies, or should he find after them there were no jobs to be had, should he turn, like Mitko, to drink or to drugs, thwarting his grandmother’s hopes, there was the lost promise of the bright boy before me. But if the boy made the most of that promise, if he left Bulgaria (where there is no future, my students tell me again and again, where there is only the narrowing horizon of diminished expectations), if he thrived beyond anything his grandmother hoped, then there was the thought, unbearable to me, of what Mitko might have been. By the third paper card the boy’s writing had lost its shape altogether, softening and flattening out until it was just a wavy line across the page. As the train slowed in its approach to Plovdiv, where my mother and I would spend the night—I wanted her to see the beautiful old city, the ornate wooden houses climbing the hills—he held up this last card with its scribbles for me to read. That must be a language I don’t know, I said, smiling, I can’t read it, and he seemed satisfied, he grunted and said Tova e ispanski , that’s Spanish, making me laugh again. You’re very smart, I said, as his grandmother shook her head, it’s good to know so many languages. My mother and I were standing now, gathering our things, lifting our large bags from the rack, and I found I didn’t know how to say goodbye to the boy. I wanted to tell him to study, to work hard, above all to study his English, which he would be helpless without; it was his best chance, I wanted to say, but that’s the kind of thing one can never say, there’s no way to say it, or no way for it to be heard. And so instead I opened a small pocket of my bag, telling him I wanted to give him something, something you couldn’t find in Bulgaria, I said, and I handed him a drugstore peppermint from a packet my mother had brought over for me.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Being an assistant only allows Doug to occasionally miss practice because, for example, he’s on one of his 24-hour shifts at the fire station. But missing the practices kills him a little bit at a time. This is his passion, the thing he wants to do the most. His wife, Mary, says that Doug was crushed when Michael abruptly stopped wrestling in high school and never picked up the sport again. Doug simply couldn’t understand why anyone who knew as much about wrestling as Michael wasn’t interested in continuing the education, because Doug is still as vitally interested in that education as he ever was. He never gets tired of it, never wearies of talking about it. As Mary figures it, this may occasionally be the problem. In the meantime, that is Doug out there going against Burkle, bandaged up but refusing to (a) come off the mat or (b) go anything less than all out. Burkle has inadvertently opened a cut on Doug’s right ear—could’ve been a head-butt, could’ve been a hand swipe or a knee—and Doug is bleeding profusely. A few random attempts to stanch the flow have failed, and so Doug finally grabs a wad of toilet tissue, jams it against the ear and resumes a ferocious scrap with Burkle, a kid for whom the coaches have high hopes in the State Tournament despite the fact that Burkle’s Class 1A weight, 152, is the one at which Ryan Morningstar wrestles. Doug and Burkle go at each other repeatedly, and you see at once where the LeClere boys get their wrestling prowess. Doug is all power and leverage. He’s still quick on his feet, good with a low shoot-in to grab one of Burkle’s ankles, and he is virtually impossible to move around on the mat with his low center of gravity and almost perfectly balanced wrestling stance, two traits that Dan clearly carries. The wrestling goes on. And on. For what feels like an hour without a significant break, the wrestlers continue in two- and three- and five- and seven-minute periods. There will be pounds and blood lost today that may never be found. And Bridgewater isn’t close to being done. Before this practice is finished, he will send his wrestlers on a series of suicide sprints back and forth across the width of the room—twelve sprints and a break, then ten, then eight, then six, then four, and then two. It’s the old-school approach to fatigue, like a lifter going to a lighter weight with each repetition until the point where he is working with almost no pounds, yet is so exhausted that his arms and shoulders can barely function anyway. After the sprints comes the jump rope, and after that—the end of perhaps two and a half hours of nonstop practice—it is hoped that some or all of the wrestlers will stick around for extra work.