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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Somehow, it never was, but neither Muriel nor I wanted to notice that, nor how unfair such a stacked deck was. She and I had each other; Lynn had only a piece of each of us, and was here on sufferance. We never saw nor articulated this until much later, despite our endless examinations and theme-writing about communal living. And by then it was too late, at least for this experiment in living out our visions. Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given. One Sunday night in the beginning of August, Muriel and I came home from Laurel’s to find that Lynn had left. Her knapsack and the boxes in which she kept her assortment of mementos from different lives were gone. In the middle of the kitchen table was Muriel’s Cassell’s german dictionary, the book in which we kept our savings, ninety dollars to date. It was open, and the pages were empty. That ninety dollars was all the money we had, and it represented a huge loss to us. Our roommate was gone, our house-keys were gone, our savings were gone. The loss of the dream was even greater. Even many years afterward, Lynn was never able to say to us why she had done it. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 28 That fall, Muriel and I took a course at the New School in contemporary american poetry, and I went into therapy. There were things I did not understand, and things I felt that I did not want to feel, particularly the blinding headaches that came in waves sometimes. And I seldom spoke. I wrote and I dreamed, but almost never talked, except in answer to a direct question, or to give a direction of some sort. I became more and more aware of this the longer Muriel and I lived together. With Rhea, as with most of the other people I knew, my primary function in conversations was to listen. Most people never get a chance to talk as much as they want to, and I was an attentive listener, being really interested in what made other people tick. (Maybe I could squirrel it off and examine their lives in private and find out something about myself.) Muriel and I communicated pretty much by intuition and unfinished sentences. Libraries are supposed to be quiet, so at work I didn’t have to talk, except to point out where books were, and tell stories to the children.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 11. --Of the Statue of Apollo at Cumae, Whose Tears are Supposed to Have Portended Disaster to the Greeks, Whom the God Was Unable to Succor. And it is still this weakness of the gods which is confessed in the story of the Cuman Apollo, who is said to have wept for four days during the war with the Achaeans and King Aristonicus. And when the augurs were alarmed at the portent, and had determined to cast the statue into the sea, the old men of Cumae interposed, and related that a similar prodigy had occurred to the same image during the wars against Antiochus and against Perseus, and that by a decree of the senate, gifts had been presented to Apollo, because the event had proved favorable to the Romans. Then soothsayers were summoned who were supposed to have greater professional skill, and they pronounced that the weeping of Apollo's image was propitious to the Romans, because Cumae was a Greek colony, and that Apollo was bewailing (and thereby presaging) the grief and calamity that was about to light upon his own land of Greece, from which he had been brought. Shortly afterwards it was reported that King Aristonicus was defeated and made prisoner,--a defeat certainly opposed to the will of Apollo; and this he indicated by even shedding tears from his marble image. And this shows us that, though the verses of the poets are mythical, they are not altogether devoid of truth, but describe the manners of the demons in a sufficiently fit style. For in Virgil, Diana mourned for Camilla, [136] and Hercules wept for Pallas doomed to die. [137]This is perhaps the reason why Numa Pompilius, too, when, enjoying prolonged peace, but without knowing or inquiring from whom he received it, he began in his leisure to consider to what gods he should entrust the safe keeping and conduct of Rome, and not dreaming that the true, almighty, and most high God cares for earthly affairs, but recollecting only that the Trojan gods which AEneas had brought to Italy had been able to preserve neither the Trojan nor Lavinian kingdom rounded by AEneas himself, concluded that he must provide other gods as guardians of fugitives and helpers of the weak, and add them to those earlier divinities who had either come over to Rome with Romulus, or when Alba was destroyed. [136] AEneid, xi. 532. [137] Ibid. x. 464.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 20. --Of the Destruction of the Saguntines, Who Received No Help from the Roman Gods, Though Perishing on Account of Their Fidelity to Rome. But among all the disasters of the second Punic war, there occurred none more lamentable, or calculated to excite deeper complaint, than the fate of the Saguntines. This city of Spain, eminently friendly to Rome, was destroyed by its fidelity to the Roman people. For when Hannibal had broken treaty with the Romans, he sought occasion for provoking them to war, and accordingly made a fierce assault upon Saguntum. When this was reported at Rome, ambassadors were sent to Hannibal, urging him to raise the siege; and when this remonstrance was neglected, they proceeded to Carthage, lodged complaint against the breaking of the treaty, and returned to Rome without accomplishing their object. Meanwhile the siege went on; and in the eighth or ninth month, this opulent but ill-fated city, dear as it was to its own state and to Rome, was taken, and subjected to treatment which one cannot read, much less narrate, without horror. And yet, because it bears directly on the matter in hand, I will briefly touch upon it. First, then, famine wasted the Saguntines, so that even human corpses were eaten by some:so at least it is recorded. Subsequently, when thoroughly worn out, that they might at least escape the ignominy of falling into the hands of Hannibal, they publicly erected a huge funeral pile, and cast themselves into its flames, while at the same time they slew their children and themselves with the sword. Could these gods, these debauchees and gourmands, whose mouths water for fat sacrifices, and whose lips utter lying divinations,--could they not do anything in a case like this? Could they not interfere for the preservation of a city closely allied to the Roman people, or prevent it perishing for its fidelity to that alliance of which they themselves had been the mediators? Saguntum, faithfully keeping the treaty it had entered into before these gods, and to which it had firmly bound itself by an oath, was besieged, taken, and destroyed by a perjured person. If afterwards, when Hannibal was close to the walls of Rome, it was the gods who terrified him with lightning and tempest, and drove him to a distance, why, I ask, did they not thus interfere before? For I make bold to say, that this demonstration with the tempest would have been more honorably made in defence of the allies of Rome--who were in danger on account of their reluctance to break faith with the Romans, and had no resources of their own--than in defence of the Romans themselves, who were fighting in their own cause, and had abundant resources to oppose Hannibal.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  The weeping was buried beneath the song. She had been hearing this song all her life, she had grown up with it, but she had never understood it as well as she understood it now. It filled the church, as though the church had merely become a hollow or a void, echoing with the voices that had driven her to this dark place. Her aunt had sung it always, harshly, under her breath, in a bitter pride: ‘The consecrated cross I’ll bear Till death shall set me free, And then go home, a crown to wear, For there’s a crown for me. ’ She was probably an old, old woman now, still in the same harshness of spirit, singing this song in the tiny house down home which she and Elizabeth had shared so long. And she did not know of Elizabeth’s shame—Elizabeth had not written about John until long after she was married to Gabriel; and the Lord had never allowed her aunt to come to New York City. Her aunt had always prophesied that Elizabeth would come to no good end, proud, and vain, and foolish as she was, and having been allowed to run wild all her childhood days. Her aunt had come second in the series of disasters that had ended Elizabeth’s childhood. First, when she was eight, going on nine, her mother had died, an event not immediately recognized by Elizabeth as a disaster, since she had scarcely known her mother and had certainly never loved her. Her mother had been very fair, and beautiful, and delicate of health, so that she stayed in bed most of the time, reading spiritualist pamphlets concerning the benefits of disease and complaining to Elizabeth’s father of how she suffered. Elizabeth remembered of her only that she wept very easily and that she smelled like stale milk—it was, perhaps, her mother’s disquieting colour that, whenever she was held in her mother’s arms, made Elizabeth think of milk. Her mother did not, however, hold Elizabeth in her arms very often. Elizabeth very quickly suspected that this was because she was so very much darker than her mother and not nearly, of course, so beautiful. When she faced her mother she was shy, downcast, sullen. She did not know how to answer her mother’s shrill, meaningless questions, put with the furious affectation of maternal concern; she could not pretend, when she kissed her mother, or submitted to her mother’s kiss, that she was moved by anything more than an unpleasant sense of duty. This, of course, bred in her mother a kind of baffled fury, and she never tired of telling Elizabeth that she was an ‘unnatural’ child. But it was very different with her father; he was—and so Elizabeth never failed to think of him—young, and handsome, and kind, and generous; and he loved his daughter.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Then we would have to get up to gather the pits and fruit skins and bag them to put out later for the garbagemen, because if we left them near the bed for any length of time, they would call out the hordes of cockroaches that always waited on the sidelines within the walls of Harlem tenements, particularly in the smaller older ones under the hill of Morningside Heights. Afrekete lived not far from Genevieve’s grandmother’s house. Sometimes she reminded me of Ella, Gennie’s stepmother, who shuffled about with an apron on and a broom outside the room where Gennie and I lay on the studio couch. She would be singing her non-stop tuneless little song over and over and over: Momma kilt me Poppa et me Po’ lil’ brudder suck ma bones… And one day Gennie turned her head on my lap to say uneasily, “You know, sometimes I don’t know whether Ella’s crazy, or stupid, or divine.” And now I think the goddess was speaking through Ella also, but Ella was too beaten down and anesthetized by Phillip’s brutality for her to believe in her own mouth, and we, Gennie and I, were too arrogant and childish—not without right or reason, for we were scarcely more than children—to see that our survival might very well lay in listening to the sweeping woman’s tuneless song. I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing—not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy. Afrekete’s house was the tallest one near the corner, before the high rocks of Morningside Park began on the other side of the avenue, and one night on the Midsummer Eve’s Moon we took a blanket up to the roof. She lived on the top floor, and in an unspoken agreement, the roof belonged mostly to those who had to live under its heat. The roof was the chief resort territory of tenement-dwellers, and was known as Tar Beach. We jammed the roof door shut with our sneakers, and spread our blanket in the lee of the chimney, between its warm brick wall and the high parapet of the building’s face. This was before the blaze of sulphur lamps had stripped the streets of New York of trees and shadow, and the incandescence from the lights below faded this far up.

• From The City of God

  [140] Virgil, AEn. i. 286. [141] Pharsal. v. 1. Chapter 14. --Of the Wickedness of the War Waged by the Romans Against the Albans, and of the Victories Won by the Lust of Power. But what happened after Numa's reign, and under the other kings, when the Albans were provoked into war, with sad results not to themselves alone, but also to the Romans? The long peace of Numa had become tedious; and with what endless slaughter and detriment of both states did the Roman and Alban armies bring it to an end! For Alba, which had been founded by Ascanius, son of AEneas, and which was more properly the mother of Rome than Troy herself, was provoked to battle by Tullus Hostilius, king of Rome, and in the conflict both inflicted and received such damage, that at length both parties wearied of the struggle. It was then devised that the war should be decided by the combat of three twin-brothers from each army:from the Romans the three Horatii stood forward, from the Albans the three Curiatii. Two of the Horatii were overcome and disposed of by the Curiatii; but by the remaining Horatius the three Curiatii were slain. Thus Rome remained victorious, but with such a sacrifice that only one survivor returned to his home. Whose was the loss on both sides? Whose the grief, but of the offspring of AEneas, the descendants of Ascanius, the progeny of Venus, the grandsons of Jupiter? For this, too, was a "worse than civil" war, in which the belligerent states were mother and daughter. And to this combat of the three twin-brothers there was added another atrocious and horrible catastrophe. For as the two nations had formerly been friendly (being related and neighbors), the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii; and she, when she saw her brother wearing the spoils of her betrothed, burst into tears, and was slain by her own brother in his anger. To me, this one girl seems to have been more humane than the whole Roman people. I cannot think her to blame for lamenting the man to whom already she had plighted her troth, or, as perhaps she was doing, for grieving that her brother should have slain him to whom he had promised his sister. For why do we praise the grief of AEneas (in Virgil [142] ) over the enemy cut down even by his own hand? Why did Marcellus shed tears over the city of Syracuse, when he recollected, just before he destroyed, its magnificence and meridian glory, and thought upon the common lot of all things? I demand, in the name of humanity, that if men are praised for tears shed over enemies conquered by themselves, a weak girl should not be counted criminal for bewailing her lover slaughtered by the hand of her brother. While, then, that maiden was weeping for the death of her betrothed inflicted by her brother's hand, Rome was rejoicing that such devastation had been wrought on her mother state, and that she had purchased a victory with such an expenditure of the common blood of herself and the Albans.

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

  GREGORY. (ubi sup.) It may also be answered, that evil men receive in this life good things, because they place their whole joy in transitory happiness, but the righteous may indeed have good things here, yet not receive them for reward, because while they seek better things, that is, eternal, in their judgment whatever good things are present seem by no means good. CHRYSOSTOM. (in Conc. de Laz.) But after the mercy of God, we must seek in our own endeavours for hope of salvation, not in numbering fathers, or relations, or friends. For brother does not deliver brother; and therefore it is added, And beside all this between us and yon there is a great gulf fixed. THEOPHYLACT. The great gulf signifies the distance of the righteous from sinners. For as their affections were different, so also their abiding places do not slightly differ. CHRYSOSTOM. The gulf is said to be fixed, because it cannot be loosened, moved, or shaken. AMBROSE. Between the rich and the poor then there is a great gulf, because after death rewards cannot be changed. Hence it follows, So that they who would pass from hence to you cannot, nor come thence to us. CHRYSOSTOM. As if he says, We can see, we cannot pass; and we see what we have escaped, you what you have lost; our joys enhance your torments, your torments our joys. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) For as the wicked desire to pass over to the elect, that is, to depart from the pangs of their sufferings, so to the afflicted and tormented would the just pass in their mind by compassion, and wish to set them free. But the souls of the just, although in the goodness of their nature they feel compassion, after being united to the righteousness of their Author, are constrained by such great uprightness as not to be moved with compassion towards the reprobate. Neither then do the unrighteous pass over to the lot of the blessed, because they are bound in everlasting condemnation, nor can the righteous pass to the reprobate, because being now made upright by the righteousness of judgment, they in no way pity them from any compassion. THEOPHYLACT. You may from this derive an argument against the followers of Origen, who say, that since an end is to be placed to punishments, there will be a time when sinners shall be gathered to the righteous and to God.

• From The City of God

  501 The City of God’s Journey through Hist ory A ugustine’s city outlived him by merely a matter of months. The Vandals, making their way through Gaul, over the Mediterranean, and across the North African coast were besieging Hippo by the summer of 430. Augustine died on August 28, 430, knowing that his city was surrounded and no rescue was coming from Carthage. The city surrendered and was occupied in the spring of 431 and went into decline at once. The trans-Mediterranean economy in which it flourished fell into decrepitude, and it shrank into a fishing town. Within a century there was little left of the city Augustine had served. Barbarians and the Rise of Christianity „After Augustine’s death and the end of the siege, somehow his staff saved his library, including all his own works. They made it across the sea to Italy and were copied and distributed in the West, wherever the Christian churches prayed and preached and thought in Latin. „His bones made it too: Removed by his church first to Cagliari in Sardinia, they finally found a home in Pavia, in the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where they rest to this day. „We have his books. We have his bones. Do we, then, have him? In a very real way we do not. We lack Augustine because our organic connection to him was severed by the chaos that followed his death and erased the audiences to which his works were addressed and with whom he shared a coherent worldview. Lecture 24

• From The City of God

  [1273] Ps. xxv. 17. Chapter 7. --Of the Diversity of Languages, by Which the Intercourse of Men is Prevented; And of the Misery of Wars, Even of Those Called Just. After the state or city comes the world, the third circle of human society,--the first being the house, and the second the city. And the world, as it is larger, so it is fuller of dangers, as the greater sea is the more dangerous. And here, in the first place, man is separated from man by the difference of languages. For if two men, each ignorant of the other's language, meet, and are not compelled to pass, but, on the contrary, to remain in company, dumb animals, though of different species, would more easily hold intercourse than they, human beings though they be. For their common nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; so that a man would more readily hold intercourse with his dog than with a foreigner. But the imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless. This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description--social and civil wars--and with these the whole race has been agitated, either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak. If I attempted to give an adequate description of these manifold disasters, these stern and lasting necessities, though I am quite unequal to the task, what limit could I set? But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrong-doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man's wrong-doing. Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 6. --Of the Evil of Death in General, Considered as the Separation of Soul and Body. Wherefore, as regards bodily death, that is, the separation of the soul from the body, it is good unto none while it is being endured by those whom we say are in the article of death. For the very violence with which body and soul are wrenched asunder, which in the living had been conjoined and closely intertwined, brings with it a harsh experience, jarring horridly on nature so long as it continues, till there comes a total loss of sensation, which arose from the very interpenetration of spirit and flesh. And all this anguish is sometimes forestalled by one stroke of the body or sudden flitting of the soul, the swiftness of which prevents it from being felt. But whatever that may be in the dying which with violently painful sensation robs of all sensation, yet, when it is piously and faithfully borne, it increases the merit of patience, but does not make the name of punishment inapplicable. Death, proceeding by ordinary generation from the first man, is the punishment of all who are born of him, yet, if it be endured for righteousness' sake, it becomes the glory of those who are born again; and though death be the award of sin, it sometimes secures that nothing be awarded to sin.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 17. --Of the Endless Glory of the Church. "And I saw," he says, "a great city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, but neither shall there be any more pain:because the former things have passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. " [1391]This city is said to come down out of heaven, because the grace with which God formed it is of heaven. Wherefore He says to it by Isaiah, "I am the Lord that formed thee. " [1392]It is indeed descended from heaven from its commencement, since its citizens during the course of this world grow by the grace of God, which cometh down from above through the laver of regeneration in the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. But by God's final judgment, which shall be administered by His Son Jesus Christ, there shall by God's grace be manifested a glory so pervading and so new, that no vestige of what is old shall remain; for even our bodies shall pass from their old corruption and mortality to new incorruption and immortality. For to refer this promise to the present time, in which the saints are reigning with their King a thousand years, seems to me excessively barefaced, when it is most distinctly said, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, but there shall be no more pain. " And who is so absurd, and blinded by contentious opinionativeness, as to be audacious enough to affirm that in the midst of the calamities of this mortal state, God's people, or even one single saint, does live, or has ever lived, or shall ever live, without tears or pain,--the fact being that the holier a man is, and the fuller of holy desire, so much the more abundant is the tearfulness of his supplication? Are not these the utterances of a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem:"My tears have been my meat day and night;" [1393] and "Every night shall I make my bed to swim; with my tears shall I water my couch;" [1394] and "My groaning is not hid from Thee;" [1395] and "My sorrow was renewed? " [1396]Or are not those God's children who groan, being burdened, not that they wish to be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life? [1397]Do not they even who have the first-fruits of the Spirit groan within themselves, waiting for the adoption, the redemption of their body? [1398]Was not the Apostle Paul himself a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, and was he not so all the more when he had heaviness and continual sorrow of heart for his Israelitish brethren? [1399]But when shall there be no more death in that city, except when it shall be said, "O death, where is thy contention? [1400]O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin. " [1401]Obviously there shall be no sin when it can be said, "Where is"--But as for the present it is not some poor weak citizen of this city, but this same Apostle John himself who says, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. " [1402]No doubt, though this book is called the Apocalypse, there are in it many obscure passages to exercise the mind of the reader, and there are few passages so plain as to assist us in the interpretation of the others, even though we take pains; and this difficulty is increased by the repetition of the same things, in forms so different, that the things referred to seem to be different, although in fact they are only differently stated. But in the words, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, but there shall be no more pain," there is so manifest a reference to the future world and the immortality and eternity of the saints,--for only then and only there shall such a condition be realized,--that if we think this obscure, we need not expect to find anything plain in any part of Scripture.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 23. --Of the Varying Condition of Both the Hebrew Kingdoms, Until the People of Both Were at Different Times Led into Captivity, Judah Being Afterwards Recalled into His Kingdom, Which Finally Passed into the Power of the Romans. So also in the kingdom of Judah pertaining to Jerusalem prophets were not lacking even in the times of succeeding kings, just as it pleased God to send them, either for the prediction of what was needful, or for correction of sin and instruction in righteousness; [1132] for there, too, although far less than in Israel, kings arose who grievously offended God by their impieties, and, along with their people, who were like them, were smitten with moderate scourges. The no small merits of the pious kings there are praised indeed. But we read that in Israel the kings were, some more, others less, yet all wicked. Each part, therefore, as the divine providence either ordered or permitted, was both lifted up by prosperity and weighed down by adversity of various kinds; and it was afflicted not only by foreign, but also by civil wars with each other, in order that by certain existing causes the mercy or anger of God might be manifested; until, by His growing indignation, that whole nation was by the conquering Chaldeans not only overthrown in its abode, but also for the most part transported to the lands of the Assyrians,--first, that part of the thirteen tribes called Israel, but afterwards Judah also, when Jerusalem and that most noble temple was cast down,--in which lands it rested seventy years in captivity. Being after that time sent forth thence, they rebuilt the overthrown temple. And although very many stayed in the lands of the strangers, yet the kingdom no longer had two separate parts, with different kings over each, but in Jerusalem there was one prince over them; and at certain times, from every direction wherever they were, and from whatever place they could, they all came to the temple of God which was there. Yet not even then were they without foreign enemies and conquerors; yea, Christ found them tributaries of the Romans. [1132] 2 Tim. iii. 16.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὀρφᾶκίνης [1]. ov, 6, a young ὀρφός, Dorion ap. Ath. 315 B. ὀρφάνευμα [a], τό, orphan state, orphanhood, Eur. H. F. 546. ophavertw, to take care of, rear orphans, παῖδας, τέκνα Eur. Alc. 165, 297 :—Pass. c. fut. med.,= ὀρφανός εἰμι, to be an orphan, Ib. 535, Hipp. 847, Supp. 1132; cf. παρθενεύομαι. ὀρφᾶνία, 7, orphanhood, Lys. 176. 22, Plat. Legg. 926 Ε, al.; in pl., Id. Crito 45 D. IL. bereavement, want of .. , στεφάνων Pind. 1. 8 (7).14. ὀρφᾶνίξω, fut. Att. ἐῶ, to make orphan, make destitute, πρὸς παίδων, ods ὀρφανιεῖς Eur. Alc. 276; ἀμὸν βίον ὠρφάνισεν Ib. 397 :—c. gen. to rob or bereave of a thing, τινὰ ὕπνου, (was Theocr. Ep. 5.6, Anth. P. 7. 483; opp. κακὰν γλῶσσαν ὀπός to rob Slander of her voice, Pind. P. 4. 504 :—Pass. to be bereaved, πατρός .. ὠρφανισμένος βίου Soph. Tr. 942; absol. to be left in orphanhood, Pind. P. 6. 22. II. to sweep away. “Ans . . ἐλπίδας ὠρφάνισεν Epigr. Gr. 233. 10. f ὀρφᾶνϊκός, 7, dv, (ὀρφανός) orphaned, fatherless, παῖς Il.6.432., 11-394; cf. Dem. 152.153; ἦμαρ ὀρφανικόν the day which makes one an orphan, i. e. orphanhood, Il. 22. 490. II. of or for orphans, τύχη Plat. Legg. 928 A; συμβόλαια Ib. 922 A; ὀρφανικά, τά, their property and interests, Arist. Pol. 2. 8, 7. ὀρφάνιος, ov, =foreg., desolate, γῆρας Anth. P. 7. 466. ὀρφᾶνιστής, οὔ, ὁ, a tender of orphans, a guardian, Soph. Aj. 512. ὀρφᾶνός, 7, dv, also és, όν Eur. Hec. 151 :—orphan, without parents, fa- therless, dppavat orphan-daughters, Od. 20. 68; ὀρφανὰ τέκνα Hes. Op. 332; παῖδά τ᾽ ὀρφ. λιπών Soph. Aj. 653; νύμφας dppavas Eur. Or. 1136: II. =dpvé 1, Byz. 1080 —as Subst., an orphan, ἐπικλήροι καὶ opp. Lys. 176. 21; ὀρφανοῖς καὶ ὀρφαναῖς Plat. Leg 88. 926 C; they were under the care of the Archon, Arist. Fr. 389 :—also in neut., eis ὀρφανὰ καὶ ἔρημα ὑβρίζειν Plat. Legg. 927 C:—of animals, ὄρνις Ar. Av. 1361; ὀρφ. οἶκος, δόμος Soph. Fr. 680, mae Alc. 657. ΤΙ. c. gen. bereaved or ber: ft of, Ἱ, ΟΕ children, opp. πατρός reft of father, Id. El. 914, τοῖο; opp. τοῦ πατρός Dem. 1320. 20; γονέων Plut., etc. 2. of parents, πότμον ὀρφανὸν γενεᾶς childless, Pind. O. 9. 92 : opp. παίδων, τέκνων Eur. Hec. 151, Fr. 336. 6, Plat. Legg. 730 Ὁ; νεοσσῶν ὀρφανὸν λέχος Soph. Ant. 425. 3. generally, opp. ἑταίρων Pind. I. 7. 16; ἐπιστήμης Plat. Alc. 2. 147 A; κρατός Sosith. in Herm. Opusc. 1.55; ὀρφανοὶ ὕβριος free from inso- lence, Pind. 1. 4.14; dp. ἀγκίστρου κάλαμος Anth. P. 12. 42 :—Comic metaph., opp. ταρίχιον salt-fish without sauce, Pherecr. Αὐτομ. 4; cf. χήρα I. fin. (A shorter form ὀρφός appears in ὀρφο-βότης (q. v.), ὀρφόω, Lat. orb-us, orb-are, etc., Ο. Η. G. arb-ja (erb-e).) Sphavorpodetov, τό, an orphan-hospital, Pandect. ὀρφᾶνοτροφέω, to bring up orphans, Schol. Eur. Alc. 163. ὀρφᾶνο-τρόφος, ov, bringing up orphans, Suid. 5.ν. ᾿Ακάκιος, Ο.1. 9207.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I told Mrs. Flouton I wanted to leave home when I was eighteen, or go away to school, but my mother didn’t want me to. The sounds of traffic outside the window on Lexington Avenue grew louder. It was 3:30. Mrs. Flouton looked at her watch. “We’ll have to stop now, dear. Why don’t you ask your mother to drop in to see me tomorrow? I’m sure we can fix this little problem.” I didn’t know which problem she meant, but her condescending smile was sweet, and it felt good for once to have a grownup on my side. Next day, my mother left the office early and came to Hunter. The night before I had told her Mrs. Flouton wanted to see her. She fixed me with a piercing look from out of the corner of her tired eyes. “Don’t tell me you making trouble again in this school, too?” “No, Mother, it’s just about going to college.” Somebody on my side. I sat outside the guidance room door while my mother was inside talking to Mrs. Flouton. The door opened. My mother sailed out of the office and headed for the school exit without so much as a look at me. Oh boy. Was I going to be allowed to go away to school if I could get a scholarship? I caught up with my mother at the door leading to the street. “What did Mrs. Flouton say, Mother? Can I go away to college?” Just before the street, my mother finally turned to me, and I saw with a shock that her eyes were red. She had been crying. There was no fury in her voice, only heavy, awful pain. All she said to me before she turned away was, “How could you say those things about your mother to that white woman?” Mrs. Flouton had repeated all of my words to my mother, with a ghoulish satisfaction of detail. Whether it was because she saw my mother as an uppity Black woman refusing her help, or both of us as a sociological experiment not involving human feeling, confidentiality, or common sense, I will never know. This was the same guidance counselor who gave me an aptitude test a year later and told me I should consider becoming a dental technician because I had scored very high on science and manual dexterity. At home, it all seemed very simple and very sad to me. If my parents loved me I wouldn’t annoy them so much. Since they didn’t love me they deserved to be annoyed as much as possible within the bounds of my own self-preservation. Sometimes when my mother was not screaming at me, I caught her observing me with frightened and painful eyes. But my heart ached and ached for something I could not name.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  πηλό-τροφος, ov, reared in mud or soft soil, Opp. C. 1. 288. πηλουργός, ov, (*épyw) a worker in clay, Luc. Prom. 2, Lxx (Sap. 15. 7):---πηλουργέω, fo work in clay, Eccl.:—amqdovpyia, Ion. πηλοεργίη, ἡ, Aretae. Caus. M. Diut. 1. 6, Epiphan. Πηλούσιον, τό, a town on the coast of Egypt bordering on Arabia, Hdt. :—Adj., τὸ Πηλούσιον στόμα the Eastern mouth of the Nile, Hdt. 2.17,1543 τὸ Πηλουσιακὸν στ. Strab. 801, etc. :—in Jo. Lyd. de Mens. 4. 40, ἡ Πηλούσιος ἑορτή (in Egypt) is expl. muddy. πηλοφορέω, to carry clay, Ar. Av. 1142, Eccl. 310. πηλο-φόροϑ, ov, carrying clay, Poll. 7. 130, Suid. πηλο-φύρᾶτοκ, ov, kneaded of clay, ἄνθρωποι Manass. Amat. 4. 18. πηλό-χὕτος, ov, moulded of clay, θάλαμοι π., of swallows’ nests, Anth. Ρ. το, τό. πῆλυξ, -- ῥαγάς, a rent, cleft, Hesych., Phot. πηλώδη, €s, (εἶδος) like clay, clayey, muddy, of places, Thuc. 6. 101, Arist. H. A. 5.17, 8, etc.; of persons, dirty, Plat. Phaedo 113 B. πηλώειϑ, εσσα, ev, poet. for πηλώδης, Opp. H. 4.520, Nonn. Ὁ. 2. 59. πήλωσις, 7, a wallowing in mire, Plut. 2. 166A, ubi v. Wyttenb. πῆμα, τό, remaining unchanged in Dor. :—poét. word, suffering, misery, calamity, woe, bane, Hom., Hes., Pind., and Trag., both in sing. and pl.; κακὸν m., Od. 5.179; π. κακοῖο 3.152; m. duns 14. 338; π. τῆς ἄτης Soph. Aj. 363; π. θεὸς Δαναοῖσι κυλίνδει 11. 17. 688 ; τοῖσι ες πῆμα κυλίνδεται Od. 2. 163, cf. Il. 11. 347; ἡμῖν πήματα πολλὰ θέσαν 15. 721; τοι πῆμα τόδ᾽ ἤγαγον οὐρανίωνες 24. 547; πημάτων ἔξω πόδα ἔχειν Aesch. Pr. 263; πήματα ἐπὶ πήμασι Soph. Ant. 593; πῆμ᾽ ἐπὶ πήματι κεῖται, i.e. iron upon iron, the sword forged upon the anvil, Orac. ap. Hdt. 1. 67, cf. 68. ITI. in Hom. often of persons, a bane, calamity, ὅς μιν ἔτικτε .. πῆμα γενέσθαι Τρωσί Il. 22. 421, cf. 3. 50, 160., 6. 282, Soph. O. T. 379. πημαίνω: fut. ἄνῶ Soph. Aj. 1314, O. C. 837, Ion. -avéw Il. 24. 781: aor. ἐπήμηνα 1]., Att.:—Med., fut. πημᾶνοῦμαι Ar. Ach. 842 (but as πημανούμενος occurs in pass. sense in Soph. Aj. 1155, Elmsl. and L. Dind. [1 yAvas — πηρομελής.

• From The City of God

  [263] Quanto iste innocentior esset, tanto frontosior appareret; being used for the shamelessness of innocence, as we use "face" for the shamelessness of impudence. Chapter 5. --Concerning the More Secret Doctrine of the Pagans, and Concerning the Physical Interpretations. But let us hear their own physical interpretations by which they attempt to color, as with the appearance of profounder doctrine, the baseness of most miserable error. Varro, in the first place, commends these interpretations so strongly as to say, that the ancients invented the images, badges, and adornments of the gods, in order that when those who went to the mysteries should see them with their bodily eyes, they might with the eyes of their mind see the soul of the world, and its parts, that is, the true gods; and also that the meaning which was intended by those who made their images with the human form, seemed to be this,--namely, that the mind of mortals, which is in a human body, is very like to the immortal mind, [264] just as vessels might be placed to represent the gods, as, for instance, a wine-vessel might be placed in the temple of Liber, to signify wine, that which is contained being signified by that which contains. Thus by an image which had the human form the rational soul was signified, because the human form is the vessel, as it were, in which that nature is wont to be contained which they attribute to God, or to the gods. These are the mysteries of doctrine to which that most learned man penetrated in order that he might bring them forth to the light. But, O thou most acute man, hast thou lost among those mysteries that prudence which led thee to form the sober opinion, that those who first established those images for the people took away fear from the citizens and added error, and that the ancient Romans honored the gods more chastely without images? For it was through consideration of them that thou wast emboldened to speak these things against the later Romans. For if those most ancient Romans also had worshipped images, perhaps thou wouldst have suppressed by the silence of fear all those sentiments (true sentiments, nevertheless) concerning the folly of setting up images, and wouldst have extolled more loftily, and more loquaciously, those mysterious doctrines consisting of these vain and pernicious fictions. Thy soul, so learned and so clever (and for this I grieve much for thee), could never through these mysteries have reached its God; that is, the God by whom, not with whom, it was made, of whom it is not a part, but a work,--that God who is not the soul of all things, but who made every soul, and in whose light alone every soul is blessed, if it be not ungrateful for His grace.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Driven as we all were driven, she found ways out that were still alien to some of the rest of us—harsher, less hidden. That Sunday afternoon while Muriel and I waited for Flee and our photography lesson, Addie was turning Flee onto smack for the first time in a borrowed apartment across Second Avenue. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 30 The spring of 1956 came with a plethora of ambiguous omens. I had stopped therapy because of our shortage of money. What had seemed just enough to get by on a year ago had shrunk through inflation or recession or whatever they chose to call it in the New York Times . Fingering over my private structures became a luxury I could not afford. Therapy was the last possible cut to be made. Neither of us said a word about Muriel’s inability to look for work. She did not deal with her self-loathing, and I did not deal with my resentment. My physiology professor at Hunter College tried to help my financial problems by offering me a job as a live-in maid in her Park Avenue house. The night before my last session in therapy, I dreamt that Muriel and I stood waiting for a train in a midnight-blue subway station. There are clusters of people about, but their backs are turned and I cannot see their faces. As the train pulls into the station, Muriel falls off the platform beneath its wheels. I stand on the platform as the train rolls over her, powerless to do anything, my heart breaking beneath the wheels. I awake to tears and a sense of mourning too deep for words, that would not go away. Muriel was having trouble sleeping. Night after night she sat up on the couch in the middle room, reading and smoking and writing in her journal, and sometimes I woke to hear her talking to herself. I found out only later the desperate quality of those hallucinations which she hid from me under irascibility or humor. Other nights she stayed out drinking until I had gone to sleep. I could wake and look through the doorway of our bedroom to find her, night after night, leaning against the pillows on the couch propped up against the wall. Her dear dark head outlined in a circle of lamplight, Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou curled up together against the warmth of her thighs. Sometimes I felt we were as lost to each other as if one of us were dead. In the morning when I got up to dress for work, I would find her asleep on the couch looking worn and vulnerable, her pale hand still holding the book fallen upon her breast, the two little kittens entwined, asleep, upon her tummy. She was getting thinner and thinner, eating less and less, insisting she was not hungry, even though it seemed very dangerous to me to be living on beer and cigarettes.

• From The City of God

  340 Books That Matter: The City of God order them. It might seem undignified to talk about the essence of adults lying in their adorations, resting in their adorations. Mature humans are supposed to be cooler than this, calmer, to keep their emotions in check. Certainly, the Stoics thought so; they say that the emotions are not basic. They say that they are derivative of the character of the person and that we should subject all our attachments which generate these emotions to remorseless scrutiny. When we do, the Stoics say, we see that all our emotional responses are the consequences of us overestimating the significance of whatever episode solicited that emoted response in the first place. This, they thought, is one of the most infantile things about us, and we should work, they said, to eliminate it. So the Stoics wanted to replace emotions, what they called pathe with constant states, eupathe or eupatheiai. This means replacing words like desire with words like will, or a word like joy with a word like gladness, and a word like fear with a word like caution. For Augustine, though, this Stoic proposal is wrong, in ways that even the Stoics, were they fair-minded, might be brought to see; and wrong for Christians since of the particular models that scripture offers of exemplary human behavior, which reliably involve emotion. But first of all, in the Stoics’ own terms, Augustine says that their dream of apatheia, of impassability, of an emotion-free state, it could be good if it were understood as calmness, purity, integrity, and stability. But in this life, such stability is practically impossible, and when anyone approaches such a state, it is not tranquility that they realize, but tranquilization, the moral defect of stupor. Augustine also accuses the Stoics of existential inadequacy. They deny the possibility, for example, of wise grief. But we should, at times, feel grief—not nostalgia for Adam and Eve, say, but sadness and grief for our own condition, still so far away from proper redemption and fulfillment. Sometimes emotions such as grief and fear are signs of a growing moral maturity. I just want to pitch him over the side entirely.

• From The City of God

  366 Books That Matter: The City of God How do we know, though, how to pick out those meaningful moments? Well, by a principle of selection. But whence comes that principal of selection? Not from a bare reading of history, but for Augustine, from the larger salvation story—from Adam to Christ to today. Hence what is crucial here, for Augustine, is the spinal story of the two cities, mapped out in these books as tracking the generations of men and the generations of the sons of God, Cain and Abel; even, in Roman history, by Romulus and Remus. All of these are manifestations of the struggle between siblings over goods they should share, and this story would be more tragic if it were less pathetic. But it is pathetic since, as he says, “A man’s possession of goodness is in no way diminished by the arrival, or the continuance, of a sharer in it,” despite each of these situations being one where the sibling annihilates the other. The point of this conflict between brothers, then, is that in the Ancient Near East, as in any city today, most violence is intimate violence within families, within a context where people are attached by bonds of blood and, we hope, of love. Any policeman will tell you, the most dangerous call you can get is a call to a so-called “domestic disturbance.” For Augustine, the history of humanity from Cain and Abel forward is a history of domestic disturbances. In general, Augustine thinks—as many theologians have—that scripture is best understood as employing what is called an accommodationist use of language; simplifying its syntax, fitting its formulations to the overly-physical and simple minds of us humans, to make its meanings vivid to as large an audience of us as possible. Augustine says, “If scripture did not use such terms, it would not communicate its meaning so clearly to all the race of men for whom it has care.” Through this, Augustine tries, then, to teach his audience to understand historical events by reshaping them to fit the overall story he wants them to find in history. Now, that’s what he does at some times. At other times, he does not want to diminish an episode’s significance, but to expand it.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 19. --Of the Calamity of the Second Punic War, Which Consumed the Strength of Both Parties. As to the second Punic war, it were tedious to recount the disasters it brought on both the nations engaged in so protracted and shifting a war, that (by the acknowledgment even of those writers who have made it their object not so much to narrate the wars as to eulogize the dominion of Rome) the people who remained victorious were less like conquerors than conquered. For, when Hannibal poured out of Spain over the Pyrenees, and overran Gaul, and burst through the Alps, and during his whole course gathered strength by plundering and subduing as he went, and inundated Italy like a torrent, how bloody were the wars, and how continuous the engagements, that were fought! How often were the Romans vanquished! How many towns went over to the enemy, and how many were taken and subdued! What fearful battles there were, and how often did the defeat of the Romans shed lustre on the arms of Hannibal! And what shall I say of the wonderfully crushing defeat at Cannae, where even Hannibal, cruel as he was, was yet sated with the blood of his bitterest enemies, and gave orders that they be spared? From this field of battle he sent to Carthage three bushels of gold rings, signifying that so much of the rank of Rome had that day fallen, that it was easier to give an idea of it by measure than by numbers and that the frightful slaughter of the common rank and file whose bodies lay undistinguished by the ring, and who were numerous in proportion to their meanness, was rather to be conjectured than accurately reported. In fact, such was the scarcity of soldiers after this, that the Romans impressed their criminals on the promise of impunity, and their slaves by the bribe of liberty, and out of these infamous classes did not so much recruit as create an army. But these slaves, or, to give them all their titles, these freed-men who were enlisted to do battle for the republic of Rome, lacked arms. And so they took arms from the temples, as if the Romans were saying to their gods:Lay down those arms you have held so long in vain, if by chance our slaves may be able to use to purpose what you, our gods, have been impotent to use. At that time, too, the public treasury was too low to pay the soldiers, and private resources were used for public purposes; and so generously did individuals contribute of their property, that, saving the gold ring and bulla which each wore, the pitiful mark of his rank, no senator, and much less any of the other orders and tribes, reserved any gold for his own use. But if in our day they were reduced to this poverty, who would be able to endure their reproaches, barely endurable as they are now, when more money is spent on actors for the sake of a superfluous gratification, than was then disbursed to the legions?