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 Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I began to think of myself as bigendered, viewing my female subconscious sex as being just as legitimate as my physical maleness. In the years just prior to my transition, I started to express my femaleness as much as possible within the context of having a male body; I became a very androgynous queer boy in the eyes of the world. While it felt relieving to simply be myself, not to care about what other people thought of me, I still found myself grappling with a constant, compelling subconscious knowledge that I should be female rather than male. After twenty years of exploration and experimentation, I eventually reached the conclusion that my female subconscious sex had nothing to do with gender roles, femininity, or sexual expression—it was about the personal relationship I had with my own body. For me, the hardest part about being trans has not been the discrimination or ridicule that I have faced for defying societal gender norms, but rather the internal pain I experienced when my subconscious and conscious sexes were at odds with one another. I think this is best captured by the psychological term “cognitive dissonance,” which describes the mental tension and stress that occur in a person’s mind when they find themselves holding two contradictory thoughts or views simultaneously—in this case, subconsciously seeing myself as female while consciously dealing with the fact that I was male. This gender dissonance can manifest itself in a number of ways. Sometimes it felt like stress or anxiousness, which led to marathon battles with insomnia. Other times, it surfaced as jealousy or anger at other people who seemed to enjoy taking their gender for granted. But most of all, it felt like sadness to me—a sort of gender sadness—a chronic and persistent grief over the fact that I felt so wrong in my body. Sometimes people discount the fact that trans people feel any actual pain related to their gender. Of course, it is easy for them to dismiss gender dissonance: It’s invisible and (perhaps more relevantly) they themselves are unable to relate to it. These same people, however, do understand that being stuck in a bad relationship or in an unfulfilling job can make a person miserable and lead to a depression so intense that it spills over into all other areas of that person’s life. These types of pain can be tolerated temporarily, but in the long run, if things do not change, that stress and sadness can ruin a person. Well, if that much despair can be generated by a forty-hour-a-week job, then just imagine how despondent and distressed one might become if one was forced to live in a gender that felt wrong for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Unlike most forms of sadness that I’ve experienced, which inevitably ease with time, my gender dissonance only got worse with each passing day.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  Many of the men, rushing up to the spot, threw themselves upon the body, from which the women arose when the men approached, until in a few minutes we could see nothing but a struggling mass of bodies all mixed up together. To one side, three men of the Thapungarti class, who still wore their ceremonial decorations, sat down wailing loudly, with their backs towards the dying man, and in a minute or two another man of the same class rushed on to the ground yelling and brandishing a stone knife. Reaching the camp, he suddenly gashed both thighs deeply, cutting right across the muscles, and, unable to stand, fell down into the middle of the group, from which he was dragged out after a time by three or four female relatives, who immediately applied their mouths to the gaping wounds while he lay exhausted on the ground." The man did not actually die until late in the evening. As soon as he had given up his last breath, the same scene was re-enacted, only this time the wailing was still louder, and men and women, seized by a veritable frenzy, were rushing about cutting themselves with knives and sharp-pointed sticks, the women battering one another's heads with fighting clubs, no one attempting to ward off either cuts or blows. Finally, after about an hour, a torchlight procession started off across the plain, to a tree in whose branches the body was left. [1238] Howsoever great the violence of these manifestations may be, they are strictly regulated by etiquette. The individuals who make bloody incisions in themselves are designated by usage: they must have certain relations of kinship with the dead man. Thus, in the case observed by Spencer and Gillen among the Warramunga, those who slashed their thighs were the maternal grandfather of the deceased, his maternal uncle, and the maternal uncle and brother of his wife. [1239] Others must cut their whiskers and hair, and then smear their scalps with pipe-clay. Women have particularly severe obligations. They must cut their hair and cover the whole body with pipe-clay; in addition to this, a strict silence is imposed upon them during the whole period of mourning, which may last as long as two years. It is not rare among the Warramunga that, as a result of this interdiction, all the women of a camp are condemned to the most absolute silence. This becomes so habitual to them that even after the expiration of the period of mourning, they voluntarily renounce all spoken language and prefer to communicate with gestures—in which, by the way, they acquire a remarkable ability.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Ah, don’t speak of it! I was staying on my estate, and he was with me. A note was brought him. He wrote an answer and sent it off. We hadn’t an idea that she was close by at the station. In the evening I had only just gone to my room, when my Mary told me a lady had thrown herself under the train. Something seemed to strike me at once. I knew it was she. The first thing I said was, he was not to be told. But they’d told him already. His coachman was there and saw it all. When I ran into his room, he was beside himself—it was fearful to see him. He didn’t say a word, but galloped off there. I don’t know to this day what happened there, but he was brought back at death’s door. I shouldn’t have known him. _Prostration complète,_ the doctor said. And that was followed almost by madness. Oh, why talk of it!” said the countess with a wave of her hand. “It was an awful time! No, say what you will, she was a bad woman. Why, what is the meaning of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out of the way. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to ruin and two good men—her husband and my unhappy son.” “And what did her husband do?” asked Sergey Ivanovitch. “He has taken her daughter. Alexey was ready to agree to anything at first. Now it worries him terribly that he should have given his own child away to another man. But he can’t take back his word. Karenin came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting Alexey. For him, for her husband, it was easier, anyway. She had set him free. But my poor son was utterly given up to her. He had thrown up everything, his career, me, and even then she had no mercy on him, but of set purpose she made his ruin complete. No, say what you will, her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling. God forgive me, but I can’t help hating the memory of her, when I look at my son’s misery!” “But how is he now?”

• From Nothing Was the Same

  I am alone, but he is so utterly alone. I cannot do anything for him now. There are so many things one thinks that one never thought to think about. I felt at sea, assailed, numb. I did not know what I thought or felt—everything was jumbled, in flux, and contrary. I sat on the marble bench near his grave and read to myself poems by Thomas Hardy, Louis MacNeice, Edward Thomas, and Robert Bridges. The last verse of Bridges’s “Poem,” I read aloud, to Richard: I will not let thee go . I hold thee by too many bands Thou sayest farewell, and lo! I have thee by the hands , And will not let thee go . And then I let him go, for a while. That November, there was a new profusion of meteor showers. I tried to muster enthusiasm for it, but I could not. At midnight, I went outside to look for meteors but there was a full moon and I could see nothing. I went out again at five in the morning and this time saw several, but they held no wonder for me without Richard. Nothing could come close to our early morning in the park just a year earlier. I could not imagine that I would run away from shooting stars, but I did. I went indoors. I knew that the Christmas season would be hard; I hoped only that it would not be too hard. There is so much memory wrapped up in Christmas, so much specificity. Richard liked white Christmas lights, I like colored ones; Richard preferred lights to blink, I do not. Each year we put up strands of nonblinking colored lights for me and strands of blinking white lights for him. It looked higgledy-piggledy, but lovely in its own odd way. On that first Christmas without Richard, I did not know what to do about Christmas lights, so I did nothing. I came home one evening to find that Silas Jones, who had worked for Richard and me for years and was, for both of us, a cross between close friend and father, had put up our strange strands of blinking and nonblinking lights. There we were, Richard and I together in spirit, lighting up the house and the yard. It was a warm moment in a cold season. Trimming the tree was a melancholy affair. Ornament by ornament, I hung our memories on the tree. Gingerbread snowflakes, glass candy canes, an ugly clay parrot, handblown glass balls from London. In a small act of mourning, I did not put any tinsel on the tree. No one would notice, but it was of moment to me. Tinsel was a part of the excitement of childhood Christmases, its absence a bit of Lent. I had to go to the store to buy more lights for the tree—I wished I could tell Richard this, but at least I could imagine his laugh. It was another good moment.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  His girlfriend was a runner, a vegetarian, a dieter. This was a recipe for amenorrhea, the ceasing of the menstrual cycle—a recipe that was little researched in those days. Her regimen had inflicted havoc on her hormonal system and delayed the renewal of her period after she gave up the pill, he felt sure as he read what he could find. It had also reconfigured “her affective life,” he said while we talked in a café, the remote and professional word “affective” at odds with his expression, his voice. Thirty years afterward, he was wistful, bereft. For a long while, with her amenorrhea ravaging her hormones and her brain’s biochemistry, she’d lost desire for him. And with desire, her love, too, had flattened. But eventually, with the pill out of the picture and probably with a slight, unnoted easing of her running, her diet, hormones had revived, ovulation had resumed. In the brain, the molecules of eros had resurged. This didn’t restore her emotions for him, though. Instead, her reawakened sex drive seemed to flee straight from him toward the wish for other men. “The biological changed her affective feelings for me,” he used the word again, scientific, crushed. She decided to cut the bond, to wrest herself free. The sudden switch in her molecular state had cost him the love of his life. Both times, coincidentally, it had taken her about two weeks to make the decision. His girlfriend and her sister had got it wrong, he thought. The psychological hadn’t dictated the hormonal. Rather, biochemistry had determined the trajectory of lust and love; it had destroyed everything. Tuiten’s reasoning had led to his writing and publishing his first scientific paper while he was still working toward his master’s (the article was about discerning causality, he said, but “nothing about my suffering”), to his seeking his PhD, to his researching a biochemical vortex that can suck girls into anorexia, to his studying sex. Throughout it all, there were themes, threads that converged in his current inventing. One was the reign of the chemical within the psychological; another was timing. There was the molecular narrative, the biochemical chronology, behind his own tragedy. There was his resequencing of the forces that pull girls into anorexia. There was, after an experience with another girlfriend, his scrutiny of the molecular relationships that plunge certain women into severe premenstrual syndrome, with deprivations of serotonin and, for some, lowered inhibition and crests of lust. There was, much later, his investigation of the exact delay between doses of testosterone and the spurring of desire in women who respond to infusions of the hormone. There were his ruminations on the timing of serotonin pulses and on the timing of compounds that temporarily suppress this neurotransmitter.

• From Wild (2012)

  The good things aren’t a movie. There isn’t enough to make a reel. The good things are a poem, barely longer than a haiku. There is his love of Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers. There are the chocolate bars he brought home from his job in a grocery store. There are all the grand things he wanted to be, a longing so naked and sorry I sensed it and grieved it even as a young child. There is him singing that Charlie Rich song that goes “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” and saying it was about me and my sister and our mother, that we were the most beautiful girls in the world.O But even that is marred. He said this only when he was trying to woo my mother back, when he was claiming that things would be different now, when he was promising her that he would never again do what he’d done before. He always did it again. He was a liar and a charmer, a heartbreak and a brute. My mother packed us up and left him and came back, left him and came back. We never went far. There was nowhere for us to go. We didn’t have family nearby, and my mother was too proud to involve her friends. The first battered women’s shelter in the United States didn’t open until 1974, the year my mother finally left my father for good. Instead, we would drive all night long, my sister and me in the back seat, sleeping and waking to the alien green lights of the dashboard, Leif up front with our mom. The morning would find us home again, our father sober and scrambling eggs, singing that Charlie Rich song before long. When my mother finally called it quits with him, when I was six, a year after we’d all moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, I wept and begged her not to do it. Divorce seemed to me to be the very worst thing that could happen. In spite of everything, I loved my dad and I knew if my mom divorced him I’d lose him, and I was right. After they broke up the last time, we stayed in Minnesota and he returned to Pennsylvania and only intermittently got in touch. Once or twice a year a letter would arrive, addressed to Karen, Leif, and me, and we’d rip it open, filled with glee. But inside would be a diatribe about our mother, about what a whore she was, what a stupid, mooching welfare bitch. Someday he’d get us all, he promised. Someday we’d pay.

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

  CHAPTER 15 One morning, an orderly with arms like a wrestler’s scooped Daddy up, bent his limbs around so he’d fit in a wheelchair, then rolled him from intensive care to a regular ward while I walked alongside. I carried a warm jar of piss that had a tube running out and leading under Daddy’s hospital gown. Mother brought his metal flip chart, where somebody official had declared Daddy’s condition “stable” in block letters. After that, the men from the Liars’ Club came practically every night to shuffle at Daddy’s bedside. They came straight from work, unfed, but refusing to dip into any pizza box you tipped open or to take any wrapped sandwich you held out. They arrived alone or in awkward pairs, holding their silver hard hats at belt level, turning them around in their hands like so many prayer wheels. Once, when Daddy had shit the bed, I found Ben and Shug talking about an upcoming Yankees game, talking volubly as if the room didn’t stink like a barnyard. Ben cried that night in the hall. His big meaty hands covered his face. And after that, he only came late, when Daddy was dozing and Mother was gathering up the day’s magazines and leftover soda cans. Ben took his post in a precariously tipped tub chair outside Daddy’s room nearly every night for hours at a pop “in case something happened.” But nothing ever happened. Whatever vacuum the stroke had dug inside Daddy’s skull held its place. He was pitched way back behind flat-staring eyes, too deep for any mere human presence to register on him as much more than shadow. Some mornings if he’d slept straight through, he’d spark up when you came in. You could suddenly see him seeing you, almost feel him bearing toward you from where he lay, though the form of his body never altered one iota. Such times, he might come into a word like “juice,” squawking it out in his new crow’s voice. Only a few such words ever got spoken, though, before his eyes fogged over again, and his head dropped back on the pillow. On the anniversary of D-Day, Mother and I watched a TV special. The first young GIs scaling the wall on the French coast got picked off by German bullets like so many insects. Daddy had been an infantryman there. He’d waded out of a landing craft with his rifle held up out of the surf. The film footage must have overlaid with images fixed in his head, for watching he roused as if jolted up by stong current. He cried out, “That’s Omaha Beach!” with perfect clarity. He pointed at the screen and fought to rise to a full sit, but his own body pinned him down. Mother had to push the button to tilt the electric bed up. “That’s Normandy!” Daddy hollered. A while later, he started calling what first sounded like nonsense, then took on the cadence of the old Latin mass.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Seeing my brother Andrei's children, who were staying at Yasnaya, in the zala one day, he asked with some surprise, "Whose children are these?" Meeting my wife, he said, "Don't be offended, my dear; I know that I am very fond of you, but I have quite forgotten who you are"; and when he went up to the zala after one of these fainting fits, he looked round with an astonished air and said, "Where's my brother Nitenka." Nitenka had died fifty years before. The day following all traces of the attack would disappear. During one of these fainting fits my brother Sergei, in undressing my father, found a little note-book on him. He put it in his own pocket, and next day, when he came to see my father, he handed it back to him, telling him that he had not read it. "There would have been no harm in YOUR seeing it," said my father, as he took it back. This little diary in which he wrote down his most secret thoughts and prayers was kept "for himself alone," and he never showed it to any one. I saw it after my father's death. It is impossible to read it without tears. It is curious that the sudden decay of my father's memory displayed itself only in the matter of real facts and people. He was entirely unaffected in his literary work, and everything that he wrote down to the last days of his life is marked by his characteristic logicalness and force. It may be that the reason he forgot the details of real life was because he was too deeply absorbed in his abstract work. My wife was at Yasnaya Polyana in October, and when she came home she told me that there was something wrong there. "Your mother is nervous and hysterical; your father is in a silent and gloomy frame of mind." I was very busy with my office work, but made up my mind to devote my first free day to going and seeing my father and mother. When I got to Yasnaya, my father had already left it. I paid Aunt Masha a visit some little time after my father's funeral. We sat together in her comfortable little cell, and she repeated to me once more in detail the oft-repeated story of my father's last visit to her. "He sat in that very arm-chair where you are sitting now, and how he cried!" she said. "When Sasha arrived with her girl friend, they set to work studying this map of Russia and planning out a route to the Caucasus. Lyovotchka sat there thoughtful and melancholy. "'Never mind, Papa; it'll be all right,' said Sasha, trying to encourage him. "'Ah, you women, you women!' answered her father, bitterly. 'How can it ever be all right?' "I so much hoped that he would settle down here; it would just have suited him.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  VIOLENCE IN A FAMILY COMES DOWN THROUGH GENERATIONS: long before my father (finally) left my mother, her father left her mother, and her father’s father left my great-grandmother. I look like her, it’s said, this woman I knew as a frail bird, this Jewish woman who fled Nazi-occupied Romania as a married teenager, was deserted, survived the war in England as a registered alien, a single mother with a small son who became the grandfather I never met. SOMETIMES MY MOTHER TELLS ME STORIES ABOUT HER FATHER, or stories about my father. They are not mine to repeat. “I want you to know,” she tells me, as if she feels guilty for explaining our history to me. I am amazed at how much violence we can contain—internalize, suppress, hold on to, narrate. How much we can swallow and still survive. THERE’S A SCAR ON MY LEG, A SCAR LIKE MANY PEOPLE’S SCARS. It’s shiny and pale, even against my Ashkenazi-beige skin. It will never disappear. Like the scar on my scalp, it’s marked out by hairlessness, a clear-cut in the forest. It’s evidence of a story like other people’s stories. One rainy day I was running to catch the tube home from school. I slipped and fell, sliding under the high step up to the train carriage. Two strangers caught my arms and hauled me on board as the train juddered with motion. It didn’t even surprise me. I have never been in my body: I still, as I did when I was a child, fall over all the time, walk into things, trip and tumble. I am constantly covered with bruises. My body was not my body but a postpubertal amorphous mass of Silly Putty whose shape, position in space, and vector I couldn’t control. On the way home, my friends chattered, hyped by the drama. Pumped full of the adrenaline of the near-miss. Me too. So pumped that I didn’t notice, until we got off the tube, that my navy school trousers were soaked with blood, leaking through a small rip in the fabric—a rip that mapped exactly onto a rip in my flesh. “It’s not that bad,” said my best friend, but she grudgingly went to the chemist near the tube station and bought some Band-Aids while I waited for the bus, trying not to pass out. The rip fit neatly under a large Band-Aid. Not that bad. We had a fight because I felt too faint to hang out. I stormed (limped) off. I don’t remember how I got to the doctor’s office. I remember that the Band-Aid had swollen with blood, sodden with it, ballooning outward. I remember my sock and shoe were full of blood. I remember that when the doctor cleaned the cut, you could see bone.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  And then Paul died. I attended his memorial in the Stanford church, a gorgeous space where I often go when it is empty to sit and admire the light, the silence, and where I always find renewal. It was packed for the service. I sat off to one side, listening to a series of moving and sometimes raucous stories from his closest friends, his pastor, and his brother. Yes, Paul was gone, but strangely, I felt I was coming to know him, beyond that visit in my office, beyond the few essays he’d written. He was taking form in those tales being told in the Stanford Memorial Church, its soaring cathedral dome a fitting space in which to remember this man whose body was now in the earth but who nevertheless was so palpably alive. He took form in the shape of his lovely wife and baby daughter, his grieving parents and siblings, in the faces of the legions of friends, colleagues, and former patients who filled that space; he was there at the reception later, outdoors in a setting where so many came together. I saw faces looking calm, smiling, as if they had witnessed something profoundly beautiful in the church. Perhaps my face was like that, too: we had found meaning in the ritual of a service, in the ritual of eulogizing, in the shared tears. There was further meaning residing in this reception where we slaked our thirst, fed our bodies, and talked with complete strangers to whom we were intimately connected through Paul. But it was only when I received the pages that you now hold in your hands, two months after Paul died, that I felt I had finally come to know him, to know him better than if I had been blessed to call him a friend. After reading the book you are about to read, I confess I felt inadequate: there was an honesty, a truth in the writing that took my breath away. Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory. Listen to Paul. In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies his message. I got it. I hope you experience it, too. It is a gift. Let me not stand between you and Paul. PROLOGUEWebster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. —T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Closing the door behind me, I felt an unbearable sadness. This was worse than getting into trouble—this was forever. As I made my way slowly to the refectory, I felt forsaken, abandoned by the whole court of heaven. For years I had prayed to them to sustain me in times of trouble, and now they had deserted me. I was a failure. And worse, I now faced a time bomb, a countdown to my graduation, just seven months away. On that day in June, I would lose the only thing in the world that was dear to me—my home and my huge extended family. What had I done to deserve this punishment? What could I do to change Sister Catherine’s mind? That became my mission, and instinctively I prayed once again for help from heaven. 2 A Moment of Grace 1935 S ix-year-old Betsy Ann McKinley stood on the sidewalk outside the Willard Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next to her best friend, Peter Bailey, as they waited for their mothers to pick them up at the end of the school day. The sound of singing distracted them, and they turned to witness a procession coming in their direction through the park. Betsy stared at the sight of a white and gold canopy held aloft by four men who walked slowly, providing cover for a priest who wore an enormous, radiantly embroidered cape and held high a gold monstrance, as though inviting the entire world to view it. Behind the priest came the congregation, solemn and reverent, singing hymns in unison. Nuns, wearing long black habits and wimpled veils, escorted their charges—schoolchildren in blue-and-white uniforms. Following them were the parishioners, men wearing suits and hats, and women in modest dress with kerchief veils on their heads. As the procession drew nearer, an elderly lady next to Betsy got down on her knees, bowed her head, and made the sign of the cross. Betsy was mesmerized by the giant gold monstrance and the circular glass window in its center, displaying a white object. She nudged Peter and whispered, “What’s happening?” Peter turned to look at her. “It’s the feast of Corpus Christi. Aren’t you a Catholic?” “No,” said Betsy, “I’m Episcopalian. What’s the priest carrying?” Peter replied, “That’s God.” Betsy’s eyes opened wide. “God? I’m looking at God?” “Yup,” said Peter. She grew silent and watched as the procession passed in front of them and the old lady on her knees, and then disappeared around the corner at the end of the block. On that day, Betsy Ann McKinley vowed to herself, “I’m going to become a Catholic so that I can see God.” 3 Quest for Knowledge 1946 A young man wearing the uniform of the United States Navy walked to the back of a Boston College classroom and sat down to await the arrival of the professor. Tall and handsome, with curly black hair and pale blue eyes, Lt.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  The night wore on; I tried to regain my balance, sensing that there was little satisfaction to be had from my newfound liberation. What stood in the way of my succumbing to the same defeat that had brought down the Old Man? Who might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul? The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live. All he could tell me, perhaps, was what had happened to him. It occurred to me that for all the new information, I still didn’t know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his ambitions? I imagined once again the first and only time we’d met, the man I now knew must have been as apprehensive as I was, the man who had returned to Hawaii to sift through his past and perhaps try and reclaim that best part of him, the part that had been misplaced. He hadn’t been able to tell me his true feelings then, any more than I had been able to express my ten-year-old desires. We had been frozen by the sight of the other, unable to escape the suspicion that under examination our true selves would be found wanting. Now, fifteen years later, I looked into Auma’s sleeping face and saw the price we had paid for that silence. Ten days later, Auma and I sat in the hard plastic seats of an airport terminal, looking out at the planes through the high wall of glass. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly. “I was thinking about Alego,” she said. “Home Square—our grandfather’s land, where Granny still lives. It’s the most beautiful place, Barack. When I’m in Germany, and it’s cold outside, and I’m feeling lonely, sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m there. Sitting in the compound, surrounded by big trees that our grandfather planted. Granny is talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow swishing its tail behind us, and the chickens pecking at the edges of the field, and the smell of the fire from the cooking hut. And under the mango tree, near the cornfields, is the place where the Old Man is buried ….” Her flight was starting to board. We remained seated, and Auma closed her eyes, squeezing my hand. “We need to go home,” she said. “We need to go home, Barack, and see him there.” CHAPTER TWELVE

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] FROM THE FELL repast that sinner raised his mouth, wiping it upon the hair of the head he had laid waste behind. Then he began: “Thou wiliest that I renew desperate grief, which wrings my heart, even at the very thought, before I tell thereof. But if my words are to be a seed, that may bear fruit of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw, thou shalt see me speak and weep at the same time. I know not who thou mayest be, nor by what mode thou hast come down here; but, when I hear thee, in truth thou seemest to me a Florentine. Thou hast to know that I was Count Ugolino, and this the Archbishop Ruggieri;1 now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbour to him. That by the effect of his ill devices I, confiding in him, was taken and thereafter put to death, it is not necessary to say. But that which thou canst not have learnt, that is, how cruel was my death, thou shalt hear and know if he has offended me. A narrow hole within the mew, which from me has the title of Famine, and in which others yet must be shut up, had through its opening already shown me several moons, when I slept the evil sleep that rent for me the curtain of the future. This man seemed to me lord and master, chasing the wolf and his whelps, upon the mountain2 for which the Pisans cannot see Lucca. With hounds meagre, keen, and dexterous, he had put in front of him Gualandi with Sismondi, and with Lanfranchi.3 After short course, the father and his sons seemed to me weary; and methought I saw their flanks torn by the sharp teeth. When I awoke before the dawn, I heard my sons4 who were with me, weeping in their sleep, and asking for bread. Thou art right cruel, if thou dost not grieve already at the thought of what my heart foreboded; and if thou weepest not, at what art thou used to weep? They were now awake, and the hour approaching at which our food used to be brought us, and each was anxious from his dream, and below I heard the outlet of the horrible tower locked up: whereat I looked into the faces of my sons, without uttering a word. I did not weep: so stony grew I within; they wept; and my little Anselm said: ‘Thou lookest so, father, what ails thee?’ But I shed no tear, nor answered all that day, nor the next night, till another sun came forth upon the world. When a small ray was sent into the doleful prison, and I discerned in their four faces the aspect of my own, I bit on both my hands for grief. And they, thinking that I did it from desire of eating, of a sudden rose up,

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  but by the bounty of graces divine, which have for their rain vapours so high that our eyes reach not nigh them, 17 this man was such in his new life 18 potentially, that every good talent would have made wondrous increase in him. But so much the more rank and wild the ground becomes with evil seed and untilled, the more it hath of good strength of soil. Some time I sustained him with my countenance; showing my youthful eyes to him I led him with me turned to the right goal. 19 So soon as I was on the threshold of my second age, and I changed life, he forsook me, and gave him to others. 20 When I was risen from flesh to spirit, and beauty and virtue were increased within me, I was less precious and less pleasing to him; and he did turn his steps by a way not true, pursuing false visions of good, that pay back no promise entire. 21 Nor did it avail me to gain inspirations, with which in dream and otherwise, I called him back; so little recked he of them. 22 so low sank he, that all means for his salvation were already short, save showing him the lost people. For this I visited the portal of the dead, and to him who has guided him up hither, weeping my prayers were borne. 23 God’s high decree would be broken, if Lethe were passed, and such viands were tasted, without some scot of penitence that may shed tears.” 1. The “wain of the first heaven” are the seven candlesticks, which are the spiritual guides of the righteous; even as the seven stars of the Septentrio or Ursa Minor direct the mariner making for port. 2. The twenty-four elders. 3. The elder representing the books of Solomon sang aloud three times the words of the Song of Solomon (iv. 8): “Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon.” 4. These are identical with the angels mentioned later: ad vocem tanti senis, “at the voice of so great an elder.” 5. “Blessed art thou that comest.” See Matt. xxi. 9, Mark xi. 9, Luke xix. 38, John xii. 13; and cf. the preceding canto, note 7. 6. “Oh, with full hands give lilies” (Æn. vi). 7. This is Beatrice. Note the colours of Faith, Hope and Charity. In the Vita Nuova [the whole of which should be read in conjunction with the present and the following canto; see, too, Gardner, pp. 8, 9, 13-15, 45-53], Beatrice appears in red and white, but never in green. The olive was sacred to Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom. 8. The appearance of Beatrice has the same effect on Dante now as in the days of the Vita Nuova (§ ii, xi, xiv and xxiv).—so long a time: ten years—1200-1300; see note 20.