Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled “Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs,” and explains that it started “only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.” He opposes the so-called Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even though the Catholic bishops advocate it. “Prohibition was a disaster,” Harvey explains, and we shouldn’t be pushing for “another Constitutional amendment based on a moral conviction.” In 2006, at the age of ninety-one, Harvey’s unique life comes to an end. It’s been twenty-eight years since he invited me to give the homily, yet whenever I’m in Minneapolis I always feel he’s just around the corner. I miss him. In his honor, I try to be as courageous and outrageous as he was. I add to speeches something I learned from historians of religious architecture but left out of my homily: the design of many patriarchal religious buildings resembles the body of a woman. Think about it: there is an outer and inner entrance (labia majora, labia minora) with a vestibule between (an anatomical as well as architectural term) and a vaginal aisle up the center of the church to the altar (the womb) with two curved (ovarian) structures on either side. The altar or womb is where all-male priests confer everlasting life—and who can prove that they don’t? This surrealism of patriarchy goes on after Harvey’s death. In 2012 the Vatican announces an investigation—not of the sexual abuse of children by priests that has been exposed as epidemic, but of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that represents 80 percent of the nuns in North America. They are accused of asking for greater decision-making roles in the church for themselves and for women in general, of “remaining silent” on homosexuality and abortion, of spending too much time working against poverty and injustice, of promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith,” and of supporting President Obama’s health care legislation that includes birth control. Indeed, the success of that health care bill seems to have been the last straw. Some members of Congress cited support for the bill by nuns as giving them the courage to vote against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was the major force opposing the bill. The Vatican investigation declared that bishops “are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” As the Bible says, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” Even I am surprised to find this is so literal. The name of the Vatican body investigating the nuns is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same body that conducted the Inquisition, which came to be known as the Holocaust of Women because as many as eight million women healers and leaders of pre-Christian Europe were killed by torture and burning at the stake over more than five hundred years.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The dawn came; the sick man’s condition was unchanged. Levin stealthily withdrew his hand, and without looking at the dying man, went off to his own room and went to sleep. When he woke up, instead of news of his brother’s death which he expected, he learned that the sick man had returned to his earlier condition. He had begun sitting up again, coughing, had begun eating again, talking again, and again had ceased to talk of death, again had begun to express hope of his recovery, and had become more irritable and more gloomy than ever. No one, neither his brother nor Kitty, could soothe him. He was angry with everyone, and said nasty things to everyone, reproached everyone for his sufferings, and insisted that they should get him a celebrated doctor from Moscow. To all inquiries made him as to how he felt, he made the same answer with an expression of vindictive reproachfulness, “I’m suffering horribly, intolerably!” The sick man was suffering more and more, especially from bedsores, which it was impossible now to remedy, and grew more and more angry with everyone about him, blaming them for everything, and especially for not having brought him a doctor from Moscow. Kitty tried in every possible way to relieve him, to soothe him; but it was all in vain, and Levin saw that she herself was exhausted both physically and morally, though she would not admit it. The sense of death, which had been evoked in all by his taking leave of life on the night when he had sent for his brother, was broken up. Everyone knew that he must inevitably die soon, that he was half dead already. Everyone wished for nothing but that he should die as soon as possible, and everyone, concealing this, gave him medicines, tried to find remedies and doctors, and deceived him and themselves and each other. All this was falsehood, disgusting, irreverent deceit. And owing to the bent of his character, and because he loved the dying man more than anyone else did, Levin was most painfully conscious of this deceit. Levin, who had long been possessed by the idea of reconciling his brothers, at least in face of death, had written to his brother, Sergey Ivanovitch, and having received an answer from him, he read this letter to the sick man. Sergey Ivanovitch wrote that he could not come himself, and in touching terms he begged his brother’s forgiveness. The sick man said nothing. “What am I to write to him?” said Levin. “I hope you are not angry with him?” “No, not the least!” Nikolay answered, vexed at the question. “Tell him to send me a doctor.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  My father and I lived together for far less time, but his faith in a friendly universe helped balance my mother’s fear of a threatening one. He gave me that gift. He let in the light. —AS DECADES PASSED AFTER his death, my father seemed so improbable that I sometimes wondered if I’d made him up. My mother died peacefully of heart problems just before her eighty-second birthday. I wrote a long essay about her called “Ruth’s Song: Because She Could Not Sing It.” I mourned her unlived life. Still, my father’s chosen life was less understandable. My sister was the only other witness—and she had left home when she was seventeen. My father’s friends were as spread out as his life, and were strangers to me. When I got two letters about my father out of the blue, I was older than he had been when he died. These generous correspondents had known my father when they themselves were boys. The first letter came from John Grover, by then a retired obstetrician. In high school, he had a summer job as a trombone player with the house band at Ocean Beach Pier. One Saturday night, the bandleader took all the cash the band had earned, leaped over the side of the pier, and swam away, leaving Grover and another teenage band member stranded. “Your father saved the summer for us by offering us a place to stay and enough cash to help us get food,” Grover wrote. “In return, we acted as ‘guardians’ of the pier at night. We slept on a mattress placed on a dance floor under the stars…and he found day jobs for us in a cement-block manufacturing plant….I also played third trombone with several bands as they passed through on weekends, providing a little more cash.” Before the end of the summer, Grover and his friend had found jobs as musicians with a traveling circus. Then they went home to finish high school. Grover, by then in his seventies, wrote: “I’ve always remembered your father’s solicitude in helping two homeless and broke West Virginia boys that summer….It is interesting that I, too, went into a field important to women and women’s rights. I spent a large part of my professional career helping to make the care of pregnant women and women in labor more humane. I was also deeply involved with the birth control and legal abortion movements in the state of Massachusetts during the 1960s.” At last, I had a witness to my father’s kindness. Though his solution to unjust rules was to ignore them, not change them, it was no accident that a young man he helped had grown up to help others. My father knew a good heart when he saw one. He himself was often dependent, in the timeless phrase of Tennessee Williams, “on the kindness of strangers.” A few years later, I got a letter from Hawaii and another physician. Dr.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.” She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand. “What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears. Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day. Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine-glass and dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind. When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so long in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But she only said: “I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?” “Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I suppose, _mais excessivement terre-à-terre._ Still, I’m very glad to see her.” He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As he says, “We have to fight with all our hearts for choices we wouldn’t dream of making.” This has also motivated him to head the Campaign for Military Service in Washington, D.C., an effort to support a newly elected President Bill Clinton in ending discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military, as he promised in his campaign. That’s why we are marching with uniformed gay men and lesbians to show that New York supports their presence in the military. Still, Tom sees the irony of trying to get people into the army instead of out of it. Because he looks tired—and because making him laugh is always a reward in itself—I tell him my general rule: Shit equally divided is always better than shit unequally divided . He laughs, and we dance to the military music, somehow demilitarizing it. I ask if it’s a hardship for him to go back and forth to Washington every week. After all, his home is here in New York with Walter Rieman, his partner of five years, also a lawyer, and they were married recently in a ceremony that had every blessing but a legal one. Tom says yes, it is hard—especially now that he needs more rest. And suddenly, in a heart-stopping moment, I know what I hadn’t known before. He is revealing a secret that will cut short his future. Later we have one more long dinner. Tom is his usual enthusiastic self, making plans, talking tactics. He tells me that Walter is a scholar of Jane Austen’s novels—as if introducing us for a time to come. Tom’s own work has ended in the bitter compromise of President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, yet Tom makes clear that secrecy is never acceptable and the campaign will go on. I see him at a few more meetings and marches. He looks fragile and is carrying a bag of antiviral drugs—but he is still working, still caring. Then in 1997, when he is forty-eight, Tom’s heart simply stops beating. I can feel my own heart beating harder in disbelief. I join his friends at a memorial, and everyone tells Tom stories. The good news is that we all leave knowing him even better than ever before. The bad news is that we also know he could have been anything, including president of the United States. In this new century, his former students, now lawyers and activists themselves, tell me that Tom was the best teacher they ever had. He taught them that legal cases are worth fighting because even if they lose, they change consciousness, and if they win, they change lives. He didn’t live to see his own marriage become equal under the law, yet he lived marriage equality for all to see. Tom wanted to free us from secrets, both legal and internalized. When I think about all the people still made to hide an essential part of themselves, I know we still need him.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  My father’s car was sideswiped with such force that the driver’s door was staved in, he was pinioned beneath the steering wheel, and the car was spun into the oncoming traffic. Unable to move, much less get out and run, he was hit by another car. From a hospital that was little more than a battle station by the freeway, a doctor left a message for me in New York. My father must have given him my number, knowing that my sister couldn’t leave her young children, my mother couldn’t travel alone, and I was the most logical helper. But I was also my father’s daughter. I was out of the country, traveling, unreachable. By the time I got home days later, the doctor had reached my sister. She suggested I fly out a week later, when my father would be ready to leave the hospital and would need help in his furnished room. I think I sensed that I should go right away, yet somehow the accident seemed like a normal part of my father’s life on the road, nothing to be too alarmed about. Also I felt a cold stab of fear that if I went to California, I would become my father’s caretaker, as I had been my mother’s—and never come back to my own life. A few days before I was to leave, the doctor called my sister to say that our father had taken a turn for the worse due to internal bleeding. I got on the first flight to Los Angeles, but when I changed planes in Chicago, I heard myself being paged. It was my sister. The doctor had called again. There had been a massive internal hemorrhage—our father had died. When I arrived at that hospital, I found only a manila envelope with my father’s few belongings, and a doctor who seemed barely able to control his anger that no family member had been present. My father had succumbed to gushing traumatic ulcers, he said, more lethal than his crash wounds. I don’t know whether I was listening with a daughter’s ears or hearing a fact, but I thought he was saying that this fatal bleeding had been caused not by the crash itself, but by trauma, stress, despair. It was something I could never find the courage to tell my sister. It was something I would never forget. Still, I thought I could get through the hospital procedures without breaking down. And I did—until I held my father’s worn wallet in my hands, its leather shaped to the curve of his body by years in his back pocket as he drove the road. I can feel it still. I will never stop wishing I had been with him. I will always wonder: Alone in a hospital within sound of the freeway, would he have traded the freedom of the road for the presence of family and friends?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At Stonewell each year we had a field-day when the boys were divided into squads and despatched on surreal errands to test their initiative: bring back a letter signed by a bishop, or souvenirs from six Cinque Ports, present a baby to a master in disguise on Beachy Head. A kind of home-sickness coloured the early phase of the day. Hitch-hiking was forbidden, and whilst a few such as Dawn slipped away by bike, the rest of us amassed in sprawling bands at bus-stops and the local station, as if reluctant to separate, hoping feebly to tag along with our rivals, or to absorb the good luck, the slightly manic confidence of the two or three who were already making with maps, cameras and phone-calls to high-placed relations. But when we were an hour or two away from school, forlornly tramping up to the gates of top-security dockyards or trespassing through woodland in search of sham ruins, anxiety gave way to a guilty suspicion that none of it mattered, a muddled sense of futile freedom. The days always took place in a perspective of failure, we never expected to get an interview with a submarine captain, and we were often stranded as evening fell at some inconvenient spot requiring to be rescued by the harassed masters in their station-wagons. Getting home turned out to be the real test of initiative, and we failed it. We waited at a shelterless bus-stop just like this, as the rain came on, playing basic games of chance with tossed coins. I remembered that once I was with a couple of others, including the palely introverted German boy Peter Rott (Tommy as he was known) who grew his nails into buckled claws and disguised the length of his hair by not rinsing out the shampoo: as the rain fell on his matted pine-scented head he began to bubble gently, and suds ran down his face like sleepy tears. My father didn't have a few more months, he had just over a year; he died in that month of shadowed insouciance that precedes the arrival of the A-level results. I was relieved that it wasn't in term, that I hadn't been called out of school to be told, that it hadn't messed up my exams; but later on I mildly regretted the loss of the acclaim and respect that should have been due to me. By the following term, when I abruptly began to grieve, it no longer merited my schoolfriends' puzzled consideration. His ashes were strewn on the common, because he had loved it, but the idea seemed so gruesome to me that I stayed alone in the house while my mother and Charlie and my Uncle Wilfred set off up the hill, uncertain whether they were a procession or if they should go a bit faster, like a family out for a walk.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We all know, no matter what we say, no matter how we may justifY it or hide from this fact, every human being knows, something in him knows, and this is what Christ was talking about; no one wants to be a slave. Black people have had to adjust to incredible vicissitudes and involve in fantastic identity against incredible odds. But those songs we sang, and sing, and our dances and the way we talk to each other, betray a terrifYing pain, a pain so great that most Western people, most white Westerners, are simply baf fled by it and paralysed by it, because they do not dare imagine 752 OTHER ESSAYS what it would be like to be a black father, and what a black father would have to tell a black son in order for the black son to live at all. Now, this is not called morality, this is not called faith, this has nothing to do with Christ. It has to do with power, and part of the dilemma of the Christian Church is the fact that it opted, in fact, for power and betrayed its own first principles which were a responsibility to every living soul, the assump tion of which the Christian Church's basis, as I understand it, is that all men are the sons of God and that all men are free in the eyes of God and are victims of the commandment given to the Christian Church, "Love one another as I have loved you." And if that is so, the Church is in great danger not merely because the black people say it is but because people are always in great danger when they know what they should do, and retuse to act on that knowledge. To try to make it as clear as I can; we hear a great deal these days of a young black man called Stokely Carmichael, we gather from the public press that Stokely's a very dangerous, radical, black fanatic rac ist. Not long ago we heard much the same thing about the late Malcolm X, and neither was the late Martin Luther King the most popular man in his country.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  When one of the parents (or sometimes both) cannot maintain his or her adulthood and abdicates responsibility to protect the child, then the child is exposed to many serious risks. This can happen in both intact and divorced families. The ambience within many intact marriages is no different from many wretched postdivorce families I have seen—one adult pulling the children into alliances against the other adult. As in divorced families where this happens, the children usually wake up to the injustice of these insults and turn against the accuser. Ill-founded accusations have built-in ways of self-correcting as the child matures. The chief danger is that the children are not given a moral compass by which to steer through problems in their own marriages. They are seriously misled about the nature of the man-woman relationship and the responsibility of a parent to his or her children. We know that this happens after divorce, but it is also common in intact families. I have seen it a lot in my clinical experience. Whenever tensions arise, the urge to scapegoat is powerful. The Decision to Divorce—Telling the ChildrenNOW LET’S ASK a critical question. Suppose you choose to end your marriage. Taking Gary’s father as a role model of a good parent who understands how to speak to his children about very painful issues, how should you conduct yourself? Here, too, there are clear do’s and don’ts that are rarely followed because parents are poorly informed, raging, or overwhelmed by the demands of life at the time of the breakup. Typically, they have reached a point of no return in a marriage that is intolerable to them. The situation is unlikely ever to improve. Individual histories vary. Divorce at a young age is different from divorce after spending half or a whole lifetime together. But most divorces reflect a dream that was shattered because of profound disappointment, suffering in the relationship, and the end of hope for a better future. Most of the time people with children take this step reluctantly. Many do so after intense conflict within themselves. It’s a terrifying decision because there’s no way back as you step across the Rubicon onto an unknown continent.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The needs of older children are unacknowledged. At the same time, the cost of a university education has risen steeply. It’s become much harder for young people to work their way through college. It may soon be impossible. A recent study shows that fewer children of divorce even apply to the nation’s top colleges. 8 At the present time and in the foreseeable future, children from divorced families end up less well educated than their peers coming from intact homes. This is a dramatic example of the children’s lament that they are the ones paying for their parents’ divorce. TWENTY Is Not Fighting Enough? F or many years when I spoke about divorce and children at conferences around the world, I would begin my talk with excerpts from interviews with Lisa. She was an articulate child who immediately charmed people as she spoke about her parents with great love and compassion. As an adolescent, Lisa was doing remarkably well and I often referred to her as “my best case.” Audiences liked to hear about her because it allayed their fears about the effects of divorce on children. If Lisa could make it, so could others. But when Lisa moved into adulthood, I began to see changes in her that hinted everything was not okay. Like other children I have described, Lisa took on a role in her family and played it well from the day her parents divorced. She was the model child who never rocked the boat. And although she was aware of the passions, jealousy, and hate that lay beneath the surface of her post-divorce family, she and everyone else pretended all was tranquil. In her core, Lisa was eager to protect her parents from feeling unhappy or guilty about the breakup. But her virtuous resolve no longer helped her when she came face-to-face with adult relationships. Lisa’s story shows us that whatever we do to protect our children after divorce, residues appear in the realm of adult love and sexual intimacy. Through the years, many people have asked me, “What if we don’t fight after the divorce? What if we get along and put our child’s best interest before our own? Surely we can protect our children from the harm that divorce can do. Can’t we?” Let’s look at the evidence. It’s true that fighting between parents, whether it takes place in the courtroom or bedroom, is harmful to children. As we’ve seen throughout this book, it offers a frightening model of adult behavior and it seriously erodes the quality of any parent-child relationship. Parents who engage in a conjugal jihad often lose sight of a child’s needs.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I wouldn’t know. The police have no idea of course who did it. It seems not to have been for money—he still had money on him. Did he usually carry money?’ I ignored the lazily loaded question. ‘There can be no doubt that this was an act of racial hatred and ignorance.’ ‘I’m afraid so, Nantwich. I think there will be more of them, too.’ He looked confident of vindication, almost proud. I was still standing in the middle of the room, though by now I was beginning to shake, and had to force my knees back and grip my hands together. ‘Your opinion is of no interest to me,’ I said. He gave a little smirk. ‘You will be allowed to attend the funeral,’ he said, as if I had been wrong to judge him so harshly. And so the light of my life went out. The morning of the funeral was ragged and squally, and I was stunned to find how readily I returned to the Scrubs and hid myself away: even if a car had been waiting to drive me home I would have been incapable of accepting it—and throughout the first few days of choking grief the hermit bleakness of my cell served to contain me in the fullest sense. In my own house I would have fallen apart. The other men, my friends, too, helped me and held me, and showed in their laconic condolences an understanding I could never have received in the world at large. It would be unedifying to describe as it would be needless torture to recall those days when the world first changed, and became a world without my Taha. It was a terrible destitution, and my knowledge is all bound up with my physical experience of the hard coir mattress where I lay, the few properties of my cell, the bladeless razor, the little framed square of looking-glass in which I caught my tear-blotched face, the steady night-time smell of the chamberpot. As the autumn drew on it grew colder in the prison, but if one held one’s hand to the black iron vent through which warm air was supposed to issue into each cell one felt only a slight chill stirring, which seemed to come from far away.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A sliver of a last night's dream came back to me and melted away as I tried to grasp it. Matt in the bar teasing me and mocking me with the story of how he'd seduced Luc the afternoon I'd left town—how easy it had been for him, the boy almost bawling for it, four, five times, how he was having him again tonight . . . I started thinking forward impatiently to my return flight tomorrow, wishing away the unrepeatable hours. A prospect of the backs of heads, the part of yourself you didn't know about, which always came as a surprise in a clothes-shop or a barber's glancing hand-mirror, the part so trustingly turned to a lover. There were heads here I'd sat behind in school: Tony Barnett who used to stow his hair into his turned-up collar with the aid of grease and paper-clips, a big director of commercials these days with a shiny bald patch like a tonsure; Hilary Smythe (poor fellow), teenage cottager you saw hanging on the railings by the traffic lights in town, along with the drunks in torn tweed jackets, looking drably smart now, with a grey moustache; beside him that broadnecked figure like a boisterous but not ill-natured dog, actually called Boxer, captain of rugby, mopping at his eyes with a red handkerchief; in front of him the forgotten Sindon twins, Doug and Greg, or was it Greg and Doug, completely unchanged, brilliant swimmers interested in nothing else—I suddenly remembered their address, like a far-off holiday, and their bathroom with its smell of chlorine and drying towels—they were here in padded silvery suits; I wanted to lick the identical blond ferns in the hollows of their necks. I couldn't listen to much of the service before I was on; we sang a hymn with the wrong tune, so that nobody did more than mumble till the last verse. I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again. I kept trying to name people, not to fidget as the time raced closer. Suddenly the vicar announced my reading, before the Gospel, much earlier than I expected. I looked stupidly about, hoping that no one might have noticed. The audience settled back, some blowing their noses. There was a thin wail from Dawn's mother in the front row, I knew how she must long for it to be over, but must want it done properly.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Indeed, he disapproved of Kennedy’s affairs, especially since he sometimes had to serve as a cover. He also thought smoking made a woman look immoral, and since I thought a cigarette made me look like a writer—though I couldn’t inhale without getting sick—I smoked and felt judged by him. Far more important was his mastery of parallel construction, with sentences as elegant and inspiring as “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” If I hung out in his office for a day or two, I hoped I might learn, contribute, or both. That’s why, on a November day, I was sorting clippings while Ted hurried to finish a speech for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. He ran the final copy out onto the White House lawn, where a helicopter waited to take the president to Air Force One. I watched as Kennedy, that familiar man I’d never met, walked into the wind from the whirling blades. It was the last time Ted or I would ever see him. In New York the next day, I could tell, from the faces of people in the street, who knew about the shooting and who did not. Ted called to say the bullet had shattered the president’s skull. There was no hope. I thought, When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves. —ONCE VICE PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON was president, Bobby Kennedy stepped down as attorney general to give LBJ the right to name his own. Then this younger Kennedy declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate from New York State. It seemed to be a painful effort to fill his brother’s shoes. Bobby Kennedy hated even public speaking. I once heard him give a brief talk, and I related to his uncomfortable voyage from one sentence to the next. Hoping to publish a freelance article, I followed Bobby Kennedy around for a day of campaigning in New York City. He was a very unusual candidate. When avoiding a reporter’s question, for instance, he didn’t just give a skillful nonanswer, as most politicians do. “As you can see,” he would say, “I’m trying to avoid that question.” He seemed interested in engaging only with people who asked questions to which they really didn’t know the answers. Jack Newfield of The Village Voice told me the secret of interviewing Bobby: Bring along someone who doesn’t know the subject—or better yet, who disagrees. Then Bobby will see a purpose in explaining, and you’ll get lots of quotes. In Manhattan, two famous writers, journalist Gay Talese and novelist Saul Bellow, joined Kennedy’s Senate campaign for the day. I knew Talese and had recently met Bellow when I interviewed him and followed him around his beloved Chicago. The three of us shared a taxi to Kennedy events.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus T-shirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.” But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life. This quiets the T-shirt wearers, but probably not for long; I can see them conferring. Meanwhile another student rises to object to parental and judicial consent laws that treat a young woman as if she were the property of her parents or the state. “If you’re old enough to get pregnant,” she says, “you’re old enough to get unpregnant.” A man chimes in, pointing out that if a woman serving in the military is raped by another soldier or even by the enemy, she can’t get an abortion in an army hospital or anywhere with government funds. She’s not even guaranteed a leave to find one on her own. There is a rumble of disapproval and learning. A nurse arises to explain the metal bracelet she is wearing. It looks like the prisoner of war bracelets that bear the birth date of a loved one, but she explains that hers bears the birth and death dates of Rosie Jimenez, the first woman—but not the last—to die from an illegal abortion because the Hyde Amendment forbids not only the use of military tax dollars but health care or any tax dollars for abortion. Rosie was on welfare, only a few months away from graduating with teaching credentials so she could support herself and her five-year-old daughter. But she got pregnant, crossed the Mexican border to get an illegal abortion, the only kind she could afford, returned to Texas, and spent seven painful and fevered days in a hospital being treated for septic shock—at hundreds of times the taxpayers’ expense of an abortion. She died, leaving behind her daughter and a $700 scholarship check that was proof of Rosie’s promising future. This happened only two months after the Hyde Amendment went into effect. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of women have lost their health or lives since. With an eye on the T-shirt group, I explain that reproductive freedom means what it says and also protects the right to have a child. A woman can’t be forced into an abortion, just as she can’t be forced out of childbirth by sterilization or anything else: the women’s movement is as devoted to the latter as the former—including the economic ability to support a child. It just seems lopsided because the opponents of safe and legal abortion have focused there.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Soldier!” said Korney contemptuously, and he turned to the nurse who was coming in. “Here, what do you think, Marya Efimovna: he let her in without a word to anyone,” Korney said addressing her. “Alexey Alexandrovitch will be down immediately—and go into the nursery!” “A pretty business, a pretty business!” said the nurse. “You, Korney Vassilievitch, you’d best keep him some way or other, the master, while I’ll run and get her away somehow. A pretty business!” When the nurse went into the nursery, Seryozha was telling his mother how he and Nadinka had had a fall in sledging downhill, and had turned over three times. She was listening to the sound of his voice, watching his face and the play of expression on it, touching his hand, but she did not follow what he was saying. She must go, she must leave him,—this was the only thing she was thinking and feeling. She heard the steps of Vassily Lukitch coming up to the door and coughing; she heard, too, the steps of the nurse as she came near; but she sat like one turned to stone, incapable of beginning to speak or to get up. “Mistress, darling!” began the nurse, going up to Anna and kissing her hands and shoulders. “God has brought joy indeed to our boy on his birthday. You aren’t changed one bit.” “Oh, nurse dear, I didn’t know you were in the house,” said Anna, rousing herself for a moment. “I’m not living here, I’m living with my daughter. I came for the birthday, Anna Arkadyevna, darling!” The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and began kissing her hand again. Seryozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his mother by one hand and his nurse by the other, pattered on the rug with his fat little bare feet. The tenderness shown by his beloved nurse to his mother threw him into an ecstasy. “Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she comes....” he was beginning, but he stopped, noticing that the nurse was saying something in a whisper to his mother, and that in his mother’s face there was a look of dread and something like shame, which was so strangely unbecoming to her. She went up to him. “My sweet!” she said. She could not say _good-bye_, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood. “Darling, darling Kootik!” she used the name by which she had called him when he was little, “you won’t forget me? You....” but she could not say more.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin listened and racked his brains, but could think of nothing to say. Nikolay probably felt the same; he began questioning his brother about his affairs; and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because then he could speak without hypocrisy. He told his brother of his plans and his doings. His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested by it. These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words. Both of them now had only one thought—the illness of Nikolay and the nearness of his death—which stifled all else. But neither of them dared to speak of it, and so whatever they said—not uttering the one thought that filled their minds—was all falsehood. Never had Levin been so glad when the evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never with any outside person, never on any official visit had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening. And the consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more unnatural. He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live. As the house was damp, and only one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen. His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, tossed about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his throat clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he said, “Oh, my God!” Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily, “Ah, the devil!” Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various, but the end of all his thoughts was the same—death. Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself too, he felt that. If not today, tomorrow, if not tomorrow, in thirty years, wasn’t it all the same! And what was this inevitable death—he did not know, had never thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it. “I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten—death.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  221 I QUERELLE It broke Querelle's heart to see Gil pocket the money. That pang of pain would serve to justify the double-cross he was preparing for Gil. Jt wasn't the money he had pre t ended to steal from a house he well knew to be uninhabited-it would only take him a couple of days to get back a hundred times as much-but it did give him a pain to see Gil go for it hook, line and sinker. Then, every day, Querelle brought him some items of clothing. \V ithin three days he had outfitted Gil in sailor's bells, jersey, peacoat and beret. Roger helped haul each bundle over the sea wall, by the same method employed in getting the opium past customs. One evening Querelle gave him his briefing. "It's all set. You're not backing out, are you? You better tell me, if you get cold feet at the last moment ... " "You can trust me." Gil was to walk into Brest in broad daylight. The uniform would render him invisible. The police would hardly expect the mu rderer to take a stroll in the city disguised as a sailor. "You sure that Lieutenant's an easy one?" "I told you, he's a little old lady. He looks military and all that, but he ain't no fighter." The sailor's outfit transformed Gil and gave him a new, strange personality. He didn't recognize himself. In the dark, all by himself, he dressed with the greatest of care. Striving for elegance, he put on the beret, then pushed it back a little, most coquettishly. The charming and forceful soul of the most elega nt branch of the armed services entered int o him. He became a member of that fighting Navy whose purpose is to grace the shores of France rat her than to defend them: it embroiders and strings out a festive garland along the seaboard, from Dunkirk to . Villefranche, with here and there a couple of thicker knots in it to mark the naval ports. The Navy is a wonderfully constructed organization consisting of young men who are given an entire education in how to make themselves appear desirable. 'When he was still working at his trade, Gil

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Men we were, and now are turned to trees: truly thy hand should be more merciful, had we been souls of serpents.” As a green brand, that is burning at one end, at the other drops, and hisses with the wind which is escaping: so from that broken splint, words and blood came forth together: whereat I let fall the top, and stood like one who is afraid. “If he, O wounded Spirit!” my Sage replied, “could have believed before, what he has seen only in my verse, 4 he would not have stretched forth his hand against thee; but the incredibility of the thing made me prompt him to do what grieves myself. But tell him who thou wast; so that, to make thee some amends, he may refresh thy fame up in the world, to which he is permitted to return.” And the trunk: “Thou so allurest me with thy sweet words, that I cannot keep silent; and let it not seem burdensome to you, if I enlarge a little in discourse. I am he, who held both keys 5 of Frederick’s heart, and turned them, locking and unlocking so softly, that from his secrets I excluded almost every other man; so great fidelity I bore to the glorious office, that I lost thereby both sleep and life. The harlet, 6 that never from Caesar’s dwelling turned her adulterous eyes, common bane, and vice of courts, inflamed all minds against me; and these, being inflamed, so inflamed Augustus, that my joyous honours were changed to dismal sorrows. My soul, in its disdainful mood, thinking to escape disdain by death, made me, though just, unjust against myself. By the new roots of this tree, I swear to you, never did I break faith to my lord, who was so worthy of honour. And if any of you return to the world, strengthen the memory of me, which still lies prostrate from the blow that envy gave it.” The Poet listened awhile, and then said to me: “Since he is silent, lose not the hour; but speak, and ask him, if thou wouldst know more.” Whereat I to him: “Do thou ask him farther, respecting what thou thinkest will satisfy me; for I could not, such pity is upon my heart.” He therefore resumed: “So may the man do freely for thee what thy words entreat him, O imprisoned spirit, please thee tell us farther, how the soul gets bound up in these knots; and tell us, if thou mayest. whether any ever frees itself from such members.” Then the trunk blew strongly, and soon that wind was changed into these words: “Briefly shall you be answered. When the fierce spirit quits the body, from which it has torn itself, Minos sends it to the seventh gulf. It falls into the wood, and no place is chosen for it; but wherever fortune flings it, there it sprouts, like grain of spelt;

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  simulat privigni veneno filium. suum interceptum. Et hoc quidem non adeo mentiebatur, quod: iam destinatam. iuveni mortem praevenisset puer; sed fratrem iuniorem fingebat ideo privigni scelere per- emptum, quod eius. probrosae libidini, qua se com- primere temptaverat, noluisset suceumbere. Nee tam immanibus contenta mendaciis addebat sibi quo- que ob. detectum flagitium eundem illum gladium comminari. Tune infelix duplici filiorum morte per- cussus magnis aerumnarum procellis aestuat: nam.et iuniorem incoram sui funerari videbat, et alterum . ob incestum parricidiumque capitis scilicet damnatum iri certo sciebat. Ad: hoe uxoris dilectae nimium mentitis.lamentationibus ad: extremum subolis im- pellebatur odium. 6 Vixduüm pompae funebres et sepultura filii fuerat explicata, et statim ab ipso eius rogo senex infelix, ora sua recentibus adhue rigans lacrimis trahensque cinere sordentem. canitiem, foro se festinus immittit atque ibi, tum. fletu; tum precibus, genua. etiam de- curionum contingens, nescius. fraudium pessimae mulieris, in exitium reliqui filii plenis operabatur affectibus: illum incestum paterno thalamo, illum parricidam fraterno-exitio et in comminata novercae caede sicarium. Tanta denique miseratione tantaque indignatione curiam sed. et: plebem. maerens inflam- maverat, ub remoto: iudicandi: taedio et aecusationis: manifestis probationibus et responsionis meditatis: ambagibus. euneti. conclamarint. lapidibus: obrutum publieum malum publice vindicari. 482 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X beyond all reason, declared that her son had. been taken off with his brother's poison. And so far she spoke no lie, inasmuch as the boy had forestalled the death that was prepared for the young man ; but she feigned that he had been for this reason murdered.by his brother’s crime, because she would not consent to his evil will which he had had towards her, and told: him divers other leasings, adding in the end that he threatened with his sword to kill-her like- wise, because she discovered the fact. Then, the unhappy father was stricken with a double storm of dolour-at-the death of his two children, for on the one side he saw: his younger slain-before his eyes, on the other side he seemed to see the elder condemned to die for his offences both of incest and of parricide, and where he beheld his dear wife lament in such sort, it gave him. further occasion to hate his son more deadly.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Howbeit, Thrasillus was not sufficed to see him thus wounded, but when he desired his friendly help, he thrust Lepolemus through the right thigh with his speare, the more because he thought the wound of the speare would be taken for a wound of the Boars teeth, then he killed the beast likewise, And when he was thus miserably slaine, every one of us came out of our holes, and went towards our slaine master. But although that Thrasillus was joyfull of the death of Lepolemus, whom he did greatly hate, yet he cloked the matter with a sorrowfull countenance, he fained a dolorous face, he often imbraced the body which himselfe slew, he played all the parts of a mourning person, saving there fell no teares from his eyes. Thus hee resembled us in each point, who verily and not without occasion had cause to lament for our master, laying all the blame of this homicide unto the Boare. Incontinently after the sorrowfull newes of the death of Lepolemus, came to the eares of all the family, but especially to Charites, who after she had heard such pitifull tydings, as a mad and raging woman, ran up and down the streets, crying and howling lamentably. All the Citizens gathered together, and such as they met bare them company running towards the chasse. When they came to the slaine body of Lepolemus, Charites threw her selfe upon him weeping and lamenting grievously for his death, in such sort, that she would have presently ended her life, upon the corps of her slaine husband, whom shee so entirely loved, had it not beene that her parents and friends did comfort her, and pulled her away. The body was taken up, and in funerall pompe brought to the City and buried. In the meane season, Thrasillus fained much sorrow for the death of Lepolemus, but in his heart he was well pleased and joyfull. And to counterfeit the matter, he would come to Charites and say: O what a losse have I had of my friend, my fellow, my companion Lepolemus? O Charites comfort your selfe, pacifie your dolour, refraine your weeping, beat not your breasts: and with such other and like words and divers examples he endeavoured to suppresse her great sorrow, but he spake not this for any other intent but to win the heart of the woman, and to nourish his odious love with filthy delight. Howbeit Charites after the buriall of her husband sought the meanes to follow him, and (not sustaining the sorrows wherein she was Wrapped) got her secretly into a chamber and purposed to finish her life there with dolour and tribulation. But Thrasillus was very importunate, and at length brought to passe, that at the intercession of the Parents and friends of Charites, she somewhat refreshed her fallen members with refection of meate and baine.