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 How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  This depends on the law’s theory of the human mind. Whatever the goal, punishment must be enacted so that the defendant’s humanity is preserved, while the victim’s humanity is honored, even if the defendant commits an unspeakable act. To do otherwise puts the legal system itself in jeopardy. ... Why is it that you can sue someone for breaking your leg but not for breaking your heart? The law considers emotional damage to be less serious than physical damage and less deserving of punishment. Think about how ironic this is. The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are—your brain. Emotional harm is not considered real unless accompanied by physical harm. Mind and body are separate. (Let’s all raise a glass to René Descartes here.) If there is one thing you can take away from this book, it is that the boundaries between mental and physical are porous. chapter 10 explained a bit about the ways in which emotional harm from chronic stress, parental emotional abuse and neglect, and other psychological ills can ultimately cause physical illness and injury. And we’ve seen how stress and proinflammatory cytokines lead to numerous health problems, including brain atrophy, and increase the likelihood of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, depression, and a host of other illnesses. 59 But that’s not the whole story. Emotional harm can shorten your life. Inside your body, you have little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes like protective caps. They’re called telomeres. All living things have telomeres—humans, fruit flies, amoebas, even the plants in your garden. Every time one of your cells divides, its telomeres get a little shorter (although they can be repaired by an enzyme called telomerase). So generally their size slowly decreases, and at some point, when they are too short, you die. This is normal aging. But guess what else causes your telomeres to get smaller? Stress does. Children who experience early adversity have shorter telomeres. In other words, emotional harm can do more serious damage, last longer, and cause more future harm than breaking a bone. This means the legal system might be misguided when it comes to understanding and gauging the degree of lasting injury that can come from emotional harm. 60 As another example, consider chronic pain. The law treats chronic pain by and large as “emotional” because there’s no observable tissue damage. In these cases, the law usually concludes that the suffering is not real enough to merit compensation. People who suffer from chronic pain are often diagnosed as mentally ill, and even more so if they opt for an invasive operation to try and reduce their “illusory” suffering.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She just wanted to check out, and often did. She went to Europe for months on end. She fell in love at least once a week. She went from broken engagement to broken engagement. When she finally married my stepfather it was painful trying to balance his need for her with her responsibilities to write (and drink). She was paralyzed by the pressure to deliver more world-changing books, and she struggled to maintain her equilibrium in the face of an unending series of vile, misogynist attacks and actual stalkers, including the man who parked his car at the head of our driveway in Connecticut and listened to messages from God coming from a radio with no batteries. Back then, neither my mother nor the police in Weston, Connecticut, knew how to handle stalkers. Erica Jong was very much trapped in a world of her own creation. Mom is in her early eighties now and has dementia. She is both on this planet and very much not. What little jewelry she had sits in my safe. Her legacy sits on my desk and on the hard drive of my computer. I thought I would be a great literary executor because I know how publishing works, but the truth is that being my mother’s literary executor is just excruciating. I thought writing this foreword would be fun, easy work, but it’s like performing root canal surgery on myself. Writing about our lives together brings me back to those years when I needed her and didn’t yet know that we would never connect in the way I needed. Now my mother sits in a room waiting for me to visit her, but she’s not in there anymore—or not the mother I once knew. Now she’s like some beautiful little doll. There is no winning the past. No number of forewords will make me at peace with the years between Fear of Flying and now. Writing about her and her legacy just makes me even more uncomfortable than I was before. This foreword should be a celebration of her work, of my mother’s place in the pantheon of second-wave feminists, but I fear it’s not. Perhaps this is just my own personal failure, but my mother used to butcher that Ernest Hemingway quote about sitting at the typewriter and opening a vein. Here’s every nepo baby’s open secret—no matter how hard we work, no matter how good our work might be, the tormenting gift of celebrity and notoriety passed down from our parents nullifies everything we do. Some of us admit this.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She’s just a nice woman!  On Beauty Besides, I didn’t like the nurse! She was a harpy – mean and bony. Bit feminist, you know. She wasn’t nice to me, son. She was unhinged . . .’ A few tears, here. Wiping them sloppily with the sleeve of his cardigan. ‘But I stopped the service – last year I stopped it. Your Kiki did it for me. It’s in me little book. You ain’t paying for it. There’s no . . . no . . . bugger, WHAT IS THE NAME OF IT? Debit . . . my mind goes . . . debit . . .’ ‘ Direct debit ,’ supplied Howard, raising his own voice and hating himself now. ‘It’s not the bloody money, is it, Dad? It’s about a standard of care.’ ‘I care for meself !’ And then, under his breath, ‘ I bloody have to . . .’ So how long was that? Eight minutes? Harry on the edge of his seat, pleading, and always pleading with the wrong words. Howard already incensed, looking at the rose in the ceiling. A stranger could come in now and think them both completely insane. And neither man would be able to give an account of why what had just happened had happened, or at least no account that would be shorter than sitting down with the stranger and taking them through an oral history – with slides – of the past fifty-seven years, day by day. They didn’t mean it to be like this. But it was like this. Both had other intentions. Howard had knocked on the door eight minutes ago filled with hope, his heart loosened by music, his mind stunned and opened by the appalling proximity of death. He was a big malleable ball of potential change, waiting on the doorstep. Eight minutes ago. But once inside, everything was the same as it had always been. He didn’t mean to be so aggressive, or to raise his voice or to pick fights. He meant to be kind and tolerant. Equally, four years ago, Harry surely hadn’t meant to tell his only son that you couldn’t expect black people to develop mentally like white people do. He had meant to say: I love you, I love my grandchildren, please stay another day. ‘Here you are,’ sang Carol, and put two unappetizing milky teas before the Belseys. ‘No, I won’t stay. I’ll be going.’ Harold wiped yet another tear away. ‘Carol, don’t go! This is my son. Howard, I’ve told you about him.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ said Carol, but she did not look charmed and now Howard regretted having spoken so loudly. ‘Dr Howard Belsey.’ ‘Doctor!’ cried Carol, without smiling. She crossed her arms across her chest, waiting to be impressed. ‘No, no . . . not medical,’ clarified Harold and looked defeated. ‘He didn’t have the patience for medical.’ ‘Oh, well,’ said Carol, ‘we can’t all save lives.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Exile is a correlative for all human loss, and Nabokov records with infinite tenderness the constrictions the heart must suffer; even in his most parodic novels, such as Lolita, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain. “Pity,” says John Shade, “is the password.” Nabokov’s are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic “prison of mirrors” where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to use another prison trope, drawn from the story “The Assistant Producer” [1943], in Nabokov’s Dozen [1958]). The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov. He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral resonance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of Lolita that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.” The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often overlooked by critics. In Pnin the gentle, addlepated professor is seen in a new light in the final chapter, when the narrator assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity “the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the Commentary, Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “The past [is] the past,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel, when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost. As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a grotesque cul-de-sac. Lolita is the last book one would offer as “autobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor in The Gift, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything “on the very brink of parody ... there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it”. An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes on a new life: frozen in art, halted in space, now timeless, it can be lived with.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  sed exequias suas. Ac dum maesti parentes et tanto malo perciti nefarium facinus perficere cunctantur, ipsa illa filia talibus eos adhortatur vocibus : * Quid infelicem senectam fletu diutino cruciatis? Quid spiritum vestrum, qui magis meus est, crebris eiula- tibus fatigatis? Quid lacrimis inefficacibus ora mihi veneranda foedatis? Quid laceratis in vestris oculis mea lumina? Quid canitiem scinditis? Quid pec- tora, quid ubera sancta tunditis? Haec erunt vobis egregiae formositatis meae praeclara praemia? In- vidiae nefariae letali plaga percussi sero sentitis. Cum gentes et populi celebrarent nos divinis honori- bus, eum novam me Venerem ore consono nuncu- parent, tune dolere, tunc flere, tunc me iam quasi peremptam lugere debuistis: iam sentio, iam video solo me nomine Veneris perisse. Ducite me, et cui sors addixit scopulo sistite : festino felices istas nup- tias obire, festino generosum illum maritum meum videre. Quid differo? Quid detrecto venientem 35 qui totius orbis exitio natus est?’ Sic profata virgo conticuit ingressuque iam valido pompae populi pro- sequentis sese miscuit. Itur ad constitutum scopu- lum montis ardui, cuius in summo cacumine statutam puellam cuncti deserunt, taedasque nuptiales, quibus praeluxerant, ibidem lacrimis suis extinctas relin- quentes deiectis capitibus domuitionem parant, et miseri quidem parentes eius tanta clade defessi clausae domus abstrusi tenebris perpetuae nocti sese 196 | ! THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  weep, so far was he stricken into dolour, but pre- sently taking the knife wherewith he had but now divided the cheese and other meat for his guests, he cut his own throat with many blows like his most unhappy son, in such sort that he fell head foremost upon the board and washed away with the streams of his blood in most miserable manner those pro- digious drops which had before fallen thereon. Hereby was my master the gardener deprived of his hope, and pitying very greatly the evil fortune of the house, which in a brief moment of time had thus fallen in ruins, and getting instead of his dinner the watery tears of his eyes, and clapping oft-times together his empty hands, mounted upon my back, and so we went homeward the same way as we came. Yet was our return not free from harm: for as we passed by the way we met with a tall soldier (for so his habit and countenance declared) which was a legionary, who with proud and arrogant words spake to my master in this sort: “Whither lead you this ass unladen?” My master, still somewhat astonished and fearful at the strange sights which he saw before, and ignorant of the Latin tongue, rode on and spake never a word. The soldier, unable to refrain his proper insolence and offended at his silence as it were an insult, struck him with a vine- stick which he held on the shoulders, and thrust him from my back. Then my master gently made answer that he knew not his tongue and so under- stood not what he said ; whereat the soldier angrily. demanded again, but in Greek, whither he rode with his ass: “ Marry," quoth he, * To the next city." « But I,” quoth the soldier, Have need of his help, to carry the trusses of our captain with the other beasts from yonder castle"; and therewithal he 463 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  xesecto, ursae magnificum despoliavit latronem. Sic etiam Thrasyleon nobis perivit sed a gloria non peri- vit. Confestim itaque constrictis sarcinis illis, quas nobis servaverant fideles mortui, Plataeae terminos concito gradu deserentes, istud apud nostros animos identidem reputabamus, merito nullam fidem in vita nostra repperiri, quod ad manes iam et mortuos odio perfidiae nostrae demigrarit. Sic onere vecturae simul et asperitate viae toti fatigati, tribus comitum desideratis, istas quas videtis praedas adveximus." 22 Postistum sermonis terminum poculis aureis memo- riae defunctorum commilitonum vine mero libant, dehine canticis quibusdam Marti deo blanditi paulu- lum conquiescunt. Enim nobis anus illa recens hor- deum affatim et sine ulla mensura largita est, ut equus quidem meus tanta copia et quidem solus potitus saliares se cenasse cenas? crederet : ego vero, qui numquam alias hordeum cibatus ni minutatum et diutina coquitatione iurulentum semper eserim,? rimatus angulum quo panes reliquiae totius multi- tudinis congestae fuerant, fauces diutina fame saucias et araneantes valenter exerceo. Et ecce nocte pro- mota latrones expergiti castra commovent instruc- tique varie, partim gladiis armati, partim 4^ in Lemures reformati, concito se gradu proripiunt. Nec me tamen instanter ac fortiter manducantem 1 Vulcanius’ emendation for the MSS’ aspere. 2 Luetjohann's emendation, slightly changed by van der Vliet. The best MS has sales secenas, with a lacuna of about five letters after the last word. 3 The whole of this passage is very corruptin the MSS, The 176 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV skin from the hardy and venturous thief. In this manner there was lost to us also our captain Thrasy- leon, but there was not lost to him his fame and honour. When all this was done, we packed up our treasure which the faithful dead in the sepulchre had kept for us, and we got us out of the bounds of Plataea, thinking always with ourselves that there was no fidelity to be found amongst the living; and no wonder, for that it hath passed over to the ghosts and the dead in hatred of our deceitfulness. And so, being wearied with the weight of our burdens, and very tired with our rough travel, having thus lost three of our soldiers, we are come home with this present prey that you see."

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Alas what a pittifull sight it was to see our poore Thrasileon thus environed and compassed with so many dogs that tare and rent him miserably. Then I impatient of so great a misery, ranne in among the prease of people, and ayding him with my words as much as I might, exhorted them all in this manner: O great and extreame mischance, what a pretious and excellent beast have we lost. But my words did nothing prevaile, for there came out a tall man with a speare in his hand, that thrust him cleane through, and afterwards many that stood by drew out their swords, and so they killed him. But verily our good Captaine Thrasileon, the honour of our comfort, received his death so patiently, that he would not bewray the league betweene us, either by crying, howling, or any other meanes, but being torn with dogs and wounded with weapons, did yeeld forth a dolefull cry, more like unto a beast than a man. And taking his present fortune in good part, with courage and glory enough did finish his life, with such a terror unto the assembly, that no person was hardy until it was day, as to touch him, though hee were starke dead: but at last there came a Butcher more valiant than the rest, who opening the panch of the beast, slit out an hardy and ventrous theefe. In this manner we lost our Captain Thrasileon, but he left not his fame and honour. When this was done wee packed up our treasure, which we committed to the sepulchre to keepe, and got out of the bounds of Platea, thus thinking with our selves, that there was more fidelity amongst the dead than amongst the living, by reason that our preyes were so surely kept in the sepulchre. So being wearied with the weight of our burthens, and well nigh tyred with long travell, having lost three of our soldiers, we are come home with these present cheats. Thus when they had spoken in memory of their slaine companions, they tooke cups of gold, and sung hymns unto the god mars, and layd them downe to sleep. Then the old woman gave us fresh barley without measure, insomuch that my horse fed so abundantly that he might well thinke hee was at some banquet that day. But I that was accustomed to eat bran and flower, thought that but a sower kinde of meate. Wherfore espying a corner where lay loaves of bread for all the house I got me thither and filled my hungry guts therewith. THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER How the Theeves stole away a Gentlewoman, and brought her to their den.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  LUCIUS APULEIUS animam. Sed intervallo revalescente paulatim spi- ritu, ferinos mugitus iterans et iam scaenam pessimi Thrasylli perspiciens, ad limam consilii desiderium petitoris distulit. Tunc inter moras umbra illa misere trucidati Tlepolemi sanie cruentam et pallore deformem attollens faciem quietem pudicam inter- pellat uxoris : * Mi coniux (quod tibi prorsus ab alio dici non licebit) etsi pectori tuo iam perimitur nostri memoria, vel acerbae mortis meae casus foedus caritatis intercidit, quovis alio felicius maritare, modo ne in Thrasylli manum sacrilegam convenias, neve sermonem conferas nec mensam accumbas nec toro acquiescas. Fuge mei percussoris cruentam dex- teram: noli parrieidio nuptias auspicari. ^ Vulnera illa, quorum sanguinem tuae lacrimae proluerunt, non sunt tota dentium vulnera: lancea mali Thra- syli me tibi fecit alienum ': et addidit cetera omnemque scaenam sceleris illuminavit. At illa, ut primum maesta quieverat toro faciem impressa, etiam nunc dormiens lacrimis emanantibus genas cohumidat et velut quodam tormento inquieta quieti excussa, luctu redintegrato prolixum eiulat,! discissaque in- terula decora brachia saevientibus palmulis conver- berat. Nec tamen cum quoquam participatis noc- 1 The end of ch. 7 and the beginning of ch.8, as well as the end of ch. 8 and the beginning of ch. 9, have suffered by a bad tear in the parchment of the best MS. In both passages the text is a little uncertain. 358 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII end, when her spirits were revived and that she returned to herself crying and shrieking like some beast, remembering all that had passed with the wicked Thrasyllus, she demanded respite to de- liberate and to take advice on the matter. “In the mean season of delay the shape of Tlepolemus that was slain so miserably appeared to Charite as she chastely slept, with a pale and bloody face, saying: ‘O my sweet wife (a name which no other person shall say but I), even if the memory of me in thy heart groweth dim, or the remembrance faileth of my pitiful death, in so much that our bond of love hath been severed, marry happily with any other person, so that you marry not with the traitor Thrasyllus; have no conference with him, eat not with him, lie not with him ; avoid the bloody hand of mine enemy, let not thy marriage be begun with parricide.1 For those wounds, the blood whereof thy tears did wash away, were not all the wounds of the teeth of the boar, but the spear of wicked Thrasyllus parted me from thee.’ Thus spoke Tlepolemus unto his loving wife, and declared the whole residue of the damnable fact. But Charite lay as she had first fallen asleep, with her face buried in her pillow; now she wetted her cheeks with her welling tears: and now aroused as by some new anguish, she began to cry aloud as if she renewed her dolour, to tear her garments, and to beat her comely arms with her furious hands: howbeit she revealed the vision which she saw to

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  8 Inter haee quaedam mulier per medium theatrum laerimosa et flebilis, atra veste contecta, parvulüm quendam sinu tolerans decurrit, ac pone eam anus alia pannis horridis obsita paribusque maesta fletibus, ramos oleagineos utraeque quatientes, quae circum- 110 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK III esteemed mine innocency above all the treasure of the world, can find no reasonable cause why, having justly punished these evil robbers, I should now be accused and condemned to die; since there is none that can affirm that there has been at any time either grudge or hatred between us, or that we were aught but men mere strangers and of no acquaintance; and last of all, no man can prove that I committed that deed for any lucre or gain." When I had ended my words in this sort, behold I wept again piteously, and holding up my hands, I prayed all the people by their common mercy and for the love of their poor infants and children to shew me some pity and favour. And when I believed their hearts somewhat relented and moved by my lamentable tears, Í called upon the eyes of the sun and of Justice to witness that I was not guilty of the crime, and so to the divine providence I committed my present estate; but lifting up somewhat mine eyes again, I perceived that all the people laughed with exceeding laughter, and especially my good friend and host Milo. Then thought I with my- self: “Alas! where is faith, where is conscience ? Behold for the safeguard of mine host and his family I am a slayer of men, and brought to the bar as a murderer. Yet is he not contented with coming not to comfort and help me, but likewise laugheth with all his heart at my destruction." ! When this was a-doing, out came a woman weeping into the middle of the theatre arrayed in mourning vesture, and bearing a child in her arms. And after her came an old woman in ragged robes crying and howling likewise : and these brought with them olive-boughs, and going about the bier whereon lay the three slain bodies all covered up, with loud 111 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Incontinently came Thrasillus, the detestable demander of sodaine pleasure, and wearied the closed eares of Charites with talke of marriage, but she gently refused his communication, and coloring the matter, with passing craft in the middest of his earnest desires gan say, Thrasillus you shall understand that yet the face of your brother and my husband, is alwayes before mine eies, I smell yet the Cinamon sent of his pretious body, I yet feele Lepolemus alive in my heart: wherefore you shall do well if you grant to me miserable woman, necessarie time to bewaile his death, that after the residue of a few months, the whole yeare may be expired, which thing toucheth as well my shame as your wholsome profit, lest peradventure by your speed and quicke marriage we should justly raise and provoke the spirit of my husband to worke our destruction. Howbeit, Thrasillus was not contented with this promise, but more and more came upon her: Insomuch, that she was enforced to speake to him in this manner: My friend Thrasillus, if thou be so contented untill the whole yeare be compleate and finished, behold here is my bodie, take thy pleasure, but in such sort and so secret that no servant of the house may perceive it. Then Thrasillus trusting to the false promises of the woman, and preferring his inordinate pleasure above all things in the world, was joyfull in his heart and looked for night, when as he might have his purpose. But come thou about midnight (quoth Charites) disguised without companie, and doe but hisse at my chamber doore, and my nourse shall attend and let thee in. This counsell pleased Thrasillus marveilously, who (suspecting no harme) did alwaies looke for night, and the houre assigned by Charites.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded-by their children's murderers, after all-to cease having children. But I was haunted, too, by the fact that it is Dr. Manette's testimony, written in prison, and recuperated by Ernest De farge upon the storming of the Bastille, which dooms his son in-l aw to death. The Defarges seize and hide this document in order to use it against the son-in-law at the latter's trial: at which trial, Dr. Manette is chief witness for the defense-or, in other words, in fact, his son-in-l aw's only hope. Manette wrote his testimony in agony and silence, never expecting to sec his daughter again, and unable, of course, to imagine that his daughter would marry one of the descendants of the house which had condemned him to a living death. His testimony ends: them and their descendant s, to the last of their race, I ... denounce them to Heaven and to earth. His son in-law is the descendant of the "race" which had imprisoned him, and the "last" of that race, denounced by him, is Aesh of his flesh, his granddaughter. Which connected for me, hor ribly, with the testimony of Madame Defarge, sister of the murdered boy: that brother was my brother, that father was my father, those dead are my dead and that summons to answer for CHAPTER ONE 491 all those things descends to me! Her husband reluctantly agrees that this is so, whereupon Madame Dcfargc says, Then tell wind and fire where to stop, bttt don't tell me! I understood that: I had seen it in the face, heard it in the voice of many a black man or woman, sweeping the pavement, wrestling with the garbage cans, men and women whose chil dren were dying faster than those MGM extras dropping from the drawbridge. If I love you, I love yott, and I don't give a damn. Yott my nigger, nigger, if you don 't get no bigger. I will cut yottr dick off, I will cut yottr balls out. I ain' t got to do nothing bttt stay black and die and I'm black already! Honey. Don't be like that. Honey. Don't do me like that. We in this shit together, and yott need me and I need yott, now ain't that so?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I saw Jim Brown at a distance, but he didn't sec me. I leaned up on the car, making frantic signals, and, finally, someone on the church steps did see me and came to the car and sort of lif ted me over. I talked to Jim Brown fi>r a minute, and then somebody led me into the church and I sat down. TO BE BAP TIZED 449 The church was packed, of course, incredibly so. Far in the front, I saw Harry Bel atonte sitting next to Caretta King. I had interviewed Caretta years ago, when I was doing a profile on her husba nd. We had got on very well; she had a nice, free laugh. Ralph David Abernathy sat in the pulpit. I remembered him from years ago, sitting in his shirtsleeves in the house in Montgomery, big, black, and cheerful, pouring some cool soft drink, and, later, getting me settled in a nearby hotel. In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt---c overed in black, looking like a lost ten-year-old girl-and Sidney Poirier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a te n sion indescribable-as though something, perhaps the heav ens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still . The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church ser vice I've ever sat through in my lite, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep tor Martin; tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep fix, if one was to weep--so many of us, cut down, so soon . Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Rev erend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved-"once more," said Ralph David, "f or Martin and tor me," and he sat down. The long, dark sister, whose name I do not remember, rose, very beautiful in her robes, and in her covered grief, and be gan to sing. It was a song I knew: "My Heavenly Father Watches Over Me." The song rang out as it might have over dark fields, long ago; she was singing of a covenant a people had made, long ago, with lif e, and with that larger life which ends in revelation and which moves in love . He guides the eagle through the pathless air.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And this hurt me. They should have known me better, or at least enough, to have known that I meant what I said. But the general reaction to famous people who hold difficult opinions is that they can't really mean it. It's considered, generally, to be merely an astute way of attracting public attention, a way of making oneself interesting: one marches in Montgomery, for example, merely (in my own case) to sell one's books. Well. There is nothing, then, to be said. There went the friendly fried chicken dinner. There went the loving past. I watched the mother watching me, wonder ing what had happened to her beloved Jimmy, and giving me up: her sourest suspicions confirmed. In great weariness I poured myself yet another stiff drink, by now definitively con demned, and lit another cigarette, they watching me all the while for symptoms of cancer, and with a precipice at my feet. for that bloody suit was their suit, after all , it had been TAKE ME TO THE WA TER bought for them, it had even been bought by them: they had created Martin, he had not created them, and the blood in which the fabric of that suit was stiffening was theirs. The distance between us, and I had never thought of this bef ore, was that they did not know this, and I now dared to realize that I loved them more than they loved me. And I do not mean that my love was greater: who dares judge the inex pressible expense another pays for his lif e? who knows how much one is lov ed, by whom, or what that love may be called on to do? No, the way the cards had fallen meant that I had to face more about them than they could know about me, knew their rent, whereas they did not know mine, and was condemned to make them uncomfortable. For, on the other hand, they certainly wanted that freedom which they thought was mine-that frightening limousine, for example, or the power to give away a suit, or my increasingly terrifYing trans Atlantic journeys. How can one say that freedom is taken, not given, and that no one is free until all are free? and that the price is high. My friend tried on the suit, a perfect fit, and they all ad mired him in it, and I went home. Well. Time passes and passes. It passes backward and it passes forward and it carries you along, and no one in the whole wide world knows more about time than this: it is car rying you through an element you do not understand into an element you will not remember. Yet, something remembers it can even be said that something avenges: the trap of our century, and the subject now before us.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to or fr om church. I was in high school and had been doing a lot of writing and I was, at about this time, the editor of the high school magazine. But I had also been a Young Minister and had been preaching from the pulpit. Lately, I had been taking fe wer engagements and preached as rarely as possible. It was said in the church, quite truthfully, that I was "cooling off. " My father asked me abruptly, "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?" I was astonished at his question-because it was a real ques tion. I answered, "Y cs." That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all we had ever said. The casket now was opened and the mourners were being led up the aisle to look fo r the last time on the deceased. The assumption was that the fa mily was too overcome with grief to be allowed to make this journey alone and I watched while my aunt was led to the casket and, muffled in black, and shak ing, led back to her scat. I disapproved of fo rcing the children to look on their dead fa ther, considering that the shock of his death, or, more truthfully, the shock of death as a reality, was already a little more than a child could bear, but my judgment in this matter had been overruled and there they were, be wildered and frightened and very small, being led, one by one, to the casket. But there is also something very gallant about children at such moments. It has something to do with their silence and gravity and with the fa ct that one cannot help them. Their legs, somehow, seem exposed, so that it is at once incredible and terribly clear that their legs arc all they have to hold them up. I had not wanted to go to the casket myself and I certainly had not wished to be led there, but there was no way of avoid ing either of these f(mns. One of the deacons led me up and I looked on my fa ther's face. I cannot say that it looked like him at all. His blackness had been equivocated by powder and there was no suggestion in that casket of what his power had or could have been. He was simply an old man dead, and it was hard to believe that he had ever given anyone either joy NOTES OF A NATIVE SON 81 or pain. Yet, his life filled that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his newborn child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the life of man.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then all we of the house, with all the Citizens, ranne incontinently after her to take the sword out of her hand, but she clasping about the tombe of Lepolemus, kept us off with her naked weapon, and when she perceived that every one of us wept and lamented, she spake in this sort: I pray you my friends weepe not, nor lament for me, for I have revenged the death of my husband, I have punished deservedly the wicked breaker of our marriage; now is it time to seeke out my sweet Lepolemus, and presently with this sword to finish my life. And therewithall after she had made relation of the whole matter, declared the vision which she saw and told by what meane she deceived Thrasillus, thrusting her sword under her right brest, and wallowing in her owne bloud, at length with manly courage yeelded up the Ghost. Then immediately the friends of miserable Charites did bury her body within the same Sepulchre. Thrasillus hearing all the matter, and knowing not by what meanes he might end his life, for he thought his sword was not sufficient to revenge so great a crime, at length went to the same Sepulchre, and cryed with a lowd voice, saying: o yee dead spirites whom I have so highly and greatly offended, vouchsafe to receive me, behold I make Sacrifice unto you with my whole body: which said, hee closed the Sepulchre, purposing to famish himselfe, and to finish his life there in sorrow. These things the young man with pitifull sighes and teares, declared unto the Cowheards and Shepheards, which caused them all to weepe: but they fearing to become subject unto new masters, prepared themselves to depart away. THE THIRTY-THIRD CHAPTER How Apuleius was lead away by the Horsekeeper: and what danger he was in.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Wherefore towards night being very weary, I went to the Baines to refresh my selfe, and behold, I fortuned to espy my companion Socrates sitting upon the ground, covered with a torn and course mantle; who was so meigre and of so sallow and miserable a countenance, that I scantly knew him: for fortune had brought him into such estate and calamity, that he verily seemed as a common begger that standeth in the streets to crave the benevolence of the passers by. Towards whom (howbeit he was my singular friend and familiar acquaintance, yet half in despaire) I drew nigh and said, Alas my Socrates, what meaneth this? how faireth it with thee? What crime hast thou committed? verily there is great lamentation and weeping for thee at home: Thy children are in ward by decree of the Provinciall Judge: Thy wife (having ended her mourning time in lamentable wise, with face and visage blubbered with teares, in such sort that she hath well nigh wept out both her eyes) is constrained by her parents to put out of remembrance the unfortunate losse and lacke of thee at home, and against her will to take a new husband. And dost thou live here as a ghost or hogge, to our great shame and ignominy? Then he answered he to me and said, O my friend Aristomenus, now perceive I well that you are ignorant of the whirling changes, the unstable forces, and slippery inconstancy of Fortune: and therewithall he covered his face (even then blushing for very shame) with his rugged mantle insomuch that from his navel downwards he appeared all naked. But I not willing to see him any longer in such great miserie and calamitie, took him by the hand and lifted him up from the ground: who having his face covered in such sort, Let Fortune (quoth he) triumph yet more, let her have her sway, and finish that which shee hath begun. And therewithall I put off one of my garments and covered him, and immediately I brought him to the Baine, and caused him to be anointed, wiped, and the filthy scurfe of his body to be rubbed away; which done, though I were very weary my selfe, yet I led the poore miser to my Inne, where he reposed his body upon a bed, and then I brought him meat and drinke, and so wee talked together: for there we might be merry and laugh at our pleasure, and so we were, untill such time as he (fetching a pittifull sigh from the bottom of his heart, and beating his face in miserable sort), began to say. THE THIRD CHAPTER How Socrates in his returne from Macedony to Larissa was spoyled and robbed, and how he fell acquainted with one Meroe a Witch.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  All along the street there arc people who watched me grow up, people who grew up with me, people I watched 1 70 FIF TH AVE NUE, UPTOWN 171 grow up along with my brothers and sisters; and, sometimes in my arms, sometimes underfoot, sometimes at my shoul der--or on it- their children, a riot, a forest of children, who include my nieces and nephews. When we reach the end of this long block, we find ourselves on wide, filthy, hostile Fifth Avenue, facing that project which hangs over the avenue like a monument to the folly, and the cowardice, of good intentions. All along the block, for anyone who knows it, are immense human gaps, like craters. These gaps are not created merely by those who have moved away, inevitably into some other ghetto; or by those who have risen, almost always into a greater capacity for self -loathing and self delusion; or yet by those who, by whatever means-War II, the Korean war, a policeman's gun or billy, a gang war, a brawl, madness, an overdose of heroin, or, simply, unnatural ex haustion-are dead. I am talking about those who are lef t, and I am talking principally about the young. What are they doing? Well, some, a minority, are fanatical churchgoers, members of the more extreme of the Holy Roller sects. Many, many more are "moslems," by affiliation or sympathy, that is to say that they are united by nothing more-and nothing less-than a hatred of the white world and all its works. They are present, for example, at every Buy Black street-corner meeting-meetings in which the speaker urges his hearers to cease trading with white men and establish a separate econ omy. Neither the speaker nor his hearers can possibly do this, of course, since Negroes do not own General Motors or RCA or the A & P, nor, indeed, do they own more than a wholly insufficient fraction of anything else in Harlem (those who do own anything are more interested in their profits than in their fellow s). But these meetings nevertheless keep alive in the par ticipators a certain pride of bitterness without which, however futile this bitterness may be, they could scarcely remain alive at all . Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, brothers, or uncles, and only lea ve the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "H ow're you making it?" one may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV- ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shame faced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one 1� 2 NOBODY KN OWS MY NAME is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world .

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Since Martin's death, in Memphis, and that tremendous day in Atlanta, something has altered in me, something has gone away. Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make-indeed, I can see that a great deal of what the knowl edgeable would call my life-style is dictated by this reluctance. Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented mir acle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin was still alive. One could scarcely be deluded by Americans anymore, one 35 8 NO NAME IN THE STREET scarcely dared expect anything fr om the great, vast, blank gen erality; and yet one was compelled to demand of Americans and for their sakes, after all-a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of them selves. Part of the error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the existence of an entity which, when the chips were down, could not be lo cated-i.e., there are no American people yet: but to this spec ulation (or desperate hope) we shall presently return. Perhaps, however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself. How ever that may be, the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up, and condemn, forever, those de scendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arro gantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans. The mind is a strange and terrible vehicle, moving accord ing to rigorous rules of its own; and my own mind, after I had left Atlanta, began to move backward in time, to places, people, and events I thought I had forgotten. Sorrow drove it there, I think, sorrow, and a certain kind of bewilderment, triggered, perhaps, by something which happened to me in connection with Martin's funeral. When Martin was murdered, I was based in Hollywood, working-working, in fact, on the screen version of The Auto biography of Malcolm X.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  With these NOTES OF A NATIVE SON 79 several schisms in the mind and with more terrors in the heart than could be named, it was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knOJvest this man's fall; but thou knoll' est not his wrassling. While the preacher talked and I watched the children years of changing their diapers, scrubbing them, slapping them, taking them to school, and scolding them had had the perhaps inevitable result of making me lm·e them, though I am not sure I knew this then-my mind was busily breaking out with a rash of disconnected impressions. Snatches of pop ular songs, indecent jokes, bits of books I had read, movie sequences, fa ces, voices, political issues-! thought I was go ing mad; all these impressions suspended, as it were, in the solution of the fa int nausea produced in me by the heat and liquor. For a moment I had the impression that my alcoholic breath, inefficiently disguised with chewing gum, filled the entire chapel. Then someone began singing one of my fa ther's favorite songs and, abruptly, I was with him, sitting on his knee, in the hot, enormous, crowded church which was the first church we attended. It was the Abyssinia Baptist Church on 1 3 8th Street. We had not gone there long. With this image, a host of others came. I had fo rgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my fa ther had been of me when I was little. Apparently, I had had a voice and my father had liked to show me off before the members ofthe church. I had fo rgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I remembered that he had always been grinning with pleasure when my solos ended. I e,·en remembered certain expressions on his fa ce when he teased my mother-had he loved her? I would never know. And when had it all begun to change? For now it seemed that he had not always been cruel. I remembered being taken fo r a haircut and scraping my knee on the fo otrest of the barber's chair and I remembered my father's face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine. Then I remembered our fights, fights which had been of the worst possible kind because my technique had been silence. I remembered the one time in all our life together when we had really spoken to each other. 8o NOTES OF A NATIVE SON It was on a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I leti: home.