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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed. It was a long and exhausting but beautiful day. When I got back to the hotel I was grateful for the two-hour break before my next speaking commitment. I don’t know what prompted me to turn on the television, but I’d been away from home for four days and hadn’t seen any headlines. The local news blasted into my room. The unfamiliar Swedish TV anchors were chatting away when I heard my name. It was the piece the crew had filmed with me; familiar images filled the screen. I watched myself walking with the reporter into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, then up the street to the Civil Rights Memorial. The scene then switched to Walter, standing in overalls amid his pile of discarded cars down in Monroeville. Walter gently put down a little kitten he’d been holding as he started to answer the reporters’ questions. He’d mentioned to me previously that all kinds of cats had sought shelter in his field of abandoned metal. He said things I’d heard him say dozens of times before. Then I watched his expression change, and he began talking with more animation and excitement than I’d ever heard from him. He became uncharacteristically emotional. “They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job. I lost my wife. I lost my reputation. I lost my—I lost my dignity.” He was speaking loudly and passionately and looked to be on the verge of tears. “I lost everything,” he continued. He calmed himself and tried to smile, but it didn’t work. He looked soberly at the camera. “It’s rough, it’s rough, man. It’s rough.” I watched worriedly while Walter crouched down close to the ground and began to sob violently. The camera stayed on him while he cried. The report switched back to me saying something abstract and philosophical, and then it was over. I was stunned.

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

  AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 373. 3.) O blessed infants! He only will doubt of your crown in this your passion for Christ, who doubts that the baptism of Christ has a benefit for infants. He who at His birth had Angels to proclaim Him, the heavens to testify, and Magi to worship Him, could surely have prevented that these should not have died for Him, had He not known that they died not in that death, but rather lived in higher bliss. Far be the thought, that Christ who came to set men free, did nothing to reward those who died in His behalf, when hanging on the cross He prayed for those who put Him to death. RABANUS. He is not satisfied with the massacre at Bethlehem, but extends it to the adjacent villages; sparing no age from the child of one night old, to that of two years. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 132. App.) The Magi had seen this unknown star in the heavens, not a few days, but two years before, as they had informed Herod when he enquired. This caused him to fix two years old and under; as it follows, according to the time he had enquired of the Magi. AUGUSTINE. (Gloss. ord.) Or because he feared that the Child to whom even stars ministered, might transform His appearance to greater or under that of His own age, or might conceal all those of that age: hence it seems to be that he slew all from one day to two years old. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. ii. 11.) Or, disturbed by pressure of still more imminent dangers, Herod’s thoughts are drawn to other thoughts than the slaughter of children, he might suppose that the Magi, unable to find Him whom they had supposed born, were ashamed to return to him. So the days of purification being accomplished, they might go up in safety to Jerusalem. And who does not see that that one day they may have escaped the attention of a King occupied with so many cares, and that afterwards when the things done in the Temple came to be spread abroad, then Herod discovered that he had been deceived by the Magi, and then sent and slew the children. BEDE. (Hom. in Nat. Innocent.) In this death of the children the precious death of all Christ’s martyrs is figured; that they were infants signifies, that by the merit of humility alone can we come to the glory of martyrdom; that they were slain in Bethlehem and the coasts thereof, that the persecution shall be both in Jerusalem whence the Church originated, and throughout the world; in those of two years old are figured the perfect in doctrine and works; those under that age the neophytes; that they were slain while Christ escaped, signifies that the bodies of the martyrs may be destroyed by the wicked, but that Christ cannot be taken from them. 2:17–1817. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This helplessness and this gnawing uneasiness docs something, at length, to even the toughest mind. Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew fe lt, mainly, a NOTES OF A NATIVE SON 7 5 peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle m·erseas. It was, perhaps, like te eling that the most dangerous part of a dan gerous journey had been passed and that no\\·, e\·en if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in short, a ta ct with which one could hope to Ji,·e. It was on the 28th of July, which I belie,·e was a Wednesday, that I \'isited my ta ther to r the first time during his illness and to r the last time in his lite. The moment I saw him I knew why I had put off this ,·isit so long. I had told my mother that I did not want to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was onlv that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be to rced to deal with pain. We traveled out to him, his older sister and myselt� to what seemed to be the very end of a ,·ery Long Island. It was hot and dusty and we wrangled, my aunt and I, all the way out, over the ta ct that I had recently begun to smoke and, as she said, to gi,·e myself airs. But I knew that she wrangled with me because she could not bear to tJ. ce the ta ct of her brother's dying. �either could I endure the reality of her despair, her unstated bafflement as to what had happened to her brother's lite, and her own. So we wrangled and I smoked and fr om time to time she te ll into a hea,·y re,·erie. Cm·ertly, I watched her ta ce, which was the tace of an old woman; it had ta llen in, the eyes were sunken and lightless; soon she would be dying, too. In my childhood-it had not been so long ago-! had thought her beautiful. She had been quick-\\itted and quick mm·ing and very generous with all the children and each of her visits had been an e\·ent. At one time one of my brothers and myself had thought of running away to Ji,·e \\ith her. :\'ow she could no longer produce out of her handbag some un expected and yet familiar delight. She made me te e! pity and re,·ulsion and tear.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  499 by the wartime death of a dear friend and who is offered nothing more than “rest” by way of treatment cannot bear to live any longer. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), the various members of a rural Southern family are so deeply divided psychically that they each take turns narrating the novel from their own idiosyncratic points of view. Held together by little more than their sense of obligation to a dying—then dead—woman who cared almost nothing for any of them, they feel bound to haul her steadily decomposing corpse for days until they can bury her in her native town. The last three writers grapple in different ways with the horrors of World War II. Just after the outbreak of the war in September 1939, Bertolt Brecht wrote Mother Courage and Her Children, a play that shows how the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) shattered Germany in general and one family in particular. In 1947, Camus published The Plague, a novel he wrote during the Second World War. Telling how an utterly unexpected outbreak of bubonic plague struck the Algerian city of Oran in the 1940s, how the whole city was placed under quarantine for 10 months, and how a dedicated doctor fought the plague with nothing but the weapons of healing, Camus symbolically represents the plague of war. Finally, in Waiting for Godot (1953), a play with no action at all in the conventional sense of the word, Samuel Beckett represents the human condition as one of interminable waiting for something that never comes. Throughout these lectures, we will see how a succession of writers at fi rst anticipates, then articulates the dilemmas of Modernism, which chronologically coincides with modernity but is quite distinct from it. While modernity is a condition largely created by technological advances, such as the invention of the automobile and the telephone, Modernism is a cultural condition characterized by a sense of isolation, collapsing social structures, and exploded assumptions. It culminates, we shall see, in the existentialism of the mid-20 th century, when such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre claim that all we know for certain is our existence, and Camus movingly argues that a Sisyphean life of struggle—regardless of its outcome or ultimate goal—must be its own reward. For all of their attention to Modernism and the historical contexts of modern literature, the lectures never lose sight of their primary object: the richness,

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Is that why she wanted it, is that why she wove it into her braid? At the house in Brentwood Park in which we lived from 1978 until 1988, a house so determinedly conventional (two stories, center-hall plan, shuttered windows, and a sitting room off every bedroom) as to seem in situ idiosyncratic (“their suburbia house in Brentwood” was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need), there was stephanotis growing outside the terrace doors. I would brush the waxy flowers when I went out to the garden. Outside the same doors there were beds of lavender and also mint, a tangle of mint, made lush by a dripping faucet. We moved into that house the summer she was about to start the seventh grade at what was then still the Westlake School for Girls in Holmby Hills. This was like yesterday. We moved out of that house the year she was about to graduate from Barnard. This too was like yesterday. The stephanotis and mint were dead by then, killed when the man who was buying the house insisted that we rid it of termites by tenting it and pumping in Vikane and chloropicrin. At the time this buyer bid on the house he sent us word via the brokers, apparently by way of closing the deal, that he wanted the house because he could picture his daughter marrying in the garden. This was a few weeks before he required us to pump in the Vikane that killed the stephanotis, killed the mint, and also killed the pink magnolia into which the twelve-year-old who took so assiduously removed a view of our suburbia house in Brentwood had until then been able to look from her second-floor sitting-room windows. The termites, I was quite sure, would come back. The pink magnolia, I was also quite sure, would not . We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married. Where I have lived again since 1988. Why then do I say I lived much of this time in California? Why then did I feel so sharp a sense of betrayal when I exchanged my California driver’s license for one issued by New York? Wasn’t that actually a straightforward enough transaction? Your birthday comes around, your license needs renewing, what difference does it make where you renew it?

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  245 In part two, the narrator, who had been reading the story in order to fall asleep, slumbers and has a dream. The narrator awakens, as it were, from his dream, joins a hunt, and then follows a puppy to a knight dressed in black who is sitting under a tree and reciting a mournful lament. The dreamer asks the knight why is lamenting so and learns that he has lost his lady-love, “White.” The knight goes on at some length, the narrator remarks that such lamentation is unnatural, and the dreamer is awakened by the sound of the hunt, which he rejoins. On one level, the story is about grief and about how excessive grief will turn into debilitating despair. Chaucer uses the narrator here more effectively than ever before. But how do we understand this narrator? Is it Chaucer, or John of Gaunt, or us? This most courtly of poems is not happy and has no happy ending. Is Chaucer tinkering with the conventions of courtly love or speaking of how “real” human beings respond to tragedy? The moral for John—and for all—is that he must remember and let go. Thus, the story is also an elegant re fl ection on memory. The Parliament of Fowls is different in tone and texture than Duchess. The poem may have been written in connection with Richard II’s marriage negotiations between 1377 and 1382. Parliament is Chaucer’s most experimental work to date in terms of language. Dreams work in various ways here: The narrator reads Macrobius’s account of Cicero’s rendition of the Dream of Scipio, only to discover that he has not learned what he desired. He falls asleep and dreams. In his dream, Scipio pushes him through a gate into a kind of love garden. Nature presides in this garden and arrayed before her are all the birds arranged hierarchically according to their diet, from meat to seed-eaters. Clearly, this is meant to mimic human society. The female eagle is about to choose a mate, and none of the other birds can get on with their own mating until “Formel Eagle” chooses her mate. Formel Eagle has three suitors, Royal Eagle and two others who go on and on—comically?—in pressing their claims. Eventually, Nature invites all the birds to adjudicate the matter. Predictably, they argue among themselves and begin to debate the relative merits of fi delity. Nature then tells Formel Eagle to choose for herself of her own free

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I think, in fact, that I counted on this coming about in some myster ious, irrevocable way, the way a child dreams of winning, by means of some dazzling exploit, the love of his parents. However, he is dead now, and so we never shall be recon ciled. The debt I owe him can now never be discharged, at least not in the way I hoped to be able to discharge it. In fact, the saddest thing about our relationship is that my only means of discharging my debt to Richard was to become a writer; and this eft(>rt revealed, more and more clearly as the years went on, the deep and irreconcilable differences between our points of view. This might not have been so serious if I had been older when we met .... If I had been, that is, less uncertain of my sclt� and less monstrously egotistical. But when we met, I was twenty, a carnivorous age; he was then as old as I am now, thirty-six ; he had been my idol since high school, and I, as ALAS, POOR RICH ARD 253 the fledgling Negro writer, was very shortly in the position of his protege. This position was not really fair to either of us. As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possibly be. But no one can read the fu ture, and neither of us knew this the n. We were linked together, really, because both of us were black. I had made my pilgrimage to meet him because he was the greatest black writer in the world tor me. In Uncle Tom)s Children, in Native Son, and, above all, in Black Boy, I found expressed, for the first time in my life, the sorrow, the rage, and the mur derous bitterness which was eat ing up my life and the lives of those around me. His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me. He became my ally and my witness, and alas! my father. I remember our first meeting very well. It was in Br ooklyn ; it was winter, I was broke, natural ly, shabby, hung ry, and scared. He appeared from the depths of what I remember as an extremely long apartment. Now his face, voice, manner, figure are all very sadly familiar to me. But they were a great shock to me th en. It is always a shock to meet famous men. There is always an irreducible injus tice in the encou nter, for the famous man cannot possibly fit the image which one has evolved of him. My own image of Richard was almost cer tainly based on Canada Lee's terrifYing stage portrait of Big ger Thomas. Richard was not like that at all.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3 rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of in justice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my fa ther's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my fa ther's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is some thing that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my fa ther for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own. I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, arc thicker than any where else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If it ever entered his head to bring a surprise home for his children, it was, almost untailingly, the wrong surprise and even the big watermelons he often brought home on his back in the sum mertime led to the most appalling scenes. I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was able to gather of his early lif e, it seemed that this inability to establish contact with other people had always marked him and had been one of the things which had driven him out of New Orleans. There was some thing in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which was never expressed and which was buried with him. One saw it most clearly when he was tacing new people and hoping to impress them. But he ne,·er did, not for long. We went trom church to smaller and more improbable church, he found himself in less and less demand as a minister, and by the time he died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the gra,·eyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine. When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father's bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had dis covered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for mv ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to Ji,·e . with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me. He had been ill a long time-in the mind, as we now re alized, reliving instances of his fantastic intransigence in the new light of his atlliction and endea,·oring to feel a sorrow for him which never, quite, came true.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. But we as it seems are the first who have received from our very cradles the rudiments of Christian teaching, and perhaps shall be last in respect of the heathens who have believed at the end of life. BEDE. Many also at first burning with zeal, afterwards grow cold; many at first cold, on a sudden become warm; many despised in this world, will be glorified in the world to come; others renowned among men, will in the end be condemned. 13:31–3531. The same day there came certain of the Pharisees, saying unto him, Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee. 32. And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. 33. Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. 34. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! 35. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate: and verily I say unto you, Ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. The preceding words of our Lord roused the Pharisees to anger. For they perceived that the people were now smitten in their hearts, and eagerly receiving His faith. For fear then of losing their office as rulers of the people, and lacking their gains, with pretended love for Him, they persuade Him to depart from hence, as it is said, The same day there came certain of the Pharisees, saying unto him, Get thee out and depart hence, for Herod will kill thee: but Christ, who searcheth the heart and the reins, answers them meekly and under figure. Hence it follows, And he said unto them, Go ye and tell that fox. BEDE. Because of his wiles and stratagems He calls Herod a fox, which is an animal full of craft, concealing itself in a ditch because of snares, having a noisome smell, never walking in straight paths, all which things belong to heretics, of whom Herod is a type, who endeavours to destroy Christ (that is, the humility of the Christian faith) in the hearts of believers.

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

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

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

  For children of divorce, especially those in their teens or older, the family home also carries great meaning and they mourn its loss for years after the breakup. The home is the repository of the family they lost and the sense of continuity with their childhood that ended with the divorce. Some poignantly go back to the neighborhood where they grew up, gazing at the house from the outside, and sit there for hours with tears in their eyes. One young woman whose parents divorced when she was a senior in high school made regular pilgrimages during her college vacations just to see the family home and renew her memories. Will You Still Need Me … When I’m Sixty-four? T HE FAMILY AS symbol of continuity plays yet another role in the lives of adults whose parents have stayed together. When I asked Gary how he got along with his parents these days, he spoke about how much closer they had become in recent years. He said, “I guess I’ve come to appreciate that my dad and I have stayed close. We talk several times a week. It’s not so much father-son as man to man. It’s a precious relationship to both of us and it gets more so as the years go by.” I was interested in Gary’s response because it was different from what children of divorce were saying. There were very few father-son relationships among the adult children of divorce that grew to have the emotional richness that many sons in intact families described with so much pleasure. Rather, there was a widening gap between the generations. (Because this is so important, I will describe it in greater detail in Chapter 15 .) But men like Gary became close friends with their dads, even when those same fathers had not been around all that much during their childhoods. They said, “He’s changed, I’ve changed. We have more time to ourselves together.” It was a time of mellowing. What did they talk about? They talked shop, politics, sports, and grandchildren. This was a welcome second chance, which both men treasured, to become good friends. Those raised in intact marriages have a ringside seat at the changes in their parents’ relationship over the years, and this, too, helps them cope with vicissitudes in their own marriages. They understand that adults can treat each other differently at turning points such as when children leave home, a crisis hits, work schedules change, or their roles shift. They witness gradual changes as their parents reach middle age and retirement.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The woman who spoke seemed nervous and somewhat fearful. She spoke hesitantly: “I’m Rena Mae’s mother—the victim’s mother. They said they would help us, but they never did. MaryLynn can’t hear right, her hearing ain’t never been right since that bomb, and her sister has nerve problems. I got ’em, too. We were hoping you would help us.” The stunned look on my face prompted her to say more. “I know you’re busy. It’s just that we could use the help.” I realized that she’d cautiously offered her hand to me as she spoke, and I held it in mine. “I’m so very sorry you haven’t received the help you’ve been promised. But I actually represent Herbert Richardson in this case,” I said as gently as I could. “We know that. I know you might not be able to do anything right now, but when this is over, can you help us? They said we’d get some money for medical help and help for my daughter’s hearing.” A young woman had quietly approached the woman as she spoke to me and embraced her. While she was probably in her early twenties, she acted in every other respect like a very small child. She leaned her head into her mother’s side like a much younger child would and looked at me sadly. Another woman approached and spoke somewhat defiantly. “I’m her auntie,” she said. “We don’t believe in killin’ people.” I wasn’t exactly sure what she was trying to say, but I looked at her and replied, “Yes, I don’t believe in killing people, either.” The aunt seemed to relax a little. “All this grievin’ is hard. We can’t cheer for that man you trying to help but don’t want to have to grieve for him, too. There shouldn’t be no more killing behind this.” “I don’t know what I can do to help you all but I do want to help. Please contact me after August 18, and I’ll see what I can find out.” The aunt then asked me if she could have her son write to me because he was in prison and needed a lawyer. She sighed with relief when I gave her my card. As we all left the courthouse, we offered each other solemn goodbyes. “We’ll pray for you,” the aunt said as they departed. On the way to my car, I considered asking them to say something to the prosecutor and state lawyers about not wanting Mr. Richardson to be executed, although it was clear that the State wasn’t acting on behalf of these victims. The courtroom had been filled with state lawyers and other officials watching the hearing, but they had long since fled the courthouse without so much as a word to any of the battered souls standing in the back of the room. I was haunted by the tragic irony that they felt I was their best hope for help.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  127 Ambiguous or not, the Aeneid stands as one of the most in fl uential texts in Western culture. In late antiquity, it was one of the most commonly read and cited works; St. Augustine mentions weeping over Dido’s death. The Aeneid’s infl uence continued into the Middle Ages; Dante’s Divine Comedy is the most obvious example. The Aeneid’s popularity and in fl uence continued to grow during the Renaissance and after; the work of such authors as Marlowe, Spenser, and Milton is unimaginable without the Aeneid. ■ Virgil, The Aeneid. Bowra, “Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal.” Galinsky, “Anger of Aeneas.” Johnson, Darkness Visible. Parry, “Two V oices.” Stockton, “The Founding of the Empire.” Wiltshire, Public and Private. 1. Scholars disagree over whether the Aeneid is optimistic or pessimistic, pro-Augustan or anti-Augustan. Does it matter? Can we enjoy so very historically grounded an epic “on its own terms,” without reference to the author’s possible political agenda? 2. What is your own view of the end of the Aeneid? Is Aeneas justifi ed in killing Turnus? Why or why not? Questions to Consider Supplementary Reading Essential Reading

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The atmosphere was black, with a ten 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, "for 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 life, and with that larger life which ends in revelation and which moves in love. He guides the eagle through the pathless air. She stood there, and she sang it. How she bore it, I do not know; I think I have never seen a face quite like that t:Ke that afternoon. She was singing it tor Martin, and fix us. 4- 5 0 NO NAME IN THE STREET And sureZv, He Remembe1'S me. My heavenly Father watches over me. At last, we were standing, and filing out, to walk behind Martin, home. I found myself between Marlon and Sammy. I had not been aware of the people when I had been press ing past them to get to the church. But, now, as we came out, and I looked up the road, I saw them. They were all along the road, on either side, they were on all the roofs, on either side. Every inch of ground, as far as the eye could sec, was black with black people, and they stood in silence. It was the silence that undid me. I started to cry, and I stumbled, and Sammy grabbed my arm. We started to walk. A week or so later, Billy and I were having a few drinks in some place like The Factory, I think, and one of the young Hollywood producers came over to the table to insist that the Martin Luther King story should be done at once, and that I should write it.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois included in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a brilliant but haunting short story. I thought about “Of the Coming of John” on the drive home. In Du Bois’s story, a young black man in coastal Georgia is sent off hundreds of miles to a school that trains black teachers. The entire black community where he was born had raised the money for his tuition. The community invests in John so that he can one day return and teach African American children who are barred from attending the public school. Casual and fun-loving, John almost flunks out of his new school until he considers the trust he’s been given and the shame he would face if he returned without graduating. Newly focused, sober, and intensely committed to succeed, he graduates with honors and returns to his community intent on changing things. John convinces the white judge who controls the town to allow him to open a school for black children. His education has empowered him, and he has strong opinions about racial freedom and equality that land him and the black community in trouble. The judge shuts down the school when he hears what John’s been teaching. John walks home after the school’s closing frustrated and distraught. On the trip home he sees his sister being groped by the judge’s adult son and he reacts violently, striking the man in the head with a piece of wood. John continues home to say goodbye to his mother. Du Bois ends the tragic story when the furious judge catches up to John with the lynch mob he has assembled. I read the story several times in college because I identified with John as the hope of an entire community. None of my aunts or uncles had graduated from college; many hadn’t graduated from high school. The people in my church always encouraged me and never asked me for anything back, but I felt a debt accumulating. Du Bois understood this dynamic deeply and brought it to life in a way that absolutely fascinated me. (I just hoped that my parallel with John wouldn’t extend to the getting lynched part.) Driving home that night from meeting Walter’s family, I thought of the story in a whole new way. I had never before considered how devastated John’s community must have felt after his lynching. Things would become so much harder for the people who had given everything to help make John a teacher. For the surviving black community, there would be more obstacles to opportunity and progress and much heartache. John’s education had led not to liberation and progress but to violence and tragedy.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  wherefore she went thitherward, and with great paine and travell, moved by hope, after that she climbed to the top of the mountaine, she came to the temple, and went in, wheras behold she espied sheffes of corn lying on a heap, blades withered with garlands, and reeds of barly, moreover she saw hooks, sithes, sickles, and other instruments, to reape, but every thing lay out of order, and as it were cast in by the hands of laborers which when Psyches saw she gathered up and put everything in order, thinking that she would not despise or contemne the temples of any of the Gods, but rather get the favour and benevolence of them all: by and by Ceres came in, and beholding her busie and curious in her chapell, cried out a far off, and said, O Psyches needfull of mercy, Venus searcheth for thee in every place to revenge her selfe and to punish thee grievously, but thou hast more mind to be heere, and carest for nothing lesse, then for thy safety. Then Psyches fell on her knees before her, watring her feet with her teares, wiping the ground with her haire, and with great weeping and lamentation desired pardon, saying, O great and holy Goddesse, I pray thee by thy plenteous and liberall right hand, by the joyfull ceremonies of thy harvest, by the secrets of thy Sacrifice, by the flying chariots of thy dragons, by the tillage of the ground of Sicilie, which thou hast invented, by the marriage of Proserpin, by the diligent inquisition of thy daughter, and by the other secrets which are within the temple of Eleusis in the land of Athens, take pitty on me thy servant Psyches, and let me hide my selfe a few dayes amongst these sheffes of corne, untill the ire of so great a Goddesse be past, or until that I be refreshed of my great labour and travell. Then answered Ceres, Verely Psyches, I am greatly moved by thy prayers and teares, and desire with all my heart to aide thee, but if I should suffer thee to be hidden here, I should increase the displeasure of my Cosin, with whom I have made a treatie of peace, and an ancient promise of amity: wherefore I advise thee to depart hence and take it not in evil part in that I will not suffer thee to abide and remaine here within my temple. Then Psyches driven away contrary to her hope, was double afflicted with sorrow and so she returned back againe.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  39 Even after killing Hector, Achilles still cannot reconcile himself to Patroclus’s death. He refuses to give Patroclus his appropriate funeral rites until Patroclus’s ghost appears and asks for a funeral. Achilles complies with the ghost’s request with an elaborate ceremony. But after the funeral, Achilles still fasts, refrains from bathing, and drags Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’s tomb. Zeus sends Thetis to speak to Achilles and Iris to urge Priam to visit Achilles and ransom Hector’s body. Somehow, this visit from his enemy allows Achilles to accept the reality of death and loss as nothing else has. Priam enters Achilles’s tent and beseeches Achilles, in his own father’s name, to show pity and return Hector’s body. Achilles reacts with wonder, compassion, and grief to Priam’s request. The two enemies weep together, Priam for Hector and Achilles for Patroclus. Achilles comforts Priam by reminding him that all humans must bear grief and adversity. Achilles himself carries Hector’s body to Priam’s wagon. By recognizing the humanity of his enemy, Achilles fi nally accepts mortality and is reintegrated into humanity. Achilles himself serves a meal to Priam; after they eat, Achilles promises a truce of 11 days for Hector’s funeral. Achilles has a bed prepared for Priam, and he himself sleeps beside Briseis. This is our fi nal view of Achilles in the Iliad. The culminating paradox is that Achilles himself will now return to battle and die. ■ Homer, Iliad. Essential Reading 40 Lecture 7: Homer—The Iliad Edwards, Homer: Poet of the Iliad. Griffi n, Homer on Life and Death. Kirk, The Songs of Homer. Lord, Singer of Tales. Schein, The Mortal Hero. 1. Do you fi nd the resolution of the Iliad psychologically credible in its portrayal of the effect of Priam’s grief on Achilles? Why or why not? 2. Does the end of the Iliad give any role to kleos at all? Put another way, has Achilles reaccepted the norms of his society, along with accepting Patroclus’s death? Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  193 Roland urged that the offer be refused, but Ganelon ridicules Roland’s advice and says that there is no reason for many more Christians to die. Naimes, Charlemagne’s most trusted adviser, urges acceptance. One after another, Charlemagne’s greatest warriors offer to go as an emissary to carry the terms of peace. Charlemagne refuses each one in turn. Roland then nominates his stepfather (their relationship is never explained), Ganelon. Charlemagne accepts this nomination, but Ganelon is furious. Nevertheless, Ganelon goes to Marsilie and plots with him the destruction of Roland. Ganelon persuades Marsilie that Charlemagne will never abandon the war as long as Roland is alive. Ganelon is rewarded richly and sent back to Charlemagne. Charlemagne accepts the terms that are proposed but must appoint someone to protect his rearguard. Ganelon nominates Roland. The next great scene has Roland and his companions Oliver and the lordly Archbishop Turpin realizing that they have been betrayed and that Marsilie’s vast forces are approaching. Oliver three times asks Roland to sound his oliphant to summon Charlemagne. Roland refuses to dishonor himself and his family name by doing so. Battle is joined, and one by one, the great Franks are killed, each one killing countless Muslims before expiring. In a touching scene, a mortally wounded Oliver strikes by mistake at Roland. Sensing the inevitable, Roland blows his horn, bursts his temples—no enemy blow killed him—and expires. The third great scene has Charlemagne returning to Spain. He sees the utter destruction and grieves for his dead comrades. Leaving some men to attend to the dead, Charlemagne sets off in hot pursuit of the Muslims. Meanwhile Baligant, the emir of Babylon, from whom Marsilie had long ago requested aid, appears. Charlemagne wins a majestic battle. The fi nal scene treats the trial of Ganelon. Ganelon had already been arrested before Charlemagne returned to Spain. Back at Aachen (Aix), a trial is held. Ganelon argues that he has not betrayed Charlemagne but only avenged his own betrayal by Roland. Some of the nobles argue that all should be forgiven The form, content, and origins of the poem are somewhat mysterious and have occasioned a good deal of controversy.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Protestantism is the wrong religion tor people in such cli mates; America is perhaps the last nation in which such a climate belongs. In the Southern night everything seems 204 NOBODY KNOW S MY NAM E possible, the most private, unspeakable longings; but then ar rives the Southern day, as hard and brazen as the night was sotl: and dark. It brings what was done in the dark to light. It must have seemed something like this for those people who made the region what it is today. It must have caused them great pain. Perhaps the master who had coupled with his slave saw his guilt in his wife's pale eyes in the morning. And the wife saw his children in the slave quarters, saw the way his concubine, the sensual -lo oking black girl, looked at her-a woman, after all, and scarcely less sensual, but white. The youth, nursed and raised by the black Mammy whose arms had then held all that there was of warmth and love and desire, and still confounded by the dreadful taboos set up between himself and her progeny, must have wondered, after his first experiment with black flesh, where, under the blazing heav ens, he could hide. And the white man must have seen his guilt written somewhere else, seen it all the time, even if his sin was merely lust, even if his sin lay in nothing but his power: in the eyes of the black man . He may not have stolen his woman, but he had certainly stolen his freedom-this black man, who had a body like his, and passions like his, and a ruder, more erotic beauty. How many times has the Southern day come up to find that black man, sexless, hanging from a tree! It was an old black man in Atlanta who looked into my eyes and directed me into my first segregated bus. I have spent a long time thinking about that man. I never saw him again. I cannot describe the look which passed bet\veen us, as I asked him tor directions, but it made me think, at once, of Shake speare's "the oldest have borne most." It made me think of the blues: Now, when a woman gets the blues, Lord, she hangs her head and cries. But when a man gets the blues, Lord, he Jirabs a train and rides. It was borne in on me, suddenly, just why these men had so often been grabbing freight trains as the evening sun went down. And it was, perhaps, because I was getting on a segregated bus, and wondering how Negroes had borne this and other indignities for so long, that this man so struck me. He seemed to know what I was feeling.