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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether there is Hope in the Damned1. It seems that there is hope in the damned. For the devil is damned, and the prince of the damned, according to Matt. 25:41: “ Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. ” Yet the devil has hope, according to Job 41:9: “ Behold, the hope of him is in vain. ” It seems, therefore, that the damned have hope. 2. Again, just as faith can be formed and unformed, so can hope. Now there can be unformed faith in devils and in the damned, according to James 2:19: “ the devils also believe, and tremble. ” It seems, therefore, that there can be unformed hope in the damned. 3. Again, no man after death is credited either with a merit or with a demerit which he did not have in life, according to Eccl. 11:3: “ and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be. ” But many of the damned had hope in this life, and never despaired. They will therefore have hope in the life to come. On the other hand: hope causes joy, according to Rom. 12:12: “ Rejoicing in hope. ” Now the damned do not have joy, but rather sorrow and grief, according to Isa. 65:14: “ Behold, my servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for vexation of spirit. ” There is therefore no hope in the damned.

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

  He came up with an idea to win back his girlfriend. He decided that if she felt threatened, she would come to him for protection. He concocted a tragically misguided plan: He would construct a small bomb and place it on her front porch. He would detonate the bomb and then run to her aid to save her and then they would live happily ever after. It was the kind of reckless use of explosives that wouldn’t have been sensible in a combat zone, much less in a poor black neighborhood in Dothan, Alabama. One morning, Herbert completed his assembly of the bomb and placed it on his former girlfriend’s porch. The woman’s niece and another little girl came out instead and saw the peculiar package. The ten-year-old niece was drawn to the odd bag with a clock on it and picked up the device. She shook the clock to see if it would tick, which triggered a violent explosion. The child was killed instantly, and her twelve-year-old friend, who was standing next to her, was traumatized. Herbert knew both children. In this community, children were always roaming the streets looking for something to do. Herbert loved kids and would invite them into his yard, pay them to do errands, and talk to them. He started making cereal and cooking for the kids who would wander by. The two girls had come by his house for breakfast. Herbert, watching the house from across the street, was devastated. He had planned to run to his girlfriend’s aid when the bomb exploded to reinforce his readiness to protect her and to keep her safe. When the child picked up the bomb and it detonated, Herbert ran across the street and found himself in a circle of grieving neighbors. It didn’t take long for police to make an arrest. They found pipes and other bomb-making materials in Herbert’s car and front yard. Because the victims were black and poor, this wasn’t the kind of case that would usually be prosecuted as a capital crime, but Herbert wasn’t local. His identity as an outsider, a Northerner, and the nature of the crime seemed to generate heightened contempt from law enforcement officials. Placing a bomb anywhere in Dothan, even in a poor section of town, posed a different kind of threat than “typical” domestic violence. The prosecutor argued that Herbert was not just tragically misguided and reckless; he was evil.

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

  279 Thomas More Lecture 39 Thanks to the successful play and even more successful movie of A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More the man is probably better known than Thomas More the writer. I n our own time, Thomas More (1477–1535) is probably better known for his life than for his works. But the life that is memorably retold in A Man for All Seasons alludes to his position as a leading humanist thinker without truly engaging it. After a brief recapitulation of his life and tragic death at the hands of Henry VIII, this lecture will focus on More’s humanism, as revealed in his most famous work, Utopia. More’s work, of course, coins the term utopia, and in this lecture, we will look at how the imaginative world that More creates here provides a vantage point for his critique of contemporary society, as well as for the exposition of some of More’s most sincerely held humanist principles. The radical simplicity of the Utopians certainly provides a contrast to the ills of the Europe of More’s day, but to what extent is More attempting to provide a viable alternative? Thanks to the successful play and even more successful movie of A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More the man is better known than Thomas More the writer. Born in 1477, More was an extremely talented lawyer. He became the fi rst layman to hold the offi ce of Lord Chancellor of England, succeeding his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey. More came into con fl ict with Henry VIII over his refusal to acknowledge the king as the sole head of the English Church. More resigned in 1532 because of his beliefs. He was charged with treason for denying the validity of Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and refusing to deny the pope’s authority. More was executed in 1535, with the famous last words: “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s fi rst.” Thomas More’s most famous literary work, Utopia, the story of a non- Christian, advanced New World society, was written in 1516. The character More recounts the tale of Utopia as told to him by the fi ctional explorer

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Walter, my cook-chauf fe ur, was about to begin preparing supper. The girl got up to leave, and we walked her to her car, and came back to the swimming pool, jubilant. The phone had been brought out to the pool, and now it rang. Billy was on the other side of the pool, doing what I took to be Atli can improvisations to the sound of Aretha franklin. And I picked up the phone. TO BE BAP TIZED 447 It was David Moses. It took awhile before the sound of his voice- I don't mean the sound of his voice, something in his voice-got through to me. He said, "Ji mmy-? Martin's just been shot," and I don't think I said anything, or felt anything. I'm not sure I knew who Martin was. Ye t, though I know-or I think-the record player was still playing, silence fell. David said, "He' s not dead yet"-t hen I knew who Martin was-" but it's a head wound-so-'' I don't remember what I said; obviously, I must have said something. Billy and Wal ter were watching me. I told them what David had said. I hardly remember the rest of that evening at all, it's retired into some deep cavern in my mind. We must have turned on the television set, if we had one, I don't remember. But we must have had one. I remember weeping, briefly, more in helple ss rage than in sorrow, and Billy trying to comf ort me. But I really don't remember that evening at all. Later, Walter told me that a car had prowled around the house all night. The very last time I saw Medgar Evers, he stopped at his house on the way to the airport so I could autograph my books for him and his wife and children. I remember Myrilie Evers standing outside, smiling, and we waved, and Medgar drove to the airport and put me on the pl ane. He grinned that kind of country boy preacher's grin of his, and we said we'd see each other soon. Months later, I was in Puerto Rico, working on the last act of my play . My host and hostess, and my friend, Lucien, and I, had spent a day or so wandering around the island, and now we were driving home. It was a wonderful, bright, sunny day, the top to the car was down, we were laughing and talk ing, and the radio was playing. Then the music stopped, and a voice announced that Medgar Evers had been shot to death in the carport of his home, and his wife and children had seen that big man fall. No, I can't describe it.

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

  678. Then he gives the view of Homer, who seemed to be of the same opinion according to what people said of him. For in his story he made Hector lie, as it were, in a trance from the blow which he had been dealt, “ lingering in another place, ” i.e., to think other thoughts than he had thought before, or, according to another text, to be of a different opinion from the one which he had before; as if in lingering and not lingering, i.e., in the state in which he lay after being struck down, he would both think and not think, although not about the same thing. For he knew those things which then appeared to him, but not those which he had known before, and had then ceased to know. Another translation expresses the idea thus: “ Implying that people of sound and unsound mind both think but not the same thoughts ” ; as if to say that, just as this is true of Hector, who had strange opinions after the blow, so too it is possible for others to have sound and foolish opinions at the same, although not about the same things but about different ones. 679. Now from all of the foregoing views of the philosophers he draws his intended conclusion that, if both of these states of mind constitute knowledge, i.e., those states in which a man thinks contrary things when he is changed from one state to another, it follows that whatever anyone thinks is true; for knowing would not consist in thinking what is false. Hence it follows that beings are equally so and not so. 680. Hence, their conclusion (360). Here he attacks the above-mentioned philosophers. He says that the conclusion which they drew is the most serious one. For if those who have seen the truth most clearly, insofar as it is possible for man to see it (namely, the foregoing philosophers, who are also the ones that love and seek it most of all) offer such opinions and views about the truth, how is it unfitting that these philosophers should grieve about the ineffectualness of their study if truth cannot be found? Another text reads, “ How is it unfitting that those who are trying to philosophize should give up or abandon the attempt? ” i.e., that a man should not cling to those who want to philosophize but despise them. For, if a man can know nothing about the truth, to seek the truth is to seek something which he cannot attain. In fact he resembles someone who chases or hunts birds; for the more he pursues them the farther they get away from him. 681. Now the reason (361).

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

  537 minister not just through the eyes of Clarissa the hostess but also through the eyes of her poor cousin Ellie. Though dazzled at fi rst by the prime minister’s rank, Ellie is amused by his ordinary appearance, then stirred to pity by the constraining effect of his fancy clothes, then impressed by his poise. The party is shadowed by news of a suicide that re fl ects the devastating consequences of the recent world war and profoundly stirs Clarissa. Septimus Smith, who committed suicide, survived the First World War, the bloodiest war that Britain had ever fought. It took a million British lives. Earlier, when Peter Walsh sees a uniformed troop of boys marching to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, we are reminded of the cost of war. In this novel, the new fashions and habits of the early 1920s refl ect the impact of the war by showing the impossibility of recovering the period that came just before it. The sudden freedom from old conventions and proprieties— illustrated by girls putting on make-up in public—shows the impact of the war on all traditions. Though the name of Septimus recalls the era of Edward the Seventh—the Edwardian age of light and elegance—nothing could be less Edwardian than this traumatized survivor of the war. Because Septimus has lost his dearest friend in the war, he believes that he has lost the capacity to feel. As a result, he loathes himself. He thinks human nature itself has sentenced him to death. When a distinguished psychologist named Bradshaw says that Septimus simply lacks a “sense of proportion,” and his wife insists that he “has done nothing wrong,” both of them fail to see that his anguish springs from his incapacity to grieve for his friend. At this time in England, society forbade love between men. Society thus dams up his tears. But for Septimus, as for Camus’ Meursault in The Stranger , failure to grieve is just as intolerable as murder—or homosexuality. Hence, Septimus feels compelled to take his own life. When Clarissa learns of Septimus’s death from Bradshaw, who turns up as a guest at her party, she feels deeply touched. Withdrawing from her guests to a little empty room, she thinks about Septimus’s suicide and is fascinated by its daring. While she and her girlhood friends (Sally and Peter) would grow old, the young man made his death an act of de fi ance—an attempt to communicate. Though she has achieved a social triumph at her party, Clarissa

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

  Biographical Notes (Lectures 73–84) 574 Biographical Notes (Lectures 73–84) Beckett, Samuel (1906–1989). Born near Dublin, Beckett was the second son of a well-to-do Protestant family. In 1923, after private schooling in Dublin and Enniskillen, he entered Dublin’s Trinity College, where in 1927 he earned fi rst-class honors in French and Italian. He then spent two years as a lecturer in English at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, returned to Trinity as a lecturer in French, and left after little more than a year to settle in Paris. There he wrote his fi rst novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (posthumously published in 1993) and came to know James Joyce. In 1933, the deaths of his beloved cousin Peggy Sinclair and of his father plunged him into prolonged depression. On recovering, he produced his fi rst collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (published 1934) and his second novel, Murphy (published 1938). In 1938, while recovering from stab wounds infl icted by a total stranger on a Paris street, he was visited by a pianist named Suzanne Dumesnil, who soon became his partner for life, though they did not marry for 23 years. In 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War prompted him to join the French Resistance, and he spent much of the war as a farm laborer in the unoccupied Vaucluse; in 1944, writing only at night, he produced his second novel, Watt (published 1953). Returning to Paris at the end of the war, he burst into creative action. From 1946 to 1950, writing in French, he produced four novellas, two plays (including Waiting for Godot), and the trilogy of novels known in English as Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (fi rst published in English together in 1958). After Godot (fi rst staged in Paris in 1953), Beckett wrote a number of other plays, including Fin de Partie (1956), translated as Endgame in 1958; Krapp’ s Last Tape (1958); Happy Days (1961); Play (1962); and Not I (1972). In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956). Born Eugen Berthold Brecht in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, he was the fi rst child of a paper factory clerk newly married to the daughter of a stationmaster. After early schooling in Augsburg, Brecht started writing plays at 16, studied medicine and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Berlin, and in 1922 (at age 24) won the Kleist

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

  546 Lecture 81: Bertolt Brecht declines to be a hero, saving his life by pretending to submit to the authorities while covertly pursuing and disseminating his work. After fl eeing Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and learning of the brutality of Soviet communism, Brecht resolved to write an antiwar play in the fall of 1939, when the Second World War broke out. In the 1930s, Brecht hated Nazi Germany and learned to distrust Soviet Russia. He voiced his hatred of Hitler and the Nazis in such sketches as Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, written in March of 1938. Though for a time Brecht thought Moscow the “only” theatrical city in the world, he learned by June of 1938 that a number of Moscow theater professionals whom he knew had been brutally crushed. As an antiwar play written at the start of World War II, Mother Courage takes its place with two other pacifi st works written in time of war. In Joyce’s Ulysses, written during the First World War, Leopold Bloom denounces war as the enemy of life itself. In Camus’ The Plague, also written during the Second World War, the plague is implicitly compared to war and fought with nothing but the weapons of healing. In spite of her name, Brecht’s Mother Courage views death-defying courage as simply foolhardy. She doesn’t want her children to fi ght. When her two sons join the army anyway, she slaps one of them for not surrendering when he was surrounded by four peasants. She insists that survival is more important than heroism. But as a war pro fi teer, Mother Courage exempli fi es the alienating effect of Brecht’s “epic” theater. Mother Courage is a fi gure we normally detest—a war pro fi teer. But as such, she demonstrates Brecht’s determination to defl ect our sympathy from his main character. Brecht disliked what he called “Aristotelian (empathy) drama,” which aims to make us identify with the protagonist. His “epic” theater seeks to detach us from the emotional life of the main character. Unlike Aristotelian tragedy, wherein the hero discovers his own fl aw, Brecht says that Mother Courage never grasps the lesson of the play because she never stops trying to make money from the war. In writing about the Thirty Years’ War, Brecht seeks not only to show that war can devastate Germany but also to expose the unholy alliance between

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Their children had never seen the South; their challenges came fr om the hard pavements of a hostile city, and their parents had no arms with which to protect them fr om its devastation. When I went to work as a civilian for the Army in 1942, I earned about three times as much in a week as my father ever had. This was not without its effect on my father. His au thority was being eroded, he was being cheated of the reality of his role. And I, of course, had absolutely no way of un derstanding the ferocious complexity of his reaction. I did not understand the depth and power and reality of his pain. The blacks who moved out of Harlem were not received with open arms by their countrymen. They were mocked and despised, and their children were in greater danger than ever. No friendly neighbor was likely to correct the child. The child would either rise up into a seeming responsibility and respect ability, one step ahead of paranoia, or drop down to the nee dle and the prison. And since there is not a single institution in this country that is not a racist institution-beginning with the churches, and by no means ignoring the unions-blacks were unable to seize the tools with which they could forge a genuine autonomy. The new prosperity also brought in the blight of housing projects to keep the nigger in his place. Whites, thinking "If you can't beat them, stone them," dumped drugs into the ghetto, and what had once been a community began to fr ag ment. The space between people grew wider. The question of identity became a paralyzing one. Being "accepted" could cause even greater anguish, and was a more deadly danger, than being spat on as a nigger. I was luckier in school than the children arc today. My sit- DARK DAYS 793 uation, however grim, was relatively coherent. I was not yet lost. Though most of my teachers were white, many were black. And some of the white teachers were very definitely on the Left. They opposed Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Third Reich. For these extreme opinions, several were placed on blacklists and drummed out of the academic community-to the everlasting shame of that community. The black teachers, paradoxically, were another matter. They were laconic about politics but single-minded about the future of black students. Many of them were survivors of the Harlem Renaissance and wanted us black students to know that we could do, become, anything. We were not, in any way whatever, to be limited by the Republic's estimation of black people. They had refused to be defined that way, and they had, after all, paid some dues. I did not, then, obviously, really know who some of these people were. Gertrude E. Ayers, for example, my principal at P.S. 24, was the first black principal in the history of New York City schools.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My guide and companion in this was a young man I met after a week or so, a well set-up, rather tongue-tied little chap called Bill Hawkins. I had noticed him early on, and was not surprised to find that he spent a lot of time in the gym: he had a fine torso and packed shoulders. We played a few games of draughts together on my first Sunday evening. He clearly wanted to talk to me, but was uncertain how to go about it, so I drew him out. It transpired that he had been for over a year the lover of a teenage boy who trained at the sports club in Highbury where Bill was employed. They saw each other every day, and were blissfully happy, though Alec, as the boy was called, avoided his old friends and caused concern to his parents by his singular behaviour. Twice Bill and Alec went to Brighton and spent the weekend in a guesthouse owned by a friend of the sports club manager: if anyone asked questions they were to pretend to be brothers, for Bill himself was only eighteen, and Alec was a couple of years younger. After a while, though, Alec became more distant, and it soon became clear that he was involved with another man. Bill, in all the torments of first love, took precipitately to drink, and would make a nuisance of himself banging on the door of Alec’s parents’ house. Then foolish, intimate letters were written: and found, by the parents. They showed them to Alec’s new friend, an insurance salesman with a Riley whom they, in a fine hypocritical fashion, considered more suitable and respectable than poor, passionate, uncontrollable Bill. Together the salesman and the parents took the letters to the police. Bill, when questioned, did nothing to conceal his feelings. He was sent down for eighteen months with hard labour.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But love is another matter: it is scarcely worth observing what a mockery love makes of the will. Leaving all that alone, however: when he was dead, I realized that I would have done anything whatever to have been able to hold him in this world. Through him, anyway, my political lif e, in sofar as I can claim, formally, to have had one, began. He was a Socialist-a member of the Young People's Socialist League (Y PSL) and urged me to join, and I did. I, then, outdistanced him by becoming a Trotskyite-so that I was in the interesting OTHER ES SAYS posttton (at the age of nineteen) of being an anti-S talinist when America and Russia were allies. My life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be im possible to indoctrinate me; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not. This was to lead to very serious differences between myself and Eugene, and others: but it was during this period that I met the people who were to take me to Saul Levitas, of The New Leader, Randall Jarrell, of The Nation, Elliott Cohen and Robert Warshaw, of Com mental')', and Philip Rahv, of Pat'tisan Review. These men arc all dead, now, and they were all very im portant to my life. It is not too much to say that they helped to save my lif e. (As Bill Cole, at Knopf, was later to do when the editor assigned Go Tell It On The Moun tain had me on the ropes.) And their role in my lif e says something arresting concerning the American dilemma, or, more precisely, per haps, the American torment. I had been to two black newspapers before I met these people and had simply been laughed out of the office: I was a shocshine boy who had never been to college. I don't blame these people, God knows that I was an unlikely cub reporter: yet, I still remember how deeply I was hurt. On the other hand, around this time, or a little later, I landed a job as messenger for New York's liberal newspaper, PM. It is perhaps worth pointing out that PM had a man of about my complexion (dark) in the tower, under whom I worked, a coal black Negro in the cellar, whom nobody ever saw, and a very f.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And the horses and tanks arc indeed upon us, and the end is not in sight. Perhaps it is just as well, after all, that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly with the inward one. And it is not at all furfetchcd to suspect that what she saw contrib uted to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man. I saw Lorraine in her hospital bed, as she was dying. She tried to speak, she couldn't. She did not seem frightened or SWEET LORRAINE 7 61 sad, only exasperated that her body no longer obeyed her; she smiled and waved. But I prefer to remember her as she was the last time I saw her on her feet. We were at, of all places, the PEN Club, she was seated, talking, dressed all in black, wearing a very handsome wide, black hat, thin, and radiant. I knew she had been ill, but I didn't know, then, how seriously. I said, "Lorraine, baby, you look beautiful, how in the world do you do it?" She was leaving, I have the impression she was on a staircase, and she turned and smiled that smile and said, "It helps to develop a serious illness, Jimmy!" and waved and disappeared. Esquil·e, November 1969 Ho w One Black Man Came To Be an American A REVIEW OF "ROOTS" I CANNOT guess what Alex Haley's countrymen will make of his birthday present to us during this election and Bicen tennial year. One is tempted to say that it could scarcely have come at a more awkward time-what with the conventions, the exhibition of candidates, the dubious state of this partic ular and perhaps increasingly dubious union, and the Ameri can attempt, hopelessly and predictably schizophrenic, of preventing total disaster, for white people and for the West, in South Africa. There is a carefully muffled pain and panic in the nation, which neither candidate, neither party, can coher ently address, being, themselves, but vivid symptoms of it. What most significantly fills this void, or threatens to, is the presence, in America, of the world's first genuine black West erner. Created here in pain and darkness, remnant of slaugh ter, his hour may, at last, and in mysterious, unprecedented ways, have begun to strike.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  His brow was higher, his face scored with lines that had been mere charcoal strokes on the boy’s velvety brow and cheeks. His eyes, though, had deepened their immensity of melancholy and laughter, and his exquisite hands too were lined and shiny as old leather, as if he had done far more than merely polishing my shoes and silver. That night I lay long awake, caught up again, with a vividness of recall, in the life we had spent together. Despite a thousand differences it was like a marriage, a great, chaste bond of love and tact—which made it all the odder that he had really married and become a father. I was gripped again by my mood of awful falseness and despair on his wedding day, when I gave him away into that little house in North Kensington and into a world more unknown and inaccessible than the Nuba Hills where I had found him first. Since then I have seen this period simply as a test, challenging our bond only to affirm it again. The terms were different, his independence, as each evening he went off on the Central Line, took a concrete, dignified form; but his loyalty was unaltered. Perhaps his distancing even endeared him to me more, and showed me afresh a devotion to which we had both become over-accustomed. Such thoughts were still uppermost in my mind when I was called to see the governor a couple of days later. We had not met since the cursory talking-to of my first day, an occasion when I was strongly aware of the unease that his brief and accidental superiority had given him. Dressed though I was in my deforming prison bags I was made to feel wickedly sophisticated. He knew the disadvantage I suffered under would not—even should not—last. Today he was absent, and one of the senior officers took his place, pacing behind the desk but starchily resisting the temptation to sit down. I was not asked to sit myself, and as I refused to stand to attention, I adopted a rather decadent kind of slouch, which the officer did not like, visibly suppressing his criticism. I wondered what was up and had faint expectations of some kind of remission. ‘I have some’—he seemed to hesitate to choose and then reject an adjective—‘news for you, Nantwich. You have a servant, a houseboy. What is his name?’ ‘I have a companion. He is called Taha al-Azhari.’ I spoke with assumed calm, suddenly afraid that Taha had done something stupid, something he thought would help me. ‘Azhari, exactly. He came from the Sudan, I believe?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How old a man?’ ‘He is just forty-four.’ ‘Wife and children?’ ‘I really don’t see the point of this.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Without ever seeming to, and with a compassion as haunting as the sorrow songs which helped produce him, Haley makes us aware of the disaster overtaking not the black nation, but the white one. One will not, for example, soon forget the fiddler, who had been told by his master-who was considered to be a "good" master-that he could buy his fr eedom, and how he worked for 30 years to buy it. But when he brought the money to his master, his master regretfully informed him that he could take the money HOW ONE BLACK MAN ... only as a down payment on the fiddler's fr eedom because the price of slaves had risen so high that he would be cheating himself if he allowed his slave to buy his fr eedom for so little. This is the same master who later sells Kunta 's daughter as punishment for her having aided a runaway slave, and who, as Kuma is beaten nearly unconscious, as the girl's mother lies prostrate, and as the sheriff drags the girl away, walks, head downward, into his house. What, one can't but wonder, can be waiting for him in that house. Perhaps, all hard things con sidered, it was wealthier in the slaves' cabins. We had to face whatever was in there, and, while we might call each other nigger, we knew that a man was not a thing. "Roots" is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one-the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can't but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road. The New Ym·k Ti mes Rook Rwiell', September 26, 1976 An Op en Letter to Mr. Carter I HAVE a thing to tell you, but with a heavy heart, for it is not a new thing. In North Carolina, as I write, nine black men and one white woman arc under sentences of a total of 282 years in various prisons on various charges, including arson. The Rev. Ben Chavis, who was 29 years old yesterday, is the best known of the Wilmington 10. In Charlotte, three black men arc on bail and facing sen tences, equally savage, on charges equally preposterous. I will not insult your intelligence by discussing the details of the cases. It must be relatively rare to find ten people (who have never before committed any offense) who merit 282 years in prison. As tor Ben Chavis, the courts have totally failed to indicate what he has done to merit 34. James Earl Grant was arrested in the more liberal city of Charlotte, accused with two others of burning down the Lazy B riding stables in which fifteen horses died.

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

  But what they don’t know is that each year an estimated five hundred thousand children under the age of six find themselves in Paula’s shoes—small, uncomprehending, frightened, and vulnerable. 1 As they grow up, they retain very few memories of life before the divorce with two parents at home. Most of what they know and remember stems from being raised in the postdivorce family. The family that created them simply vanished. As happens to so many children of divorce, life changed radically for Paula and her sister after the separation. Their mother had left college after her freshman year to elope and had spent her married life involved in child-centered activities around her home. She had been active in both children’s nursery schools and had ferried Joan and then Paula to friends’ houses, to swimming lessons, to the park to play, and out for ice cream afterward. After Joan started kindergarten, this at-home mom became involved in the PTA and was often at the elementary school, helping in the classroom and organizing school events. She drove for every field trip and was present at every class event and party. She fetched Joan and Paula to and from school and had snacks for them at home afterward. A teenaged girl who lived down the street always babysat on Saturday evenings when the parents went out. The only other times Paula and her sister were separated from their mother was once a year when their parents went away for a long weekend together and they were cared for by their paternal grandparents. For Paula, divorce meant that she lost the three things that had always anchored her—her mother, her father, and the comforting routines of her life. Only now, at age thirty-three, can Paula put the magnitude of these losses into words: “I don’t remember anything except living together and then not. I don’t remember anybody explaining anything to me. Suddenly, there was no one there. I spent so much time alone that I tried to become my own company. But how can you do that as a four-year-old child? I would go for days without saying a word. ” No More Security Blanket A FTER THE SEPARATION Paula’s mother was in dire financial straits. The bankruptcy left both her and her ex-husband destitute. He could not afford to pay alimony or child support. For a while, the young mother’s only financial support came from her husband’s parents, who sympathized with her plight and sent money each month to help pay for food and health insurance. Without marketable skills, she went to work full-time at what was then minimum wage. At the end of each month, after she had paid the household expenses and the babysitter, she had sixty dollars left over.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When I was working on An other Co-untry, which was the hardest thing I had done until that time, I had several problems in trying to get across, in trying to convey, what I felt was happening to us in this country. Not that this is unusual: In a sense, every work of a_rl,__if I may use that phrase, is_LkjncL_Qf__metaphor for what the artist takes to be our condition. My principal problem, at least by hindsigl�� ;as hmv-to -il:i'i1dle my heroine, Ida, who in ctlCct dictated a great deal of the book to me. And the first thing that I had to realize was that she, operating in New WORDS OF A NA TIVE SON 709 York as she did, as Negro girls do, was an object of wonder and even some despair-and some distrust-to all the people around her, including people who were very fond of her Vivaldo, her lover, and their friends. I had somehow to make the reader see what was happening to this girl. I knew that a girl like Ida would not be able to say it for herself, but I also knew that no reader will belie ve you if you simply tell him what you want him to know. You must make him see it for himself . He must somehow be trapped into the reality you want him to submit to and you must achieve a kind of rig orous discipline in order to walk the reader to the guillotine without his knowing it. Now, in order to get what I wanted I had to invent Rufus, Ida's brother, who had not been present at the original con ception. Rufus was the only way that I could make the reader see what had happened to Ida and what was controlling her in all her relatio nships, why she was so difficult, why she was so uncertain, why she suffered so; and of course the reason she was suffering was because of what had happened to her brother, because her brother was dead. She was not about to forgive anybody for it. And this rage was about to destroy her.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  292 THE FIR E NE XT TIME pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my coun try and my countr y men, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hu ndreds of thou sands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know · it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (B ut remember: most of mankind is not all of man kind.) But it is not permissible that the auth ors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countr ymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundr ed years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No! This is not true! How bitter you are!"-but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was ther e. Your cou ntrymen were not there, and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countr ymen don't know that she exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives.) \Veil, you were born, here you came, something like fifteen years ago; and though your father and mother and grand mother, looking about the streets through which they were carryi ng you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhe arted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me-yo u were a big baby, I was not-here you were: to be loved. To be loved, MY DUNG EON SHOOK 293 baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  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-law 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-law'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 descendants, 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 fr om the drawbridge. If I love you, I love yott, and I don't give a damn. Yott my n igger, 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? Who going to take care of tts if we don't take care of each other?

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

  Whether it is possible to have patience without grace?Objection 1: It seems that it is possible to have patience without grace. For the more his reason inclines to a thing, the more is it possible for the rational creature to accomplish it. Now it is more reasonable to suffer evil for the sake of good than for the sake of evil. Yet some suffer evil for evil’s sake, by their own virtue and without the help of grace; for Augustine says (De Patientia iii) that “men endure many toils and sorrows for the sake of the things they love sinfully.” Much more, therefore, is it possible for man, without the help of grace, to bear evil for the sake of good, and this is to be truly patient. Objection 2: Further, some who are not in a state of grace have more abhorrence for sinful evils than for bodily evils: hence some heathens are related to have endured many hardships rather than betray their country or commit some other misdeed. Now this is to be truly patient. Therefore it seems that it is possible to have patience without the help of grace. Objection 3: Further, it is quite evident that some go through much trouble and pain in order to regain health of the body. Now the health of the soul is not less desirable than bodily health. Therefore in like manner one may, without the help of grace, endure many evils for the health of the soul, and this is to be truly patient. On the contrary, It is written (Ps. 61:6): “From Him,” i.e. from God, “is my patience.” I answer that, As Augustine says (De Patientia iv), “the strength of desire helps a man to bear toil and pain: and no one willingly undertakes to bear what is painful, save for the sake of that which gives pleasure.” The reason of this is because sorrow and pain are of themselves displeasing to the soul, wherefore it would never choose to suffer them for their own sake, but only for the sake of an end. Hence it follows that the good for the sake of which one is willing to endure evils, is more desired and loved than the good the privation of which causes the sorrow that we bear patiently. Now the fact that a man prefers the good of grace to all natural goods, the loss of which may cause sorrow, is to be referred to charity, which loves God above all things. Hence it is evident that patience, as a virtue, is caused by charity, according to 1 Cor. 13:4, “Charity is patient.” But it is manifest that it is impossible to have charity save through grace, according to Rom. 5:5, “The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost Who is given to us.” Therefore it is clearly impossible to have patience without the help of grace.

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

  “The divorce was hardest on her. Dad didn’t care about her and she knew it. He insulted her or he ignored her. It really affected her self-esteem. When she graduated from high school, she started to get involved with bad guys. She’d come home with a yellow bruise on her face and a rigid posture, so that I knew her ribs were taped and that the guy she lived with had beat her up again.” His tone turned to exasperation. “What can I tell you? For years she lived in a dream world. She’d say, ‘I love Danny, or Joe, or Jim. He has so much potential. If I love him enough, we can get through this.’ She got involved with violent men who were like leeches. She took care of them, supported them, babied them, did everything and they took advantage of her and hit her. She’s a very pretty woman so boyfriends were never a problem. But she didn’t understand that. There were three guys who hit her that I knew about. She was always afraid that she would marry someone like my dad. I was afraid that was exactly what she’d end up doing.” “What do you think this is all about?” “Seeing my dad hit my mom affected her badly. She had nightmares and stomachaches for years after the breakup. Plus she always thought it was her fault that my folks’ marriage was falling apart. She was fourteen before my mom finally sat down with her and explained the divorce and the violence. I’ve really been worried about her getting badly hurt or killed. I’ve gone to get her twice in the emergency room. Each time I told her she needed professional help, not just getting emergency aid. I think that she finally listened. She’s doing better, but it’s taken a lot of years and a lot of beatings.” “It sounds like you were able to help each other.” “That’s true. That’s been one of the good things about our crazy family. Recently Anja told my wife that maybe there was a point to all of that pain and suffering that we had. ‘You know what I think of,’ she said. ‘I have Larry as a brother and that makes it all worth it.’” He smiled. “I certainly feel that way about her.” He seemed to be holding a vision of his sister in his head. “Anja finally went into some heavy-duty therapy and it’s helped. Now she’s married to a decent man and they have a neat child. I think she’s finally made it.”