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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The Olympieion of Athens, built on the plain, had to be in exact counterpoise to the Parthenon on its hill, vastness opposed to perfection, ardor kneeling before calm, splendor at the feet of beauty. The chapels of Antinous and his temples were magic chambers, commemorating a mysterious passage between life and death; these shrines to an overpowering joy and grief were places of prayer and evocation of the dead; there I gave myself over to my sorrow. My tomb on the bank of the Tiber reproduces, on a gigantic scale, the ancient vaults of the Appian Way, but its very proportions transform it, recalling Ctesiphon and Babylon with their terraces and towers by which man seeks to climb nearer the stars. Sepulchral Egypt provided the plan for the obelisks and rows of sphinxes of that cenotaph which forces upon a vaguely hostile Rome the memory of the friend forever mourned. The Villa was the tomb of my travels, the last encampment of the nomad, the equivalent, though in marble, of the tents and pavilions of the princes of Asia. Almost everything that appeals to our taste has already been tried in the world of forms; I turned toward the realm of color: jasper as green as the depths of the sea, porphyry dense as flesh, basalt and somber obsidian. The crimson of the hangings was adorned with more and more intricate embroideries; the mosaics of the walls or pavements were never too golden, too white, or too dark. Each building-stone was the strange concretion of a will, a memory, and sometimes a challenge. Each structure was the chart of a dream. Plotinopolis, Hadrianopolis, Antino�polis, Hadrianotherae. ... I have multiplied these human beehives as much as possible. Plumber and mason, engineer and architect preside at the births of cities; the operation also requires certain magical gifts. In a world still largely made up of woods, desert, and uncultivated plain, a city is indeed a fine sight, with its paved streets, its temple to some god or other, its public baths and toilets, a shop where the barber discusses with his clients the news from Rome, its pastry shop, shoestore, and perhaps a bookshop, its doctor's sign, and a theatre, where from time to time a comedy of Terence is played. Our men of fashion complain of the uniformity of our cities; they suffer in seeing everywhere the same statue of the emperor, and the same water pipes. They are wrong: the beauty of N�mes is wholly different from that of Arles. But that very uniformity, to be found now on three continents, reassures the traveler as does the sight of a milestone; even the dullest of our towns have their comforting significance as shelters and posting stops.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e sack of Rome by a Visigothic army in AD 410 was a profound moral and mental shock; in its aftermath, confusion and recrimination quickly followed. Among the most visceral horrors of the experience was that the immemorial adjunct of war, sexual violence against women, was visited on the eternal city. Th e rape of wives and virgin daughters was a bitter tragedy; the rape of nuns was, for many, unambiguous proof that the Christian God was uninterested in Roman fortunes. Such a dark insult to Roman honor demanded a reckoning. Th e crisis of AD 410 was the proximate cause for the composition of Augustine’s magnum opus, Th e City of God. Th e issue of sexual violence called forth some of the most astonishing, and indelicate, passages of the entire Augustinian oeuvre. In the defense of his religion, the bishop of Hippo put on trial a whole cluster of deep and usually implicit assumptions about the nature of female sexual honor, as old as the hills of Rome. He insisted that female purity was a mental, intentional, and not an objective, physical state. “One can only assent or refuse with his mind. Who of sound sense would believe that someone who has been seized and forced to use his fl esh to slake the lust of someone else has lost his sexual honor?” To console the wounded pride of Rome in the aftermath of defeat, he attacked Roman values at their core. He insisted, in short, that sin, rather than shame, provided the only real scale of sexual values. Th e Romans were not accustomed to blaming rape victims. For centuries the law had recognized the innocence of women subjected to sexual violence. But a primitive sensibility toward physical violation abided in ancient Mediterranean societies; rape was a social, as well as a personal, trauma. Certainly the social rehabilitation of abused bodies was something that was strictly beyond the limits of comfortable discussion. Augustine was deliberately, and brashly, scraping against some of the most primitive strata of belief about a woman’s body. Th e lust of another, he defi antly claimed, could not “pollute” one’s purity. Intent was all that hung in the scales. A woman whose body was forced into sex “but who off ered no consent with her will” kept her chastity intact. With his unfailing instinct for drama, Augustine hailed before the tribunal of sexual justice the legendary Roman matron Lucretia. It was a savvy choice. In a culture that had long valued the moral exemplum, Lucretia was the example of examples. She preferred death over dishonor, and her suicide made her the unquestioned paragon of female C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H 

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

  Before that night, the Litrovski family had all lived in a green clapboard house in a middle-class section of Monterey, California, where Larry’s father, who had learned four languages from his parents, taught Russian at the Monterey Language Institute. He was a disturbed, angry man whose violent outbursts stemmed from early life experiences that neither he nor anyone close to him knew much about. Larry’s mother taught Spanish at the public high school, speaking so softly that her students often had to strain to hear her. Like many abused women, Larry’s mother was ambivalent about her decision to file for divorce. “Children need a father,” she said, with tears falling down both cheeks. “I gave him children and a purpose, it was a shared dream.” Her voice faltered as she struggled to explain herself: “I hope I was important to him at one time.” With that, she began to cry openly. Larry’s mother was heartbroken but her children were furious. Like most young children in the abusive families that I have seen, they made no connection between the violence and the decision to divorce. Their mother told them that she was ending the marriage because their father “drank too much,” but this explanation made absolutely no sense to them. Drinking what? Milk? Soda? Orange juice? How could they know what “drinking” meant or how it affected their father’s behavior? Nor did they link the drinking with his violence. They were aware that their father hurt their mother, and they were very distressed at her pain, but they did not understand his taunts or the depth of her humiliation. Larry was especially enraged at what he considered his mother’s outrageous decision. Shortly after the divorce, he told me that his father always said that women and girls were stupid and worthless. In his view, he had been left with an inferior being. Whenever Larry’s father visited, he told the boy, “You are my favorite.” He pointedly ignored his little daughter who tagged behind hoping, as she later told me, that she would at least be allowed to pet her father’s dog, Ivan. After the separation, Larry donned his father’s tie and marched around the house shouting obscene insults at his mother. He threw himself into the role of filling his absent father’s shoes, representing his father in the household and identifying with his attitudes and behavior. Years later Larry confessed to me, “I was infuriated with my mother and I wanted my dad to return home. I would regularly compile a list of my grievances against her and call up my dad on the phone and tell him what she had done wrong. He would then call her and yell at her and she would cry.” Larry continued to lead the charge against his mother for all kinds of real or imagined misdeeds, with his father acting as silent partner and sometimes coach. Sometimes Larry took the lead.

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

  Many LossesWHEN MOST PEOPLE hear the word “divorce,” they think it means one failed marriage. The child of divorce is thought to experience one huge loss of the intact family after which stability and a second, happier marriage comes along. But this is not what happens to most children of divorce. They experience not one, not two, but many more losses as their parents go in search of new lovers or partners. Each of these “transitions” (as demographers call them) throws the child’s life into turmoil and brings back painful reminders of the first loss. National studies show that the more transitions there are, the more the child is harmed because the impact of repeated loss is cumulative.1 The prevalence of this instability in the lives of these children hasn’t been properly weighed or even recognized by most people. While we do have legal records of second, third, and fourth remarriages and divorces, we have no reliable count of how many live-in or long-term lovers a child of divorce will typically encounter. Children observe each of their parents’ courtships with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. For adolescents, the erotic stimulation of seeing their parents with changing partners can be difficult to contain. Several young teenage girls in the study began their own sexual activity when they observed a parent’s involvement in a passionate affair. Children and adolescents watch their parents’ lovers, with everything from love to resentment, hoping for some clue about the future. They participate actively as helper, critic, and audience and are not afraid to intervene. One mother returning home from a date found her school-age children asleep in her bed. Since they’d told her earlier that they didn’t like her boyfriend, she took the hint. Many new lovers are attentive to the children, regularly bringing little gifts. But even the most charming lovers can disappear overnight. Second marriages with children are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. Thus the child’s typical experience is not one marriage followed by one divorce, but several or sometimes many relationships for both their mother and father followed by loss or by eventual stability.2 Karen’s experience is typical of many that I have seen. Her father’s second wife, who was nice to the children, left without warning three years into the marriage. After she was gone, her father had four more girlfriends who caused him a great deal of suffering when they also left. Karen’s mother had three unhappy love affairs prior to her remarriage, which ended after five years. Obviously Karen and her siblings experienced more than “one divorce.” Their childhoods were filled with a history of new attachments followed by losses and consequent distress for both parents. Karen’s brother, at age thirty, told me: “What is marriage? Only a piece of paper and a piece of metal. If you love someone, it breaks your heart.”

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

  Whether a religious sins more grievously than a secular by the same kind of sin?Objection 1: It would seem that a religious does not sin more grievously than a secular by the same kind of sin. For it is written (2 Paralip 30:18,19): “The Lord Who is good will show mercy to all them who with their whole heart seek the Lord the God of their fathers, and will not impute it to them that they are not sanctified.” Now religious apparently follow the Lord the God of their fathers with their whole heart rather than seculars, who partly give themselves and their possessions to God and reserve part for themselves, as Gregory says (Hom. xx in Ezech.). Therefore it would seem that it is less imputed to them if they fall short somewhat of their sanctification. Objection 2: Further, God is less angered at a man’s sins if he does some good deeds, according to 2 Paralip 19:2,3, “Thou helpest the ungodly, and thou art joined in friendship with them that hate the Lord, and therefore thou didst deserve indeed the wrath of the Lord: but good works are found in thee.” Now religious do more good works than seculars. Therefore if they commit any sins, God is less angry with them. Objection 3: Further, this present life is not carried through without sin, according to James 3:2, “In many things we all offend.” Therefore if the sins of religious were more grievous than those of seculars it would follow that religious are worse off than seculars: and consequently it would not be a wholesome counsel to enter religion. On the contrary, The greater the evil the more it would seem to be deplored. But seemingly the sins of those who are in the state of holiness and perfection are the most deplorable, for it is written (Jer. 23:9): “My heart is broken within me,” and afterwards (Jer. 23:11): “For the prophet and the priest are defiled; and in My house I have found their wickedness.” Therefore religious and others who are in the state of perfection, other things being equal, sin more grievously.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I try now to observe my own ending: this series of experiments conducted upon myself continues the long study begun in Satyrus' clinic. So far the modifications are as external as those to which time and inclement weather subject any edifice, leaving its architecture and basic material unaltered; I sometimes think that through the crevices I see and touch upon the indestructible foundation, the rock eternal. I am what I always was; I am dying without essential change. At first view the robust child of the gardens in Spain and the ambitious officer regaining his tent and shaking the snowflakes from his shoulders seem both as thoroughly obliterated as I shall be when I shall have gone through the funeral fire; but they are still there; I am inseparable from those parts of myself. The man who howled his grief upon a dead body has not ceased to wail in some corner of my being, in spite of the superhuman, or perhaps subhuman calm into which I am entering already; the voyager immured within the ever sedentary invalid is curious about death because it spells departure. That force which once was I seems still capable of actuating several more lives, or of raising up whole worlds. If by miracle some centuries were suddenly to be added to the few days now left to me I would do the same things over again, even to committing the same errors; I would frequent the same Olympian heights and even the same Infernos. Such a conclusion is an excellent argument in favor of the utility of death, but at the same time it inspires certain doubts as to death's total efficacity. In certain periods of my life I have noted down my dreams; I have discussed their significance with priests and philosophers, and with astrologers. That faculty for dreaming, though deadened for many years, has been restored to me in the course of these months of agony; the incidents of my waking hours seem less real, and sometimes less irksome, than those of dream. If this larval and spectral world, where the platitudinous and the absurd swarm in even greater abundance than on earth, affords us some notion of the state of the soul when separated from the body, then I shall doubtless pass my eternity in regretting the exquisite control which our senses now provide, and the adjusted perspectives offered by human reason. And nevertheless I sink back with a certain relief into those insubstantial regions of dream; there I possess for a moment some secrets which soon escape me again; there I drink at the sacred springs.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Camille rushed home to take care of us. “There are too many of us to fit in the same car, love bug.” Gi was as skinny as a piece of licorice, losing her hair from malnutrition and the stress of having to steal food just to make sure Norm and I would keep growing. “But we always fit in one car!” “Not this time,” Gi said. Tears streaked down her face. I grabbed Gi’s licorice leg and said, “But you always said that we are so skinny we can all be folded up to fit anywhere. And we are really skinny now. We can fit in the same car!” “Well, maybe we can, but the home that you’re going to prefers little kids like you and Norm because you’re cuter, sweeter, and easier to hug.” Gi picked me up and squished me in her arms. I could feel her bones and muscles and all her love coming out at me. Cookie, our mother, had arms as big as my belly. All that bubbling flesh, and she never used any of it to love us. There were boyfriends, however, men who got a charming, purring version of Cookie reserved just for them. Sometimes Cookie paid the rent with her flesh. Watching Cookie, I absorbed a quick lesson, barely understood at the time but later fully digested, of just how much utility the female form can hold. “I’m not a baby,” I told Gi. She brushed my hair with her darting fingers and said, “You will always be my baby, mia bambina .” Gi stopped talking for a minute, as if something were stuck in her throat. Her lumpy face was wet with tears. And then finally she said, “I’m so sorry, mia bambina . I’m so, so sorry.” “But you didn’t do anything wrong! You were protecting me!” I started to touch my sister’s face but pulled my hand away when I remembered how much those walnut bruises had hurt when I’d touched them last. “I was supposed to take care of you forever,” Gi said, and she began crying again. With everything we’d endured, and everything we’d seen, you’d think we’d also seen a lot of crying. But we were scrappy, willful, and driven. We knew how to get a loaf of bread out of a grocery store with no cash in less than sixty seconds. We knew how to manage landlords, bill collectors, our mother’s old boyfriends, enraged wives (whose husbands had slept with Cookie), and nosy neighbors as they hunted down Cookie. We could convince an entire school system that we had a mother and a house—the only two things that could prevent us from getting split up and placed in separate foster homes. And we knew how to run from our mother when she was drunk as a rabid raccoon and ready to focus her heft and her misery on any one of us who got in her way. Especially Gi.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  He told them he was not going to turn over his niece and her two sisters to complete strangers so you all could end up in an orphanage. All we needed was food stamps, no money. The county refused.” She leans back in her chair, resigned. “That’s when it all became a big mess.” Julia explains that she and Frank hurried out of the social services’ office, and the social workers asked when they were bringing us back. “Frank hollered over his shoulder, ‘Never!’ I thought he’d have a heart attack. A couple of days later, three social workers and the police showed up on our doorstep and demanded we turn you over. Frank clutched you so tight that it took two social workers to tear one arm at a time off of you, while the third took you from him. “Your Uncle Frank never saw you again after that,” Julia says. “He was devastated. He always wondered what happened to you and your sisters, and finally he came to accept that he was never going to see you again. Then—out of the blue—you wrote him in 1983. When we got your letter, he opened it, thinking it was for him, then he realized you wanted him to hand it off to Pauly. He called Pauly and read it to him. ‘You son of a bitch,’ Frank says, ‘you get over here and talk about this. I am your brother. Let me help you do the right thing.’ When Pauly arrived, Frank told him that he knew full well that you were his daughter, that he had to take responsibility for you and get you out of that foster home.” “So what did Paul do?” “Pauly? Not a thing, honey. Such a shame. My Frank . . . a decade he’s been gone and I just could not bring myself to go through his papers. Finally, before last Christmas, I knew it was time to go through them. That’s when I found the envelope. Pauly took that letter”—my stomach flips in excitement to hear Paul had cared to keep that much—“but your uncle Frank held on to the envelope all this time. He refused to throw it out. So when I found it, I knew he held on to it so that one day he could contact you . . . let you know the truth. I guess you could say it was for him that I reached out to you. Frank always wanted to right this somehow.” She looks at me softly, almost apologetically. “I was worried. It’s been sixteen years since you wrote that letter. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to find you, but when the letter didn’t come back, I knew you must have gotten it.” Julia goes on to tell me that she’ll answer any questions I have under one condition: No one in the Accerbi family can know who I really am.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Norm meets us with a grin and his arms held wide to help when he sees we’re toting food. I take out the dishes I’d found earlier in the afternoon—a few pots, mismatched plastic plates, a few forks, and a spoon—and rinse them in the sink as Camille searches for matches to light the pilot on the gas stove to boil macaroni and cheese. “How long you think this hot water’s going to last?” I ask her. “Gi, I need to have a serious talk with you,” she says. I still myself and look at her, but she’s avoiding my eyes by busying herself with drying the dishes. Her voice is low: always a sure sign or trouble. “What is it?” “I want to stay at Kathy’s for the summer.” “For the summer ?” “Yes. I think Doug’s parents will let me stay on their couch for a night or two until Kathy convinces her mom to let me stay at their house.” My heart sinks into my flip-flops. “It’s not forever —” “I thought you would be here more!” I tell her. “Camille, you can’t leave me alone with the kids again—you lived at Kathy’s the whole last year!” Cherie and Camille have known Kathy since Cherie was in second grade and Camille was in first. Since my sisters are so close in age, they shared everything, including friends. One afternoon during recess at Saint James Elementary School, Cherie got hit in the head with a baseball. Kathy scooped her up, carried her off the field, and stayed with her until the school nurse came. From that moment, Cherie and Kathy—and Camille—became inseparable. Kathy had a big family and a mother who worked a lot, so Cherie and Camille would just hang out at her house for days, or sometimes weeks. It was during this time that I became the little mom to Rosie and Norman. I kept hoping Cherie and Camille would walk through the door together, but when Camille finally came back, she was alone. Cherie got married and moved into her in-laws’ basement in Brentwood. Kathy and Camille stayed close friends, and Camille lived almost all of last year with Kathy’s family after we were kicked out of our last apartment. There was nowhere for the rest of us to go, so we lived out of Cookie’s car in a supermarket parking lot on Hawkins Avenue in Ronkonkoma. When I’d see Kathy’s younger siblings at school, I’d avoid them. They already had tons of siblings, so why did they get to have mine, too? I pictured Kathy’s whole giant family gathered around the table for dinner, my sisters clearing the dishes and helping with homework, when they should have been at home helping me! “How do you expect me to do this on my own?” By now I’m sobbing muffled words into Camille’s embrace. “Huh?” “Shhh,” she says, hugging me again. “Does Cherie know?” “Gi,” she says, “I need you to understand.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Her action strikes me as symbolic: In the end, the only thing we were able to do was keep her warm with that coat, and now she’s giving it back, knowing what was meant to protect her here will bring her harm when she gets where she’s going. The only prayer she has to survive Cookie’s reaction will be to pretend this trip to New York never happened. Cherie and I both reach out and take the coat, which seems to weigh four hundred pounds. This was supposed to be Rosie’s forever rescue, and I’ve failed her yet again. The crowd of travelers at the gate fills in around us. In response, Cherie’s actions seem to pick up with a pace of urgency, but for Rosie I’m calm and gentle as ever. As she hugs Cherie, her limbs move as though they’re weighed down with lead, as if any part of her that’s lively or able to feel love is dead. I take her cheeks in my hands, staring into her sculpted face, her eyes that show she’s seen too much. Everything about her seems older than it is. “Mia bambina amore,” I whisper. Suddenly, she throws her arms around me and buries her face in my hair. For a moment, I can feel her resisting sobs; and then she whispers: “Je t’aime.” The other travelers seem somehow empowered by the luggage they’re carrying onto the plane, but Rosie approaches the ticket counter with nothing . . . because she came with nothing. Cherie and I grip her coat between us. A loose, sandy curl flips over her shoulder when she looks back and forces a smile. “I love you, Rosie!” I yell through my tears so loudly that the crowd turns. Rosie hands her ticket to the agent, who points her to the Jetway. And then, she’s gone. 10 Aging Out Spring 1986 to Summer 1988 “I FAILED .” Pinching the stem of his glasses between his thumb and forefinger, Mr. Brownstein rubs the bridge of his nose. “Regina, have a seat. You have a lot on your shoulders—” “Mr. Brownstein, I’ll make it up!” “Don’t worry about making it up. It’ll work out at the end.” “At the end of the semester, you mean? Or just . . . in general?” I’d recently shared with Mr. Brownstein that I’d grown up in and out of foster care. I want to remind him things don’t just “work out” in my life; that my future depends on my grades in ways my classmates’ futures don’t. “Regina, I’m here to help. If you’d feel better to share details about what’s happening in your family, I want you to know this is a safe place.” I flash back: I’m thirteen again, in the car with the social workers. Rosie and Norm are in the other car, and because I’ve revealed what’s happened to us, I’ll never be able to control what happens to my siblings again. Mr.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Eleusis, where his age and status as a stranger formerly prevented him from being initiated with me, now makes of him the young Bacchus of the Mysteries, prince of those border regions which lie between the senses and the soul. His ancestral Arcadia associates him with Pan and Diana, woodland divinities; the peasants of Tibur identify him with the gentle Aristaeus, king of the bees. In Asia his worshippers liken him to their tender gods devoured by summer heat or broken by autumn storms. Far away, on the edge of barbarian lands, the companion of my hunts and travels has assumed the aspect of the Thracian Horseman, that mysterious figure seen riding through the copses by moonlight and carrying away souls of the dead in the folds of his cloak. All of that could be merely an excrescence of the official cult, a form of public flattery or the adulation of priests greedy for subsidies. But the young face is escaping from me to respond to the aspirations of simpler hearts: by one of those shifts of balance inherent in the nature of things that somber but exquisite youth has taken his place in popular devotion as the support of the weak and the poor, and the comforter of dead children. His image on the coins of Bithynia, that profile of the youth of fifteen with floating locks and delighted, truthful smile (which he kept for so short a time), is hung at the neck of new-born infants to serve as an amulet; it is nailed up likewise in village cemeteries on the small tombs. In recent years, when I used to think of my own death, like a pilot unmindful of himself but trembling for the ship's passengers and cargo, I would tell myself bitterly that this remembrance would founder with me; that young being so carefully embalmed in the depths of my memory seemed obliged thus to perish for a second time. That fear, though justifiable, has been in part allayed; I have compensated for this premature death as well as I could; an image, a reflection, some feeble echo will survive for at least a few centuries. Little more can be done in matters of immortality. I have again seen Fidus Aquila, governor of Antino�polis, as he passed on his way to his new post at Sarmizegethusa. He has described to me the annual rites celebrated now on the banks of the Nile in honor of the dead god, to which pilgrims come by thousands from the regions of the North and the South, with offerings of beer and of grain, and with prayers; every third year anniversary games are held in Antino�polis as well as in Alexandria, and in Mantinea and my beloved Athens.

• From Untrue (2018)

  One of her most popular events is a night of sex trivia (What’s the most common sexual fetish? A fixation on shoes and feet! Which US president was supposedly gay and went to events with his partner? James Buchanan!). “There’s no place I don’t go—libraries, coffee shops.” Davis laughed when I asked her about venues. But she particularly wants to serve black communities, and for her that often means getting out the message in the spaces they come together: churches. “I try to work with churches as much as possible, to help people see that, yes, you can put these two aspects of your life together,” she says, “and I figured, ‘Hell, they do bingo in those basements. We can do sex bingo!’” Davis, one of the country’s few African American sexologists, is a fan of humor. On her Instagram account, she wears a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words SEX GEEK and posts messages like “it’s not premarital sex if you never get married!” and “I gently slid her panties to the side…so I could fit the rest of her socks in the drawer.” She believes in confounding expectations and biases about what it means to be black, female, and sexual. But Davis’s motivations are deep and serious. When she was younger and living in Detroit, Davis told me, she lost several close friends within a span of a few weeks to what she describes as “sexually related violence.” Two of these friends were shot and killed when relationships went awry, one by a boyfriend who didn’t want her to go to college. “I had a lot of questions about black love. And the lack thereof. And the link between black love and violence. What are the origins? How did these things happen? There had to be reasons. I have quested to find out.” Writing about the intersection of love, sex, and race was part of her search. In 2003, Davis made her first major television appearance on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam series, performing her spoken-word erotica. Since then, she has performed and lectured at more than fifty colleges and universities across the country and internationally, frequently sharing the stage with the likes of Mos Def, Sonia Sanchez, and Jill Scott. Davis was the first African American to write a book of poetry sold at New York City’s Museum of Sex, Not from Between My Thighs, which pastors throughout the country have purchased and used for sex-positive discussions at their churches. “I have to keep bridging this gap,” she explains. “Bringing my activism and writing and academic training together is the way to do that.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The massive legs were covered to the knees with inscriptions traced in Greek by sightseers: names, dates, a prayer, a certain Servius Suavis, a certain Eumenius who had been in that same place six centuries before me, a certain Panion who had visited Thebes just six months ago. . . . Six months ago. ... A fancy seized me which I had not known since childhood days, when I used to carve my name in the bark of chestnut trees on the Spanish estate; the emperor who steadily refused to have his appelations and titles inscribed upon the buildings and monuments of his own construction now took his dagger to scratch a few Greek letters on that hard stone, an abridged and familiar form of his name, ADPIANO. ... It was one more thrust against time: a name, a life sum (of which the innumerable elements would never be known), a mere mark left by a man wholly lost in that succession of centuries. Suddenly I remembered that it was the twenty-seventh day of the month of Athyr, the fifth day before our kalends of December. It was the birthday of Antinous; the boy would have been twenty that day had he been still alive. I went back aboard; the wound closed too quickly had opened again; I stifled my cries in the cushion which Euphorion slipped under my head. That corpse and I were drifting apart, carried in different directions by two currents of time. The fifth day before the kalends of December, the first day of the month of Athyr: with each passing moment that body was sinking deeper, that death was more imbedded. Once more I climbed the treacherous ascent; with my very nails I strove to exhume that day dead and gone. Phlegon had sat facing the door, but remembered the successive entries and departures in the cabin only for the ray of light which had disturbed him each time that a hand pushed the blind. Like a man accused of a crime I strove to account for each hour: some dictation, a reply to the Senate of Ephesus; at which of those phrases did that agony take place? I tried to gauge the play of the footbridge under his tread, to reconstitute the dry bank and the flat paving stones; then the knife cutting the curl at the edge of his temple, the inclined body and knee bent to allow the hand to untie the sandal; the unique manner of opening the lips as he closed his eyes. It must have cost a desperate resolution indeed for so fine a swimmer to smother in that black silt. In my thoughts I tried to go as far as that revolution through which we all shall pass, when the heart gives out and the brain stops short as the lungs cease to draw in life. I shall undergo a similar convulsion; I, too, shall die.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “Were you one of the boys who was paralyzed in the war.” … “I can’t move it,” he said, showing her his penis. “You see this?” he said, pointing at the yellow catheter tube. “It doesn’t move anymore and I have to use this tube. You see this tube,” he said, pointing to it again. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, senorita is muy bonita ,” he said, staring at her dark eyes. “We can still love,” he said. The tears began to roll down her face. She was sitting in the bed next to him crying. “You see?” he said, pointing to the scar on his chest. “This is where they stuck a chest tube. . . .” She was getting up now and putting her clothes back on. She was still crying.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  And he will come and go around those who love him for millions of days. . . . Sometimes, after long intervals, I have thought to feel the slight stir of an approach, a touch as light as the contact of eyelashes and warm as the hollow of a hand. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles' side. ... I shall never know if that warmth, that sweetness, did not emanate simply from deep within me, the last efforts of a man struggling against solitude and the cold of night. But the question, which arises also in the presence of our living loves, has ceased to interest me now; it matters little to me whether the phantoms whom I evoke come from the limbo of my memory or from that of another world. My soul, if I possess one, is made of the same substance as are the specters; this body with swollen hands and livid nails, this sorry mass almost half-dissolved, this sack of ills, of desires and dreams, is hardly more solid or consistent than a shade. I differ from the dead only in my faculty to suffocate some moments longer; in one sense their existence seems to me more assured than my own. Antinous and Plotina are at least as real as myself. Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is no longer what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. Death's approach re-establishes between us a kind of close complicity: the living beings who surround me, my devoted if sometimes importunate servitors, will never know how little the world interests the two of us now. I think with disgust of those doleful symbols of the Egyptian tombs: the hard scarab, the rigid mummy, the frog which signifies eternal parturition. To believe the priests, I have left you at the place where the separate elements of a person tear apart like a worn garment under strain, at that sinister crossroads between what was and what will be, and what exists eternally. It is conceivable, after all, that such notions are right, and that death is made up of the same confused, shifting matter as life. But none of these theories of immortality inspire me with confidence; the system of retributions and punishments makes little impression upon a judge well aware of the difficulties of judging. On the other hand, the opposite solution seems to me also too simple, the neat reduction to nothingness, the hollow void where Epicurus' disdainful laughter resounds.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I had the feeling of taking that father's grief to myself much as I had taken on the sorrow of Hercules, of Alexander, of Plato, each of whom wept for a dead friend. I sent a few gold pieces to this poor fellow; one could do nothing more. Two or three days later I saw him again; he was contentedly picking at lice as he lay in the sun at the doorway. Messages flooded in; Pancrates sent me his poem, finished at last; it was only a mediocre assemblage of Homeric hexameters, but the name which figured in almost every line made it more moving for me than many a masterpiece. Numenius sent me a Consolation written according to the usual formulas for such works; I passed a night reading it, although it contained every possible platitude. These feeble defenses raised by man against death were developed along two lines: the first consisted in presenting death to us as an inevitable evil, and in reminding us that neither beauty, youth, nor love escapes decay; life and its train of ills are thus proved even more horrible than death itself, and it is better, accordingly, to die than to grow old. Such truths are cited to incline us toward resignation, but they justify chiefly despair. The second line of argument contradicts the first, but our philosophers care little for such niceties: the theme was no longer resignation to death but negation of it. Only the soul was important, they said, arrogantly positing as a fact the immortality of that vague entity which we have never seen function in the absence of the body, and the existence of which they had not yet taken the trouble to prove. I was not so certain: since the smile, the expression of the eyes, the voice, these imponderable realities, had ceased to be, then why not the soul, too? Was it necessarily more immaterial than the body's heat? They attached no importance to those remains wherein the soul no longer dwelt; that body, however, was the only thing left to me, my sole proof that the living boy had existed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The second thing, as my head was jerked back by the hair, my cheek squashed and grazed on the ground, was a boot drawn back, very large and hard, then slamming towards my face. ‘But darling, I was going to give it to you.’ James was terribly upset about the book. ‘I haven’t got one with the wrapper. It was probably worth £100—more, if it was as mint as you say.’ He sat beside me on the sofa, holding my hand. It was rather awful to see him so cheated of his treasure, his aghast look of cupidity and disbelief. ‘I’m afraid the dustmen will have cleared it away by now.’ I spoke thickly, as though I were very drunk. By a miracle I had only lost one tooth, but as it was right in the front it gave me the fatuous air of a defaced advertisement. My left cheek was purple, my mouth swollen and lopsided, and my left eye narrowed to a gluey slit in a bed of tenderest black, like an exposed mollusc. Over the bridge of my beautiful nose, broken and cut, an apache stripe of dressing was stuck. My James was so movingly practical over all this, not repelled, even slightly in his element, somehow vindicated. Deliberately or not, he kept making me laugh, which I could hardly bear, with my bludgeoned head, cracked ribs, and the bruises and contusions on my side and my legs. I had always had such good health—never a broken bone, never a filling, all the household ailments checked off in childhood—that James had had no occasion to prescribe to me for more than a hangover. Because we were always so private with each other he seemed almost to be play-acting when he sounded me and felt me expertly with his still mottled, childish hands, and took my pulse and gave me tiny, painkilling pills. I surrendered to his doctoring, since it resembled the special kindnesses and attentions of an intimate, done for our mutual pleasure. At the same time I knew he was judging me physically and professionally, despite his look of doleful pride at having such a dangerous friend. Phil came too, each afternoon, fresh from his lunchtime breakfast. Though still hot, the weather had turned rainy and bothersome, and he wore a blue showerproof jacket with a hood. He would look lightly flushed when he came in and took it off, and he concealed his initial dismay at my appearance with a preoccupied, evasive manner. For ten days or so I hardly went out and he sweetly brought me food—tinned soups, fruit juice, bread and milk—which he unpacked on the kitchen table for me to see. But I didn’t have much appetite.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  drunken elephant. “MY BABIES,” she wailed. The man hurriedly got into the front seat and slammed his door. A sturdy click sounded before Cookie was at the window, her fists thudding against the glass. “Don’t open the windows,” Mrs. Brady said without turning to look at us. “My babies!” Cookie cried. “Don’t worry, my babies! I’ll get you back!” I watched my mother in her spandex jumpsuit bounce around outside my window. Her insincere pleading didn’t feel real—it was like watching a play at school. Norm was as impassive as I. What struck me at that moment was not Cookie’s emotions, rather it was how tight her clothing was and how much her body jiggled in spite of being bound in fabric. I scooted up and looked out the front window as Camille and Gi got into the car parked in front of ours. Cookie didn’t put on a show for them. They knew things at the time that I sensed but couldn’t articulate until later: Cookie only wanted us for the welfare checks. It was money that benefited Cookie alone. Between mental illness and a fierce alcohol addiction, Cookie was walled into a windowless tunnel of her own desires. There wasn’t room in there for another being, even ones as pipe-cleaner scrawny as me, my sisters and Norm. Cookie ran alongside the car, screaming as we backed out of the driveway. Her giant breasts heaved up and down, almost in slow motion as she tried to keep up. We were only one house away when she stopped running, pulled a cigarette from her jumpsuit pocket, and lit up. Norm and I looked out the back window and watched the car Gi and Camille were in. We couldn’t see them, but we could see their silhouettes in the backseat. A bone-thin arm was waving at us —it was Gi’s arm, I knew. That arm, not Cookie’s hysterics, got me crying. And once I was crying, Norm cried too. We tried to keep it down, sniffling, our heads rocking as we sobbed. Mrs. Brady talked to us from the front seat. She wanted us to know that no one had room enough for four kids. And even if they did, the people who would take little kids didn’t want big kids. And the people who would take big kids didn’t want little ones. When we pulled up to a stoplight, Gi and Camille’s car pulled right up beside us. Gi had her face against the window and was mouthing words to me: Je t’aime, mia bambina, je t’aime. Camille lunged forward so she was beside her and for a moment I thought they’d jump out and get in our car. But then their car turned right and ours turned left. A sound came out of me. Not a scream, more of a gasp. It was as if something had been pulled straight from my gut. I was crying harder than ever.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The day after the woman from the Dream House breaks up with you for the second time, Nick calls you. He sounds jolly on the phone, explains that he’s coming through town on business, and could he swing by for a quick visit? You say sure, then hang up, then immediately begin scolding yourself. Not only are you not out to a man who thinks highly of Bill O’Reilly, but you’re a mess. You haven’t showered in days. You run around trying to throw yourself together, and an hour later you see his huge car chugging down the street. He gets out, waves to you, and starts up your sidewalk. He is a few feet away when you start sniffling uncontrollably. His face expands with concern. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Uncle Nick,” you say, “I am a lesbian, and my girlfriend just broke up with me.” Then the wrecking ball goes clear through the dam, and you begin to bawl. “Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way.” Everyone’s heart does not break in the same way, but you know what he means. You both go inside and sit down on the couch. For the next hour, he tells you stories about his various breakups—he’s been married three times—and gives you advice. “Join a club,” he says. “Take up a new hobby. What about boating? Do you like boating?” You laugh, and for the first time in what feels like a year, you smile. Dream House as MemoryYou spend the month after the breakup doing unofficial CrossFit with your friend Christa, who is brilliant and kind and pushes you. “You’re a natural athlete!” she says admiringly over and over again, and it is hilarious because you are so fat and the furthest possible thing from a natural athlete, but the year’s events have given you uncanny focus, and it’s true that you have been improving: you can now lightly jog a mile without stopping and deadlift two hundred pounds. One day, as you drag your aching body to the locker room, you see that you have nine missed calls. They are all from her, the woman from the Dream House, and there are voicemails to match. Suddenly the phone goes off again, vibrating like a maniacal insect, and you almost drop it on the floor. You sprint out to the parking lot. The whole drive home the phone is ringing, ringing. You run into the house where John is reading, and show him the phone.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  My Roman guests, less accustomed than I to the mysteries of the East, showed a certain curiosity for those ceremonies of another race. For me, on the contrary, they were tiring and irritating to the extreme. I had ordered my boat anchored at some distance from the others, far from any habitation; but a half-abandoned temple of the time of the Pharaohs stood near the river bank and had still its school of priests, so I did not entirely escape the sound of wailing. On the preceding evening Lucius invited me to supper on his boat. I went there at sunset. Antinous refused to go with me, so I left him alone in my stern deck cabin lying on his lion skin, playing at knucklebones with Chabrias. Half an hour later, just as night fell, he changed his mind and called for a boat. Aided by a single oarsman, and pulling against the current, he rowed the considerable distance which separated us from the other boats. His entry into the deck tent where the supper was given interrupted the applause for the contortions of a dancing girl. He had arrayed himself in a long Syrian robe, sheer as the skin of a fruit and strewn over with flowers and chimeras. In order to row more easily he had freed his right arm from its sleeve; sweat was trembling on the smooth chest. Lucius tossed him a garland which he caught in mid-air; his gaiety, almost strident, did not abate for one moment, though hardly sustained by a single cup of Greek wine. We returned together in my boat with six oarsmen, followed by the cutting "good night" of Lucius from above. The wild gay mood persisted. But in the morning I happened by chance to touch a face wet with tears. I asked him impatiently the cause for such crying; he replied humbly, excusing himself on the ground of fatigue. I accepted the lie and fell back to sleep. His true agony took place in that bed, there beside me. The mail from Rome had just come, and the day went by in reading and answering it. As usual Antinous went silently about the room; I know not at what moment that fair creature passed out of my life. Toward the twelfth hour Chabrias entered, in great agitation. Contrary to all regulations the youth had left the boat without stating his purpose or the length of his intended absence; two hours at least had gone by since his departure. Chabrias recalled some strange things said the evening before, and a recommendation made that very morning, concerning me. He voiced his fears.