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 The City of God

  389 This is the part of Augustine’s legacy that was widely shared in the first few centuries after the coming of Jesus, and it is the part that, authorized by Augustine after his life, became a major part of the buttresses of what we call Christian supersessionism—the idea that Christianity succeeds Judaism, replaces it as God’s favored community, as God’s elect. This was a very dangerous idea in its worldly effects, and many Christians think theologically mistaken. This supersessionism warranted a great deal of anti-Judaic violence over the centuries. And then sometime in the past millennium, it curdled into the more savage idea of antisemitism—namely, the idea that the people Israel, the Jews as a race, as a physical collection of humans, are in some way marked out as wicked and evil. This stands behind many Christian pogroms against the Jews in the Middle Ages and up to today, and also behind the more gruesome forms of antisemitism, including but not limited to the Holocaust or Shoah, that have marked the past few centuries of history, first in Europe and the Americas, but now, alas, extending far beyond the West. Now, that is a grim legacy of Augustine’s thinking, but there’s another part of the legacy of Augustine’s allegorical reading of Judaism, one more unusual in his age and less adopted by those who came after. And this is his insistence not only that the Jews of his day are an important reminder of God’s promise to Christianity, but that they still themselves are a salvifically significant people. The most anti-Jewish of Augustine’s contemporaries, remember, were Manicheans, and Gnostics, and other more radical Platonists who suspected any attempt to inhabit or affirm the literal bodies that we have. And they saw Judaism and its attachment to ritual and fleshly existence, and they saw that as deeply problematic. As we have seen, Augustine’s views are far more aligned with Jewish practice here. He, too, saw God caring for body and soul, and insisted on our collective concern for both. Besides, he points out, Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, lived according to the law—the Torah—throughout their lives. Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I’m going to get my money!” Eudora hugged me tightly for a moment, then pushed me away. There was a strange acrid smell upon her. “Goodbye, Chica. Go on back to Frieda’s house. This doesn’t concern you. And have a good trip. When you come back next time we’ll go to Jalisco, to Guadalajara, or maybe up to Yucatan. They’re starting a new dig there I’m going to cover…” “Eudora, I can’t leave you like this. Please. Let me stay!” If only I could hold her. I reached out to touch her again, and Eudora whirled away, almost tripping over the table. “No, I said.” Her voice was nasty, harsh, like gravel. “Get out! What makes you think you can come into someone’s life on a visa and expect…” I flinched in horror at her tone. Then I recognized the smell as tequila, and I realized she had been drinking already. Maybe it was the look on my face that stopped her. Eudora’s voice changed. Slowly, carefully—almost gently—she said, “You can’t handle this, Chica. I’ll be all right. But I want you to leave, right now, because it’s going to get worse, and I do not want you around to see it. Please. Go.” It was as clear and as direct as anything Eudora had ever said to me. There was anger and sadness beneath the surface of her words that I still did not understand. She picked up the bottle from the table and flopped into the armchair heavily, her back to me. I had been dismissed. I wanted to burst into tears. Instead, I picked up my suitcase. I stood there, feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach, feeling afraid, feeling useless. Almost as if I’d spoken, Eudora’s voice came muffled through the back of the armchair. “I said I’ll be all right. Now go.” I moved forward and kissed the top of her tousled head, her spice-flower smells now mixed with the acrid smell of tequila. “All right, Eudora, I’m going. Goodbye. But I’m coming back. In three weeks, I’ll be back.” It was not only a cry of pain, but a new determination to finish something I had begun, to stick with—what? A commitment my body had made? or with the tenderness which flooded through me at the curve of her head over the back of the chair? To stick with something that had passed between us, and not lose myself. And not lose myself. Eudora had not ignored me. Eudora had not made me invisible. Eudora had acted directly towards me. She had sent me away. I was hurt, but not lost.

• From The City of God

  The Romans, then, conquered that they might, with hands stained in the blood of their fathers-in-law, wrench the miserable girls from their embrace,--girls who dared not weep for their slain parents, for fear of offending their victorious husbands; and while yet the battle was raging, stood with their prayers on their lips, and knew not for whom to utter them. Such nuptials were certainly prepared for the Roman people not by Venus, but Bellona; or possibly that infernal fury Alecto had more liberty to injure them now that Juno was aiding them, than when the prayers of that goddess had excited her against AEneas. Andromache in captivity was happier than these Roman brides. For though she was a slave, yet, after she had become the wife of Pyrrhus, no more Trojans fell by his hand; but the Romans slew in battle the very fathers of the brides they fondled. Andromache, the victor's captive, could only mourn, not fear, the death of her people. The Sabine women, related to men still combatants, feared the death of their fathers when their husbands went out to battle, and mourned their death as they returned, while neither their grief nor their fear could be freely expressed. For the victories of their husbands, involving the destruction of fellow-townsmen, relatives, brothers, fathers, caused either pious agony or cruel exultation. Moreover, as the fortune of war is capricious, some of them lost their husbands by the sword of their parents, while others lost husband and father together in mutual destruction. For the Romans by no means escaped with impunity, but they were driven back within their walls, and defended themselves behind closed gates; and when the gates were opened by guile, and the enemy admitted into the town, the Forum itself was the field of a hateful and fierce engagement of fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. The ravishers were indeed quite defeated, and, flying on all sides to their houses, sullied with new shame their original shameful and lamentable triumph. It was at this juncture that Romulus, hoping no more from the valor of his citizens, prayed Jupiter that they might stand their ground; and from this occasion the god gained the name of Stator. But not even thus would the mischief have been finished, had not the ravished women themselves flashed out with dishevelled hair, and cast themselves before their parents, and thus disarmed their just rage, not with the arms of victory, but with the supplications of filial affection. Then Romulus, who could not brook his own brother as a colleague, was compelled to accept Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, as his partner on the throne. But how long would he who misliked the fellowship of his own twin-brother endure a stranger? So, Tatius being slain, Romulus remained sole king, that he might be the greater god. See what rights of marriage these were that fomented unnatural wars. These were the Roman leagues of kindred, relationship, alliance, religion. This was the life of the city so abundantly protected by the gods. You see how many severe things might be said on this theme; but our purpose carries us past them, and requires our discourse for other matters.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Marie’s problems were external, and solvable on some manageable plane: evading Jim’s search for her, finding a new job, fending off inquisitive family and friends. We had a good time in Detroit. Back in New York, Muriel stayed at the apartment to feed the cats and to straighten out her messes in the kitchen, which over the summer, through both of our lacks of concern, had become an archeological dig of remains from other people’s lives. She tidied up our collections of tools and nails and old wood, and the potentially lovely results of our once idyllic Sunday scavenging through the city. She also refinished the wooden cabinet which we had been building to store the stuff. To top it all off, as a surprise, she decided to paint the whole kitchen. But Muriel had difficulty in finishing any project. I got back from Detroit two days later. It was late afternoon as I dragged my valise back up the familiar flights of stairs and unlocked my front door. Open cans of dried-out paint stinking in the summer heat. The half-painted kitchen, brilliant yellow on one wall, pale cream on the others. And the kittens, who had gotten into the turpentine looking for something to eat. Little Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou were quite dead and rigid on the floor under the kitchen table. I packed their small bodies into a toolbox lined with an old pillowcase, and took them down Seventh Street to the East River Park in the beginning twilight. I left them there, in a scrambled grave, under a bush as close to the muddy river waters as I could get, piling stones and dirt around the heap to keep the dogs away. The ballplayers in the park opposite watched curiously. On my walk home through the late summer evening, I thought of the rapid transition from Detroit back to the same old New York. But something had given inside of me. I did not stop by Sixth Street to ask Muriel what had happened. No need; she’d loved the kittens, and she’d let them die. Suddenly, and curiously without drama, the two stiff little black bodies in the toolbox under the bush became tangible evidence I needed, the last sacrifice. When two women construct a relationship they enter together, the anticipated satisfactions are mutual if not similar. Sometimes that relationship becomes unsatisfactory, or ceases to fulfill those separate needs. When that happens, unless there is a mutual agreement to simultaneously dissolve the relationship, there must always be one person who decides to make the first move. The woman who moves first is not necessarily the most injured nor the most at fault. The first week in September. The Journal-American was predicting that Elvis Presley, whose voice decorated every jukebox and radio, would be only a flash-in-the-pan. Muriel’s clothes were still at the house, although I saw little of her.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  This failure is part of the previously noted failure to convey any sense of Negro life as a continuing and complex group reality. Bigger, who cannot function therefore as a reflection of the social illness, having, as it were, no society to reflect, likewise refuses to function on the loftier level of the Christ-symbol. His kinsmen are quite right to weep and be frightened, even to be appalled: for it is not his love for them or for himself which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self-hatred; he does not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals, on the contrary, nothing more than his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them. In this also he is the “native son,” his progress determinable by the speed with which the distance increases between himself and the auction-block and all that the auction-block implies. To have penetrated this phenomenon, this inward contention of love and hatred, blackness and whiteness, would have given him a stature more nearly human and an end more nearly tragic; and would have given us a document more profoundly and genuinely bitter and less harsh with an anger which is, on the one hand, exhibited and, on the other hand, denied. Native Son finds itself at length so trapped by the American image of Negro life and by the American necessity to find the ray of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications. This is why Bigger must be at the last redeemed, to be received, if only by rhetoric, into that community of phantoms which is our tenaciously held ideal of the happy social life. It is the socially conscious whites who receive him—the Negroes being capable of no such objectivity—and we have, by way of illustration, that lamentable scene in which Jan, Mary’s lover, forgives him for her murder; and, carrying the explicit burden of the novel, Max’s long speech to the jury.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Let us pray.…’ His father’s hands were at his waist, and he took off his belt. Tears were in his eyes. ‘Gabriel,’ cried Aunt Florence, ‘ain’t you done playing the fool for to-night?’ Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the crack! against Roy’s flesh. And the baby, Ruth, began to scream. ‘ My Lord, my Lord, ’ his father whispered, ‘ my Lord, my Lord .’ He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning. His Aunt Florence and his father faced each other. ‘Yes, Lord,’ Aunt Florence said, ‘you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.’ John opened the church door with his father’s key at six o’clock. Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the saints to enter the church and pray. It was seldom, however, that anyone arrived before eight-thirty, the Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping, clean their houses, and put their children to bed. John closed the door behind him and stood in the narrow church aisle, hearing behind him the voices of children playing, and ruder voices, the voices of their elders, cursing and crying in the streets. It was dark in the church; street lights had been snapping on all around him on the populous avenue; the light of the day was gone. His feet seemed planted on this wooden floor; they did not wish to carry him one step further.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Suppose I get on the same bus as she does coming uptown from the office? What shall I tell them when I get home? My mother was home when I got in. An unwillingness to share any piece of my private world, even the pain, made me lie. I said Gennie was in the hospital because she had swallowed poison, by accident. Iodine, from the medicine chest. “But what kind of house is that for a young girl to grow up in? How could she make such a mistake, poor thing? Wasn’t her stepmother home?” “I don’t know, Mother. That’s all her father told me.” Under my mother’s curious gaze I kept my face carefully blank. Early early the next morning. Using my church collection for carfare. The hospital odor and the muted sound of the p.a. Nobody around, nobody to stop me. The hospital bed in the glass cubicle. You can’t just die like this, Gennie, we haven’t had our summer yet. Don’t you remember? You promised . She can’t die. Too much poison, they say. She stuffed rat poison into the gelatin capsules, ate them, one by one. We had bought two dozen capsules on Friday. A crumpled flower on the hospital bed. Arsenic is a corrosive. She lingered, metallic-smelling foam at the corners of her mouth, blackened and wet. Her Gennie braids askew, unraveling. The last five inches of them revealed as a hairpiece. How could it be that I never knew? Gennie had plaited false hair into her braids. She was so proud of her long hair. Sometimes she wound them around her head like a crown. Now they were unraveling on the hospital pillow as she tossed her head from side to side, her eyes closed in the emptiness and quiet of the early Sunday morning hospital light. I took her hand. “I’m supposed to be at church, Gennie, but I had to come see you.” She smiled, her eyes still closed. She turned her head towards me. Her breath was foul and shallow. “Don’t die, Gennie. Do you still want to?” “Of course, I do. Didn’t I tell you I was going to?” I bent close to her and touched her forehead. “Oh why, Gennie, why?” I whispered. Her great black eyes flashed open. Her head moved on the pillow in a parody of her old arrogance. Her brows came down in the center. “Why what?” she snapped. “Now don’t be silly. You know why.” But I did not know why. I scanned her face turned toward me, eyes closed again. The wrinkle-frown still between the thick brows. I did not know why.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Now, somewhere at the other end of the earth, her husband lay buried. He slept in a land his fathers had never seen. She wondered often if his grave was marked—if there stood over it, as in pictures she had seen, a small white cross. If the Lord had ever allowed her to cross that swelling ocean she would have gone, among all the millions buried there, to seek out his grave. Wearing deep mourning, she would have laid on it, perhaps, a wreath of flowers, as other women did; and stood for a moment, head bowed, considering the un-speaking ground. How terrible it would be for Frank to rise on the day of judgment so far from home! And he surely would not scruple, even on that day, to be angry at the Lord. ‘Me and the Lord,’ he had often said, ‘don’t always get along so well. He running the world like He thinks I ain’t got good sense.’ How had he died? Slow or sudden? Had he cried out? Had death come creeping on him from behind, or faced him like a man? She knew nothing about it, for she had not known that he was dead until long afterwards, when boys were coming home and she had begun searching for Frank’s face in the streets. It was the woman with whom he had lived who had told her, for Frank had given this woman’s name as his next-of-kin. The woman, having told her, had not known what else to say, and she stared at Florence in simple-minded pity. This made Florence furious, and she barely murmured: ‘Thank you,’ before she turned away. She hated Frank for making this woman official witness to her humiliation. And she wondered again what Frank had seen in this woman, who, though she was younger than Florence, had never been so pretty, and who drank all the time, and who was seen with many men. But it had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Wallace, bought the tickets and threw them on the ground at Mr. Warde’s feet, advising him not to show his black face in Georgia again. The quartet, meanwhile, had gotten together six dollars doing odd jobs, which was enough, perhaps, for three of them to eat on the road. They split up, three leaving that Friday and the other two staying on about ten days longer, working for a construction company. Mr. Warde stopped off to visit his family, promising to see The Melodeers in New York, but he had not arrived as this was being written. The Melodeers laugh about their trip now, that good-natured, hearty laughter which is, according to white men, the peculiar heritage of Negroes, Negroes who were born with the fortunate ability to laugh all their troubles away. Somewhat surprisingly, they are not particularly bitter toward the Progressive Party, though they can scarcely be numbered among its supporters. “They’re all the same,” David tells me, “ain’t none of ’em gonna do you no good; if you gonna be foolish enough to believe what they say, then it serves you good and right. Ain’t none of ’em gonna do a thing for me. ” Notes of a Native Son Notes of a Native Son On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. The day of my father’s funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  His mother, too, was silent, but he had seen her pray before, and her silence made him feel that she was weeping. And why did she weep? And why did they come here, night after night after night, calling out to a God who cared nothing for them—if, above this flaking ceiling, there was any God at all? Then he remembered that the fool has said in his heart, There is no God—and he dropped his eyes, seeing that over his Aunt Florence’s head Praying Mother Washington was looking at him. Frank sang the blues, and he drank too much. His skin was the colour of caramel candy. Perhaps for this reason she always thought of him as having candy in his mouth, candy staining the edges of his straight, cruel teeth. For a while he wore a tiny moustache, but she made him shave it off, for it made him look, she thought, like a half-breed gigolo. In details such as this he was always very easy—he would always put on a clean shirt, or get his hair cut, or come with her to Uplift meetings whete they heard speeches by prominent Negroes about the future and duties of the Negro race. And this had given her, in the beginning of their marriage, the impression that she controlled him. This impression had been entirely and disastrously false. When he had left her, more than twenty years before, and after more than ten years of marriage, she had felt for that moment only an exhausted exasperation and a vast relief. He had not been home for two days and three nights, and when he did return they quarrelled with more than their usual bitterness. All of the rage she had accumulated during their marriage was told him in that evening as they stood in their small kitchen. He was still wearing overalls, and he had not shaved, and his face was muddy with sweat and dirt. He had said nothing for a long while, and then he had said: ‘All right, baby. I guess you don’t never want to see me no more, not a miserable, black sinner like me.’ The door closed behind him, and she heard his feet echoing down the long hall, away. She stood alone in the kitchen, holding the empty coffee-pot that she had been about to wash. She thought: ‘He’ll come back, and he’ll come back drunk.’ And then she had thought, looking about the kitchen: ‘Lord, wouldn’t it be a blessing if he didn’t never come back no more.’ The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer. Frank never did come back. He lived for a long while with another woman, and when the war came he died in France.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  But swift-moving Louisa caught me, one hand on my arm, before I could open the door. Louisa took off her rimless glasses and she did not look like anybody’s mother at all. She looked too young, and too pretty, and too tired, and her red-rimmed eyes were full of tears and pleading. She was thirty-four years old and tomorrow we were going to bury her only child, a sixteen-year old suicide. “You-all were best friends,” insistent, less proper, her fingers tight through my coat sleeve. “Do you know why she did it?” Louisa had a mole on her face beside her nose, almost exactly the same place as Gennie’s had been. It was magnified by the tears rolling down her cheeks. I looked away, my hand still on the doorknob. “No, ma’am.” I looked up, again. I remembered my mother’s words, resisting them, “That man call himself father was using that girl for I don’t know what.” “I have to go now.” I opened the door, stepped over the floor-anchored metal rod upon which I had tripped so many times before, and closed the door behind me. I heard the metallic clang of the police lock rod as it slid back into place, mingled with the muffled sounds of Louisa’s sobbing. Gennie was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery on the first day of April. The Amsterdam News story about her death announced that she was not pregnant and so no reason for her suicide could be established. Nothing else. The sound of dirt clods flying hollow against the white coffin. The sound of birds who knew death as no reason for silence. A black-clad man mouthing words in a foreign tongue. No hallowed ground for suicides. The sound of weeping women. The wind. The forward edge of spring. The sound of grass growing, flowers beginning to blossom, the branching of a far-off tree. Clods against the white coffin . We drove away from the grave, down a winding hill. The last thing I saw of that place was two large gravemen with unshaven faces pulling the lowering straps from the grave. They tossed the still living flowers into a waiting bin, and shoveled earth into the grave. Two grave-hands, putting the finishing touches on a raw mound of earth, outlined against the suddenly grey and lowering April sky. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 15 Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I moved out of my parents’ home. I hadn’t planned it that way; that’s just the way it worked out. I went to stay with a friend of Jean’s who had her own apartment on the Lower East Side, on Rivington Street. I worked at Beth David hospital nights as a nurses’ aide, and had an affair with a boy named Peter. I met Peter at a Labor Youth League party in February and we made a date.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Among-you children do things different in this place and you think we stupid. But this old head of mine, I know what I know. There was something totally wrong there from the start, you mark my words. That man call himself father was using that girl for I don’t know what.” The merciless quality of my mother’s fumbling insights turned her attempt at comfort into another assault. As if her harshness could confer invulnerability upon me. As if in the flames of truth as she saw it, I could eventually be forged into some pain-resistant replica of herself. But all this was so beside the point. Across the darkening air shaft Mrs. Washer pulled down her window-shade. Gennie was dead. Dead dead dead, a nickel a rabbit’s head . When my father came home, he knew, too. “Next time, don’t lie to us. Was your girlfriend in trouble?” Days later, I sat on the low bench beside Louisa’s window, newly opened after its end-of-winter untaping. It was an early spring afternoon. The season had begun unusually warm. The street outside was runny with old rain, the still slick pavement reflecting oily rainbows. Louisa perched upon her window ledge. One high hip nudged against the wooden window frame, her stockinged leg moving back and forth ever so slightly. The other drooped down over the edge of the bench where I was sitting. “You and Gene were such good friends.” Louisa’s tones were clipped and longing. “Matter of fact, she saw you more than…” she fingered the spirals of Gennie’s notebook which I had just given her, keeping the diary for myself. Louisa’s eyes were dry and desperately conversational. I suddenly remembered Gennie saying her mother had once been a schoolteacher down south and prided herself on proper speech. “…than she saw anybody else.” Louisa finished abruptly. I savored this piece of information in silence. Gennie’s best friend . “You looked enough alike to be sisters, people said.” Except Gennie was lighter and thinner and beautiful . Something about Louisa’s eyes warned me and I stood up quickly. “I gotta go, Miz Thompson, my mother…” I reached for my coat on the couch. It had once been Louisa’s daybed, the one where Gennie and I lay laughing and talking and smoking. When Gennie left, Louisa had redone the tiny apartment and taken over the bedroom. I suddenly saw again Gennie’s scratched face and tired eyes as she snapped at me that night, “I can’t go back, there’s no room for me anymore… I can’t talk to my mother about Phillip…” I buttoned my coat hurriedly. “She’s waiting for me to go marketing, because my sisters have a rehearsal at school.”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Somehow, it never was, but neither Muriel nor I wanted to notice that, nor how unfair such a stacked deck was. She and I had each other; Lynn had only a piece of each of us, and was here on sufferance. We never saw nor articulated this until much later, despite our endless examinations and theme-writing about communal living. And by then it was too late, at least for this experiment in living out our visions. Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given. One Sunday night in the beginning of August, Muriel and I came home from Laurel’s to find that Lynn had left. Her knapsack and the boxes in which she kept her assortment of mementos from different lives were gone. In the middle of the kitchen table was Muriel’s Cassell’s german dictionary, the book in which we kept our savings, ninety dollars to date. It was open, and the pages were empty. That ninety dollars was all the money we had, and it represented a huge loss to us. Our roommate was gone, our house-keys were gone, our savings were gone. The loss of the dream was even greater. Even many years afterward, Lynn was never able to say to us why she had done it. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 28 That fall, Muriel and I took a course at the New School in contemporary american poetry, and I went into therapy. There were things I did not understand, and things I felt that I did not want to feel, particularly the blinding headaches that came in waves sometimes. And I seldom spoke. I wrote and I dreamed, but almost never talked, except in answer to a direct question, or to give a direction of some sort. I became more and more aware of this the longer Muriel and I lived together. With Rhea, as with most of the other people I knew, my primary function in conversations was to listen. Most people never get a chance to talk as much as they want to, and I was an attentive listener, being really interested in what made other people tick. (Maybe I could squirrel it off and examine their lives in private and find out something about myself.) Muriel and I communicated pretty much by intuition and unfinished sentences. Libraries are supposed to be quiet, so at work I didn’t have to talk, except to point out where books were, and tell stories to the children.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 11. --Of the Statue of Apollo at Cumae, Whose Tears are Supposed to Have Portended Disaster to the Greeks, Whom the God Was Unable to Succor. And it is still this weakness of the gods which is confessed in the story of the Cuman Apollo, who is said to have wept for four days during the war with the Achaeans and King Aristonicus. And when the augurs were alarmed at the portent, and had determined to cast the statue into the sea, the old men of Cumae interposed, and related that a similar prodigy had occurred to the same image during the wars against Antiochus and against Perseus, and that by a decree of the senate, gifts had been presented to Apollo, because the event had proved favorable to the Romans. Then soothsayers were summoned who were supposed to have greater professional skill, and they pronounced that the weeping of Apollo's image was propitious to the Romans, because Cumae was a Greek colony, and that Apollo was bewailing (and thereby presaging) the grief and calamity that was about to light upon his own land of Greece, from which he had been brought. Shortly afterwards it was reported that King Aristonicus was defeated and made prisoner,--a defeat certainly opposed to the will of Apollo; and this he indicated by even shedding tears from his marble image. And this shows us that, though the verses of the poets are mythical, they are not altogether devoid of truth, but describe the manners of the demons in a sufficiently fit style. For in Virgil, Diana mourned for Camilla, [136] and Hercules wept for Pallas doomed to die. [137]This is perhaps the reason why Numa Pompilius, too, when, enjoying prolonged peace, but without knowing or inquiring from whom he received it, he began in his leisure to consider to what gods he should entrust the safe keeping and conduct of Rome, and not dreaming that the true, almighty, and most high God cares for earthly affairs, but recollecting only that the Trojan gods which AEneas had brought to Italy had been able to preserve neither the Trojan nor Lavinian kingdom rounded by AEneas himself, concluded that he must provide other gods as guardians of fugitives and helpers of the weak, and add them to those earlier divinities who had either come over to Rome with Romulus, or when Alba was destroyed. [136] AEneid, xi. 532. [137] Ibid. x. 464.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 20. --Of the Destruction of the Saguntines, Who Received No Help from the Roman Gods, Though Perishing on Account of Their Fidelity to Rome. But among all the disasters of the second Punic war, there occurred none more lamentable, or calculated to excite deeper complaint, than the fate of the Saguntines. This city of Spain, eminently friendly to Rome, was destroyed by its fidelity to the Roman people. For when Hannibal had broken treaty with the Romans, he sought occasion for provoking them to war, and accordingly made a fierce assault upon Saguntum. When this was reported at Rome, ambassadors were sent to Hannibal, urging him to raise the siege; and when this remonstrance was neglected, they proceeded to Carthage, lodged complaint against the breaking of the treaty, and returned to Rome without accomplishing their object. Meanwhile the siege went on; and in the eighth or ninth month, this opulent but ill-fated city, dear as it was to its own state and to Rome, was taken, and subjected to treatment which one cannot read, much less narrate, without horror. And yet, because it bears directly on the matter in hand, I will briefly touch upon it. First, then, famine wasted the Saguntines, so that even human corpses were eaten by some:so at least it is recorded. Subsequently, when thoroughly worn out, that they might at least escape the ignominy of falling into the hands of Hannibal, they publicly erected a huge funeral pile, and cast themselves into its flames, while at the same time they slew their children and themselves with the sword. Could these gods, these debauchees and gourmands, whose mouths water for fat sacrifices, and whose lips utter lying divinations,--could they not do anything in a case like this? Could they not interfere for the preservation of a city closely allied to the Roman people, or prevent it perishing for its fidelity to that alliance of which they themselves had been the mediators? Saguntum, faithfully keeping the treaty it had entered into before these gods, and to which it had firmly bound itself by an oath, was besieged, taken, and destroyed by a perjured person. If afterwards, when Hannibal was close to the walls of Rome, it was the gods who terrified him with lightning and tempest, and drove him to a distance, why, I ask, did they not thus interfere before? For I make bold to say, that this demonstration with the tempest would have been more honorably made in defence of the allies of Rome--who were in danger on account of their reluctance to break faith with the Romans, and had no resources of their own--than in defence of the Romans themselves, who were fighting in their own cause, and had abundant resources to oppose Hannibal.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  The weeping was buried beneath the song. She had been hearing this song all her life, she had grown up with it, but she had never understood it as well as she understood it now. It filled the church, as though the church had merely become a hollow or a void, echoing with the voices that had driven her to this dark place. Her aunt had sung it always, harshly, under her breath, in a bitter pride: ‘The consecrated cross I’ll bear Till death shall set me free, And then go home, a crown to wear, For there’s a crown for me. ’ She was probably an old, old woman now, still in the same harshness of spirit, singing this song in the tiny house down home which she and Elizabeth had shared so long. And she did not know of Elizabeth’s shame—Elizabeth had not written about John until long after she was married to Gabriel; and the Lord had never allowed her aunt to come to New York City. Her aunt had always prophesied that Elizabeth would come to no good end, proud, and vain, and foolish as she was, and having been allowed to run wild all her childhood days. Her aunt had come second in the series of disasters that had ended Elizabeth’s childhood. First, when she was eight, going on nine, her mother had died, an event not immediately recognized by Elizabeth as a disaster, since she had scarcely known her mother and had certainly never loved her. Her mother had been very fair, and beautiful, and delicate of health, so that she stayed in bed most of the time, reading spiritualist pamphlets concerning the benefits of disease and complaining to Elizabeth’s father of how she suffered. Elizabeth remembered of her only that she wept very easily and that she smelled like stale milk—it was, perhaps, her mother’s disquieting colour that, whenever she was held in her mother’s arms, made Elizabeth think of milk. Her mother did not, however, hold Elizabeth in her arms very often. Elizabeth very quickly suspected that this was because she was so very much darker than her mother and not nearly, of course, so beautiful. When she faced her mother she was shy, downcast, sullen. She did not know how to answer her mother’s shrill, meaningless questions, put with the furious affectation of maternal concern; she could not pretend, when she kissed her mother, or submitted to her mother’s kiss, that she was moved by anything more than an unpleasant sense of duty. This, of course, bred in her mother a kind of baffled fury, and she never tired of telling Elizabeth that she was an ‘unnatural’ child. But it was very different with her father; he was—and so Elizabeth never failed to think of him—young, and handsome, and kind, and generous; and he loved his daughter.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Then we would have to get up to gather the pits and fruit skins and bag them to put out later for the garbagemen, because if we left them near the bed for any length of time, they would call out the hordes of cockroaches that always waited on the sidelines within the walls of Harlem tenements, particularly in the smaller older ones under the hill of Morningside Heights. Afrekete lived not far from Genevieve’s grandmother’s house. Sometimes she reminded me of Ella, Gennie’s stepmother, who shuffled about with an apron on and a broom outside the room where Gennie and I lay on the studio couch. She would be singing her non-stop tuneless little song over and over and over: Momma kilt me Poppa et me Po’ lil’ brudder suck ma bones… And one day Gennie turned her head on my lap to say uneasily, “You know, sometimes I don’t know whether Ella’s crazy, or stupid, or divine.” And now I think the goddess was speaking through Ella also, but Ella was too beaten down and anesthetized by Phillip’s brutality for her to believe in her own mouth, and we, Gennie and I, were too arrogant and childish—not without right or reason, for we were scarcely more than children—to see that our survival might very well lay in listening to the sweeping woman’s tuneless song. I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing—not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy. Afrekete’s house was the tallest one near the corner, before the high rocks of Morningside Park began on the other side of the avenue, and one night on the Midsummer Eve’s Moon we took a blanket up to the roof. She lived on the top floor, and in an unspoken agreement, the roof belonged mostly to those who had to live under its heat. The roof was the chief resort territory of tenement-dwellers, and was known as Tar Beach. We jammed the roof door shut with our sneakers, and spread our blanket in the lee of the chimney, between its warm brick wall and the high parapet of the building’s face. This was before the blaze of sulphur lamps had stripped the streets of New York of trees and shadow, and the incandescence from the lights below faded this far up.

• From The City of God

  [140] Virgil, AEn. i. 286. [141] Pharsal. v. 1. Chapter 14. --Of the Wickedness of the War Waged by the Romans Against the Albans, and of the Victories Won by the Lust of Power. But what happened after Numa's reign, and under the other kings, when the Albans were provoked into war, with sad results not to themselves alone, but also to the Romans? The long peace of Numa had become tedious; and with what endless slaughter and detriment of both states did the Roman and Alban armies bring it to an end! For Alba, which had been founded by Ascanius, son of AEneas, and which was more properly the mother of Rome than Troy herself, was provoked to battle by Tullus Hostilius, king of Rome, and in the conflict both inflicted and received such damage, that at length both parties wearied of the struggle. It was then devised that the war should be decided by the combat of three twin-brothers from each army:from the Romans the three Horatii stood forward, from the Albans the three Curiatii. Two of the Horatii were overcome and disposed of by the Curiatii; but by the remaining Horatius the three Curiatii were slain. Thus Rome remained victorious, but with such a sacrifice that only one survivor returned to his home. Whose was the loss on both sides? Whose the grief, but of the offspring of AEneas, the descendants of Ascanius, the progeny of Venus, the grandsons of Jupiter? For this, too, was a "worse than civil" war, in which the belligerent states were mother and daughter. And to this combat of the three twin-brothers there was added another atrocious and horrible catastrophe. For as the two nations had formerly been friendly (being related and neighbors), the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii; and she, when she saw her brother wearing the spoils of her betrothed, burst into tears, and was slain by her own brother in his anger. To me, this one girl seems to have been more humane than the whole Roman people. I cannot think her to blame for lamenting the man to whom already she had plighted her troth, or, as perhaps she was doing, for grieving that her brother should have slain him to whom he had promised his sister. For why do we praise the grief of AEneas (in Virgil [142] ) over the enemy cut down even by his own hand? Why did Marcellus shed tears over the city of Syracuse, when he recollected, just before he destroyed, its magnificence and meridian glory, and thought upon the common lot of all things? I demand, in the name of humanity, that if men are praised for tears shed over enemies conquered by themselves, a weak girl should not be counted criminal for bewailing her lover slaughtered by the hand of her brother. While, then, that maiden was weeping for the death of her betrothed inflicted by her brother's hand, Rome was rejoicing that such devastation had been wrought on her mother state, and that she had purchased a victory with such an expenditure of the common blood of herself and the Albans.

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

  GREGORY. (ubi sup.) It may also be answered, that evil men receive in this life good things, because they place their whole joy in transitory happiness, but the righteous may indeed have good things here, yet not receive them for reward, because while they seek better things, that is, eternal, in their judgment whatever good things are present seem by no means good. CHRYSOSTOM. (in Conc. de Laz.) But after the mercy of God, we must seek in our own endeavours for hope of salvation, not in numbering fathers, or relations, or friends. For brother does not deliver brother; and therefore it is added, And beside all this between us and yon there is a great gulf fixed. THEOPHYLACT. The great gulf signifies the distance of the righteous from sinners. For as their affections were different, so also their abiding places do not slightly differ. CHRYSOSTOM. The gulf is said to be fixed, because it cannot be loosened, moved, or shaken. AMBROSE. Between the rich and the poor then there is a great gulf, because after death rewards cannot be changed. Hence it follows, So that they who would pass from hence to you cannot, nor come thence to us. CHRYSOSTOM. As if he says, We can see, we cannot pass; and we see what we have escaped, you what you have lost; our joys enhance your torments, your torments our joys. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) For as the wicked desire to pass over to the elect, that is, to depart from the pangs of their sufferings, so to the afflicted and tormented would the just pass in their mind by compassion, and wish to set them free. But the souls of the just, although in the goodness of their nature they feel compassion, after being united to the righteousness of their Author, are constrained by such great uprightness as not to be moved with compassion towards the reprobate. Neither then do the unrighteous pass over to the lot of the blessed, because they are bound in everlasting condemnation, nor can the righteous pass to the reprobate, because being now made upright by the righteousness of judgment, they in no way pity them from any compassion. THEOPHYLACT. You may from this derive an argument against the followers of Origen, who say, that since an end is to be placed to punishments, there will be a time when sinners shall be gathered to the righteous and to God.

• From The City of God

  501 The City of God’s Journey through Hist ory A ugustine’s city outlived him by merely a matter of months. The Vandals, making their way through Gaul, over the Mediterranean, and across the North African coast were besieging Hippo by the summer of 430. Augustine died on August 28, 430, knowing that his city was surrounded and no rescue was coming from Carthage. The city surrendered and was occupied in the spring of 431 and went into decline at once. The trans-Mediterranean economy in which it flourished fell into decrepitude, and it shrank into a fishing town. Within a century there was little left of the city Augustine had served. Barbarians and the Rise of Christianity „After Augustine’s death and the end of the siege, somehow his staff saved his library, including all his own works. They made it across the sea to Italy and were copied and distributed in the West, wherever the Christian churches prayed and preached and thought in Latin. „His bones made it too: Removed by his church first to Cagliari in Sardinia, they finally found a home in Pavia, in the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where they rest to this day. „We have his books. We have his bones. Do we, then, have him? In a very real way we do not. We lack Augustine because our organic connection to him was severed by the chaos that followed his death and erased the audiences to which his works were addressed and with whom he shared a coherent worldview. Lecture 24