Guilt

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 Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  dem, cotidie ac partes electiores surripere atque iis divenditis peculium latenter augere, de reliquis aequam vindicare divisionem. Si tibi denique societas ista displicet, possumus omnia quidem cetera fratres manere, ab isto tamen nexu com- munionis discedere : nam video in immensum damni procedentem querelam nutrire nobis immanem dis- cordiam," Subicit alius: * Laudo istam tuam me- hercules et ipse constantiam, quod cotidie furatis claneulo partibus praevenisti querimoniam, quam diutissime sustinens tacitus ingemescebam, ne viderer rapinae sordidae meum fratrem arguere. Sed bene, quod utrimquesecus sermone prolato iacturae re- medium quaeritur, ne silentio procedens simultas 15 Eteocleas nobis contentiones pariat." His et simili- bus altercati conviciis deierantur utrique nullam se prorsus fraudem, nullam denique surreptionem facti- tasse, sed plane debere cunctis artibus communis dispendii latronem inquiri: nam neque asinum, qui solus interesset, talibus cibis affici posse, et tamen cotidie partes electiles comparere nusquam, nec utique cellulam suam tam immanes involare muscas ut olim. Harpyiae fuere, quae diripiebant Phineias dapes. Interea liberalibus cenis inescatus et humanis affatim cibis saginatus, corpus obesa pinguitie comple- veram, corium arvina sueculenta molliveram, pilum 408 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X away the best meat and selling to augment thy private good, and yet nevertheless to have thy equal part of the residue that is left? If our partnership do displease thee, we will be partners and brothers in other things, but in this we will break off: for I perceive that the great loss which I sustain will at length grow from complaining to be a cause of great discord between us." Then answered the other: “Verily I praise thy great constancy and subtileness, in that thou (when thou hast secretly taken away the meat) dost begin to complain first; whereas I by long space of time have silently suffered thee, because I would not seem to accuse my brother of a scurvy theft. But I am right glad in that we are fallen into communication of this matter, to seek a remedy for it, lest by our silence like contention might arise between us as fortuned between Eteocles! and his brother." When they had reasoned and striven together in this sort, they sware both earnestly that neither of them stole or took away any jot of the meat, but that they must conclude to search out the thief by all kind of means in common. For they could not imagine or think that the ass, who stood alone there, would fancy any such meats, and yet every day the best parts thereof would utterly disappear; neither could they think that flies were so great or ravenous as to devour whole dishes of meat, like the birds harpies which carried away the meats of Phineus, king of Arcadia. In the mean season, while I was fed with dainty morsels, and fattened with food fit for men, I gathered together my flesh, my skin waxed soft and juicy, my hair began to shine, and I was gallant on every part;

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Ultimately, I said goodbye to Steve and took up masturbation, fasting, and poetry. I kept telling myself that masturbation at least kept me pure. Steve continued to woo me with bottles of Chanel No. 5, Frank Sinatra records, and beautifully lettered quotations from the poems of Yeats. He called me whenever he got drunk and on every one of my birthdays for the next five years. (Was it just jerking him off which inspired such loyalty?) But meanwhile I repented for my self-indulgence by undergoing a sort of religious conversion which included starvation (I denied myself even water), studying Siddhartha, and losing twenty pounds (and with them, my periods). I also got a Joblike rash of boils and was sent to my first dermatologist—a German lady refugee who said, memorably, “Za skeen is za meeroar of za zoul” and who referred me to the first of my many psychiatrists, a short doctor whose name was Schrift. — Dr. Schrift (the very same Dr. Schrift who had flown to Vienna with us) was a follower of Wilhelm Stekel and he tucked his shoelaces under the toes of his shoes. (I am not sure whether or not this was part of the Stekelian method.) His apartment building on Madison Avenue had very dark and narrow halls whose walls were covered with gold, seashell-spotted wallpaper, such as you might find in the bathroom of an old house in Larchmont. Waiting for the elevator, I used to stare at the wallpaper and wonder if the landlord had gotten a good deal on a bathroom wallpaper closeout. Why else paper a lobby with gold seashells and tiny pink fishes? Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn’t realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at the foot and a hard wedge-shaped pillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head. He insisted that the horse I was dreaming about was my father. I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ avocado-green silk couch. He insisted that the coffin I was dreaming about was my mother. What could be the reason my periods had stopped? A mystery. “Because I don’t want to be a woman. Because it’s too confusing. Because Shaw says you can’t be a woman and an artist. Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd!” he tells Humbert, and his words are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him totally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov parody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to connect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the confessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged: “because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die.” Since Quilty has been described as “the American Maeterlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene should be extravagantly “symbolic.” Because one is not easily rid of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossible to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his comically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of The Rape of the Lock, burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of detective novels and action films. (“Chum,” Humbert’s revolver, parodies the “phallic” pistols of “Freudian” Westerns and the American Gun Mystique at large.) Quilty returns to the scene of the crime—a bed—and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished.” The last details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood, and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does the Gothic Doppelgänger convention, with all its own “juvenile connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is still “all covered with Quilty.” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readily—McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism—and the ambiguities of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere “dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible self, we are left with “Clare Obscure” and “quilted Quilty,” the patchwork self. Quilty refuses to die, just as the recaptured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name (1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoevsky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelgänger fiction instead discovers himself adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’s. Having hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spectral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter, which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially “beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. But even at our very best moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo’s glance skipping from the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we drove on: “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store”); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Would improvement be forthcoming with a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl’s day?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Her most definite and also most desperate act is the burning of his letters-and the anguish this cost her, and the fact that in this burning she expr essed what surely must have seemed to her lif e's monumental failu re and waste, Gide characteris tically (indeed, one may say, necessarily) cannot enter into and cannot understand. "They were my most precious belong ings," she tells him, and perhaps he cannot be blamed for prote cting himself against the knife of this dreadful conjugal confession. But: "It is the best of me that disappears," he tells us, ((and it will no longer cotm terbalance the worst.'' (It alics mine.) He had entrusted, as it were, to her his pur ity, that part of him that was not carnal; and it is quit e clear that, though he suspected it, he could not face the fact that it was only when her purity ended that her life could begin, that the key to her liberation was in his hands. But if he had ever turned that key madness and despair would have followed for him, his world would have turned completely dark, the string connecting him to heaven would have been cut. And this is because then he could no longer have lmred Madeleine as an ideal, as Emanuele, God-with-us, but would have been compelled to love her as a woman, which he could not have done except physically. And then he would have had to hate her, and at that moment those gates which, as it seemed to him, held him back from utter corru p tion would have been opened. He loved her as a woman, indeed, only in the sense that no man could have held the 23+ NOBODY KN OWS MY NAME place in Gidc's dark sky which was held by Madeleine. She was his Heaven who would forgive him for his Hell and help him to endure it. As indeed she was and, in the strangest way possible, did-by allowing him to feel guilty about her instead of the boys on the Piazza d'Espagne-with the result that, in Gide's work, both his Heaven and his Hell suffer from a cer tain lack of ur gency. Gidc's relations with Madeleine place his relations with men in rather a bleak light. Since he clearly could not forgive him self for his anomaly, he must certainly have despised them which almost certainly explains the fascination felt by Gidc and so many of his heroes for countries like North Africa. It is not necessary to despise people who are one's inferior s whose inferiority, by the way, is amply demonstrated by the fact that they appear to relish, without guilt, their sensuality.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The song says, "I know my robe's going to fit me well. I tried it on at the gates of Hell." It was time to leave, and we stood in the large living room, saying good night, with everything curiously and heavily un resolved. I could not help feeling that I had failed a test, in their eyes and in my own, or that I had failed to heed a warn ing. Elijah and I shook hands, and he asked me where I was going. Wherever it was, I would be driven there-"because, when we invite someone here," he said, "we take the respon sibility of protec ting him from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he's going." I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town. I confess that for a fraction of a second I hesitated to give the address the kind of address that in Chicago, as in all American cities, identified itself as a white address by virtue of its location. Bu t I did give it, and Elijah and I walked out onto the steps, and one of the young men vanished to get the car. It was very strange to stand with Elijah tor those few moments, facing those vivid, violent, so problematical streets. I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and his fu ry, and, yes, even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets-because 332 THE FIR E NE XT TIME of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be mine-we would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies. The car arrived-a gleaming, metallic, grossly Amer ican blu e-and Elijah and I shook hands and said good night once more. He walked into his mansion and shut the door. The driver and I started on our way through dark, mur muring -and, at this hour, strangely beautiful-Chicago, along the lake. We returned to the discussion of the land. How were we-Negroes-to get this land? I asked this of the dark boy who had said earlier, at the table, that the white man's actions proved him to be a devil. He spoke to me first of the Muslim temples that were being built, or were about to be built, in various parts of the United States, of the strength of the Muslim t<>llowing, and of the amount of money that is annually at the disposal of Negroes-something like twenty billion dollars.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that, in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and Y.�:!,_ O!L the other hand, it se�I)'!S ali too likely� In-any case, whatever they bring to one another, it is certainly not freedom from guilt. The guilt remains, more deeply rooted, more se curely lodged, than the oldest of old trees. And to have to deal with such people can be unutterably exhausting, for they, with a really dazzling ingenuity, a tireless agility, are perpetually defending themselves against charges which one, disagreeable mirror though one may be, has not, really, for the moment, made. One does not have to make them. The record is there for all to read. It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky. One wishes that Americans, white Americans, would read, for their own sakes, this record, and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives. The fact that they have not yet been able to do this-to tace their history, to change their lives-hideously menaces this country. In deed, it menaces the entire world. White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems_ t:o know, is not merely sometnii1g to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, 722 THE WH ITE MAN ' S GUIL T 723 the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In white Americans he finds reflected-repeat ed, as it were, in a higher key-his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness. Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. The refore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced. The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a maudlin abilit y to forgive. It is difficult to make clear that he is not seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make articulate. Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the Amer ican experience. Yet one day he will face his home again; nor can he realis tically expect to find overwhelming changes. In America, it is 90 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON true, the appearance is perpetually changing, each generation greeting with short-lived exultation yet more dazzling addi tions to our renowned fa�ade. But the ghetto, anxiety, bitter ness, and guilt continue to breed their indescribable complex of tensions. What time will bring Americans is at last their own identity. It is on this dangerous voyage and in the same boat that the American Negro will make peace with himself and with the voiceless many thousands gone before him. A Question of Identity T HE AMERIC AN student colony in Paris is a social phenomenon so amorphous as to at once demand and defY the generality. One is far from being in the position of finding not enough to saF0ne- 60hlar__iOo mtiCh, and--everything one fi�g-�_c _ontradictory. What one wants to know at bot tom,- is what they came to find: to which question there are at least-as many answers as there are faces at the cafe tables. The assumed common denomina tor, which is their military experience, does not shed on this question as much light as one might hope.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  But the Physitian perceiving that he was rayled at and his words denyed, did never cease to confirme his sayings, and to disprove the varlet, till such time as the Officers by the commandment of the Judges, bound his hands and brought out the seale, wherewith he had sealed the purse which augmented suspition which was conceived of him first. Howbeit, neither the feare of the wheele or any other torment according to the use of the Grecians, which were ready prepared, no, nor yet the fire could enforce him to confesse the matter, so obstinate and grounded was he in his mischievous mind. But the Physitian perceiving that the menaces of these torments did nothing prevaile, gan say: I cannot suffer or abide that this young man who is innocent, should against all law and conscience, be punished and condemned to die, and the other which is culpable, should escape so easily, and after mocke and flowte at your judgement: for I will give you an evident proofe and argument of this present crime. You shall understand, that when this caytiffe demanded of me a present and strong poyson, considering that it was not my part to give occasion of any others death, but rather to cure and save sicke persons by meane of medicines: and on the other side, fearing least if I should deny his request, I might minister a further cause of his mischiefe, either that he would buy poyson of some other, or else returne and worke his wicked intent, with a sword or some dangerous weapon, I gave him no poyson, but a doling drinke of Mandragora, which is of such force, that it will cause any man to sleepe as though he were dead. Neither is it any marvaile if this most desperate man, who is certainly assured to be put to death, ordained by an ancient custome, can suffer and abide these facill and easie torments, but if it be so that the child hath received the drinke as I tempered it with mine owne hands, he is yet alive and doth but sleepe, and after his sleepe he shall returne to life againe, but if he be dead indeed, then may you further enquire of the causes of his death. The opinion of this ancient Physitian was found good, and every man had a desire to goe to the Sepulchre where the child was layd; there was none of the Justices, none of any reputation of the towne, nor any of the common people, but went to see this strange sight.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  You're one of the very few writers around who might really become a great writer, who might help to excavate the buried consciousness of this country, and you want to settle fo r being the lousy mayor of New York. It)s not your job. And I don't at all mean to suggest that writers are not responsible to and fo r-in any case, always fo r-the social order. I don't, fo r that matter, even mean to suggest that Norman would have made a particularly bad Mayor, though I confess that I simply can not see him in this role. And there is probably some truth in the suggestion, put forward by Norman and others, that the shock value of having such a man in such an office, or merely running fo r such an office, would have had a salutary effect on the life of this city-particularly, I must say, as relates to our young people, who are certainly in desperate need of adults who love them and take them seriously, and whom they can respect. (Serious citizens may not respect Norman, but young people do, and do not respect the serious citizens; and their instincts are quite sound.) But I do not fe el that a writer's responsibility can be dis charged in this way. I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it by trying to become something else. One docs not become something else: one becomes nothing. And what is crucial here is that the writer, however unwillingly, always, somewhere, knows this. There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out this self-knowledge. What has happened, however, time and time again, is that the fantasy NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME structure the writer builds in order to escape his central re sponsibility operates not as his fo rtress, but his prison, and he perishes within it. Or: the structure he has built becomes so stifling, so lonely, so fa lse, and acquires such a violent and dangerous life of its own, that he can break out of it only by bringing the entire structure down. With a great crash, inev itably, and on his own head, and on the heads of those closest to him. It is like smashing the windows one second before one asphyxiates; it is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it. And this, I think, really, to touch upon it lightly, is the key to the events at that monstrous, baffling, and so publicized party. Nearly everyone in the world-or nearly everyone, at least, in this extraordinary city-was there: policemen, Mafia types, the people whom we quaintly refer to as "beatniks," writers, actors, editors, politicians, and gossip columnists.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One is always disproving the accusation in action as futile as it is inevitable. I had not seen this friend-who could scarcely, any longer, be called a friend-in many years. I was brighter, or more driven than he-not my fau lt!-and, though neither of us knew it then, our friendship really ended during my ministry and was deader than my hope of heaven by the time I left the pulpit, the church, and home. Hindsight indicates, obviously, that this particular rupture, which was, of necessity, exceed ingly brutal and which involved, after all, the deliberate re pudiation of everything and everyone that had given me an identity until that moment, must have left some scars. The current of my life meant that I did not see this person very often, but I was always terribly guilty when I did. I was guilty NO NAME IN THE STREET because I had nothing to say to him, and at one time I had told him everything, or nearly everything. I was guilty because he was just another post-office worker, and we had dreamed such tremendous futures for ourselves. I was guilty because he and his family had been very nice to me during an awful time in my life and now none of that meant anything to me. I was guilty because I knew, at the bottom of my heart, that I judged this unremarkable colored man very harshly, far more harshly than I would have done if he were white, and I knew this to be unjust as well as sinister. I was furious because he thought my life was easy and I thought my life was hard, and I yet had to see that by his lights, certainly, and by any or dinary yardstick, my life was enviable compared to his. And if, as I kept saying, it was not my fault, it was not his fault, either. You can certainly see why I tended to avoid my old school chum. But I called him, of course. I thought that he probably needed money, because that was the only thing, by now, that I could possibly hope to give him. But, no. He, or his wife, or a relative, had read the Leonard Lyons column and knew that I had a suit I wasn't wearing, and-as he remembered in one way and I in quite another-he was just my size. Now, for me, that suit was drenched in the blood of all the crimes of my country. If I had said to Leonard, somewhat melodramatically, no doubt, that I could never wear it again, I was, just the same, being honest. I simply could not put it on, or look at it, without thinking of Martin, and Martin's end, of what he had meant to me, and to so many. I could not put it on without a bleak, pale, cold wonder about the future.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But, e\·en if they did, and even if they were qualified, how could one prove that So-and-So had not been hired by TIVA because he was a Ne gro? I had found this almost impossible to do at home . Isn't this, I suggested, the kind of thing which ought to be done from Washington? Richard, however, was not to be put otl� and he had made me feel so guilty that I agreed to find out how many Negroes were then working tor the ECA. There turned out to be two or three or four, I forget how many. In any case, we were dead, there being no way on earth to prove that there should have been six or seven. But we were all in too deep to be able to turn back now, and, ac cordingly, there was a pilot meeting of this ext raordinary or ganization, quite late, as I remember , one evening, in a pri\'ate room over a bistro. It was in some extremely inconvenient part of town, and we all arri\'ed separately or by twos. (There was some vague notion, I think, of def eating the ever -present agents of the CIA, who certainly ought to ha\'e had better things to do, but who, quite probably, on the other hand, didn't.) We may have defeated pursuit on our way there, but there was certainly no way of def eating detection as we ar ri\'e d: slinking casually past the gaping mouths and astounded eyes of a workingman's bistro, like a disorganized parade, some thi rty or forty of us, through a back door, and up the stairs. My friend and I arrived a little late, perhaps a little drunk, and certainly on a laughing jag, for we felt that we had been trapped in one of the most improbable and old-fash ioned of English melodramas. But Richard was in his glory . He was on the platform abo\"e us, I think he was alone there; there were only Negroes in the room. The results of the in\'estigations of others had prm·ed NOBODY KN OWS MY NAME no more conclusive than my own-one could certainly not, on the basis of our findings, attack a policy or evolve a strat egy -but this did not seem to sur prise Richard or, even, to disturb him. It was decided, since we could not be a pressure group, to form a fellowship club, the pu rpose of which would be to get to know the French, and help the French to get to know us. Given our temperaments, neither Andy nor myse lf felt any need to join a club for this, we were getting along just fine on our own; but, somewhat to my surprise, we did not know many of the other people in the room, and so we listened. If it were only going to be a social club, then, ob viously, the problem, as far as we were concerned, was over.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  THE THIRD BOOKE THE TWELFTH CHAPTER How Apuleius was taken and put in prison for murther. When morning was come, and that I was awaked from sleep, my heart burned sore with remembrance of the murther I had committed the night before: and I rose and sate downe on the side of the bed with my legges acrosse, and wringing my hands, I weeped in most miserable sort. For I imagined with my selfe, that I was brought before the Judge in the Judgement place, and that he awarded sentence against me, and that the hangman was ready to lead me to the gallows. And further I imagined and sayd, Alasse what Judge is he that is so gentle or benigne, that will thinke that I am unguilty of the slaughter and murther of these three men. Howbeit the Assyrian Diophanes did firmely assure unto me, that my peregrination and voyage hither should be prosperous. But while I did thus unfold my sorrowes, and greatly bewail my fortune, behold I heard a great noyse and cry at the dore, and in came the Magistrates and officers, who commanded two sergeants to binde and leade me to prison, whereunto I was willingly obedient, and as they led me through the street, all the City gathered together and followed me, and although I looked always on the ground for very shame, yet sometimes I cast my head aside and marvelled greatly that among so many thousand people there was not one but laughed exceedingly. Finally, when they had brought me through all the streets of the city, in manner of those that go in procession, and do sacrifice to mitigate the ire of the gods, they placed mee in the Judgement hall, before the seat of the Judges: and after that the Crier had commanded all men to keep silence, and people desired the Judges to give sentence in the great Theatre, by reason of the great multitude that was there, whereby they were in danger of stifling. And behold the prease of people increased stil, some climed to the top of the house, some got upon the beames, some upon the Images, and some thrust their heads through the windowes, little regarding the dangers they were in, so they might see me. Then the officers brought mee forth openly into the middle of the hall, that every man might behold me. And after that the Cryer had made a noise, and willed all such that would bring any evidence against me, should come forth, there stept out an old man with a glasse of water in his hand, dropping out softly, who desired that hee might have liberty to speake during the time of the continuance of the water. Which when it was granted, he began his oration in this sort. THE THIRTEENTH CHAPTER How Apuleius was accused by an old man, and how he answered for himselfe.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Ye are liat'S and the truth ' s not in you: it cannot be pretty to be f(>rccd, with every day the good Lord sends, to tell so many lies about everything. It demands a tremendous effort of the will and an absolute surrender of the personality to act on the lies one tells oneself It is not true that people become liars without knowing it. A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come t<>r them. They need each other t(>r the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie. They have a tacit agreement to guard each other's secrets, for TO BE BAP TIZED they have the same secret. That is why all liars arc cruel and filthy minded-one's merely got to listen to their dirty jokes, to what they think is funny, which is also what they think is real. The flower children seemed completely aware tha t the blacks were their denied brothers, seemed even to be patiently waiting for the blacks to recognize that they had repudiated the house. For it seemed to have struck the flower chil dren- I judged this from their conduct, from what seemed to be their blind and moving need to become organic, autonomous, lov ing and joyful creatures; their desire to connect love, joy, and eroticism, so that all flowed together as one-that they were themselves the issue of a dirty joke, the dirty joke which has always been hidden at the heart of the legend of the Virgin birth. They were in the streets in the hope of becoming whole. They had taken the first step-they had said, No. Whether or not they would be able to take the second step, the harder step-of saying, Yes, and then going for their own most pri vate broke-was a question which much exercised my mind, as indeed it seemed to exercise the minds, very loosely speak ing, of all the tourists and policemen in the area. When the heir of a great house repudiates the house, the house cannot continue, unl ess it looks to alien blood to save it; and here were the heirs and heiresses of all the ages, in the streets, along with that blood always considered to be most alien, never lawfully to be mixed with that of the sons and daughters of the great house.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But this choice was a choice in terms of a personal, a private better (I was, after all, a writer); what was its relevance in terms of a social worse? Here was the South Side-a million in captivit y-stretc hing from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or ener gy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have THE FIR E NE XT TIME been their help, didn't, as far as could be discovered, read, either -they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes. Also, I knew that once I had entered the house, I couldn't smoke or drink, and I felt gui lty about the cigarettes in my pocket, as I had felt years ago when my friend first took me into his church. I was half an hour late, having got lost on the way here, and I felt as deserving of a scolding as a schoolboy. The young man who came to the door-he was about thi rty, perhaps, with a handsome, smiling face-didn't seem to find my lateness offensive, and led me into a large room. On one side of the room sat half a dozen women, all in white; they were much occupied with a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women. On the other side of the room sat seven or eight men, young, dressed in dark suits, very much at case, and very imposing. The sunlight came into the room with the peacef ulness one remem bers from rooms in one's ear ly childhood-a sunlight encountered later only in one's dreams. I remember being astounded by the qu ietness, the case, the peace, the taste. I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect-and the respect increased my fright, for it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, for their sakes, I could not give-and we sat down. Elijah Mu hammad was not in the room. Conversation was slow, but not as stiff as I had feared it would be. They kept it going, for I simply did not know which subjects I could acceptably bring up. They knew more about me, and had read more of what I had written, than I had expected, and I wondered what they made of it all, what they took my usef ulness to be. The women were carrying on their own conversati on, in low tones; I gathered that they were not expected to take part in male conversations. A few women kept coming in and out of the room, apparently making preparations tix dinner. We, the men, did not plunge deeply into any subject, for, clearly, we were all waiting for the appearance of Elijah. Presently, the men, one by one, left the room and returned.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This was a difficult assignment, since I had known Malcolm, after all, crossed swords with him, worked with him, and held him in that great esteem which is not easily distinguishable, if it is distinguishable at all, from love. (The Hollywood gig did not work out because I did not wish to be a party to a second assassination: but we will also return to Hollywood, presently.) Very shortly before his death, I had to appear with Martin at Carnegie Hall, in New York. Having been on the Coast so long, I had nothing suitable to wear for my Carnegie Hall gig, and so I rushed out, got a dark suit, got it fitted, and made my appearance. Something like two weeks later, I wore this same suit to Martin's funeral; returned to Hollywood; presently, had to come East again, on business. I ran into Leonard Lyons one night, and I told him that I would never TAKE ME TO THE WATER 3 59 be able to wear that suit again. Leonard put this in his column. I went back to Hollywood. Weeks later, either because of a Civil Rights obligation, or because of Columbia Pictures, I was back in New York. On my desk in New York were various messages-and it must be said that my sister, Gloria, who worked for me then, is ex tremely selective, not to say brutal, about the messages she leaves on my desk. I don't see, simply, most of the messages I get. I couldn't conceivably live with them. No one could-as Gloria knows. However, my best friend, black, when I had been in junior high school, when I was twelve or thirteen, had been calling and calling and calling. The guilt of the survivor is a real guilt-as I was now to discover. In a way that I may never be able to make real for my countrymen, or myself, the fact that I had "made it"-that is, had been seen on televi sion, and at Sardi 's, could (presumably!) sign a check any where in the world, could, in short, for the length of an e ntrance, a dinner, or a drink, intimidate headwaiters by the use of a name which had not been mine when I was born and which love had compelled me to make my own-meant that I had betrayed the people who had produced me. Nothing could be more unutterably paradoxical: to have thrown in your lap what you never dreamed of getting, and, in sober, bitter truth, could never have dreamed of having, and that at the price of an assumed betrayal of your brothers and your sisters!

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the other hand, for me, then, Harlem was almost as alien and in a yet more intimidating way and risked being equally hostile, although for very different reasons. This truth cost me something in guilt and confusion, but it was the truth. It had something to do with my being the son of an evangelist and having been a child evangelist, but this is not all there was to it-that is, guilt is not al l there was to it. The fact that this particular child had been born when and where he was born had dictated certain expectations. The chil d does not really know what these expectations are-docs not know how real they are-u ntil he begins to fail, challenge, or defeat them. When it was clear, for example, that the pulpit, OTH ER ESS AYS where had made so promising a beginning, would not be my career, it was hoped that I would go on to college. This was never a very realistic hope and-perhaps because I knew this-I don't seem to have felt very strongly about it. In any case, this hope was dashed by the death of my father. Once I had lef t the pulpit, I had abandoned or betrayed my role in the community-i ndeed, my departure from the pulpit and my leaving home were almost simultaneous. (I had aban doned the ministry in order not to betray myself by betraying the ministry.) Once it became clear that I was not going to go to college, I became a kind of two- headed monstrosity of a problem. Without a college education, I could, clearly, never hope to become a writer: would never acquire the skills which would enable me to conquer what was thought of as an all-white world. This meant that I would become a half -educ ated han dyman, a vociferous, bitter ruin, spouting Shakespeare in the bars on Saturday night and sleeping it off on Sunday. I could see this, too. I saw it all around me. There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows that he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is lef t of human attention. I fled . I didn't want my Mama, or the kids, to see me like that. And if all this seems, now, ridiculous and theatrical appre hension on the part of a nineteen-y ear-old boy, I can say only that it didn't seem remotely ridiculous then.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And one of the reasons fo r this is that it would rob the nor mal-who are simply the many-of their very necessary sense of security and order, of their sense, perhaps, that the race is and should be devoted to outwitting oblivion-and will surely manage to do so. But there arc a great many ways of outwitting oblivion, and to ask whether or not homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock, whether or not it was natural fo r St. Paul to suffer fi>r the Gospel, whether or not it was natural fo r the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twen tieth-century death. It does not seem to me that nature helps us very much when we need illumination in human affairs. I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state. How to be natural docs not seem to me to be a problem quite the contrary. The great problem is how to be-in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word-a man. This problem was at the heart of all Gide's anguish, and it proved itself, like most real problems, to be insoluble. He died, as it were, with the teeth of this problem still buried in his throat. What one learns from Madeleine is what it cost him, in terms of unceasing agony, to live with this problem at all. Of what it cost her, his wite, it is scarcely possible to conjecture. But she was not so much a victim of Gide's sexual nature-homosexuals do not choose women fo r their victims, THE MALE PRISON 2 33 nor is the difficulty of becoming a victim so great fo r a woman that she is compelled to turn to homosexuals fo r this-as she was a victim of his overwhelming guilt, which connected, it would seem, and most unluckily, with her own guilt and shame.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, help less, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease-cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis-which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured. In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect fr om that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him 19 20 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we arc panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed. When he violates this image, thcrd(>re, he stands in the greatest danger (sensing which, we uneasily suspect that he is very often playing a part t( >r our benefit); and, what is not always so apparent but is equally true, we arc then in some danger ourselves-hence our retreat or our blind and imme diate retaliation. Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible fr om our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay t( >r our annulment of his. Time and our own t( >rce act as our allies, creating an impossible, a fr uitless tension between the traditional master and slave. Impossible and fr uitless because, literal and visible as this tension has be come, it has nothing to do with reality. Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white. When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed fr om the black face as it has been fr om ours, our guilt will be finished-at least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing. But, paradoxically, it is we who prC\'Cnt this fr om happening; since it is we, who, every hour that we li,·c, reinvest the black face with our guilt; and we do this-by a further paradox, no less fcrocious-hclp lcssly, passionately, out of an unrealized need to suffer absolution.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And thinke you not that I did willingly procure this anguish and sorrow unto you, I call the gods to witnesse. For I had rather myne owne body to perish, than that you should receive or sustaine any harme by my means, but that which I did was by the commandement of another, and wrought as I thought for some other, but behold the unlucky chance fortuned on you by my evill occasion. Then I, very curious and desirous to know the matter, answered, In faith (quoth I), this most pestilent and evill favoured whip which thou hast brought to scourge thee withal, shal first be broken in a thousand pieces, than it should touch or hurt thy delicate and dainty skin. But I pray you tell me how have you been the cause and mean of my trouble and sorrow? For I dare sweare by the love that I beare unto you, and I will not be perswaded, though you your selfe should endeavour the same, that ever you went to trouble or harm me: perhaps sometimes you imagined an evil thought in your mind, which afterwards you revoked, but that is not to bee deemed as a crime.