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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Over the coming days and weeks, White tries different food, better food, trying to tempt the hawk to eat more that it can bear. He is wheedling, desperate, certain that his patience will triumph. And of course at some point the hawk becomes half-hungry enough to eat, and White stuffs it with food, convinced that all will now be well. And then the hawk hates him, and the strange cycle begins again. ‘Days of attack and counter-attack,’ was how White described it; ‘a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields.’ There is a nightmarish logic to White’s time with the hawk: the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because he hates himself, who wants to hurt it because he loves it, but will not, and insists that it eats so that it will love him. And these twisted logics were met with the simple logic of a wild, fat goshawk that considers this man the most inimical thing on earth. ‘I had only just escaped from humanity,’ White wrote, ‘and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.’ But he hadn’t escaped, not quite. When you read The Goshawk you’re given to understand that his cottage was miles from anywhere, a remote outpost deep in a wood half a mile from the nearest road. But the cottage was on the Stowe estate; it had been built on one of the old roads laid out as carriage routes to the great house centuries before. They were called the Ridings, and one ran in a shifting river of grass straight past White’s cottage, over the crest of a sheep-cropped hill and down to the doors of the school. The house was rustic, yes: it had an earth-closet and a well, and when White stood with his hawk in the barn he could still see where a Victorian gamekeeper had written of vanished bags of game in pencil on the back of the door. Phesant, it said. Harn. But remote it was not. There was his house, not quite in a wood, sitting on the old and open road to Stowe, like a promise not quite kept, and White in it, like a dog who sits at the very end of his chain, or the sad divorcee who moves out of their partner’s house to live at the bottom of the road. For all his joy in freedom, the schoolmaster had not escaped the bounds of the school, and he’d not escaped schoolmastering either.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The always-scorching memory of my Father, emerging—“loved”—out of the ashes of that early hatred.... Yet I know that this is not what Jeremy means. He had pushed my thoughts into an area I preferred to leave unexplored. I grasped for the least dangerous thought: Could I have really loved Barbara? (The stabbing unhappiness inside me when I saw her that last time—but hadnt we merely used each other, in some kind of mutual fear?) And my mind sprang forward: Dave.... (I try to picture his face when I first met him; but the face I remember is another one—the one which had stared at me in disbelief that afternoon when I had walked out, that look branded in my mind, recalled so clearly, so often....) And how much of what I had fled from had been fear for myself?—how much had been fear of hurting him?... Lance.... Pete: the feeling of hopelessness and pain and embarrassment and isolation that night when he had held my hand for so long in bed.... The man on the beach in Santa Monica (and I remember him, instead, as I had seen him earlier here in New Orleans).... Mr King’s loneliness—shared!—shared and acknowledged; and it had been that very awareness of his pain (as perhaps, too, it had been toward Dave) which had sent me from him. By fleeing impotently, hadnt I manifested what could be, perhaps, a shape of “love”?... “No,” I repeated emphatically, “Ive never loved any one.” And when I said that, I thought of this: That night in Chicago, walking along the lake, when I felt myself exploding with love—but it was something else, something that was closer to pity (as it had been in my feelings toward Mr King, the others, I now realized). Outside, there is a sudden change in the noises. Voices are shouting: “Let them go! Let them go!” Soon the shouting becomes a chant, the same three words: “Let! Them! Go!” The clapping of hands in rhythm to the commanding words. The sound of feet stamping. “The police, probably,” said Jeremy. “Probably trying to arrest someone—but that crowd isnt going to let them. It’s the crowd’s day of complete freedom, if anarchy is complete freedom. The police know it too. Theyre largely powerless—but still they put up a pretense. Their masks are the last to come off,” he said ambiguously....

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return. 8 The Rembrandt interior White loosed his young male goshawk in the barn that first night and in the early hours, at five minutes past three, it stepped onto his fist and fed. It was hungry, familiar with humans, willing already to come to the falconer for food. It was a state that my hawk had not yet reached and would not reach for days. If White had only known what he was doing, Gos could have been flying free in a week. But he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t understand that a hawk in training must be kept a little hungry, for only through gifts of food will a wild bird begin to see you as a benevolent figure and not an affront to all existence. White was petrified. On his hawk’s tail were strange pale transverse stripes, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across the quills. He knew what they were: hunger-traces caused by lack of food as the feathers grew; weaknesses that made them liable to break. Guilt and blame. He worried that it was his fault the hawk was damaged. He wanted to stop these hunger-traces, make up for whatever early lack had scarred his hawk and made its feathers weak. So he fed it. He fed it as much as he possibly could. He didn’t know that because those feathers were now full-grown there was no danger of making the traces worse. He gave the hawk so much food that the hawk couldn’t eat it, bear the sight of it, and here is White, the terrified austringer , stroking the hawk’s breast-feathers with a split rabbit skull showing all the rabbit’s spilled brains in desperate attempts to get it to eat, when the hawk doesn’t want to eat because it is full. Love me , he is saying. Please. I can make it up to you, make it better. Fix you. Please eat . But a fat, stuffed goshawk doesn’t want anything other than to be left alone, to disappear into that half-world of no-humans, replete and contented, eyes half-closed, one foot tucked up into soft feathers, to digest its food and sleep. Over the coming days and weeks, White tries different food, better food, trying to tempt the hawk to eat more that it can bear .

• From Educated (2018)

  There was never any more talk of a hospital. The moment for such a decision had passed, and to return to it would be to return to all the fury and fear of the accident itself. Dad said doctors couldn’t do anything for her anyhow. She was in God’s hands. In the coming months, Mother called me by many names. When she called me Audrey I didn’t worry, but it was troubling when we had conversations in which she referred to me as Luke or Tony, and in the family it has always been agreed, even by Mother herself, that she’s never been quite the same since the accident. We kids called her Raccoon Eyes. We thought it was a great joke, once the black rings had been around for a few weeks, long enough for us to get used to them and make them the subject of jokes. We had no idea it was a medical term. Raccoon eyes. A sign of serious brain injury. Tyler’s guilt was all-consuming. He blamed himself for the accident, then kept on blaming himself for every decision that was made thereafter, every repercussion, every reverberation that clanged down through the years. He laid claim to that moment and all its consequences, as if time itself had commenced the instant our station wagon left the road, and there was no history, no context, no agency of any kind until he began it, at the age of seventeen, by falling asleep at the wheel. Even now, when Mother forgets any detail, however trivial, that look comes into his eyes— the one he had in the moments after the collision, when blood poured from his own mouth as he took in the scene, raking his eyes over what he imagined to be the work of his hands and his hands only. Me, I never blamed anyone for the accident, least of all Tyler. It was just one of those things. A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It wasn’t conscious. None of it was conscious. But the disaster was inevitable. White saw that the hawk was himself, a bird that was a ‘youth who had been maddened by every kind of clumsiness, privation, and persecution’. And he understood, finally, terribly, that what he had done was become the persecutor, no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. The hawk was the child in front of the play-castle. He was his father. He was his father. He was the dictator, not the hawk. And so the great tragedy rolled to its conclusion, and the final blow, of course, fell from simple sentiment. Low clouds move fast over the Ridings. It is raining hard. The cattle lie under the trees in the gale, their flanks dark and soaked, their breaths steaming in the air. White goes out to the barn where Gos is tied to his perch in shadow. Guilt uncoils in his heart. The hawk has no choice but to sit where he is told. He has no freedom at all. So White puts a bow-perch in the ground just outside the door, ties six yards of twine – the tarred twine with no breaking strain, the twine that has already snapped twice, the dangerous, poor quality twine – to Gos’s swivel, then ties the other end to the perch in the barn. This way, he tells himself, his hawk can fly outside and then fly back inside when he wants. Pleased that he’s given Gos more freedom, he returns to the house. The rain is relentless. It is not a day to try to trap the hawks. It is a day for comfort. He will make it up to Gos. He will pace up and down the kitchen with him, feed him tidbits, make him love him again. Gos likes music: he will play him songs on the wireless. But he finds the wireless has died. He bicycles to Tom’s, borrows his telephone to order a new battery. Then he pedals back. Rain and rooks. A man on a bicycle in a high wind who decides he must concentrate on small things today. Big things are too difficult. What he will do is repaint the woodwork in the passageway, and then perhaps the kitchen door. When the passageway is done he examines his handiwork with a critical eye. It looks well. Now for the kitchen door. Blue paint, he thinks. His father used to like painting things in bright and clashing colours. He knows he has inherited the vice. So he goes into the barn to fetch it. Gos bates from him, first upwards to the rafters, then straight out of the open door. When White leaves the barn, the paintpot in his hand, he looks for Gos sitting on his perch. But the perch is empty. Gos is not there. His hawk is gone. Gos has gone and the frayed end of the twine lies snapped upon the ground. PART II 18 Flying free

• From Educated (2018)

  I struggle to imagine the scene while they waited for the chopper. Dad said that when the paramedics arrived, Shawn was sobbing, begging for Mother. By the time he reached the hospital, his state of mind had shifted. He stood naked on the gurney, eyes bulging, bloodshot, screaming that he would rip out the eyes of the next bastard who came near him. Then he collapsed into sobs and finally lost consciousness. — SHAWN LIVED THROUGH THE NIGHT. In the morning I drove to Buck’s Peak. I couldn’t explain why I wasn’t rushing to my brother’s bedside. I told Mother I had to work. “He’s asking for you,” she said. “You said he doesn’t recognize anyone.” “He doesn’t,” she said. “But the nurse just asked me if he knows someone named Tara. He said your name over and over this morning, when he was asleep and when he was awake. I told them Tara is his sister, and now they’re saying it would be good if you came. He might recognize you, and that would be something. Yours is the only name he’s said since he got to the hospital.” I was silent. “I’ll pay for the gas,” Mother said. She thought I wouldn’t come because of the thirty dollars it would cost in fuel. I was embarrassed that she thought that, but then, if it wasn’t the money, I had no reason at all. “I’m leaving now,” I said. I remember strangely little of the hospital, or of how my brother looked. I vaguely recall that his head was wrapped in gauze, and that when I asked why, Mother said the doctors had performed a surgery, cutting into his skull to relieve some pressure, or stop a bleed, or repair something—actually, I can’t remember what she said. Shawn was tossing and turning like a child with a fever. I sat with him for an hour. A few times his eyes opened, but if he was conscious, he didn’t recognize me. When I came the next day, he was awake. I walked into the room and he blinked and looked at Mother, as if to check that she was seeing me, too.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She flies to my fist perfectly, a whole thirty yards. But on the second and third flights she clouts the glove hard with both feet, skies up, tries to turn in mid-air , wobbles, stalls, then ends up on the ground a few feet away, panting, wings dropped, looking as if she is going to explode. All my laughter is gone. Now I know why austringers have, for centuries, been famed for cursing. I curse. It is my fault this is happening. I know it is. I hate myself. I try to keep calm. I fail. Damn, damn, damn . I’m hot, incredibly bothered, pushing hair from my eyes with rabbit-flesh-specked fingers, cursing to high heaven, and to top it all I see a man in white shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat striding towards Christina, his shadow dark before him. It is one of the college porters, and he is not happy. The set of his shoulders is unmistakable. They start talking. From this distance I can’t hear what’s being said, but she is waving one hand towards me, and I suppose she is explaining to him that I’m not a random trespasser , but a bona fide College Fellow , and what I am doing is not against the rules. From his demeanour I don’t think he believes her. They stop talking as I approach. He recognises me. I recognise him. ‘Hello!’ I say brightly, and explain what I am doing with a hawk on this hallowed ground. ‘Hmm,’ he says, eyeing Mabel with suspicion. ‘Are you going to catch students with it?’ ‘Only if they’re causing trouble.’ Then I whisper conspiratorially, ‘ Let me have the names . ’ It is the right answer . A shout of laughter . He is fascinated by the hawk, and wants to know more about it, but he is working and duty calls. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, and he sets his shoulders once again, narrows his eyes into the sun, and stalks off towards some poor tourists who’ve decided to have a picnic on the corner of the college rugby pitch. I flew her later in the day. I flew her earlier. I fed her rabbit with fur and rabbit without. I fed her chicks that I’d gutted and skinned and rinsed in water. I reduced her weight. I raised it. I reduced it again. I wore different clothes. I tried everything to fix the problem, certain that the problem couldn’t be fixed because the problem was me. Sometimes she flew straight to my fist, sometimes straight over it, and there was no way of knowing which it would be. Every flight was a monstrous game of chance, a coin-toss, and what was at stake felt something very like my soul. I began to think that what made the hawk flinch from me was the same thing that had driven away the man I’d fallen for after my father’s death.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He was the dictator , not the hawk. And so the great tragedy rolled to its conclusion, and the final blow, of course, fell from simple sentiment. Low clouds move fast over the Ridings. It is raining hard. The cattle lie under the trees in the gale, their flanks dark and soaked, their breaths steaming in the air. White goes out to the barn where Gos is tied to his perch in shadow. Guilt uncoils in his heart. The hawk has no choice but to sit where he is told. He has no freedom at all. So White puts a bow-perch in the ground just outside the door , ties six yards of twine – the tarred twine with no breaking strain, the twine that has already snapped twice, the dangerous, poor quality twine – to Gos’s swivel, then ties the other end to the perch in the barn. This way, he tells himself, his hawk can fly outside and then fly back inside when he wants. Pleased that he’s given Gos more freedom, he returns to the house. The rain is relentless. It is not a day to try to trap the hawks. It is a day for comfort. He will make it up to Gos. He will pace up and down the kitchen with him, feed him tidbits, make him love him again. Gos likes music: he will play him songs on the wireless. But he finds the wireless has died. He bicycles to Tom’s, borrows his telephone to order a new battery. Then he pedals back. Rain and rooks. A man on a bicycle in a high wind who decides he must concentrate on small things today. Big things are too difficult. What he will do is repaint the woodwork in the passageway, and then perhaps the kitchen door . When the passageway is done he examines his handiwork with a critical eye. It looks well. Now for the kitchen door . Blue paint , he thinks. His father used to like painting things in bright and clashing colours. He knows he has inherited the vice. So he goes into the barn to fetch it. Gos bates from him, first upwards to the rafters, then straight out of the open door . When White leaves the barn, the paintpot in his hand, he looks for Gos sitting on his perch. But the perch is empty. Gos is not there. His hawk is gone. Gos has gone and the frayed end of the twine lies snapped upon the ground. 23 Memorial I sat on the train clutching the folder with the speech inside, ankles burning from the heater on the floor. Outside, winter breathed in.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White was petrified. On his hawk’s tail were strange pale transverse stripes, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across the quills. He knew what they were: hunger-traces caused by lack of food as the feathers grew; weaknesses that made them liable to break. Guilt and blame. He worried that it was his fault the hawk was damaged. He wanted to stop these hunger-traces, make up for whatever early lack had scarred his hawk and made its feathers weak. So he fed it. He fed it as much as he possibly could. He didn’t know that because those feathers were now full-grown there was no danger of making the traces worse. He gave the hawk so much food that the hawk couldn’t eat it, bear the sight of it, and here is White, the terrified austringer, stroking the hawk’s breast-feathers with a split rabbit skull showing all the rabbit’s spilled brains in desperate attempts to get it to eat, when the hawk doesn’t want to eat because it is full. Love me, he is saying. Please. I can make it up to you, make it better. Fix you. Please eat. But a fat, stuffed goshawk doesn’t want anything other than to be left alone, to disappear into that half-world of no-humans, replete and contented, eyes half-closed, one foot tucked up into soft feathers, to digest its food and sleep. Over the coming days and weeks, White tries different food, better food, trying to tempt the hawk to eat more that it can bear. He is wheedling, desperate, certain that his patience will triumph. And of course at some point the hawk becomes half-hungry enough to eat, and White stuffs it with food, convinced that all will now be well. And then the hawk hates him, and the strange cycle begins again. ‘Days of attack and counter-attack,’ was how White described it; ‘a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields.’ There is a nightmarish logic to White’s time with the hawk: the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because he hates himself, who wants to hurt it because he loves it, but will not, and insists that it eats so that it will love him. And these twisted logics were met with the simple logic of a wild, fat goshawk that considers this man the most inimical thing on earth.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The Bible was translated into Choctaw; hymns were written in Choctaw; Choctaws began leading Christian worship services. The origins of our Christian heritage, therefore, did not follow the pattern Vine described. We were not forced to accept Jesus at the point of a gun, but evolved into a Christian nation as an expression of our own culture. Missionaries were not the problem for me as a Choctaw. It was, however, Vine’s analysis of what happened to Native American nations, Christian or otherwise, that began to unravel my faith. In the 1830s the Choctaw people were the first of many Native American nations to be forced to take the Trail of Tears.3 Bullied and cheated by the American government, we were forced out of our homeland and made to take the long walk from the southern United States to Oklahoma, the sanctuary for displaced Native nations. Thousands of our people died. The white Americans we thought of as allies betrayed us. Even though we were Christians, other Christians turned to look the other way as we were despoiled. Like vultures, they swooped in to take our land. The Trail of Tears is a bitter legacy, one shared by many Native nations whose homelands were east of the Mississippi. And yet, as a Choctaw, I had been raised to believe that our Christian faith was part of this experience. On the long walk into exile, I had been told that our Christian faith sustained us. It spoke to us about survival through an Exodus and about God’s love for the dispossessed. Like the African slaves who took our place on the land in the American South, we found Christianity to be the one thing to which we could cling when the times we endured were so harsh. When I encountered God is Red the memories of the Trail of Tears came back to haunt me. It planted a seed of doubt. Had my ancestors made a mistake? Had they accepted a false religion and paid the price? The story that Vine Deloria told was not something I could dismiss. In fact, it was not something I wanted to dismiss because I was so acutely aware of what had been done to my own people. The Trail of Tears is an historical memory no Choctaw will ever forget. The loss of land, culture, language, and freedom: these are the facts of life for any Native American community. Therefore, Vine’s argument spoke to a truth I already knew. It was as if John the Baptist had appeared before me, calling me to wake up and smell the coffee, repent from my devotion to the conqueror’s faith, and return to the ancient heritage of a pre-colonial Native America. The impact his writing had on me as a young man may seem hard for people to understand who did not live through the 1960s and early 1970s; these years were a hinge of history when Civil Rights and liberation movements were at high tide.

• From Educated (2018)

  Lord’s house. That fact offended Dad more than anything else: that such a lewd display had taken place in a church. After he had worn himself out and gone to bed, I crawled under my covers and stared into the black. There was a knock at my door. It was Mother. “I should have known better,” she said. “I should have seen that class for what it was.” — MOTHER MUST HAVE FELT guilty after the recital, because in the weeks that followed she searched for something else I could do, something Dad wouldn’t forbid. She’d noticed the hours I spent in my room with Tyler’s old boom box, listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, so she began looking for a voice teacher. It took a few weeks to find one, and another few weeks to persuade the teacher to take me. The lessons were much more expensive than the dance class had been, but Mother paid for them with the money she made selling oils. The teacher was tall and thin, with long fingernails that clicked as they flew across the piano keys. She straightened my posture by pulling the hair at the base of my neck until I’d tucked in my chin, then she stretched me out on the floor and stepped on my stomach to strengthen my diaphragm. She was obsessed with balance and often slapped my knees to remind me to stand powerfully, to take up my own space. After a few lessons, she announced that I was ready to sing in church. It was arranged, she said. I would sing a hymn in front of the congregation that Sunday. The days slipped away quickly, as days do when you’re dreading something. On Sunday morning, I stood at the pulpit and stared into the faces of the people below. There was Myrna and Papa Jay, and behind them Mary and Caroline. They looked sorry for me, like they thought I might humiliate myself. Mother played the introduction. The music paused; it was time to sing. I might have had any number of thoughts at that moment. I might have thought of my teacher and her techniques—square stance, straight back, dropped jaw. Instead I thought of Tyler, and of lying on the carpet next to his desk, staring at his woolen-socked feet while the Mormon Tabernacle

• From Educated (2018)

  I didn’t stay long on Buck’s Peak, maybe a week. On the day I left the mountain, Audrey asked me not to go. I have no memory of the conversation, but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I wrote it my first night back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone bridge and staring up at King’s College Chapel. I remember the river, which was calm; I remember the slow drift of autumn leaves resting on the glassy surface. I remember the scratch of my pen moving across the page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages, precisely what my sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it is as if I wrote in order to forget. Audrey asked me to stay. Shawn was too strong, she said, too persuasive, for her to confront him alone. I told her she wasn’t alone, she had Mother. Audrey said I didn’t understand. No one had believed us after all. If we asked Dad for help, she was sure he’d call us both liars. I told her our parents had changed and we should trust them. Then I boarded a plane and took myself five thousand miles away. If I felt guilty to be documenting my sister’s fears from such a safe distance, surrounded by grand libraries and ancient chapels, I gave only one indication of it, in the entry’s last line: Cambridge is less beautiful tonight.

• From Educated (2018)

  “I’m at the hospital.” There was silence, then he said, “We’re coming.” Fifteen minutes later they were there, and the three of us waited awkwardly together, me chewing my fingernails on a pastel-blue sofa, Mother pacing and clicking her fingers, and Dad sitting motionless beneath a loud wall clock. The doctor gave Shawn a CAT scan. He said the wound was nasty but the damage was minimal, and then I remembered what the last doctors had told me—that with head injuries, often the ones that look the worst are actually less severe—and I felt stupid for panicking and bringing him here. The hole in the bone was small, the doctor said. It might grow over on its own, or a surgeon could put in a metal plate. Shawn said he’d like to see how it healed, so the doctor folded the skin over the hole and stitched it. We took Shawn home around three in the morning. Dad drove, with Mother next to him, and I rode in the backseat with Shawn. No one spoke. Dad didn’t yell or lecture; in fact, he never mentioned that night again. But there was something in the way he fixed his gaze, never looking directly at me, that made me think a fork had come along in the road, and I’d gone one way and he the other. After that night, there was never any question of whether I would go or stay. It was as if we were living in the future, and I was already gone. When I think of that night now, I don’t think of the dark highway, or of my brother lying in a pool of his own blood. I think of the waiting room, with its ice-blue sofa and pale walls. I smell its sterilized air. I hear the ticking of a plastic clock. Sitting across from me is my father, and as I look into his worn face it hits me, a truth so powerful I don’t know why I’ve never understood it before. The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good. I want to bellow, to weep into my father’s knees and promise never to do it again. But wolf that I am, I am still above lying, and anyway he would sniff the lie. We both know that if I ever again find Shawn on the highway, soaked in crimson, I will do exactly what I have just done. I am not sorry, merely ashamed.

• From Educated (2018)

  surrender that he had offered my sister. I imagined what a relief it must have been for her, to realize she could trade her reality—the one she shared with me—for his. How grateful she must have felt to pay such a modest price for her betrayal. I could not judge her for her choice, but in that moment I knew I could not choose it for myself. Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon; it was me. Dad reached into his pocket and withdrew a vial of consecrated oil, which he placed in my palm. I studied it. This oil was the only thing needed to perform the ritual, that and the holy authority resting in his misshapen hands. I imagined my surrender, imagined closing my eyes and recanting my blasphemies. I imagined how I would describe my change, my divine transformation, what words of gratitude I would shout. The words were ready, fully formed and waiting to leave my lips. But when my mouth opened they vanished. “I love you,” I said. “But I can’t, Dad. I’m sorry.” My father stood abruptly. He said again that there was an evil presence in my room, that he couldn’t stay another night. Their flight was not until morning, but Dad said it was better to sleep on a bench than with the devil. My mother bustled about the room, shoveling shirts and socks into their suitcase. Five minutes later, they were gone. * Exactly how noticeable Dad's burn is today is a topic of much debate. His right hand has remained twisted and paretic, but his face has recovered remarkably well, so that if you hadn't known him before the burn, you might not perceive the changes right away. In photos taken more than ten years after the injury, it seems to me that even the taut, waxy quality of his cheeks has lessened. I don't have an explanation for this. Perhaps the burns on his face were not actually as severe as they seemed to us when we perceived them through the trauma of those initial days. Or perhaps they were as dramatic as we remember them, only Mother's skill as a healer was more dramatic, and she achieved something astonishing by the standards of modern

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He files away the teeth designed to break hawks’ legs and pads its spring-shut jaws with felt. Then he makes another trap, a falconer’s trap from a description in a book: a noose of running twine around a ring of upturned feathers, and in the centre of the ring a tethered blackbird. He’ll hide with one end of the twine in his hand, and when the hawk takes the bird, he’ll pull, so the twine slips over the feathers and catches the hawk by its legs. It might work, if he can trap a blackbird to use as bait. He cannot trap a blackbird. He despairs. He starts a letter. Dear Herr Waller, it begins. He writes in English because his German is poor. He asks the man who’d sent him Gos for another hawk. He knows it might be too late in the year to get a young one, and passage hawks – those trapped when already on the wing – are few and far between. But he ends the letter with hope, takes it to Buckingham and posts it to Berlin. He waits for a reply, he waits for the hawks, he waits in penance and suffers for his sins. Nothing comes and there is no answer. My job was over. It was time to move. I was already an emotional mess, but the stress of the move pushed my dysfunction to spectacular proportions. The new house in the suburbs was nothing like the old house in the city: it was huge and modern, with a vast front room for the hawk to sleep in and lawns to sun herself upon. I filled the freezer with hawk food and a stack of frozen pizzas. Dragged my clothes upstairs in their plastic sacks, dumped them in a pile by the bedroom door. The rain came again, thin and sour, and I spent my first day there sprawled on the sofa with a notepad on my knees, failing to write my father’s memorial address. I have five minutes, I kept thinking, dully. Five minutes to speak of my father’s life. The house was full of toys: alphabet blocks and jigsaws, plush animals in boxes, pictures in felt-tip pen and glitter pinned to the kitchen walls. It was a family house and there was no family in it. The emptiness I felt was my own, but in my madness I began to feel the house didn’t want me, that it missed its family and was mourning their loss. I stayed out longer with Mabel, found it harder and harder to return, because out with the hawk I didn’t need a home. Out there I forgot I was human at all.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  the propriety of violent measures against heresy was thenceforth vindicated even by the best fathers of the church. Chrysostom recommends, indeed, Christian love toward heretics and heathens, and declares against their execution, but approved the prohibition of their assemblies and the confiscation of their churches; and he acted accordingly against the Novatians and the Quartodecimanians, so that many considered his own subsequent misfortunes as condign punishment.250 Jerome, appealing to Deut. xiii. 6–10, seems to justify even the penalty of death against religious errorists.251 Augustine, who himself belonged nine years to the Manichaean sect, and was wonderfully converted by the grace of God to the Catholic church, without the slightest pressure from without, held at first the truly evangelical view, that heretics and schismatics should not be violently dealt with, but won by instruction and conviction; but after the year 400 he turned and retracted this view, in consequence of his experience with the Donatists, whom he endeavored in vain to convert by disputation and writing, while many submitted to the imperial laws.252 Thenceforth he was led to advocate the persecution of heretics, partly by his doctrine of the Christian state, partly by the seditious excesses of the fanatical Circumcelliones, partly by the hope of a wholesome effect of temporal punishments, and partly by a false interpretation of the Cogite intrare, in the parable of the great supper, Luke xiv. 23.253 "It is, indeed, better," says he, "that men should be brought to serve God by instruction than by fear of punishment or by pain. But because the former means are better, the latter must not therefore be neglected .... Many must often be brought back to their Lord, like wicked servants, by the rod of temporal suffering, before they attain the highest grade of religious development .... The Lord himself orders that the guests be first invited, then compelled, to his great supper."254 This father thinks that, if the state be denied the right to punish religious error, neither should she punish any other crime, like murder or adultery, since Paul, in Gal. v. 19, attributes divisions and sects to the same source in the flesh.255 He charges his Donatist opponents with inconsistency in seeming to approve the emperors’ prohibitions of idolatry, but condemning their persecution of Christian heretics. It is to the honor of Augustine’s heart, indeed, that in actual cases he earnestly urged upon the magistrates clemency and humanity, and thus in practice remained true to his noble maxim: "Nothing conquers but truth, the victory of truth is love."256 But his theory, as Neander justly observes, "contains the germ of the whole system of spiritual despotism, intolerance, and persecution, even to the court of the Inquisition."257 The great authority of his name was often afterward made to justify cruelties from which he himself would have shrunk with horror. Soon after him, Leo the Great, the first representative of consistent, exclusive, universal papacy, advocated even the penalty of death for heresy.258 Henceforth none but the persecuted parties, from time to time, protested against religious persecution; being made, by their sufferings, if not from principle, at least from policy and self-interest, the advocates of toleration. Thus the Donatist bishop Petilian, in Africa, against whom Augustine wrote, rebukes his Catholic opponents, as formerly his countryman Tertullian had condemned the heathen persecutors of the Christians, for using outward force in matters of conscience; appealing to Christ and the apostles, who never persecuted, but rather suffered and died. "Think you," says he, "to serve God by killing us with your own hand? Ye err, ye err, if ye, poor mortals, think this; God has not hangmen for priests. Christ teaches us to bear wrong, not to revenge it." The Donatist bishop Gaudentius says: "God appointed prophets and fishermen, not princes and soldiers, to spread the faith." Still we cannot forget, that the Donatists were the first who appealed to the imperial tribunal in an ecclesiastical matter, and did not, till after that tribunal had decided against them, turn against the state-church system. CHAPTER IV.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There’s a long vein of chalk-mysticism buried in English nature-culture, and I know that what I’m feeling, standing here, partakes of it. I’m guilty because I know that loving landscapes like this involves a kind of history that concerns itself with purity, a sense of deep time and blood-belonging, and assumes that these solitudinous windswept landscapes are finer, better, than the landscapes below. ‘The frequenter of downland is occupied with essentials; with structure, with forms and with textures,’ wrote chalk-cult ruralist H. J. Massingham in the 1930s. ‘Aloft, he breathes an air that tunes him to the grand, archaic, naked forms of things.’ It’s a landscape that is a parable of the aviator’s eye. I grew up in the lowland pine-forests and heaths of sandy Surrey. But there’s a photograph of me, wrapped in a tartan duffel coat, laying a five-year-old hand on one of the stones at Stonehenge, where my childish brain first grasped at intimations of history. And when I was a little older, corn buntings jangling from high-ground fence posts out near Wantage, I remember my father telling me that the track we walked upon, the Ridgeway, was an ancient, ancient path. This impressed me greatly. It was the 1970s, which had seen another great burst of the cult of chalk and history: there were experimental Iron Age re-enactment villages at Butser; scary children’s TV dramas about the stone circles at Avebury; great bustard reintroductions on top-secret military establishments on Salisbury Plain. Now, I wonder why. Was it some response to the oil crisis? To economic depression? I don’t know. But up on the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realised the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history. That the chalk-cult rested on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage. That chalk downlands held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later, too, that I realised these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness. I’m standing on the far side of my familiar hedge, looking at this terra incognita that is the grand twentieth-century conjuration of our mythical English past. I walk out of the cover crop to where the thin, stony soil is exposed, so thick with chalk it’s like white paste; hair roots and flints, spotted with rain; tiny buttons of stone in impasto. The land falls away at my feet into a dry valley; a basin the size of a village, one beech copse hanging grey from its left- hand slope.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Of course it is.” He sipped from his coffee. “She’s been catching the bus ever since she started at the bank. She said it was more convenient. And now, just because she gets pestered a little, she wants to change everything.” Toot’s diminutive figure hovered in the hall, peering at us from behind her bifocals. “That’s not true, Stanley.” I took her into the other room and asked her what had happened. “A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus.” “That’s all?” Her lips pursed with irritation. “He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.” I returned to the kitchen. Gramps was rinsing his cup, his back turned to me. “Listen,” I said, “why don’t you just let me give her a ride. She seems pretty upset.” “By a panhandler?” “Yeah, I know—but it’s probably a little scary for her, seeing some big man block her way. It’s really no big deal.” He turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. “ It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.” He whispered the word. “That’s the real reason why she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.” The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure. In my steadiest voice, I told him that such an attitude bothered me, too, but assured him that Toot’s fears would pass and that we should give her a ride in the meantime. Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me. Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him that it was all right, I understood. We remained like that for several minutes, in painful silence. Finally he insisted that he drive Toot after all, and struggled up from his seat to get dressed. After they left, I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about my grandparents. They had sacrificed again and again for me. They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’m nearly passing out with stress, crouching, dirty, covered in mud and sweat, pulsing with adrenalin. The goshawk is full of adrenalin too. She’s killing the pheasant more, even though it’s dead. Stamp stamp, gripe, stamp, foot, clutch, stamp. Leaves continue to fly as she dances about on it. Her eyes burn with an unholy light, her beak is open. She looks terrifying. Slowly she calms down. I keep looking back behind me. No one is in sight. I feed her all the food in my waistcoat, and give her the whole head and neck of the pheasant. I sneak the pheasant itself into the capacious back pocket of the waistcoat, breaking its long tail feathers in half so no tell-tale ends poke out of the zip, and guiltily heap leaves all over the scene of the crime. And then we sneak back to the car. I am undone. From the four corners of the field I’m crossing, from all sides, every single cock pheasant in the neighbourhood begins to crow simultaneously. It’s a terrible, echoing, barrelling sound, like an echo-effects pedal on long sustain, rolling backwards and forwards through the air. It swells into the most terrifying, sustained cacophony, more like an artillery bombardment than calling birds. It is a vast alarum of accusation. I am guilty. I’ve poached a pheasant from someone’s shoot. I didn’t mean to, I almost say out loud. It was an accident. I’m relieved when the calls die away. And then, as I round the corner to the car, the barrage starts again. Chastened and slightly unnerved, I drive away, the pheasants gone but conscience ringing in my ears. The landscape is changing before my eyes. What I see is not just winter moving onwards to spring; it is a land filling slowly with spots and lines of beauty. There’s brittle sun out on the hill this lunchtime, and a fresh westerly wind. Mabel’s pupils shrink to opiated pinpricks as I unhood her, both of her eyes narrow with happiness. It is exceptionally clear. The red flag over the range cracks with the wind and the sound of distant rifles; the radio mast on the horizon looks like an ink-drawing over a wash of shadows and lines and bolts of land rippling up to the chalk hills before me. We walk up the track. From the top I can look down and see the whole of Cambridge. The light today is beguiling. The rooftops and spires seem within a hand’s grasp; a chess-set town glittering among bare trees, as if I could pick up the brute tower of the university library and move it six places north, set it down somewhere else.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  +II. NW) vb. only Niph. Hiph. beguile, deceive ;—(kindred with I. ,שוא‎ from which, however, the forms can hardly be derived (conj. We “=? 1)) -__Niph. Pf. 3 pl. 882 Is 19% the princes have been beguiled (|| (הַתָעוּ נּאָלוּ‎ Hiph. Pf NOT 26.40. sf. ‘RET Gn 3%, wen Ob?; 2 ms, הִשָאתָ‎ 16 49; 3 1. + PT 07; Impf. only juss. יש'א‎ 2 Ch 32", so y 55" Qr (v. infr.); ישא‎ 2K 18" Is 36%, sf. JN? 2K 19” Is 37”; 2 mpl. NWA Je 37°; Inf. abs. UO Je 4";—beguile, usu. c. acc. pers. Gn 3" (J ; not elsewh. Hex) ; Je 49 Ob*’; INET OS 2K 19” let not thy God beguile thee = Is 37", of Hezekiah 2 Ch 32" (cf. infr.), אַלְדְתַּשָאוּ‎ pa nwa: Je 37° do not deceive yourselves; also sq. ל‎ pers. DID NUON 2 K 18% = Is 36" (= 2 Ch 32%, v. supr.), Je 29°; pyd ONG הַשָא‎ N10 4" thou hast utterly beguiled this people ; ישימות עָלִימו‎ + 515 Kt appar. = 0807017008 (be) upon 6 7 (but elsewh. only in n.pr.loc., ef. p: 445 supr.), > Qr מָוָת עלימו‎ N'Y) Ew Ol Pe De Now ™?, cf. G, let death (beguile them, i.e.) come deceitfully upon them/ Briill Che, cf. Bae, conj. plausibly ישיא מָוֶת יִבְלְעָמו‎ n.[m.]| guile, dissimulation (>‏ משאון1 acc. to Lag®\* der. fr. NW, lending on usury) ;‏ NBIN Pr 26” hatred may hide‏ שָנְאָה jinwioa‏ itself with dissimulation.‏ 1 משואות‎ 1 deceptions 738 74) but meaning not suitable; read prob. משואות‎ v. TSW sub שוא‎ (so Klo Now ™? Bae). I. [N [נש‎ forget, v. 11. 782, vb. blow (NH = BH; ₪ 3¥3‏ [נשב]1 (but also 22), Syr. eas, all blow; || form of‏ OM Is 40! the‏ ”122 בו Pf. 3 fs.‏ 041 --;(נשף breath of ® has blown upon tt. Hiph. Impf.‏ IW! 1478 he causes his wind to‏ רוח ms.‏ 3 Gn15" and he drove them‏ וישב blow; ONS‏ away (perh. orig. blow away, drive away by‏ blowing, or by a sound like blowing).‏ ae נשה‎ vb. lend, become a creditor (cf. I. xwi3);—Qal Pf rs. mW) Je 15"; 3 pl. Wi ;יו‎ Pr mw. Ex 22% + 4%.; pl. DWI Ne 5°" + vi Qr (Kt נשָאִים‎ , v. 1. ,(נשא‎ sf. Wi Ts 50';—lend, ucu. 6. ב‎ pers.: ‘IWIN לאנְשִיתִי‎ 46 לד‎ I have not lent, and they have not lent to me, Dt 24% Ne5‘ (Qr; + acc. cogn.), yi? נשה 4