Hope

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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  It seems more hopeful to talk about what came before patriarchy—and could show us a way beyond it. So I talk about original cultures that saw the presence of god in all living things—including women. Only in the last five hundred to five thousand years—depending on where we live in the world—has godliness been withdrawn from nature, withdrawn from females, and withdrawn from particular races of men, all in order to allow the conquering of nature, females, and certain races of men. Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm. Indeed, millions still do, from traditional Native Americans here to original cultures around the world. The simple right to reproductive freedom—to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction—is basic to restoring women’s power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature. So when Father Egan prays to a female as well as a male god—and invites women as well as men to speak from the church pulpit—he is taking a step toward restoring an original balance. My homily seems to go over just fine. People nod at the idea that when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women’s birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, elaborate concepts of Heaven and Hell didn’t seem to exist before patriarchy; you just joined your elders or kept being reincarnated until you learned enough. There is the laughter of recognition. Altogether I sense curiosity and openness, not hostility or opposition. As people leave, there is a long line to shake hands, to share comments, and to thank—even to bless—Father Egan and me. He asks me to call him Harvey. I think we both feel bonded by this experience of both opposition and support. Outside, the cars with pictures of fetuses are still circling, and bullhorns are still blaring. Minnesota is home to the Human Life Center, a think tank headed by the delightfully named Father Marx, who often warns that “the white Western world is committing suicide through abortion and contraception.” His use of “white Western” is a big clue to the reasons for preserving patriarchy and controlling reproduction. But still, the parishioners streaming out of St. Joan of Arc don’t seem alarmed. This isn’t their first brush with local extremists. Harvey and I feel we have dodged a bullet. In New York a few days later, I hear the news that Archbishop John Roach, Harvey’s superior in the Catholic hierarchy, has reprimanded Father Egan and apologized in public for him. This is a big deal. It’s all over the media, from the front pages of newspapers in Minnesota to national television.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Nucor obeyed. He put the socks on the table and slipped into one of them a lump of sugar, handed to him by Rosa; then, after pouring some kirsch into the bottom of a bowl, he picked up the two socks, held them above the bowl and dipped them into it, taking care not to let the kirsch moisten anything but the tips, and then offered them to Dirbel, saying: " 'Take your pick, suck either one, with suga, or without. Don't act disgusted. This is the way one joins, to eat and drink at the same trough. There must be honor among thieves.' " And the latest Querelle, born in one piece at the age of twenty-five, arisen, defenseless; from a shadowy region within ourselves, strong, solid, swung his shoulders round gladly to greet his self-chosen, smiling, happy brothers, each one of them both younger and older than himself. And each Querelle regarded him with sympathy. In his dark moments Querelle was 119 I QUERELLE aware of their presence around him. \Vhile the fact that they were creatures of memory made them a little hazy, that very haze endowed them with a lovable gracefulness, a feminine quality that gently arched over him. If he had been inventive enough, he might have called them his "daughters," as Beethoven used to call his symphonies. By dark moments we mean those instants when the other Querelles crowded closer round the latest athlete, and when the haze around them was more like a veil of mourning than one of bridal tulle : when he himself already felt those gentle folds of oblivion descending over his body. "Seems they just don't know who it was cut him down." "Did you know him?" "Sure. Everybody knew him. But he wasn't no buddy of . , mine. Nona said : "\Veil, that mason, he must've been like the other one that got killed. The same type, most probably." "\Vhat mason?" Querelle said it slowly, stretching the vowels. "Haven't you heard?" Then Querelle and his brother were talking. The brothelkeeper stood leaning his elbows on the counter. He was observing them, especially Querelle, as Robert was telling him about Gil's ferocious deed . A powerful feeling of hope, the source of which seemed to be the universe itself, was gradually mounting in Querelle. An exquisite sense of freshness spread a11 through him . More and more he came to see himself as an exceptional and blessed being. His limbs and their gestures showed greater strength, greater grace. He was aware of this, gravely recorded the fact in his mind, all the while retaining the custom-ary smile. The two brothers had been fighting for five minutes. As they didn't really know where to strike or grab the other, their tactics 120 I JEAN GENET

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  A few years earlier in the 1960s, women a decade or so older than I had begun to reject the “feminine mystique” of the suburbs, as brilliantly and lethally described by Betty Friedan in her best seller, and to demand women’s rightful place in the paid workforce. Friedan had dared to name this glorified consumer role that women’s magazines were forcing on readers—though to be fair, advertisers were forcing it on editors—but younger and more radical women didn’t want just a job and a piece of the existing pie. They wanted to bake a new pie altogether. Eventually these more conservative women came to agree that feminism had to include all women—lesbians, women on welfare, the intertwining of sex and race for women of color; everyone—and the more radical women of diverse races and classes no longer turned up their noses at the idea of making change from inside the system as well as outside. Though the starting places of these various activist groups had been very different and had created pain and misunderstanding, by the end of the 1970s they came together as fractious, idealistic, diverse, and effective parts of the same movement. Given my age of just over thirty, I was in between these two groups of women—one trying to integrate and the other to transform. But because of my experience, I was drawn to the more radical and younger ones. I wasn’t married and living in the suburbs. I’d always been in the workforce, but the gender ghetto in journalism was not just a glass ceiling, it was a glass box. Also India had taught me that change grows from the bottom, like a tree, and that caste or race can double or triple women’s oppression. Soon feminism became a brushfire that spread coast to coast—and some people viewed it with the same alarm. To the religious right wing and much of the mainstream, we were defying God, family, and the patriarchy they decreed. To the left wing and some in the mainstream, bringing up bias against females was a distraction from struggles over class, race, and other issues that were taken more seriously, because they also affected men. Nonetheless, the idea of equality was so contagious that the right wing would soon rate feminism as a danger right up there with secular humanism and godless Communism. The American mainstream began to support issues of equality in public opinion polls, even when some of those issues were still thought of simply as “life”—think of sexual harassment or domestic violence. After Dorothy had a baby and decided to travel less, my partners became friends and colleagues like Margaret Sloan, a black feminist poet and activist from Chicago’s South Side, and Florynce Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer and an infinitely quotable and charismatic speaker. Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Because it is a weekend, the first big room we enter has about thirty women listening to two volunteer musicians who have come in to entertain. When I ask about the many empty seats, the male guard explains that gatherings have to be small because prisoners far outnumber the guards, who could be overwhelmed in a riot. One has never happened here—it is a rule made for men’s prisons—but it is a rule nonetheless. And this is the way the day goes, the up and down of it. This area the size of a city block is full of prison buildings that are well kept, but cells meant for one or two women have bunk beds for four. Here as nationally, the number of incarcerated women has gone up by 800 percent in the last twenty years, mostly because of drugs. There is a building named for Susan B. Anthony, but it houses drug programs for the addicted and therapy for the depressed or mentally ill. There is a well-stocked library, and when we enter, the librarian, a Smith College graduate, has gathered a dozen women prisoners who are talking around a table. But if our school system didn’t produce one of the lowest literacy rates in the developed world, and if the rate of childhood sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and drug addiction weren’t so high, those dozen women would probably not be here at all. Then I also meet with twenty or so prisoners in a very competitive and successful military-style program that creates confidence and reduces the likelihood of return, but it is so about marching and barking out orders in West Point style that we spend quite a while talking in a room together before anyone speaks spontaneously or laughs or calls me by my first name. I can see why Deborah is devoting her life to talking to people outside prisons about people inside, and to people inside about kindness, literacy, skills, and hope in any form. They are like sponges soaking up attention and the novelty of being listened to. It’s just possible that prison could be a restorative and communal place. I leave with the hope of going to other prisons with Deborah, including men’s prisons where she takes her book program to fathers, too. I feel I have entered a world where I want to be again, a world where small things can make a big difference. And that was just one day. As in the classic experiment of changing visible patterns by moving a magnet beneath the surface, if we take the magnetic secret away, freedom appears. I am reminded of Bryan Stevenson’s four steps for creating change, in the secret world of prisons or otherwise: There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things. Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Passing twice up and down beside the baggage in silence and regaining his self-possession, he addressed Sergey Ivanovitch calmly: “You have had no telegrams since yesterday’s? Yes, driven back for a third time, but a decisive engagement expected for tomorrow.” And after talking a little more of King Milan’s proclamation, and the immense effect it might have, they parted, going to their carriages on hearing the second bell. Chapter 6 Sergey Ivanovitch had not telegraphed to his brother to send to meet him, as he did not know when he should be able to leave Moscow. Levin was not at home when Katavasov and Sergey Ivanovitch in a fly hired at the station drove up to the steps of the Pokrovskoe house, as black as Moors from the dust of the road. Kitty, sitting on the balcony with her father and sister, recognized her brother-in-law, and ran down to meet him. “What a shame not to have let us know,” she said, giving her hand to Sergey Ivanovitch, and putting her forehead up for him to kiss. “We drove here capitally, and have not put you out,” answered Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’m so dirty. I’m afraid to touch you. I’ve been so busy, I didn’t know when I should be able to tear myself away. And so you’re still as ever enjoying your peaceful, quiet happiness,” he said, smiling, “out of the reach of the current in your peaceful backwater. Here’s our friend Fyodor Vassilievitch who has succeeded in getting here at last.” “But I’m not a negro, I shall look like a human being when I wash,” said Katavasov in his jesting fashion, and he shook hands and smiled, his teeth flashing white in his black face. “Kostya will be delighted. He has gone to his settlement. It’s time he should be home.” “Busy as ever with his farming. It really is a peaceful backwater,” said Katavasov; “while we in town think of nothing but the Servian war. Well, how does our friend look at it? He’s sure not to think like other people.” “Oh, I don’t know, like everybody else,” Kitty answered, a little embarrassed, looking round at Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’ll send to fetch him. Papa’s staying with us. He’s only just come home from abroad.” And making arrangements to send for Levin and for the guests to wash, one in his room and the other in what had been Dolly’s, and giving orders for their luncheon, Kitty ran out onto the balcony, enjoying the freedom, and rapidity of movement, of which she had been deprived during the months of her pregnancy. “It’s Sergey Ivanovitch and Katavasov, a professor,” she said. “Oh, that’s a bore in this heat,” said the prince. “No, papa, he’s very nice, and Kostya’s very fond of him,” Kitty said, with a deprecating smile, noticing the irony on her father’s face. “Oh, I didn’t say anything.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  By the following year, progressive forces looking for a new candidate—not just in the Senate but for the presidency—were approaching him with offers to, as Obama said, “drink the Kool-Aid.” Though he resisted at first, the draft effort gradually became a movement with a life of its own. Though such African American leaders as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and Reverend Jesse Jackson had run, Obama became the first with a serious chance of being a major-party candidate. Together, he and Hillary could turn this election into the first in history with candidates who looked like the country. It wasn’t campaign season yet, but wherever I went, from campuses to living rooms, questions about the possibility of a new kind of president were being raised. Though Obama was younger, with less national, international, and Senate experience than Hillary, I still thought it was too soon for the country to accept a woman commander in chief. Moreover, Obama’s Kennedyesque appeal created a rare and precious chance to break the racial barrier. But to me, their shared content was way more important than different forms. She was a civil rights advocate. He was a feminist. They were a modern-day echo of the abolitionist and suffragist era, when black men, black women, and white women—the groups white male supremacists had worked so hard and cruelly to keep apart—turned this country on its head by working together for universal adult suffrage. Whenever I was on the road before the primaries, I saw a revival of this unconscious coalition in audiences that were interested in politics as never before. There was enthusiasm for these two new faces that stood for a shared worldview. In audiences from very blue states to very red ones, support was more like a Rorschach test than a division by race and sex. For instance, 94 percent of black Democrats had a favorable view of Hillary Clinton, compared to an 88 percent favorable view of Obama. After all, he was new on the national stage and the Clintons had earned a reputation for racial inclusiveness that caused African American novelist Toni Morrison to famously call Bill Clinton “the first black president.” Both white and black women were more likely than their male counterparts to support Hillary Clinton—and in my observation, also more likely to believe that she couldn’t win. Male and female black voters were more likely than white voters to support Obama and also to believe he couldn’t win. Each group was made pessimistic by the depth of the bias they had experienced. Some mostly white audiences seemed to hope this country could expiate past sins by electing Obama. As one white music teacher rose in an audience to say, “Racism puts me in prison, too—a prison of guilt.” Many parents of little girls, black and white, were taking them to Clinton rallies so they would know that they, too, could be president.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  It’s my chance to do more than come home saying to friends, “I met an amazing person who…,” or “Here’s a great new idea for…,” or, most of all, “We have to stop generalizing about ‘the American people,’ ” as if we were one homogeneous lump. I’m also now immune to politicians who say, “I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know …” I’ve traveled more than any of them, and I don’t know. What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don’t. Altogether, if I’d been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person—especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative. On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality. For instance, Americans are supposed to cherish freedom, yet we imprison a bigger percentage of our people than any other country in the world. I talk to students who are graduating in crippling debt, yet don’t connect this to state legislatures that are building prisons we don’t need instead of schools we do need, and then spending an average of fifty thousand dollars a year per prisoner and way less per student. I love the entrepreneurial spirit of people who start a high-tech company or a hot dog stand, but our income and wealth gaps are the biggest in the developed world. I meet people in Indian Country who can trace their origins back a hundred thousand years, and survivors of sex and labor trafficking who arrived yesterday. Also, this country is transforming before our eyes. In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? But with all the power and money that is behind it, this backlash could imprison us in a hierarchy all over again. As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, “Hate generalizes, love specifies.”2 That’s what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies. —MY SECOND PURPOSE IS to encourage you to spend some time on the road, too. By that, I mean traveling—or even living for a few days where you are—in an on-the-road state of mind, not seeking out the familiar but staying open to whatever comes along. It can begin the moment you leave your door.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I hope the quiet T-shirt group might be realizing that this protects their choice, too—that government with the power to forbid birth control or abortion could also enforce one or the other—but no such luck. Suddenly they stand up in unison, chant “Abortion! Murder! Abortion! Murder!” and walk out en masse. In the silence that follows, I can feel people trying to figure out what went wrong. I too wonder what I could have said or done. I express my regret at their walkout, which seems to break the spell. A young white man in jeans—slender, shy, perhaps in his late twenties—raises his hand and begins a story that seems unrelated. He has invented a new kind of bit for oil rigs. He just sold the patent and received an unexpected amount of money. He would like to donate $90,000, about half of his windfall, to the cause of reproductive freedom as a basic human right—like freedom of speech. There is silence, then laughter, and then cheers. Never in my four decades of traveling and fund-raising will anything like this happen again. If people pledge money, it’s usually after an appeal and in requested sums. Also they tend to give according to what others are giving. To me and to everyone in that room, this young man has shown how to give without being asked and according to ability—more than ability, since he is sharing a rare windfall. He has given us all the gift of spontaneity—and hope. We stay in touch. He comes to New York and stops to say hello. When I’m on another trip, a young woman introduces herself to me as his sister. When he and I cross paths in Denver, we have breakfast. Every few years, the road seems to bring us together. That day in Oklahoma became a landmark in all our lives. II.For me, talking and organizing after a campus or any other lecture is the big reward—because then I am learning. We often continue in a restaurant or campus hangout or just sit on the nearest available floor. With a shared lecture to respond to—plus my request to overcome the hierarchical setting and pretend we’re all sitting in a circle, even if there are five hundred or five thousand of us—people get up and say things they might not say to friends or family. It’s as if the audience creates its own magnetic field that draws out stories and ideas. I also read aloud from notes handed to me by the audience—about, say, cuts of hard-won new courses that aren’t yet in the core curriculum, but plenty of money allocated for a new football stadium—because I can do this without punishment. Often a kind of alchemy takes place. When someone on one side of the hall asks a question, and someone on the other side answers it, I know this magic has happened. The group has acquired a life of its own. There are rock-bottom subjects for men as well as women.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Chief among their sins was passing on the knowledge of herbs and abortifacients that allowed women to decide whether and when to give birth. After a period of shock and conferring, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious issues a statement. It condemns “unsubstantiated accusations,” offers to go to the Vatican for a dialogue, and observes that just by following the teachings of Jesus, many in the church might also be called “radical feminists.” Also some of the nuns get their rebellious act together and take it on the road. They begin touring the country to highlight poverty and injustice and become known as the Nuns on the Bus. I start to see men and women of all descriptions wearing T-shirts that say, WE ARE ALL NUNS NOW ! If Harvey were alive, he would be wearing one, too. —A FEW YEARS LATER, I’m waiting for a friend on a snowbound street in Minneapolis. A skinny boy of twelve or thirteen, with a backpack almost as big as he is, is standing nearby. I realize he’s trying to get up the courage to say something, so I say hello. All in a rush, he says he knows I was at St. Joan of Arc Church, it’s where his family goes, he’s part of a group there called Awakening the Dreamer, and it’s trying to help indigenous tribes save the rain forest. He wants to go to Latin America one day, just like Father Egan did. I look at this boy who wasn’t born yet when I spoke there—maybe his parents weren’t born yet either—and ask how he knows me or Father Egan. He says he read all about us on the big St. Joan of Arc website. I realize it’s a new day. It turns out that his family are Hmong refugees from Laos, people who were first displaced by the Vietnam War. Though Minneapolis has been mostly blond and Scandinavian in its immigrant past, it now has become the American city with the largest Hmong population. Indeed, I’ve read that a Hmong woman has just been elected to the city council. I ask him why he cares about such a long-ago event. He says he’s shy, his parents have a hard time with English, he is trying to help them and also to speak up in school. He read on the church website that I was the most protested speaker Joan of Arc ever had, and he wants to speak up for his family. I tell him that he just took that power. Now no one can ever take it away. I also tell him that the rain forest is beautiful, like where his family came from, that Father Egan would be proud of him, and that I am proud of him, too. The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves. As I watch him trudge off in the snow, I think for the millionth time: You never know.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin heard the words, and they impressed him. “How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants?” he thought, recalling all his fears and doubts of late. “What do I know? what can I do in this fearful business,” he thought, “without help? Yes, it is help I want now.” When the deacon had finished the prayer for the Imperial family, the priest turned to the bridal pair with a book: “Eternal God, that joinest together in love them that were separate,” he read in a gentle, piping voice: “who hast ordained the union of holy wedlock that cannot be set asunder, Thou who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca and their descendants, according to Thy Holy Covenant; bless Thy servants, Konstantin and Ekaterina, leading them in the path of all good works. For gracious and merciful art Thou, our Lord, and glory be to Thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and ever shall be.” “Amen!” the unseen choir sent rolling again upon the air. “‘Joinest together in love them that were separate.’ What deep meaning in those words, and how they correspond with what one feels at this moment,” thought Levin. “Is she feeling the same as I?”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I’m going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my efforts will make no show,” he said, and he left the edge of the forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch, knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy spindle-tree in full flower with its rosy red catkins. It was perfectly still all round him. Only overhead in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the children’s voices were floated across to him. All at once he heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka’s contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed over Sergey Ivanovitch’s face. Conscious of this smile, he shook his head disapprovingly at his own condition, and taking out a cigar, he began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a match to light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft scales of the white bark rubbed off the phosphorus, and the light went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away forwards and upwards over a bush under the overhanging branches of a birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergey Ivanovitch walked gently on, deliberating on his position. “Why not?” he thought. “If it were only a passing fancy or a passion, if it were only this attraction—this mutual attraction (I can call it a _mutual_ attraction), but if I felt that it was in contradiction with the whole bent of my life—if I felt that in giving way to this attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty ... but it’s not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie, I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her memory. That’s the only thing I can say against my feeling.... That’s a great thing,” Sergey Ivanovitch said to himself, feeling at the same time that this consideration had not the slightest importance for him personally, but would only perhaps detract from his romantic character in the eyes of others. “But apart from that, however much I searched, I should never find anything to say against my feeling. If I were choosing by considerations of suitability alone, I could not have found anything better.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I spent my first days there trying to figure out why the halls full of students looked so odd. Suddenly I realized that everyone was white. I asked a teacher if this reflected the neighborhood, and he said of course not, it reflected segregation. Washington was two separate cities, he said, and the black majority wanted separate schools, too. Besides, the city had come a long way since slaves built the White House. This was news to me. My Toledo high school was segregated socially, too—not only by race but by whose family had a television set, spoke Polish or Hungarian at home, or had a father who was a foreman instead of working the line—but at least we all went to the same classes, ate in the same cafeteria, and cheered the same football team. Altogether, this Stevenson for President office was the most open and welcoming place I’d ever been. But one Saturday when I and the other young women arrived, we found ourselves stashed away on an upper floor. We were devastated. A staffer explained that Stevenson himself might drop in and must not be seen with any female unless she was old enough to be his mother. After all, he was that terrible thing—divorced—something no president had ever been. Though everyone seemed to know that Eisenhower had imported the beautiful young English woman who was his driver during the war—and even arranged for her U.S. citizenship—he would have his wife, Mamie, as a proper First Lady. Appearances were all that mattered. We didn’t object to being hidden away; we felt like Typhoid Marys who might endanger the cause we cared about. When we went out for ten-cent hamburgers at the local White Castle, we talked about staying out of sight. What we didn’t talk about were the male staffers who rated our looks, brushed against us in close quarters, and became hazards to be navigated. Our presence was the problem; their behavior was inevitable. Avoiding them while keeping their egos intact was just part of our job. The truth is that we would have put up with almost anything to stay in this exciting place with its air of fighting for outsiders—even though we didn’t yet know we were outsiders, too. Or to put it another way, we didn’t believe we could ever be insiders. I didn’t know that political change could make me feel safer in the street, or allow me an identity of my own instead of marrying it, or send my Toledo classmates to college instead of to factories, or get my current classmates out of their white ghetto. I didn’t realize that changes made through politics might have helped my mother remain the pioneer journalist she had been years before I was born. My only thought was Where else could I find such openness, excitement, and hope? I was hooked. And I’ve stayed hooked on campaigns to this day.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But when I got to Bhave’s ashram, almost everyone was gone. An elderly man explained that caste riots had broken out in nearby Ramnad, a large rural area of the southeast, and government leaders in far-off New Delhi had ordered the area cordoned off in the hope of containing the burnings and killings. Not even reporters were allowed in. Nonetheless, teams of three or four from the ashram had walked around the roadblocks and were going from one village to the next, holding meetings, letting people know they were not abandoned, and dispelling rumors that were even worse than reality—an on-the-ground organizing effort to reverse the spiral of violence. Each team had to include at least one woman. Men couldn’t go into the women’s quarters to invite women to meetings, and if there was no woman present, other women were unlikely to come anyway. But the ashram had no women left. That’s how I was persuaded that a foreigner in a sari would seem no more out of place than someone from New Delhi, and why I found myself leaving behind all my possessions except a cup, a comb, and the sari I had on, and getting on a rickety bus. As my companion, the elderly man from the ashram, explained to me, if the villagers wanted peace, they would feed and house the peacemakers. If they didn’t want peace, no outsiders could help anyway. As we started on our journey, I noticed that without possessions, I felt oddly free. After hours on that ancient bus that seemed to stop everywhere, we arrived at the place where police barriers had blocked the dusty road into Ramnad. Without a car or even an oxcart, we just bypassed the road altogether and walked into this large area so traumatized by caste riots. Thus began a week unlike any other. We walked between villages in the heat of the day, stopping to cool off in shallow streams or find shade in groves where chai and steamed rice cakes called idlis were sold from palm-roofed shelters. At night, I watched as villagers slowly came out of their small earthen houses and compounds to sit around a kerosene lamp in circles of six or twenty or fifty. I listened as villagers told stories of burnings and murders, thefts and rapes, with fear and trauma that needed no translation. It was hard to imagine anything that could slow this cycle of violence, yet villagers took comfort from neighbors who had ventured out of their compounds, too. People seemed relieved to see one another, talk, be heard, separate truth from rumor, and discover that any outsiders knew or cared. To my surprise, these long nights often ended with pledges to keep meeting, to sort out what was true and what was not, and to refuse to be part of vengeful cycles that only endangered them more.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  and has a nature so perverse and vicious, that she never satiates her craving appetite; and after feeding, she is hungrier than before. The animals to which she weds herself are many;13 and will yet be more, until the Greyhound14 comes, that will make her die with pain. He will not feed on land or pelf, but on wisdom, and love, and manfulness; and his nation shall be between Feltro and Feltro. He shall be the salvation of that low15 Italy, for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus, and Nisus, died of wounds;16 he shall chase her through every city, till he have put her into Hell again; from which envy first set her loose Wherefore I think and discern this for thy best, that thou follow me; and I will be thy guide, and lead thee hence through an eternal place,17 where thou shalt hear the hopeless shrieks, shalt see the ancient spirits in pain, so that each calls for a second death;18 and then thou shalt see those who are contented in the fire:19 for they hope to come, whensoever it be, amongst the blessed; then to these, if thou desirest to ascend, there shall be a spirit20 worthier than I to guide thee; with her will I leave thee at my parting: for that Emperor who reigns above, because I was rebellious to his law, wills not that I come into his city.21 In all parts he rules and there holds sway; there is his city, and his high seat: O happy whom he chooses for it!” And I to him: “Poet, I beseech thee by that God whom thou knowest not: in order that I may escape this ill and worse, lead me where thou now hast said, so that I may see the Gate of St. Peter,22 and those whom thou makest so sad.” Then he moved; and I kept on behind him. * See “Note on Dante’s Hell” and “The Chronology of the Inferno,” at pp. 3 and 6. 1. The Vision takes place at Eastertide of the year 1300, that is to lay, when Dante was thirty-five years old. Cf. Psalms xc. 10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten.” See also Convito iv: “Where the top of this arch of life may be, it is difficult to know.… I believe that in the perfectly natural man, it is at the thirty-fifth year.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Like a jazz musician improvising, or a surfer looking for a wave, or a bird riding a current of air, you’ll be rewarded by moments when everything comes together. Listen to the story of strangers meeting in a snowstorm that Judy Collins sings about in “The Blizzard,” or read Alice Walker’s essay “My Father’s Country Is the Poor.” Each starts in a personal place, takes an unpredictable path, and reaches a destination that is both surprising and inevitable—like the road itself. An addiction to the road can exist anywhere. The Sufi poet Rumi’s caravan wandered through a dozen Muslim lands; the Roma people left India for Europe and never settled down; and Australia’s aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders go on walkabout to renew ancient songlines. I am writing this on-the-road-in-America book because it’s the place I live and travel most, and most need to understand, especially given its outsize influence on the world. Also I’m not sure we can understand another country if we don’t understand our own. In my twenties, I had the good luck to live for a year in Europe, and then for two years in India—yet in some ways, I was escaping more than being fully present. Secure Europe was a momentary way of leaving an insecure childhood behind. Faraway India helped to introduce me to the way most people live in the world, something way beyond anything I knew. I’m still thankful to that huge and struggling country for being impossible to ignore; otherwise I might have come home as the same person I was when I left. My purpose here is to tempt you to explore this country. American travel seems to need an advocate. If I’m going to Australia or Zambia, people tell me how exciting it is, yet if I’m traveling anywhere in these United States, they sympathize and say how tiring it must be. In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning. However, I’m not suggesting that you travel as much as I have. Like Sky Masterson, the wandering gambler in Damon Runyon stories, I’ve been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible—and he didn’t wash his hair with hotel soap, eat from vending machines, or sit up late organizing with the hotel maids. After my first two decades traveling as an organizer, I realized that the longest stretch I’d spent at home was eight days. As you can see, I’d fallen in love with the road. —MY THIRD HOPE IS to share stories.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  In campus terms, you might say I’ve gone from mimeographing to tweeting; from curfews to hooking up; from no-credit women’s studies courses in summer school to the National Women’s Studies Association; from African American history as demanded by black students to such history as the expectation of all students; from gay and lesbian groups forbidden to meet on campus to transgender and transsexual students who challenge all gender binaries; from blue book exams to handwriting as a disappearing art; and from limited seminars to limitless Web hangouts. For instance, during early visits to campuses, I saw students painting a big red X on sidewalks wherever a woman had been sexually assaulted—and ending up getting arrested for vandalism instead of being praised. Now I see their daughters and granddaughters using Title IX—the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education, including sports—to threaten campuses with the loss of federal funding if sexual assault creates an environment hostile to women’s education. For decades, places of higher education obscured the rates of sexual assault, in order to protect a campus reputation and encourage parents to send their daughters. Now I see a few campuses that are honest about and have policies to deal with sexual assault—which happens to an average of one in five women on campus, and a few men, too.2 It shows this is beginning to be taken seriously, which is a reason for parents to trust those campuses. As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism. Scholarly language may be so theoretical that it obscures the source of feminism in women’s lived experience. One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is “I don’t know enough to be a feminist.” Or even “I’m not smart enough to be a feminist.” It breaks my heart. But despite all these differences, with the passage of time, I’ve found there is a pattern to campus visits. It goes like this: I arrive at the airport—or train station or bus station—where I’m met by one or more of the hardy band of activists who invited me. In the car on the way to the campus—or hotel or classroom or press conference—I learn they are worried. In the South or Midwest, they may warn that this is the most “conservative” place I’ve ever been. If we are on the East or West Coast, they’re more likely to say it’s the most “apathetic.” Or perhaps it’s “activist,” but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production. They have reserved a hall for tonight and have publicized the event, but they’re worried that hardly anyone will come.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Ironically, as that young Puerto Rican man also said, the men least likely to be in prison seemed to be those who committed crimes against women—at least anything short of murder. The average rapist has raped seven to eleven times before being arrested. Men guilty of domestic violence stay in their homes while their victims go to shelters—if they’re lucky. We must not let prisons stay a secret. It dawned on me that for prisoners, getting out of that secret space is progress, but because I am free, progress for me is going in. While writing this chapter, for instance, I heard about the unPrison Project. It provides children’s books to mothers in prison so they have another way to connect with their children during visits, minds fly over prison walls, and mothers also improve their literacy. Seventy percent of all people in prison return within five years, but of those who get help there with literacy, only 16 percent return. Who can argue with that?Deborah Jiang-Stein, the inventor of the unPrison Project, invited me to go with her to the Shakopee women’s prison, near Minneapolis, Minnesota. —WE MEET OUTSIDE THE prison with both the surprise of strangers and the instant intimacy of people who share work. I had read her book Prison Baby: A Memoir, and she has read my writing. I know she was born to an incarcerated and addicted mother, was lucky to survive withdrawal from the heroin she had absorbed from her mother’s body and blood, and was also lucky to spend her first year in a rare prison with a nursery so she could be with her mother. Then she was adopted by a Jewish family of teachers who gave her the gift of education, a gift she passes on to women like her mother, who was in and out of prison all her life. Deborah refers to herself as multiracial, and one can see Asian and many other influences in her expressive face. You might say she is a universal person. She went through a hard childhood of being obviously different from her adoptive family, yet not being told the secret of her birth. She, too, experienced teenage years of addiction and rebellion until she finally discovered her true story. With the end of secrecy, she discovered her mission. Since she is way more familiar than I am with prison routine, she guides me through filling out forms, removing jewelry, leaving everything but our indoor clothing in a locker, and passing through metal detectors. When we are finally in the halls of the prison itself—surprising because they are bright and clean, and depressing because there is no way out—we see five mothers with very young children. I am sad because I know this is a rare visiting day. Deborah is glad because she knows this prison is rare in allowing maternal visits at all.

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

  The Creed of our faith touches on the various defects of Christ when it states: “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; He descended into hell.” CHAPTER 236 THE RESURRECTION OF CHRISTSince the human race was freed by Christ from the evils flowing from the sin of our first parent, it was fitting that, as He bore our ills to free us from them, the first fruits of man’s restoration effected by Him should make their appearance in Him. This was done that Christ might be held up to us as a sign of salvation in two ways. First, we learn from His passion what we brought down on ourselves by sin and what suffering had to be undergone for us to free us from sin. Secondly, we see in His exaltation what is proposed to us to hope for through Him. In triumph over death, which resulted from our first parent’s sin, Christ was the first of all men to rise to immortal life. Thus, as life first became mortal through Adam’s sin, immortal life made its first appearance in Christ through the atonement for sin He offered. Others, it is true, raised up either by Christ or by the prophets, had returned to life before Him; yet they had to die a second time. But “Christ rising again from the dead, dies now no more” (Rom. 6:9). As He was the first to escape the necessity of dying, He is called “the first begotten of the dead” (Apoc. 1:5) and “the first fruits of those who sleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). Having thrown off the yoke of death, He was the first to rise from the sleep of death. Christ’s resurrection was not to be long delayed, nor, on the other hand, was it to take place immediately after death. If He had returned to life immediately after death, the fact of His death would not have been well established; and if the resurrection had been long delayed, the sign of vanquished death would not have appeared in Him, and men would not have been given the hope that they would be rescued from death by Him. Therefore He put off the resurrection until the third day, for this interval was judged sufficient to establish the truth of His death, and was not too long to wither away the hope of liberation. If it had been delayed for a longer time, the hope of the faithful might have begun to suffer doubt. Indeed, on the third day, as though hope were already running out, some were saying: “We hoped that it was He that should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 24:21).

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I don't remember whether it was on this evening that we arranged to appear together a few weeks later at Carnegie Hall, or if this had already been ar ranged. Presently, Marlon, very serious, and even being, as I remember, a little harsh with the assembled company-want ing to make certain that they understood the utter gravity of NO NAME IN THE STREET our situation, and the speed with which the time for peaceful change was running out-took the floor, and introduced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As our situation had become more complex, Martin's speeches had become simpler and more concrete. As I remem ber, he spoke very simply that evening on the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, what had been done, what was being done, and the enormity of the tasks that lay ahead. But I remember his tone more than his words. He spoke very humbly, as one of many workers, speaking to his co-workers. I think he made everyone in that room feel that whatever they were doing, whatever they could do, was important, was of the utmost importance. He did not flatter them-very subtly, he challenged them, challenged them to live up to their moral obligations. The room was quite re markable when he finished-still, thoughtful, grateful: per haps, in the most serious sense of that weary phrase, profoundly honored. And yet-how striking to compare his tone that night with what it had been not many years before! Not many years be fore, we had all marched on Washington. Something like two hundred and fifty thousand people had come to the nation's capital to petition their government for a redress of grievances. They had come fr om all over the nation, in every condition, in every conceivable attire, and in all kinds of vehicles. Even a skeptic like myself, with every reason to doubt that the pe tition would, or could, be heard, or acted on, could not fail to respond to the passion of so many people, gathered to gether, for that purpose, in that place. Their passion made one forget that a terrified Washington had bolted its doors and fled, that many politicians had been present only because they had been afraid not to be, that John Lewis, then of SNCC, had been forced to tone down his speech because of the insuperable arrogance of a Boston archbishop, that the administration had done everything in its power to prevent the March, even to finding out if I, who had nothing whatever to do with the March as organized, would use my influence to try to prevent it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, _might have been_,” he said mournfully. “He’s just one of those people of whom they say they’re not for this world.” “But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,” said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch. Chapter 20 The next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction. During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card-table covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened his hope by accounts of the marvelous recoveries she had heard of. Levin knew all this; and it was agonizingly painful to him to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with difficulty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover” (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), “and Thou wilt save him and me.” After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken. “Is he better?” “Yes, much.” “It’s wonderful.” “There’s nothing wonderful in it.” “Anyway, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.