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

  As an adult child of divorce reading this book, I hope you have gained a better understanding of who you are today and how you got here. I hope you realize that you have millions of peers who share your worries about relationships and who understand the seriousness of your predicament. Your fears and feelings were forged in the crucible of your parents’ divorce years ago and strengthened over the years that followed. These emotions, which are often hidden from consciousness, have the power to affect your marriage, your parenting, indeed the quality of your entire life. An important task for your generation is to achieve better relationships. But how to go about it? You still wonder what motivated your parents’ decision to divorce. Some people find that it helps to sit down and talk candidly with their parents. You may not believe or like the answers, but the exercise can provide new and useful perspectives. Not everyone can do this, nor should they, since it may cause both parent and child unnecessary suffering. But for many, it’s worth trying to lift the curtain of silence that has troubled the parent and child relationship for years. My next advice is to delay marriage or commitment until you have learned more about yourself and what you want in a partner. A good relationship cannot be created if you’re expecting to fail. You can learn about people by observing them and by observing yourself together with them. Look around and try to see relationships that are working. You might learn something. You should consider individual or group therapy as a bridge to understanding yourself. You need to learn how to resolve conflict without becoming terrified. In mastering this skill, you’ll gain confidence that you can influence your relationships instead of passively settling for whatever comes your way. Before you settle for disappointment, try to learn about the parts of life that you missed. In the end, each person finds his or her own way. Ultimately, your goal is to close the door on your parents’ divorce, to separate the now from the then. By giving up wanting what you didn’t have, you can set yourself free . For the Parents I N TALKING TO young adults who were raised in unhappy intact families, it became clear to me that their parents could have gone either way—stay together or get a divorce. This older generation of parents certainly had enough legitimate complaints about their spouses to consider divorce. But their marriages were not so explosive or chaotic or unsafe that husband and wife felt living together was intolerable. What can we learn from them? Is their example useful to people today who share similar problems?

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  It’s true, at that time you could count the number of literary erotic short stories on two hands. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my contract, which stipulated that the publisher needed at least twenty stories to make a decent page count. I wondered if I would have to write a story myself under a pseu donym, or if I should change the title of our collection from The Best American Erotica to The Only American Erotica. I haunted friends and even relative strangers with my quest: “Where are the erotic writers?” I chewed my nails. They had to be out there somewhere—and I felt it in my gut—there must be more than twenty. Nowadays I face a different sort of question. Readers and critics alike wonder how I can possibly read all the erotica pub lished—and, in particular, how I can keep up with the publish ing infinity machine that is called the Internet. In the time it takes me to write this introduction, there are probably one thousand erotic poems, short stories, and novellas being up loaded onto the Web for the very first time—some with great fanfare and others quite obscure. Within minutes, however, all these authors will receive reactions and critiques from around the world; their stories will be quoted, copied, imitated, and even sabotaged by their newfound and greedy public. My response to the millions of splitting embryos? Thank God for cream, I say. Thank all the erotic muses and laws of literary karma—because the writing that is the very best, the most cherished and deeply influential, does find its way to the top, like the richest cream. If you have any eye for talent at all, you can even see the cherry on top, winking at you. When people ask me who might be my inspiration, I have to credit a character from the late, great Charles Schulz: Linus, in the Pumpkin Patch. Linus’s faith in the rewards of sincerity and passion is my divining rod as well. Linus believes in the Great Pumpkin, a bountiful magical figure whom the other children scorn or have never even heard of. While all the other kids look to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy for their just deserts, Linus looks out to his Pumpkin Patch, where he’s been growing his organic best, his squashes watered and tended with infinite love. He hopes the Great Pumpkin will rise up Halloween night, witness his ef forts, and reward his sincerity. Sincerity is the key word here— the Great Pumpkin knows a poser pumpkin when he sees one, and isn’t about to applaud any phony or halfhearted efforts. From the beginning of my career in erotica, I was told that

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

  In talking to the women from divorced families who married young, I thought a lot about our comparison group. Many of the women from good and “good enough” intact families told me that they were often drawn to losers in their late teens and early twenties. The guy in the motorcycle jacket was exciting and fun to play with. Men who used drugs and drank hard were wonderful party boys and excellent lovers. But they did not go on to marry such men. As they told these stories, I heard time and again how their parents’ concern played an important role in not choosing such men for life partners. “I knew my mom wanted me to be taken care of and respected,” said Donna. “I didn’t always follow her thinking and I lived with one guy who drove her up the wall. But I didn’t marry him. In the end, I listened to my mom’s advice about men.” Another woman told me, “I knew all along that my folks disapproved of my lover. But it took me five years to dump him. It was a narrow escape.” By contrast, few of the divorced parents tried to intervene in their children’s poor choice of marriage partners. I don’t know of a single father who sat his daughter down to warn her about what was ahead of her. The few mothers who tried to intervene found that their daughters ignored them because the girls didn’t credit their moms with wisdom in relationships. Like Gary, the young women raised in good intact homes entered adulthood expecting that their future relationships would work, not fail. By their early twenties, they were in no rush to select a life mate but did have notions about the kind of relationship they wanted. Most postponed serious commitments, including marriage, until after they began to establish themselves in the workplace. But when the time is right they are reasonably confident, although admittedly also apprehensive, that they will choose well and settle down to raise a family. They feel that they have a good start and fair chance to make it on their own.

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Quæst. Ev. lib. ii. qu. 22.) Or by the bread is meant charity, because we have a greater desire of it, and it is so necessary, that without it all other things are nothing, as the table without bread is mean. Opposed to which is hardness of heart, which he compared to a stone. But by the fish is signified the belief in invisible things, either from the waters of baptism, or because it is taken out of invisible places which the eye cannot reach. Because also faith, though tossed about by the waves of this world, is not destroyed, it is rightly compared to a fish, in opposition to which he has placed the serpent on account of the poison of deceit, which by evil persuasion had its first seed in the first man. Or, by the egg is understood hope. For the egg is the young not yet formed, but hoped for through cherishing, opposed to which he has placed the scorpion, whose poisoned sting is to be dreaded behind; as the contrary to hope is to look back, since the hope of the future reaches forward to those things which are before. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 105.) What great things the world speaks to thee, and roars them behind thy back to make thee look behind! O unclean world, why clamourest thou! Why attempt to turn him away! Thou wouldest detain him when thou art perishing, what wouldest thou if thou wert abiding for ever? Whom wouldest thou not deceive with sweetness, when bitter thou canst infuse false food? CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now from the example just given he concludes, If then ye being evil, (i. e. having a mind capable of wickedness, and not uniform and settled in good, as God,) know how to give good gifts; how much more shall your heavenly Father? BEDE. Or, he calls the lovers of the world evil, who give those things which they judge good according to their sense, which are also good in their nature, and are useful to aid imperfect life. Hence he adds, Know how to give good gifts to your children. The Apostles even, who by the merit of their election had exceeded the goodness of mankind in general, are said to be evil in comparison with Divine goodness, since nothing is of itself good but God alone. But that which is added, How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him, for which Matthew has written, will give good things to them that ask him, shews that the Holy Spirit is the fulness of God’s gifts, since all the advantages which are received from the grace of God’s gifts flow from that source. ATHANASIUS. (Dial. 1. de Trin.) Now unless the Holy Spirit were of the substance of God, Who alone is good, He would by no means be called good, since our Lord refused to be called good, inasmuch as He was made man.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was the same assholes, he said—the word he used was neshtastnitsi , the literal meaning is something like unhappy or unlucky, the unfortunate ones—it was the same assholes who took over. It was still hot though it was the end of the afternoon, people were heading home from work, heading home or to the center, as we were, where already protesters were gathering as they had all week, in the hundreds and thousands. I had been watching them on the news but wanted to be among them in person, it felt like something remarkable was happening or about to happen in this country where so little happens, really, which is usually so quiescent. I wanted to see it for myself though it had nothing to do with me, of course, it wasn’t my country, would never be my country, I was leaving at the end of the term. But it had been my home, as close to home as anywhere else, and I wanted the demonstrations to be more than a momentary spasm, I felt the hope that some of my students felt, my colleagues, I wanted it to be real. What does it matter which party takes over, he went on, vse edno , they’re all the same, they’re all thieves, look what they’ve done to my country. The traffic moved a little finally, he gripped the steering wheel again, the cigarette burned almost to the filter between the first and second fingers of his left hand. I could have gone away but I didn’t, he said, prostak , idiot, I’ve fucked my life. He was still a young man, I thought, or at least he wasn’t old, maybe a few years older than I was, too young to talk the way he was talking. Too young by American time, I mean, different times pertain in different places. He was dressed like a young man, too, in jeans and a worn T-shirt, his face rough with two or three days’ stubble and glistening just slightly with sweat, as mine was, even with the windows open it was hot in the car. He glanced at me every now and again, his eyes not holding mine. Vizh , he said then, look, I understand them, it’s impossible to live a normal life in Bulgaria, I mean if you want to follow the laws, pay your taxes, you can’t survive here and be honest, only criminals survive. I don’t mean you don’t go to expensive restaurants or bars, you don’t have a good time, I mean you can’t put food on the table, you can’t have a normal life. I want to live like that, do you understand, I want to live in a normal country. We had gotten past the Pliska Hotel finally, where all the buses stop, the traffic was heavy still but moving.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannpt a,fford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so un trustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a " country unaBle to faa why so many of tile nonwhite are 111 pns'on,Oron the needle, or standing, flltti-r� less, in�� -g� ets-it may ve!)'_�ell be that both the child, and his elder, have CO!.l(:lll_degthat theyhaY�_!lothlng whatever to learn from-the people of a country thaLhas._managcd..-t.G Ieamso little�- - The Ne1v York Times, July 29, 1979 Open Letter to the Born Again I MET Martin Luther King Jr. before I met Andrew Young. I know that Andy and I met only because of Martin. Andy was, in my mind, and not because he ever so described him self, Martin's "right-hand man." He was present-absolutely present. He saw what was happening. He took upon himself his responsibility for knowing what he knew, and for seeing what he saw. I have heard Andy attempt to describe himself only once: when he was trying to clarifY something about me, to someone else. So, I learned, one particular evening, what his Christian ministry meant to him. Let me spell that out a little. The text comes from the New Testament, Matthew 2 5 :40: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. I am in the strenuous and far from dull position of having news to deliver to the Western world-for example: black is not a synonym for slave. Do not, I counsel you, attempt to defend yourselves against this stunning, unwieldy and unde sired message. You will hear it again: indeed, this is the only message the Western world is likely to be hearing fr om here on out. I put it in this somewhat astringent fashion because it is necessary, and because I speak, now, as the grandson of a slave, a direct descendant of a born-again Christian. My con venion, as Countee Cullen puts it, came high-priced/! belong to Jesus Christ. I am also speaking as an ex-minister of the Gospel, and, therefore, as one of the born again. I was in structed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit those in prison.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Nowadays I face a different sort of question. Readers and critics alike wonder how I can possibly read all the erotica pub lished—and, in particular, how I can keep up with the publish ing infinity machine that is called the Internet. In the time it takes me to write this introduction, there are probably one thousand erotic poems, short stories, and novellas being up loaded onto the Web for the very first time—some with great fanfare and others quite obscure. Within minutes, however, all these authors will receive reactions and critiques from around the world; their stories will be quoted, copied, imitated, and even sabotaged by their newfound and greedy public. My response to the millions of splitting embryos? Thank God for cream, I say. Thank all the erotic muses and laws of literary karma—because the writing that is the very best, the most cherished and deeply influential, does find its way to the top, like the richest cream. If you have any eye for talent at all, you can even see the cherry on top, winking at you. When people ask me who might be my inspiration, I have to credit a character from the late, great Charles Schulz: Linus, in the Pumpkin Patch. Linus’s faith in the rewards of sincerity and passion is my divining rod as well. Linus believes in the Great Pumpkin, a bountiful magical figure whom the other children scorn or have never even heard of. While all the other kids look to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy for their just deserts, Linus looks out to his Pumpkin Patch, where he’s been growing his organic best, his squashes watered and tended with infinite love. He hopes the Great Pumpkin will rise up Halloween night, witness his ef forts, and reward his sincerity. Sincerity is the key word here— the Great Pumpkin knows a poser pumpkin when he sees one, and isn’t about to applaud any phony or halfhearted efforts. From the beginning of my career in erotica, I was told that

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  On one of these sad restless evenings that they came ding-donging into with such puzzling gaiety my mother muttered to me not to go out after supper. I was immediately certain that this was the night when Dawn would come back. I saw him, bronzed, heavy with sperm, roaming the common into the small hours, maybe meeting someone else . . . But Charlie had boorishly slipped the net and gone down to the pub, and I was being relied on to keep up some sense of occasion. The Turloughs had brought a bottle of cherry brandy and I drank several little glasses of it and felt annoyingly careless and witty. We went into the sitting-room, and I sat by the door, so as to get to the phone first when it rang. It was extraordinary the certainty I felt, one of those baseless whims, a slight chemical thing perhaps, that changes your whole attitude. Geoffrey, as a rule needlessly discreet, gave a detailed account of the machinations behind the current bypass proposals. Then my father went to put a record on the stereogram. I knew that he hated background music, and that this was a ploy to prevent anyone from singing. But the moment he lifted the magic lid Mirabelle exclaimed, "Oh Lewis, my love, why don't you sing to us? I can't bear a record on, when you don't know whether to talk or listen to it." "I really won't tonight," he said firmly but with a smile. And then what could he do but add, "But if you'd like to . . ." I think she agreed less out of high spirits than from a sense of duty. "I shan't sing 'I'm just a wee bit boozy'", she said, "because actually I am, and I'll probably get muddled up with the words." "Ah well," said my father. "But can you play . . . ?" She had a whisper with my mother and after five seconds' modest thought broke out in a deeper, sexier voice than usual, "A home is not a home without a man—He's the necessary evil in the plan . . .", at which Geoffrey looked quite uncomfortable. My mother accompanied anxiously, making it sound like a metrical psalm. When it was finished I clapped for too long. "Thank you, darling," said Mirabelle with a bow. She had on black linen bell-bottoms that added a further curve to her outline and low-cut slippers which showed the little pinched cleavages of her toes. "What would you like me to do next?"

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

  There is no one stimulus for these major changes. For some women, the birth of a child in or out of wedlock jump-starts their emotional development. As they grow into the role of parent and gradually take responsibility for the infant, toddler, and young child, they realize they cannot continue their adolescent acting out. Others become badly frightened by somatic symptoms or simply wake up to the fact that they have been on the wrong road for too long. They don’t make a big deal of whatever it is that triggers their decision to change. At the same time, they realize the importance of their transformation and have no illusions about the difficulties ahead. They’ve seen friends go to jail or die from overdoses. Their decision to quit cold turkey or with a brief assist from self-help programs reflects their powerful wish to control themselves. It’s an amazing feat that is in some ways parallel to the change we saw in Larry, who finally learned to stop identifying with his violent father. But in this instance, the girls learn to stop waiting for their parents to rescue them and instead rescue themselves. After years of self-destructive behavior, they decide to join the world of adults and accept its standards. Their stories are honest, startling, and inspiring as they shoulder the responsibility of becoming their own parents. As I suggested earlier, their extended adolescence finally drew to a close. Enter the GrandparentPAULA CONTINUED. “Racer’s really the reason that I decided that I had to get my life shaped up. After I got sober I took a hard look at my life and decided that I wanted to give him stability. And, as I started to think, I decided it was important to go back to school but not the way my mom did it. I wanted to take classes and work toward a degree and have time to be with Racer—to be there when he got home from school and to see him off in the morning. Then I kind of got stuck because I couldn’t see how I could work and have time for Racer and go to school. Mom was already paying for Racer’s preschool and she was babysitting in the evenings so I could go to AA meetings. I was barely getting by on welfare and some yard jobs. And then a miracle happened! You’ll never guess.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Dr. Norman Poythress from Taylor Hardin explained that Myers had told him that “his prior ‘confessions’ are bogus and were coerced out of him by the police through keeping him physically and psychologically isolated.” We presented evidence from Taylor Hardin staffer Dr. Kamal Nagi, who said that Myers had told him of “another murder that occurred in 1986 where a girl was shot in the Laundromat. [He] said that the ‘police and also my lawyer want me to say that I had driven these people to the Laundromat and they shot the girl, but I won’t do it.’ ” Myers also told Nagi, “They threatened me. They want me to say what they want to hear and if I don’t then they tell me, ‘You’re going to the electric chair.’ ” We had evidence from a fourth doctor to whom Myers confided that he was being pressured to give false testimony against Walter McMillian. Dr. Bernard Bryant testified that Myers told him “he did not commit the crime and that at the time he was incarcerated for the crime, he was threatened and harassed by the local police authorities into confessing he committed a crime.” We emphasized to the court throughout the day’s hearing that all of these statements were made by Myers before the initial trial. Not only did these statements make Myers’s recantation more credible but they had also been documented in medical records that had never been turned over to Walter’s trial lawyers, as the law required. The U.S. Supreme Court has long required that the prosecution disclose to the defendant anything that is exculpatory or that may be helpful to the defendant in impeaching a witness. The supporters whom the State had brought to court and the victim’s family seemed confused by the evidence we were presenting—it complicated the simple narrative they had fully embraced about Walter’s guilt and the need for swift and certain punishment. State supporters began to leave the courtroom as the day went on, and the number of black people who were let into the room grew. By the end of that second day, I felt very hopeful. We had maintained a good pace and the cross-examinations had been shorter than I had expected. I thought we could finish our case in one more day. — I was tired but feeling pleased as I walked to my car that evening. To my surprise, I noticed Mrs. Williams sitting outside the courthouse on a bench, alone. She stood when our eyes met. I walked over, remembering how unsettled I had been to see her leave the courtroom. “Mrs. Williams, I’m so sorry they did what they did this morning. They should not have done it, and I’m sorry if they upset you. But, so you know, things went well today. I feel like we had a good day—” “Attorney Stevenson, I feel so bad.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I’m sure you don’t really think that,’ I said, in the way that one blandly comforts those whose torments one cannot imagine. ‘I mean, I really am wasting my life, and it’s not like what you were doing.’ Charles took this up directly. ‘I’ve no time for idleness,’ he said. ‘I want you to have a job.’ ‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself. ‘I’d like it if I could simply disappear, like you did. It was wonderful how you could disappear into Africa.’ ‘One disappeared,’ Charles admitted. ‘But one also remained in view.’ I came back to it carefully, weighing the weightless teacup and saucer in my hands. ‘What I rather got the impression of is that you were lost in a dream. It’s very beautiful that feeling the diaries give of a constant kind of transport when you were in the Sudan. It’s like a life set to music,’ I said, in a fantastic impromptu, which Charles ignored. ‘We were doing a job, of course. It was exceedingly hard work: relentless and exhausting.’ ‘Oh, I know.’ ‘But you’re right in a way—of me, at any rate. It was a vocation. Not all of them in the Service saw it in quite the same light as I did, perhaps. Many of them hardened. Many of them were dryish sticks long before they reached the desert. They write books about it, even now—fantastically boring.’ Charles shot out his foot and sent a book across the hearth-rug to me. It was the memoirs of Sir Leslie Harrap, privately printed and inscribed to Charles: ‘With best wishes, L. H.’. A photograph of the author, in puzzled superannuation, took up the back of the dust-jacket. ‘He was one of the people who went out with you, wasn’t he?’ ‘He was a good administrator, loyal, fair, stayed on longer than me, went back in fifty-six to help with the independence arrangements: utterly sound—Eton, Magdalen. Not a breath of imagination in his body. It was reading his book—what’s it called? A Life in Service —that made me realise I didn’t want to write anything of that kind. There is a book in my life, but it’s almost entirely to do with imagination and all that. The facts, my sweet William, are as nothing.’ I looked on abashed. ‘You have published something about the Sudan though?’ ‘Oh—yes, I did a little book in the war; part of a series that Duckworth brought out on various different countries, I can’t quite remember why. It wasn’t much good. Fortunately almost all the stock was destroyed when a bomb hit the warehouse.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In James a scientific mind coexisted with a fantastic and romantic belief in Providence. ‘And you’ve got fuck-all else to do. And you can write—your essay on Coade Stone vases was heart-breaking. And you’re very keen on the grace, nobility and so forth of Negroes. It’s an ideal opportunity. If you don’t do it, some other creep will get on to him. Or worse, the old boy will die. It would be an inestimable advantage,’ James concluded, ‘to do it while he was alive, to talk to about it all.’ ‘You’ve obviously thought about this far more clearly than I have,’ I said flippantly but truthfully. ‘I’d do it myself, but you know how it is—the sick to heal …’ ‘I agree there are reasons for doing it. I’ve just been preoccupied with the reasons for not doing it.’ ‘It’s too pathetic. I know you think you’re too grand to do any work, but you’ve got to commit yourself to something. Otherwise you’ll end up an old-young queen who’s done nothing worthwhile. Famous last words of the third Viscount Beckwith: “Fuck me again”.’ I smirked and half-laughed. ‘I thought my last words were to be “How do I look?” ’ James, himself in his grandest mood, was doing his occasional lecture, for which he stood in, it struck me, as an updated version of Mr Bast. ‘It’s just the thought of it going on for years and years, and perhaps not being interesting in the least.’ ‘There is also the thought that it will undoubtedly be a bestseller. Come on, he was obviously testing you out at his house—what did you think of the pictures, how did you react to the statue of King Thingamy.’ ‘There’s no doubt of that, and he obviously fancies me.’ ‘Surely you can handle that , my dear,’ James objected silkily. ‘I mean, you may have to pleasure him once or twice. Mostly with these very old queens they just ask you to go swimming in their pool, or they burst into the bathroom by mistake when you’re having a bath. They just like to have a look, you know.’ ‘For God’s sake, James, I’m not bothered about all that. It’s me that’s doing him a favour in the first place. He’s already seen me in my birthday suit several times. He hasn’t got a pool. That’s why I know him.’ ‘Promise me you’ll do it. Write the book, I mean.’ ‘But darling, you know how it is,’ I squirmed. Instinctively I was playing with myself. ‘I mean, I hate the idea of tying myself down. I want to go out all the time and—you know.’ ‘As far as I know, writing books does not preclude having sex. Admittedly some great authors have gone without: Jane Austen, for example, never partook of coition while she was working on a book. Bunyan, too, I believe, wrote the whole of Pilgrim’s Progress without a single fuck.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But they have the authority of knowing it is there. The Americans are no longer Euro peans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital. That capital also belongs, however, to the slaves who cre ated it for Europe and who created it here; and in that sense, the Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe, and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. This is precisely what is demanded of all the other white men in this country, and the Jew will not find it easier than anybody else. The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that the Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough-for not having learned fr om his history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different. All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different fr om one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy. If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by OTHER ESSAYS oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppres sion did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated . I learned this fr om Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced. The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews. T7J e New Yo rk Times Magazine, April 9, 1967 White Racism or World Community?

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

  After all, a child who is unhappy in one relationship should logically welcome another person to fill that gap. But that would be true only if the child gives up hope for the father’s renewed love and interest or rejects the father, as we saw in Larry’s story. Billy, no matter how many disappointments he sustained, never gave up expecting that his father would someday love him and value him. To many children, the father’s disinterest fuels a passionate attachment in the son toward the father. A close relationship with a stepfather would be a betrayal of the father. Whether he is nearby or far away, the biological father’s attitude toward the stepfather is of utmost importance. He stands symbolically at the entrance to their relationship. If the biological father resents the stepfather or competes with him for the child’s affection, it is almost impossible for the child to love the new man. But if the father encourages the new relationship, he helps clear the path for stepfather and child to proceed. In contrast, children and adolescents who have rejected their biological father, seeing him as a failure or morally flawed or lacking in interest, often turn eagerly to their stepfather as a person they can admire and emulate. Many talked of their stepfather with great affection and praise. “I really love him. He’s a good, loyal man.” Others said, “My stepfather saved my life.” One young man explained to me, “I have no respect for my father. He’s irresponsible and self-centered. But my stepfather is just the kind of person that I want to be. I’m lucky to have him.” One young woman, who was rescued from a delinquent life with a motorcycle gang by her stepfather’s confidence in her, told me proudly, “He told me that I was smart and that I was too good to waste my time with those losers. He said that I should go to college, and best of all he put his money where his mouth was. He is the father I always wanted.” I have seen many such transformations when an adolescent turns his back on the morally bankrupt biological parent and looks to the stepfather for guidance and help in the real world. One young man said, “My step is more of a father than my real father. He’s the one who took care of my mom, my sisters, and me. He’s earned his place with me.” Several of the young adults said they appreciated stepfathers who played quiet, protective roles in their lives and in the life of their mother—in effect taking good care of their moms. This they found comforting. “He was always there for me if I needed him,” a successful thirty-four-year-old businesswoman confided about her stepfather. “We’d go to Dad’s and it was like a big party. He’d buy us presents and let us do things that Mom and my step didn’t allow. We adored Dad.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I discovered that the law school offered an unusual one-month intensive course on race and poverty litigation taught by Betsy Bartholet, a law professor who had worked as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Unlike most courses, this one took students off campus, requiring them to spend the month with an organization doing social justice work. I eagerly signed up, and so in December 1983 I found myself on a plane to Atlanta, Georgia, where I was scheduled to spend a few weeks working with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC). I hadn’t been able to afford a direct flight to Atlanta, so I had to change planes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and that’s where I met Steve Bright, the director of the SPDC, who was flying back to Atlanta after the holidays. Steve was in his mid-thirties and had a passion and certainty that seemed the direct opposite of my ambivalence. He’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky and ended up in Washington, D.C., after finishing law school. He was a brilliant trial lawyer at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and had just been recruited to take over the SPDC, whose mission was to assist condemned people on death row in Georgia. He showed none of the disconnect between what he did and what he believed that I’d seen in so many of my law professors. When we met he warmly wrapped me in a full-body hug, and then we started talking. We didn’t stop till we’d reached Atlanta. “Bryan,” he said at some point during our short flight, “capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.’ We can’t help people on death row without help from people like you.” I was taken aback by his immediate belief that I had something to offer. He broke down the issues with the death penalty simply but persuasively, and I hung on every word, completely engaged by his dedication and charisma. “I just hope you’re not expecting anything too fancy while you’re here,” he said. “Oh, no,” I assured him. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with you.” “Well, ‘opportunity’ isn’t necessarily the first word people think of when they think about doing work with us. We live kind of simply, and the hours are pretty intense.” “That’s no problem for me.” “Well, actually, we might even be described as living less than simply. More like living poorly—maybe even barely living, struggling to hang on, surviving on the kindness of strangers, scraping by day by day, uncertain of the future.” I let slip a concerned look, and he laughed. “I’m just kidding…kind of.”

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  369 V oltaire wishes to engage with optimist philosophy in order to argue for the presence of free will in man. V oltaire underscores his argument for free will by showing that the natives in Paraguay—that is, natives in the New World and, therefore, according to 18 th-century philosophy, in a state of nature— are capable of being both good or bad, depending on the circumstances. V oltaire blames people’s lack of will for society’s persistent corruption and complacency. He takes particular aim at certain philosophers for being rigidly ideological. The overwhelming evidence in Candide is that people are corrupt, even if they were not born that way. This is a pessimistic view of the world, but even Martin admits, “It is always good to have hope.” Even if the principal characters seem unable to alter their habits and opinions, V oltaire suggests that Candide might change. In the fi nal exchange of the book, the naïve hero seems to move cautiously away from the pure optimism of his mentor. ■ V oltaire, The Portable Voltaire, Ben R. Redman, ed. Haydn Mason, Candide: Optimism Destroyed. 1. Aside from driving the narrative forward, why does V oltaire have Candide and Cacambo leave Eldorado? Is there something in Candide’s nature in particular, or in mankind’s nature in general, that would cause him to leave paradise? 2. If men are not born evil, then why is there more bad than good in the world as presented by V oltaire? Is there a difference between a penchant for evil and a penchant for choosing evil? According to V oltaire, are we born with any other proclivities besides choice? Questions to Consider Supplementary Reading Essential Reading

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  All my love was in it, and the reason for my journey. I suspect, though I certainly cannot prove it, that every life moves full circle-toward revelation: You begin to sec, and even rejoice to sec, what you always saw. You can even tell anguish to sit down, and shut up, you're busy right now and anguish, as you should certainly know by now, ain't to go nowhere. It might go around the corner, on a particularly EVERY GOOD-BYE AIN ' T GONE 77 9 bright day, and there are those days: but anguish has your number, knows, to paraphrase the song, where you live. It's a difficult relationship, but mysteriously indispensable. It teaches you. So. I could talk about the European panic, which takes so monotonous a f(>rm: but what is happening in Europe, now, to blacks, and to other, unprecedented niggers, has been hap pening for a very long time. Once I began to recover fr om my delirium, it was the first thing in Europe that I clearly saw: so it would be dishonest to pretend that this crisis, a global crisis, has anything to do with my motives or my movement now. I will say that my baby sister is a grown, married woman now, with an exceedingly swift and cunning son who has not the faintest intention of allowing me to t(>rget that I'm his uncle: so, for me, for all of us, I believe, that dreadful day in November of ' 48 is redeemed. Neither do I want anyone to suppose that I think that the gem of the ocean has kept any of its promises, but my ances tors counseled me to keep the faith: and I promised, I vowed, that I would. If I am a part of the American house, and I am, it is because my ancestors paid-striPing to make it m;• home so unimaginable a price: and I have seen some of the effects of that passion everywhere I have been, all over this world. That music is everywhere, resounds, resounds: and tells me that now is the moment, for me, to return to the eye of the hurricane. Nell' Ym · k, December 19, 1977 If Black English Isn)t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is ? S T. PAUL DE VENCE, France-The argument concerning the usc, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It would soon be thirty years. He was always upbeat and encouraging when I met with him, but I was increasingly desperate to find a way to get his case overturned. I was encouraged by the fact that nationwide the rate of mass incarceration had finally slowed. For the first time in close to forty years, the country’s prison population did not increase in 2011. In 2012, the United States saw the first decline in its prison population in decades. I spent a lot of time in California that year supporting ballot initiatives and was encouraged that voters decided, by a huge margin, to end the state’s “three strikes” law that imposed mandatory sentences on nonviolent offenders. The initiative won majority support in every county in the state. California voters also came very close to banning the death penalty; the ballot initiative lost by only a couple of percentage points. Almost banning the death penalty through a popular referendum in an American state would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. We were able to finally launch the race and poverty initiative I’d long been hoping to start at EJI. For years I’d wanted to implement a project to change the way we talk about racial history and contextualize contemporary race issues. We published a racial history calendar for 2013 and 2014. We started working with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South. We brought hundreds of high school students to our office for supplemental education and discussion about rights and justice. Also, we worked on reports and materials that seek to deepen the national conversation about the legacy of slavery and lynching and our nation’s history of racial injustice. I found the new race and poverty work extremely energizing. It closely connected to our work on criminal justice issues; I believe that so much of our worst thinking about justice is steeped in the myths of racial difference that still plague us. I believe that there are four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice but remain poorly understood. The first, of course, is slavery. This was followed by the reign of terror that shaped the lives of people of color following the collapse of Reconstruction until World War II. Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the 9/11 attacks. An older African American man once said to me, “You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Certainly a bell is tolling now for all that the Western peoples imagined would last forever. This electoral contest, taking place in an arena which is, presently, at the very center of the troubled world, seems to have in vested the black vote with a power, and exhibits toward it a respect, which the black vote has never, in the memory of the living, had before. This has not happened bcf(>rc now for the very simple reason that, until now, Americans were able to prevent it trom happening. They cannot prevent it now simply because-they cannot; it is not because the Americans have seen a great light. They need the moral authority oftheir for mer slaves, who arc the only people in the world who know anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only peo ple in the world who really care anything about them. In any event, and no matter how diversely, and with what contradictions, the black vote is cast in the 2 4 years left of this century's lite, the impact of the visible, overt, black presence on the political machinery of this country alters, forever, the \\'eight and the meaning of the black presence in the world. 7 62 HOW ONE BLACK MAN ... This means that the black people of this country bear a mighty responsibility-which, odd as it may sound, is nothing new and face an immediate future as devastating, though in a dif ferent way, as the past which has led us here: I am speaking of the beginning of the end of the black diaspora, which means that I am speaking of the beginning of the end of the world as we have suffered it until now. The world of Alex Haley's book begins in Gambia West Africa in 1 750 with the birth of one of his ancestors, Kunta Kinte, born ofOmoro and Binta Kinte, of the Mandinka tribe, and of the Muslim faith. In the re-creation of this time and place, Haley succeeds beautifully where many have fai led. He must have studied and sweated hard to achieve such ease and grace, for he would appear to have been born in his ancestral village and to be personally acquainted with everybody there. The public ceremonies of this people are revealed as a precise and coherent mirror of their private and yet connected imag inations. And these ceremonies, imaginations, however re moved in time, are yet, for a black man anyway, naggingly familiar and present. I say, for a black man, but these cere monies, these imaginations are really universal, finally inescap ably as old and deep as the human race. The tragedy of the people doomed to think of themselves as white lies in their denial of these origins: they become incoherent because they can never stammer fr om whence they came. There exists, in West African life, what I have heard de scribed as the "eight day" ceremony.

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

  They knew that having children would alter their lives. They were aware that the road ahead would be sometimes rocky and sometimes smooth. They didn’t expect or even want serenity or perfection. They did expect that their relationship with each other would influence them as individuals. Finally, they were open to change from the day they embarked on marriage. Gary surprised me when he explained that one of the many things that attracted him to Sara is that she’s from a very close-knit family. I didn’t expect that people would give a hoot about the marital status of the parents of the person they fall in love with. I was wrong. A number of people from intact families said that they took a good look at prospective in-laws before getting too involved. Some claimed that they could always tell on a date if their partner came from a divorced family—the women were edgy and too eager to please, the men confided their history too quickly. I doubt that this perception affects the numbers of people willing to marry children of divorce, and I don’t know of any engagements broken because of it. Nevertheless, many young people admitted that the pedigree of coming from a happy intact family is reassuring. They boasted, “My husband comes from a large family with no divorce. He’s got no demons.” Their attitudes reflect the general anxiety in our society about the fragility of marriage and the fear that children of divorce may have less of a commitment to marriage. I was impressed with the self-confidence of so many of those raised in harmonious intact families. Despite the high incidence of divorce among their friends and schoolmates, they said that they never doubted they’d marry a good person and have a stable life with children. This was not true of the adults like Gary who were raised in troubled marriages that stayed together. They came to marriage with serious concerns that they would repeat their parents’ behavior along with a firm resolve to keep that from happening. Despite their passionate hope for a good marriage, children of divorce came with a much higher expectation of failure and only a sketchy sense of how one goes about protecting the relationship. In contrast, like the other adults who did not want to emulate their parents’ marriage, Gary had a clear agenda. One of the lessons he drew from watching his parents was that he wanted to have better communication in his own marriage. “That wasn’t hard,” he quipped, “because my parents hardly talked except about us kids. Communication isn’t talking baseball or even children. It’s solving problems.