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.

Page 47 of 216 · 20 per page

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

  Standing before the judge, waiting for sentencing, he silently concluded that his parents had joined together to help him. Despite their conflicts with each other, they had not—as he fervently believed—forgotten him. Most of all, he concluded that despite what he had felt for years, his father really loved him. At that critical moment, he resolved to turn his life around. There are many other stories. Children who had been drinking or taking drugs since age eleven quit by their early or mid-twenties, sometimes before. A whole group who had witnessed violence and been either victims or perpetrators of more violence during their adolescence fell into this category of turnabouts. They were able to transform their lives when they reached a particular crossroads, without direct intervention from therapy or family. All were in their twenties or early thirties when the transformation unfolded, which may not be a coincidence. Many people this age seem able to mobilize large reserves of physical and psychic energy to implement the change. Although it takes them longer to grow into adulthood, they often do so with spurts of self-determination. Think how hard Larry worked for at least six years to establish his new life and how much effort Karen expended in her twenties in entirely revising her career, her relationships with her family, and the relationship in her marriage. As children and teenagers, Larry and the others did not stand out as being resilient or special in any regard. It may be in fact that these very impressive changes for the better are made possible by the divorce, which provides a window of escape. But the young person must have the will and strength to climb through this window, something I’ll say more about later. As I left Larry that day in the restaurant, I realized with awe that I was witnessing a transformation in almost every aspect of this young man’s personality. But I left him still wondering what lay ahead in his relationships with women; he had not yet seriously addressed this part of his life. No End in Sight C AROL’S STORY IS instructive because it shows what happens to children from chaotic families when there is no turnaround. The children live in turmoil whether or not their parents get divorced. Without some intervention—help from a parent who recovers, a sudden self-realization that life could be better, or anything else that prevents a young adult from following in the shoes of their self-destructive parents—the entry into adulthood is fraught with problems. After graduating with a B.A. in psychology when she was twenty-five, Carol spent a couple of years working in mental health settings but found herself unsuited for the work. A job at a shelter for abused women and their children overwhelmed her with sad memories. A friend got her a job in retail, selling a line of popular cosmetics. Here, Carol’s flair for organization and her people-pleasing skills shone.

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

  But I don’t want to give the impression that these marriages cannot work or are doomed to end in divorce. In our society, with its growing number of children from divorce, these marriages will inevitably multiply. That said, some good marriages I have seen are between children from divorced families. Many of these marriages work for the very reason that each spouse is aware of the difficulties they face and resolve to help each other grow and change. They understand each other’s history and are profoundly sympathetic to the other’s fears of conflict and expectation that the marriage might fail. Such marriages provide a healing experience and restore each person’s faith that they can find love and constancy in a troubled world. Karen’s ability to hope and trust is restored by her marriage to a loving man who wants to undo her childhood deprivations by teaching her to lighten up. Larry learns to forgive himself for his earlier behavior by marrying a woman who, in his words, “brought love and laughter into my life.” Their union rescues him from lifelong brooding and anger. Promiscuous women who meet and marry men who say “Stop it. I’m here and I’m planning to stay” are rescued from continuing infidelity. All of these marriages require enormous patience, a shared understanding of how easily children of divorce become discouraged, and knowing how important it is to stick it out despite the impulse to run. In my own research on good marriages, I became convinced that a good marriage more than any other adult relationship has a healing potential and the capacity to turn one or two tragic lives around.3

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I had Pell Grants and government-subsidized low-interest student loans that made college affordable, and need-based scholarships for law school. I never went hungry, thanks at least in part to the old-age benefits that Mamaw generously shared with me. These programs are far from perfect, but to the degree that I nearly succumbed to my worst decisions (and I came quite close), the fault lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control. Recently, I sat down with a group of teachers from my alma mater, Middletown High. All of them expressed the worry, in one form or another, that society devoted too many resources too late in the game. “It’s like our politicians think college is the only way,” one teacher told me. “For many, it’s great. But a lot of our kids have no realistic shot of getting a college degree.” Another said: “The violence and the fighting, it’s all they’ve seen from a very young age. One of my students lost her baby like she’d lost her car keys—had no idea where it went. Two weeks later, her child turned up in New York City with the father, a drug dealer, and some of his family.” Short of a miracle, we all know what kind of life awaits that poor baby. Yet there’s precious little to support her now, when an intervention might help. So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home. For example, we’d recognize that Section 8 vouchers ought to be administered in a way that doesn’t segregate the poor into little enclaves. As Brian Campbell, another Middletown teacher, told me, “When you have a large base of Section 8 parents and kids supported by fewer middle-class taxpayers, it’s an upside-down triangle. There’re fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can’t lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.” On the other hand, he said, “put the lower-income kids with those who have a different lifestyle model, and the lower-income kids start to rise up.” Yet when Middletown recently tried to limit the number of Section 8 vouchers offered within certain neighborhoods, the federal government balked. Better, I suppose, to keep those kids cut off from the middle class. Government policy may be powerless to resolve other problems in our community. As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and, later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were “sissies” or “faggots.” I don’t know where I got this feeling. Certainly not from Mamaw, who demanded good grades, nor from Papaw. But it was there, and studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The idea for this book and the first writing of it, in whole or in part, and in various forms, date from the period between 1924 and 1929, between my twentieth and twenty-fifth year. All those manuscripts were destroyed, deservedly. In turning the pages of a volume of Flaubert's correspondence much read and heavily underscored by me about the year 1927 I came again upon this admirable sentence: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone." A great part of my life was going to be spent in trying to define, and then to portray, that man existing alone and yet closely bound with all being. I resumed work on the book in 1934; after prolonged research some fifteen pages were written which seemed to me final in form. Then the project was abandoned, only to be taken up again several times between 1934 and 1937. There was a long period in which I thought of the work in the form of a series of dialogues, where all the voices of those times would be heard. But whatever I did, the details seemed to take undue precedence; the parts threatened the balance of the whole; Hadrian's voice was drowned out by all the others. I was not succeeding in my attempt to reconstruct that world as seen and heard by one man. From the version of 1934 only one sentence has been retained: "I begin to discern the profile of my death." Like a painter who has chosen a landscape, but who constantly shifts his easel now right, now left, I had at last found a point from which to view the book. Take a life that is known and completed, recorded and fixed by History (as much as lives ever can be fixed), so that its entire course may be seen at a single glance; more important still, choose the moment when the man who lived that existence weighs and examines it, and is, for the briefest span, capable of judging it. Try to manage so that he stands before his own life in much the same position as we stand when we look at it. Mornings spent at the Villa Adriana; innumerable evenings passed in small caf�s around the Olympieion; the constant back and forth over Greek seas; roads of Asia Minor. In order to make full use of these memories of mine they had first to recede as far from me as is the Second Century. Experiments with time: eighteen days, eighteen months, eighteen years, or eighteen centuries.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I was finally a college graduate, and I knew that I’d soon accomplish another dream—going to law school. I worked odd jobs to save money and grew closer to my aunt’s two daughters. Every day I’d get home from work, dusty and sweaty from manual labor, and sit at the dinner table to hear my teenage cousins talk about their days at school and trials with friends. Sometimes I’d help with homework. On Fridays during Lent, I helped with the fish fries at the local Catholic church. That feeling I had in college—that I had survived decades of chaos and heartbreak and finally come out on the other side—deepened. The incredible optimism I felt about my own life contrasted starkly with the pessimism of so many of my neighbors. Years of decline in the blue-collar economy manifested themselves in the material prospects of Middletown’s residents. The Great Recession, and the not-great recovery that followed, had hastened Middletown’s downward trajectory. But there was something almost spiritual about the cynicism of the community at large, something that went much deeper than a short-term recession. As a culture, we had no heroes. Certainly not any politician—Barack Obama was then the most admired man in America (and likely still is), but even when the country was enraptured by his rise, most Middletonians viewed him suspiciously. George W. Bush had few fans in 2008. Many loved Bill Clinton, but many more saw him as the symbol of American moral decay, and Ronald Reagan was long dead. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbors could even name a high-ranking military officer. The space program, long a source of pride, had gone the way of the dodo, and with it the celebrity astronauts. Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society. We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream—a steady wage. To understand the significance of this cultural detachment, you must appreciate that much of my family’s, my neighborhood’s, and my community’s identity derives from our love of country. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Breathitt County’s mayor, its health care services, or its famous residents. But I do know this: “Bloody Breathitt” allegedly earned its name because the county filled its World War I draft quota entirely with volunteers—the only county in the entire United States to do so. Nearly a century later, and that’s the factoid about Breathitt that I remember best: It’s the truth that everyone around me ensured I knew. I once interviewed Mamaw for a class project about World War II. After seventy years filled with marriage, children, grandchildren, death, poverty, and triumph, the thing about which Mamaw was unquestionably the proudest and most excited was that she and her family did their part during World War II.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the same way, too, the spirit comes alongside and helps us in our weakness. We don’t know what to pray for as we ought to; but that same spirit pleads on our behalf, with groanings too deep for words. And the Searcher of Hearts knows what the spirit is thinking, because the spirit pleads for God’s people according to God’s will. (8:26–27) We should not forget, as we contemplate the depth of pain in this passage, that ten verses later Paul is declaring, in a shout of praise, that the Messiah’s people are “completely victorious.” As in the Psalms themselves, these things belong together. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Romans 8:26–27 is the passage that supplies a vital clue to the otherwise shocking question of how Jesus, the living embodiment of Israel’s God, could cry out, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” Here we have the Holy Spirit, who in Romans 8 is clearly the powerful presence of Israel’s God himself, groaning inarticulately from the heart of creation. And the Father—the Searcher of Hearts—is listening. This is the extraordinary “conversation” in which the suffering church is caught up. And because it was always the will of the Creator to work in his world through human beings, this human role of intercession—of patient, puzzled, agonized, labor-pain intercession—becomes one of the key focal points in the divine plan, not just to put into effect this or that smaller goal, but to rescue the whole creation from its slavery to corruption, to bring about the new creation at last. Paul has a great deal to say about suffering elsewhere in his writings, but I think this passage goes to the heart of it all. It clarifies for us the way the revolution of the cross is worked out in the present time. Suffering was the means of the victory. Suffering is also the means of its implementation.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Answer: Because the perversion of human rule is just that, a perversion. We ought not to let the perversion rob us of the good news; and the good news is not only that God is sorting out the world, but that his rule is a different kind of rule entirely from those that give monarchs a bad name. Prophetic passages such as Isaiah 11 and psalms such as Psalm 72 demonstrate that when God is faced with the corruption of monarchy, he promises not to abolish monarchy, but to send a true king to rule with utter justice, making the poor and needy his constant priority. The human vocation to share that role, that task, is framed within the true justice and mercy of God himself. So too with “priesthood.” This word makes many people think of corrupt hierarchies, organizing “religion” for their own purposes and threatening dire, and indeed “divine,” punishments for any who step out of line. Again, the abuse does not invalidate the proper use. The notion of priesthood, admittedly now often exposed as a cloak for selfish wrongdoing, is another vital part of being human. We humans are called to stand at the intersection of heaven and earth, holding together in our hearts, our praises, and our urgent intercessions the loving wisdom of the creator God and the terrible torments of his battered world. The Bible knows perfectly well that this priestly vocation can be corrupted and often has been. But once more it proposes not abolition, but full and complete cleansing. The Coming One “will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to YHWH in righteousness” (Mal. 3:3). This ancient Jewish promise points ahead to the ultimate “priesthood” of Jesus himself. We should not be surprised, then, that horrible abuses have spoiled our sense of both the royal and the priestly vocations. That is what we should expect. The remarkable thing is that the Creator, having made the world to work in this way—with humans functioning like the “image” in a temple, standing between heaven and earth and acting on behalf of each in relation to the other—has not abandoned the project. Yes, it gets distorted again and again. But it remains the way the world was supposed to work—and the way in which, through the gospel, it will work once more. The powers that have stolen the worshipping hearts of the world and that have in consequence usurped the human rule over the world would like nothing better than for humans to think only of escaping the world rather than taking back their priestly and royal vocations. Communities of Reconciled Worshippers

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Everything written about me in the law of Moses, and in the prophets and the Psalms, had to be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Bible. “This is what is written,” he said. “The Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and in his name repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, must be announced to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are the witnesses for all this. Now look: I’m sending upon you what my father has promised. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” (24:44–49) “Forgiveness of sins,” in other words, is to be seen both as the summary of the redemptive blessings promised to Israel and as the key blessing that will enable non-Jews to be welcomed into the one family. As Deuteronomy 30, Jeremiah 31, Daniel 9, and many other passages had indicated, “forgiveness of sins” was the key thing that Israel needed for the long years of desolation to be over at last. And if the non-Jewish nations were to escape from their slavery to idolatry and all that went with it, “forgiveness of sins” would summarize what it meant for them to leave that past behind—for, in the words of the Psalm, the “princes of the people” to “gather as the people of the God of Abraham” (47:9). This would become one of the main foundations of Paul’s argument for the equal status, in the Messiah’s family, of believing Gentiles alongside believing Jews. The latter, turning back as Deuteronomy had indicated to their true God, were experiencing through the Messiah’s death and resurrection the “forgiveness of sins” in the ancient biblical sense of the long-awaited covenant renewal and “end of exile.” The former, turning from their idols to serve the living God, were experiencing the “forgiveness of sins” through the divine amnesty that all along had been aimed at their full inclusion. It is noticeable how, in the early preaching reported in the book of Acts, this notion of “forgiveness of sins” is highlighted as the key thing that will result from believing the good news about Jesus. Peter urged the crowds on the day of Pentecost: “Turn back [“Return,” in other words, “Repent,” as in Deut. 30:2]! Be baptized . . . in the name of Jesus the Messiah, so that your sins can be forgiven and you will receive the gift of the holy spirit” (2:38). John’s baptism had been aimed at the same things, repentance and the “forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  By six o’clock on the evening of the first Good Friday, the world had changed. A revolution had begun. The first sign of the difference came on the third day, when Jesus was raised from the dead. Without that, his followers would have concluded with shame and sorrow that he was just another failed Messiah. But his resurrection was not simply a surprise happy ending to the story. It was, and was bound to be seen as, a glorious beginning. It meant that the darkest and strongest power in the world, the power of death itself, had been defeated. If that was true, then a new power, a different sort of power from all others, had been unleashed into the world. How had this happened? As the early Christians looked back with Easter eyes at Jesus’s kingdom-launching public career and his bizarrely “royal” death (with “King of the Jews” above his head), they soon reached the conclusion that his death itself had been the ultimate victory. That is what we have been exploring in this book. But that victory seemed to have been won not at the very end of the “present age,” but right in the middle of it, with suffering and wickedness still rampant all around. This could only mean that the victory was coming in two stages. Jesus’s followers themselves were to be given a new kind of task. The Great Jailer had been overpowered; now someone had to go and unlock the prison doors. Forgiveness of sins had been accomplished, robbing the idols of their power; someone had to go and announce the amnesty to “sinners” far and wide. And this had to be done by means of the new sort of power: the cross-resurrection-Spirit kind of power. The power of suffering love. It was quite a struggle for the first Christians to learn what that meant: to work for the kingdom of God in a world that neither wanted nor expected any such thing. It is that work, the work we sometimes call “mission,” that we must now consider. If Jesus’s death really did launch a revolution, what does it look like, and how do we join in? Here we run into a problem. I have been arguing in this book against one particular way of looking at the cross of Jesus. Millions of Christians in many parts of the world still think the cross means “Jesus died for my sins so that I can go to heaven.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  For many protestant Christians in Europe and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the mood was one of optimism. New things were happening, and the gospel was going forward, changing lives and communities. As Europeans traveled the globe, they had a sense of spreading what they saw as Christian civilization in areas previously unknown. This, they believed, was how the kingdom of God would indeed come on earth as in heaven. This was one outflowing of the solidly this-worldly focus of some Reformation theology. It led to what has been called the “Puritan hope”: the vision that the kingdoms of the world would become the kingdom of God, as it says in Revelation 11:15. When Georg Frideric Handel set scripture passages to music in his oratorio Messiah, this text from Revelation was used in his “Hallelujah Chorus,” a powerful celebration of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. But my point is not just this chorus itself. What matters even more is where the chorus comes in the work as a whole. The selection and arrangement of texts were not random. The oratorio divides into three parts: first, the hope for the Messiah, and his birth and public career; second, his death and resurrection and the worldwide preaching of the gospel; third, the resurrection of the dead and the joy of the new creation. The “Hallelujah Chorus” celebrates the fact that the true God now reigns over the whole world, so that their kingdoms have become his; and it is placed not at the end of the third and final part, but at the end of the second part. This reflects closely the view of mission held by many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the first performance of Messiah was in 1742). First would come the worldwide kingdom, achieved through the preaching of the gospel; then, and only then, the final resurrection. The aim of “mission” was therefore then to bring the nations into submission to God the Creator and to his Son, Jesus the Messiah. That is, after all, what Psalm 2 had indicated as the divine purpose. And Psalm 2, speaking of the dramatic divine victory over all enemies, was the text set immediately before the “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was quite clear what view of “mission” was being advocated.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “I’m a coach for very deliberate reasons,” Britton told me. “I did not want to go into mental health care because I don’t believe you assist people in becoming sexually whole or sexually fulfilled as human beings by pathologizing them and by making sex [about] communication disorders or mental health disorders.” She avoids viewing sexual problems through the lens of trauma, a trend she feels is too common in the therapeutic world. (For what it’s worth, I feel it’s not common enough.) While Britton strives to create a safe space for traumatized patients, she finds it much more effective to focus on the present, helping clients “rewrite” their stories to empower and embolden them, rather than dwelling on the same traumatic events. “Of course, there are different ways of being a therapist and doing mental health care, but coaching is so much about the here and now, and moving to where you want to get to. And it’s so dynamic and collaborative and interactive.” Even though interest in sex coaching and therapies has surged in recent years, the sexual wellness industry at large remains relatively taboo. Seeking sex therapy is doubly stigmatized for being therapy and sex-related. The pleasure-themed episode of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow featuring Betty Dodson marked a promising cultural shift in the popular representation of sexuality, but the framing was still giggly. Dodson’s decades-old practice is presented as a sort of novel spectacle—which, for many American viewers, it probably is! Naked women sit in a circle and show each other their vulvas before masturbating together. The show’s moments of vulnerability were the most powerful; if we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable about sex, including recognizing when we need help, our pleasure potential would expand. Many women on the show admitted that they’d never looked at their vulvas before, and had seen vulvas (edited, labioplastied, color-corrected) only in porn. The next year, Paltrow debuted a Netflix follow-up series devoted entirely to sex called Sex, Love, and Goop, which recruited sexologists to help real-life couples struggling with their sex lives. We have a long way to go in destigmatizing sex therapy and, frankly, medically accurate sexual information. Pockets of the internet have taken up the cause—sex educators on Instagram post tips and tricks for impact play, pegging, edging, role playing, dirty talking, and other sex acts. While misinformation abounds on social platforms, the sex-therapification of Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram content performs an important role in sharing sex-positive, queer-inclusive information that people are not getting elsewhere. (It should be noted that these social platforms, while doing vital community-building work, remain deeply imperfect: sex workers’ and educators’ accounts are regularly shadow-banned and deleted.) A thirty-two-year-old cis bisexual woman, who I’ll call Anna, told me she never wants to have sex with her boyfriend again. She also said sex therapy was out of the question.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Armco’s people sat on the boards of many of the important local organizations, and it helped to fund the schools. And it employed thousands of Middletonians who, like my grandfather, earned a good wage despite a lack of formal education. Armco earned its reputation through careful design. “Until the 1950s,” writes Chad Berry in his book Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles , “the ‘big four’ employers of the Miami Valley region—Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Champion Paper and Fiber in Hamilton, Armco Steel in Middletown, and National Cash Register in Dayton—had had serene labor relations, partly because they . . . [hired] family and friends of employees who were once migrants themselves. For example, Inland Container, in Middletown, had 220 Kentuckyians on its payroll, 117 of whom were from Wolfe County alone.” While labor relations no doubt had declined by the 1980s, much of the goodwill built by Armco (and similar companies) remained. The other reason most still call it Armco is that Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced. The opposition was mostly a bunch of noise. Even Papaw—who once promised he’d disown his children if they bought a Japanese car—stopped complaining a few days after they announced the merger. “The truth is,” he told me, “that the Japanese are our friends now. If we end up fighting any of those countries, it’ll be the goddamned Chinese.” The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it. Growing up, my friends and I had no clue that the world had changed. Papaw had retired only a few years earlier, owned stock in Armco, and had a lucrative pension. Armco Park remained the nicest, most exclusive recreation spot in town, and access to the private park was a status symbol: It meant that your dad (or grandpa) was a man with a respected job. It never occurred to me that Armco wouldn’t be around forever, funding scholarships, building parks, and throwing free concerts. Still, few of my friends had ambitions to work there. As small children, we had the same dreams that other kids did; we wanted to be astronauts or football players or action heroes. I wanted to be a professional puppy-player-wither, which at the time seemed eminently reasonable. By the sixth grade, we wanted to be veterinarians or doctors or preachers or businessmen. But not steelworkers. Even at Roosevelt Elementary—where, thanks to Middletown geography, most people’s parents lacked a college education—no one wanted to have a blue-collar career and its promise of a respectable middle-class life.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I had a nice job, a recently purchased home, a loving relationship, and a happy life in a city I loved—Cincinnati. Usha and I had returned there for a year after law school for one-year clerkships and had built a home with our two dogs. I was upwardly mobile. I had made it. I had achieved the American Dream. Or at least that’s how it looked to an outsider. But upward mobility is never clean-cut, and the world I left always finds a way to reel me back in. I don’t know the precise chain of events that led me to that hotel, but I knew the stuff that mattered. Mom had begun using again. She’d stolen some family heirlooms from her fifth husband to buy drugs (prescription opiates, I think), and he’d kicked her out of the house in response. They were divorcing, and she had nowhere to go. I’d sworn to myself that I’d never help Mom again, but the person who made that oath to himself had changed. I was exploring, however uneasily, the Christian faith that I’d discarded years earlier. I had learned, for the first time, the extent of Mom’s childhood emotional wounds. And I had realized that those wounds never truly heal, even for me. So when I discovered that Mom was in dire straits, I didn’t mutter insults under my breath and hang up the phone. I offered to help her. I tried to call a Middletown hotel and give them my credit card information. The cost for a week was a hundred and fifty dollars, and I figured that would give us time to come up with a plan. But they wouldn’t accept my card over the phone, so at eleven P.M. on a Tuesday night, I drove from Cincinnati to Middletown (about an hour’s drive each way) to keep Mom from homelessness. The plan I developed seemed relatively simple. I’d give Mom enough money to help her get on her feet. She’d find her own place, save money to get her nursing license back, and go from there. In the meantime, I’d monitor her finances to ensure that she stayed clean and on track financially. It reminded me of the “plans” Mamaw and Papaw used to put together, but I convinced myself that this time things would be different. I’d like to say that helping Mom came easily. That I had made some peace with my past and was able to fix a problem that had plagued me since elementary school. That, armed with sympathy and an understanding of Mom’s childhood, I was able to patiently help Mom deal with her addiction. But dealing with that sleazy motel was hard. And actively managing her finances, as I planned to do, required more patience and time than I had. By the grace of God, I no longer hide from Mom. But I can’t fix everything, either.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I eased on to an elbow and studied his face. I could just make out, under the veined and silvery eyelids, the rapid osculations of the eyes that mean dreaming, or in a waking person the secretive reflex when a wish is glimpsed and then denied. I wondered what townscape he was rambling through and who he fell in with in that luminous world of his own invention, that no one but him would ever see and that he himself would prodigally forget. Chapter 16 Later that week we put the triptych together. Paul was jumpy and hard to please, and when he asked me to do things for him I got in the way. The facilities of the Museum were so cramped, he needed to close the first-floor gallery to assemble his new acquisition, and brusquely dismissed a polite young student who was already in it copying, as well as the woman who came in to do the typing. On the threshold of his fulfilment we all seemed potential obstacles, who needed to be thrust unsentimentally aside. We were waiting for an overnight courier from Munich, bringing the central section, the townscape. I knew these were special art-transport experts, but I couldn't banish the image of a lad on a mud-streaked motorcycle, with the canvas strapped on the back. At the same time the loaned wing from Switzerland was being flown to our little airport, the whole thing being destined to converge in a nerve-racking climax just before lunch. As Helene was abroad on her honeymoon I opted to get out of the way and sat at the front desk, with my chair tipped back against the dim warmth of a radiator. I was reading the text of an article Orst had contributed to The Studio about his childhood summers in the Ardennes. He described the days of preparation, the tremors of anticipation that ran through their well-ordered household as the morning of departure approached. Then it was the train to Brussels, the "stupendous and terrifying impression" of the capital after the empty thoroughfares and grass-grown quays from which they had come; a second train to Namur, and after a long wait, "when it seemed that for all our efforts we might never arrive", on to St Hilaire, where the great towers of the basilica, glimpsed from a distance through the forest as we approached, gave the first assurances that our pilgrimage was ending and that we should shortly be traversing the blessed domain of Givrecourt. On descending from the train we were welcomed by my grandfather's coachman and conveyed to the house in a great black carriage which quite resembled, to the imagination of my sister and me, a stage-coach of the last century, sent to bear us off into the regions of romance. The manor of Givrecourt is a low old house, from the time of Charles V, with tall old trees about it, a mighty bam and stables and a hamlet of ancient cottages.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass, one where family dysfunction, childhood trauma, cultural segregation, and hopelessness coexist with some basic measure of subsistence. Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass. Yet to return to the issue that motivated me to write this book, doing better requires that we acknowledge the role of culture. As the liberal senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” I agree, and my view that there will never be a purely government-based solution to the problems I write about has remained largely unchanged since Hillbilly Elegy came out. That said, I’m hardly a policy skeptic, and I think there is much more our governments could do to address these problems. Better policy requires better politics, however, and like many people, I find new reasons each day to wonder whether our politics are remotely up to the challenge. To the degree I’ve commented on politics in the past five years, I’ve usually argued that my own party has to abandon the dogmas of the 1990s and actually offer something of substance to working- and middle-class Americans. And despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for the “elites” and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base. For so many years, I and a few of my intellectual fellow travelers in the Republican Party were telling politicians to make precisely those sorts of arguments. Yet the populist rhetoric of the campaign hasn’t informed the party’s approach to governing. Unless that changes, I suspect Republicans will pay a heavy political price. Despite a relatively vibrant economy, many of the regional economies in the industrial Midwest continue to struggle, wage growth lags behind productivity growth, and many metrics of broader social problems—opioid overdoses, rising mortality—are going up. The rancor of the 2016 campaign continues to infect our discourse. In short, there are many reasons to worry about the future, though I remain hopeful about it. Part of that stems from the fact that my own life remains remarkably blessed. Understandably, many people wonder what so many of the characters of Hillbilly Elegy are doing. I recently led an effort (along with my partner Steve Case) to bring more investment capital to neglected areas of the country, an effort we hope will spur serious job growth in places like my hometown.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Yes. They’re mostly only glancing—he must have known him at Oxford, and after. There’s no Oxford diary of course. The most interesting one is before Waugh goes to Africa: “Dinner with Alastair, who returns to Cairo on Sunday. We ran over the Abyssinian plan again. Later we were joined by Charlie Nantwich. He was quite drunk, having been at Georgia’s. Georgia says he is having a liaison with a Negro waiter at the Trocadero, and it is not going well. We pretended to know nothing. He passionate about Africa, beauty, grace, nobility etc of Negroes. He gave me copious advice, which I promised to remember. A. very quiet.” ’ ‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Is that all about him?’ ‘That’s the main thing. Quite juicy, isn’t it? Dearest, you must do this. You are going to, aren’t you?’ I rubbed at my legs with the towel. ‘Actually, I’ve just about come to the decision not to.’ ‘Well, I think you’re mad.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Look, he’s obviously selected you specially. You’re meant to do it.’ 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.’

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

  Praise for Just Mercy “[A] searing, moving and infuriating memoir...Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both....Injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. We need to wake up. And that is why we need a Mandela in this country.” —NICHOLAS KRISTOF, The New York Times “Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age....This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: Stevenson’s life’s work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life. You don’t have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court....The book extols not his nobility, but that of the cause, and reads like a call to action for all that remains to be done. The message of this book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful....Bryan Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.” —TED CONOVER, The New York Times Book Review “A riveting, even shocking narrative...Throughout, though, Stevenson lingers on small moments of grace, forgiveness, encouragement, and kindness.” —The Boston Globe “Brilliant...The experiences [Stevenson] shares are universal.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Valuable and compelling...ought to be required reading in law school.” —The Seattle Times “There is nobody in America who is doing more of God’s work with less acclaim than Bryan Stevenson....He is taking on the incompetence, inequities, and the simple, confounded clumsiness of an overworked system that grinds up too many people and delivers far too little of what it’s supposed to deliver, both to the people caught up in it, and to the country that takes such unwarranted pride in it.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Sundays were usually happy, though Mom did angrily chide us during one visit because our relationship with Mamaw had grown too close. “I’m your mother, not her,” she told us. I realized that Mom had begun to regret the seeds she’d sown with Lindsay and me. When Mom came home a few months later, she brought a new vocabulary along with her. She regularly recited the Serenity Prayer, a staple of addiction circles in which the faithful ask God for the “serenity to accept the things [they] cannot change.” Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family. Oddly enough, it’s probably both: Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it. Mom was telling herself the truth, but the truth was not setting her free. I didn’t believe in any of the slogans or sentiments, but I did believe she was trying. Addiction treatment seemed to give Mom a sense of purpose, and it gave us something to bond over. I read what I could on her “disease” and even made a habit of attending some of her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which proceeded precisely as you’d expect: a depressing conference room, a dozen or so chairs, and a bunch of strangers sitting in a circle, introducing themselves as “Bob, and I’m an addict.” I thought that if I participated, she might actually get better. At one meeting a man walked in a few minutes late, smelling like a garbage can. His matted hair and dirty clothes evidenced a life on the streets, a truth he confirmed as soon as he opened his mouth. “My kids won’t speak to me; no one will,” he told us. “I scrounge together what money I can and spend it on smack. Tonight I couldn’t find any money or any smack, so I came in here because it looked warm.” The organizer asked if he’d be willing to try giving up the drugs for more than one night, and the man answered with admirable candor: “I could say yes, but honestly, probably not. I’ll probably be back at it tomorrow night.” I never saw that man again. Before he left, someone did ask him where he was from. “Well, I’ve lived here in Hamilton for most of my life. But I was born down in eastern Kentucky, Owsley County.” At the time, I didn’t know enough about Kentucky geography to tell the man that he had been born no more than twenty miles from my grandparents’ childhood home.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was at a bar that was quite crowded, back in the middle of town. I'd had a few drinks, my sense of possibilities was bobbing up again, as well as a feeling of justified delay—I'd only just arrived, there was time for everything. I looked out through my cigarette-smoke and the coppery half-light at various strangers, some chatting, some embracing, others airily alone. It was called the Cassette. I had a presentiment of it in a month or two's time, when these first impressions of brass taps and bottle-glass windows and little varnished compartments would be dulled, and I would take the manners of the two barmen, one taciturn, the other solicitous, for granted. I smiled at my own sense of anticipation, of being poised for change, ready to fall in love, and finding myself in the midst of this ordinary evening in the oddly mock-Tudor surroundings of the city's one gay bar. I thought perhaps I should go and eat somewhere, but I ordered another beer first. They were quick and lightweight—You could have as many as you liked. I stretched and admitted how tired I was. I'd been up at dawn to leave, my mother speechlessly helping, unable to disguise her misery and anxiety as she drove me to the Dover train. I sympathised with her, and felt confirmed in the rightness of what I was doing. It was something I couldn't explain, although explanations were asked for. I had mumbled reluctantly about time running on, and about the job abroad being only temporary; but not about the darker sense of stepping already along the outward edge of youth, and looking back at those who were truly young with unwelcome eagerness and regret. Just in front of me was a boy with thick fair hair and a long rather mouthy face—it must be a local type. I saw that the older man he was with couldn't quite believe his luck and was clinging to it with clumsy determination while it lasted, though the boy himself appeared relaxed by his frequent caresses. I caught the boy's eye from time to time, while he carried on talking as if he couldn't see me. I found myself idly imagining our life together. A middle-aged man in a suit came and stood by me and started talking about his success in business; I was polite, as always, but he could probably tell I thought something wasn't right. He looked around a good deal and wanted seconding in his view of other people here; several times he backed into the pathway of kids who were going to the loo and then turned his apology into a hurried half-embrace. Sex was very firmly at the top of his agenda, but in some obscurely unflattering way he seemed not to regard me as a sexual possibility myself.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  You'll have to ask Paul about it." "It doesn't sound as if he's very likely to tell me." We swung round and looked back over low roofs to the rival towers of St John's and the Cathedral, already silvery and shadowless in flood-lights against the dimming sky. "actually I think it may have been a mistake—or he was arrested and died anyway. He was old and I think extremely ill. It was just before we were liberated," she said with a somehow comically offhand identification with that earlier generation and that deep event: "Paul would have been about eighteen." I thought, if this was the Second World War, what would Luc be doing? I didn't know yet if he was merely a follower, subtly institutionalised by his St Narcissus training, or if his breaking away showed some more decisive and unstable quality, the inexplicable gift of shaping his own life, as he was shaping mine. When Paul took up with the blind old painter, he was a boy, he might have been someone that someone like me might have taught; and he was making a life-decision—no one knew at the time, perhaps it was mildly worrying to his parents who condoned the charitable impulse but regarded the artist in his eccentric villa with superstitious unease. Who could say? But if he hadn't recognised that necessity, well, I wouldn't have been perched on this canal-side railing now. It was an oddly satisfying few minutes, under the great wrecked chestnuts, looking back at the gables and towers and the evening lamps, and seeing how Paul's altruism and Luc's wild truancy fed into the empty vortex of my own life. "I'm quite envious of you working upstairs," Helene said, with a little gasped laugh at her own candour. "I won't always, you know. When you're not there I'm going to be on the front desk, with the Meredith." "Well, we'll see." "It would be nice if we could both be upstairs," I said courteously, masking my new sense of disquiet that I might have taken a job from her and that this little stroll was being used by her to let me know. "You know so much more about it all than me." "Well, I wouldn't be useless. It's not that I really warm to the paintings themselves, just that I seem to have known them all my life. It's Paul's direct connection with them—it makes me a little proprietorial about them in my turn." She stood off a pace or two and we went on, through an archway under a lamp that gave it the look of a convent or a hospital and through a chain of silent courtyards so obliquely linked with dog-leg alleys that in each one it seemed we had gone wrong and had come to the end. "What did you think of Orst's pictures when you were a girl?" I said, quick-marching for a moment to keep up.