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 On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Er . . . Levi – sorry to . . .’ said Tom from Folk Music. ‘I just heard that you were . . . is there . . . like a meeting? I just heard you were trying to organize some kind of . . .’ Tom was cool. Levi disagreed with him in matters of music in every possible way two young men can disagree, but he could also see that Tom was cool in a lot of other ways. Cool about this crazy war, cool about not letting customers stress him out – plus he was easy to be around. ‘Yo, my man Tom – how’s it hanging,’ said Levi and tried to knock fists with Tom, always a mistake. ‘For real – we’re having a meeting. I’m heading there now. This Christmas Day thing is bullshit.’ ‘Good, it’s total bullshit,’ said Tom, pushing his thick blond bangs back off his face. ‘It’s cool that you’re taking . . . you know . . . a stand and everything.’  On Beauty But sometimes Levi found Tom a little too fretfully deferential, like right now – always anxious to award Levi a prize that Levi didn’t even know he was in the running for. It was immediately noticeable that only the white kids had showed up for the meeting. Gloria and Gina, the two Hispanic girls, were absent, as was Jamal, the brother who worked in World Music, and Khaled, a Jordanian, who worked in the music DVD section. It was just Tom, Candy and a short, freckly guy Levi didn’t know too well called Mike Cloughessy who worked in Pop on the third floor. ‘Where is everybody?’ asked Levi. ‘Gina said she was coming but . . .’ explained Candy. ‘She has a supervisor up her ass, following her around, so.’ ‘But she said she was coming?’ Candy shrugged. Then she looked at him hopefully, as did the others. It was the same weird sense he had in his prep school: that unless he spoke no one else would. He was being gifted with an authority, and it was something complex and unspoken to do with being the black guy – deeper than that he could not penetrate. ‘I’m just like, there’s gotta be a line that we don’t cross – where we don’t go. And working on Christmas Day is that line, man. That’s it, right there,’ he said, employing his hands a little more than was natural to him because they seemed to expect it. ‘My point is we got to protest, with action. ’Cos right now, as it stands, anybody who’s working part time who refuses to work Christmas is looking at losing their job. And that’s bullshit – in my opinion.’ ‘But what does that mean . . . protest with action?’ asked Mike. He was jittery, moving a lot when he spoke. Levi wondered what it would be like to be such a small, pink, funny-looking, nervy guy.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The sympathy in his eyes caused me to say, “Yes.” Once I had, I realized that this single lie had made me into a character in a story—just like one of the marionettes. “I want them to—yes.” I felt my face become more beautiful. I hoped the minister would invite me to his house and take care of me, or at least tell my mother how wonderful I was. I hoped the minister would tell his congregation about the wonderful little boy who had visited him one rainy afternoon. “Is there anything I can do? To bring them back together?” I asked. “Probably not. You can pray for them, for both of them to make the best possible decision.” I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn’t. I was small enough, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn’t really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be. This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role—it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I’d look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them. We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lobby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened onto a ballroom.

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

  I kept an eye on Judge Norton to make sure he was still engaged, and he seemed visibly affected by the proceedings. I believed the concerned look on his face revealed confusion about what he was going to do in light of this evidence, and I considered the judge’s newfound confusion and concern to be real progress. All of the witnesses we called during the first day were white, and none had any loyalties to Walter McMillian. It seemed that Judge Norton had not expected that. When Clay Kast acknowledged that the truck the state witnesses described as a “low-rider” wasn’t modified until close to seven months after the crime took place, the judge furiously scribbled notes, the worry lines on his face deepening. When Woodrow Ikner announced that he had been fired for trying to be honest about the evidence against McMillian, the judge seemed shaken. This was the first evidence we presented that suggested that people in law enforcement had been so focused on convicting Walter that they were prepared to ignore or even hide evidence that contradicted their case. After Woodrow Ikner completed his testimony, it was deep into the afternoon. The judge looked at the clock and called it a day. I wanted to keep going, to continue until midnight if necessary, but I realized that that wasn’t going to happen. I walked over to Walter. “We have to stop now?” he asked worriedly. “Yes, but we’ll just pick up and keep going tomorrow morning.” I smiled at him, and I was pleased when he smiled back. Walter looked at me excitedly. “Man, I can’t tell you how I’m feeling right now. All this time I’ve been waiting for the truth and been hearing nothing but lies. Right now feels incredible. I just—” A uniformed deputy walked over and interrupted us. “We need to take him back to the holding cell, you’ll have to talk there.” The middle-aged white officer seemed provoked. I didn’t pay it much attention and told Walter I’d come down later. As people filed out of the courtroom you could see hope growing among Walter’s family. They came up to me and gave me hugs. Walter’s sister Armelia, his wife Minnie, and his nephew Giles were all talking excitedly about the evidence we’d presented. When we got back to the hotel, Michael was pumped up, too. “Chapman should just call you and say he wants to drop the charges against Walter and let him go home.” “Let’s not hold our breath waiting for that call,” I replied. Chapman had seemed troubled as we left the courthouse. I still had some hope that he might turn around on this and even help us, but we definitely couldn’t plan on that. — I arrived at the courthouse early the next morning to visit Walter in his basement cell before the proceedings began.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Using the same ill-fated parchment on which I’d written Helen, I indicted a love poem to Mr. Pouchet. I didn’t sign it and I was careful to disguise my handwriting, to imitate laboriously the long, lean eccentricities of an italic script I traced out of a copybook. His compliance in going to church with me every Sunday and his reluctance to talk to me about his private life (if he had one) had enabled me to fancy he was quite prepared to love me—his compliance and reticence were the soft wax I impressed with the intaglio of my daydreams. In the afternoon, when I knew he’d be with the track team, I flew by his room and pushed the poem under his locked door. Now it was done. Would he read it and search me out after supper, invite me to drive with him into town where we’d sit in a dirty hamburger joint and feed nickels into the miniature jukebox at our table? Would he frown and pretend to be studying the song titles on the movable cards revolving under the smudged glass while he muttered his love for me, almost as though he were angry at me or embarrassed? Or would he really be angry? Would he grab my arm as I came out of the dining hall and sadistically dig his nails into my biceps as he steered me down brick walkways glittery with ice and gritty with cast sand until we reached the deserted gymnasium, where he would unlock door after door, pushing me ahead of him onto a varnished, echoing, suddenly floodlit basketball court and would order me to do hundreds of pushups and jumping jacks in expiation, hours and hours of exercise as punishment and cure? But he never lifted his long-lashed eyes at dinner except to wisecrack with one of his kids and to hand out the pudding. I kept looking at him from my table. He was illegible. Had he, come to think of it, been able to read my fancy writing? Was he so dim he didn’t recognize, in spite of my flimsy precautions, that I was the author of this great love poem? Did he—oh, many questions, one fear: he would hate me. I never found out. He didn’t mention the poem to me. He didn’t invite me to go churching with him the next Sunday, nor did I seek him out. We both attended our fatuous chaplain’s service. “Dearly beloved,” the chaplain said, his eyebrows bouncing roguishly, “let us pray,” and then, since he had no style for seriousness, he became horribly boring. He bowed his head and spoke in a monotone so dull it repelled attention. A rich person’s smell of wet wool and perfume pressed down on us. The dismal leaking of the hushed organ trickled out around us. Sunlight came and went behind a rose window coarsely stenciled in lead, harshly colored with aniline shades, an industrial rose.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Jody slips up and has a one-night stand with her ex. She picks a fight with Lyle’s ultrareligious older sister. The pair break up but in the end they both take a leap of faith—Lyle invites her to play tennis again and Jody lets herself really feel something. “I wish I could be looking back ten years from now so I could know if Lyle will be someone important, someone who’s still there, or someone whom I’ll just remember because he was the first,” she says. “Not the first in one sense, but the first in terms of being all-out in love.” All-out love, for Jody, is far more vulnerable than sex. Even though the novel is explicit about lovemaking, It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me is about a young woman setting her heart free. But for a vocal contingent of readers, all they could see was the body parts. And these body parts, they argued, didn’t belong in school libraries. Chapter Twenty Censorship “I willed myself not to give in to the tears of frustration and disappointment I felt coming.” The temperature was unusually mild the day of January 20, 1981, in Washington, DC. For the first time ever, the inauguration was set to take place on the Capitol’s west front, facing the National Mall and providing more room for spectators. There, the newly elected president of the United States stood to take his oath of office. The onetime governor of California placed his left hand on the Bible and repeated after the then–chief justice of the Supreme Court, a white-haired Warren E. Burger. “I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God,” he said. Reagan then went on to kiss his wife on the cheek—an impeccable Nancy Reagan dressed in a matching red Adolfo dress coat and pillbox hat—and delivered his inaugural address. “As great as our tax burden is, it has not kept up with public spending,” Reagan announced, his folksy, Midwestern rhythms burnished by the years he’d spent as an actor in Hollywood. “For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.” His hair pomade-slick, Reagan was the picture of the elder statesman. “I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves,” he went on, in response to a quoted passage from the Massachusetts physician Joseph Warren, a Founding Father. The faintest smile played at Reagan’s lips during an otherwise somber delivery.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Now the rain washes them, and the wind stirs them, beyond the Realm, hard by the Verde, whither he translated them with tapers quenched. By curse of theirs man is not so lost, that eternal love may not return, so long as hope retaineth aught of green. True is it, that he who dies in contumacy of Holy Church, even though at the last he repent, needs must stay outside this bank thirty fold for all the time that he hath lived in his presumption, if such decree be not shortened by holy prayers. Look now, if thou canst make me glad, by revealing to my good Constance how thou hast seen me, and also this ban: for here, through those yonder, much advancement comes.” 1. evening is the last of the four divisions of the day, from 3 to 6 P.M. (cf. Conv. iii. 6; iv. 23). When it is 3 P.M. in Italy, it is 6 P.M. at Jerusalem and 6 A.M. in Purgatory. 2. This tradition is recorded by Virgil’s biographers, Donatus and Suetonius. The body was transferred by order of Augustus (cf. Canto vii). 3. Be satisfied that it is, without asking the reason why. “Demonstration is two-fold: the one demonstrates by means of the cause, and is called propter quid … the other by means of the effect, and is called the demonstration quia” (Thomas Aquinas).4. Had human reason been capable of penetrating these mysteries, there would have been no need for the revelation of the Word of God.5. Lerici and Turbia are at the eastern and western extremities of Liguria, respectively.6. The mountain was on their right, and the sun on their left.7. This is Manfred (ca. 1231-1266), grandson of the Emperor Henry VI and of his wife Constance (for whom see Par. iii), and natural son of the Emperor Frederick II. Manfred’s wife, Beatrice of Savoy, bore him a daughter who (in 1262) married Peter III of Aragon (for whom and for whose sons see Canto vii; cf. also Par. xix). Manfred became King of Sicily in 1258, usurping the rights of his nephew Conradin. The Popes naturally opposed him, as a Ghibelline, and excommunicated him; and in 1265, Charles of Anjou came to Italy with a large army, on the invitation of Clement IV, and was crowned as counter King of Sicily. On February 26, 1266, Manfred was defeated by Charles at Benevento (some thirty miles north-east of Naples), and slain. He was buried near the battlefield, beneath a huge cairn (each soldier of the army contributing a stone); but his body was disinterred by order of the Pope, and deposited on the banks of the Verde (now the Garigliano, cf. Par. viii), outside the boundaries of the Kingdom of Naples and of the Church States, and with the rites usual at the burial of those who died excommunicated.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The sympathy in his eyes caused me to say, “Yes.” Once I had, I realized that this single lie had made me into a character in a story—just like one of the marionettes. “I want them to—yes.” I felt my face become more beautiful. I hoped the minister would invite me to his house and take care of me, or at least tell my mother how wonderful I was. I hoped the minister would tell his congregation about the wonderful little boy who had visited him one rainy afternoon. “Is there anything I can do? To bring them back together?” I asked. “Probably not. You can pray for them, for both of them to make the best possible decision.” I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn’t. I was small enough, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn’t really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be. This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role—it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I’d look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them. We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lobby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened onto a ballroom.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Now gay life seemed to be less about reflection and private suffering and sublimation and more about ecstasy, pleasure, and the direct expression of erotic desire. AIDS, of course, had plunged the gay male community into a decade of pain, self-doubt, and death, but it had also given the gay community a higher profile and better political organization and had garnered more general acceptance and sympathy from a portion of the straight community. Gays were no longer shadowy deviants or spoiled brats but just another part of the human drama. To the degree that fiction continued to speak to the gay community or at least reflect its concerns, the gay novels of the late eighties and nineties were no longer about coming out but about fighting AIDS. In my stories ( Skinned Alive ) and in my novels (The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man) I moved away from the struggle to accept oneself as gay to the dire reality of AIDS. In this period those prescriptive gay critics were no longer insisting on positive role models but on some carefully positioned presentation of the AIDS crisis. Today the whole category of gay and lesbian fiction seems dated and about to disappear. The bookstores and the literary magazines are disappearing (with the exception of two quality publications valiantly fighting on, the Gay and Lesbian Review and The James White Review) . Gay subject matter has been taken up by the more popular medium of sitcoms. Gay novelists are bridging out into other domains. Allan Gurganus, who published the first gay story ever to appear in The New Yorker in the early 1970s, became best known for his historical novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All . David Leavitt, who became famous in the 1980s for exploring the relationship of a young gay man to his family, an innovation in subject matter that won him a wide audience, has recently moved on to travel writing. Michael Cunningham has become the best known postgay writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours , a novel that echoes Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and mixes a gay man and his lesbian friend in with a larger, heterosexual cast. Of course there are still great gay writers at work, including Alan Hollinghurst, who is one of the two or three best novelists in England and acknowledged as such. Andrew Holleran, who became famous for his late seventies novel Dancer from the Dance , continues to produce superb fiction. David Leavitt has turned himself into a true man of letters. In England Patrick Gale, Adam Mars-Jones, Charlotte Mendelsohn, and Joanna Briscoe are all new stars in the lesbian and gay literary firmament, while older gay writers such as Frances King and Paul Bailey and Jonathan Keates continue to work at the top of their powers. Nor could one say that gay subject matter is exhausted. There are still so many corners of gay experience that have yet to be mapped that the opportunities for writers remain tantalizing.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he spoke he did so with a faint Tidewater accent. Like other upper-class Southerners he had an interest in history and acted as though he were on an intimate footing with the famous dead. The Roman Republic had been discussed over the pumpkin pie and Father Burke had winked at me and said, “You know that Julius Caesar was a terribly attractive man. He made conquests wherever he went, and not just among the ladies.” I dared to hope he meant Caesar had loved men as well, although possibly ladies were being contrasted to sluts. Assuming Burke had meant men, was his wink a way of showing me the Scotts had told him about my homosexual problem and that he was too worldly to be appalled by it? I’d never known this particular shade of Christianity before. I’d met know-nothing Fundamentalists, or at least heard them rave over the radio. Higher up the social ladder came the suburban Presbyterians and Unitarians and Congregationalists who joined a vanilla-pudding sort of earnestness to a complete lack of charity. Fortunately, they had no urge to proselytize, since they maintained their faith as a closed club, a Rotary lodge for well-heeled businessmen. Then I had had my brush with Marilyn’s Catholicism, but it was all rapture and votive candles and tears, something I filed in my imagination next to Puccini arias and the names of expensive perfumes ( Poème d’Extase ). The Scotts, however, were serious people. They cared about the poor. They liked their pleasures. They were well read. And they were spiritually on the make; they wanted me to convert. Father Burke himself was both cerebral and sensuous, unshockable. He had small dark eyes that he would let deliberately cloud over only so that they could suddenly clarify. As I spoke he’d tap his fingertips together and wear a wan smile that said, “I’ve heard this all a hundred times before. Please continue.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  the order of priesthood, very gently and kindly deferred my affection from day to day with comfort of better hope, as parents commonly bridle the desires of their children when they attempt or endeavour any unprofitable thing, saying that the day when any one should be admitted into their order is appointed by the goddess, the priest which should minister the sacrifice is chosen by her provi- dence, and the necessary charge of the ceremonies is allotted by her commandment; all of which things he willed me to attend with marvellous patience : and that I should beware both of too much forwardness, and of stubborn obstinacy, avoiding either danger, that if being called I should delay, or not called I should be hasty. Moreover he said that there was none of his company either of so desperate a mind, or so rash and hardy unto death as to enterprise receiving this mystery without the commandment of the god- dess, whereby he should commit a deadly offence : considering that it was in her power both to damn and to save all persons, and that the taking of such orders was like to a voluntary death and a difficult recovery to health : and if anywhere there were any at the point of death and at the end and limit of theirlife, so that they were capable to receive the dread secrets of the goddess, it was in her power by divine providence to make them as it were new-born and to reduce them to the path of health. Finally he said that I must therefore attend and wait for the celestial precept, although it were evident and plain that the goddess had already vouchsafed to call and appoint me to the happy company of her ministry, and that I must refrain from profane and unlawful meats, as those priests which were already received, to the end I might come more 575 LUCIUS APULEIUS iam nunc temperare, quo rectius ad arcana purissimae religionis secreta pervaderem.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Fifteen minutes later Zora peeled it all off again in the women’s locker room of Wellington’s college pool. This was part of the new Zora Self-Improvement Programme for the fall: wake early, swim,  On Beauty class, light lunch, class, library, home. She crushed her hat into the locker and pulled her bathing-cap down low over her ears. A naked Chinese woman who looked eighteen from the back now turned and surprised Zora with her crumpled face, in which two little obsidian eyes struggled under the pressure of folded skin from above and below. Her pubic hair was very long and straight and grey, like dead grass. Imagine being her , thought Zora vaguely, and the thought puttered along for a few seconds, collapsed, vanished. She pinned her locker key to the black fabric of her own functional costume. She walked the long edge if the pool, her flat feet meeting the ceramics with a wet slap. Up beyond the stadium seating, at the very top of this giant room, a glass wall let the autumn sun in and shot it across the room, like the searchlights in a prison yard. From this superior vantage point, a long line of athletes on tread-mills was looking down on Zora and all the other people not fit enough for the gym. Up there behind glass the ideal people were exercising; down here the misshapen people were floating around, hoping. Twice a week this dynamic changed when the swim team graced the pool with their magnificence, relegating Zora and everyone else to the practice pool to share lanes with infants and senior citizens. Swim-team people launched themselves from the edge, remade their bodies in the image of darts, and then entered the pool like something the water had been waiting for and gratefully accepted. People like Zora sat carefully down on the gritty tiles, gave the water only their feet and then had a debate with their bodies about committing to the next stage. It was not at all unusual for Zora to get undressed, walk the pool, look at the athletes, sit down, put her toes in, get back up, walk the pool, look at the athletes, get dressed and leave the building. But not today. Today was a new beginning. Zora pushed forward an inch and then launched herself; the water rushed up to her neck like a garment she was wearing. She tread water for a minute and then let herself go under. Blowing water out of her nose, she began to swim slowly, indecorously – never quite able to coordinate her arms and legs but still feeling a partial grace that dry land never offered her.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And think it not an injury to be alwayes serviceable towards me, since as by my meane and benefit thou shalt become a man: thou shalt live blessed in this world, thou shalt live glorious by my guide and protection, and when thou descendest to Hell, where thou shalt see me shine in that subterene place, shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and raigning in the deepe profundity of Stix, thou shalt worship me, as one that hath bin favourable to thee, and if I perceive that thou art obedient to my commandement, addict to my religion, and merite my divine grace, know thou, that I will prolong thy dales above the time that the fates have appointed, and the celestial Planets ordeined.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  If they were going to take him, they could take him as he truly was. He pulled out black jeans, dark blue short-sleeved shirt, sandals. Today, supposedly, there would be people from Pomona in the audience, and from Columbia University and from the Courtauld. Smith was excited about all these possibilities, and now Howard did his best to be too. This is the big one , read Smith’s e-mail of this morning, Howard, it’s time for tenure. If Wellington can’t give you that, you move on. This is how it’s supposed to be. See you at ten thirty! Smith was right. Ten years in one place, without tenure, was a long time. His children were grown. They would soon leave. And then the house, if it were to stay as it was, without Kiki, would be intolerable. It was in a university that he must now put all his remaining hope. Universities had been a home for him for over thirty years. He only needed one more: the final, generous institution to take him in his dotage and protect him. Howard pulled a baseball cap on to his head and hurried downstairs, Murdoch struggling behind him. In the kitchen, his children were hooking their various bags and knapsacks round their shoulders. ‘Wait – ’ said Howard, padding his hand around the empty sideboard. ‘Where’re my car keys?’ ‘No idea, Howard,’ said Zora callously. ‘Jerome? Car keys!’ ‘ Calm down .’ ‘I’m not going to calm down – no one’s leaving until I find them.’ In this way, Howard made everybody late. It’s strange how children, even grown children, will accept the instruction of a parent. Obediently they tore up the kitchen hunting for what Howard needed. They looked everywhere likely and then in stupid unlikely places because Howard went ballistic if anyone, for a moment, appeared to have ceased looking. The keys were nowhere. ‘Aw, man, I’m done with this, it’s too hot – I’m out,’ cried Levi, and left the house. A minute later he returned, having found Howard’s car keys in the door of his car. ‘Genius!’ cried Howard. ‘OK, come on, come on, everybody out – alarm on, everyone get keys, come on , people.’  on beauty and being wrong Out on the scorching street, Howard opened the door of his baking car by wrapping the corner of his shirt round his hand. The leather interior was so hot he had to sit on his own bag. ‘I’m not coming,’ said Zora, protecting her eyes from the sun with her hand. ‘Just in case you thought I was. I didn’t want to change my shift.’ Howard smiled charitably at his daughter.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Your genes are not your destiny. Which is why self-care is health care—it’s that important. Even more so when we’re shells of our former selves. Regardless of the DNA blueprint you were born with, you can help determine where your health goes from here. Once I learned about epigenetics, I never looked back. True, cancer was still in my body, but now I had an answer as to what I could do to help. I could create an environment in my body where cancer and other diseases were less likely to thrive and health was more likely to flourish. People often ask me, “What’s one thing I can do to support my health?” My answer is always the same, whether you’re a patient or you hope to never become one: “Tend to your garden.” THE FIVE PILLARS OF WELLNESS In my online community, I teach simple practices to support what I call the Five Pillars of Wellness: the five areas that will have the biggest impact on your well-being—body, mind, and spirit. I’m going to walk you through a condensed version of the pillars to help you jump-start your own self-care practice, but if you want to go deeper, or get coaching from me, go to my website (kriscarr.com) for more details. The Five Pillars are as follows: being mindful of what you’re eating, drinking, and thinking, and how you’re resting and renewing. I designed this holistic approach for one very important purpose—to combat the number one garden killer: inflammation. As you may know, chronic inflammation is like living in a constant state of fight-or-flight in your body. And it’s often triggered by prolonged stress. If you’re overburdened at work or carrying financial or family pressure; if you haven’t been sleeping well for a long period of time; or if you’re struggling to eat well, stay hydrated, and move your body, all of this can contribute to chronic inflammation. (And let’s face it, we’re under no greater stress than when we’re grieving, missing a loved one, or otherwise trying to piece our fractured selves back together. That’s why tending to your garden is extra important.) Whatever the cause, that inflamed condition eventually stresses your system so much that it gets confused and starts attacking its own healthy tissue. The result is a slew of nasty symptoms, including chronic pain, joint stiffness, headaches, fatigue, loss of appetite, fever, and chills. Long term, it also makes us more susceptible to serious disease, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. That’s why caring for the pillars can help you so much right now. Let’s go through some simple ways to do that. Pillar One—What You’re Eating When we’re just trying to survive whatever storm we find ourselves in, it’s easy to skimp on nutrition. Yet the more we shortchange ourselves, the worse we feel, and the tougher it becomes to get through the day and function at the levels a crisis demands.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  This is how I learned that there was a difference between healing and curing. Curing takes place at the physical level. It’s absolutely possible but never guaranteed. Healing, on the other hand, takes place at the spiritual level and is available to all of us—no matter who we are, what we look like, or where we come from. And just like love, healing never ends. In fact, we can be healing and dying at the very same time. The only thing required to enter the healing path is the decision to do so. Nothing and no one can take it away from you—not even your own mortality. While figuring out how to truly accept this paradigm is by no means easy, know that on the other side of this awareness is a greater ease and appreciation for life, as well as a deeper compassion for yourself and others. Accepting my disease freed me up to love my life, again. It allowed me to embrace living as a cancer “thriver”—someone who lives fully with cancer— who coexists with something that isn’t easy or desired but doesn’t define me, either. Identifying as a thriver helped me stop taking care of myself for cancer (or because “I have to”) and start doing it for me. Because I deserve to feel good—and so do you. Now, instead of eating my vegetables or moving my body for cancer, I do healthy things so that I can have more energy and joy for my life. This may seem like a small mental shift, but for me it was epic. Now, I’m not going to lie, some days are more triumphant than others. Healing is never linear. We zig and zag, take two steps forward and one step back. And that’s OK. It’s yet another thing I’m working on accepting. Before Dad got sick, I thought I had a Ph.D. in acceptance, but after his terminal prognosis, the prospect of losing him demanded that I do some postgrad work. No matter how irrational and misplaced my feelings were, the little girl inside me was still terrified of being left. For a while, denial or gin or researching more medical procedures (that didn’t exist) provided an excellent distraction from those feelings. When I finally had to wake up and accept that the only thing left to do was to make Dad feel as comfortable and loved as possible, I didn’t think I could do it. I wanted to keep running. But in actuality, my resistance was keeping me running in the opposite direction of love. ACCEPTING LOSS The hardest thing for any of us to accept is loss, especially when it comes to the death of someone we love or even our own mortality. As we’ve explored, allowing the pain of our losses is how we ultimately start feeling alive again.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I assured him it had in that it had removed me from my dependency on my mother. Paraphrasing Dr. O’Reilly, I added, “But you see, Daddy, I’ve internalized my mother and when I fall in love I merely project her introjected image—” “Love?” I could hear the wires singing between us as they dipped and rose in rhythmic arcs over the cindered sidings of railroad tracks or plunged underground and threaded their way through the entrails of American cities. Instantly I recognized that in such a big, hardworking country and in the vocabulary of such a sober man the word love took on a coy, neurasthenic ring. Women lived for love and talked about it and made their decisions by its guttering, scented light; men (at least a real man like my dad) took the love that came their way gratefully but suffered its absence in silence. Certainly no real man ever discussed love or made a single move to woo it. “Let me put my thoughts on paper,” I said, for by now I’d learned he preferred personal transactions to resemble business invoices. That night during study period, as I sat in my cold room at my desk, my pen flew over page after page as I drew in a portrait of myself as an adolescent desperate for medical attention. Once again I wrote on my special parchment, once again I was petitioning someone. But this time I had more confidence, for I felt I was within my rights. I knew Dr. O’Reilly was my one chance to escape the cage and treadmill of neurosis, to head out, ears up and whiskers twitching, into the enchanting unknown. The dorm master tiptoed past my open door. He was on the lookout for boys breaking rules. Across the hall from me at his own desk a square-jawed German lad—who wrestled for the team, excelled at trig and played records of music he called “easy listening”—was working a slide rule and jotting down figures in his minuscule hand. His glasses blazed when he cocked his head at a certain angle, as though the numerical intelligence projected light rather than drank it in. On the wall above his head was an Eton pennant, placed with mathematical precision at the correct, casual angle, Gustav’s concession to frivolity. The master tiptoed back past my door. In fact, he was cutting up, taking giant, slow-motion steps, his hands raised high as a marionettists’s, his mouth turned down as though he himself were a truant who feared making a floorboard squeak—good for a chuckle. In my letter to my father I used the word homosexuality , thereby breaking a taboo and forcing two responses from him: silence and the money I wanted.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  1. For first three stanzas, cf. Ecloga, i, and the Ecloga responsiva of Johannes del Virgilio, and Gardner, iii.2. fleece; keeping up the metaphor of the lamb and the sheepfold.3. Peter.4. James, of the “Peter, James and John,” referred to in the Gospels, is James son of Zebedee, and is identified with the James said, by tradition, to have preached the Gospel in Spain, whose most celebrated shrine was at Compostela in Galicia. Cf. Vita Nuova, xli. But the James associated with Peter and John as a “pillar” of the Church in Gal. ii. 9. is “James the Lord’s brother” (Gal. i. 19) mentioned in Acts xv. 13 and elsewhere. It is to him, and not to the son of Zebedee that the Epistle of James has usually been assigned. But Dante forgets or ignores the distinction.5. James i. 5.6. i.e., admitted Peter, James and John to more intimate knowledge and familiarity than was extended to the other disciples. Cf. Conv. ii. 1. The occasion specially referred to are the Transfiguration, the raising of the daughter of Jairus, and the agony of Gethsemane.7. The Exodus from Egypt had a manifold significance. Amongst other things it was the symbol of the liberation of the soul from the bondage of the flesh; as the entry into the Promised Land and the City of God was the symbol of the heavenly life. Cf. Purg. ii, Epist. ad Can. Grand., § 7, and the cruder statement in Conv. ii. 1.8. Cf. Cantos xvii and xxiv.9. It is to be noted that the theological virtue of Hope, as understood by the Catholic Church, is not a general hopefulness of disposition, but the specific hope of the bliss of heaven. Dante’s definition is closely copied from Peter Lombard’s “Hope is the certain expectation of future Bliss, coming from the grace of God and from preceding merits.”10. Psalm ix. 10. In the Vulgate, ix. 11, where the reading is sperent = “let them hope.”11. James i. 12. “With his dropping” = “in combination with his (David’s) teaching.”12. Martyrdom and death.13. “Isaiah (lxi. 7,10); in describing the gathering of the redeemed, declares that they shall possess double things, to wit robes, as your brother-apostle John in describing the same scene (Revelation, vii. 9), makes yet clearer. Scripture tells us, then, in symbolical language, that we shall have two robes, and this symbol, in its turn, assures me that we shall have joy of body as well as joy of soul. The content of my hope, then, is the unbroken immortality of the soul and the resurrection to immortality of the body.” (Cf. Canto xiv, note 4.) The fanciful and indirect character of this scriptural support for the belief in the resurrection of the body is the more remarkable when we consider that 1 Cor. xv. would have furnished Dante with a perfectly explicit statement. Thomas Aquinas, as one would expect, makes frequent use of this chapter.14.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  As the pupil who followeth the teacher, eager and glad, in that wherein he is expert, in order that his excellence may be revealed; “Hope,” said I, “is a certain expectation of future glory, the product of divine grace and precedent merit.9 From many stars cometh this light to me; but he first distilled it into my heart who was the supreme singer of the supreme leader. Let them hope in thee,10 in his divine song he saith, who know thy name; and who knoweth it not, having my faith? Thou then didst drop it on me with his dropping, in thine Epistle,11 so that I am full and pour again your shower upon others.” Whilst I was speaking, within the living bosom of that flame trembled a flash sudden and dense like unto lightning. Then breathed forth: “The love whence I am still aflame to-ward that virtue which followed me even to the palm and issuing from the field,12 willeth that I breathe on thee who dost delight thee in her; and further, ’tis my pleasure that thou tell the thing which hope doth promise thee.” And I: “The new and the ancient scriptures set down the symbol, which again doth point me to the thing itself. Of the souls which God hath made his friends Isaiah saith that each one shall be c?ad with double garb in its own land, and its own land is this sweet life. And more worked out by far, doth thy brother, where he treateth of the white robes, set forth this revelation to us.”13 And, close upon the ending of these words, first rang above us, Let them hope in thee, whereunto all the carols answered; then, from amongst themselves, a light flashed out, in fashion such that if the Crab contained a crystal like it winter would have a month of one unbroken day.14 And as doth rise and go her way and enter on the dance a joyous virgin, only to do honour to the bride, and not for any failing,15 so did I see the illumined splendour join the other two, who were wheeling round in such guise as their burning love befitted. There it launched itself into their music and their words; and my Lady held her look upon them just like a bride, silent and unmoving. “This is he who lay upon the breast of our Pelican, and this was he chosen from upon the cross for the great office.”16 My Lady thus; but no more after than before her words moved she her eyes from their fixed intent. As who doth gaze and strain to see the sun eclipsed a space, who by looking grows bereft of sight; so did I to this last flame till a word came: “Wherefore dost dazzle thee to see that which hath here no place? Earth in the earth my body is, and there it shall be, with the rest, until our number equalleth the eternal purpose.17

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  That was the winter I began to write in earnest. I began to write as if it were my only hope for survival, for escape. I had always written, after a fashion. I had always worshipped authors. I used to kiss their pictures on the backs of books when I finished reading. I regarded anything printed as a holy relic and authors as creatures of superhuman knowledge and wit. Pearl Buck, Tolstoy, or Carolyn Keene, the author of Nancy Drew. I made none of the snotty divisions you learn to make later. I could happily go from Through the Looking Glass to a horror comic, from Great Expectations or The Secret Garden to Mad Magazine. Growing up in my chaotic household, I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, “the absentminded professor.” They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe. Bennett’s grandfather—that courageous old man who came from China at the age of twenty, who was converted to Christianity by a missionary who promised to teach him English (and never did), who preached the gospel to Chinese laborers in mining camps of the Northwest, who finally ended his days keeping a gift shop on Pell Street—and never in all his 99 or 100 years learned to speak more than a few words of intelligible English, much less write it—launched me on my career as a writer by dying. Sometimes death is the beginning of things. While Bennett mourned in silence through the long winter, I wrote. I threw out all my college poems, even the ones that had been published. I threw out all my false starts at stories and novels. I wanted to make myself anew, to make a new life for myself by writing. I immersed myself in the work of other writers. I used to send for books from Foyle’s in London or ask my friends or parents to send them from New York. I would study one contemporary poet or novelist at a time, reading and rereading their books, studying how they had changed from book to book, imitating a different author’s style every few months. The whole time I was terrified and regarded myself as a failure. Once, when I was eighteen or so and thought of thirty as old age, I had promised to kill myself if I hadn’t published my first book by the age of twenty-five. And here I was already twenty-five! And just beginning.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Charlie’s father, however, did amputate half his nose (with the result that he wound up looking like a Jew with an absurdly small nose). But the main thing was that the Feldsteins left Brooklyn and turned up in the Beresford (that gilded ghetto, that pseudocastle) on Central Park West. The family business was a worldwide chain of dancing schools which sold life memberships to lonely old people. It wasn’t exactly a racket any more than psychoanalysis or religion or encounter groups or Rosicrucianism can be said to be rackets, but, like them, it also promised an end to loneliness, powerlessness, and pain, and of course it disappointed many people. Charlie had worked in the dance-studio business for a few summers during college, but this was only a token gesture. He hated any kind of everyday job—even if it consisted of gliding across the dance floor with an eighty-year-old lady who had just become a life member to the tune of several thousand dollars. When I knew him, Charlie was very sensitive on the subject of ballroom dancing. He did not want it generally known that this was what his father did for a living. Nevertheless, he dropped his famous uncle’s name frequently among his friends and mine. Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own. But what did Charlie do? He prepared himself for greatness. He daydreamed about his conducting debut—which otherwise he did nothing much to hasten—and he began symphonies. They were—every one of them—unfinished symphonies. He also began sonatas and operas (based on works by Kafka or Beckett). These were unfinished bars (but which he always promised to dedicate to me). Perhaps to others he was a failure, but to himself he was a romantic figure. He spoke of “silence, exile, and cunning.” (Silence: the unfinished symphonies. Exile: he had left the Beresford for the East Village. Cunning: his affair with me.) He was going through the initial trials of all great artists. As a conductor, he had not yet had his break and was further handicapped, he thought, by the fact of not being a homosexual. As a composer, it was a question of learning to cope with the crisis of style which bedeviled the age. That too would come in time. One had to think in decades, not years. Dreaming at the piano bench or over a plate of cherry blintzes in Ratner’s, Charlie thought of himself as he would be when he finally made it—graying at the temples, suave, and eccentrically dressed. After conducting his own new opera at the Met, he would not be above running down to the Half Note for a jam session with aspiring jazz musicians.