Loneliness

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 21 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Lily would stop to examine plants or insects, her brow taut and puzzled. She’d pick up a lot of things to hold in her pockets, especially chestnuts. She would pick up a chestnut and hold it in her hand for the whole walk, stroking it with her fingers, or meditatively rubbing it across her lower lip. Other times they’d just sit at the kitchen table and drink tea. Virginia was astonished at the things she told Lily during these afternoons. Lily knew things about Virginia that very few other people knew. Virginia did not know why she confided in her. She had been lonely. The afternoon kitchen was sunny and lulling. Lily listened intently. She asked questions. She asked a lot of questions about Magdalen. “But don’t you like Magdalen?” she asked once. “Weren’t there good times when she was growing up?” “Magdalen could be the most lovely, charming child in the world—if she wanted to be. She’d give you the shirt off her back—if she was in the mood. If she was in the mood. But to answer your question, no, I don’t like Magdalen. I love her—I love her dearly—because I’m her mother and I can’t help it. But I don’t like her.” Lily stared at her, pale and troubled. “Don’t you ever repeat that. It’s very private. If Magdalen ever comes to me and says, ‘Mama, Lily says you don’t like me,’ I’ll say you’re lying.” As they talked, Lily rested her elbow on a small pile of schoolbooks. She carried these books to and from school every day. One of them had a split green cover that showed its gray cardboard stuffing and a dirty strip of masking tape running up its broken spine. Whenever Lily heard Jarold pull into the driveway, she would grab her books and leave the room. Jarold would come in and see her cup on the table, its faint sugary crust fresh around the bottom. He’d never say anything, but his mouth got sarcastic. Virginia tried to get Jarold to be nicer to Lily. “She’s got a special kind of charm,” she said. “She’s gentle and low-key. She listens, and she has fresh insights.” Sometimes Jarold looked as though he were listening to this. But Lily wouldn’t or couldn’t show Jarold her charm. To him, she displayed only her most annoying aspects. And they really were annoying. She almost never said anything at family meals; she either kept her head down and chewed, or stared at people. She ignored Jarold, and sometimes she ignored Virginia too. She was judgmental; she was always talking about what was wrong with the world. She never helped with the dishes or anything else.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I didn’t make any friends in Highlands North for the longest time. I had an easier time making friends in Eden Park, to be honest. In the suburbs, everyone lived behind walls. The white neighborhoods of Johannesburg were built on white fear—fear of black crime, fear of black uprisings and reprisals—and as a result virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, and on top of that wall is electric wire. Everyone lives in a plush, fancy maximum-security prison. There is no sitting on the front porch, no saying hi to the neighbors, no kids running back and forth between houses. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood for hours without seeing a single kid. I’d hear them, though. They were all meeting up behind brick walls for playdates I wasn’t invited to. I’d hear people laughing and playing and I’d get off my bike and creep up and peek over the wall and see a bunch of white kids splashing around in someone’s swimming pool. I was like a Peeping Tom, but for friendship. It was only after a year or so that I figured out the key to making black friends in the suburbs: the children of domestics. Many domestic workers in South Africa, when they get pregnant they get fired. Or, if they’re lucky, the family they work for lets them stay on and they can have the baby, but then the baby goes to live with relatives in the homelands. Then the black mother raises the white children, seeing her own child only once a year at the holidays. But a handful of families would let their domestics keep their children with them, living in little maids’ quarters or flatlets in the backyard. For a long time, those kids were my only friends. [image file=image_rsrc2UD.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2UE.jpg] COLORBLINDAt Sandringham I got to know this one kid, Teddy. Funny guy, charming as hell. My mom used to call him Bugs Bunny; he had a cheeky smile with two big teeth that stuck out the front of his mouth. Teddy and I got along like a house on fire, one of those friends where you start hanging out and from that day forward you’re never apart. We were both naughty as shit, too. With Teddy, I’d finally met someone who made me feel normal. I was the terror in my family. He was the terror in his family. When you put us together it was mayhem. Walking home from school we’d throw rocks through windows, just to see them shatter, and then we’d run away. We got detention together all the time. The teachers, the pupils, the principal, everyone at school knew: Teddy and Trevor, thick as thieves.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Everyone who works with patients gives off a similar affect: it is calm, kind, and helpful, but also completely dogmatic. Staff, patients, and visitors eat lunch and dinner together in a spacious, well-draped but sunny dining room with real linens and individualized embroidered napkins. We are seated at tables holding six to ten diners, amid signs of the zodiac and planets sculpted from various kinds of european bedrock, also done in the Steiner artistic tradition of massive, solid lines. Meals are a real chore for me, since it is difficult for me to eat anyway and I loathe eating around strangers. The feeling in the dining room is genteel, cultivated, and totally formal. I take a one-and-a-half-hour class daily in curative eurhythmy with a tiny East Indian woman named Dilnawaz who was raised in Rudolf Steiner schools in India, trained in Germany, and speaks fluent English and German as well as her native tongue. Eurhythmy is a combination of sustained rhythmical body movements and controlled breathing, based upon vowel and consonant sounds. As I learn and practice the stylized movements, they remind me of tai chi and feel like a complement to the Simonton visualization work I’ve been doing for a while. My body feels relaxed and good after eurhythmy, and my mind, too. There is a part of me that wants to dismiss everything here other than Iscador as irrelevant or at least not useful to me, even before I try it, but I think that is very narrow and counterproductive and I don’t want to do it. At least not without first giving myself fully to it, because that is why I came all this way and what do I have to lose at this point? Dilnawaz stresses that the treatment of any disease, and of cancer in particular, must be all of a piece, body and mind, and I am ready to try anything so long as they don’t come at me with a knife. Dilnawaz is the most human, the most friendly, and the most real person I’ve met here, as well as the most spiritual. She is also the most lonely. She is very friendly and helpful toward everyone, and people respond to her with considerable respect, but there is still an air of isolation about her that says to me she is not quite a part. She lives alone in Arlesheim town, and her sister is coming from Germany to spend Christmas with her. I wonder how she feels as a woman of Color among all these white ethnocentric Swiss. She is very cautious about what she says, but she does talk of how reluctant most northern europeans are to give themselves to eurhythmy. I find her a touch of emotional color within a scene of extraordinary blandness. Dilnawaz seems to be relieved to see me, too.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Her words sounded disconnected, not only from her but from each other. Virginia suddenly wanted her to go home, back to Michigan. It would be easy. All she had to do was tell Jarold that she’d been taking drugs. “Well, that’s funny. Magdalen was a talker.” “About what? What did she talk about?” She sounded genuinely interested. “Oh, about boys. There was one in particular. David. I remember the name because she kept moaning it over and over.” She hadn’t meant to sound sarcastic, but it was hard not to. Lily didn’t say anything. They lay there in silence, not even scratching or shifting. Every time one of them swallowed, it was obvious that she was trying to do it quietly. Virginia’s nightgown was hot and her feet were dry. She felt as if she couldn’t close her eyes. She remembered the afternoon conversations they had shared and their walks in the mountains. They seemed meaningless now—like bits of color glimpsed through a kaleidoscope. She felt an unhappy chill. Virginia turned, and the blankets rasped in the long silence. In a fiercely sudden move, she put her body against Lily’s, and her arm around her. She waited, almost frightened. For several seconds there was no reaction. Then Virginia could feel every muscle in Lily’s body slowly tightening. Lily’s body became rigid. Her back began to sweat. They lay like that, uncomfortably, for a long time. Having moved, it was hard for Virginia to turn away again. — The next day they ate birthday cake from paper plates on their laps as they watched TV. Jarold said, “Well, do you feel fifteen?” “I don’t know,” said Lily. It seemed like she really didn’t know. She looked badly shaken. Jarold didn’t say anything else. Charles stopped eating his cake and looked at Lily for a long moment. He looked puzzled and disturbed; for one thing, Lily loved cake and she hadn’t eaten any of the cake in her lap. — Virginia didn’t tell Jarold about the drugs, but he got rid of Lily anyway. She had stayed out with her friends one night, and he had her things packed when she came back the next morning. They drove her to the airport within the hour and left her waiting for a standby flight with her clothes in a big white shopping bag. Virginia kissed her good-bye, but it didn’t feel like anything. That night Anne called. Lily had not gone home. She had taken a plane to Canada instead. “I don’t think we’ll send anybody after her this time,” said Anne. “It wouldn’t do any good. Nothing we ever did was any good.” “Don’t blame yourself,” said Virginia.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Old Man Martin was retired. He sat in a lawn chair on his porch listening to the McCarthy hearings on his radio. It was turned up so loud you could hear it all the way down the block. “Gotta watch out,” he’d tell me as I passed his house, “communists could be anywhere. Anywhere.” I'd nod solemnly and run off to play. 10 Leslie Feinberg But Old Man Martin and I shared something in common. The radio was my best friend, too. “The Jack Benny Show” and “Fibber McGee and Molly” made me laugh, even when I didn’t know what was so funny. “The Shadow” and “The Whistler’ chilled me. Perhaps outside these projects working families already had televisions, but not us. The streets of the project weren't even paved—just gravel and giant Lincoln Logs to mark the parking. Very few new things came down our road. Ponies pulled the carts of the ice man and the knife sharpener. On Saturday they brought the ponies without the carts and sold rides for a penny. A penny also bought a chunk from the ice man—chipped off with his ice pick. The ice was dense and slick and sparkled like a cold diamond that might never melt. When a television set first appeared in the projects, it was in the living room of the McKensies’. All the children in the neighborhood begged our parents to let us go watch “Captain Midnight” on the McKensies’ new television. But most of us were not allowed in their home. Although it was 1955, the neighborhood still had some invisible war zones from a fierce strike that had been settled in 1949, the year I was born. “Mac” McKensie had been a scab. Just the word itself was enough to make me shy away from their house. You could still see traces of that word on the front of their coal bin, even though it had been painted over in a slightly different shade of green. Years later, fathers still argued about the strike overt kitchen tables and backyard barbecue grills. I overheard descriptions of such bloody strike battles, I thought WWII had been fought at the plant. At night when we’d drive my father to his shift, I used to crouch down on the backseat of the car and peek past the plant gates out over the now quiet fields of combat. There were also gangs in the projects, and the kids whose parents had scabbed during the strike made up a small but feared pack. “Hey, pansy! Are you a boy or a girl?” There was no way to avoid them in the small planet of the projects. Their sing-song taunts stayed with me long after I’d passed by. The world judged me harshly and so I moved, or was pushed, toward solitude.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was immovable. I was a burned-out meteor adrift somewhere in the neighborhood of Vega. And now I’m on the same bed and the light that’s in me refuses to be extinguished. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck. It seems to me that I hear the clanking of a great machine, the linotype bracelets passing through the wringer of sex. Hymie and his nymphomaniac of a wife are lying on the same level with me, only they are across the river. The river is called Death and it has a bitter taste. I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I have neither been petrified nor immortalized. I am still burning brightly inside, though outwardly dead as a planet. From this bed I have gotten up to dance, not once but hundreds, thousands of times. Each time I came away I had the conviction that I had danced the skeleton dance on a terrain vague. Perhaps I had wasted too much of my substance on suffering; perhaps I had the crazy idea that I would be the first metallurgical bloom of the human species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was both a sub-gorilla and a super-god. On this bed of ferroconcrete I remember everything and everything is in rock crystal. There are never any animals, only thousands and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they utter I have an answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of their mouths. There is plenty of killing, but no blood. The murders are perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in silence. But even if everyone were killed there would still be conversation, and the conversation would be at once intricate and easy to follow. Because it is I who create it! I know it, and that is why it never drives me mad. I have conversations which may take place only twenty years hence, when I meet the right person, the one whom I shall create, let us say, when the proper time comes. All these talks take place in a vacant lot which is attached to my bed like a mattress. Once I gave it a name, this terrain vague: I called it Ubiguchi, but somehow Ubiguchi never satisfied me, it was too intelligible, too full of meaning. It would be better to keep it just terrain vague, which is what I intend to do. People think that vacuity is nothingness, but it is not so. Vacuity is a discordant fullness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes reconnoitering. As a boy I remember standing in the vacant lot as if I were a very lively soul standing naked in a pair of shoes. The body had been stolen from me because I had no particular need of it.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Lily would stop to examine plants or insects, her brow taut and puzzled. She’d pick up a lot of things to hold in her pockets, especially chestnuts. She would pick up a chestnut and hold it in her hand for the whole walk, stroking it with her fingers, or meditatively rubbing it across her lower lip. Other times they’d just sit at the kitchen table and drink tea. Virginia was astonished at the things she told Lily during these afternoons. Lily knew things about Virginia that very few other people knew. Virginia did not know why she confided in her. She had been lonely. The afternoon kitchen was sunny and lulling. Lily listened intently. She asked questions. She asked a lot of questions about Magdalen. “But don’t you like Magdalen?” she asked once. “Weren’t there good times when she was growing up?” “Magdalen could be the most lovely, charming child in the world—if she wanted to be. She’d give you the shirt off her back—if she was in the mood. If she was in the mood. But to answer your question, no, I don’t like Magdalen. I love her—I love her dearly—because I’m her mother and I can’t help it. But I don’t like her.” Lily stared at her, pale and troubled. “Don’t you ever repeat that. It’s very private. If Magdalen ever comes to me and says, ‘Mama, Lily says you don’t like me,’ I’ll say you’re lying.” As they talked, Lily rested her elbow on a small pile of schoolbooks. She carried these books to and from school every day. One of them had a split green cover that showed its gray cardboard stuffing and a dirty strip of masking tape running up its broken spine. Whenever Lily heard Jarold pull into the driveway, she would grab her books and leave the room. Jarold would come in and see her cup on the table, its faint sugary crust fresh around the bottom. He’d never say anything, but his mouth got sarcastic. Virginia tried to get Jarold to be nicer to Lily. “She’s got a special kind of charm,” she said. “She’s gentle and low-key. She listens, and she has fresh insights.” Sometimes Jarold looked as though he were listening to this. But Lily wouldn’t or couldn’t show Jarold her charm. To him, she displayed only her most annoying aspects. And they really were annoying. She almost never said anything at family meals; she either kept her head down and chewed, or stared at people. She ignored Jarold, and sometimes she ignored Virginia too. She was judgmental; she was always talking about what was wrong with the world. She never helped with the dishes or anything else.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I was like a weed dealer, but of food. The weed guy is always welcome at the party. He’s not a part of the circle, but he’s invited into the circle temporarily because of what he can offer. That’s who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share. For me it was humor. I learned that even though I didn’t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing. I’d drop in, pass out the snacks, tell a few jokes. I’d perform for them. I’d catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself. [image file=image_rsrc2U9.jpg] I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days. [image file=image_rsrc2UA.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2UB.jpg] A YOUNG MAN’S LONG, AWKWARD, OCCASIONALLY TRAGIC, AND FREQUENTLY HUMILIATING EDUCATION IN AFFAIRS OF THE HEART, PART II: THE CRUSHIn high school, the attention of girls was not an affliction I suffered from. I wasn’t the hot guy in class. I wasn’t even the cute guy in class. I was ugly. Puberty was not kind to me. My acne was so bad that people used to ask what was wrong with me, like I’d had an allergic reaction to something. It was the kind of acne that qualifies as a medical condition. Acne vulgaris, the doctor called it. We’re not talking about pimples, kids. We’re talking pustules—big, pus-filled blackheads and whiteheads. They started on my forehead, spread down the sides of my face, and covered my cheeks and neck and ravaged me everywhere.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  While settling in Cape Town and the surrounding frontier, the white colonists had their way with the Khoisan women, and the first mixed people of South Africa were born. To work the colonists’ farms, slaves were soon imported from different corners of the Dutch empire, from West Africa, Madagascar, and the East Indies. The slaves and the Khoisan intermarried, and the white colonists continued to dip in and take their liberties, and over time the Khoisan all but disappeared from South Africa. While most were killed off through disease, famine, and war, the rest of their bloodline was bred out of existence, mixed in with the descendants of whites and slaves to form an entirely new race of people: coloreds. Colored people are a hybrid, a complete mix. Some are light and some are dark. Some have Asian features, some have white features, some have black features. It’s not uncommon for a colored man and a colored woman to have a child that looks nothing like either parent. The curse that colored people carry is having no clearly defined heritage to go back to. If they trace their lineage back far enough, at a certain point it splits into white and native and a tangled web of “other.” Since their native mothers are gone, their strongest affinity has always been with their white fathers, the Afrikaners. Most colored people don’t speak African languages. They speak Afrikaans. Their religion, their institutions, all of the things that shaped their culture came from Afrikaners. The history of colored people in South Africa is, in this respect, worse than the history of black people in South Africa. For all that black people have suffered, they know who they are. Colored people don’t. THE MULBERRY TREE At the end of our street in Eden Park, right in a bend at the top of the road, stood a giant mulberry tree growing out of someone’s front yard. Every year when it bore fruit the neighborhood kids would go and pick berries from it, eating as many as they could and filling up bags to take home. They would all play under the tree together. I had to play under the tree by myself. I didn’t have any friends in Eden Park. I was the anomaly wherever we lived. In Hillbrow, we lived in a white area, and nobody looked like me. In Soweto, we lived in a black area, and nobody looked like me. Eden Park was a colored area. In Eden Park, everyone looked like me, but we couldn’t have been more different. It was the biggest mindfuck I’ve ever experienced.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  My first night there I crawled out onto the fire escape. I could see a few green trees lining a tiny strip of something people in this city call a park. The traffic backed up for the bridge to Brooklyn had thinned. The music of mariachi and Mandarin melded in the night. Three little girls sat on a fire escape across the street, combing each other’s hair as they sang pop tunes from Hong Kong. A man and a woman fought bitterly in an apartment below me. I tensed at the sound of a crash. It was followed by an even more ominous silence. From the open living room window of my next-door neighbor’s apartment I could hear the steady hum of a sewing machine. The faint glow of the city softened the darkness of night. If there were still stars in the sky, they weren't within my sight. oe | I saw my next-door neighbor a month later. As I unlocked my apartment, she opened hers. I said hello before I even looked up. She didn’t answer. Her face startled me. It was badly bruised on one side like a rainbow—yellow, red, blue. Her hair was outrageously crimson. I could tell that womanhood had not come easily to her. It wasn’t just her large Adam’s apple or her broad, big-boned hands. It was the way she dropped her eyes and rushed away when I spoke to her. Every day I saw others like me in this city— enough of us to populate our own town. But we only acknowledged each other with a furtive glance, fearful of calling attention to ourselves. Being alone in public was painful enough; two could find themselves smack in the center of an unbearable sideshow. We didn’t seem to have any of our own places to gather in community, to immerse ourselves in our own ways and our own languages. But now I had a neighbor who was different like me. As weeks passed I became intrigued by the sounds and smells coming from her apartment. She sewed endlessly. She loved Miles Davis. And whenever she opened her oven, the hall outside her door filled with the most tantalizing aromas. One Saturday afternoon I found her clutching two huge bags of groceries and fumbling with the downstairs front-door lock. I pulled out my key. “Here, let me.” She didn’t say thank you. She hurried 270 Leslie Feinberg ahead of me on the stairs. “Can I help you carry those?” I offered. “Do I look weak to you?” she asked. I stopped on the stairs. “No. Where I come from it’s just a sign of respect, that’s all.” She continued up the stairs. “Well, where I come from,” she called out, “men don’t reward women for pretending to be helpless.” Once I heard her apartment door close I kicked the stair in anger and frustration.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  All day long I sat in my apartment rehearsing how I would introduce myself to her. I stood outside her door and listened to the Motown music blaring on her stereo before I finally got up the courage to knock. Someone turned the music down as she cracked open the door. I lifted my hand to silence her before she could speak. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I didn’t make a very good impression before. I know you think I’m a man, but I’m not. ?m a woman.” She sighed and unhooked the chain. “Listen,” she opened her door a little wider, “I don’t need a gender identity crisis on my doorstep. This is my home and I’m with friends. Please understand, I really don’t want to be bothered.” I heard a drag queen’s voice from inside her apartment. “Who’s that, Ruth? Ooh, he’s cute! Let him in.” “Tanya, please.” Ruth silenced the drag queen with a glare. I could see someone else peering at me from the living room. Ruth was visibly annoyed at the curious way her friends and I were checking each other out. “Pm not trying to be rude, “she told me, “but let me make myself clear: This is my home. I do not want to be annoyed.” I rested my hand on her doorframe. “But I need to talk to you.” She glared at my hand. I removed it. “But I don’t need to talk to you. Excuse me.” She closed her door. I had no choice but to give Ruth the wide berth she demanded. I shivered in a blanket on my fire escape, unwilling to let go of the day. The temperature had risen to seventy-five degrees, unusual in late October. The chilly evening breeze still smelled fresh by Manhattan standards. Ruth poked her head out of her living room window. “Oh,” she sounded startled. “I didn’t know you were out here. ’m going to close my window because it’s cold.” I sighed and looked up at the sky. She spoke more softly. “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” The shades of gender in her voice were intricate, like mine. I smiled. “That’s a harvest moon up there tonight.” Ruth laughed. “What’s a city slicker like you know about harvests?” Her words and tone angered me. I was sick of being everybody’s “other.” But part of me still needed Ruth’s friendship so damn much. So I took a moment before I answered and spoke without anger. “T know how it feels to stand in a field in the pitch dark under a billion stars, with no sound except the music of crickets and cicadas.” Ruth nodded as she stared at the moon. I leaned my head back against the brick. “And I know how a white-capped rivet looks when it’s racing toward the falls—how it’s translucent and green at the place where it bends over the edge, like bottle glass when it washes up in the surf.”

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  257Lecture 26—The Rival Gods of the Cold War õWithin this bloc, the experience of Christians varied from nation to nation. This lecture will focus on just one of the Soviet satellite states: Poland. By looking at Poland, we can see how religious faith—in this case, Catholicism—served as a powerful counter-force against the collectivist and atheist ideology of 20 th -century Communist regimes. õKarol Wojtyla—who as Pope John Paul II would become the first pope from the Slavic world—was born in 1920 in a town about 30 miles southwest of Kraków. His father was a retired military officer. His mother, a schoolteacher who was chronically ill, died when he was a boy. So did his older brother, a doctor who caught scarlet fever from his patients. õWojtyla was a good student, and in 1938 went to university to study philosophy and Polish language. He also dabbled in theater and was known for his acting talent. But then World War II intervened, and the Germans marched into Poland. Wojtyla was shipped off to manual labor in a quarry and, later, a chemical factory. Most of his professors died in a concentration camp. His father died of a heart attack in 1941. õDuring these years, when he was basically alone in the world and just trying to survive the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla felt himself called to the priesthood. And though the Nazis had tried to shut down all religious schools, in 1942 he enrolled in an underground seminary. õBy the time Wojtyla was ordained in 1946, he was an orphan who had worked as essentially a slave laborer under a totalitarian regime. At seminary he threw himself into the study of philosophy, so even as a young priest he was equipped to understand the existential clash of the Cold War both at an intellectual level and, more importantly, with deep human empathy. õThe Catholic Church sent him to Rome to earn a doctorate at a pontifical university. In the years that followed he served as a parish priest in various Polish towns and taught ethics at Jagiellonian University. He worked his way up the ranks of the hierarchy, was appointed bishop in 1958, and played a major part in Vatican II.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  They’re done fleeing. They’ve already fled. They get to a place, build their shul, and hold it down. Since the white people around us weren’t leaving, there weren’t a lot of families like ours moving in behind us. I didn’t make any friends in Highlands North for the longest time. I had an easier time making friends in Eden Park, to be honest. In the suburbs, everyone lived behind walls. The white neighborhoods of Johannesburg were built on white fear—fear of black crime, fear of black uprisings and reprisals—and as a result virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, and on top of that wall is electric wire. Everyone lives in a plush, fancy maximum-security prison. There is no sitting on the front porch, no saying hi to the neighbors, no kids running back and forth between houses. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood for hours without seeing a single kid. I’d hear them, though. They were all meeting up behind brick walls for playdates I wasn’t invited to. I’d hear people laughing and playing and I’d get off my bike and creep up and peek over the wall and see a bunch of white kids splashing around in someone’s swimming pool. I was like a Peeping Tom, but for friendship. It was only after a year or so that I figured out the key to making black friends in the suburbs: the children of domestics. Many domestic workers in South Africa, when they get pregnant they get fired. Or, if they’re lucky, the family they work for lets them stay on and they can have the baby, but then the baby goes to live with relatives in the homelands. Then the black mother raises the white children, seeing her own child only once a year at the holidays. But a handful of families would let their domestics keep their children with them, living in little maids’ quarters or flatlets in the backyard. For a long time, those kids were my only friends. COLORBLIND At Sandringham I got to know this one kid, Teddy. Funny guy, charming as hell. My mom used to call him Bugs Bunny; he had a cheeky smile with two big teeth that stuck out the front of his mouth. Teddy and I got along like a house on fire, one of those friends where you start hanging out and from that day forward you’re never apart. We were both naughty as shit, too. With Teddy, I’d finally met someone who made me feel normal. I was the terror in my family. He was the terror in his family. When you put us together it was mayhem. Walking home from school we’d throw rocks through windows, just to see them shatter, and then we’d run away. We got detention together all the time.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “If you’re an organizer for Local 6,” the owner leaned across his desk, “you can punch in, but you may not punch out.” Ironic. He was afraid the union had sent me to organize his typesetters. I was afraid he’d find out I’d only recently learned to type. The foreman led me to a machine. “Here’s the manual. I don’t have time to train you now. Start typing this text. When it’s done, run it out and give it to the proofreaders in there. Pll show you the format codes later, or look them up. Got it?” I nodded. “Wait,” I stopped him, “how do I run it out?” He shook his head disgustedly. ““That’s what you got a manual for.” From where I typeset I could see four women working inside the proofreaders’ room. I could hear their laughter, easy and relaxed. The foreman poked his head in and said something I couldn’t hear. They broke off their conversation. One woman nodded. He left. Their laughter rose again. I wondered if men know that women talk differently among themselves. I guessed the same must be true for the Black and Latino workers too, when no whites were around. The women huddled to share a secret. I typed up the text and looked up the codes to run it out. I actually looked forward to being inside the proofreaders’ space for a moment—women’s space. The women stopped talking as I walked in. I held up the repros. “Put them over there,’ one of the women said. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. I sighed, dropped them in the basket, and left. As I Stone Butch Blues 261 walked away, I heard their conversation resume and their voices rise in laughter once again. I only lasted one shift in that shop. But New York City was chock full of typesetting shops that ran around the clock. They were always hiring on third shift—lobster shift. After faking my way into enough shops and learning a bit at each, I soon realized I wasn't bluffing any longer. I had become a typesetter. It wasn’t a bad rhythm of life. For six or eight months out of the year I earned top dollar. I loved the leisurely predawn ride home, traveling in the opposite direction to packed rush hour trains and crowded streets. But it was dark when I got up, and I began to feel like a mole. Just when I thought Id lose my sanity, it was summertime— layoffs. I became eligible for the maximum unemployment benefits. During the summer I explored the city. My biggest problem was loneliness. I didn’t have anyone to talk to all summer long. By fall I longed for casual conversation between co-workers. Bill pounded the lunchroom table for emphasis. I read the newspaper. “Isn’t that the truth?” Bill asked me. 262 = Leslie Feinberg

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Sandringham was more like a spectrum. South African schools don’t have cafeterias. At Sandringham we’d buy our lunch at what we call the tuck shop, a little canteen, and then have free rein to go wherever we wanted on the school grounds to eat—the quad, the courtyard, the playground, wherever. Kids would break off and cluster into their cliques and groups. People were still grouped by color in most cases, but you could see how they all blended and shaded into one another. The kids who played soccer were mostly black. The kids who played tennis were mostly white. The kids who played cricket were a mix. The Chinese kids would hang out next to the prefab buildings. The matrics, what South Africans call seniors, would hang out on the quad. The popular, pretty girls would hang out over here, and computer geeks would hang out over there. To the extent that the groupings were racial, it was because of the ways race overlapped class and geography out in the real world. Suburban kids hung out with suburban kids. Township kids hung out with township kids. At break, as the only mixed kid out of a thousand, I faced the same predicament I had on the playground at H. A. Jack: Where was I supposed to go? Even with so many different groups to choose from, I wasn’t a natural constituent of any particular one. I obviously wasn’t Indian or Chinese. The colored kids would shit on me all the time for being too black. So I wasn’t welcome there. As always, I was adept enough with white kids not to get bullied by them, but the white kids were always going shopping, going to the movies, going on trips—things that required money. We didn’t have any money, so I was out of the mix there, too. The group I felt the most affinity for was the poor black kids. I hung out with them and got along with them, but most of them took minibuses to school from way out in the townships, from Soweto, from Tembisa, from Alexandra. They rode to school as friends and went home as friends. They had their own groups. Weekends and school holidays, they were hanging out with one another and I couldn’t visit. Soweto was a forty-minute drive from my house. We didn’t have money for petrol. After school I was on my own. Weekends I was on my own. Ever the outsider, I created my own strange little world. I did it out of necessity. I needed a way to fit in. I also needed money, a way to buy the same snacks and do the things that the other kids were doing. Which is how I became the tuck-shop guy. Thanks to my long walk to school, I was late every single day. I’d have to stop off in the prefect’s office to write my name down for detention. I was the patron saint of detention.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  It seemed possible that the astronauts’ super-resilience was a skill that even the most highly traumatized individuals could learn to activate, a birthright that needed to be reclaimed. A First Step: Serendipity Gained In attempting to understand what had transpired that day with Nancy, I was struck by a “footnote” in an informal graduate seminar I was taking in comparative animal behavior. One of the professors, Peter Marler, had mentioned some peculiar behaviors exhibited by prey animals such as birds and rabbits when they were physically restrained. That night I awoke, shaking in excitement. Could Nancy’s reaction (when held down by the doctors) be similar to those of the experimentally restrained animals? As for my “hallucination” of the crouching tiger, that was undoubtedly a creative “waking dream” stimulated by that inspiring graduate seminar. In pursuing the arcane allusion from my seminar, I came across a 1967 article titled “Comparative Aspects of Hypnosis.” 6 I brought this article, along with my ideas about it, to my graduate research advisor, Donald M. Wilson. † His field was invertebrate neurophysiology, and he was familiar with these types of “freezing” behaviors. However, for one dedicated solely to the study of creatures like insects and lobsters, he was understandably skeptical about “animal hypnosis.” Nonetheless, I remained fascinated by the broadly observed phenomenon of animal paralysis and spent endless hours in the musty, dusty stacks of the Life Sciences graduate library. At the same time, I continued to see more clients referred primarily by Ed Jackson, the psychiatrist who had referred Nancy to me. I was exploring with them how various imbalanced patterns of muscular tension and postural tone were related to their symptoms—and how releasing and normalizing these entrenched patterns often led to unexpected and dramatic cures. Then in 1973, in the acceptance speech for his share in the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, ‡ the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen unexpectedly chose to talk not primarily about his study of animals in their natural environment, but about the observed human body as it goes through life and as it functions and malfunctions under stress. I was struck by his observations about the Alexander technique § This body-based reeducation treatment, which he and members of his family had undergone with notable health benefits (including a normalizing of his high blood pressure), paralleled my observations with my body-mind clients. Clearly, I needed to talk to this elder.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “All my life I’ve been told there’s something really wrong with me because of the way I am as a woman. But if ’m a man, then ’m a nice young man. The way I am is just fine.” Edna waited for more. “Some of it is fun. I was tied up so tight all the time as a he-she. It feels good to be free to do little things, like go to a public bathroom in peace or to be touched by a barber. It’s nice to be smiled at by strangers or flirted with at a lunch counter.” Edna studied my face. “Then why are your eyes even sadder than I remember?” “Oh, I think ...” I sighed. Edna interrupted me. “I’m interested in what you think, Jess. But tell me how you feel.” I had forgotten how much I loved femmes. Another butch would have nodded when I sighed, content that the whole story had been articulated in the rush of ait. But Edna pressed for words. “T feel like a ghost, Edna. Like I’ve been buried alive. As far as the world’s concerned, I was born the day I began to pass. I have no past, no loved ones, no memories, no me. No one really sees me or speaks to me or touches me.” Edna’s eyes filled with tears. She reached forward and took my hand in hers. The waiter interrupted us. “More coffee, sir?” I shook my head. When he’d walked out of earshot, Edna told me, “I feel like a ghost, too, Jess. Should I still call you Jess?” My smile felt shy. “Sometimes people call me Jesse and I don’t correct them. You can call me whatever you want, just try to remember the right pronoun in a public place. It could get real ugly.” Edna sighed and nodded. I'd forgotten she was Rocco’s lover, too. “Did you know, Edna,” I asked her, “did you know I would make the same decision Rocco made?” Edna shook her head. “I only knew your options were as few as hers. But when you were young I recognized something in you that I’d seen in Rocco.” I chewed my lower lip, waiting for the words of a woman who knew me. “T don’t know how to say this. ?m afraid Pll make a mistake,” she hesitated. “Try,” I urged her. “Please. I need to hear it.” “T don’t think femmes ever see butches as one big group. After a while you see how many different ways there are for butches to be. You see them young and defiant, you see them change, you watch them harden up or be destroyed. Soft ones and bitter ones and troubled ones. You and Rocco were granite butches who couldn’t soften your edges. It just wasn’t in your nature.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I smiled at Ruth. “And I know your hair is as red as wild sumac in early autumn.” Ruth looked at me wide-eyed. “What a lovely thing to say. You’re from upstate. I can tell by your accent. Me, too.” Stone Butch Blues 271 I nodded. “TI know.” Ruth’s whole demeanor toward me changed. She seemed ready to open her door partway for me. That’s when I discovered I was still hurt and angry at her earlier rejections. Before she could say another word I told her “Good night” and climbed back inside my living room. I leaned my head against the windowsill and watched the moon continue to rise over Manhattan. I never would have known Ruth was doing the same thing only a few feet away from me if I hadn’t heard the scratch of a match and smelled the smoke from her cigarette. I didn’t see her again for a couple of months. I think she went away for a few weeks over the holidays because I didn’t hear music or sewing, and the hallway went back to smelling like a urinal. I got tired of sleeping on an air mattress and I bought a bed from the Salvation Army. I also got a used record and tape player that was so beat-up I wouldn’t care if someone stole it. One Saturday afternoon, after weeks of working overtime I woke up late. My apartment looked so filthy it discusted me. The daylight had thinned to grey by the time I bundled up to go out for cleaning supplies. 272 Leslie Feinberg Ruth and I opened our doors at the same moment and looked away in embarrassment. I held back to let her go ahead of me. From the landing she called up to me, “I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but what was the music you were playing yesterday? Do you remember?” “Why?” I called down to her. “Is this an indirect way of saying it was too loud?” There was a long silence. “No,” she said. “T liked it, that’s all. Do you mind me asking?” “If it sounded African it was King Sunny Ade.” “Thank you,” she said curtly. I heard the front door shut. Now I knew that she listened to my music just as I listened to hers. So I began to play tapes for both of us, wondering as I did which ones she enjoyed most. I imagined our lives connected in spite of the thin walls and closed doors physically separating us. That’s when I realized just how lonely I was. On the morning of the spring equinox, I wearily climbed my stairs at dawn, eager for a hot shower and a long sleep. The pungent aroma of simmering rhubarb pulled me up the steps two at a time. The irresistible smell was coming from Ruth’s kitchen. I was a child the last time I’'d smelled rhubarb cooking. I rested my head against her door. My mouth filled

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  One at a time I broke the shells of the peanuts. I threw some of them to the ducks and ate the others myself. I felt more alone and afraid than ever before. 239 IT SEEMED TO BE A Saturday morning like any other. One day had become so much like the next. Each hour dragged so slowly that I didn’t pay attention as months turned into years. As I made myself coffee, I watched a blue jay fight with a starling over the crumbs in the bird feeder. Neither noticed the orange-marmalade cat crouched below them, ready to spring. I took my time in the shower, trying to scrub away the grime of isolation with hot, soapy water. Loneliness had become an environment—the air I breathed, the spatial dimension in which I was trapped. I sat in a boat on a deathly calm sea, waiting for a breeze to fill my sails. And so it never occurred to me my life might change again dramatically that day. It was quite simple, really. I drew one cc of hormones into a syringe, lifted it above my naked thigh—and then paused. My arm felt restrained by an unseen hand. No matter how I tried I could not sink that needle into my quadriceps as I'd done hundreds of times before. I stood up and looked in the bathroom mirror. The depth of sadness in my eyes frightened me. I lathered my morning beard stubble, scraped it clean with a razor, and splashed cold water on my face. The stubble still felt rough. As much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it. What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my surface. I stared far back into my past and remembered the child who couldn’t be catalogued by Sears. I saw her standing in front of her own mirror, in her father’s suit, asking me if I was the person she would grow up to become. Yes, I answered her. And I thought how brave she was to have begun this journey, to have withstood the towering judgments. But who was I now—woman or man? I fought long and hard to be included as a woman among women, but I always felt so excluded by my differences. I hadn’t just believed that passing would hide me. I hoped that it would allow me to express the part of myself that didn’t seem to be woman. I didn’t get to explore being a he-she, though. I simply became a he—a man without a past. Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  explorers isolated in remote regions (see Richard E. Byrd’s account of his harrowing five months in isolation in Antarctica, in his book Alone ) that they begin to feel disconnected from reality and sense that their personalities are disintegrating. They become prone to elaborate hallucinations. What they miss most of all is not simply the presence of people near them but the eyes of others looking back at them. We formed our whole concept of ourselves in our first months as we looked at our mothers; her return gaze gave us a sense that we existed; she told us who we were by how she looked at us. As adults, we experience the same kind of nonverbal validation and sense of self through the eyes of others who look at us. We are never aware of this; it would take prolonged isolation to understand the phenomenon. This is the social force at its most basic level—only the eyes of other people can reassure us that we are real and whole and that we belong. The social force can make itself felt in our virtual worlds and virtual crowds. It is less intense than being in an actual crowd, but we can feel the presence of others in a phantom-like way through the screen (inside us and outside us), and we continually consult our smartphones as a kind of substitute pair of eyes upon us. The social force among humans is merely a more complex version of what all social animals experience. Social animals are continually attuned to the emotions of others within the group, aware of their role in the pack and anxious to fit in. (Among higher primates, this includes imitating those higher up in the rank as a show of inferiority.) They display elaborate physical cues that allow the group to communicate and cooperate. They have grooming rituals to tighten their bonds, and hunting in packs has a similar effect. They experience a shared energy when simply assembled together. We humans may seem much more sophisticated, but the same dynamic occurs in us as well, on a completely subverbal level. We sense and feel what others in the group are feeling. We have an urgent need to fit in and play our role in the group. We are prone to unconsciously imitate gestures and expressions, particularly from leaders. We still like to hunt in packs, through social media or wherever it is acceptable to vent our anger. We have our own rituals to tighten group bonds—religious or political assemblies, spectacles, warfare. And we most definitely experience a collective energy that passes through any group of like-minded people. What is most peculiar about this force as it exists within us is how little we discuss or analyze something that is so obviously common to our experience. Some of this may come from the fact that it is hard to study these sensations in a rigorously scientific manner. But there is also something willful about this ignorance; deep down, this