Nostalgia

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 38 of 45 · 20 per page

• From My People (2022)

  That and the Spanish words and accents coming out of the mouths of my new friends playing hopscotch, not with the little pebbles we used to throw to the dirt squares in Covington, but with bottle caps that resonated differently in ears when they hit the Harlem concrete. It would be a while before I tried another memoir, especially to focus on something I didn’t see much of in the magazine (or anywhere else) at the time—the experience of ordinary Black people in the segregated South, like my dear grandmother. And while it was a South that had been challenged and changed by mostly young civil rights activists, I thought it was important to tell a story that focused on the ongoing, day-to-day experiences of ordinary Black people. It was equally important to me to show readers where we got our own sense of commitment to family and community. So I embarked on a journey that shed some light on those realities. But it was still a time when there could be unhappy consequences for Black people in places where the civil rights movement had not reached, so I submitted the piece as fiction, changing the name of the town I was writing about. But that was where the fiction ended. This story, about the small injustices faced by Black people in Covington, reflected an ongoing reality my family and many other Black families knew all too well . . . some that, alas, remain to this day. A Walk Through a Georgia CorridorThe Urbanite 1961 On one hot day early in July of 1959, Hamp (Hamilton Holmes) and I went down to the Court House in Atlanta to have our application forms certified, a routine but necessary step in our attempt to enroll as students at the University of Georgia. We went to one judge and presented the papers. Though the papers were in order he flatly refused to sign and waved us away saying, “You people are just trying to start something.” Finally, the clerk of the Superior Court signed the forms, which certified our status as residents of the state of Georgia, but he said, “This doesn’t mean that you are going to get in.” As an afterthought, he added, “Course it doesn’t mean you won’t get in either.” All this talk made little sense to me. After all, I had gone to school with white students before. My family and I had lived in Alaska while my father was stationed there. I recalled the first day I walked into class there. I was the only Negro student in the eighth grade, and except for a few smaller students in the first or second grades, the only Negro in the entire school. I thought about my first day in class in Alaska a long time after the clerk had left. The first person to speak to me that day had been a sixteen-year-old girl from Alabama. We became close friends from that day on.

• From My People (2022)

  Although 125 certainly increases the odds of coming across a black student, they still manage to get lost on the sprawling campus among 18,000 whites. While waiting for Dr. David Foley, the young white professor in charge of the program, I looked at the paper. That morning, the Athens Daily News carried the headline: “Black Studies Panel Hears Local Professor,” with a story out of Atlanta, which began: “While most speakers agreed Monday that more emphasis on black studies is needed in the state’s public schools, a University of Georgia department head said this might result in building ‘feelings of superiority among blacks.’” The man, who was quoted later in the story as saying that Negro history taught distinctly “could backfire badly,” is chairman of the social studies department. Dr. Foley, who taught for three years at the University of Sierra Leone, turned out to be pleasant, enthusiastic, and intensely pleased with himself. “In most universities,” he said, “whites ignore the existence of black culture. They’re not anti—they just spend their time saying, ‘What a wonderful fellow I am.’ This is more degrading than anything. I don’t know whether a black would like somebody to just come up and whack ’im one or ignore him.” Foley feels that students “cannot understand the demands or aspirations of Afro Americans without an understanding of the black man as the inheritor of African culture.” As for his own preparation, he said, “I’d like to think my two years in Africa helped me to rap here.” Downstairs, in an African history classroom, Anderson Williams, a young black graduate assistant who had just passed his PhD orals, was lecturing on the “strong indigenous civilization in Africa that began a thousand years before the Europeans came to the continent.” After the class ended, I introduced myself to the black students sitting in front of me, and invited them to have lunch with me. Anderson Williams joined us, and we drove to a steak house in town—one of many that did not serve black people when I graduated. On the way out, Benny Roberson, a junior from Athens, majoring in anthropology, started to chuckle. “Charlayne Hunter. You know how I remember you so well? The day you entered Georgia and all that stuff was going on with you, I started getting ready to go to town, and my mamma said, Boy, you are not going nowhere near that town today. And I sat back down.” “When I first came here,” said Joe Sales, a handsome senior from Columbus, Georgia, who reminded me of Hamp, “I knew every black student on the yard, but not now.” Russell Williams, a graduate student who had been at the university off and on, having started his freshman year when I was a senior, concurred, and added, “There are even some black students nobody knows.” They explained that, although they and about thirty other black students belonged to the BSU, the majority did not.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Grandma pulled one loose and expertly plucked out the seeds till she had a mass of pure fluff in her hand. She showed Lecia and me how to draw a thin thread out of it like spider silk by rolling the strand between thumb and forefinger and pulling just so. Cotton was a mean crop, I recall her saying, like most money crops. It sucked a lot out of the ground and even more out of those who worked it. When I grew up and read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, much of the first volume was devoted to how hard life in that part of the country was on a woman in the Dust Bowl. Water was so scarce that the average thirty-year-old had a dowager’s hump from toting buckets up to the house several times a day. Their faces wrinkled from too much sun, and their hands grew hard as boot leather. Every family buried a couple of kids, too, and that made them hard inside. Thinking of Grandma’s picture in the gold oval frame above Mother’s bed, I tried to imagine someone choosing those girly white hands of hers to do field work, but never quite fathomed it. We stood in this field in our Sunday visiting clothes, Grandma dabbing at her temples with a hankie. About a stone’s throw away, there stood a barn and tall silo aswarm with Mexican workers. At some point, Grandma announced that Dotty had sure made a good marriage, which judgment wasn’t lost on Mother, I guess. She got all quiet. Then she took her sketch pad and a stub of charcoal from the backseat and wandered off to the barn. When I tried to follow, she squatted down and said to stay with Grandma. This caused Lecia to mouth that I was a baby, and subsequently I tossed a pebble at her kneecap, so Grandma clamped her bony hand on my shoulder and made me go sit in the hot car by myself. On the way home, we pulled up to the barn to pick up Mother. The door to Dotty’s Cadillac made a big impression on me: it must have weighed a hundred pounds, and also lit up like Broadway when I heaved it open. Mother was talking soft Spanish to two guys studying her sketch pad. One of them quickly tucked a pint bottle of clear liquid into his back pocket. You couldn’t smell liquor on her when she got in, but she had that clipped, Yankee way of talking she always got when she’d had a few. She must have done ten thousand such sketches in my childhood, but for some reason, that drawing stays with me: a hasty sketch of the older man in a sombrero, done in bold scrawls with few shadings, his face withered up. She pulled a can of Aqua Net hair spray out of her bag and sprayed the sketch to fix it, then snapped shut the pad.

• From My People (2022)

  For example, children my age played hopscotch, just as we did in Covington. But instead of the dirt play grounds I was used to skipping around on, these children played on the paved streets, and I quickly learned how to treat my aching feet after jumping around on concrete. And even though I had a harder time learning to understand the girls and boys I played with—their lilting, musical, and rapid way of speaking a language I had never heard before—in time, I even managed to pick up a few Spanish words. And while my great-uncle was no longer among the living by the time I went to Harlem as a reporter some twenty-two years later, what I had learned about Harlem early on did not depart from me as I returned armed with pen and notepad—the days before cell phones made them mostly obsolete. In attempting to expand readers’ views of the Black community, I continued to apply my well-learned lessons about My People’s community and culture, including the music. Now I often went to places in Harlem, like the historic Apollo Theater, where some of the legends of Black music performed music that was right up my alley. But when I learned about a symphony orchestra in Harlem, well, that was surely not anything that had ever seen the light of day in any newspaper, other than, perhaps, the Harlem-based Black newspaper the Amsterdam News . So I immediately set out to find it, and when I met some of the musicians, what a surprise it was, as by day some were employed as postal workers or schoolteachers or held jobs totally unrelated to a symphony orchestra and had no place other than Harlem to display their classical talents. To be sure, I was exposed to Harlem in all of its manifestations, not all nearly as benign as those from my young years on 115th-Street-Between-Lenox-and-Fifth. I never shied away from reporting its darker challenges. But even when I had to cover those, I often tried to give context, like some of the reasons so many young people turned to drugs—using, selling, or both and sometimes dying, like young Walter Vandermeer, whose family I got to know. I offered whatever support I could provide to a mother with five children and no man living in their cramped apartment. My other approach to Harlem was through culture and individuals who were attracted by and contributed to its vibrancy, people like Frank Hercules, the Trinidadian author, and Lewis Michaux, whose bookstore they and so many authors and others frequented because of its huge collection of books by and about Black people. The history it contained was also reflected on the corner across the street, where for generations Black men from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X stood on tall wooden ladders to speak.

• From My People (2022)

  The sirens on Lenox Avenue frightened me for a while, and would not let me sleep. One night, I tumbled out of bed and walked to the front of the house, where one window looked out. For as far as I could see, people were walking along the street or standing languidly around their stoops, careless of the night or the sounds it brought them. Near the corner, people, colored by red and green and orange and yellow neon lights, stood gesturing and laughing about some secret thing that I could never know. Somewhere along the street, a bell rang with predictable regularity. It was the ragman, who got little for his time. Perhaps the nights would have come easier for me and would have seemed more like home had there been more windows. At home, there were several windows in every room, and the houses next door were not too close. But the windows on 115th Street were blinded by the buildings next door—they were almost close enough to touch—so I could not see the stars. Mornings came quietly to 115th Street, unlike those in my home, where, at daybreak, clucking hungry chickens and silent hungry rabbits had to be fed. Most of my mornings there—in fact, most of my days—I spent running. I cannot remember ever walking anywhere in summer. I remember occasionally sitting long enough to dress a paper doll, but my mother always made me come in just at early dark, so I had to run and run and run to stay ahead of the day. When it came time to leave 115th Street, I had nearly forgotten what I’d left at home. Everything that I hadn’t brought with me—bicycle, bottle dolls, tree swing—I had learned to do without. I had learned to make marbles out of bottle caps weighted with wax. It had not been a lonely summer. Maria and her friends and I promised to send cards at Christmas. Our parting wasn’t sad. I left, promising to return the following summer. I did not, however, keep that promise. My family moved, and also my great-uncle died. New discoveries and new impressions clouded even the clearest days in my memory. Despite an annual exchange of cards at Christmas that always began “Dear Friend,” written in ink above the printed verse, I had all but forgotten my promise to come back until some seventeen years later, when, one warm evening, on the way to a party on 138th Street, I passed a corner that looked familiar. One side of the street had changed; a row of brownstones had been replaced by tall apartment buildings with a scattering of trees and grass. On the left side of the street, the old buildings stood impassive. The soft darkness, coming late in summer, made their lines look like a Fauve pattern—blunt grays and reds and browns—against the sky.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  in the northern Netherlands after it won independence from the Habsburgs over the half-century from the 1560s. The outcome of the Dutch Revolt had produced an unusual degree of religious untidiness and pluralism in the United Provinces; in the background was the fragrant memory of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, in a Low Countries as yet undivided by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had spoken much of spiritual religion and of tolerance, and had also discreetly questioned the way that Augustine of Hippo had shaped Western Christianity. Radical Christianity learned a great deal from Erasmus. [8] In cosmopolitan and commercial Amsterdam, émigré Jewish communities from mass expulsions in Iberia prospered alongside a spectrum of Christians who were also refugees from less-hospitable territories, ranging from the Catholic southern Netherlands to regions of eastern Europe where Catholicism had reasserted its control. After 1685 the Reformed Protestant element was much reinforced when Louis XIV of France betrayed his grandfather’s promises to tolerate his Protestant subjects (‘Huguenots’) and expelled them all after half a century of increasing harassment. The Netherlands also enjoyed ancient trading links with England, where the Stuart dynasty’s attempt at creating an episcopal Protestant religious monopoly in its three Atlantic kingdoms collapsed into war in the 1640s and never recovered. That encouraged a conversation of doubt and religious radicalism spanning the North Sea. [9] In this pluralist setting emerged some creatively disruptive views of biblical authority that interconnected and have never died away in the Judaeo- Christian tradition: the Jewish radicalism of Baruch Spinoza, the grimly physical rationalism of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and a variety of biblical scepticism among early English Quakers who have only recently been given the recognition that they deserve. The distinctive witness of the Friends was to encounter divine authority in experiencing the light of the Spirit within them, rather than from the Word of God in Scripture. Quakers were inclined to demonstrate this by denigrating biblical authority. Protestants had already given a paradoxical prompt to this by their very attempt to stress the authority of sola scriptura, because they stressed the Bible’s literal meaning as an historical text. In the process they had largely discarded more than a millennium of allegorical or poetic interpretation that had long unravelled or even celebrated the Bible’s more baffling aspects. Reading the Bible as history carried with it the problem that historical scrutiny of a sacred text is liable to reveal how similar to other texts it is in nature and construction. Martin Luther had tried to demarcate a Bible that was the revealed Word of God but was still set in the sort of historical time that humanist scholarship was defining. In doing so, he had narrowed the boundaries of the biblical texts by creating a category of Apocrypha, cordoned off from the Old Testament, though neither Jews nor the pre-Reformation Christian Church had made such a categorical distinction.

• From The Art of Memoir

  prepubescent face blooms awake in you. Then you remember where your locker was that year, and that speech class came after English, and since speech was last period you walked home across the football field’s fresh-mown grass, watching the boy you had a crush on in practice gear. So a single image can split open the hard seed of the past, and soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory. Almost unbelievable how much can rush forward to fill an absolute blankness. On the first day of a memoir class, I often try to douse my students’ flaming certainty about the unassailability of their memories. Usually I fake a fight with a colleague—prof or student— while a videographer whirs in back. Then the class is asked to record right after the event what happened. For the caliber of grad students I face down, the exercise should be a slam-dunk. A year or so back almost eight hundred applied for six slots in poetry and six in fiction. They’re all broke out in smarts, but in some oddball ways. Sure there are Ivy Leaguers, but in poetry we once turned down a Harvard grad for a gay ex-marine. In fiction, a Yale summa cum laude lost a seat to a former Barnum & Bailey clown. Picture a seminar room with tables in a horseshoe and some twenty grad students, mostly in black, each propping up a styrofoam cup of lukewarm liquid. I explain the videographer in back by saying a class transcript may help with a book on memoir I’m writing. Following a script, I apologize for leaving my phone on but claim I have an administrative problem to work out halfway through our three-hour class. At planned intervals, my coconspirator, Chris, sometimes calls, putatively to ask—harangue?—me about swapping classrooms. The students hear me be jovial and accommodating, though I hustle him off the phone, saying let’s talk at the break. An hour before he’s due, Chris steams in. A tall, fiftyish poet with a shaved head, he’s tight-lipped his mouth into a line and is claiming that this is his seminar room. We need to clear out. Now.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  [image "A group of five graduates: Sherman Alexie, Rick Williams, Tom Beitey, Doug Fiess and Gordon Tyus, in caps and gowns holding diplomas standing in front of a wall with the text REARDAN JUNIOR SENIOR." file=image_rsrc4TN.jpg] This is the day of my graduation from Reardan High School with my best friends, Rick Williams, Tom Beitey, Doug Fiess, and Gordon Tyus. We all graduated from high school and college with academic honors. You could say I was best friends with four white boy geniuses. Tom died in 1991, but the other three are doing well. I don’t have much contact with them, but I remember them with love and respect. A never-before-seen, unedited excerpt from an unfinished and unpublished sequel to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, from Rowdy’s point of view. Rowdy, Rowdy, Rowdy by Sherman Alexie [image file=image_rsrc4TG.jpg] SEPTEMBER 5Everybody loves a meteor, but hardly anybody cares about a meteorite. SEPTEMBER 6A meteor is called a shooting star, an amazing name, but it’s only space junk set afire as it enters our atmosphere and burns to nothing. During meteor showers, people gather in large numbers and “ooh” and “aah” and talk about God’s fireworks and the last time they saw something so beautiful and the world is an amazing place and I love you and let’s be happy forever and blah, blah, frigging blah. And the nightly news sends a reporter into the foothills to let viewers know when and where to see the prettiest part of a meteor shower. And people, actually believing in the news for the first time, put on their shoes and coats and rush out to watch. So, yeah, big butt cheers for the meteor. As for the meteorite? That’s a piece of space junk that made it through the flames and survived the impact with the earth. It can be a piece of dust or a house-sized boulder. But big or small, there are no television reports and no celebrations and no big crowds to celebrate a meteorite. Imagine walking up to a crowd circling a baseball-sized meteorite. “Hey, what’s going on?” you’d ask the friendliest-looking dude. “We’re celebrating,” he’d say, and point with his lips at the space baseball. “You’re celebrating a rock?” “It’s a meteorite.” “You mean a shooting star?” “Sort of. This is a shooting star that survived. It’s amazing.” “It’s a rock.” “It’s a survivor.” “It’s a small rock.” “It was burning at three thousand degrees Fahrenheit when it passed through the earth’s atmosphere.” “Okay, it’s a hot small rock.” “It’s a testament to the awesome power of the universe.” “It looks like a baseball.” SEPTEMBER 7So, yeah, the question is: Do you want to be a meteor or a meteorite?

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: In a lot of ways, I think I created the idealized version of me. A lot of wish fulfillment on who I wish I would have been back then, or maybe looking back, decisions I would have made or ways I would have acted. I could have been a better person, slightly better. And also in writing the other characters, I blended people, I took real aspects of certain people and blended them into a fictional stew and created these other characters. It’s realistic and people are racist and classist and sexist and mean and funny and kind. And I think because I wrote with specific people in mind, it was easier to create a real world or a fictional world that felt real. JW: Has the response in that real world been different than to your other books? SA: You know, I never really heard much from Reardan. I mean, there’s a real Gordy—Gordy the white boy genius in the book—there’s a real character he’s based on. He had a different name in the early drafts; I think I called him Henry? JW: Oh, and it just never felt right, I guess. SA: No, and I sent the manuscript to the real Gordy, and he said, “Yeah, this is good, but why are you calling him Henry? Call him Gordy.” So he wanted his real name in the book. To this day I think he’s the only real person I’ve seen at a reading of True Diary. He lives in Arizona and I gave a reading in Arizona, and I knew he was coming, but I didn’t have a cell phone back then so I had no contact with him, and I was reading the book and I decided to read that chapter—even though I hadn’t seen him yet—where Gordy teaches Arnold about books and boners and how to read and the importance of education.…That’s also an interesting thing to write in the book, that positive idea of education. I think that was quietly revolutionary for a Native American character. JW: It really is a quest to have the best education you can get.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Since she thought that he was low-rent and since she was herself dying, she sort of trumped him into staying away from his own house. He worked days and pulled a lot of double shifts. On days off, he fished till it turned squirrel season. Then he hunted. One Saturday, he brought home dozens of squirrel tails for me to play with. The tails had bloody stub ends where they’d been lopped off, and I remember pinning them all together with clothespins and looping them around my neck, which grossed Lecia out. I think I fancied myself, in this squirrel-tail stole, some cross between Greta Garbo and Daniel Boone. Lecia put herself in charge of cooking squirrel gumbo. She had a recipe for a black and garlicky roux that a Cajun neighbor lady had taught her. One whiff of that gumbo will make some gland draw up in the back of your throat and ache. Yankee gumbos are full of tomatoes and okra and all manner of pussyfied spices, but that game gumbo Lecia fixed—made with squirrel or duck or deer sausage—came together out of nothing quite so pretty. Instead it was mixed up from things you cannot live without—lard and flour and onion. It was a thin, black, elemental soup that opened your sinuses from the three kinds of pepper and left you tasting garlic and sassafras root for days after. Grandma said just the smell of the roux browning made her want to hork. She took Mother out for shrimp rémoulade at Al’s Seafood. (Shrimp rémoulade, I might explain here, was my grandma’s moral antidote to all those little split-up squirrel carcasses dismantled and frying in fat.) The shrimp are blanched pink, peeled and deveined, then hooked over the side of a sundae dish like the legs of so many young girls hanging over the edge of a swimming pool. The sundae dish may get piled up with shredded lettuce in the middle just for show. The rémoulade sauce is an extra-lemony kind of mayonnaise that has the muted luster of good pearls. When the car backed out to take them to the restaurant, the headlights streaked across the kitchen wall behind Daddy. He sat in his string T-shirt at the table he’d built from sheet plywood and clear varnish. He held his spoon the way I later learned guys in jail are supposed to. He looped his arm around his plate so it was sort of guarding the bowl from somebody snatching at it. Positioned like this, he scooped the gumbo into his mouth in a steady motion that didn’t stop till the bowl was clean. I still had the squirrel tails looped around my neck and said didn’t it hurt his feelings that they wouldn’t eat what he’d brought home. The idea made him laugh. “Shit, that’s okay too, Pokey,” he said with a lopsided grin.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Daddy sets down the duck again, and a smile stretches across his face, his eyes crinkle up, and his shoulders go square like the best part of the story just bubbled back up in him. “And old A.D. had hell to pay. Don’t think he didn’t.” “Wasn’t Uncle A.D. a lot bigger than you, Daddy?” I am always trying to figure a way around my own skinniness. Uncle A.D. is a big oak tree of a man, white-headed and strong. In all the pictures of the Karr boys lined up, he stands close to Daddy and stares down his nose, like he’s lording something over him. “Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it. Bigger’s ass, was what I thought. “I head out behind the shed,” Daddy says, “and there’s old A.D. hunkered down on the ground. ‘Say, brother,’ I says to him.” Daddy’s voice as he makes out talking to Uncle A.D. is smooth and sweet as melty butter. “‘I believe you made out pretty bad back there.’ I tell him I got some burn salve may take that sting out. And A.D. he bends over. Starts picking at that shirt on his back where that fabric’s stuck down in them sores. He’s a-hissing between his teeth. Gets that old cotton blouse pulled up over his shoulder blades, then asks me does that look bad. And I say, ‘Poor old you.’ Course she cut the shirt slap off my back. ‘Pull your shirt off your neck a little higher,’ I says to him. ‘I don’t want to get this here salve on it. Piss Momma off any worse.’ So he bends way over further. Gets bent double-like. His arms all hung up in them shirtsleeves till he’s stuck like a snake in a sock. That’s when I grab hold to him. Pour that old turpentine horse liniment down in them sores. Was a deep, purple-black liniment Momma made from tar. I held him still and smeared it in with the flat of my hand. And him wrassling me to break loose.” Shug stops wrapping bird carcasses a second. He tilts his head at Daddy, then says that his momma cooked up some horse liniment back then out of a tar base. See, Shug’s from up in the piney woods too. “Hers was tar and pine sap, I remember right. Maybe she put some lemon grass in it, one of them stingy herbs.” Shug’s momma knew Daddy’s momma. They were both pretty good country doctors, and every now and then Shug and Daddy ride back toward their mothers into that place to get to something like this liniment, or some other doctoring recipe. The looks on their faces grow so vaguely soft that I feel tears start in back of my eyes. I am verging on lonesome myself for these women I never knew. Daddy says that sounds like the exact stuff.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  realm. Redemption consists in the return of the spirit from its exile in this world to its true home, a realm of light totally other than anything existing within the realities of the material universe. The hope for redemption is thus associated with a profound nostalgia for man’s true home, as expressed in the following passage from a Gnostic text: In that world [of darkness] I dwelt thousands of myriads of years, and nobody knew of me that I was there ... Year upon year and generation upon generation I was there, and they did not know about me that I dwelt in their world. Or again, from a Manichaean text: Now, O our gracious Father, numberless myriads of years have passed since we were separated from thee. Thy beloved shining living countenance we long to behold. (35) Dualistic schemes of this type solve the problem of theodicy by, as it were, transposing its terms. The empirical universe ceases to be a cosmos and becomes either the arena within which cosmization is in the making (as in classical Zoroastrianism) or is actually conceived as the realm of chaos (as in the various Gnostic systems). What appears as anomy is, therefore, that which is quite appropriate to this unfinished or negative realm; nomos is either not yet achieved or is to be sought in realms utterly beyond the realities of the empirical universe. In the development of this type of dualism it followed quite logically that everything associated with this world, notably the physical and historical being of man, was radically devaluated. Matter came to be understood as negative reality, as did the human body and all its works. Empirical history, furthermore, was excluded a priori from 88

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I’ve probably climbed, like, one hundred different trees in my lifetime. There are twelve in my backyard. Another fifty or sixty in the small stand of woods across the field. And another twenty or thirty around our little town. And a few way out in the deep woods. And that tall monster that sits beside the highway to West End, past Turtle Lake. That one is way over one hundred feet tall. It might be one hundred and fifty feet tall. You could build a house using just the wood from that tree. When we were little, like ten years old, Rowdy and I climbed that sucker. It was probably stupid. Yeah, okay, it was stupid. It’s not like we were lumberjacks or anything. It’s not like we used anything except our hands, feet, and dumb luck. But we weren’t afraid of falling that day. Other days, yeah, I’m terrified of falling. No matter how old I get, I think I’m always going to be scared of falling. But I wasn’t scared of gravity on that day. Heck, gravity didn’t even exist. It was July. Crazy hot and dry. It hadn’t rained in, like, sixty days. Drought hot. Scorpion hot. Vultures flying circles in the sky hot. Mostly Rowdy and I just sat in my basement room, which was maybe five degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and read books and watched TV and played video games. Mostly Rowdy and I just sat still and dreamed about air-conditioning. “When I get rich and famous,” Rowdy said, “I’m going to have a house that has an air conditioner in every room.” “Sears has those big air conditioners that can cool a whole house,” I said. “Just one machine?” Rowdy asked. “Yeah, you put it outside and you connect it through the air vents and stuff.” “Wow, how much does that cost?” “Like, a few thousand bucks, I think.” “I’ll never have that much money.” “You will when you play in the NBA.” “Yeah, but I’ll probably have to play pro basketball in, like, Sweden or Norway or Russia or something, and I won’t need air-conditioning. I’ll probably live in, like, an igloo and own reindeer or something.” “You’re going to play for Seattle, man.” “Yeah, right.” Rowdy didn’t believe in himself. Not much. So I tried to pump him up. “You’re the toughest kid on the rez,” I said. “I know,” he said. “You’re the fastest, the strongest.” “And the most handsome, too.” “If I had a dog with a face like yours, I’d shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards.” “I once had a zit that looked like you.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The pastor, gray-bearded with the eyes of a benevolent fanatic, was leading a hymn, and because nearly everybody went to the same Church of Christ in Fort Davis, they joined expertly in the a cappella singing: Yonder, yonder! Yonder in the great beyond Peace and love await Beyond the pearly gate Over yonder in the great beyond! L.D. hadn’t been to church since the Nixon administration, but the song found its way back into his mouth as easily as if he had been singing it that very morning. The familiar harmonies awakened memories, not altogether unpleasant, of his long-forsaken youthful piety, enforced by family and community and really everyone he knew. But look at him now, the silver-haired cynic in a gray westerncut suit and handmade boots, tall, slender, suave, part of the scene and apart from it, a man who knew exactly where he ought to be, on top of the world and in control. Governor Abbott was there and said a few kind words of the sort that might be said of anyone not convicted of a felony. The deceased and the governor represented different parties, but L.D. thought it a smart move on Abbott’s part to plant a flag in the district, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War, but after Trump the chickens were out of the coop. At least, L.D. hoped so. The governor slyly called Walter a “friend and occasional ally,” overlooking votes that might be inconvenient to recall in the face of the fierce widow in the front row with the folded flag of Texas in her lap. Walter might be dead, but his influence lingered. After the eulogies—there must have been seven or eight of them, all on the same themes, good family man, selfless public servant, little truth in any of it—L.D. got in line to toss a few desiccated clods into Walter’s grave. He noticed old Ben Fortson hobbling in his direction so he moved off a bit to avoid him, but Ben would not be dodged. “My oh my oh my, looky who’s here,” Ben said, his eyes alight with deviltry. “Good day to you, Judge.” “You come all this way for Walter Dunne?” “He was a good man.” “True or not, he’s no use to you now,” Ben observed. “You’re a harsh old bastard, Ben.” Ben’s laugh detoured into a dry cough. “I seen you casting your eyes over this lot,” he said when he recovered. “I mighta been,” L.D. allowed. “What’s it to you?” “Walter’s not even in the ground and you’re shopping for his replacement.” “Not shopping. Poking around, like.” “Waste of your time.” Ben spat into the dust, the only moisture the soil had experienced in months. “You oughter run over to Alpine, talk to the mayor, he’s got an appetite for higher office, they tell me. Sees hisself as governor one day.” “He’s about as likely to get a blow job from the Queen of England.” L.D.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  We can afford to smile at the silly superstition which points out the kitchen of the Virgin Mary beneath the Latin Church of the Annunciation, the suspended column where she received the angel’s message, the carpenter shop of Joseph and Jesus, the synagogue in which he preached on the acceptable year of the Lord, the stone table at which he ate with his disciples, the Mount of Precipitation two miles off, and the stupendous monstrosity of the removal of the dwelling-house of Mary by angels in the air across the sea to Loretto in Italy! These are childish fables, in striking contrast with the modest silence of the Gospels, and neutralized by the rival traditions of Greek and Latin monks; but nature in its beauty is still the same as Jesus saw and interpreted it in his incomparable parables, which point from nature to nature’s God and from visible symbols to eternal truths.165 Jesus was inaugurated into his public ministry by his baptism in the fast-flowing river Jordan, which connects the Old and New Covenant. The traditional spot, a few miles from Jericho, is still visited by thousands of Christian pilgrims from all parts of the world at the Easter season, who repeat the spectacle of the multitudinous baptisms of John, when the people came "from Jerusalem and all Judaea and all the region round about the Jordan" to confess their sins and to receive his water-baptism of repentance. The ruins of Jacob’s well still mark the spot where Jesus sat down weary of travel, but not of his work of mercy and opened to the poor woman of Samaria the well of the water of life and instructed her in the true spiritual worship of God; and the surrounding landscape, Mount Gerizim, and Mount Ebal, the town of Shechem, the grain-fields whitening to the harvest, all illustrate and confirm the narrative in the fourth chapter of John; while the fossil remnant of the Samaritans at Nablous (the modern Shechem) still perpetuates the memory of the paschal sacrifice according to the Mosaic prescription, and their traditional hatred of the Jews. We proceed northward to Galilee where Jesus spent the most popular part of his public ministry and spoke so many of his undying words of wisdom and love to the astonished multitudes. That province was once thickly covered with forests, cultivated fields, plants and trees of different climes, prosperous villages and an industrious population.166 The rejection of the Messiah and the Moslem invasion have long since turned that paradise of nature into a desolate wilderness, yet could not efface the holy memories and the illustrations of the gospel history.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Thus the old Keltic Church came to an end, leaving no vestiges behind it, save here and there the roofless walls of what had been a church, and the numerous old burying-grounds to the use of which the people still cling with tenacity, and where occasionally an ancient Keltic cross tells of its former state. All else has disappeared; and the only records we have of their history are the names of the saints by whom they were founded preserved in old calendars, the fountains near the old churches bearing their name, the village fairs of immemorial antiquity held on their day, and here and there a few lay families holding a small portion of land, as hereditary custodiers of the pastoral staff, or other relic of the reputed founder of the church, with some small remains of its jurisdiction."95 II. THE CONVERSION OF FRANCE, GERMANY, AND ADJACENT COUNTRIES. General Literature. I. Germany Before Christianity. Tacitus: Germania (cap. 2, 9, 11, 27, 39–45); Annal. (XIII. 57); Hist. IV. 64). Jac. Grimm: Deutsche, Mythologie. Göttingen, 2nd ed. 1854, 2 vols. A. F. Ozanam: Les Germains avant le christianisme. Par. 1847. K. Simrock. Deutsche Mythologie. Bonn, 2nd ed. 1864. A. Planck: Die Götter und der Gottesglaube der Deutschen. In "Jahrb. für Deutsche Theol.," 1866, No. 1. II. The Christianization Of Germany. F. W. Rettberg: Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands. Göttingen, 1846–48. 2 vols. C. J. Hefele (R.C.): Geschichte der Einführung des Christenthums im südwestl. Deutschland. Tübingen 1837. H. Rückert: Culturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes in der Zeit des Uebergangs aus dem Heidenthum. Leipz. 1853, 2 Vols. W. Krafft: Kirchengeschichte der German. Völker. Berlin 1854. (first vol.) Hiemer (R.C.): Einführung des Christenthums in Deutschen Landen. Schaffhausen 1857 sqq. 4 vols. Count de Montalembert (R.C.): The Monks of the West from St. Benedict to St. Bernard. Edinb. and Lond. 1861 sqq. 7 vols. I. Friedrich (R.C., Since 1870 Old Cath.): Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands. Regensb. 1866, 1869, 2 vols. Charles Merivale: Conversion of the West. The Continental Teutons. London 1878. (Popular). G. Körber: Die Ausbreitung des Christenthums im südlichen Baden. Heidelb. 1878. R. Cruel: Geschichte der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter. Detmold 1879. (Chs. I. and II.) § 21. Arian Christianity among the Goths and other German Tribes. I. Editions of the remains of the Gothic Bible Version of Wulfila: by H. C. von der Gabelenz and J. Loebe, Leipz. 1836–46; Massmann, 1855–57; E. Bernhardt, 1875 (with the Greek text and notes); and Stamm, 7th ed. 1878, and in fac-simile by Uppström, 1854–1868. See also Ulphilae Opera, and Schaff, Compan. to Gr. Test., p. 150. Ulphilae Opera (Versio Bibliorum Gothica), in Migne’s Patrolog., Tom. XVIII. pp. 462–1559 (with a Gothic glossary). II. G. Waitz: Ueber das Leben und die Lehre des Ulfila. Hanover 1840. W. Bessel: Das Leben des Ulfilas und die Bekehrung der Gothen zum Christenthum. Götting. 1860. W. Krafft: l.c. I. 213–326; and De Fontibus Ulfilae Arianismi. 1860. A. Helfferich: Der west-gothische Arianismus und die spanische Ketzergeschichte. Berlin 1860.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  I’ve always loved tiny things. Miniatures.” The plier’s jaws probed gently at Fran’s infected gum line. Fran groaned, her body tensing from her taint up to the base of her skull as her muscles bathed in a deluge of sour cortisol. “When I was six our dentist got these little cars. Dragsters, cement mixers, all kinds of shit. My brother Derek got a little cop car and I was obsessed with that thing. I used to pretend it had tiny cops inside it, drinking tiny coffees and complaining about their tiny wives. He said there was another one left in the prize drawer and fuck, I wanted it worse than anything.” The nose of the pliers found a shard of tooth standing at an angle to the root. Slowly, her face inches from Fran’s mouth, Beth gripped it and worked it free. The pain was sickening. Gray light washed over Fran’s thoughts. She groaned at the sight of the bloody white sliver and Beth covered her mouth with her free hand. “You can’t scream,” she said. “I know it sucks.” Fran sucked in deep breaths through her nostrils, fighting the urge to bite Beth’s hand and then shriek her lungs out. How long had it been since she screamed? She imagined little Beth had screamed a lot. A horrible, fussy baby with a scrunched red face and jaundiced skin. By six she must have been a terror. “The morning of my next checkup I was practically salivating. The fuckin’ adventures I was gonna have with that car.” She leaned in close, dark brown eyes narrowed to slits, and nosed the pliers back toward Fran’s left rear molars where the hot pulse of her broken tooth clutched at her jaw. “Finally there was one boy left ahead of me, this little ginger puke named Brian Finnerty I knew from school. I was losing my mind waiting for him to come out. I knew he’d take it first, that he’d know somehow and take it just to fuck with me.” The pliers’ jaws found their mark. Roots of pain unfurled down through Fran’s jawbone. “When he finally strutted out into the waiting room with that patrol cruiser in his hand, I couldn’t take it. I walked up to him and popped him right in the mouth. Knocked out his filling.” Fran laughed. She couldn’t help it. Beth, who must have been waiting for the opening, pulled. Tearing, sucking pain. Bone grinding against bone. Blood welling up from the white-hot absence of the socket. Threads and rags of loose flesh waved in the sluggish flow. Fran whimpered, curling in on herself, flinching away from the gory little nub of broken bone clamped in Beth’s pliers. The other girl leaned down to kiss her temple, then pressed something smooth and crinkling into her limp hand. “Good job, Frankie,” said Beth. “Here’s your prize.” Fran looked down at it.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  They are Asian and they are Russian. They think and speak and consider themselves Russian, for all intents and purposes so far as I can see, and I really wonder how they manage that. On the other hand, the longer I stayed the more I realized some of the personal tensions between North Russian and Uzbek are national and some racial. There are only four sisters in this whole conference. In the plane coming to Tashkent, I sat with the three other African women and we exchanged chitchat for 5½ hours about our respective children, about our ex-old men, all very, very heterocetera. IV Tashkent is divided into two parts. There’s the old part that survived the huge earthquake of 1966, and there’s the newer part which is on the outskirts of old Tashkent. It’s very new and very modern, rebuilt in a very short time after the earthquake that practically totaled the area. It was rebuilt by labor from all over the Soviet Union. People came from the Ukraine, from Byelo-Russia, from all over, and they rebuilt the city. And there are many different styles of architecture in the new part of town because every group who came built their own type of building. It’s almost a memorial to what can be done when a large group of people work together. It was one of the things that impressed me greatly during my stay in Tashkent. The old part, which is really the center of Tashkent, looks very, very much like a town in Ghana or Dahomey, say Kumasi or Cotonou. In the daylight it looks so much like some parts of West Africa that I could scarcely believe it. In fact, if Moscow is New York in another space, in another color — because both New York and Moscow have a little over eight million population and should apparently have many of the same problems, but Moscow seems to have handled them very differently — if Moscow is New York, Tashkent is Accra. It is African in so many ways — the stalls, the mix of the old and the new, the corrugated tin roofs on top of adobe houses. The corn smell in the plaza, although the plazas were more modern than in West Africa. Even some flowers and trees, Calla lilies. But the red laterite smell of the earth was different.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But everything was so reminiscent of New York in winter that even as I sat at 9:30 P.M . after dinner, writing, looking through the blinds, there was the sound of a train and light on the skyline, and every now and then the tail lights of an auto curving around between the railroad bridge and the hotel. And it felt like a hundred nights that I remembered along Riverside Drive, except that just on the edge of the picture was the golden onion-shaped dome of a Russian Orthodox church. Before dinner I took a short walk. It was already growing dark, but down the street from the hotel was the Stadium stop on the Metro, which is a subway. I walked down there and into the Metro station and I stood in front of the escalators for awhile just watching the faces of the people coming and going. It felt like instant 14th Street of my childhood, before Blacks and Latins colored New York, except everyone was much more orderly and the whole place seemed much less crowded. The thing that was really strangest of all for the ten minutes that I stood there was that there were no Black people. And the token collector and the station manager were women. The station was very large and very beautiful and very clean — shockingly, strikingly, enjoyably clean. The whole station looked like a theater lobby — bright brass and mosaics and shining chandeliers. Even when they were rushing, and in Moscow there’s always a kind of rush, people lack the desperation of New York. One thing that characterized all of these people was a pleasantness in their faces, a willingness to smile, at least at me, a stranger. It was a strange contrast to the grimness of the weather. There are some Black people around the hotel and I inquired of Helen about the Patrice Lumumba University. This is a university located in Moscow for students from African countries. There were many Africans in and around the hotel when I got back from the Metro station and I think many of them were here for the Conference. Interestingly enough, most of them speak Russian and I don’t. When I went downstairs to dinner, I almost quailed in front of the linguistic task because I could not even find out where I was supposed to sit, or whether I should wait to be seated. Whenever the alphabet is unfamiliar, there are absolutely no cues to a foreign language. A young Black man swaggered across my eyesight with that particular swagger of fine, young Black men wanting to be noticed and I said, “Do you speak English?” “Yes,” he said and started walking very rapidly away from me.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Gardens can be built t o awa ken all sorts of emotions: some may be gay, others offer a sweet m elancholy, oth er s w ill be romantic, and others agai n majestic. The art of garden s i s a " m etaphysic", which makes us able "par la maniere de diriger les terrains, d e se donner, a sa volonte, des sentiments et d es pensees" ("by the way one l a y s out the grounds, to give oneself, at will, feelings an d thoughts"). Gardens c a n thus make us better: "La theorie de s jardins nous men e a l'humanite et a l a bienfaisance,, ("the theory of gardens leads us to humani ty and beneficence " ). 3 3 In fact, the gardens of the late eighteenth century were used for a ll sort s of purposes in addition to making people better. Many were design e d to evoke and sustain the pleasant melancholy of the lonely dreamer. The park a t Ermenonvill e e ven had an Altar of Revery. And their means included more than nature. They also evoked nostalgic melancholy by constructing to mbs, temples, statues, pagodas, an d also fresh ruins, which sometimes suggeste d foreign lands and far-away t imes. They played the full gamut of emotions, from the most exalted to the most sensational. And some were meant t o evoke a frisson before the fearful and uncann y . But alw a ys the point l a y in the feelings. To see how new this is, we can pe rhaps usefully con trast it with earlier views of nature which also in some way relied on notions of a c ert ain a t tunement or correspondence between natural phenomena and hum a n affairs. We see this kind of corresponden ce in S hakespeare, for inst a nc e, where great natural disorders accompany and portend crimes in the h um a n dom ain. The night in which Duncan is murdered was an unrul y one , wi t h "lam entings heard i' th' air; strange screams of death", and it re mains da rk even though day should hav e started. On the previous Tuesday a f alco n h a d been killed by a mousing owl; and Duncan's horses turned wild i n the n i gh t, "Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would/ Make war with m ankin d". 3 4 Nature is here in some way in tu ne with human affairs.