Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My People (2022)

  In my five decades as a journalist bearing witness to the cyclical nature of our country’s history of racism and division, I’ve come to believe that my professor’s sentiment was his way of challenging us to not only learn from our history, but also to use our craft as journalists to help the public know our past, because the duty to remember does not belong to journalists alone. It’s only through this knowledge that we’re all able to make informed decisions about our lives—decisions that, in turn, affect our neighbors near and far. Indeed, knowing our history inspired Hamilton and me to make our own: we had attended a high school named for Henry McNeal Turner, a pioneering minister and politician who was elected to the Georgia legislature during Reconstruction, a brief time in the 1800s when newly freed slaves were granted full citizenship and could vote for the very first time. We were reminded of that history every day as we walked through the school doors. A few months before we enrolled in college, six-year-old Ruby Bridges exercised her right to enroll in the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Her walk, accompanied by federal marshals, was immortalized in the Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With . (The same painting formed a shadow in Bria Goeller’s photo illustration of Kamala Harris after Ms. Harris became the first Black woman nominated by a major party for vice president of the United States.) Hamilton and I were also empowered by the history of our people and the struggles they confronted and overcame, dating to their first steps off the slave ships and onto these shores in 1526. It took a village to teach us this legacy—the teachers in our segregated schools and churches; our neighbors and families. And it took yet another village to help us play our own part in this history. Our lawyers Constance Baker Motley, Donald L. Hollowell, and Horace Ward were advocates for us, along with the newly minted young lawyer Vernon Jordan. Mr. Jordan helped lead us through the crowd of students yelling ugly racial epithets as we walked on campus to register for classes. And earlier, that village comprised the men of ACCA who encouraged us to apply to college in the first place. It’s because of this village that a Republican judge, William A. Bootle, gave his historic ruling ordering UGA to accept us. It’s also because of this village that, forty years after we set foot on campus, former governor S. Ernest Vandiver of Georgia apologized in person at the university for having vowed, “No, not one”—not one person the color of Hamilton and me would ever be allowed to enter its hallowed halls.

• From My People (2022)

  “I’m from out of state—Florida—and I decided to come here after the students were killed. I wanted to help black people, and I figured ain’t no better place to start.” But there was festivity, much of it buzzing around Dr. Walker, a figure styled by Miss Giovanni as “the living personification of the spirit of Phillis Wheatley.” Dr. Walker has been at Jackson State for twenty years. She feels this festival is particularly significant, because she says she sees many parallels between what happened to Phillis Wheatley and what is continuing to happen to black women and black men who try to get published today. In 1942, she recalled, she received the Yale Younger Poets Award for For My People . It was, she said, a steady seller for sixteen years, and then, she said, her friends at the press either left Yale or died and the book went out of print. “In 1968, the young black students forced Yale to bring it back. They reissued it in the sixth printing. But now that it’s selling better than ever, they’ve decided it should go out of print, after thirty-one years.” Black women, Dr. Walker said, have “always been tokens” in the publishing world. “The textbooks haven’t included them, no matter how well received or critically acclaimed they were. And this is one of the reasons we’re having this festival. Our young people have got to be educated to all that has been hidden.” Shirley ChisholmWilling to Speak OutThe New York Times MAY 22, 1970 Mrs. Shirley Chisholm, who went to Congress as the first black woman member of the House of Representatives sixteen months ago, sat forward in her office chair and succinctly assessed herself and her colleagues. “The difference between me and most of them,” she said, “is that I am not a politician, I’m a stateswoman. “I never told anybody that I came into politics for life. Therefore I have nothing to lose for speaking out against the wrongs in the system. I am basically a fearless person, and everywhere people look to that kind of person for leadership.” In winning the seat for the 13th District, in Brooklyn, Mrs. Chisholm defeated James Farmer, former national director of the Congress of Racial Equality and now undersecretary of health, education, and welfare. In speaking of Mr. Farmer the other day she referred to him as “the national figure.” Mrs. Chisholm not only has become something of a national figure herself, but is also an important figure in Democratic state and local politics. The double role, she has learned, is a demanding one. Mrs. Chisholm, a former member of the Assembly, led the recent party fight to designate State Senator Basil A. Paterson for lieutenant governor. But because she is in Washington four days a week, and spends a day with her constituents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, she said she cannot go on the road to campaign with Mr. Paterson. “Mrs.

• From My People (2022)

  But the event at the hospital was particularly important to Zuma, in part because it would demonstrate how much he differs from his predecessor Thabo Mbeki, who questioned the connection between HIV and AIDS, and whose health minister believed in treating the disease with garlic and beetroot. Even Nelson Mandela, Mbeki’s predecessor, largely ignored the issue while in office. The UN estimates that about one in five South Africans between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine is HIV-positive, and that around a thousand people die from AIDS-related causes every day. Zuma sat in a chair in the middle of a crowded stage and watched as Chomee, a stunning young singer of kwaito , urban-township music that sounds something like hip-hop, bounded up. Dressed in a short red satin skirt and black fishnet stockings, and joined by a backup group of similarly sultry young women, Chomee was singing a song that was written for the campaign: “No blame, no shame / We need no stigma / You got to test in order to be treated.” Within a few minutes, Zuma, who is sixty-eight years old and was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie, had sprung out of his chair and joined the singers. He swayed back and forth, bending his knees and rhythmically dropping his body down, until you could see the shiny top of his clean-shaven head. He smiled broadly as he shimmied back up beside one of the young women. There was a blast of applause, and Zuma moved to a lectern and began to describe his new campaign. After a short while, he declared that he had recently taken an HIV test and wanted to make an announcement. The crowd grew quiet. “After careful consideration, I have decided to share my results with all South Africans,” he said. Then he laughed and added, “I’m sure South Africans know I’m open about my life generally. No surprises.” The whole world knows quite a bit about Zuma’s private life. In 2006, he was acquitted of raping an AIDS activist who was HIV-positive. He conceded that he had had unprotected sex with the woman, but he insisted that it had been consensual—and that taking a shower afterward was one way he had reduced the risk of contracting the disease. Zuma is a Zulu, and he made a debatable ethnic assertion at the trial to justify his behavior: “In Zulu culture, you cannot leave a woman if she is ready.” In 2008, Zuma, a polygamist who had already married three women (one of whom he divorced, and another of whom committed suicide), took a fourth wife. In January of this year, he took a fifth, and in February he admitted to fathering a daughter with yet a different woman, the daughter of a friend. This gave him, officially, twenty children. After the revelation, Zuma apologized to the nation and paid the traditional compensation to the woman’s family.

• From My People (2022)

  Louis,” said one associate, “but, as a lawyer and a lifelong worker in the NAACP, she has worked with the problems of folks who represent a large part of the association’s membership—working-class and poor people. She’ll be terrific for the job.” Following the election, Roy Wilkins, who as executive director of the NAACP is an employee of the board, said Mrs. Wilson was an “excellent choice, smart, and has never given in under pressure.” He added that he looked forward to working with her. “She’s from my hometown, you know—St. Louis. We’re both from the ‘Show Me’ state.” The fifty-five-year-old Mrs. Wilson’s involvement as a leader in the association began at the local level, where in 1958, she was the first woman president of the six-thousand-member branch in St. Louis. Following four years as president of the Missouri State Conference of Branches, she was elected in 1963 to the National Board of Directors, where she remained until her election as chairman yesterday. Part of her tutoring occurred under the late William Ming, a Chicago lawyer, whom she succeeded two years ago as permanent chairman or chief parliamentarian of the organization’s national conventions. “I don’t have any horror stories,” Mrs. Wilson said yesterday in explaining her commitment to one of the country’s leading organizations for racial justice. “I consider myself an aristocrat. Character. Competence. Accomplishment,” she said firmly. “That’s my definition of aristocracy.” Sitting on the edge of her hotel bed and pounding her fist occasionally for emphasis, she continued: “I am what I am because my parents were fine, spirited human beings who had a sense of family and were concerned about bringing us up in the best possible world.” Mrs. Wilson has one brother and one sister. Although both parents are now dead, it was their lifetime involvement in the NAACP that charted her own course, she said, adding that they had been involved “because it was the thing to do.” She said her father, the late James Bush Sr., a real estate broker, was the “spark plug” who organized black real estate brokers to bring a suit against restrictive covenants in housing. That successful case, Shelley v. Kramer , was to housing discrimination what Brown v. Board of Education was to segregated education, as one NAACP official put it. And Mrs. Wilson proudly recalls that her first case following her graduation from Lincoln University Law School in 1943 was to incorporate the brokers who brought the suit. Following her father’s interest and encouragement to her to enter a career in nursing, teaching, or social work—“all those female things”—Mrs. Wilson majored in economics and mathematics at Talladega College. After law school, she began working in real estate law, and later, among other things, served as an assistant attorney general in Missouri. Mrs.

• From My People (2022)

  In the decade since Rutledge , Strode has kept working but even in a film like The Professionals , where his role was virtually equal to those of Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Robert Ryan, he was denied top billing. During the last three years, he has made five “spaghetti westerns” in Italy. But he has never protested from public platforms about the injustice of it all. In New York, Strode’s present entourage includes Sig Shore, the American distributor who bought Black Jesus , publicity woman Myrna Post, and general kinds of people who move in and out with promotion designs. Strode feels that “if Sig Shore hadn’t bought Black Jesus , Woody Strode would still be just a legend.” Among the films contributing to the legend are some that are mediocrities, offering the image of Strode as semi-savage, and a few that he recalls not without a certain satisfaction—like Pork Chop Hill , a story of the Korean War, in which he acted “a reluctant black soldier who didn’t want to fight. At one point in it, I pretended to be crazy. ‘Don’t you move, I’m aiming straight at your body,’ I said to my superior officer, Gregory Peck. He tells me, ‘But all the boys are fighting,’ and I said, ‘But you ought to see where I live back home. You sonfabitch, I wouldn’t die for that and I be goddam if I’m going to fight for Korea.’ That was in 1958 and Sy Bartlett, who produced the movie, almost got killed for that. It was never a big hit in the States.” Strode cherishes the times when he could speak such lines in films—“dignified lines.” Black Jesus , he feels, gives him dignity, too. During the interview, when we are alone, Strode is relaxed and easy to talk with—almost as if he had discovered a long-lost relative and was eager to reconstruct the past. He is wearing cowboy boots, tight-fitting blue slacks, and a blue, short-sleeved knit shirt that is complemented by his broad chest and large, muscular arms. Eagerly, he sits forward in his chair as he talks, sometimes saying “Negro” but often correcting himself and changing it to “black,” and excitement brightens his eyes. But later, when his business associates are in the room, Strode is cautious. He talks, but carefully. A former athlete who played football at UCLA, was named all-pro end in the Canadian League in 1948, was a professional wrestler and used to do 1,000 sit-ups, 1,000 push-ups, and 1,000 knee-bends each morning, Strode is now fifty-seven—looks thirty-seven—and can still muster 500 of each daily. He remembers that he could beat Glenn Morris, the 1936 Olympic Decathlon champion, in all sports except sprints. “I could throw over 50 feet in shot, go 6'5" in high jump, 11 feet pole vault, throw the javelin over 200 feet—I would stand flatfooted. I couldn’t hop—I hadn’t the finesse. “And I could run the five-minute mile.

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

  It is possible that the office of rector goes back as far as 1200, when an official was called "the head of the Paris scholars."1292 As early as 1245 the title appears distinctly and the rector is distinguished from the proctors.1293 At a later time it was the proper custom, in communicating with the university, to address the "rector and the masters." The question of precedence as between the rector and other high dignitaries, such as the bishop and chancellor of Paris, was one which led to much dispute and elbowing. Du Boulay, himself an ex-rector, takes pride in giving instances of the rector’s outranking archbishops, cardinals, papal nuncios, peers of France, and other lesser noteworthies at public functions.1294 The faculties came to be presided over by deans, the nations by proctors. In the management of the general affairs of the university, the vote was taken by faculties. The liberties, which the university enjoyed in its earlier history, were greatly curtailed by Louis XI. and by his successors in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The university was treated to sharp rebukes for attempting to interfere with matters that did not belong to it. The right of cessation was withdrawn and the free election of the rectors denied.1295 The police of the city were invested with larger jurisdiction, and the sovereign’s will was made a controlling element. The fame of the University of Paris came from its schools of arts and theology. The college of the Sorbonne, originally a bursary for poor students of theology, afterwards gave its name to the theological department. It was founded by Robert of Sorbon, the chaplain of St. Louis, the king himself giving part of the site for its building. In the course of time, its halls came to be used for disputations, and the decisions of the faculty obtained a European reputation. Theological students of twenty-five years of age, who had studied six years, and passed an examination, were eligible for licensure as bachelors. For the first three years they read on the Bible and then on the Sentences of the Lombard. These readers were distinguished as Biblici and Sententiarii. The age limit for the doctorate was thirty-five. One of the most interesting chapters in the history of the university is the struggle over the admission of the mendicant friars in the middle of the thirteenth century. The papacy secured victory for the friars. And the unwilling university was obliged to recognize them as a part of its teaching force. The struggle broke out first at the time of the "cessation," 1229, when, as it would seem, the Dominicans secretly favored the side of the civil magistrates against the university authorities, and poisoned the court against them.

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

  But before that boy singled me out, the sheer velocity of running across a wet field with other kids felt safe. There were dozens of us. We ranged in age from thirteen or fourteen for the big boys down to Babby Carter, who at two trailed behind the herd everywhere. I was seven and fit into the group about dead center, age-wise. I was small-boned and skinny, but more than able to make up for that with sheer meanness. Lecia still holds that I would have jumped a buzz saw. Daddy had instructed me in the virtue of what he called equalizers, which meant not only sticks, boards, and rocks, but having one hell of a long memory for mistreatment. So I wouldn’t hesitate to sneak up blindside and bite a bigger kid who’d gotten the better of me a week before. To my knowledge, I never slouched off an ass-kicking, even the ones that made me double up and cry. It might take me a week or so, but I always came back. (To this day, I don’t know whether to measure this as courage or cowardice, but it stuck. After I grew up, the only man ever to punch me found himself awakened two nights later from a dead sleep by a solid right to the jaw, after which I informed him that, should he ever wish to sleep again, he shouldn’t hit me. My sister grew up with an almost insane physical bravery: once in the parking lot outside her insurance office, she brushed aside the .22 pistol of a gunman demanding her jewelry. “Fuck you,” she said and opened her Mercedes while the guy ran off. The police investigator made a point of asking her what her husband did, and when she said she didn’t have one, the cop said, “I bet I know why.”) In some ways, all the kids in my neighborhood were identical. Our fathers belonged to the same union. (“Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, Local 1242” was how they answered the phone on Daddy’s unit.) They punched the same clocks for almost exactly the same wage. (Our family had been considered rich because of Mother’s part-time newspaper work.) Maybe one kid’s daddy worked Gulf and another Texaco and another Atlantic Richfield, but it amounted to the same thing. Maybe one was a boilermaker and another controlled the flow of catalyst in a cracking unit. But they all worked turning crude oil into the various by-products you had to memorize by weight in seventh-grade science class—kerosene, gasoline, and so on. The men all worked shift work because that paid a little better, so all of us knew how to tiptoe on days when the old man was on graveyards. The union handed out cardboard signs that ladies tacked to their doors: SHHH! SHIFT WORKERS ASLEEP. Nobody but Mother had ever been to college.

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

  But to reach a still higher level of ascetic holiness, he retreated, after the year 285, further and further from the bosom and vicinity of the church, into solitude, and thus became the founder of an anchoretism strictly so called. At first he lived in a sepulchre; then for twenty years in the ruins of a castle; and last on Mount Colzim, some seven hours from the Red Sea, a three days’ journey east of the Nile, where an old cloister still preserves his name and memory. In this solitude he prosecuted his ascetic practices with ever-increasing rigor. Their monotony was broken only by basket making, occasional visits, and battles with the devil. In fasting he attained a rare abstemiousness. His food consisted of bread and salt, sometimes dates; his drink, of water. Flesh and wine he never touched. He ate only once a day, generally after sunset, and, like the presbyter Isidore, was ashamed that an immortal spirit should need earthly nourishment. Often he fasted from two to five days. Friends, and wandering Saracens, who always had a certain reverence for the saints of the desert, brought him bread from time to time. But in the last years of his life, to render himself entirely independent of others, and to afford hospitality to travellers, he cultivated a small garden on the mountain, near a spring shaded by palms.314 Sometimes the wild beasts of the forest destroyed his modest harvest, till he drove them away forever with the expostulation: "Why do you injure me, who have never done you the slightest harm? Away with you all, in the name of the Lord, and never come into my neighborhood again." He slept on bare ground, or at best on a pallet of straw; but often he watched the whole night through in prayer. The anointing of the body with oil he despised, and in later years never washed his feet; as if filthiness were an essential element of ascetic perfection. His whole wardrobe consisted of a hair shirt, a sheepskin, and a girdle. But notwithstanding all, he had a winning friendliness and cheerfulness in his face.

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

  This empire embraced the most fertile and civilized countries of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and about one hundred millions of human beings, perhaps one-third of the whole race at the time of the introduction of Christianity.76 To this outward extent corresponds its historical significance. The history of every ancient nation ends, says Niebuhr, as the history of every modern nation begins, in that of Rome. Its history has therefore a universal interest; it is a vast storehouse of the legacies of antiquity. If the Greeks had, of all nations, the deepest mind, and in literature even gave laws to their conquerors, the Romans had the strongest character, and were born to rule the world without. This difference of course reached even into the moral and religious life of the two nations. Was the Greek, mythology the work of artistic fantasy and a religion of poesy, so was the Roman the work of calculation adapted to state purposes, political and utilitarian, but at the same time solemn, earnest, and energetic. "The Romans had no love of beauty, like the Greeks. They held no communion with nature, like the Germans. Their one idea was Rome—not ancient, fabulous, poetical Rome, but Rome warring and conquering; and orbis terrarum domina. S. P. Q. R. is inscribed on almost every page of their literature."77 The Romans from the first believed themselves called to govern the world. They looked upon all foreigners—not as barbarians, like the cultured Greeks, but—as enemies to be conquered and reduced to servitude. War and triumph were their highest conception of human glory and happiness. The "Tu, regere imperio populos, Romane, memento!"had been their motto, in fact, long before Virgil thus gave it form. The very name of the urbs aeterna, and the characteristic legend of its founding, prophesied its future. In their greatest straits the Romans never for a moment despaired of the commonwealth. With vast energy, profound policy, unwavering consistency, and wolf-like rapacity, they pursued their ambitious schemes, and became indeed the lords, but also, as their greatest historian, Tacitus, says, the insatiable robbers of the world.78 Having conquered the world by the sword, they organized it by law, before whose majesty every people had to bow, and beautified it by the arts of peace. Philosophy, eloquence, history, and poetry enjoyed a golden age under the setting sun of the republic and the rising sun of the empire, and extended their civilizing influence to the borders of barbarianism. Although not creative in letters and fine arts, the Roman authors were successful imitators of Greek philosophers, orators, historians, and poets. Rome was converted by Augustus from a city of brick huts into a city of marble palaces.79 The finest paintings and sculptures were imported from Greece, triumphal arches and columns were erected on public places, and the treasures of all parts of the world were made tributary to, the pride, beauty, and luxury of the capital.

• From The Art of Memoir

  In 1991, after five years, I delivered the novel to my hard- drinking, hell-for-leather writer’s group, which was famous for making people cry. I still have longhand notes from Sven Birkerts and Robert Polito (was Lewis Hyde there?). They patiently say: “Try this as memoir.” “Your essays are good, maybe do this as nonfiction.” “TRIM!!” Looking back, every arrow aimed at a throbbing neon sign that read *memoir*. As Elizabeth Hardwick told Robert Lowell before he invented confessional poetry, “Why not just say what happened.” The voice I’d eventually figure for that first memoir drew from a lifetime of reading, which my mother had fostered. An artist and history maven, she kept a wobbly tower of books by her bed. She was smart and witty—master of the one-liner—but not much of a storyteller. The talk of my barroom aficionado daddy ran rich with figurative language. If a woman had an ample backside, he might say, “She had a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag,” which—believe it or not—was a positive attribute. Instead of milking this current running naturally through my head, I’d tried in my novel to sound like some fluffy, ruffly Little Bo Peep. Daddy’s manner of speaking would unlock the book for me. Daddy, the in-house exile in our household of book-reading females, would solve my biggest literary problem. He was a legendary storyteller in the bars and gambling joints across our county. For an anthro class in college, I’d even recorded some of his tales. But his manner of talk was so singular, I didn’t need to listen to the tapes. The stories hummed through my fibers. It’s ironic that the very redneckese I’d spent some time trying to rise above wound up branding my work like hot iron on a steer’s ass. Without borrowing from Daddy’s voice—without the grit and grime of where I’d grown up—I’d been playing with one hand tied back. When there was a thunderstorm, Daddy might say, “It’s raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock,” which, for all purposes, is a line of poetry. The crisp image jolts a little. It yanks you out of the

• From Going Clear (2013)

  At the end of the evening, Miscavige retires to his den and drinks Macallan Scotch and plays backgammon with members of his entourage, or listens to music on his $150,000 stereo system (he loves Michael Jackson), or watches movies in his private screening room ( his favorite films are Scarface and the Godfather trilogy). He usually turns in around three or four in the morning. Miscavige enjoys shooting pool or playing video games in his lounge. He has a tanning bed, and a high-end gym that few people other than Cruise are permitted to use. Although he is short in stature, Miscavige exudes physical power. He favors tight-fitting T-shirts that show off his chiseled biceps. He collects guns, maintains at least six motorcycles, and has a number of automobiles, including an armor-plated GMC Safari van with bulletproof windows and satellite television, and a souped-up Saleen Mustang that Cruise gave him to match his own. His uniforms and business suits are fashioned by Richard Lim, a Los Angeles tailor whose clients include Cruise, Will Smith, and Martin Sheen. Miscavige’s shoes are custom-made in London by John Lobb, bootmaker to the royal family. His wardrobe fills an entire room. Two full-time stewards are responsible for his cleaning and laundry. Cruise admired the housecleaning so much—even Miscavige’s lightbulbs are polished once a month—that the church leader sent a Sea Org team to Cruise’s Telluride retreat to train the star’s staff. Until 2007, when he traveled, Miscavige would often rent Cruise’s Gulfstream jet, but he has since upgraded to a roomier Boeing business jet, at a cost of thirty to fifty thousand dollars per trip. He brings along his personal hairdresser and chiropractor. He loves underwater photography, and when he returns from his annual trip on the Freewinds , he has the photography staff put the photos into slides so they can be appreciated by the entire Gold Base staff. The contrast with the other Sea Org members is stark. They eat in a mess hall, which features a meat-and-potatoes diet and a salad bar, except for occasional extended periods of rice and beans for those who are being punished. The average cost per meal as of 2005 (according to Marc Headley, who participated in the financial planning each week) was about seventy-five cents a head—significantly less than what is spent per inmate in the California prison system. When members join the Sea Org, they are issued two sets of pants, two shirts, and a pair of shoes, which is their lifetime clothing allotment; anything else, they purchase themselves. Although the nominal pay for Sea Org members is fifty dollars a week, many are fined for various infractions, so it’s not unusual to be paid as little as thirteen or fourteen dollars. Married couples at Gold Base share a two-bedroom apartment with two other couples, meaning that one pair sleeps on the couch. In any case, few get more than five or six hours of sleep a night.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The ship was being constructed in Portland, Oregon, and when it was finally commissioned, in April 1943, the local paper wrote about it, describing Hubbard as a “Lieutenant Commander” (he was actually not yet a full lieutenant), who was “a veteran sub-hunter of the battles of the Pacific and the Atlantic.” There is a photo of Hubbard and Moulton standing in front of the small ship, which was suited mainly for harbor patrol. Hubbard is wearing his glasses and holding a pipe in his hands, with the collar of his pea jacket turned up and a determined look on his face. “ These little sweethearts are tough,” he says of the ship. “They could lick the pants off anything Nelson or Farragut ever sailed. They put up a sizzling fight and are the only answer to the submarine menace. I state emphatically that the future of America rests with just such escort vessels.” It is worth lingering a moment over this overblown statement. The scripted language might as well have been lifted from one of Hubbard’s pulp-fiction heroes. Hubbard must have longed to be such a figure in reality, only to be thwarted by his repeated quarrels with higher authority. Each detail Hubbard offers—comparing himself advantageously with history’s greatest naval heroes, asserting that he holds the future of his nation in his hands—testifies to his need for grandeur and heroism, or at least to be seen as grand and heroic. He would soon be given an opportunity. The PC-815 was equipped with depth charges and sonar to detect enemy submarines. Sonar sends out pinging sounds, which, in clear water, go unanswered, but obstacles, such as enemy submarines—or fish, or debris, or even schools of shrimp—generate echoes. The art of reading such responses is a tricky one, and although Hubbard had trained on the device in sub-chaser school, he had been near the bottom of his class. He cast off from Astoria, Oregon, for his shakedown cruise on May 18, bound for San Diego to pick up radar equipment. At 3:40 a.m., only five hours out of port, the sonar picked up an echo ten miles off Cape Lookout in a heavily traveled shipping lane. Hubbard and Moulton immediately put on headsets, trying to determine what the object was. In particular, they were listening for the giveaway sound of a propeller. The craft made no recognition signals that would have indicated it was an American vessel. “ It made noises like a submarine and it was behaving like a submarine,” Moulton later testified. “So we proceeded to attack.” “ The target was moving left and away,” Hubbard wrote in his subsequent Action Report. “The night was moonlit and the sea was flat calm.” The professional writer in him warmed to the narrative: “The ship, sleepy and sceptical, had come to their guns swiftly and without error.

• From The Art of Memoir

  In the beginning, when there are zero pages, you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out, even if it later lands on the cutting room floor. Each page takes you somewhere you need to travel before you can land in the next spot. You zigzag, and in the low moments, you just have to keep plodding on—saying the next small thing about which you feel strongly, trying to nestle down into that single instant of clear memory you know without shadow of doubt is both true and important to who you’ve become. When it works, it’s like a spell has been cast. For me, it’s less the old world that comes in clear as the old me—how I felt, what I schemed about, who I lied to. But the writing’s seldom pretty—the sentences are just banal. The pushing comes when editor me comes back to comb over— and over and over—the pages, unpacking each moment. Mostly I take general ideas and try to show them carnally or in a dramatic story. I also interrogate a lot of what I believe: Are you sure that happened? How would he have told it differently? And because the carnal is where I write from, I write a lot of kinesthetic descriptions of my body in old spaces. All the while, I question. Is this really crucial? Are you writing this part to pose as cool or smart? For me, the last 20 percent of a book’s improvement takes 95 percent of the effort—all in the editing. I can honestly say not one page I’ve ever published appears anywhere close to how it came out in first draft. A poem might take sixty versions. I am not much of a writer, but I am a stubborn little bulldog of a reviser. In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity. Each editorial mark can’t register as a “mistake” that threatens the spider ego. Remind yourself that revising proves your care for the reader and the nature of your ambition. Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. And you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby, disordered parts. There’s a strange freedom in keeping the bar so high that—poor me—I’ll never make it over. If Shakespeare’s my standard, I’m at

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

  Beza was now considered by all the French Reformed as their most distinguished orator, and next to Calvin their most celebrated theologian. This commanding position he had attained by many able services. When, therefore, the queen-mother Catherine determined to hold a discussion between the French prelates and the most learned Protestant ministers, the Parisian pastors, seconded by the Prince of Condé, the Admiral Coligny, and the king of Navarre, implored Beza to come, and to him was committed the leadership. At first he declined. But in answer to renewed and more urgent appeals he came, and on Aug. 22, 1561, he was again in Paris, for the first time since his precipitate flight, in October, 1548—thirteen years before. The preliminary meeting was in the famous château of St. Germain-en-Laye, on the Seine, a few miles below Paris. There, on Aug. 23, he made his appearance. On the evening of that day he was summoned to the apartments of the king of Navarre, and in the presence of the queen-mother and other persons of the highest rank, he had his first encounter in debate with Cardinal Lorraine. The subject was transubstantiation. The Cardinal was no match for Beza, and after a weak defence, yielded the floor, saying that the doctrine should not stand in the way of a reconciliation. On Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1561, the parties to the Colloquy assembled in the nuns’ refectory at Poissy, some three miles away. It was soon evident that there was not to be any real debate. The Catholic party had all the advantages and acted as sole judges.1288 It was a foregone conclusion that the verdict was to be given to the Catholic party, whatever the arguments might be. Nevertheless, Beza and his associates went through the form of a debate, and courageously held their ground. In characteristic fashion they first knelt, and Beza prayed, commencing his prayer with the confession of sins used in the Genevan liturgy of Calvin. He then addressed the assembly upon the points of agreement and of disagreement between them, and was quietly listened to until he made the assertion that the Body of Christ was as far removed from the bread of the Eucharist as the heavens are from the earth. Then the prelates broke out with the cry "Blasphemavit! blasphemavit!" ("he has blasphemed"), and for a while there was much confusion. Beza had followed the obnoxious expression with a remark which was intended to break its force, affirming the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist; but the noise had prevented its being heard. Instead, however, of yielding to the clamor the queen-mother insisted that Beza should be heard out, and he finished his speech. The Huguenots claimed the victory, but the Roman Catholics spread the story that they had been easily and decidedly beaten. The prelates requested the points in writing, and it was not till Sept. 16 that they made a reply. The Cardinal of Lorraine was the spokesman. No opportunity was given the Protestants to rejoin, as they were ready to do at once.

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

  The eldest son of a knight, Abaelard was born at the village of Palais or le Pallet, a few miles from Nantes. His original name was Pierre de Palais. Both his parents entered convents. Abaelard had for his first teacher Roscellinus. He listened to William of Champeaux, then at the head of the cathedral school at Paris, and soon began with confidence to refute William’s positions.1352 He then established independent schools at Melun and Corbeil. After a period of sickness, spent under his father’s roof, he returned to Paris. He again listened to William on rhetoric, but openly announced himself as an antagonist of his views, and taught on Mt. Genevieve, then covered with vineyards. Abaelard represents himself as having drawn almost the last scholar away from the cathedral school to Genevieve. We next find him under Anselm of Laon, who, with his brother Radulf, had made the school of Laon famous. Again Abaelard set himself up against his teacher, describing him as having a wonderful flow of words, but no thoughts. When he lit a fire, he filled the whole house with smoke.1353 He was like the barren fig tree with the promise of leaves and nothing more. Abaelard started at Laon counter lectures on Ezekiel. Now the opportunity of his life came and he was called to preside over the cathedral school at Paris. William of Champeaux had retired to St. Victor and then had been made bishop. The years that immediately followed were the most brilliant in Abaelard’s career. All the world seemed about to do him homage. Scholars from all parts thronged to hear him. He lectured on philosophy and theology. He was well read in classical and widely read in sacred literature. His dialectic powers were ripe and, where arguments failed, the teacher’s imagination and rhetoric came to the rescue. His books were read not only in the schools and convents, but in castles and guildhouses. William of Thierry said1354 they crossed the seas and overleaped the Alps. When he visited towns, the people crowded the streets and strained their necks to catch a glimpse of him. His remarkable influence over men and women must be explained not by his intellectual depth so much as by a certain daring and literary art and brilliance. He was attractive of person, and Bernard may have had this in mind when he says, Abaelard was outwardly a John though he had the heart of a Herod.1355 His statements were clear. He used apt analogies and quoted frequently from Horace, Ovid, and other Latin poets.

• From My People (2022)

  The ProfessorThe New Yorker SEPTEMBER 3, 1966 For more than thirty years, in two crowded rooms that make up the National Memorial African Bookstore, on Seventh Avenue near 125th Street, or on a soapbox out front, the owner of the store, Lewis Michaux, a small, nimble, Virginia-born Negro of about seventy, has been dispensing the truth as he sees it (“telling it like i’ tis”) about the life and welfare of “the black man.” (He disdains the word “Negro.”) The other day, when we paid him the first of a couple of visits, he told us that before he came to New York he had a job picking huckleberries for nine cents a day on a white man’s plantation. “That white man had so many sheeps and cows and pigs that I decided he didn’t need me,” he said. “So one day I sat down and ate all the huckleberries I had picked, and then I walked away, followed by three pigs. Later, I sold the pigs out of a croker sack for a dollar and a half apiece, and I never picked another huckleberry.” When Mr. Michaux arrived in New York, he had with him one book, Up from Slavery , and a bust of Booker T. Washington. Now he has, by his own count, stacked on tabletops and under them, and along stretches of the walls from floor to ceiling, a hundred and five thousand volumes (“a few less or more”), mostly by or about Negroes—there are more abouts than bys—and, along the walls not covered by books, what he calls the world’s only Afro-American Hall of Fame. Michaux has been preaching Back to Africa long enough to have been influenced both by Marcus Garvey (“We do not desire what has belonged to others, though others have always sought to deprive us of that which belonged to us. . . . If Europe is for the Europeans, then Africa shall be for the black peoples of the world”) and by Malcolm X (“America has a very serious problem: us. . . . Once we all realize that we have a common enemy, then we unite on the basis of what we have in common, and what we have foremost in common is that enemy—the white man. He’s an enemy to all of us”), and he has not confined his words to Negro audiences in Harlem but has often spoken over the radio and on college campuses. (“I told them at Hunter College, ‘You are the future. What your forefathers have laid down, you’d better bypass it.’”) As the years have passed, he has had some unusual visitors at the bookstore. There is a picture of Nasser on one wall of the store, alongside pictures of Negro and African leaders, and he told us that Nasser had given it to him. “Yes, Nasser came to see me,” he said, with obvious amusement.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Whatever we have been, in some sort we still are.’ 6 Lewis here points to the cumulative capacity of human beings to retain the wisdom of the past, while ensuring that its subsequent development and enhancement is passed on to future generations. Communities of beliefs can thus be grounded in the inherited wisdom of the past, and see this as generating strategies for dealing with the future. Communities of Belief as Places of Safety I have deliberately spoken of ‘ communities of beliefs’. There is no universal, indubitable foundation for human knowledge, no set of grounding or informing beliefs that is shared by all human beings. What we find empirically is a diversity of beliefs across history and human culture – beliefs that are not universally perceived as intellectually self-evident. This naturally leads people to gravitate towards communities that share their beliefs, partly for intellectual and cultural security (beliefs can easily lead to discrimination or social conflict), but also to enable them to flourish within this tradition of belief by exploring its implications for an appropriate way of living. Communities of belief arise due to the observable diversity of human beliefs and the intellectual and social needs that this diversity raises. In western culture, communities of belief – irrespective of the genre of those beliefs – can be seen as playing two significant roles: as places of safety and reflection . Human communities emerged primarily as ‘safe places’ to enable physical survival, allowing individuals within those communities to feed and defend themselves, and ensure their futures through reproduction. The nomadic lifestyles of hunters and gatherers gradually gave way to more settled forms of existence. Cities emerged, capable of sustaining their existence through agriculture in Mesopotamia, and along the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in Asia, and the Huang (Yellow) River in China. Within those cities, social stratification took place at several levels. At least three different forms of monarchy are known to have emerged in ancient Mesopotamia, whose authority was often associated with (and perhaps even dependent) on each city-state’s patron deity. In ancient Egypt, the king was seen as both the chosen representative and servant of the gods. To be a member of these communities was to be entangled within their founding myths, social norms and beliefs. Although these were often expressed in state or civic festivals, many of them took place at the level of households, where rituals relating to family events were celebrated. 7 In the ancient world, the ‘city’ designated a polis , a community of citizens united by common origins and sharing common concerns. The core identity of the city – what was transmitted from one generation to another – rested in its citizens and their beliefs, not its physical structures. As Catherine Morgan points out, one of the key questions about ancient Greek cities concerns ‘the extent to which cities served as statements of community identity’, particularly through ‘ideological institutions such as communal cults.’

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I ran into Nora one February morning. We hadn’t seen each other since the previous September, the day we broke up. I was standing on a street corner, waiting to cross, when I heard someone call my name. We exchanged the usual pleasantries. I had something I wanted to say and wasn’t sure if I should say it. My chest was tight. You know, I said, I don’t believe anymore a lot of the things you told me. It really confused me, that stuff you said about what queer sex is and isn’t. It really messed me up. I know, she said. I’m really sorry. I’m good in bed, I said. I figured that out: I’m actually very good. A man passed on the sidewalk behind us. Can I give you a hug? she asked. I said sure. The back of her sweater was cool and rough under my hands, like the face of a cliff. Across the street, the walk sign flashed. Gently I pulled away, waved, and went on. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In King County, Washington, if you are divorcing with children, you must attend a fluorescent-lit seminar called “What About the Children?” It provides information that every parent divorcing should think about: what hurts and helps children during family transitions, how parental conflict affects a family, how to best communicate with co-parents, and the nuts and bolts of drafting a parenting plan. But the pointed title of the seminar made me livid. I felt scolded by it, as though I could possibly forget to think about my child. In the essay “The Bathroom,” Zadie Smith writes of her mixed feelings about her father’s deferring of his own ambitions for the sake of his family. “For the sake of the children was a phrase I especially detested; it seemed a thing people said to get out of the responsibility of actually living out their own desires and ideas.”55 The data I encounter most often—in the seminar and in the media—insists that kids of divorce will have it harder than kids whose parents stay married. This truism is obviously true for many. But a lot of us believe nowadays that divorce is no worse for kids than a prolonged unhappy marriage. Is that true? And is it denial or healthy skepticism that makes me want to ask?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Even with such perfect co-operative subjection as an ideal, the project of educating depressed groups has always the seeds of its own subversion within it. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing if only because it so often induces a thirst for more. Serious study can grow even from the rudiments of prescribed frivolity; can give rise to analysis, direction, organization-finally the way out of present circumstances. And the nineteenth century saw this thirst grow to Gargantuan proportions, while it produced such phenomena as the crazy pathos of Mary Lyon’s green bag and its travels over New England begging contributions of five, three, and one dollar—and even, in its graceful lack of discrimination, accepting an offering of six cents-that a real college might open for women in America.19 Mount Holyoke opened its doors in 1837. Oberlin had admitted women to its degree the same year and was the first college to offer women an education unquestionably equal to that of men. Over the following decades a handful of eastern colleges for women sprang up: Vassar in 1865, Smith and Wellesley in 1875, Radcliffe (the Harvard Annex) in 1882, and Bryn Mawr in 1885. In England, Queen’s College was founded at London University in 1848, and Bedford in 1849. In England as in America, the decade of the seventies saw great progress: Girton was opened at Cambridge in 1872, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville opened at Oxford in 1879, and in 1874 a woman’s school of medicine was founded in London. As the specific aim of these colleges was the education of women, they were at first more significant than co-education: in 1875 Vassar alone had as many women students enrolled in its collegiate course as the eight state universities combined which admitted women.20 In America, the land grant institutions were also capitulating to the demand and furnishing women with higher education, but as the public institutions admitted women largely out of their own economic need, the result of a decline in their male enrollment before and during the Civil War, rather than out of any special commitment toward their new students, and as for a long time they confined women to their “normal school” departments, they never came to feel any particular obligation to the education of women. In both countries the growth of higher education for women was the result of two factors: the opening of teaching to women, and feminist agitation.21 The spread of universal primary and secondary education was one of the great ideals of the nineteenth century. Since in both England and America, the cheapest system of public education was obtained through hiring women as schoolteachers, women had to be conceded better education if only so that they might teach children. Higher education for women on an equal basis with men was one of the feminists’ chief objectives. Yet so fearful were its advocates of compromising their cause, that they were occasionally timid about the more doubtful campaign for suffrage.

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

  Thousands of books would buy something as big as a clothes dryer, or a La-Z-Boy recliner. Back in the Leechfield grocery, the lady shoppers had fallen like vultures on the long ribbons of stamps Mother held up at the end of the checkourt lane. “Anybody want these?” she’d holler, waving them in the ai. The carts would converge four deep where she stood, all those ladies. grabbing across their chicken parts and lettuces and fat babies in the riding seat with their stubby legs jammed through the square metal holes like so many rolled roasts. Mother didn’t believe in Green Stamps or coupons. They were a trick to keep women hunched over their kitchen tables after their kids were asleep, not unlike darning and embroidery—things Mother excelled at but refused to do. Nor would she drive a block out of her way to get gas for two cents cheaper. Mother had transcended thrift, even before she got Grandma’s money. Still, when I started stuffing those stamps in the tin metal coffee canister with a rooster painted on it, Mother didn’t utter a word to mock it, which must have taken some big-league restraint. I spent my evenings at the kitchen table licking stamps and then smoothing the sticky sheets into savings books. When my spit ran out, I took up the sour-smelling blue sponge from the sink. On the pages of those books lay neat grids spelled out in menthol-green lines. I worked sloppy most of the time, but it pleased me no end when I did manage to line up a strip of stamps exactly within those borders. Lecia asked me on a nightly basis if I’d gone slap-dab crazy. But there wasn’t much venom in her voice. Days, I hung out at the grocery store in town, just inside the magic doors. People sometimes pulled their stamps out of the paper sacks to hand over to me before shoving their carts onto the black rubber runner that ticked open those doors with a hum. Garbage day was my best haul. People tended to stuff grocery sacks in those armored-looking metal cans. Often as not, the brown sacks came in a neatly folded pile on top of all the yucky stuff. Only a few times did I have to dig past coffee grounds and melon rinds to get at them. And in those sack bottoms, you could sometimes find Green Stamps by the yard that somebody’s husband or teenager forgot to draw out. The few doctors and business people from Colorado Springs who kept weekend places up there didn’t mess with stamps at all. I hit their small, neat garbage cans first. At the end of all this foraging and licking and counting, I had dozens of full stamp books stacked in a vodka box. Lecia had to help me scoot it over the pine needles and gravel in the driveway to the car. Mother then heaved it in the trunk.