Pride
Pride is the upright feeling — the chest lifting, the spine straightening, the quiet or open satisfaction in something done, made, or belonged to. It is the emotion the tradition is most divided about, named a sin in one inheritance and a dignity in another. Vela reads pride as a primary emotion that runs both ways, distinct from the defensive pride that only braces against shame, and follows the writers who have held its honest version.
Working definition · Upright satisfaction in self, lineage, or work—earned or defended.
3462 passages · 1 Vela essay · in 2 clusters
Vela’s read on this emotion
Pride is the emotion with the longest moral rap sheet, and the reading takes that history seriously without accepting its verdict. The pride the contemplative tradition warned against is real, but so is the pride a person earns by surviving, by making, by refusing to be made small — and the two are not the same feeling.
The reading splits along that seam. The memoir of escape and self-making reads pride as something reclaimed — the pride of having left, of having built a self the family or the system did not authorize. Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and the memoir of leaving hold a pride that is inseparable from dignity. The contemplative inheritance reads the other pride: Augustine of Hippo named superbia — pride — as the first and root sin, the self curving in toward itself, and the Western moral imagination has argued with that ranking ever since. The literature of identity and belonging — the pride claimed by those a culture tried to shame — reads pride as a political act, a refusal of the assigned verdict.
Pride is not the same as vanity, arrogance, or pride-as-defense. Vanity needs an audience; pride can be private. Arrogance compares and ranks; pride can simply stand. Pride-as-defense is pride mobilized to shield against shame — the upright posture held precisely because the ground feels unsafe — and the reading gives it its own page. The four are kin and the reading keeps them separate, because the difference between earned pride and defended pride is the whole moral question.
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Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
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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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3462 tagged passages
From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)
τρἄχηλιάω, fo arch the neck proudly, like a horse: metaph. to exalt oneself, LXX (Job 15. 25), Method, ap. E. Μ. :---τραχηλιαστήξκ. οὔ, 6, Byz. τρἄχηλίζω, fut. iow, properly of wrestlers, to take by the throat, or bend the neck back,and so to overpower, master completely, τὸν ταῦρον Theophr. Char. 27; τοὺς νεανίσκους Plut. Anton. 33, cf. 2. 521 B. EL: Pass. to be seized by the neck, overpowered, Diog. Cyn. ap. Diog. L. 6. 61, Teles ap. Stob. 535. 233; ὑπὸ θεάματος τραχηλιζόμενος καὶ περια- γόμενος Plut. 2. 521 C; πολέμῳ Joseph. B. J. 4. 6, 2; ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις Philo 2,127 :—absol. to practise this kind of struggle, Plat. Rival. 132 C, Themist. 291 B; cf. Xen. Lac. 5, 9, and v. oe τραχηλισμός. oR to be flung head-foremost ; and of ships, to be carried down by a whirl- pool, Strab. 268. 3. to have one’s neck bent back (like a victim), so that the throat gapes when cut, Lat. resupinare: hence, to be laid open, Ep. Hebr. 4. 13; cf. Hesych., τετραχηλισμένα" πεφανερωμένα. τρἄχηλιμαῖϊῖος, v. sub τραχηλιαῖος. τρἄχήλιον, τό, Dim. of τράχηλος, the butt-end of a spear, Suid., etc. τρἄχηλισμός, 6, a seizing by the throat, a trick in wrestling, Luc. Lexiph. 5, Plut. 2. 526 E, Ath. 14 F. τρἄχηλιστήρ, ἢ jpos, 6, a kind of bandage, Chirurg. Vett. τρἄχηλιώδης, ες, stiff-necked, E. M. τρἄχηλο- Seoporns, ov, 6, chaining the neck, κλοιός Anth. P. 6. 107. τρἄχηλο-ειδής, és, like the neck, Hesych. s. V. δειράδες. τρἄχηλο-κάκη [a], 4, neck-plague, i.e. an iron collar, cited from Nicet.; cf. ποδοκάκη. τρἄχηλο-κοπέω, to cut the throat, behead, Plut. 2. 308 Ὁ :—Pass., Arr. Epict. 1. 1, 18., 2, 16, etc. :---τραχηλοκοπία only in Gloss.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
But Dove kept me going till the sun was coming in long and red through the portal. Finally I wrapped around him, with the boat rockin’; and licked the sweat out of his ear; “You gonna tell me now what you was cryin’ for?” He just wriggled. I waited for him to tell me. But there was that shift in his breathing, you know? Gone to sleep. I just put my head down, a half-hard still eight inches in him. And went to sleep. Proud of them little bastards. They’re good boys. Glad I stuck their mammies. Glad I kept ’em when they fell out. You feelin’ better now? Yeah, you look better. Your backside okay? come on, we go see what Proctor wants us for. Gimme your hand, girl. The color of bell metal: Longer than a big man’s foot; thick as a small girl’s wrist. Veins made low relief like vines beneath the wrinkled hood. His fingers climbed the shaft, dropped to hair tight as wire, moved under the canvas flaps to gouge the sac, black as an over-ripe avocado: spilled his palm (it is a big hand); climbed the shaft again. There is little light. What’s here bars the shutters in gold. Water lisps and whispers outside. The cabin sways, rises. There is a wind out to sea, that means. That means here at port it is clear evening. The dog on the floor claws the planks. The captain’s toes spread the footboard. His chin went back and his belly made black ridges. The long head rolled on the pillow, brass ring at his ear a-flash. The hood slipped from the punctured helmet. The knuckles, like knots in weathered cable, flexed on him. The rhythm started with the boat’s sway. Increase: his hand and the boat syncopate. The doubled pace pulled his buttocks from the blanket. The rim of his fist beat the tenderer rim (one color with his palm). His breath got loud. It halted, and halted, and halted. Stop action film: a white orchid from bud to bloom. Breath regular. Mucus drips his knuckles. Still stiff, the shaft glistens. Pearls on black wire. “Kirsten?” He swung his feet over the edge, his shoulders hunched (dull as cannon shot); his dirty shirt was sleeveless. Buttons: copper. “Kirsten!” His voice: maroons, purples, a nap between velvet and suede. “Come down here!” When the door cracked, he laughed. Her hair was yellow, paler than the light. Her smock, torn at her neck, hung between her breasts. One dull aureole rose on the blue horizon. Her face moved with its laughter before she saw, “Captain, you . . . ?” saw, and smothered it, to have it break again. Blue eyes widened in the half dark. “What do you want?” She stepped on to the rug.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
But Dove kept me going till the sun was coming in long and red through the portal. Finally I wrapped around him, with the boat rockin’; and licked the sweat out of his ear; “You gonna tell me now what you was cryin’ for?” He just wriggled. I waited for him to tell me. But there was that shift in his breathing, you know? Gone to sleep. I just put my head down, a half-hard still eight inches in him. And went to sleep. Proud of them little bastards. They’re good boys. Glad I stuck their mammies. Glad I kept ’em when they fell out. You feelin’ better now? Yeah, you look better. Your backside okay? come on, we go see what Proctor wants us for. Gimme your hand, girl. The color of bell metal: Longer than a big man’s foot; thick as a small girl’s wrist. Veins made low relief like vines beneath the wrinkled hood. His fingers climbed the shaft, dropped to hair tight as wire, moved under the canvas flaps to gouge the sac, black as an over-ripe avocado: spilled his palm (it is a big hand); climbed the shaft again. There is little light. What’s here bars the shutters in gold. Water lisps and whispers outside. The cabin sways, rises. There is a wind out to sea, that means. That means here at port it is clear evening. The dog on the floor claws the planks. The captain’s toes spread the footboard. His chin went back and his belly made black ridges. The long head rolled on the pillow, brass ring at his ear a-flash. The hood slipped from the punctured helmet. The knuckles, like knots in weathered cable, flexed on him. The rhythm started with the boat’s sway. Increase: his hand and the boat syncopate. The doubled pace pulled his buttocks from the blanket. The rim of his fist beat the tenderer rim (one color with his palm). His breath got loud. It halted, and halted, and halted. Stop action film: a white orchid from bud to bloom. Breath regular. Mucus drips his knuckles. Still stiff, the shaft glistens. Pearls on black wire. “Kirsten?” He swung his feet over the edge, his shoulders hunched (dull as cannon shot); his dirty shirt was sleeveless. Buttons: copper. “Kirsten!” His voice: maroons, purples, a nap between velvet and suede. “Come down here!” When the door cracked, he laughed. Her hair was yellow, paler than the light. Her smock, torn at her neck, hung between her breasts. One dull aureole rose on the blue horizon. Her face moved with its laughter before she saw, “Captain, you . . . ?” saw, and smothered it, to have it break again. Blue eyes widened in the half dark. “What do you want?” She stepped on to the rug.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense (in the paperback of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it): The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language. He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion—not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards. I moved through the lung-scalding air, no longer a misplaced cracker but a by-God symbolic animal who’d puzzled out—over a week’s time—the meaning of a hard sentence. But checking my P.O. in the student union the next day, brushed past by the sons and daughters of the professional class—my down-jacketed (alleged) peers—I sensed a dashed line around me where invisible scissors would soon clip me away. Fair-minded, straight-toothed, impossibly clear-skinned, these kids were nothing if not democratically inclined vis-à-vis the likes of me. They blew pot smoke from their joints into my pursed lips and paid my way to Dylan and the Grateful Dead. They gave me rides in paid-for cars. Their parents steered me under restaurant awnings and through doors where the maître d’s looked at my soaking tennis shoes long and hard. They passed menus featuring appetizers that cost more than the whole chicken-fried steak dinners Daddy bought us on paycheck night. They invited me home for Thanksgiving and Easter. They seemed to trust my scrappy climb out of the lower class would allow me to handle on first sight all manner of eating utensil by imitating, chimpanzeelike, their movements. Their bottomless cool—their cynical postures grown from privilege they were ungrateful for—could make me hate them. Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and think they hit a home run. But by God, I could outdrink the little suckers, and when the dashed lines around my body felt sharp enough to be visible, I might take up a held-out bottle. Faced with a boy I had a crush on—a bow-legged Missouri cowboy with the face and form of young Marlon Brando—I eagerly took the tequila his friend handed me. Forgoing lime and salt, I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed back a shot. As that one went down like bleach, I was holding up my glass for another. Whoa, Brando said, looks like you’ve done this before. Absolutely, I said. She’s from Texas, a kid from my physics class said.
From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)
φιλοτιμία, Ion. -ίη, ἡ, the character and conduct of the φιλότιμος, jealous love of honour or distinction, ambition, mostly in bad ‘sense, Pind. Fr. 229, Eur. I. A. 527, Ar. Thesm. 383, Thuc., etc., cf. Arist. Eth. N. 4.4; κακίστη δαιμόνων φ. Eur. Phoen. 532 ; ἄκαιρος Isocr. 408 C ; joined with πλεονεξία, Thuc. 3.82; with φιλονεικία, Plat. Legg. 860E, Rep. 548 C;— but also in good sense, Isocr. g9 C, 104 C, Xen. Mem. 3. 3, 13, Hier. 7, 3, cf, Plat. Rep. 553 C:—the object is added in gen., φ. τινός emulous desire for a thing, Ib. 555 A, Xen. Cyr. 8. 1, 35; also, φ. ἐπί Tue emulous pride in a thing, Plat. Symp. 178 Ὁ ; ὑπέρ τινος, περί τι Polyb. 1. 52, 4.» 5. 71, 6; πρός τι 1d. 6. 55, 4, cf. Plat. Lege. 834 B; but, φ. πρός τινα am- bitious rivalry with him, Isocr. 30 C, Polyb., etc. :—hence, absol. am- bitious rivalry, emulous desire, p. ἐμβάλλειν τινί, ὅπως .. Xen. Cyr. 8. I, 39 :—often with Preps. in adv. sense, διὰ φιλοτιμίαν Plat. Rep. 586 C, Isocr. 99 C, etc.; φιλοτιμίας ἕνεκα Lys. 157.83 ὑπὸ φιλοτιμίας Plat. Phaedr. 257 C, etc.; or simply φιλοτιμίᾳ, Dem. 23. 9, Plut., etc. :—in pl. jealousies, rivalries, Plat. Rep. 548 Ὁ, εἴς, ; ai φ. τῶν συγγραφέων party-feelings, Polyb. 3. 21, 10:—in later writers, as Plut., it comes to be almost identical with φιλονεικία : some special uses may be noted ; 2. ambitious pertinacity, obstinacy, κτῆμα σκαιὸν ἡ φ. Hdt. 3. 5, 3. 3. ambitious display, πλούτου Lys. g11 Reisk. :— hence lavish expense, prodigality, Dem. 312. 26, Plut. Nic. 3; φ. πρός twa lavish outlay upon him, Aeschin. 56. 27; and in good sense, munificence, Greg. Naz. ΤΙ. the object coveted, honour, dis- tinction, credit, ἐκείνῳ μὲν ᾧ. πρὸς ὑμᾶς Dem. 477. fin., cf. 410. 213 >. παρέχειν τινί Xen. Hier. 1, 27, cf. Dem. 18. 22; κτᾶσθαι Aeschin. 60. 4; both in sing. and pl., ἀποστερεῖσθαι τῆς φιλοτιμίας or τῶν -τῶν Dem. 765. 14., 410. 24, cf. 729. 15. III. punningly, the con- duct of one Philotimus, Cic. Att. 7. 11, cf. 6.9, 2.
From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)
τῦραννο-ποιός, 6, a maker of tyrants, Plat. Rep. 572 Ε. τύραννος [Ὁ], 6, also ἡ (v. infr. 2), an absolute sovereign, unlimited by law or constitution, prob. first in h. Hom. 7. 5, where it is used of a god, Apes, . . ἀντιβίοισι τύραννε; ; 80, ὁ τῶν θεῶν τ., of Zeus, Aesch. Pr. 736, cf. Ar. Nub. 564; ὦ τύραννε τᾶς ἐμᾶς φρενός, i.e. Apollo, Soph. Tr. 217. The word first began to be used in the time of Archil., Hippias ap. Argum. Soph. O. T., Schol. Aesch. Pr. 224; and became common in the time of Theogn., Pind., and Hdt.; when, free governments having superseded the old hereditary sovereignties (βασιλείαι), all who obtained absolute power in a state were called τύραννοι, tyrants, or rather despots ;—for the term rather regards the irregular way in which the power was gained, whether force or fraud, than the way in which it was exercised, being applied to the mild Pisistratus, but not to the despotic kings of Persia. However, the word soon came to imply reproach, and was then used like our ¢yrant, as in Plat. Gorg. 510 B, Polit. 301 Ὁ, al. ; ὕβρις φυτεύει τύραννον Soph. O. T. 873; cf. Arnold Append. 1 to Thuc. vol. 1, Dict. of Antiqq. s. v. 2. in a wider sense, the tyrant’s son, or any member of his family, Schaf. Soph. Tr. 316, Reisig Enarr. O. C. 847 (851) :—so, % τύραννος was both the queen herself and the king’s daughter, princess, Eur. Hec. 809, Med. 41 (ubi v. Elmsl.), 877, 1356; πρέπει yap ws τύραννος εἰσορᾶν, of Clytaemnestra, Soph. El. 664; αὐτὴ οὐ τ. ἣν Φρυγῶν Eur. Andr. 204. 8. metaph., αὐλὸς τ. τᾶς ἐμᾶς φρενός Soph. Tr. 217; ἔρως τ. ἀνδρῶν Eur. Hipp. 538; πειθὼ τὴν τ. ἀνθρώποις μόνην Id. Hec. 816. 4. a bird, prob. the golden-crested wren, Regulus cristatus, Arist. H. A. 8.3, 5; cf. τρόχιλος 1. 2. 11. τύραννος, ov, as Adj. like τυραννικός, kingly, royal, τύραννα σκῆπτρα Aesch. Pr. 761; τ. σχῆμα Soph. Ant. 1169; ἡ τύραννος κόρη Eur. Med. 1125; τύραννον δῶμα the king’s palace, Eur. Hipp. 843, etc.; 7. ἑστία Id. Andr. 3; 7. δόμος the royal house, Id. Hel. 478, etc.; és τύρανν᾽ ἐγημάμην into the royal house, Id. Tro. 474. 2. imperious, despotic, τ. πόλις Thuc. 1.122, 124; TUpavva δρᾶν Soph. O.T. 588. TUpavvo- φόνος, ον, slaying tyrants, Anth. P. 7. 388, Dio C. 44. 35. τὔραννό-φρων, ovos, ὃ, 7, of imperious temper, Jo. Chrys. τύρβᾶ, Adv., (τύρβη) péle-méle, in confusion, ts .. τρέπουσα τύρβ᾽ ἄνω κάτω Aesch. Fr. 321. 8; also σύρβα, Phot., Hesych. τυρβάζω, fut. aow, to trouble, stir up, Lat. turbare, τὸν πηλὸν .. . TUp- βάσεις βαδίζων Ar. Vesp. 257; τυφλὸς "Αρῆς συὸς προσώπῳ πάντα τὺρ- βάζει κακά Soph. Fr. 720 :—Pass., πολὺς δὲ πηλὸς éx πίθων τυρβάζεται bursts in turbid stream from .. , Ib. 928 ; τ. περί τι to be troubled about .
From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)
1694 καὶ ἀνέμοεν pp. Soph. Ant. 354, cf. 176, 207; often in pl., καρτεροῖς φρονήμασι with stubborn thoughts, Aesch. Pr. 207; Ζεύς τοι κολαστὴς τῶν ὑπερκόπων ἄγαν pp, Id. Pers. 827; ματαίων .. φρονημάτων ἡ γλῶσσ᾽ ἀληθὴς γίγνεται κατήγορος Id. Theb. 438 ; ἐμπέδοις φρ. Soph. Ant. 169; τὰ σκληρ᾽ ἄγαν φρ. Ib. 4733; τῶν pp. ὁ Ζεὺς κολαστὴς τῶν ἄγαν ὑπερφρόνων Eur. Heracl. 388; φρ. μεγάλα high thoughts, Plat. Symp. 190 B, cf. Criti. 120 E. 8. judgment, κατὰ τὴν ἰδίαν pp. οὐδεὶς εὐτυχεῖ Menand. Monost. 306. II. either in good or bad sense, 1. high and noble feeling, highmindedness, high spirit, resolution, pride, τῶν ᾿Αθηναίων τὸ pp. Hdt. 8.144, cf. 9.7, 23 ppovn- ματος πλέως ὃ μῦθός ἐστιν Aesch. Pr. 953; ἀνδρί ye pp. ἔχοντι to a man of spirit, Thuc. 2. 43; pp. καὶ πίστις Arist. Pol. 5. 11, 53; δου- λοῦν τὸ pp. Thuc. 2. 61 (cf. καταφρόνημαγ : c. fut. inf., ἐν φρονήματι ὄντες τῆς Πελοποννήσου ἡ γήσεσθαι aspiring to be leaders of the P., Id. 5. 40 :—often in pl. high thoughts, proud designs, and in collective sense, spirit, pride, διασείσειν τὰ ᾿Αθηναίων pp. Hat. 6. 109, cf. 3. 122, 125., 9. 54: οὐ... ξυμφέρει τοῖς ἄρχουσι pp. μεγάλα ἐγγίγνεσθαι τῶν ἀρχομένων Plat. Symp. 182 C, cf. 190 B, Isocr. 134 Ὁ. 2. in bad sense, presumption, arrogance, insolence, conceit, Aesch, Pr. 955, Eur. Heracl. 926, Ar. Vesp. 1024, Pax 25, Plat., etc.; and in pl., Isocr. 303 D, Plut., etc. IIT. the pl.is used by Aesch., as=qpeves, the heart, breast, ids ἐις φρονημάτων .. πεσών Eum. 478. φρονημᾶτίας, ov, 6, self-confident, high-spirited, or (in bad sense) pre- sumptuous, arrogant, Arist. Pol. 5. 11, 5, Longin. 9, 4; pp. ἐπὶ τῇ in- much Xen. Ages. 1, 243 of a horse, Poll. 1. 194. φρονημᾶτιάω, to be φρονηματίας, Jo. Chrys., Tzetz. φρονημᾶτίζομαι, Pass. to become presumptuous, Arist. Pol. 2. 12, 5; φρονηματισθέντες ex τῶν ἔργων Ib. 8. 6, 11; πεφρονηματισμένοι διά wu Ib. 3. 13, 19., 5.7, 23 ἐπί τινι Polyb. 22. 8, 8, Diod.; gp. ὅτι. to get a notion that .., Schol. Theocr. 14. 48. φρονημᾶτισμός, 6, presumptuousness, arrogance, Polyb. Fr. Gr. 136, Themist. 251 B.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
“Come on up here.” I pulled him up so he leaned on my chest, still lickin’. “What’s the matter with you, boy?” He looked surprised. “Weren’t it good?” “Sure it was good,” I said. “But your daddy know when he wakes up and finds you suckin’ away on his pecker that something’s wrong. I ain’t that drunk.” He finished, then he just put his head down and began to cry. “Hey, boy . . .” I put my arms around him, while he made a couple of hiccuping tries to stop. Then finally he just let it come, all that crying. He began to pee, too, all over my belly. I just rubbed his back. I stuck my finger in his ass, ’cause he liked that. Kids brung up like Nig and Dove can’t never hold their water when they’re young. I just let him cry and pee himself out. Took about the same time. His dick was hard when he finished, too. “You feel better now?” He nodded; and he was rubbin’ himself off. Finally he began to whisper, “Fuck me, papa . . . oh, stick it up my ass, daddy! Go on, fuck me . . .” I reamed him with my fingers a little more. Then I rolled him over and slid in without even no spit. We got goin’ so hard Nig woke up long enough to get over and push his peter into his brother’s mouth. Dove took it from him; I worked his little pink bottom hard. Nig went to sleep again after one shot. But Dove kept me going till the sun was coming in long and red through the portal. Finally I wrapped around him, with the boat rockin’; and licked the sweat out of his ear; “You gonna tell me now what you was cryin’ for?” He just wriggled. I waited for him to tell me. But there was that shift in his breathing, you know? Gone to sleep. I just put my head down, a half-hard still eight inches in him. And went to sleep. Proud of them little bastards. They’re good boys. Glad I stuck their mammies. Glad I kept ’em when they fell out. You feelin’ better now? Yeah, you look better. Your backside okay? come on, we go see what Proctor wants us for. Gimme your hand, girl. FIVETHE STONES OF ST. MARKI leave you free to choose whatever lie you think worthiest to be the truth. —My Faust, Paul Valéry Nig and Dove? Big handed, heavy footed boys, twenty now. Hard shoulders; one blue-eyed, one brown. One with yellow hair, long and dirty; one with black, rough and tight as iron shavings. One bit his nails and smiled a lot. The other didn’t and laughed. Both: workman’s greens. Behind the crotch of one hung ten veined inches, nearly thick as a beer can, red and wet under the wrinkled hood. The other had so much—coal colored—it made the red look small.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
In the public imagination, Faust and Mephistopheles become confused. Frankenstein and the Monster blend by much the same process. Ignoring the literary import, which merely indicates the general reading stupidity of the general reading public, let us follow the psychological implications which take us another way entirely. The correspondence between man and his creations on the one hand, and those between an abstract ethical matrix and man himself: both relations are defined by the same moral mechanic. The world that we (excluding you; you have not been here long enough to be trusted) live in is essentially the real one. Pleasure is good; pain is bad. The rest is a matter of one’s subjective valuation focused through one’s objective powers of extension and empathy. We should have enough sociological resonance with the world you know to create existential tensions. There are more of us than most of you think. Correction: there are more of us than most people who will read this will think. That is a truth: and that this book contains one is what makes it dangerous. What in the eighteenth century was a metaphorical (and metaphysical) conceit is today merely rarified irony. One does not write to be understood. One does not write to entertain. The artist’s greatest value is, like the criminal’s, that he is concerned with symmetry first and values only subordinately. Instruction and entertainment are corollaries that the artistic process invariably generates. Faust is the master of effects; as a magician (and a charlatan) he will be conscious enough of his audience for that. But he has studied the magical effect in an endeavor to learn of magic itself. If he is successful, you will never know he has succeeded. But, lecteur et frere, you are not audience enough. So Faust seeks to gather to him a greater public; one who, by definition, will participate. You have been consorting with them these past hours. They generate in the tensions of the diction that describes them.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
8 Temporary Help C ome January, as part of clawing my way into the white-collar classes I mock, I sit behind the receptionist’s desk of a telecommunications firm that helped build and maintain the internet. In this age, faxes are big news. Operators still plug callers in and out of switchboards. Crawling with horn-rimmed MIT geniuses, this place is, and they’re marketing (unsuccessfully if you can believe it) the very first e-mail program. They’re almost growing too fast not to hire me, so soon I move up from receptionist ($12K) to a secretarial job I suck at ($13K). Since I need the overtime, I take up nighttime data entry for accounting. It’s staring into one of those green screens, doing corporate budgets, that I notice how high salaries rise in marketing. Also, they spend hundreds of thousands on trade shows each year, and my product-manager girlfriend informs me that nobody pays attention to the bud gets. So in the company library, I read a bunch of trade magazines and essentially retype what they said needs to happen into a proposal for managing that budget. Poof, I’m a marketeer. Riding the six-thirty bus to the company in my cheap suit with my briefcase on my lap, I can pass for a normal citizen—except for scribbling poetry in a black notebook. I never thought of myself as competent in commerce, particularly, and striding through the doors lends me a new bearing. I join a corporate women’s track team, lured by the sweet prospect of fitting in as we lope around the pond at lunch hour. Me, belonging somewhere. Sliding the company credit card across a hotel desk, I radiate bourgeois integrity. For a girl bred to yank peanuts out of the ground, any desk job gives off an urban sheen. And this is the go-go eighties in a company where they slap up new cubicles every week. Meanwhile, Warren’s volunteer library job has morphed into a full-time assistant curator’s position, so we’ve moved to a tree-lined suburb where the noise quotient disturbs his work and sleep less. Financially, I’m not exactly out of the woods, but with the first health insurance I’ve ever had, I track down a therapist. Night terrors still wake me screaming twice a week, and if I have a few drinks, an image of Daddy warping into fossil form can set me on a crying jag. Every month we scrape together enough to eat out at a cheap fish house—mussels in garlic and white wine. Once, at the next table, a similarly steaming bowl is lowered in front of a Polish Nobel laureate in poetry whose public lectures we’ve been religiously going to, all goggle-eyed. We marvel at his high forehead, like that bust of Beethoven you always see. Don’t stare, Warren says. But I can’t stop looking at this laureate’s gray and diabolical eyebrows, projecting above his light eyes like a ram’s horns. He practically speeds up my heart.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
Niger ahead, the captain turned the corner, back to the wharf. As they passed Proctor’s second-floor studio, Niger growled. “What? You think we should let the old fool sleep out his Sunday? Well, I’ve found you. Back to the boat, boy!” Someone was whistling overhead. He looked up. The studio windows were opened and the music came through. It stopped for a few moments of conversation; the voices were Proctor’s and Benny’s. Then a face passing and pausing at the window: “Captain?” “Hey, Proctor!” And Niger barked. “You pull out today, Captain?” “Off in a few minutes.” “Come up for a moment, then.” Face gone and only this voice: “Benny, get the captain some coffee.” Back: “I want to show you something, Captain! Come up!” “I got to go on to the—” Gesturing: “Come on!” And Niger was running up and down the first four steps. “Coffee,” Benny said when the captain reached the top step. The captain took the mug in both hands and lowered his face. His lips heated over the black disk, marred with steam, his own reflection, and smelling of chicory. “Can I give the dog . . . ?” Niger was already leaping at the tin pan of scraps. “Sure.” Then the captain—“Down boy!”—looked again at the wall. Wrapping paper was taped along the molding. On a step ladder, Proctor drew with a lump of chalk. The paper rattled. “What do you think?” Proctor stepped down, left his chalk on the top rung. His fingers were stained terra cotta. “This is just a cartoon for the finished work, of course. But it suggests the composition and some of the immediate detail.” He came across the floor, dusting his fingers on his jeans. “Cartoon? It’s going to move like a movie?” Proctor laughed. “No. I just mean it’s full-sized. It’ll be transferred to a wall, then filled in with color. I’ve been working on it since before sun-up.” The captain frowned at the length of paper. Then smiled. “Ah, you can respond to it. Even at this stage. But you know all my models. Still, the problem remains aesthetic. I’m transported by the idea of using the material in such a way that all the relations remain Unreal.” “You missed the best part.” The captain laughed. “I hear you went on well after I left.” Proctor took a cup from Benny. “I’m only interested in chaos as far as it can be contained in ritual. Even if it’s just the ritual of creation. Beyond that, reality bores me. Art is terribly limiting to certain of the sensibilities, I suppose. Oh, I’d make quite a devil.” Niger worried his bone joints to the boards. “Pleasure, suffering, boredom, death: following the path of least resistance, you are going to have a fair amount of all four. With effort, one can avoid much of the first. With craft, one can make the last three meaningful. But what connection can art make between these inevitables?” He shrugged.
It is also, for me, the clearest evidence that Jesus and his earliest companions had not just a vision but a program, not just an idea but a plan. Here, clearly, the kingdom of God is not about me but about us, not about individuality but about society, not about heaven but about earth. It is about divine justice here below. But even apart from all that, the unit demands special emphasis for several independent reasons. First, it is about words and deeds together . It is, in fact, about deeds mandated in words. It is therefore a good place to bypass the dreary debate about the ascendancy of words over deeds or deeds over words in historical Jesus research. Two examples, one each way. My Jesus Seminar colleague Burton Mack emphasizes words or teachings. The first two pages of his book on the Q Gospel mention “teachings” eight times, as in this example: “It makes a difference whether the founder of a movement is remembered for his teachings, or for his deeds and destiny. For the first followers of Jesus, the importance of Jesus as the founder of their movement was directly related to the significance they attached to his teachings” (1–2). E. P. Sanders emphasizes deeds or “facts.” His work, seeking “the securest evidence[,]… is based primarily on facts about Jesus and only secondarily on a study of some of the sayings material” (1985:3, 5). The securest evidence, surely, is neither words without deeds nor deeds without words, but words and deeds coming together most profoundly. That combination indicates that Jesus did not have just a powerful vision but also a practical program, not just a personal or individual lifestyle but a communal and social plan. Second, this unit is present not only in the Common Sayings Tradition. It is also found directly in Mark and indirectly in Paul. Furthermore, it is also important for the Didache , a document whose reactions to this program will receive much fuller study in the next chapter. This unit is, as I understand it, the heart of the Common Sayings Tradition. Its presence makes that corpus coherent and helps all the other units fall into place. Third, this is the unit where text moves into closest conjunction with context , and therefore where my method succeeds or fails most fully and absolutely. But this third point depends on that second one. If this unit is but peripheral to the Common Sayings Tradition and not, as it were, its heart, then any conjunction with the context would not be significant in any case. So, in what follows, watch this unit as central and watch also the conjunction of it and the other Common Sayings Tradition units with the proposed anthropological, historical, and archeological context proposed earlier. I begin by looking separately at the three versions of this saying in the Gospel of Thomas , the Q Gospel , and Mark.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
But in fact Tyler’s book is a series of summaries of the contents of the loyalists’ major writings. While it was a significant step forward for him to present the loyalists’ writings along with those of the Revolutionary leaders, he had neither the documentation, nor the conceptual grasp, nor the understanding of the context that would allow him to explain properly their side of the origins of the conflict. Nor indeed did those far more masterful scholars, the so-called imperialist historians, who were young when Tyler was at his height. It was they who carried the phil-anglicism of the nineteenth-century antiquarians directly into the demanding world of academic scholarship. The distance between the romantic amateurs like Fisher and Ellis, deeply concerned with questions of ethnic identity, and such scholars as George Louis Beer, Herbert L. Osgood, Charles M. Andrews, and Lawrence H. Gipson is vast, but in their original cultural orientation the two groups were in fact close. They were bred in the same culture and shared the same ultimate sources of ideas and attitudes. They all sought to express in historical terms their belief in the kinship of the British and the American peoples; and like Lecky, whom they all admired and quoted, they viewed the Revolution in some degree as unfortunate and the continuing unity of the English-speaking peoples as necessary for survival in a world that was tending, as Lecky prophetically wrote at the end of his life, more and more toward “great political agglomerations based upon an affinity of race, language and creed, which has produced the Pan-Slavonic movement and the Pan-Germanic movement, and which chiefly made the unity of Italy.”26 In this sense, as intense partisans of the unity of the English-speaking peoples, they were all, emotionally, loyalists. But these modern historians were more concerned with international relations than with domestic social problems, and they were obliged to express their views through the constraints of a large and growing body of historical documentation and in expositions that satisfied the demanding technical requirements of their profession. Andrews devoted most of his many volumes to depicting in one way or another the legal and administrative bonds that had unified England and America before the Revolution. But, like Osgood, who opened his prolific career in the 1890s by urging historians of America not only to work in the British archives but in imagination to station themselves in London in order to “view colonial affairs in their proper perspective,” Andrews avoided a detailed account of the revolution that had destroyed the eighteenth-century Anglo-American empire.
And how is it possible that a man who has nothing , who is naked, houseless, without a hearth, squalid, without a slave, without a city, can pass a life that flows easily? See, God has sent you a man to show you that it is possible. Look at me, who am without a city, without a house, without possessions, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have no wife, no children, no praetorium [official power], but only the earth and heavens, and one poor cloak. And what do I want? Am I not without sorrow? Am I not without fear? Am I not free? When did any of you see me failing in the object of my desire? or ever falling into that which I would avoid? did I ever blame God or man? did I ever accuse any man? did any of you ever see me with sorrowful countenance? And how do I meet with those whom you are afraid of and admire? Do not I treat them like slaves? Who, when he sees me, does not think that he sees his king and master? Notice, in the flow of that passage, the sequence from nothing to free to king , the logic of poverty leading to freedom leading to royalty. Notice, also, the intense political undertones of the passage. If Epictetus represented royalty, what was the Roman emperor? And those three terms are best explained by other quotations from Discourses 3.22. Poverty , first of all. Epictetus is very concerned that the externals of Cynicism may be mistaken for its internals. Since a Cynic philosopher looks much like a beggar, is not every beggar a Cynic philosopher? Do staff, knapsack, and one cloak automatically make one a Cynic? But, even while warning against that danger, he never suggests abandoning those externals. He simply insists that internal poverty must beget external and that external must not replace internal. So do you [would-be Cynics] also think about the matter carefully; it is not what you think it is. “I wear a rough cloak even as it is, and I shall have one then; I have a hard bed even now, and so I shall then; I shall take to myself a wallet and a staff, and I shall begin to walk around and beg from those I meet, and revile them….” If you fancy the affair to be something like this, give it a wide berth; don’t come near it, it is nothing for you…. Lo, these are words [the long quotation from 3.22 that I cited earlier] that befit a Cynic, this is his character, and his plan of life. But no, you say, what makes a Cynic is a contemptible wallet, a staff, and big jaws; to devour everything you give him, or to stow it away, or to revile tactlessly the people he meets, or to show off his fine shoulder.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
4 There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it. —a letter by Wallace Stevens In the dim realm of that horseshoe bar, I was boss, credibly lying to wives and business partners who phoned in that my patrons were not in fact sitting before me hours on end, imbibing. Such lies kept my tip jar stuffed. Plus compared to those guys—with their car wrecks and one-night stands, their lost families and jobs—my occasional blackout or sidewalk pukefest was bush league. Binge drinking disagreed with me in no way. The hangovers that haunted the other restaurant folk tended to spare me. Or the ones that did knock me out gave me an excuse to bail from ordinary commerce and loll around feeling resplendently poetic. I drank less steadily than some kids my age (twenty- one), but now I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent. Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement. But humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid. Showing up at a normal job was too hard. Who knows, maybe I’d still be straining martinis from a silver shaker—it was a nice joint—had I not bought a ticket to a midwestern poetry festival so debauched that it couldn’t survive even the extremely low bar of acceptable behavior back in the 1970s. Down the dorm hallways, marijuana smoke hazed lazily. At readings, bottles of syrupy wine were passed around. A poetic Woodstock, I told Mother it was on my call home, regaling her with the circuslike atmosphere she’d have been inspired by. I actually saw living, breathing poets. Back in high school, I’d fallen in love with the visionary antiwar work of Bill Knott, who’d become a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax. After collecting rejection slips, he’d wound up sending a mimeographed note to America’s poetry editors, saying something like, Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin. The allegedly posthumous poems came out under the pen name St. Geraud, a character in an eighteenth- century porno novel who ran an orphanage and sodomized his charges. The grotesque humor of the endeavor won me over, particularly when Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia, which—it took me a while to puzzle out—referred to masturbation after death.
In so focusing, the kingdom movement was acting absolutely out of the heart of Judaism, absolutely in obedience to the covenantal God of justice and righteousness. That was signaled explicitly by the name under which Jesus acted: the kingdom of God—in other words, the will of God for this earth here and now. I remind you, finally, of Gerhard Lenski’s term for those who dropped below peasant farmers or rural artisans, and of his estimate for their incidence: “The best estimate … is that in normal times from 5 to 10 per cent of the population found itself in [the Expendable Class], with the figure rising as high as 15 per cent on some occasions and falling almost to zero on others” (283). EPILOGUE: THE SOCIAL STATUS OF JESUSWe anticipated that the existence of the state, of which peasants are by definition a part, would exert an influence on the form of family life by virtue of the fact that the state limits the local uses of power and freedom to expand. We thought, however, that the influence of the state would essentially be constant: i.e., that state organization as such, and not the form, character or political policies of the particular state, would be the determinative influence. Our data [from forty-six peasant communities] suggest otherwise. They suggest that the family structure is influenced directly or indirectly by the character of the dominant outside forces…. Our analysis demonstrates that while the family structure relates to the character of land use and productive activity of the peasant farmer, it is to a very great degree manipulated by the external influences of the more powerful urban sectors of the state of which, by definition, the peasant is a part. Walter Goldschmidt and Evalyn Jacobson Kunkel, “The Structure of the Peasant Family,” p. 1070 Here is one extreme for life as an artisan. It is the proud epitaph of a freed imperial slave, now a Roman citizen, and possibly still operating with patronal capital. The translator calls it the “onerously honorific epitaph of a Roman carpenter” (Dessau 3.750, #7237; Burford 18–19): (Memorial) to Tiberius Flavius Hilarion, freedman of Tiberius, decurion of the collegium of carpenters in the 15th lustrum , inspector of the ballot-box for the elections in the 16th lustrum , quinquennial officer of the collegium of woodworkers in the 17th lustrum , honoured in the 18th, twice censor for appointing officials in the 19th and 20th, and judge among the chosen twelve from his rank (?) in the 22nd. This monument was put up by Claudia Prisca to the best of husbands. Those dates are given in terms of numbered lustra . A lustrum was the five-year term for the two censors, the most senior Roman magistrates. These officials regulated membership in the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders as well as citizenship in Italy and the provinces. Tiberius Favius Hilarion obviously did all right as a carpenter, an urban artisan. But what was it like to be a rural artisan?
Certain of them even went to meet Albinus, who was on his way from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin without his consent. Convinced by these words, Albinus angrily wrote to Ananus threatening to take vengeance upon him. King Agrippa, because of Ananus’ action, deposed him from the high priesthood which he had held for three months and replaced him with Jesus the son of Damascus. Because he had used the interlude between the departure of Festus and the arrival of his replacement, Albinus, to have James and some others put to death in 62 C.E ., the High Priest Ananus the Younger brought down on himself the wrath of the Herodian ruler Agrippa II and the Roman governor Albinus. Josephus tells us that Ananus was a Sadducee, but he was much more than that. His father, Ananus the Elder, was High Priest from 6 to 15 C.E ., and is known to us from the gospels as Annas. The elder Ananus was father-in-law of Joseph Caiaphas, High Priest from 18 to 36 C.E ., a figure also known to us from the gospels. He was furthermore the father of five other High Priests—Eleazar, Jonathan, Theophilus, Matthias, and Ananus the Younger, of present concern. Finally, he was the grandfather of Matthias, High Priest in 65 C.E . The immediate family of Ananus the Elder had dominated the high priesthood for most of the preceding decades, with eight High Priests in sixty years, yet the execution of James resulted in the deposition of Ananus the Younger after only three months in office. An abstract illegality could hardly have obtained such a reaction, so James must have had powerful, important, and even politically organized friends in Jerusalem. Who were they? Josephus’s phrase “inhabitants…who were strict in observance of the law” probably means Pharisees. Was James a Pharisee? And, more important, how long had he been in Jerusalem? We know for sure, as seen earlier, that he was there by about 38 C.E ., when Paul first met him. Did he come there only after the execution of Jesus, or had he been there long before it? I realize how tentative all this is, but much more explanation for James’s presence and standing in Jerusalem needs be given than is usually offered. Did he leave Nazareth long before and become both literate and involved within scribal circles in Jerusalem? Could his earlier presence there and Jesus’ (single?) visit to Jerusalem be somehow connected with this unit in John 7:3–5? His brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples may see the works you are doing. For no man works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” For even his brothers did not believe in him. All of that is terribly hypothetical, and I am quite well aware that it is.
He is speaking especially to dispossessed peasants seeking to restore their dignity and security in the name of God. In the same way, he is not speaking primarily to strong peasant families and trying to break them apart for or against himself. He is speaking especially to those whom family has failed and is substituting for that lost grouping an alternative one, the companionship of the kingdom of God. My proposal, therefore, is that Jesus and his first companions were not destroying families who were viable but replacing families who were not. One final point. There is no mention of husband versus wife in the Common Sayings Tradition, the Q Gospel , or the Gospel of Thomas , but only in the Lukan redaction of Hating One’s Family . Only opposition to parents and to siblings is specified elsewhere. Neither is there any husband-versus-wife wording in the Peace or Sword saying mentioned earlier. Only opposition between the generations is specified there. That agrees with another very strongly attested saying of Jesus: Against Divorce (Appendix 2B: #54). If one wished to break up families, setting husband against wife and wife against husband would be the fastest route. But Antipas’s urbanization struck hardest at the responsibility of parents for children and of siblings for one another. It is the debris of totally or partially dispossessed peasant families that are invited into the fictive kinship or new family of the kingdom under a Father who can withstand even Roman commercialization. Conclusion . Hating One’s Family , along with Peace or Sword , confirms my proposal that Jesus’ primary focus was on peasants dispossessed by Roman commercialization and Herodian urbanization in the late 20s in Lower Galilee. The itinerants as the just-recently-dispossessed destitute and the householders as the possibly-soon-dispossessed poor are brought together into a new family, a companionship of empowerment that is the kingdom of God. It does not break families apart but regroups those families torn apart already (or soon to be torn apart across the generations). MISSION AND MESSAGE The last of the three Common Sayings Tradition units to be considered in this section is Mission and Message (Appendix 1A: #5). It is a Type 3 saying (Appendix 1B); that is, it has been redacted both toward asceticism in the Gospel of Thomas and toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel . I gave it pride of place in my earlier work The Historical Jesus , saying that it indicated “the heart of Jesus’ program” and adding, “If that is incorrect, this book will have to be redone” (304). It is still, for me, the most important unit for understanding the historical Jesus, the Common Sayings Tradition, and the continuity from one to the other. It is where I see the continuation from the historical Jesus to his first companions most clearly and even physically. I interpret many ambiguous sayings and open aphorisms from the Common Sayings Tradition in the light of this complex.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Whatever else may remain obscure about the social history of colonial America, it cannot be doubted that advance in letters and in the arts was involved with social ascent by groups whose status in Europe would unquestionably have been considered inferior or middling. Despite the familial piety that has so often claimed nobility for arrivé forebears, and with it a leisured, graceful intimacy with the muses, there were few cultivated aristocrats in the colonies to lead intellectual and artistic advances. Throughout the North, the middle-class origins of the literati were unmistakable. Who led the cultural advance in the northern towns? Ministers, of course, like William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, who carried with him from Aberdeen not only a headful of learning but frustrated ambitions that developed into a common type of cultural snobbery; like Samuel Johnson, president of King’s College, who grew up in Connecticut, where, he wrote in his poignant Autobiography, “the condition of learning (as well as everything else) was very low,” and whose “thirst after knowledge and truth” alone saved him from a hopeless provincialism; or like the supercilious Mather Byles, scion of a local intellectual dynasty, who snapped the whip of sarcasm over a mulish populace while proudly displaying a note from Alexander Pope elicited by fawning letters and gifts of hackneyed verse.8 Equally important were lawyers like John Adams, William Livingston, and James DeLancey, whose cultural even more than political ascendancy was assured “in a Country,” Cadwallader Colden wrote in 1765, “where few men except in the profession of the Law, have any kind of literature, where the most opulent families in our own memory, have arisen from the lowest rank of people.”9 Along with these two professional groups, there were a few of the leading merchants, or, more frequently, their more leisured heirs, like the versifier Peter Oliver or his politician-historian cousin Thomas Hutchinson. These men, potentates on the local scene, were no more than colonial businessmen in the wider world of British society. Even the brilliant classicist and scientist James Logan of Philadelphia—“aristocrat” by common historical designation—would have been but a cultivated Quaker burgher to the patrons of arts and letters in London. If such were the leaders in the northern port towns, who followed? The numerous cultural associations, the clubs, were recruited from the professional middle and tradesman lower middle classes. Franklin’s famous Junto was a self-improvement society of autodidacts. Its original membership included a glazier, a surveyor, a shoemaker, a joiner, a merchant, three printers, and a clerk. And though Philadelphia’s merchants derided the Junto as the “Leather Apron Club,” they themselves, in their own societies, like their fellows in Annapolis’s Tuesday Club, or Newport’s Literary and Philosophical Society, could not help finding relaxation in most unaristocratic self-improvement.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
By 1754, the emergence of American English, adversely commented on as early as 1735, was so far advanced that the suggestion was made, facetiously, that a glossary of American terms be compiled. The scorn shown by Englishmen for Scots dialect was not heaped upon American speech until after the Revolution. But well before Lexington, Scottish and American peculiarities in language were grouped together as provincial in the English mind, a fact understood by John Witherspoon when he wrote in 1781, “The word Americanism, which I have coined … is exactly similar in its formation and signification to the word Scotticism.” The same equation of verbal provincialisms underlay Boswell’s recounting of an anecdote told him “with great good humour” by the Scottish Earl of Marchmont: [T]he master of a shop in London, where he was not known, said to him, “I suppose, Sir, you are an American.” “Why so, Sir?” (said his Lordship.) “Because, Sir (replied the shopkeeper,) you speak neither English nor Scotch, but something different from both, which I conclude is the language of America.”25 The sense of inferiority that expressed itself in imitation of English ways and a sense of guilt regarding local mannerisms was, however, only one aspect of the complex meaning of provincialism. Many Scotsmen and Americans followed the Reverend John Oxenbridge in castigating those who sought to “fashion your selves to the flaunting mode of England in worship or walking.”26 In the manner of Ramsay of Ochtertyre’s strictures on eighteenth-century Scottish authors, they inveighed against the slavish imitation of English models, such “a confession of inferiority as one would hardly have expected from a proud manly people, long famous for common-sense and veneration for the ancient classics.”27 Awareness of regional limitations frequently led to a compensatory local pride, evolving into a patriotism which was politically effective in the one area and, after the rebellion of 1745, mainly sentimental in the other, due to the diametrically opposed political history of the two—America moving from subordination to independence, Scotland from independence to subordination. It was the conviction that life in the provinces was not merely worthy of toleration by cosmopolites but unique in natural blessings that led Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, to read the Count de Buffon a lesson in natural history. It was a kindred conviction that, in spite of its “familiarity,” life in Edinburgh had a congeniality and vigor all its own, that made Robertson refuse all invitations to settle in London. Hume, too, in the midst of his Parisian triumphs, longed for the “plain roughness” of the Poker Club and the sharpness of Dr. Jardine to correct and qualify the “lusciousness” of French society.28 Hume’s complex attitude toward his homeland is significant; it is typical of a psychology which rarely failed to combat prejudice with pride.