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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I told the doctors I wanted braces, and at first they resisted, explaining to me that my idea of walking again was unrealistic if not impossible and that the level of my injury, T4–T6, was too high and dragging my paralyzed body around with braces and crutches would surely prove to be too strenuous. Refusing to accept their verdict, I continued to insist that they allow me to have the braces—explaining that as a 100 percent service-connected combat vet who had just sacrificed three-quarters of his body in Vietnam, I deserved the opportunity to try to walk again. For the next few weeks I continued to ask for the braces, even threatening to call the media and hold a press conference on the Spinal Cord Injury ward unless they followed through with my request. Eventually the doctors relented and about a month later I received the braces. I can still remember the first time I put the braces on in the ADL (activity of daily living) room with the help of my two physical therapists, Dick Carter and Jimmy Ford. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to get up on my feet. Carefully positioning myself behind the parallel bars, I grabbed ahold of both bars and in one quick motion lifted myself out of my wheelchair, and, with the help of my braces, stood in an upright position for the first time since my injury. I felt a bit weak and shaky at first but it was wonderful to be standing again, even if I couldn’t feel anything from my midchest down and had to imagine where my lower body and feet were. With Jimmy and Dick guiding me, I began to drag myself step by step as far as I could along the parallel bars until I was exhausted. “It’s beautiful up here!” I remember shouting to no one in particular, thrilled at the renewal of my old vantage point. Every day after that I arrived at the ADL room early to put on my braces. I would then begin my daily routine, dragging my paralyzed body back and forth between the parallel bars, determined to do my very best. By the second week I had already left the confines and safety of the parallel bars and begun to venture around the ADL room, proudly dragging my lifeless body past the others in their wheelchairs and no longer afraid to set out on my own. Each day, as I grew more and more confident and my stamina increased, so did my determination to go farther. By the third week I was now dragging my body down the hall and onto the paraplegic ward, visiting the other patients in their rooms and confounding many of the doctors and nurses who had earlier dismissed my belief that I would walk again.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  There are, of course, children who never break free from caring for their parent, husband, or other needy person. There are many dangerous traps along the way for the caregiver child who places others’ interests far ahead of her own. Karen could have remained in her unfortunate cohabitation with a man who needed her ministrations and stood in for her needy parents. Several caregiver children went on to marry men who were dependent on their caregiving, and, in fact, that was their appeal. Karen, too, might have remained at home sitting in the cinders like the well-known fairy-tale child waiting to be rescued by a fairy godmother and a prince. So the role of caregiver imposes a corollary task of freeing oneself and moving out and up because there is no one to rescue or even help her. Inarguably the role of caregiver is tricky. If it lasts during adolescence, it provides the young person with a sense of pride and satisfaction, of having been a virtuous person who helped her family. If it extends too far and there are no limits, then the child begins to feel responsible for keeping the parent alive. It becomes an impossible burden. And if it extends into adulthood and becomes the dominant pattern of relating to people, it’s a serious detriment to enjoying one’s own life. The other great hazard is that the child forever feels deprived of her own childhood and as an adult tries to make up for the playtime she has lost or for the nurturance she never received when she was young. Whether a caregiver child can shed her role as she reaches adulthood or remains tied emotionally and sometimes physically to her parents or to her own unsatisfied needs is the single most important key.

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

  As she spoke it seemed like a world of sadness surrounded her. She let go of my hand and walked away. I watched her get into a car with some other people I had seen in the courtroom earlier. I drove back to the motel in a more somber mood to start preparing for the last day of hearings. — I arrived at the court early the next morning to make sure there were no problems. As it turned out, very few people showed up to support the State. And though the metal detector and the dog were still there, no deputy stood at the door to block black people from entering the courtroom. Inside the courtroom, I noticed one of the women I’d seen leave with Mrs. Williams the night before. She came up to me and introduced herself as Mrs. Williams’s daughter. She thanked me for trying to console her mother. “When she got home last night, she was so upset. She didn’t eat anything, she didn’t speak to anybody, she just went to her bedroom. We could hear her praying all night long. This morning she called the Reverend and begged him for another chance to be a community representative at the hearing. She was up when I got out of bed, dressed and ready to come to court. I told her she didn’t have to come, but she wouldn’t hear none of it. She’s been through a lot and, well, on the trip down here she just kept saying over and over, ‘Lord, I can’t be scared of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.’ ” I was apologizing again to the daughter for what the court officials had done the day before when suddenly there was a commotion at the courtroom door. We both looked up and there stood Mrs. Williams. She was once again dressed impeccably in her scarf and hat. She held her handbag tight at her side and seemed to be swaying at the entrance. I could hear her speaking to herself, repeating over and over again: “I ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” I watched as the officers allowed her to move forward. She held her head up as she walked slowly through the metal detector, repeating over and over, “I ain’t scared of no dog.” It was impossible to look away. She made it through the detector and stared at the dog. Then, loud enough for everyone to hear, she belted out: “I ain’t scared of no dog!” She moved past the dog and walked into the courtroom. Black folks who were already inside beamed with joy as she passed them. She sat down near the front of the courtroom and turned to me with a broad smile and announced, “Attorney Stevenson, I’m here!” “Mrs. Williams, it’s so good to see you here. Thank you for coming.”

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  199 is sheer fi ction; there was never a great reconciliation between the Cid and King Alfonso. Certain traditional epic themes are present. Courage, prowess, and a willingness to overcome huge odds on the battle fi eld are marks of the Cid and his men. The Cid and his followers are deeply religious. Still, the poem has nothing in it of the miraculous or magical—except, perhaps, when the angel Gabriel appears to the Cid in a dream and assures him that in this life he will always be successful. Some scenes and characters are clearly patterned on Roland in whatever form the poet knew it. The aristocratic tone of Roland and even, to a degree, of Beowulf is absent. Aristocratic punctilio is always observed. But the nobles in the Poema are almost without exception sel fi sh, greedy, duplicitous, and dishonorable. The poet is clearly making the point that nobility is a matter of character, not of birth. As in all epics, honor is a central concern. Beowulf was lofgeornost (“most eager for praise), and Roland at fi rst refused to blow his horn. The Cid wins honor and fame by his own actions. In the end, the poet brilliantly created a new kind of epic hero. The Cid is far more than the great battler who always wins. Context may well be important. In the 12 th century, the Reconquista had not gone well, and in 1195, the Christian forces suffered a devastating defeat. The poet wanted to encourage honorable Christian soldiers to enlist in the war against Muslims instead of indulging their taste for court politics and a life of leisure. He certainly emphasizes, too, that one could win fame and fortune fi ghting on the frontier. The poet created a kind of civic ideal: The Cid is a great warrior, but he is an exemplary husband and father, a true friend, a generous sharer of spoils, and always, always wholly loyal to his (undeserving!) king. He is cheerful and philosophical in the face of exile. He is always refl ective and prudent, marked precisely by the mesure that Roland conspicuously lacked. It is fascinating to compare the trial of the Infantes with that of Ganelon: The former runs to nearly 450 lines, whereas the latter is just over 100 and the richness of detail is fundamentally different. And so the poet’s sense of verismo, of truth, is wrapped up in character, not in the ordinary details of history. ■ 200 Lecture 27: El Cid The Poem of the Cid, trans. Hamilton and Perry. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid. Smith, The Making of the Poema. 1. What do you make of the author’s sense of verismo? 2. How would you compare and contrast the Cid with Beowulf and Roland? Essential Reading Questions to Consider

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  314 Glossary (Lectures 37–48) Lepanto: A naval battle fought off the coast of Greece in 1571, in which combined European forces defeated the forces of the Ottoman-Turkish Empire. Often cited as a turning point in European history because it stemmed the tide of Islam, its more immediate interest for this course is that Cervantes fought and was wounded there. The pride that he felt in this victory (which apparently continued throughout his life) exists in tension with disillusionment about his military career that came later, when he spent fi ve years in an Algerian prison. Pastoral romance: A genre of literature that fl ourished, among other places, in Spain in the 16 th century. Shepherds discourse about love, although they are more like aristocrats in the guise of shepherds, living in an idealized landscape where they have to do no work. Because they are free from having to do real work, they can discourse on the inner life. This was one of many forms of romance that Cervantes used and parodied in Don Quixote. He was also aware of Greek romances of A.D. 3 rd century that had been made available in the Renaissance, along with medieval chivalric romances. Poetics: An important treatise by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) on the nature of drama and the nature of tragedy. Indeed, in some ways, this work represents the fountainhead of literary criticism in the Western tradition. Aristotle’s norms for drama, based on his close observation of Greek tragedy, were frozen into a kind of orthodoxy by Italian theorists during the Renaissance. Lope de Vega, in his treatise “The New Art of Writing Comedies at This Time” (1609), quite self-consciously challenged this new orthodoxy, claiming that instead of concentrating on theory, playwrights should aim to please their audiences.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  501 Henry James Lecture 73 By the spring of 1880, when Henry James started writing Portrait of a Lady, he had already made his name as a writer in both England and America. Born 37 years earlier in New York City, he was the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had come to America in 1789, settled in Albany, and made a fortune that left his children—including the father of the novelist—“leisured for life.” Y oung Henry was privately schooled in New York until the age of 12, when he and his siblings— fi ve in all—were taken abroad by their parents. Six years later, after more schooling in England, France, and Switzerland, he moved with the family to Newport, Rhode Island, studied law briefl y at Harvard, and then started writing stories and reviews that were published in Boston and New York. Henry James wrote a series of novels that chie fl y aim to dramatize the interaction of American energy and innocence with the sophisticated but often duplicitous culture of the old European world. In The Portrait of a Lady, a young American woman of limited means is adopted by a wealthy and eccentric aunt, taken to England, courted in vain by two extremely eligible men, and left with a fortune by her wealthy uncle. Free of any obligation to marry, free to make her whole life a project of self-realization in the garden of European culture, she marries an expatriate American whose years of living abroad have seemingly endowed him with the best taste in the world. Isabel’s rude awakening to the true nature of her husband illustrates the complexity of James’s treatment of the relation between the new world and the old. Isabel’s insistence on doing what she chooses and judging everything for herself exemplifi es her spirit of independence. She rejects two highly eligible suitors. Shortly after settling with her aunt and uncle in England, she rejects a marriage proposal from a fabulously wealthy English lord. She also rejects an American businessman who crosses the ocean to make his proposal.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  523 James Joyce Lecture 77 Joyce’s autobiographical novel began its life as an autobiographical essay written on a single day—January 7, 1904. Not quite 20 years earlier, he was born in Rathgar, a suburb of South Dublin, as the eldest child of a property-owning tax-collector whose fi scal irresponsibility gradually reduced his large family to poverty and debt. N evertheless, partly through his own success in winning prizes and scholarships, Joyce gained a very good education under Jesuit priests at the same schools that Stephen attends—right up through University College, where he fi rst clearly showed his literary gifts. After graduation he took up book reviewing for a Dublin newspaper, spent a few months in Paris, and came back to a gravely sick mother who died in August of 1903. On the following January 7, while still living in the family home, he wrote the autobiographical essay that became the germ of his fi rst novel— over a period of many years. Rewritten fi rst as a bulky, un fi nished story of 26 chapters called Stephen Hero, it was then cut and reshaped into fi ve long chapters, and in 1916 it was fi nally published under the title it has borne ever since: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Though young Joyce was spunky, foul-mouthed, and athletic, he represents his boyhood self—here named Stephen Dedalus—as a delicate, vulnerable, innocent victim of bullying schoolmates and one tyrannical teacher who beats him unjustly. After successfully protesting against this treatment, Stephen grows into adolescence, has his fi rst sexual experience in the arms of a prostitute, turns back to the arms of Holy Mother Church, then discovers his vocation—symbolized by the vision of his namesake, the mythic Dedalus, the fabulous winged arti fi cer of ancient Crete. Inspired by this vision, Stephen resolves to take literary fl ight beyond the nets of language, religion, and nationality and “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” In the fi rst chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , the passage describing the beating of Stephen exempli fi es the contrast between the

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And of course a tough enough reading-list would keep him busy, he'd have no spare time for his vacuous pawing friends, his day would be somehow mine; and the evenings—perhaps he would need to see me in the evenings to sort out his finer uncertainties, questions of motive and metaphor . . . I ran along the shelf again and frowned to read the rubbed title of a novel; it took several seconds for me to be sure—it really was one of my Aunt Tina's, foxed and crumbly, on wartime paper, and priced as if the dealer knew the value it would have to one affectionate customer. There were family as well as friends here under the stairs. When I didn't go to the Cassette I went to the Golden Calf, an old men's bar in the middle of town but so tucked away up an alley full of bicycles and beer crates that it could have been anywhere. The regulars either sat in unexpecting silence or spoke loudly and infrequently about what they'd seen on television. You could have been in a lounge bar in a market town in the west of England, or even in the George IV at home, except that here there was no music, which made it better for reading or writing letters. Today I sat with Careful, Mary! to distract me between the malty mouthfuls of a lunchtime "Silence"—a flooring brew from Antwerp alleged to be made by Trappist monks. I felt obtusely proud of the filthy little book, and wanted to tell the old boy next to me how Christina McFie was my comical-tragical great-aunt. Careful, Mary! was, or else wasn't, one of her best—it depended on whether you took her seriously or enjoyed her as a bizarre joke. Aunt Tina had spent a long childless adulthood in Africa, married to a Scottish coffee-planter, and her novels had come to her almost unbidden, like letters full of homesickness and childish make-believe. The more she wrote of England the more romantic her picture of it became—after three or four books it was barely recognisable; but her gaffes began to attract her a new audience, who loved the inadvertent comedy of her naively lofty style. For a while there had even been a Christina McFie fan-club, though it was never quite clear if she was fooled or if she took it in the camp spirit in which it was intended.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He had arrived a year before me, but I was streamed straight into 4A, whilst he, who had spent a year in the Remove, trundled up into 4B or C: so we didn't meet. I knew his parents lived near the school then and he cycled in on his sports-bike each day. I was a weekly boarder: every Monday morning and Friday evening I made the twenty-minute stopping-train journey out and back to Rough Common's tiny rustic station, a kind of cottage orne with an acre of commuter car-park. I can't remember much about him then. The only image is the end of a Colts match against Lancing, dutifully clapping the teams in, an air of madness and gloom, the clatter of boot-studs on the path, and Dawn in the midst of them, socks down, heavy thighs slashed with mud, sweat in his black hair and blue eyes, the nice heft of him—we crowded them consolingly and for some reason I patted his hot damp back as he passed. My great friend was Lawrence Graves. We went through school in tandem and both wrote a lot, though he always assumed, with his combination of names, that it was he who was destined to be a major literary figure whilst I would fill some ancillary role: in one of his fantasies I edited his poetical remains after his mysterious early death. He had the Lawrence-Graves Letters out of the school library on permanent loan. (There wasn't much demand for it.) Graves pleased me at the start, and even slightly unnerved me, by knowing about my father. He had heard him give a recital of popular Schubert songs in St Leonards and let it be known that though he had certain reservations it hadn't by any means been a washout. He already had autographs of Ronald Dowd and Elly Ameling, so one knew that his standards were high. Later my father sang the Evangelist when the school Choral Society put on a St Matthew Passion: he was in beautiful voice then, and sounded like a great singer against the scrawny background of child violinists and choristers uneasy in dynamics below mezzo-forte. I sat at the side of the hall in my own vortex of anxiety and pride, sometimes mouthing the words as if he might forget them. Occasionally, when he rose for his next oration and stood waiting, his eyes would sweep over me without apparent recognition: I told myself that he saw me all right, that he was bound by the exalted protocols of art, which dictated the ritual stance and the glazed formality of tails, black cummerbund and patent-leather shoes—the extinct indoors garb I would sometimes pick up for him from the cleaners or menders. The concert lights glowed on his oiled black hair and black-framed spectacles.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  To speak further of attire, an incident from which portents were drawn occurred during the year of my tribuneship in Rome. One day of appallingly bad weather, when I was to deliver a public address, I had mislaid my mantle of heavy Gallic wool. Protected only by my toga, which caught the water in its gutterlike folds, I had continually to wipe the rain from my eyes as I pronounced my discourse. Catching cold is an emperor's privilege in Rome, since he is forbidden, regardless of weather, to put anything over the toga: from that day on, every huckster and melon vendor believed in my approaching good fortune. We talk much of the dreams of youth. Too often we forget its scheming. That, too, is a form of dream, and is no less extravagant than the others. I was not the only one to indulge in such calculations throughout that period of Roman festivities; the whole army rushed into the race for honors. I broke gaily enough into the role of ambitious politician, but I have never been able to play it for long with conviction, or without need of constant help from a prompter. I was willing to carry out with utmost conscientiousness the tiresome duty of recorder of senatorial proceedings; I knew what services would count most. The laconic style of the emperor, though admirable for the armies, did not suffice for Rome; the empress, whose literary tastes were akin to mine, persuaded him to let me compose his speeches. This was the first of the good offices of Plotina. I succeeded all the better for having had practice in that kind of accommodation: in the difficult period of my apprenticeship I had often written harangues for senators who were short of ideas or turns of phrase; they ended by thinking themselves the authors of these pieces. In working thus for Trajan, I took exactly the same delight as that afforded by the rhetorical exercises of my youth; alone in my room, trying out my effects before a mirror, I felt myself an emperor. In truth I was learning to be one; audacities of which I should not have dreamed myself capable became easy when someone else would have to shoulder them. The emperor's thinking was simple but inarticulate, and therefore obscure; it became quite familiar to me, and I flattered myself that I knew it somewhat better than he did.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Nevertheless, like Alexander on the eve of a battle, I had made a sacrifice to Fear before entering into Rome: I sometimes count Attianus among my human victims. Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear. The murder of four men of consular rank was received as was the story of the forged will: the honest and pure of heart refused to believe that I was implicated; the cynics supposed the worst, but admired me only the more. As soon as it was known that my resentment had suddenly come to an end Rome grew calm; each person's joy in his own security caused the dead to be promptly forgotten. My clemency was matter for astonishment because it was deemed deliberate and voluntary, chosen each morning in preference to a violence which would have been equally natural to me; my simplicity was praised because it was thought that calculation figured therein. Trajan had had most of the virtues of the average man, but my qualities were more unexpected; one step further and they would have been regarded as a refinement of vice itself. I was the same man as before, but what had previously been despised now passed for sublime: my extreme courtesy, considered by the unsubtle a form of weakness, or even of cowardice, seemed now the smooth and polished sheath of force. They extolled my patience with petitioners, my frequent visits to the sick in the military hospitals, and my friendly familiarity with the discharged veterans. Nothing in all that differed from the manner in which I had treated my servants and tenant farmers my whole life long. Each of us has more virtues than he is credited with, but success alone brings them to view, perhaps because then we may be expected to cease practicing them. Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel. I had refused all titles. In the first month of my reign the Senate had adorned me, before I could know of it, with that long series of honorary appellations which is draped like a fringed shawl round the necks of certain emperors. Dacicus, Parthicus, Germanicus: Trajan had loved these brave blasts of martial music, like the cymbals and drums of the Parthian regiments; what had roused echoes and responses in him only irritated or bewildered me. I got rid of all that, and also postponed, for the time, the admirable title of Father of the Country; Augustus accepted that honor only late in life, and I esteemed myself not yet worthy. It was the same for a triumph; it would have been ridiculous to consent to one for a war in which my sole merit had been to force a conclusion.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  leaned into their heat, shimmering like a horizon all around me. I’d glide against a sweaty black arm or bump up against a brown leather bag, my sweat leaving a trail across the room. By the fourth or fifth round, I was totally drenched with sweat. During a rest minute, Ness got a water bottle from a cooler by the ring. I started to take the bottle from him, but he gestured for me to lean back and open my mouth. He shot the water into my mouth, then all over my face. He squirted more than I could swallow, and the water washed over my chin and down my chest. I dropped my head and he continued to pour the cool water over me, soaking my head, as I stared down at the drops hitting the floor. “Awright, man, that’s it for today.” He led me through a cool-down of push-ups, crunches, and squats, and I did as he commanded, counting under my breath, silent and sweating, doing whatever he said. © Downstairs, alone again in the locker room, I sat on the single bench and felt the blood rush through my body. I stripped and stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror. I was dripping with sweat, and my limbs were pink and bright. I grabbed my right biceps and was surprised at its hardness. Is this what “pumped” felt like? I felt leaner, meaner, and I wondered what Oscar would have thought of my body. Did I have what it takes to be a fighter? Was my body a weapon? What things could it do? As I entered the shower, I could hear the music from up stairs, the clear note of The Bell every three minutes. I imag ined Ness up there, working on another boy, turning him into

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This was not servile obedience; that wild energy was applied to the support of my program for security; nothing had cost too much, and nothing had been neglected. I thought of having Arrian compose a treatise on tactics and discipline as perfect as is a body well-formed. In Athens, three months later, the dedication of the Olympieion was occasion for festivals which recalled the Roman solemnities, but what in Rome had been celebrated on earth seemed there to occur in the heavens. Late on a luminous day of autumn I took my station in that porch which had been conceived on the superhuman scale of Zeus himself; the marble temple, built on the spot where Deucalion had watched the Deluge recede, seemed to lose its weight and float like a great white cloud; even my ritual robe was in tone with the evening colors on nearby Hymettus. I had entrusted Polemo with the inaugural discourse. It was at this time that Greece granted me those divine appellations wherein I could recognize both a source of prestige and the most secret aim of my life's work: Evergetes, Olympian, Epiphanios, Master of All. And the most beautiful of all these titles, and most difficult to merit, Ionian and Friend of Greece. There was much of the actor in Polemo, but the play of features in a great performer sometimes translates the emotion shared by a whole people, and a whole century. He raised his eyes to the heavens and gathered himself together before his exordium, seeming to assemble within him all gifts held in that moment of time: I had collaborated with the ages, and with Greek life itself; the authority which I wielded was less a power than a mysterious force, superior to man but operating effectively only through the intermediary of a human person; the marriage of Rome with Athens had been accomplished; the future once more held the hope of the past; Greece was stirring again like a vessel, long becalmed, caught anew in the current of the wind. Just then a moment's melancholy came over me; I could not but reflect that these words of completion and perfection contained within them the very word end; perhaps I had offered only one more object as prey to Time the Devourer. We were taken next inside the temple where the sculptors were still at work; the immense, half-assembled statue of Zeus in ivory and gold seemed to lighten somewhat that dim shade; at the foot of the scaffolding lay the great python brought from India at my order to be consecrated in this Greek sanctuary. Already reposing in its filigree basket, the divine snake, emblem of Earth on which it crawls, has long been associated with the nude youth who symbolizes the emperor's Genius.

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

  Williams. She was once again dressed impeccably in her scarf and hat. She held her handbag tight at her side and seemed to be swaying at the entrance. I could hear her speaking to herself, repeating over and over again: “I ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” I watched as the officers allowed her to move forward. She held her head up as she walked slowly through the metal detector, repeating over and over, “I ain’t scared of no dog.” It was impossible to look away. She made it through the detector and stared at the dog. Then, loud enough for everyone to hear, she belted out: “I ain’t scared of no dog!” She moved past the dog and walked into the courtroom. Black folks who were already inside beamed with joy as she passed them. She sat down near the front of the courtroom and turned to me with a broad smile and announced, “Attorney Stevenson, I’m here!” “Mrs. Williams, it’s so good to see you here. Thank you for coming.” The courtroom filled up, and I started getting my papers together. They brought Walter into the courtroom, the signal that the hearing was about to begin. That’s when I heard Mrs. Williams call my name. “No, Attorney Stevenson, you didn’t hear me. I said I’m here.” She spoke very loudly, and I was a little confused and embarrassed. I turned around and smiled at her. “No, Mrs. Williams, I did hear you, and I’m so glad you’re here.” When I looked at her, though, it was as if she was in her own world. The courtroom was packed, and the bailiff brought the court to order as the judge walked in. Everyone rose, as is the custom. When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long pause as we all waited for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” People chuckled nervously as she took her seat, but when she looked at me, I saw tears in her eyes. In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition. I smiled now, because I knew she was saying to the room, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.” I smiled at Mrs. Williams while she sat proudly.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Farther back, beyond Trajan and Nerva, now become officially my father and my grandfather, I looked for example even to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius: the clear-sightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius, without his weakness; Nero's taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian's thrift, but not his absurd miserliness. These princes had played their part in human affairs; it devolved upon me, to choose hereafter from among their acts what should be continued, consolidating the best things, correcting the worst, until the day when other men, either more or less qualified than I, but charged with equal responsibility, would undertake to review my acts likewise. The dedication of the Temple of Venus and Rome was a kind of triumph, celebrated by chariot races, public spectacles, and distribution of spices and perfumes. The twenty-four elephants which had transported the enormous blocks of building stone, reducing thereby the forced labor of slaves, figured in the procession, great living monoliths themselves. The date chosen for this festival was the anniversary of Rome's birth, the eighth day following the Ides of April in the eight hundred and eighty-second year after the founding of the City. Never had a Roman spring been so intense, so sweet and so blue. On the same day, with graver solemnity, as if muted, a dedicatory ceremony took place inside the Pantheon. I myself had revised the architectural plans, drawn with too little daring by Apollodorus: utilizing the arts of Greece only as ornamentation, like an added luxury, I had gone back for the basic form of the structure to primitive, fabled times of Rome, to the round temples of ancient Etruria. My intention had been that this sanctuary of All Gods should reproduce the likeness of the terrestrial globe and of the stellar sphere, that globe wherein are enclosed the seeds of eternal fire, and that hollow sphere containing all. Such was also the form of our ancestors' huts where the smoke of man's earliest hearths escaped through an orifice at the top. The cupola, constructed of a hard but lightweight volcanic stone which seemed still to share in the upward movement of flames, revealed the sky through a great hole at the center, showing alternately dark and blue. This temple, both open and mysteriously enclosed, was conceived as a solar quadrant.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  others, to go his own way, and be a bit rough about it were key parts of his success, which we venerate. And so it is with many creative, powerful people. Subtract their active Shadow, and they would be like everyone else. Understand: You pay a greater price for being so nice and deferential than for consciously showing your Shadow. First, to follow the latter path you must begin by respecting your own opinions more and those of others less, particularly when it comes to your areas of expertise, to the field you have immersed yourself in. Trust your native genius and the ideas you have come up with. Second, get in the habit in your daily life of asserting yourself more and compromising less. Do this under control and at opportune moments. Third, start caring less what people think of you. You will feel a tremendous sense of liberation. Fourth, realize that at times you must offend and even hurt people who block your path, who have ugly values, who unjustly criticize you. Use such moments of clear injustice to bring out your Shadow and show it proudly. Fifth, feel free to play the impudent, willful child who mocks the stupidity and hypocrisy of others. Finally, flout the very conventions that others follow so scrupulously. For centuries, and still to this day, gender roles represent the most powerful convention of all. What men and women can do or say has been highly controlled, to the point where it seems almost to represent biological differences instead of social conventions. Women in particular are socialized to be extra nice and agreeable. They feel continual pressure to adhere to this and mistake it for something natural and biological. Some of the most influential women in history were those who deliberately broke with these codes—performers like Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker, political figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, businesswomen such as Coco Chanel. They brought out their Shadow and showed it by acting in ways that were traditionally thought of as masculine, blending and confusing gender roles. Even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gained great power by playing against the type of the traditional political wife. She had a pronounced malicious streak. When Norman Mailer first met her in 1960 and she seemed to poke fun at him, he saw that “something droll and hard came into her eyes as if she were a very naughty eight-year-old indeed.” When people displeased her, she showed it rather openly. She seemed to care little what others thought of her. And she became a sensation because of the naturalness she exuded. In general, consider this a form of exorcism. Once you show these desires and impulses, they no longer lie hidden in corners of your personality, twisting and operating in secret ways. You have released your demons and enhanced your presence as an authentic human. In this way, the Shadow becomes your ally. Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I have already mentioned that my titles added virtually nothing to this astonishing certitude; on the contrary, the feeling was confirmed in performing the simplest routines of my function as emperor. If Jupiter is brain to the world, then the man who organizes and presides over human affairs can logically consider himself as a part of that all-governing mind. Humanity, rightly or not, has almost always conceived of its god in terms of Providence; my duties forced me to serve as the incarnation of this Providence for one part of mankind. The more the State increases in size and power, extending its strict, cold links from man to man, the more does human faith aspire to exalt the image of a human protector at the end of this mighty chain. Whether I wished it or not, the Eastern populations of the empire already considered me a god. Even in the West, and even in Rome, where we are not officially declared divine till after death, the instinctive piety of the common people tends more and more to deify us while we are still alive. The Parthians, in gratitude to the Roman who had established and maintained peace, were soon to erect temples in my honor; even at Vologasia, in the very heart of that vast world beyond our frontiers, I had my sanctuary. Far from reading in this adoration a risk of arrogant presumption, or madness, for the man who accepts it, I found therein a restraint, and indeed an obligation to model myself upon something eternal, trying to add to my human capacity some part of supreme wisdom. To be god demands more virtues, all things considered, than to be emperor. I was initiated at Eleusis eighteen months later. In one sense this visit to Osroës had been a turning point in my life. Instead of going back to Rome I had decided to devote some years to the Greek and Oriental provinces of the empire; Athens was coming more and more to be the center of my thought, and my home. I wished to please the Greeks, and also to Hellenize myself as much as possible, but though my motives for this initiation were in part political, it proved nevertheless to be a religious experience without equal. These ancient rites serve only to symbolize what happens in human life, but the symbol has a deeper purport than the act, explaining each of our motions in terms of celestial mechanism. What is taught at Eleusis must remain secret; it has, besides, the less danger of being divulged in that its nature is ineffable. If formulated, it would result only in commonplaces; therein lies its real profundity.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  But Luc, though he was ahead of me and so precious to me as I let him go, didn't forget me. He leapt down the last four steps and, as his father looked up from a muttered exchange with his mother just inside the open front door, wrapped an arm round his neck and kissed him on the lips. Then he half-turned and extended his other arm towards me. "This is Edward," he said; I came forward with a silly expression of shyness and pride, as if I were someone he wanted to marry. His father and I exchanged only a few sentences, bantering around his absence and uncertain responsibilities, reassuring ourselves with the facts of Luc's excellence at English and the inevitability of his good results. I was startled by Martin Altidore's appearance. He was so young. though I knew he was younger than his wife I had still somehow expected a burgherly figure out of one of the family portraits; but there was nothing of their prudence or their warning glint of power. He was darker than Luc, more animal and compact (Luc's legginess came from his mother), but with the same long nose and almost the same big lips. And he was in the same stretch of life as me—well, a little further on, but surely only forty. His dark suit was beautifully cut, his off-white shirt and blood-coloured tie were silk. You knew at once he was a fucker. If I'd met him in a bar I'd have wanted him. I was trying to please him, playing to some cockteasy quality he had—charm I suppose, a kind of shallow intimacy; something Luc incuriously lacked—and at the same time to stay in with Luc; and then to be good to his mother, half-forgotten just outside our little male ring. Chapter 22 It was party time again for the Spanish girls: their voices cut like buzz-saws through the background of guitar-music and chatter. Christmas, of course. And what a lot of friends they had. I looked down into the utter stillness of the back garden, the bare trees, the canal, the rotted water-door of the darkened school. It was only three but the light was going, I couldn't quite find the little statue under the apple-boughs: it pleased me that I'd never been down there and didn't know what it was. Relentless flamenco chords, and the proud rapping on the box of the guitar taken up, stamped out hilariously on the bare floor and sending its tremor through the ancient joists. I felt neglected but at the same time sniffily anti-social, as I sometimes had in childhood, when Charlie's parties had no role for me.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Every question begins with “This recruit”—This recruit needs to use the head (the bathroom); This recruit needs to visit the corpsman (the doctor). The few idiots who arrive at boot camp with Marine Corps tattoos are mercilessly berated. At every turn, recruits are reminded that they are worthless until they finish boot camp and earn the title “marine.” Our platoon started with eighty-three, and by the time we finished, sixty-nine remained. Those who dropped out—mostly for medical reasons—served to reinforce the worthiness of the challenge. Every time the drill instructor screamed at me and I stood proudly; every time I thought I’d fall behind during a run and kept up; every time I learned to do something I thought impossible, like climb the rope, I came a little closer to believing in myself. Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life. From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness. The day I graduated from boot camp was the proudest of my life. An entire crew of hillbillies showed up for my graduation—eighteen in total—including Mamaw, sitting in a wheelchair, buried underneath a few blankets, looking frailer than I remembered. I showed everyone around base, feeling like I had just won the lottery, and when I was released for a ten-day leave the next day, we caravanned back to Middletown. On my first day home from boot camp, I walked into the barbershop of my grandfather’s old friend. Marines have to keep their hair short, and I didn’t want to slack just because no one was watching. For the first time, the corner barber—a dying breed even though I didn’t know it at the time—greeted me as an adult. I sat in his chair, told some dirty jokes (most of which I’d learned only weeks earlier), and shared some boot camp stories. When he was about my age, he was drafted into the army to fight in Korea, so we traded some barbs about the Army and the Marines. After the haircut, he refused to take my money and told me to stay safe. He’d cut my hair before, and I’d walked by his shop nearly every day for eighteen years. Yet it was the first time he’d ever shaken my hand and treated me as an equal. I had a lot of those experiences shortly after boot camp. In those first days as a marine—all spent in Middletown—every interaction was a revelation. I’d shed forty-five pounds, so many of the people I knew barely recognized me.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Both did their part to ensure that I had the self-confidence and the right opportunities to get a fair shot at the American Dream. But I doubt that, as children, Jim Vance and Bonnie Blanton ever expected much out of their own lives. How could they? Appalachian hills and single-room, K–12 schoolhouses don’t tend to foster big dreams. We don’t know much about Papaw’s early years, and I doubt that will ever change. We do know that he was something of hillbilly royalty. Papaw’s distant cousin—also Jim Vance—married into the Hatfield family and joined a group of former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers called the Wildcats. When Cousin Jim murdered former Union soldier Asa Harmon McCoy, he kicked off one of the most famous family feuds in American history. Papaw was born James Lee Vance in 1929, his middle name a tribute to his father, Lee Vance. Lee died just a few months after Papaw’s birth, so Papaw’s overwhelmed mother, Goldie, sent him to live with her father, Pap Taulbee, a strict man with a small timber business. Though Goldie sent money occasionally, she rarely visited her young son. Papaw would live with Taulbee in Jackson, Kentucky, for the first seventeen years of his life. Pap Taulbee had a tiny two-room house just a few hundred yards from the Blantons—Blaine and Hattie and their eight children. Hattie felt sorry for the young motherless boy and became a surrogate mother to my grandfather. Jim soon became an extra member of the family: He spent most of his free time running around with the Blanton boys, and he ate most of his meals in Hattie’s kitchen. It was only natural that he’d eventually marry her oldest daughter. Jim married into a rowdy crew. The Blantons were a famous group in Breathitt, and they had a feuding history nearly as illustrious as Papaw’s. Mamaw’s great-grandfather had been elected county judge at the beginning of the twentieth century, but only after her grandfather, Tilden (the son of the judge), killed a member of a rival family on Election Day.2 In a New York Times story about the violent feud, two things leap out. The first is that Tilden never went to jail for the crime.3 The second is that, as the Times reported, “complications [were] expected.” I would imagine so. When I first read this gruesome story in one of the country’s most circulated newspapers, I felt one emotion above all the rest: pride. It’s unlikely that any other ancestor of mine has ever appeared in The New York Times . Even if they had, I doubt that any deed would make me as proud as a successful feud. And one that could have swung an election, no less! As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy. I can’t imagine what Papaw was thinking. Mamaw came from a family that would shoot at you rather than argue with you.