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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt some vague pressure on me to choose sherry, though I regretted the choice when I saw how astringently pale it was, and when Lord Nantwich’s tifty turned out to be a hefty tumbler of virtually neat gin. Percy poured the two drinks complacently, jotted the score on a little pad and wheeled away with a ‘Thank you, m’lord,’ in which the ‘thank you’ was clipped almost into inaudibility. I thought how much he must know about all these old codgers, and what cynical reflections must take place behind his impassive, possibly made-up features. ‘So, William, your very good health!’ Nantwich raised his glass almost to his mouth. ‘I say, I hope it wasn’t too horrible …?’ ‘Your continuing good health,’ I replied, able only to ignore the question, which drew improper attention to what had passed between us; though I also felt a certain pride in what I had done, in a British manner wanting it to be commended, but in silence. ‘What a way to be introduced, my goodness! Of course I know nothing about you,’ he added, as if he might be exposing himself, though morally this time, to some degree of danger. ‘Well I know nothing about you,’ I hastened to reassure him. ‘You didn’t look me up in the book or anything?’ ‘I don’t think I have a book to look you up in.’ My father, I thought, would have looked him up straight away; in Debrett, as in Who’s Who , the volumes in his study always fell open at the Beckwith page, as if he had been checking up credentials that he might forget, or that were too remarkable to be readily believed. ‘Well that’s splendid,’ Nantwich declared. ‘We’ve still got everything to find out. What utter fun. When you get to be an old wibbly-wobbly, as one, alas, now is, you don’t often get the chance to have a go at someone absolutely fresh!’ He took a mouthful of gin, confiding in the glass as he did so a remark I could barely make out as it drowned, but which sounded like ‘Quite a corker, too.’ ‘It’s an agreeable room, this, isn’t it,’ he observed with one of his unannounced changes of tack. ‘Mmm,’ I just about agreed. ‘That’s an interesting picture.’ I tilted my head towards a large and, I hoped, mythological canvas, all but the foreground of which receded into the murk of two centuries or so of disregard. All that one saw were garland-clad, heavy, naked figures. ‘Yes. It’s a Poussin,’ said Nantwich decisively, turning his gaze away.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She asked whether I had spoken to the teacher about it, and I assured her that I had. “That bitch ought to be put in jail for sitting there and not doing anything.” And then she said something that I will never forget: “Sometimes, honey, you have to fight, even when you’re not defending yourself. Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do. Tomorrow you need to stand up for that boy, and if you have to stand up for yourself, then do that, too.” Then she taught me a move: a swift, hard (make sure to turn your hips) punch right to the gut. “If he starts in on you, make sure to punch him right in the belly button.” The next day at school, I felt nervous and hoped that the bully would take a day off. But in the predictable chaos as the class lined up for lunch, the bully—his name was Chris—asked my little charge whether he planned on crying that day. “Shut up,” I said. “Just leave him alone.” Chris approached me, pushed me, and asked what I planned to do about it. I walked right up to him, pivoted my right hip, and sucker-punched him right in the stomach. He immediately—and terrifyingly—dropped to his knees, seemingly unable to breathe. By the time I realized that I’d really injured him, he was alternately coughing and trying to catch his breath. He even spit up a small amount of blood. Chris went to the school nurse, and after I confirmed that I hadn’t killed him and would avoid the police, my thoughts immediately turned to the school justice system—whether I’d be suspended or expelled and for how long. While the other kids played at recess and Chris recovered with the nurse, the teacher brought me into the classroom. I thought she was going to tell me that she’d called my parents and I’d be kicked out of school. Instead, she gave me a lecture about fighting and made me practice my handwriting instead of playing outside. I detected a hint of approval from the teacher, and I sometimes wonder whether there were school politics at work in her inability to appropriately discipline the class bully. At any rate, Mamaw found out about the fight directly from me and praised me for doing something really good. It was the last time I ever got in a fistfight. While I recognized that things weren’t perfect, I also recognized that our family shared a lot with most of the families I saw around me. Yes, my parents fought intensely, but so did everyone else’s. Yes, my grandparents played as big a role in my life as Mom and Bob did, but that was the norm in hillbilly families. We didn’t live a peaceful life in a small nuclear family. We lived a chaotic life in big groups of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. This was the life I’d been given, and I was a pretty happy kid.

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

  It would be staffed by people with a knowledge of children and parents and a range of psychological and mediation skills. Divorcing couples would be required to participate in a comprehensive course on the many aspects of coparenting. In small groups and at lectures, they would learn about the particular problems associated with visiting and joint custody families, moving, and the burdens on a child who travels long distances between two homes. The staff would teach parents how to help children with difficult transitions at both ends and how to make sure that going back and forth, whether for visiting or for custody, does not break up the child’s playtime and activities. Parents would discuss how to plan visits with their child at different ages. The goal would be to help parents prepare for the challenges of bringing up children in the postdivorce and remarried family, recognizing that everything will be different. And children in this new system could be given a real voice in what happens to them. Parents and children in violent or high-conflict families will need another set of services provided by people with specialized training. 3 Current arrangements in most courts are insufficient for the needs of these troubled and often tormented families. As we’ve seen, they use an inordinate amount of court time and attention. Without specialized programs there is little evidence that the children from such families can be protected. Moreover, they often require help over many years. Obviously, all of these services require training or personnel that is not currently available at universities although knowledge to design appropriate graduate courses surely exists. These new centers could establish special playgroups for young children providing an oasis of pleasant contact with peers to help offset their sense of isolation. In my experience, it’s not necessarily helpful to tell a child that she needs to “express her feelings” or that she’s not the cause of her parents’ divorce. But it does reduce a child’s anxiety to understand the changes happening in her life and to help her think of ways to actively deal with those changes. In these circumstances, a playgroup leader can be especially helpful in imparting information calmly and slowly. An intervention like this lasting several weeks will not prevent children from running into difficulties in the postdivorce family (and it will certainly not affect their anxieties when they reach adulthood), but it can give them a larger framework for understanding their situation—and it could go far in lessening their loneliness and suffering. Moreover, teachers working with children at this time can be trained to spot problems such as uncontrolled aggression, speech disturbances, or depression and to refer the family for expert help before the problems become chronic. Groups for adolescents are not easy to set up at the time of the breakup despite the fact that they would be very useful.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Well, I’ve got some cracked ribs, and there’s not much you can do about them, you just have to let them mend. The only permanent defect is a broken nose.’ ‘Oh dear …’ ‘It gives me a sort of pugilistic look—quite like one of Bill’s boys.’ ‘Even so … Who’s been looking after you? Can I send you bouquets?’ ‘I have a wonderful doctor, and a very sweet friend. I’m fine.’ There followed a typical Nantwich pause, which, heard over the telephone, was more disconcerting than when one was with him. I stood expectantly by. Suddenly he was on the air again. ‘Come over to Staines’s tomorrow, if you want to see something really extraordinary.’ ‘I had a fairly extraordinary time there a few weeks ago.’ ‘It may be a bit vulgar. About seven o’clock.’ There were a few seconds of reedy respiration, and then he hung up. I remembered from something he had said before—about Otto Henderson’s cartoons being ‘vulgar’—that this was a word Charles used, as I had used it when a little boy, to mean indecent, in the manner of, say, a rude joke. Of course, anything remoter from the vulgus than the arty pornography of Henderson and Staines would have been hard to imagine; but it was telling that in his euphemism Charles made the connection, as though his taste for them somehow joined him with the crowd. It was the crowd in the sense of the little clan, the gathering of half a dozen queens, that I joined when I went to Ronald Staines’s, feeling for the first time restored and randy, and enjoying the breeze that set the chestnuts and cherry trees along the pavements sighing. Bobby answered the bell. ‘Jolly good,’ he said, letting me in and then conducting me across the hall with a heavy arm around my shoulder, a kind of gentlemanly muffling of eroticism which also disguised his need for support: he was already extravagant and slow with drink. ‘Jolly glad you could come,’ he said. ‘Not brought your little friend this time, then?’ ‘I’m not sure he has a career as a model.’ Bobby laughed tremendously at this. ‘I liked him, I must say,’ he confessed, as if discussing with colleagues an underqualified applicant for a job. In the white, selfconscious drawing-room Staines sprang up when I entered. He had on blue, baggy workman’s trousers but with a very high, belted waist that gave him the look of someone in a Forties film; a checked camp shirt, the sleeves tightly rolled up around wiry biceps, the pale hairless arms somehow improperly revealed; and blue, rubber-soled sailing shoes, which completed the fantasy image of the man prepared for action. ‘My dear, how perfectly perfect of you to come,’ he welcomed me. ‘We’re all so relieved that you’re better.’ I came forward sheepishly but proudly, like an injured games hero at school, almost expecting sporting applause. Bobby only let go of me to move towards the drinks table.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  During one trip we went to the Castro District of San Francisco so that, in the words of my older cousin Rachael, I could learn that gay people weren’t out to molest me. Another day, we visited a winery. On yet another day, we helped at my cousin Nate’s high school football practice. It was all very exciting. Everyone I met thought I sounded like I was from Kentucky. Of course, I kind of was from Kentucky. And I loved that people thought I had a funny accent. That said, it became clear to me that California really was something else. I’d visited Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and Lexington. I’d spent a considerable amount of time in South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Arkansas. So why was California so different? The answer, I’d learn, was the same hillbilly highway that brought Mamaw and Papaw from eastern Kentucky to southwest Ohio. Despite the topographical differences and the different regional economies of the South and the industrial Midwest, my travels had been confined largely to places where the people looked and acted like my family. We ate the same foods, watched the same sports, and practiced the same religion. That’s why I felt so much kinship with those people at the courthouse: They were hillbilly transplants in one way or another, just like me. Chapter 6One of the questions I loathed, and that adults always asked, was whether I had any brothers or sisters. When you’re a kid, you can’t wave your hand, say, “It’s complicated,” and move on. And unless you’re a particularly capable sociopath, dishonesty can only take you so far. So, for a time, I dutifully answered, walking people through the tangled web of familial relationships that I’d grown accustomed to. I had a biological half brother and half sister whom I never saw because my biological father had given me up for adoption. I had many stepbrothers and stepsisters by one measure, but only two if you limited the tally to the offspring of Mom’s husband of the moment. Then there was my biological dad’s wife, and she had at least one kid, so maybe I should count him, too. Sometimes I’d wax philosophical about the meaning of the word “sibling”: Are the children of your mom’s previous husbands still related to you? If so, what about the future children of your mom’s previous husbands? By some metrics, I probably had about a dozen stepsiblings. There was one person for whom the term “sibling” definitely applied: my sister, Lindsay. If any adjective ever preceded her in troduction, it was always one of pride: “my full sister, Lindsay”; “my whole sister, Lindsay”; “my big sister, Lindsay.” Lindsay was (and remains) the person I was proudest to know.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Big Red nearly bled to death but was rushed to the hospital and survived. Uncle Pet never went to jail, though. Apparently, Big Red was also an Appalachian man, and he refused to speak to the police about the incident or press charges. He knew what it meant to insult a man’s mother. Uncle David may have been the only one of Mamaw’s brothers to care little for that honor culture. An old rebel with long, flowing hair and a longer beard, he loved everything but rules, which might explain why, when I found his giant marijuana plant in the backyard of the old homestead, he didn’t try to explain it away. Shocked, I asked Uncle David what he planned to do with illegal drugs. So he got some cigarette papers and a lighter and showed me. I was twelve. I knew if Mamaw ever found out, she’d kill him. I feared this because, according to family lore, Mamaw had nearly killed a man. When she was around twelve, Mamaw walked outside to see two men loading the family’s cow—a prized possession in a world without running water—into the back of a truck. She ran inside, grabbed a rifle, and fired a few rounds. One of the men collapsed—the result of a shot to the leg—and the other jumped into the truck and squealed away. The would-be thief could barely crawl, so Mamaw approached him, raised the business end of her rifle to the man’s head, and prepared to finish the job. Luckily for him, Uncle Pet intervened. Mamaw’s first confirmed kill would have to wait for another day. Even knowing what a pistol-packing lunatic Mamaw was, I find this story hard to believe. I polled members of my family, and about half had never heard the story. The part I believe is that she would have murdered the man if someone hadn’t stopped her. She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal. Each time someone stole a bike from our porch (three times, by my count), or broke into her car and took the loose change, or stole a delivery, she’d tell me, like a general giving his troops marching orders, “There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.” Youngest of all the Blanton boys was Uncle Gary. He was the baby of the family and one of the sweetest men I knew. Uncle Gary left home young and built a successful roofing business in Indiana. A good husband and a better father, he’d always say to me, “We’re proud of you, ole Jaydot,” causing me to swell with pride. He was my favorite, the only Blanton brother not to threaten me with a kick in the ass or a detached ear.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  We spoke for minutes about everything else; we spoke for hours about war rations, Rosie the Riveter, her dad’s wartime love letters to her mother from the Pacific, and the day “we dropped the bomb.” Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew. I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Years later, our marine boot camp marksmanship instructors would tell us that the kids who already “knew” how to shoot performed the worst, because they’d learned improper fundamentals. That was true with one exception: me. From Papaw, I had learned excellent fundamentals, and I qualified with an M16 rifle as an expert, the highest category, with one of the highest scores in my entire platoon. Papaw was gruff to the point of absurdity. To every suggestion or behavior he didn’t like, Papaw had one reply: “Bullshit.” That was everyone’s cue to shut the hell up. His hobby was cars: He loved buying, trading, and fixing them. One day not long after Papaw quit drinking, Uncle Jimmy came home to find him fixing an old automobile on the street. “He was cussing up a storm. ‘These goddamned Japanese cars, cheap pieces of shit. What a stupid motherfucker who made this part.’ I just listened to him, not knowing a single person was around, and he just kept carrying on and complaining. I thought he sounded miserable.” Uncle Jimmy had recently started working and was eager to spend his money to help his dad out. So he offered to take the car to a shop and get it fixed. The suggestion caught Papaw completely off guard. “What? Why?” he asked innocently. “I love fixing cars.” Papaw had a beer belly and a chubby face but skinny arms and legs. He never apologized with words. While helping Aunt Wee move across the country, she admonished him for his earlier alcoholism and asked why they rarely had the chance to talk. “Well, talk now. We’ve got all fucking day in the car together.” But he did apologize with deeds: The rare times when he lost his temper with me were always followed with a new toy or a trip to the ice cream parlor. Papaw was a terrifying hillbilly made for a different time and place. During that cross-country drive with Aunt Wee, they stopped at a highway rest stop in the early morning. Aunt Wee decided to comb her hair and brush her teeth and thus spent more time in the ladies’ room than Papaw thought reasonable. He kicked open the door holding a loaded revolver, like a character in a Liam Neeson movie. He was sure, he explained, that she was being raped by some pervert. Years later, after Aunt Wee’s dog growled at her infant baby, Papaw told her husband, Dan, that unless he got rid of the dog, Papaw would feed it a steak marinated in antifreeze. He wasn’t joking: Three decades earlier, he had made the same promise to a neighbor after a dog nearly bit my mom. A week later that dog was dead. In that funeral home I thought about these things, too. Most of all I thought about Papaw and me. I thought about the hours we spent practicing increasingly complex math problems.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I’m some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me. That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book. I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us. There is an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story. In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone’s skin—“black people,” “Asians,” “white privilege.” Sometimes these broad categories are useful, but to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family. The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, “In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.”1 This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits—an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country—but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart. If ethnicity is one side of the coin, then geography is the other. When the first wave of Scots-Irish immigrants landed in the New World in the eighteenth century, they were deeply attracted to the Appalachian Mountains.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The Brutus Cinema occupied the basement of one of those Soho houses which, above ground-floor level, maintain their beautiful Caroline fenestration, and seemed a kind of emblem of gay life (the piano nobile elegant above the squalid, jolly soussol) in the far-off spring of 1983. One entered from the street by pushing back the dirty red curtain in the doorway beside an unlettered shop window, painted over white but with a stencil of Michelangelo’s David stuck in the middle. This tussle with the curtain—one never knew whether to shoulder it aside to the right or the left, and often tangled with another punter coming out—seemed a symbolic act, done in the sight of passers-by, and always gave me a little jab of pride. Inside was a small front room, the walls bearing porn-mags on racks, and the glossy boxes of videos for sale; and there were advertisements for clubs and cures. In a locked case by the counter leather underwear was displayed, with cock-rings, face masks, chains and the whole gamut of dildoes from pubertal pink fingers to mighty black jobs, two feet long and as thick as a fist. As I entered, the spotty Glaswegian attendant was getting stuck into a helping of fish and chips, and the room stank of grease and vinegar. I idled for a minute and flicked through some mags. These were really dog-eared browsers, thumbed through time and again by those rent-boys who had the blessing of the management and waited there for pick-ups; curiously incredible stations of sexual intercourse, whose moving versions, or something similar, could be seen downstairs. I looked at the theatrical expressions of ecstasy without interest. The attendant had a small television behind the counter which was a monitor for the films being shown in the cinema; but as there was no one else in the shop he had broken the endless circuit of video sex and was watching a real TV programme instead. He sat there stuffing chips and oozing batter-covered sections of flaky white cod into his mouth, his short-sighted attention rapt by the screen, as if he had been a teenaged boy getting his first sight of a porn film. I sidled along and looked over his shoulder; it was a nature programme, and contained some virtuoso footage shot inside a termite colony. First we saw the long, questing snout of the ant-eater outside, and then its brutal, razor-sharp claws cutting their way in. Back inside, perched by a fibre-optic miracle at a junction of tunnels which looked like the triforium of some Gaudí church, we saw the freakishly extensile tongue of the ant-eater come flicking towards us, cleaning the fleeing termites off the wall.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I went to bed expecting to wake up the next morning, give my mediocre presentation, and call it a day. The science fair was a competition, and I even thought that, with a little salesmanship, I could advance to the next round. But in the morning I discovered that Mom had revamped the entire presentation. It looked like a scientist and a professional artist had joined forces to create it. Though the judges were blown away, when they began to ask questions that I couldn’t answer (but that the maker of the collage would have known), they realized something didn’t fit. I didn’t make it to the final round of the competition. What that incident taught me—besides the fact that I needed to do my own work—was that Mom cared deeply about enterprises of the mind. Nothing brought her greater joy than when I finished a book or asked for another. Mom was, everyone told me, the smartest person they knew. And I believed it. She was definitely the smartest person I knew. In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor, and toughness. I earned my first bloody nose at five and my first black eye at six. Each of these fights began after someone insulted my mother. Mother jokes were never allowed, and grandmother jokes earned the harshest punishment that my little fists could administer. Mamaw and Papaw ensured that I knew the basic rules of fighting: You never start a fight; you always end the fight if someone else starts it; and even though you never start a fight, it’s maybe okay to start one if a man insults your family. This last rule was unspoken but clear. Lindsay had a boyfriend named Derrick, maybe her first boyfriend, who broke up with her after a few days. She was heartbroken as only thirteen-year-olds can be, so I decided to confront Derrick when I saw him walking past our house one day. He had five years and about thirty-five pounds on me, but I came at him twice as he pushed me down easily. The third time I came at him, he’d had enough and proceeded to pound the shit out of me. I ran to Mamaw’s house for some first aid, crying and a little bloody. She just smiled at me. “You did good, honey. You did real good.” In fighting, as with many things, Mamaw taught me through experience. She never laid a hand on me punitively—she was anti-spanking in a way must have come from her own bad experiences—but when I asked her what it felt like to be punched in the head, she showed me. A swift blow, delivered by the meat of her hand, directly on my cheek. “That didn’t feel so bad, did it?” And the answer was no. Getting hit in the face wasn’t nearly as terrible as I’d imagined.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The first of those assemblies coincided with the opening of the Olympieion for public worship; that temple was becoming more than ever the symbol of a reawakened Greece. On that occasion a series of spectacles was given, with marked success, in the theater of Dionysos; my seat there was beside that of the Hierophant, and only slightly higher; thereafter the priest of Antinous had his place, too, among the notables and the clergy. I had had the stage of the theater enlarged and ornamented with new bas-reliefs; on one of these friezes my young Bithynian was receiving a kind of eternal right of citizenship from the Eleusinian goddesses. In the Panathenaic stadium, transformed for a few hours into a forest of mythological times, I staged a hunt in which some thousand wild animals figured; thus was revived for the brief space of the festival that primitive and rustic town of Hippolytus, servitor of Diana, and of Theseus, companion of Hercules. A few days later I left Athens. Nor have I returned there since. The administration of Italy, left for centuries wholly in the hands of the praetors, had never been definitely codified. The Perpetual Edict, which settles the issue once and for all, dates from this period of my life. For years I had been corresponding with Salvius Julianus about these reforms, and my return to Rome served to hasten their completion. The Italian cities were not to be deprived of their civil liberties; on the contrary, we had everything to gain, in that respect as in others, if we did not forcibly impose upon them an artificial uniformity. I am even surprised that such townships, many of which are older than Rome, should be so ready to renounce their customs (some of them wise, indeed) in order to follow the capital in every respect. My purpose was simply to diminish that mass of contradictions and abuses which eventually turn legal procedure into a wilderness where decent people hardly dare venture, and where bandits abound. Such endeavors obliged me to travel frequently from one place to another about the country. I made several stays in Baiae, in the former villa of Cicero which I had purchased early in my reign; this province of Campania interested me, for it reminded me of Greece. On the edge of the Adriatic, in the small city of Hadria whence my ancestors had emigrated to Spain nearly four centuries earlier, I was honored with the highest municipal offices. Near that stormy sea whose name I bear, I came upon some of my family urns in a ruined cemetery.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I hate all of them.” When I read that outburst, I figured Mamaw had gotten it all off her chest. But the next day, she had more to say: “Hello sweet heart all I can think about is them dicks screaming at you that is my job not them fuckers. Just kidding I know you will be what ever you want to be because you are smart something they aren’t and they know it I hate them all really hate their guts. Screaming is part of the game they play . . . you carry on as best you can you will come out ahead.” I had the meanest old hillbilly staunchly in my corner, even if she was hundreds of miles away. In boot camp, mealtime is a marvel of efficiency. You walk through a cafeteria line, holding your tray for the service staff. They drop all of the day’s offerings on your plate, both because you’re afraid to speak up about your least favorite items and because you’re so hungry that you’d gladly eat a dead horse. You sit down, and without looking at your plate (that would be unprofessional) or moving your head (that would also be unprofessional), you shovel food into your mouth until you’re told to stop. The entire process takes no longer than eight minutes, and if you’re not quite full by the end, you certainly suffer from indigestion (which feels about the same). The only discretionary part of the exercise is dessert, set aside on small plates at the end of the assembly line. During the first meal of boot camp, I grabbed the offered piece of cake and marched to my seat. If nothing else tastes good, I thought, this cake shall certainly be the exception. Then my drill instructor, a skinny white man with a Tennessee twang, stepped in front of me. He looked me up and down with his small, intense eyes and offered a query: “You really need that cake, don’t you, fat-ass?” I prepared to answer, but the question was apparently rhetorical, as he smacked the cake out of my hands and moved on to his next victim. I never grabbed the cake again. There was an important lesson here, but not one about food or self-control or nutrition. If you’d told me that I’d react to such an insult by cleaning up the cake and heading back to my seat, I’d never have believed you. The trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt. Instead of congratulating myself on having overcome some obstacles, I worried that I’d be overcome by the next ones. Marine Corps boot camp, with its barrage of challenges big and small, began to teach me I had underestimated myself. Marine Corps boot camp is set up as a life-defining challenge. From the day you arrive, no one calls you by your first name. You’re not allowed to say “I” because you’re taught to mistrust your own individuality.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Without David’s advice, I never would have found myself at that firm, nor would I have spoken (albeit briefly) to the public figure I most admired. I did decide that I wanted to clerk. But instead of walking into the process blindly, I came to know what I wanted out of the experience—to work for someone I respected, to learn as much as I could, and to be close to Usha. So Usha and I decided to go through the clerkship process together. We landed in northern Kentucky, not far from where I grew up. It was the best possible situation. We liked our judicial bosses so much that we asked them to officiate our wedding. This is just one version of how the world of successful people actually works. But social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I didn’t know when I got to Yale Law School: That you needed to wear a suit to a job interview. That wearing a suit large enough to fit a silverback gorilla was inappropriate. That a butter knife wasn’t just decorative (after all, anything that requires a butter knife can be done better with a spoon or an index finger). That pleather and leather were different substances. That your shoes and belt should match. That certain cities and states had better job prospects. That going to a nicer college brought benefits outside of bragging rights. That finance was an industry that people worked in. Mamaw always resented the hillbilly stereotype—the idea that our people were a bunch of slobbering morons. But the fact is that I was remarkably ignorant of how to get ahead. Not knowing things that many others do often has serious economic consequences. It cost me a job in college (apparently Marine Corps combat boots and khaki pants aren’t proper interview attire) and could have cost me a lot more in law school if I hadn’t had a few people helping me every step of the way. Chapter 14As I started my second year of law school, I felt like I’d made it. Fresh off a summer job at the U.S. Senate, I returned to New Haven with a wealth of new friends and experiences. I had this beautiful girlfriend, and I had a great job at a nice law firm almost in hand. I knew that kids like me weren’t supposed to get this far, and I congratulated myself for having beaten the odds. I was better than where I came from: better than Mom and her addiction and better than the father figures who’d walked out on me. I regretted only that Mamaw and Papaw weren’t around to see it. But there were signs that things weren’t going so well, particularly in my relationship with Usha.

• 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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  At last the lion regained his feet and mustered his strength to spring upon horse and rider, now disarmed. I had foreseen this danger; happily Antinous' mount did not stir: our horses had been admirably trained for this sort of game. I interposed my horse, exposing the right flank; I was used to such action and it was not very difficult for me to dispatch the beast, already mortally stricken. He collapsed for the second time; the muzzle rolled in the mire and a stream of dark blood ran into the water. The mighty cat, color of the desert, of honey, of the sun itself, expired with a majesty greater than man's. Antinous leaped down from his horse, which was covered with foam and trembling still; our companions rejoined us and the negroes dragged the immense prey back to the camp. A feast was improvised; lying flat on his stomach before a platter of copper, the youth handed us our portions of lamb roasted beneath the coals. In his honor we drank palm wine. His exultation mounted like song. Perhaps he exaggerated the significance of the aid which I had given him, forgetting that I would have done as much for any hunter in danger; we felt, nevertheless, that we had gone back into that heroic world where lovers die for each other. Pride and gratitude alternated in his joy like the strophes of an ode. The blacks did wonders: soon under the starry sky the skin was swinging suspended on two stakes at the entrance of my tent. Despite the aromatics applied to it, its wild odor haunted us all night long. The next morning, after a meal of fruits, we left the camp; at the moment of departure we caught sight of what was left of the royal beast of the day before: by that time it was only a red carcass in a ditch, surmounted by a cloud of flies. Some days later we returned to Alexandria. The poet Pancrates arranged a special entertainment for me at the Museum; in a music room was assembled a collection of fine and rare instruments. Old Dorian lyres, heavier and more complicated than ours today, stood side by side with curved citharas of Persia and Egypt; there were Phrygian pipes shrill as eunuchs' voices, and delicate Indian flutes, the name of which I do not know. For a long time an Ethiopian beat upon some African drums. Then a woman played a triangular harp of melancholy tone; her cool beauty would have won me had I not already decided to simplify my life by reducing it to what was for me the essential. My favorite musician, Mesomedes of Crete, used the water organ to accompany the recitation of his poem The Sphinx, a disturbing, undulating work, as elusive as the sand before the wind.

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

  All that Lisa said was true of her own life and her generation. Others spoke proudly and triumphantly about their achievements and the strength they acquired in having to do things on their own. “Because my parents were so different I learned to navigate my own way in the world,” said Jerry, a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker. “I’ve learned to use my head and my heart. I’m not afraid of what comes along.” Because they learn at an early age that their parents’ values could differ sharply, children of divorce learn to think for themselves. Their independent thinking extends into learning not to take sides in any continued warfare between their parents. Barbs and criticisms often drone on for years between their divorced parents, but none of the children as older adolescents or adults in this study bought into the accusations. Quite the reverse. They were careful to form their own opinions based on their own perceptions. This, too, was a source of their pride. Given the continuing accusations of infidelity and selfishness in their families, they realized that they had to develop their own morality. Whatever their own family histories, they valued honesty, equality, faithfulness, and kindness in relationships. If they failed to meet their own standards—and many did—they were no different in their values from their peers within good intact families. They just knew a lot less how to live up to them. This generation did not engage in self-pity. Having learned to trust their own judgment they were pragmatists to the core, showing grit and courage against the ups and downs of life. Most held on to the capacity to hope and with it their capacity to change. As Evan said, “The divorce was hard but we can move on and build riches out of it. There is a lot of mix in my family with my dad’s three marriages and my mom’s two marriages and all their children. Mine is the generation to put things together after our parents’ divorce.” I asked Lisa how firm her decision was about never marrying. Was she really sure at age thirty-one she would never fall in love or find a man who would love her? She answered very soberly. “Look, I don’t know a lot about love between a man and a woman, but I know a lot about love and faithfulness. I’ve been blessed with two parents and a stepmother who did their level best for me. So the truth is that I know a lot about love, and yes, I’d want that more than anything in the whole world. With all my big talk, that would be my first choice.” She smiled impishly as she left. “If my luck changes you’ll be among the first to know.” A TWENTY-TWO Conclusions “What’s done to children, they will do to society.” Karl A.

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

  I stood there awkwardly by myself in this no-man’s-land in the middle of the playground. Luckily, I was rescued by the Indian kid from my class, a guy named Theesan Pillay. Theesan was one of the few Indian kids in school, so he’d noticed me, another obvious outsider, right away. He ran over to introduce himself. “Hello, fellow anomaly! You’re in my class. Who are you? What’s your story?” We started talking and hit it off. He took me under his wing, the Artful Dodger to my bewildered Oliver. Through our conversation it came up that I spoke several African languages, and Theesan thought a colored kid speaking black languages was the most amazing trick. He brought me over to a group of black kids. “Say something,” he told them, “and he’ll show you he understands you.” One kid said something in Zulu, and I replied to him in Zulu. Everyone cheered. Another kid said something in Xhosa, and I replied to him in Xhosa. Everyone cheered. For the rest of recess Theesan took me around to different black kids on the playground. “Show them your trick. Do your language thing.” The black kids were fascinated. In South Africa back then, it wasn’t common to find a white person or a colored person who spoke African languages; during apartheid white people were always taught that those languages were beneath them. So the fact that I did speak African languages immediately endeared me to the black kids. “How come you speak our languages?” they asked. “Because I’m black,” I said, “like you.” “You’re not black.” “Yes, I am.” “No, you’re not. Have you not seen yourself?” They were confused at first. Because of my color, they thought I was a colored person, but speaking the same languages meant that I belonged to their tribe. It just took them a moment to figure it out. It took me a moment, too. At some point I turned to one of them and said, “Hey, how come I don’t see you guys in any of my classes?” It turned out they were in the B classes, which also happened to be the black classes. That same afternoon, I went back to the A classes, and by the end of the day I realized that they weren’t for me. Suddenly, I knew who my people were, and I wanted to be with them. I went to see the school counselor. “I’d like to switch over,” I told her. “I’d like to go to the B classes.” She was confused. “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t think you want to do that.” “Why not?” “Because those kids are…you know.” “No, I don’t know. What do you mean?” “Look,” she said, “you’re a smart kid. You don’t want to be in that class.” “But aren’t the classes the same? English is English. Math is math.” “Yeah, but that class is…those kids are gonna hold you back. You want to be in the smart class.”

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Of course, the stunning result of the expedition was personal proof that it really pays to listen carefully to the voice of one’s private ornithological muse. It pays to be lucky, too, for obviously I could never have come to this moment without my previous observations of the White-throated Manakin, which I was among the very few people on earth to have seen. My observations of White-throated Manakins in Suriname proved to be a unique and essential preparation for understanding the evolutionary implications of what I had witnessed in El Placer. What’s more, this newly revealed evolutionary pattern also implied something fundamental about the process of sexual selection by mate choice and the consequences for the assembly of complex repertoires of ornamental traits and seductive signals. Thirty years later, these discoveries still resonate in my work. — In the coming weeks, Ann and I would spend over 150 hours watching, tape-recording, and filming the display behaviors of the Golden-winged Manakin. It would take me much more analysis in order to establish the exact details of the host of behavioral homologies shared between these species since their common ancestor. It was obvious that long ago a common ancestral species had evolved a unique display repertoire, elements of which the Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins still exhibit in the present day. But it was also clear that over time parts of that repertoire had diverged and transformed, with each species evolving its own unique display elements. I discovered many such differences between them. For example, once on the log, the Golden-winged males do not perform the bill-pointing posture and the to-and-fro display like those of the White-throated Manakin. Nor do Golden-wings perform anything like the wing-shiver display, even though they have a glorious golden wing patch to show off during such a display. Male Golden-winged Manakins do, however, have a unique display of their own. Once on the log, the male performs an elaborate “side-to-side bowing display,” in which he fluffs out his body plumage, cocks his tail slightly, and erects the tiny black hornlets on either side of his golden crown. Then, with the mechanical rhythm of a windup toy in a davening trance, he bows forward, nearly touching his bill to the log, rises up, takes a few steps to the side and rotates a bit, bows again, takes a few steps back in the original direction, and bows, and so on. The males we observed continued this display for ten to sixty seconds without interruption. Nothing remotely like this occurs among the White-throated Manakins or any other manakin species.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Furthermore, our research has discovered that what the 2012 Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin said about rape in humans—that “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”—is actually true of ducks, but the reason it is true tells us something deeply important and new about the evolution of sexual autonomy in nature. — This chapter, like the research grant that had its fifteen minutes of infamy back in 2013, has focused on a group of birds in which female mate choice is threatened by male sexual coercion. What happens when mate choice is constrained, prevented, or denied by physical force? we asked. And as we have seen, the female ducks do not simply cave under the threat of violence or even death. Rather, their shared standards of beauty—even meaningless, arbitrary beauty—provide them with the evolutionary leverage to fight back against sexual coercion and reassert their freedom of choice over fertilization. Female ducks teach us a great lesson about the unexpected power of female sexual autonomy. In the words of the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin song, they teach us that “Sisters are doin’ it for themselves!” By doing so, females together become the agents of choice and the guarantors of their own freedom of choice. The evolutionary advantages of obtaining the mates they prefer—male offspring that will possess the traits they and other females have agreed are attractive—are so strong that they have reshaped female internal anatomy. Expanded sexual autonomy allows female waterfowl to continue to select for beauty in the form of male sexual display and everything that that involves—sounds, colors, behaviors, plumage, and so on. Even in the face of unrelenting sexual attack, female ducks have found a way to maintain the beauty in their world. It is not an accident that these discoveries are consequences of the aesthetic view of mate choice. Only when we recognize that mate choice is a form of individual agency can we conceptualize sexual violence as a disruption of that agency. To paraphrase Susan Brownmiller, sexual violence is against the will of female ducks too. The revelation of an aesthetic mechanism for the evolution of female sexual autonomy in waterfowl is a profoundly feminist scientific discovery. It is not feminist by accommodating the science to any contemporary political theory or ideology. Rather, it is a feminist discovery in that it demonstrates that sexual autonomy matters in nature. Sexual autonomy is not merely a political idea, a legal concept, or a philosophical theory; rather, it is a natural consequence of the evolutionary interactions of sexual reproduction, mating preferences, and sexual coercion and violence in social species. And the evolutionary engine of sexual autonomy is aesthetic mate choice. Only by acknowledging that these are real forces in nature can we make progress toward a complete understanding of the natural world. Of course, this should not be too surprising. As Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report has observed, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” —