Realization

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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I realized that even the date of my bar mitzvah had been left undecided, to be determined according to the date of his birth. And so I waited for him. My parents had repeated to me often enough, in spite of all, that I was their first great joy, the only boy and the future head of the family. Now, I learned that I had only just escaped not being what I was. Before me, my parents had had another boy, born with all his fingers joined together, webbed like a duck’s foot: “That was a bad omen, but I looked after him well in spite of it all,” my mother used to say, “though I knew all the time that something would happen to him.” And it did happen, for he died in infancy. On the eve of his death, one of the women next door had heard an owl hoot quite close to our house. As Monsieur Touitou, our teacher, had told us that this superstition was meaningless, I explained firmly to my mother that owls do not kill infants but that the latter die for lack of proper care. The harbinger of death kills nobody; on the contrary, it’s a useful bird. That was exactly what Monsieur Touitou had explained to us. My mother was furious and answered me that I was a fool, a very small rat who thought he had a very long tail; and if school taught me only to make fun of my parents, she would prevent my going there. I thus learned to distinguish more clearly what was right and proper at school from what was right and proper at home, though much to the advantage of school; and I acquired the habit of speaking as little as possible to my parents about what I did at school. Mother was carrying her huge belly ever more uneasily, in spite of her fortitude. She never complained, and she expressed only one longing — to ride in the car of one of our neighbors, which was granted to her at once. But one could distinguish in her vague looks a weariness that weighed on her as she concentrated on this unusual pregnancy, almost unable, it seemed, to attend at the same time to outfitting me for my bar mitzvah and preparing for the baby, or the babies, as some women predicted, at the same time. Thus, she attended only to the most urgent things, and set about readying baby clothes.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  As soon as I know this (his desire, pointing at me, is like a sword between us), I free myself, and I leave, without hurting him in any way. I think, well, I just wanted the pleasure without feeling. But something holds me back. There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me. That will have to be moved if I am to move wholly. I think of this in the Métro, and I get lost. A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something, and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid. Then I read Drake’s novel, and I discover an unsuspected Drake—foreign, uprooted, fantastic, erratic. A realist, exasperated by reality. Immediately his desire ceases to repulse me. A little link has been formed between two strangenesses. I respond to his imagination with mine. His novel conceals a few of his own feelings. How do I know? They are not consistent with the story, not quite. They are there because they are natural to him. The name Lawrence Drake is put on, too. There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work. I wondered at this last night as I closed Drake’s book. I knew it would take me years to forget John [Erskine], because it was he who first stirred the secret source of my life. There is nothing of Drake himself in the book, I am convinced. He hates the parts I like. It was all written objectively, consciously, and even the fantasy was carefully planned. We settle this at the beginning of my next visit. Very good. I am beginning to see things more clearly. I know now why I did not trust him the first day. His actions are devoid of either feeling or imagination. They are motivated by sheer habits of living and grabbing and analyzing. He’s a grasshopper. He has now hopped into my life. My feeling of dislike becomes intensified. When he tries to kiss me, I evade him. At the same time I concede to myself that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I’ve met. His gestures never miss their aim, no kiss ever goes astray. His hands are deft. My curiosity for sensuality is stirred. I have always been tempted by unknown pleasures. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. Finally I lie still on the couch, but when his desire grows, I try to escape. Too late. Then I tell him the truth: woman’s trouble. That does not seem to deter him. “You don’t think I want that mechanical way—there are other ways.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  He felt no vibration of social hope in the preaching of John the Baptist and in the shouts of the crowd when Jesus entered Jerusalem. He caught no revolutionary note in the Book of Revelation. The social movement had not yet reached him. Jesus knew human nature when he reiterated: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” We see in the Bible what we have been taught to see there. We drop out great sets of facts from our field of vision. We read other things into the Bible which are not there. During the Middle Ages men thought they saw their abstruse scholastic philosophy and theology amid the simplicity of the gospels. They found in the epistles the priests and bishops whom they knew, with robe and tonsure, living a celibate life and obeying the pope. When the Revival of Learning taught men to read all books with literary appreciation and historic insight, many things disappeared from the Bible for their eyes, and new things appeared. A new language was abroad and the Bible began to speak that language. If the Bible was not a living power before the Reformation, it was not because the Bible was chained up and forbidden, as we are told, but because their minds were chained by preconceived ideas, and when they read, they failed to read. We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. It is accompanied by a reinterpretation of nature and of history. The social movement has helped to create the modern study of history. Where we used to see a panorama of wars and strutting kings and court harlots, we now see the struggle of the people to wrest a living from nature and to shake off their oppressors. The new present has created a new past. The French Revolution was the birth of modern democracy, and also of the modern school of history. The Bible shares in that new social reinterpretation. The stories of the patriarchs have a new lifelikeness when they are read in the setting of primitive social life. There are texts and allusions in the New Testament which had been passed by as of slight significance; now they are like windows through which we see miles of landscape. But it is a slow process. The men who write commentaries are usually of ripe age and their lines of interest were fixed before the social movement awoke men. They follow the traditions of their craft and deal with the same questions that engaged their predecessors. Eminent theologians, like other eminent thinkers, live in the social environment of wealth and to that extent are slow to see. The individualistic conception of religion is so strongly fortified in theological literature and ecclesiastical institutions that its monopoly cannot be broken in a hurry. It will take a generation or two for the new social comprehension of religion to become common property.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  When life gets upended, some corner of our psyche becomes more aware that we will one day leave this planet. No one really wants to think about that (including me). But perhaps the heightened awareness of our limited time helps us see more keenly which parts of our lives could be pruned to make space for our next chapter. I think back to David Kessler and what he said about how, when our loved ones are nearing the end of their lives, we have to “ride the damn horse in the direction it’s going.” Just as that’s a sobering metaphor for the dying, it also applies to the parts of ourselves that have died (or are dying) in the process of loss and crisis. When we resist the undercurrent of deep inner transformation, we’re also resisting the natural growth process. In retrospect, the dominoes that fell once Dad got sick now seem inevitable, like they had been a long time coming. My mind always goes back to the conference I spoke at in 2016, before the return flight was delayed, before Mom greeted me at the door at midnight, before the words “Dad has a mass on his pancreas” changed our lives forever. Readying myself to go onstage that night to hopefully inspire people to live fully, I remember thinking, Once this is over , then I’ll live. Once this task—obligation, deadline, to-do—was complete, then I’d [take better care of myself, visit my best friend . . . fill in the blank]. But every time I finished a task or project, I failed to pause and keep the promises I had made to myself. Instead, I’d automatically turn to another item on my list. I knew I needed to recalibrate for quite some time. I just didn’t know how. Then illness happened, loss happened, crisis happened, and once again, I was reminded that life is always speaking to us. At first, it taps us gently and whispers in our ears. Our intuition sharpens and our gut tingles. Our dreams become more vivid as we unconsciously work out the messages being offered in our sleep. Life continues trying to get our attention in the hopes that we’ll recalibrate on our own. But when we refuse to pick up what life is laying down, those whispers can turn into wrecking balls. It’s kinda like the Glenn Close character in the movie Fatal Attraction . Life basically says, “I will not be ignored, Dan.” And if you shrug her off long enough, she’ll boil your bunny. Horrific, I know. Maybe your life isn’t as deranged (and dramatic) as mine, but my point still remains: Don’t blow off the messages. Listen to the whispers before they become roars. Even though it’s human nature to kick the can down the road because fear comes up, excuses multiply, and there’s a sale at Target, life (like Glenn Close) is very persistent. So what then?

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  Why do we think murder is wrong, Mounce asks: we can easily think of reasons, but it turns out on further reflection that none of the reasons we might cite is any more certain and fundamental than our original conviction that murder is wrong. We might say that murder is wrong because it has bad social effects—but then, when there are no such consequences, we should have to find a different reason. It might be held, on the other hand, that murdering certain persons would have good social effects: that might lead into further debate about the rights and wrongs of assassinating tyrants, and so on. As the 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler is enough to show, even assassination in such circumstances confronted the conspirators with a terrible moral dilemma. Partly, no doubt, as officers, they had a problem about breaking their oath of allegiance to the head of state. Also, however, they shrank from an act of homicide which, if successful, was likely to have good political results. This is not surprising. We think there is something wrong with murder, independently of whatever results it might have. The reasoning that might come into the question begins after, not before, some act is regarded as murder. Our reaction to murder is an example of what Thomas means by saying that we have moral principles which are not founded on reasoning but are given us by nature. For Thomas, moral reasoning is cogent only to the extent that it is framed and informed by principles that are given to us by our nature. We know the difference between right and wrong not because we have discovered it by reasoning but because it is given us as a natural disposition, “a natural way of reacting to good and evil when they appear,” as Mounce says. If this seems too mysterious we need to consider what the alternative might be. If our belief that some action is right or wrong rests on reasoning, we certainly move far from what Thomas and (before him) Aristotle held. For Thomas it is part of our being created to the image and likeness of God that we have these natural dispositions which provide the principles upon which our moral reasoning can begin to work. Given that by nature we are drawn to the good and inclined to resist evil, we have a ‘natural law’ which then requires us to reason, in particular cases. Of course we have to reason; our natural reactions will not do it all. For Thomas, as for common sense, there is something given to us and something that we have to do ourselves. Moreover, again as Mounce notes, it is mistaken to think that for Thomas natural law enables us to have solutions to every moral problem—he thought, on the contrary, that no such clear-cut solutions were available in most cases.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have periods of persistent and distracting visceral discomfort that are totally intrusive and energy-consuming. I say this rather than simply use the word pain, because there are too many gradations of effect and response that are not covered by that one word. Self-hypnosis seemed a workable possibility for maintaining some control over the processes going on inside my body. With trial and inquiry, I found a reliable person to train me in the techniques of self-hypnosis. It’s certainly cheaper than codeine. Self-hypnosis requires a concentration so intense I put myself into a waking trance. But we go into those states more often than we realize. Have you ever been wide awake on the subway and missed your station because you were thinking about something else? It’s a question of recognizing this state and learning to use it to manipulate my consciousness of pain. One of the worst things about intrusive pain is that it makes me feel impotent, unable to move against it and therefore against anything else, as if the pain swallows up all ability to act. Self-hypnosis has been useful to me not only for refocusing physical discomfort, it has also been useful to me in helping effect other bargains with my unconscious self. I’ve been able to use it to help me remember my dreams, raise a subnormal body temperature, and bring myself to complete a difficult article. I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes—not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected—a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance. December 7, 1986 New York City I’m glad I don’t have to turn away any more from movies about people dying of cancer. I no longer have to deny cancer as a reality in my life. As I wept over Terms of Endearment last night, I also laughed. It’s hard to believe I avoided this movie for over two years. Yet while I was watching it, involved in the situation of a young mother dying of breast cancer, I was also very aware of that standard of living, taken for granted in the film, that made the expression of her tragedy possible. Her mother’s maid and the manicured garden, the unremarked but very tangible money so evident through its effects. Daughter’s philandering husband is an unsuccessful English professor, but they still live in a white-shingled house with trees, not in some rack-ass tenement on the Lower East Side or in Harlem for which they pay too much rent. Her private room in Lincoln Memorial Hospital has her mama’s Renoir on the wall. There are never any Black people at all visible in that hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, not even in the background. Now this may not make her death scenes any less touching, but it did strengthen my resolve to talk about my experiences with cancer as a Black woman.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse. In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity—the abuse of feeling. When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before. But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation. Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “ For Mom and Dad ,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “ Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q .” She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night. The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can. Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut. The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar. The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working . So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach. What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood. How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen? Did I not read the poem she brought home that year from the school on the steep hill? The school to which she wore the plaid uniform jumper and carried the blue lunchbox? The school to which John watched her walk every morning and thought it was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen? “The World,” this poem is called, and I recognize her careful printing, quixotically executed on a narrow strip of construction paper fourteen inches long but only two inches wide.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Dingwall took the next train west, leaving me to put up hoardings in a month, after getting first of all the permission from the lot-owners. To cut a long story short, I got the permission from a hundred lot-owners in a week through my brother Willie, who as an estate agent knew them all. Then I made a contract with a little English carpenter and put the hoardings up and got the bills all posted three days before the date agreed upon. Hatherly’s Minstrels had a great fortnight and everyone was content. From that time on, I drew about fifty dollars a week as my profit from letting the hoardings, in spite of the slump. Suddenly Smith got a bad cold: Lawrence is nearly a thousand feet above sea-level and in winter can be as icy as the Pole. He began to cough, a nasty, little, dry hacking cough: I persuaded him to see a doctor and then to have a consultation, the result being that the specialists all diagnosed tuberculosis and recommended immediate change to the milder east. For some reason or other, I believe because an editorial post on the “Press” in Philadelphia was offered to him, he left Lawrence hastily and took up his residence in the Quaker City. His departure had notable results for me. First of all, the spiritual effect astonished me. As soon as he went, I began going over all he had taught me, especially in economics and metaphysics: bit by bit I came to the conclusion that his Marxian communism was only half the truth and probably the least important half: his Hegelianism, too, which I have hardly mentioned, was pure moonshine in my opinion: extremely beautiful at moments, as the moon is when silvering purple clouds: “history is the development of the Spirit in time: Nature is the projection of the idea in space”, sounds wonderful; but it’s moon-shiney, and not very enlightening. In the first three months of Smith’s absence, my own individuality sprang upright, like a sapling that has long been bent almost to breaking, so to speak, by a superincumbent weight and I began to grow with a sort of renewed youth. Now for the first time, when about nineteen years of age, I came to self-consciousness as Frank Harris and began to deal with life in my own way and under this name, Frank.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I remember only snippets from the rest of that weekend. Sailing on his boat. A walk in the woods. Finding a clamshell on the beach (that sits in my bathroom with a candle in it to this day). Telling him I wanted to be an actress. Him telling me I should be a writer instead. Noticing how we crossed our legs the same way and had a similar sense of humor. Moments that made me understand that I am a product of both BD and Ken, of nature and nurture. BD and I had another thing in common: he first met his father when he was a teenager, too. Being born into absence was our shared DNA, and so was the trauma that came with it. BD wasn’t a villain, after all. He was a victim of rejection, just like me. And as such, he did what he was taught to do. There’s a growing body of scientific literature to support that grief and trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. In epigenetics, researchers study how gene expression is modified based on behavior and environment. In terms of trauma, that means that people who’ve experienced war, famine, or other forms of extreme stress can pass down genetic modifications to their offspring. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and director of Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, has been at the forefront of this research. She and her team conducted a study of 32 Jewish men and women who had endured or observed torture, been interned at concentration camps, or went into hiding during the war. They also examined the genes of their adult children, finding that both parents and offspring had lowered cortisol levels compared to Jewish families who resided outside of Europe during the war. This is significant, as cortisol is the stress hormone that helps to counter adrenaline and calm the system. Yehuda concludes, “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents.” Research like Yehuda’s suggests that our ancestors’ life experiences have the power to leave lasting imprints for generations. It wouldn’t surprise me if on some very old branches of my paternal family tree there were ancestors who had also experienced abandonment and neglect. Living in these conditions creates a whole bunch of behavioral issues: codependency; fear of being left; insecurity and low selfworth; difficulty saying no and trouble self-regulating, especially big feelings like—you guessed it—anger. As a result, it can be hard to form healthy relationships, because it’s difficult to trust others and even yourself.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Automatically I took down the volume and it opened of itself at the last page of Emerson’s advice to the scholars of Dartmouth College. Every word is still printed on my memory: I can see the left-hand page and read again that divine message: I make no excuse for quoting it almost word for word: “Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the scholar’s place and hope, because I thought that standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you seek? what is this beauty!’ men will ask, with derision. If nevertheless God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season’;—then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates the extreme need of the priests of science.... Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.” The truth of it shocked me: “then perish the buds of art and poetry and science in you as they have perished already in a thousand, thousand men!” That explained why it was that there was no Shakespeare, no Bacon, no Swinburne in America where, according to population and wealth there should be dozens. There flashed on me the realization of the truth, that just because wealth was easy to get here, it exercised an incomparable attraction and in its pursuit “perished a thousand, thousand” gifted spirits who might have steered humanity to new and nobler accomplishment.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “I want to study you!” she said and took my sex in her hands and then my balls: “What are they for?” she asked and I had to explain that that was where my seed was secreted: she made a face, so I added, “You have a similar manufactory, my dear; but it’s inside you, the ovaries they are called, and it takes them a month to make one egg whereas my balls make millions of tadpoles in an hour. I often wonder why?” After getting Kate an excellent breakfast, I put her in a cab and she reached her friend’s house just at the proper time; but the girl-friend could never understand how they had missed each other at the station. I returned to Lawrence the same day, wondering what Fortune had in store for me! I was soon to find out that life could be disagreeable. The University of Kansas had been established by the first Western outwanderers and like most pioneers they had brains and courage and accordingly they put in the statutes that there should be no religious teaching of any kind in the University, still less should religion ever be exalted into a test or qualification. But in due course Yankees from New England swarmed out to prevent Kansas from being made into a slave-state and these Yankees were all fanatical so-called Christians belonging to every known sect; but all distinguished or rather deformed by an intolerant bigotry in matters of religion and sex. Their honesty was by no means so pronounced: each sect had to have its own professor; thus history got an Episcopalian clergyman who knew no history, and Latin a Baptist who, when Smith greeted him in Latin, could only blush and beg him not to expose his shameful ignorance; the lady who taught French was a joke but a good Methodist, I believe, and so forth and so on: education degraded by sectarian jealousies. As soon as Professor Smith left the University, the Faculty passed a resolution establishing “College Chapel” in imitation of an English University custom. At once I wrote to the Faculty protesting and citing the Statutes of the Founders. The Faculty did not answer my letter; but instituted roll-call instead of chapel and when they got all the students assembled for roll-call, they had the doors locked and began prayers, ending with a hymn. After the roll-call I got up and walked to the door and tried in vain to open it. Fortunately the door on this side the hall was only a makeshift structure of thin wooden planks. I stepped back a pace or two and appealed again to the Professors seated on the platform: when they paid no heed, I ran and jumped with my foot against the lock; it sprang and the door flew open with a crash.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Facing death shows us the other parts of our lives that are dying, too. Our outworn patterns, partnerships, and parts come into sharp focus. This trickle-down effect makes perfect sense. All systems of life are interconnected, and what isn’t working in one area often illuminates the struggle in other areas, too. When life gets upended, some corner of our psyche becomes more aware that we will one day leave this planet. No one really wants to think about that (including me). But perhaps the heightened awareness of our limited time helps us see more keenly which parts of our lives could be pruned to make space for our next chapter. I think back to David Kessler and what he said about how, when our loved ones are nearing the end of their lives, we have to “ride the damn horse in the direction it’s going.” Just as that’s a sobering metaphor for the dying, it also applies to the parts of ourselves that have died (or are dying) in the process of loss and crisis. When we resist the undercurrent of deep inner transformation, we’re also resisting the natural growth process. In retrospect, the dominoes that fell once Dad got sick now seem inevitable, like they had been a long time coming. My mind always goes back to the conference I spoke at in 2016, before the return flight was delayed, before Mom greeted me at the door at midnight, before the words “Dad has a mass on his pancreas” changed our lives forever. Readying myself to go onstage that night to hopefully inspire people to live fully, I remember thinking, Once this is over, then I’ll live. Once this task—obligation, deadline, to-do—was complete, then I’d [take better care of myself, visit my best friend . . . fill in the blank]. But every time I finished a task or project, I failed to pause and keep the promises I had made to myself. Instead, I’d automatically turn to another item on my list. I knew I needed to recalibrate for quite some time. I just didn’t know how. Then illness happened, loss happened, crisis happened, and once again, I was reminded that life is always speaking to us. At first, it taps us gently and whispers in our ears. Our intuition sharpens and our gut tingles. Our dreams become more vivid as we unconsciously work out the messages being offered in our sleep. Life continues trying to get our attention in the hopes that we’ll recalibrate on our own. But when we refuse to pick up what life is laying down, those whispers can turn into wrecking balls. It’s kinda like the Glenn Close character in the movie Fatal Attraction. Life basically says, “I will not be ignored, Dan.” And if you shrug her off long enough, she’ll boil your bunny. Horrific, I know.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Is 42:5 ] 26 “And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands and territories. 27 “This was so that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grasp for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. 28 “For in Him we live and move and exist [that is, in Him we actually have our being], as even some of f your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ 29 “So then, being God’s children, we should not think that the Divine Nature (deity) is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination or skill of man. 30 “Therefore God overlooked and disregarded the former ages of ignorance; but now He commands all people everywhere to repent [that is, to change their old way of thinking, to regret their past sins, and to seek God’s purpose for their lives], 31 because He has set a day when He will judge the inhabited world in righteousness by a Man whom He has appointed and destined for that task, and He has provided credible proof to everyone by raising Him from the dead.” [Ps 9:8 ; 96:13 ; 98:9 ] 32 Now when they heard [the term] resurrection from the dead, g some mocked and sneered; but others said, “We will hear from you again about this matter.” 33 So Paul left them. 34 But some men joined him and believed; among them were Dionysius, [a judge] of the Council of Areopagus, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. Acts 18 Paul at Corinth 1 A FTER THIS Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife, Priscilla, because [the Roman Emperor] Claudius had issued an edict that all the a Jews were to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3 and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them; and they worked together for they were tent-makers. 4 And he reasoned and debated in the synagogue every Sabbath, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks; 5 but when Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia (northern Greece), Paul began devoting himself completely to [preaching] the word, and solemnly testifying to the Jews that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed). 6 But since the Jews kept resisting and opposing him, and blaspheming [God], he b shook out his robe and said to them, “Your blood (damnation) be on your own heads! I am innocent of it. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” [Acts 13:46 ] 7 Then he moved on from there and went to the house of a man named c Titius Justus, who worshiped God and whose house was next door to the synagogue.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I feel like a second chance, for true! I’m making myself a new office upstairs in Jonathan’s old room. It’s going to be a good year. October 10, 1984 New York City I’ve been thinking about my time in Germany again, unencumbered by artificial shades of terror and self-concern. I don’t want my involvement with health matters to obscure the revelation of differences I encountered. The Afro-European women. What I learned about the differences when one teaches about feeling and poetry in a language that is not the original language of the people learning, even when they speak that language fluently. (Of course, all poets learn about feeling as children in our native tongue, and the psychosocial strictures and emotional biases of that language pass over into how we think about feeling for the rest of our lives.) I will never forget the emotional impact of Raja’s poetry, and how what she is doing with the German language is so close to what Black poets here are doing with English. It was another example of how our Africanness impacts upon the world’s consciousness in intersecting ways. As an African-American woman, I feel the tragedy of being an oppressed hyphenated person in america, of having no land to be our primary teacher. And this distorts us in so many ways. Yet there is a vital part that we play as Black people in the liberation consciousness of every freedom-seeking people upon this globe, no matter what they say they think about us as Black americans. And whatever our differences are that make for difficulty in communication between us and other oppressed peoples, as Afro-Americans we must recognize the promise we represent for some new social synthesis that the world has not yet experienced. I think of the Afro-Dutch, Afro-German, Afro-French women I met this spring in europe, and how they are beginning to recognize each other and come together openly in terms of their identities, and I see that they are also beginning to cut a distinct shape across the cultural face of every country where they are at home. I am thinking about issues of color as color, Black as a chromatic fact, gradations and all. There is the reality of defining Black as a geographical fact of culture and heritage emanating from the continent of Africa—Black meaning Africans and other members of a diaspora, with or without color. Then there is a quite different reality of defining Black as a political position, acknowledging that color is the bottom line the world over, no matter how many other issues exist alongside it. Within this definition, Black becomes a codeword, a rallying identity for all oppressed people of Color. And this position reflects the empowerment and the worldwide militant legacy of our Black Revolution of the 1960s, the effects of which are sometimes more obvious in other countries than in our own. I see certain pitfalls in defining Black as a political position.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I suspect I shall have to concentrate upon how painful it is to think about death all the time. [In the spring of 1984, I spent three months in Berlin conducting a course in Black american women poets and a poetry workshop in English for German students. One of my aims for this trip was to meet Black German women. I’d been told there were quite a few in Berlin, but I had been unable to obtain much information about them in New York.] May 23, 1984 Berlin, West Germany Who are they, the German women of the diaspora? Where do our paths intersect as women of Color—beyond the details of our particular oppressions, although certainly not outside the reference of those details? And where do our paths diverge? Most important, what can we learn from our connected differences that will be useful to us both, Afro-German and Afro-American? Afro-German. The women say they’ve never heard that term used before. I asked one of my Black students how she’d thought about herself growing up. “The nicest thing they ever called us was ‘warbaby,’” she said. But the existence of most Black Germans has nothing to do with the Second World War, and, in fact, predates it by many decades. I have Black German women in my class who trace their Afro-German heritage back to the 1890s. For me, Afro-German means the shining faces of Katharina and May in animated conversation about their fathers’ homelands, the comparisons, joys, disappointments. It means my pleasure at seeing another Black woman walk into my classroom, her reticence slowly giving way as she explores a new self-awareness, gains a new way of thinking about herself in relation to other Black women. “I’ve never thought of Afro-German as a positive concept before,” she said, speaking out of the pain of having to live a difference that has no name, speaking out of the growing power self-scrutiny has forged from that difference. I am excited by these women, by their blossoming sense of identity as they’re beginning to say in one way or another, “Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires. We are not some button on the pocket of your longing.” I can see these women as a growing force for international change, in concert with other Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asians, Afro-Americans. We are the hyphenated people of the diaspora whose self-defined identities are no longer shameful secrets in the countries of our origin, but rather declarations of strength and solidarity. We are an increasingly united front from which the world has not yet heard. June 1, 1984 Berlin My classes are exciting and exhausting. Black women are hearing about them and their number is increasing. I can’t eat cooked food and I am getting sicker. My liver is so swollen I can feel it under my ribs. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  The argument that i Peter must be late because it quotes from Ephesians seems to us very uncertain and insecure, and probably mistaken. As an Elder Myself It is objected that Peter could not well have written the sentence: `Now as an elder myself ... I exhort the elders among you' (i Peter 5:1). It is maintained that Peter could not have called himself an elder. He was an apostle whose function was quite different from that of an elder. The apostle was characteristically someone whose work and authority were not confined to any one congregation, but whose remit ran throughout the whole Church; whereas the elder was the governing official of the local congregation. That is perfectly true. But it must be remembered that among the Jews there was no office more universally honoured than that of elder. Elders had the respect of the whole community, and the community looked to them for guidance in its problems and justice in its disputes. Peter, as a Jew, would feel nothing out of place in calling himself an elder, and in so doing he would avoid the conscious claim of authority that the title of apostle might have implied, and graciously and courteously identify himself with the people to whom he spoke. A Witness of the Sufferings of Christ It is objected that Peter could not honestly have called himself a witness of Christ's sufferings, for after the arrest in the garden all the disciples forsook Jesus and fled (Matthew 26:56), and, apart from the beloved disciple, none was a witness of the cross (John 19:26-7). Peter could call himself a witness of the resurrection, and indeed to be such a witness was the function of an apostle (Acts 1:22); but a witness of the cross he was not. In a sense, that is undeniable. And yet Peter is here claiming not to be a witness of the crucifixion but to be a witness of the sufferings of Christ. He did see Christ suffer, in his continual rejection by the people, in the poignant moments of the Last Supper, in the agony in the garden and in that moment when, after he had denied him, Jesus turned and looked on him (Luke 22:61). It is an insensitive and unimaginative criticism which denies to Peter the right to say that he had been a witness of the sufferings of Christ. Persecution for the Name

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Poetry Is Not a Luxury T he quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/” * and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  For example, I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a painting. At first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, 'surely I have seen that before,' but when or how does not become clear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbra of familiarity,—when suddenly I exclaim: "I have it, it is a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Florentine Academy—I recollect it there!" But the motive to the recall does not lie in the fact that the brain-tract now excited by the painting was once before excited in a similar way; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with that brain-tract other tracts also are excited: those which sustain my friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the one hand; those which sustain the mental image of the Florence Academy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of my visit there; and finally those which make me (more dimly) think of the years I have lived through between these two times. The result of this total brain-disturbance is a thought with a peculiar object, namely, that I who now stand here with this picture before me, stood so many years ago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original. M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a mental image develops into an object of memory, in his usual vivid fashion. He says: "I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for some time, and surrounds itself with new details. 'When I saw him he was bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in a studio; he is so-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when was it? It was not yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he told me that he was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It was before the spring. But at what exact date? I saw, the same day, people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was Palm Sunday!' Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shiftings to front and rear along the line of the past; each of these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted with the present sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled suddenly to an indeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and confronted with all the shortened images by which we sum up the proceedings of a day or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, beyond yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the ill-defined mass constituted by our recent recollections.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Dark images of the New World accompanied more seductive ones. When early English promoters portrayed North America as a rich and fertile landscape, they grossly and perhaps knowingly exaggerated. Most were describing a land they never had seen, of course. Wary investors and state officials had to be convinced to take the plunge into a risky overseas venture. But most important, it was a place into which they could export their own marginalized people. The idea of America as “the world’s best hope” came much later. Historic memory has camouflaged the less noble origins of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We all know what imagery springs to mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division. And it gets ever more misty-eyed from there, because disorder and discord serve no positive purpose in burgeoning national pride. Class is the most outstanding, if routinely overlooked, element in presuppositions about early settlement. Even now, the notion of a broad and supple middle class functions as a mighty balm, a smoke screen. We cling to the comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class without a lower. It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the nation’s inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into the background again. An imaginary classless (or class-free) American past is the America that Charles Murray has conjured in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012). For Murray, an authority in the minds of many, the large and fluid society of 1963 was held together by the shared experiences of the nuclear family. When they watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, average Americans believed they were seeing their lives on the small screen. 1 Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in its innocent youth, television caricatured people by class types.