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 My Secret Garden (1973)

  But in the hundreds of fantasies I’ve collected, there is not one prostitution fantasy gone into at length; the subject is only mentioned fleetingly, glanced over en passant, by people hurrying to the Anonymity, Humiliation, or Masochism Rooms. This grand old theme, so beloved of Victorian women, is apparently dead. And if I’m right, and Sadie Thompson is indeed finished, it is ironically our permissive age that killed her; contrary to what her mother said, the old girl died from lack of shame. In explaining what I mean, let’s consider the difference between shame and guilt. Guilt concerns something about which you feel badly whether anyone knows it or not, and guilty love is still a very big fantasy of our time. It is an internalized judgment. But shame concerns something other people may or may not approve of; you yourself may feel neutral about it, or even like it; the shame only comes in when some outside observer catches you doing it. The woman who cheats at solitaire, for instance, will blithely go along taking cards out of turn—until someone catches her doing it, when she’ll grow irritable and testy. Shame therefore enters when your personal code of morals or behavior is felt by you to be at variance with what is generally accepted—and you feel at least a hypocritical need to pretend to go along with the majority rules. Therefore, we can see that the reason our mothers delighted so much in prostitution fantasies was their feeling that The Girls were beyond shame; they gave the fantasizer a kind of nothing-to-lose, gutter freedom. But today, why bother to be hypocritical? From every corner we are told there’s nothing in sex to be ashamed about. Good-bye, Sadie. We’ll keep a candle in the window of your room in case the wheel of repression takes another turn, and backlash brings you back. 4.“WHERE DID A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU GET AN IDEA LIKE THAT?”CHILDHOODPeople invariably ask me whether a woman’s sexual fantasies reflect her background. Doesn’t her education or economic class determine the nature of her fantasy? Haven’t I found that my material just naturally varied and fell into these categories? By the way the question was asked—especially during my researches in England—the “Yes” answer was always implied: a woman’s background will out. But my answer is “No.” Wealthy women don’t necessarily fantasize about masked dukes, any more than the uneducated wife of a miner fantasizes in rough four-letter words. Nor is the reverse true. It is meaningless to discuss the class or background of the real woman behind the fantasy, except to deny that it is the primary influence on what or how she is thinking. You can never predict what is going to turn anyone on.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Certainly if it were reduced to a contest of who responds quickest to what, men would have the edge on women. Their minds have been freer since childhood to respond to just the outline of a breast, the mention of a word, the scent of a woman; they were even encouraged, in this way, to be “little men.” But women… In the girl’s school where I went, there was a pale gray fig leaf even on the dark bronze reproduction of Michelangelo’s David (thought to have been added by the spinster librarian). It was years before I got my first really good look at a really good picture of a cock. And let no male expert tell me I wasn’t stimulated. Even if I’d still not seen an erect one, my child’s imagination graphically made up for what was missing, raising that cock to uneasily exciting (if anatomically incorrect) erect proportions. By the time I’d grown up, there still wasn’t (and isn’t) a garden of sexual stimuli for women in the world around us; but to go so far as to say that a grown woman—a woman who’s not only seen but caused a few erections—requires the already erect cock, the male sex symbol in full totality before she can feel anything… it’s ludicrous. Who more than a woman should feel aroused at the sight of a limp cock, at the provocative thought of what she might do to it? It’s exactly because a woman has been taught not to look, and has been deprived of real outlets for what real visual and verbal stimuli there are, that she’s more talented than anyone at making pictures do for the real thing—in short, it’s why she’s so good at fantasizing. Of course, there’s less to make up nowadays: men’s trousers have never been tighter, their shirts more body-hugging, their own awareness of their visual sexuality keener. Are we all playing “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? I’m not surprised that so many women say they’re sometimes (secretly) tempted to “just reach out and touch it.” Who’s it meant for anyway? The new visual turn-ons have done worlds for fantasy, and now that we’re all having a good look at it, fantasy can get on with the story development.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Many of the truths a memoirist starts out believing morph into something wholly other. Again: anybody maladroit at apology or changing her mind just isn’t bent for the fluid psychological state that makes truth discoverable. You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate- type shifts. Or it’s like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside. Geoffrey Wolff claimed he, over the years, inadvertently shaped his old man into a more dashing, gangsteresque figure than he’d been: It had always been convenient to see my father in melodramatic terms, as extraordinarily seedy or criminal. But the things I’d dined out on weren’t emotionally accurate. Before writing his Vietnam memoir, Tobias Wolff discovered that the letters he’d sent his mother—which he’d remembered as soft- focus, composed to shield her from fret—actually ramped up the danger he’d faced. When Gary Shteyngart worked on his mesmerizing Little Failure, he came to realize what a dutiful son he’d in fact always been. Family lore held he was an ingrate and a bounder who cost his parents no end of misery. Of course, revelations come to anybody who prods around in the past, memoirist or not. Ten years before my first book, I confronted my mother about why Daddy, who’d stoically tolerated her tantrums and wagging firearms at him, had stayed with her. She’d said, “He felt sorry for me.” The instant she said it, I knew it for truth, and yet it overturned a lifetime of believing she’d held all the power in their marriage. His silence hadn’t been helplessness—it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity. Mostly we get in trouble when we start trying to unpack those sound bites I mentioned. Ideas that hold decades of interpretation can lie to us worst of all: I was tough, I was beleaguered, I was

• From My People (2022)

  What effect the change on Malcolm X’s status, like all of the other sweeping policy changes being made, will have on the ranks of Muslims is impossible to assess at this time. Minister Farrakhan said that with the naming of the temple for him Malcolm’s “place in the history of Islam is assumed.” He added: “It forces the community to deal with it and think about it and assess this man unemotionally. It stimulates growth and development.” Columbia’s Overdue Apology to Langston HughesThe New Yorker DECEMBER 22, 1967 On a miserably wet evening seven months after the death of Langston Hughes, we sat, almost comfortably (except for our damp feet), in the cavernous Wollman Auditorium, at Columbia University, and listened to the low, bemused voice of Hughes on tape as, against a taped musical background, it sent his “Weary Blues” floating over a group of people who had assembled to pay tribute to him. The program, “A Langston Hughes Memorial Evening,” was sponsored by the Forum, which is, in the words of its nineteen-year-old president, Bruce Kanze, “a student organization that brings to the university interesting people whom the university itself would never consider bringing, to discuss issues and topics that are important.” A few minutes after eight, when nearly every seat was filled, three men walked onto the stage: Leon Bibb, the actor and singer; Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age ; and Professor James P. Shenton, of Columbia. (“He teaches a course on Reconstruction—the closest thing to a course on Negro history at Columbia,” Mr. Kanze told us later.) They were soon joined by Miss Viveca Lindfors, the actress, who was wearing a pale-gray fur coat but removed it as she was sitting down, and gracefully placed it over her mini-exposed knees. Professor Shenton, who had to leave early, was introduced, and hurried to the microphone. “I am here partly as a way of saying for Columbia that we owe some apologies,” he said solemnly. “For a while, there lived a poet down the street from Columbia, and Columbia never took the time to find out what he was about.” The professor paused for a few seconds, and then continued, “For a while, there lived a poet down the street from Columbia, who even attended Columbia for a while, and yet he never received an honorary degree from here. When we buried him, then we gave him a memorial. But, after all, that’s the experience of the black man down the street from Columbia.” Professor Shenton left the platform, and Mr. Kozol, a slim young man wearing rimless glasses, came to the microphone. In 1965, he was discharged from a ghetto school in Boston, in part because he read Langston Hughes’ poem “Ballad of the Landlord” to his class: Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week? Landlord, landlord, These steps is broken down.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  If patriarchal marriage and the family, though prehistoric, have their origins in the human past, they cease to be immutable, and become subject to alteration. In treating them as historical institutions, subject to the same processes of evolution as other social phenomena, Engels had laid the sacred open to serious criticism, analysis, even to possible drastic reorganization. Whatever the validity of his thesis that the institution of marriage (pairing and then monogamous) is the factor which ushered in the period of patriarchal rule, Engels’ declaration that marriage and the family were built upon the ownership of women was a most damaging charge indeed. All the historical evidence of patriarchal law now supported Mill’s charge of “domestic slavery” with a new vehemence. What Mill had thought to be a primordial evil, the inevitable consequence of man’s original savagery, Engels’ historical account transformed into an oppressive innovation, an innovation which brought with it innumerable other forms of oppression, each dependent upon it. Far from being the last injustice, sexual dominance became the keystone to the total structure of human injustice. The first course of social change as Engels had charted it140 was from consanguine group marriage, to the Punaluan consanguine group, then to maternal gens, and finally to paternal gens. And when the gens converts from maternal to paternal lineage, inherited property (and primogeniture) have already intruded as large factors in social and political life. Out of the gens or consanguine tribe who practiced democracy and held their land in common, and finally at the expense and decay of the gens, there arose with the gradual evolution of patriarchy the following institutions: slavery (the model for all later class systems and itself modeled on the ownership of persons first established over women), chiefdom, aristocracy, the social-political differentiation of economic groups into rich and poor. Finally, through the increasing importance of private property, with war serving as its catalyst, grew the state, the organ which solidified and maintained all social and economic disparities. Thus all the mechanisms of human inequality arose out of the foundations of male supremacy and the subjection of women, sexual politics serving historically as the foundation of all other social, political, and economic structures. Pairing marriages incorporated human barter, the buying and selling of women, in itself an instructive precedent for the indiscriminate human slavery which arose thereafter. Under patriarchy, the concept of property advanced from its simple origins in chattel womanhood, to private ownership of goods, land, and capital. In the subjection of female to male, Engels (and Marx as well) saw the historical and conceptual prototype of all subsequent power systems, all invidious economic relations, and the fact of oppression itself. The subjection of women is of course far more than an economic or even political event, but a total social and psychological phenomenon, a way of life, which Engels (whose psychology is less subtle and individualized than Mill’s, and based upon collective states) frames in terms of class emotion:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In the thirty years since the composition of Sexual Politics and in the seven years it has been out of print, I have had more than enough time to consider what I might say in an introduction to a new edition. Three decades have brought a great many changes, a great second wave of feminist insurgency in this country and throughout the West, but also considerable backlash and reaction despite a steady wave of patriarchal reform through the United Nations responding to international feminism. That would surely be another book—in fact, it has been thousands and must go on being so. But in 1970 my main interest was to restate and reestablish the fact of historical patriarchy in modern terms and for my generation, to see it as a controlling political institution built on status, temperament, and role, a socially conditioned belief system presenting itself as nature or necessity. Thirty years have focused this understanding but could not alter it significantly. Of course there are hindsight perceptions as well. Reading Gerda Lerner’s magnificent Creation of Patriarchy, published in 1986, I regretted not having had its fine prose and confident scholarship to guide me when I approached the subject. Differing with Lerner, I wish I had placed more emphasis on the discovery of paternity as the critical factor in establishing the groundwork for patriarchy’s triumph over earlier fertility culture, as Elizabeth Fischer does. This great early scientific discovery, a hunch I shared with friends in discussion but theorists still do not emphasize, has struck me more and more over the years as the cause of what Engels attributed it to the introduction of monogamy. And of course without monogamy and the ownership and sequestration of women, paternity is hard to ascertain. But in a free sexual culture only maternity is evident: the infant’s head in the birth canal is visible proof of parenthood, whereas a chance encounter among how many others nine months earlier can hardly establish fatherhood and all that came with it in the ownership of persons (women, children, and slaves), private property, and the state. In Engels’s Victorian imagination, itself a product of exploitative patriarchal sexual practices, sexuality was so odious to women that he reasoned they would prefer ownership by one man rather than “use” by some communal horde. All this implies the existence of an onerous and coercive sexuality instead of a free one: patriarchy, in fact. But before the establishment of patriarchy through the discovery of paternity, sexual intercourse might have had a very different meaning, a pleasure quite removed from consequences.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  When patients began having “ sperm dreams,” Hubbard had to accept the idea that prenatal engrams were recorded “ as early as shortly before conception .” Then, when patients began to remember previous lives, Hubbard resisted the idea; it threatened to tear apart his organization. “ The subject of past deaths and past lives is so full of tension that as early as last July 1950, the board of trustees of the [ Dianetics] Foundation sought to pass a resolution banning the entire subject,” he confided. Still, the implications were intriguing. What if we have lived before? Might there be memories that occasionally leak through into present time? Wouldn’t that prove that we are immortal beings, only temporarily residing in our present incarnations? Instead of remembering, the patient undergoing Dianetic counseling “returns” to the past-life event. “ There is a different feel to another period in time that’s so basic it’s hard to describe,” Hubbard’s top US executive, Helen O’Brien, recalled. “If you find yourself in a room, there may be color with unfamiliar tones because of gaslight shining on it. The air has a strange quality. Its particles of dust derive from unmodern constituents. Even human bodies seem to radiate a different kind of warmth when they are covered with the fabrics of another age. Memory, per se, filters out all that. When you return, you find the past intact.” Some of the “returnings” were shocking or painful. O’Brien’s first past-life experience in an auditing session was that of being a young Irish woman in the early nineteenth century. She could feel the coarse texture of her full-skirted dress as she walked down a narrow country lane, hearing the birds and feeling the warm country air. But when she turned a corner of her house, she saw a British soldier bayoneting her fourteen-year-old son in the yard. “ I literally shuddered with grief,” O’Brien writes. When the soldier threw her to the ground and tried to rape her, she spit in his face. He crushed her skull with a cobblestone. O’Brien’s auditor had her re-experience the scene over and over until she was able to move through the entire bloody tableau unaffected. “By the end of it, I was luxuriously comfortable in every fibre,” she writes. “When I walked downstairs … the electric lights dazzled me. The clean modern lines of the house interior, and the furniture, were elegant and strange to me beyond all description. I was freshly there from another age. For the first time in this lifetime, I knew I was beyond the laws of space and time. “I was never the same again.” With his new acceptance of past-life experiences, Hubbard could now describe the individual as being divisible into three parts. First there was the spirit, or soul, which Hubbard calls the thetan. The thetan normally lives in or near a body but can also be entirely separate from it.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  It is not until the spring of 1993, and having suffered a nervous breakdown in the meantime, that Austerlitz has another visionary experience, this time in a Bloomsbury bookshop. The bookseller is listening to the radio, which features two women discussing the summer of 1939, when, as children, they had come on the ferry Prague to England, as part of the Kindertransport: “only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well,” Austerlitz tells the narrator. The mere mention of the name “Prague” impels Austerlitz to the Czech capital, where he eventually discovers his old nanny, Vera RySanova, and uncovers the stories of his parents’ abbreviated lives. His father, Maximilian Aychenwald, escaped the Nazis in Prague by leaving for Paris; but, we learn at the end of the book, he was eventually captured and interned in late 1942, in the French camp of Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His mother, Agata Austerlitz, stayed on in Prague, insouciantly confident of her prospects, but was rounded up and sent to the Terezin ghetto (better known by its German name of Theresienstadt) in December 1942. Of the final destination of Maximilian and Agata we are not told, but can easily infer the worst: Vera tells us only that Agata was “sent east” from Terezin, in September 1944. This short recital, poignant though its content is, represents a kind of vandalism to Sebald’s beautiful novel, and I offer it only in the spirit of orientation. It leaves out, most importantly, all the ways in which Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader too, is involved in a journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberate frustration of detection, the perpetuation of an enigma. By the end of the novel, we certainly know a great deal about Jacques Austerlitz—about the tragic turns of his life, his family background, about his obsessions and anxieties and breakdowns—but it can’t be said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not a self. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to quit the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it. Sebald deliberately layers and recesses his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to get close to. He tells his story to the narrator, who then tells his story to us, thus producing the book’s distinctive repetitive tagging, a kind of parody of the source-attribution we encounter in a newspaper: almost every page has a “said Austerlitz” on it, and sometimes the layers of narration are thicker still, as

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Re-Imagining Reality: Seeing Things in a New WayHannah Arendt is one of many philosophers to note that thinking has often been thought of in terms of seeing. Recent studies have suggested that the human ability to see things in a new way is important to our evolutionary development, allowing us to solve problems through imagining alternative ways of thinking or acting.12 The western scientific, religious, philosophical and literary tradition draws extensively on our experience of sight and vision for its metaphors of truth and meaning.13 As we saw earlier, the modern term ‘theory’ derives from the Greek theōria, which means ‘beholding’. The writer Henry Miller, reflecting on the development of his own thought as he wandered through exotic landscapes, once remarked that he found his destination was ‘never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’14 Miller’s comment points to the fact that we inherit or acquire, often without realising it, certain ways of ‘seeing’ the world which we treat as fixed or self-evidently true. Philosophers of science speak of ‘theory-laden observation’, meaning that what we think is a ‘natural’ understanding of the world is often informed and to some extent predetermined by an assumed or presupposed theory.15 Scientific advance often proceeds by demolishing these assumptions, and replacing them with something more reliable. The first step in theoretical development is to identify our inherited or assumed theories, and subject them to critical examination. Ideological enforcement, however, proceeds by imposing a ‘sound’ or ‘rational’ map that invalidates others, and allows us to see only what the ideologues want us to see, normalising what would once have been seen as strange and perplexing. Theories can too easily prevent us from seeing things fully, by declaring that only the deluded and irrational ‘see’ certain things, which wiser and more theoretically informed individuals know cannot exist, and thus discount any suggestion that they should be taken seriously. This crass intellectual condescension is perhaps an inevitable outcome of modernity’s highly restrictive account of human rationality. We are only allowed to see what our theoretical precommitments permit – what our theoretical maps tell us. The economist E. F. Schumacher highlighted this in his final work, reflecting on how his education constricted his grasp and appreciation of reality. ‘All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance for the conduct of my life.’ His moment of liberation arrived when he realised the solution to this impoverishment. ‘I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’16

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  After it, the earth was a planet, like Mars and Jupiter; the sun was a star; and the moon was a new sort of body, a satellite.’ 20 Kuhn’s point is that the phenomena were unchanged; they were, however, seen in a new way. What was physically seen did not change; the change took place within the mind of the observer, who interpreted what was seen in the light of this theory. A pre-Copernican observer might ‘see’ the sun rise and set; a post-Copernican would, however, ‘see’ the earth turning on its axis, leading to the apparent motion of the sun across the heavens. Religion: The Role of Conversion Many consider religious conversions to be one the most striking examples of how a new set of beliefs changes the way people see themselves and their world, often reflecting a growing disillusionment or dissatisfaction with an existing way of thinking that is found to be inadequate and unsatisfying. Consider the case of Paul Kalanithi (1977–2015), a promising Stanford neurosurgeon who died of metastatic lung cancer at the age of thirty-seven, before he was able to practice as a fully qualified surgeon. His bestseller When Breath Becomes Air , written during his advanced illness and published posthumously, tells how he became a neurosurgeon because he wanted to learn about ‘what really matters in life’ – only to discover that science failed to engage, and could not engage, the deep and urgent existential questions that mattered to him, and which became increasingly important as his illness progressed. Science, Kalanithi concluded, might ‘provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so must be set against its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life.’ 21 This is no criticism of science; it is rather a penetrating diagnosis of what humans need, which lay behind Kalanithi’s reappraisal of the importance of literature (especially Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot) in reflecting on meaning, and Christianity in providing it. His rediscovery of Christianity reflected his realisation of its capacity to engage these ‘ultimate questions’ in a time of crisis and need. Kalanithi’s moving narrative of reflection on how we cope with trauma and uncertainty also illuminates an issue that is of recurring importance to thinking about belief. How can we live on the basis of beliefs, when we crave certainties? Kalanithi found himself drawn to seven words of Samuel Beckett: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ 22 We are caught in the insoluble enigma of the human situation. We can’t reason our way to infallible truths that are existentially meaningful – but we can’t live fully and authentically without such beliefs. Intellectually, we feel we can’t go on; existentially, we know we have to go on. Kalanithi found that his reaffirmation of a once-rejected Christianity gave him a new lens through which he could see his own situation.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She sat down and speared a piece of green bell pepper with her fork as Ramona resumed her own seat hastily. Those pale, unblinking eyes flicked up. “Do you know why we’re taught to hate old women?” “Ma’am, I apologize, I should have—” “Do you know why, Pierce?” Ramona swallowed. “No, ma’am, I don’t.” “Because they’re of no more use to men—can’t cook, can’t fuck, can’t breed—no use at all, but they remember. They remember the rapes, the beatings, the cracked skulls and little arms yanked out of sockets. They remember, and men know it, and if you can’t rape a woman, if you can’t kill her, slap her, shout over her every word, then you have to face her, and you have to face the things you’ve done.” Ramona thought of her own mother’s body, winnowed down to sticks and cold, bruised skin by cancer, and of the stooped and reed-thin phantom of her nana in the hospital years earlier, lifeless gray hair and sunken, nervous eyes. All the men in her family had died young, had never lived to see their women get old or to face the things that they’d inflicted on them. She felt a hot surge of frustration at the unfairness of it. “They’ll live like queens,” said Teach, the lines at the corners of her mouth drawn suddenly down with furious intensity. “Once the city’s been swept out and centralized we owe it to them to give them comfort. Respect. I don’t care what they say in Maryland. I will see it done.” Ramona picked at her bok choy. “I’d never thought of it that way. It makes sense. Honoring them.” “Another question. Don’t look so nervous, Pierce. I’m not trying to fool you. Do you know why I wanted Seabrook?” Ramona swallowed. Something about that trip still didn’t sit right with her. “The power plant?” she ventured. “If we can reconnect the lines—” “I have no plan to reconnect the lines.” “The manhunters? A lot of them move through there. Valuable supply to control, and—” “It’s much simpler than that.” Teach smiled. “I think you can see it from that postmodernist dump.” A hulk beached on the glittering sand. Guns draped in dried seaweed. Gulls nesting among antennae and radar dishes. “What, that boat?” As soon as she’d said it, she understood. The railroads were all well and good, but the coast was both lifeline and fortress. A hundred fractious little city-states, from quaint, salt-smelling Seabrook down to the malarial floodlands of Miami, all of them tenuously stable after the long years of vicious swarm-fighting which had followed T-Day. Next came power. Control. Supply lines and trade agreements. Strong states swallowing up the weak, nascent ideologies nourished or else smothered in their cradles.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  If paternity was not clear until the example of animal husbandry, with its use of breeding pens and sequestration, made the discovery of human paternity possible through analogy, the economic potential and social control over human birth and issue were not available to human males. Knowledge of paternity is the key; until its discovery, the religious and monetary uses of the phallus and the seed were also not available. The discovery once made, patriarchy could and did invalidate all female participation in the spiritual creation of life, nominate the female as a mere vessel in which the magic seed grew, invent male gods who gave birth alone to Adam or Athena, and begin the long subordination of woman in every avenue of human experience and civilization—even to its symbols. The ovum was not discovered until the nineteenth century, and it appears to have had no such social or political significance. If the biological discovery of paternity had monumental ramifications for human social organization at the onset of patriarchy, today, when that institution is under attack and perhaps about to be reformed out of existence, other biological discoveries have, perhaps even fortuitously, come into being. In vitro fertilization, cloning, and surrogate motherhood—the products of an essentially masculine science—have made human reproduction subject to human manipulation as it has never been previously. It is in the interpretation of scientific knowledge that power lies, and the social consequence of these discoveries is still unclear, but control over them is in the hands of a male scientific establishment increasingly driven by corporate profit and Western and class interests. Why not wombs rented from the poor for the rich? As amniocentesis has made it possible to chose boy infants over girls, many have done so. The consequence of knowledge as power may be staggering; the discovery of paternity need not have had any social or political effect at all, yet it came to shape the iron form of human society in the entire historical period. What uses may be made of the new biology, by whom, and for what ends? Another perception that hindsight might have emphasized is the role of force in patriarchy. When I finished Sexual Politics in 1970, feminists were still so intent on a reasonable civil rights argument that it seemed almost “shrill” to look very far into domestic violence and rape, which had always been presented as “aberrant” behavior. Only later did we become aware that there was a normative element in patriarchal violence, still later we began to understand the depth of worldwide poverty among women, even the widespread malnourishment of female children. The brutality visited on female adolescents that I studied in The Basement was too shocking for me to write about yet; although I already knew the story of Sylvia Likens, it was fourteen years before I could put it on paper. And the explosion of state violence within patriarchy that I studied in The Politics of Cruelty took another ten years to understand.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “At what? She could not tell me. She was filled with sorrow, with anguish. Probably her tortured nerves had suggested to her the truth about the baseness of our relations, but she found no words in which to say it. I began to question her; she answered that she missed her absent mother. It seemed to me that she was not telling the truth. I sought to console her by maintaining silence in regard to her parents. I did not imagine that she felt herself simply overwhelmed, and that her parents had nothing to do with her sorrow. She did not listen to me, and I accused her of caprice. I began to laugh at her gently. She dried her tears, and began to reproach me, in hard and wounding terms, for my selfishness and cruelty. “I looked at her. Her whole face expressed hatred, and hatred of me. I cannot describe to you the fright which this sight gave me. ‘How? What?’ thought I, ‘love is the unity of souls, and here she hates me? Me? Why? But it is impossible! It is no longer she!’ “I tried to calm her. I came in conflict with an immovable and cold hostility, so that, having no time to reflect, I was seized with keen irritation. We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us. Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. We stood face to face in our true light, like two egoists trying to procure the greatest possible enjoyment, like two individuals trying to mutually exploit each other. “So what I called our quarrel was our actual situation as it appeared after the satisfaction of sensual desire. I did not realize that this cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I thought that we had disputed with each other, and had become reconciled, and that it would not happen again. But in this same honeymoon there came a period of satiety, in which we ceased to be necessary to each other, and a new quarrel broke out. “It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance. ‘It was inevitable,’ I thought. This second quarrel stupefied me the more, because it was based on an extremely unjust cause. It was something like a question of money,—and never had I haggled on that score; it was even impossible that I should do so in relation to her. I only remember that, in answer to some remark that I made, she insinuated that it was my intention to rule her by means of money, and that it was upon money that I based my sole right over her. In short, something extraordinarily stupid and base, which was neither in my character nor in hers.

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

  It didn’t much. Maybe he’d been missing us so bad that he was set to grab us any way he could. But even that doesn’t explain it. No, what moved him was Lecia, her sudden solidity and power, the sheer force of her will. I was coiling the phone cord around my index finger when this knowledge settled on me. Lecia’s eyes were the same calm brown as always, her blond bangs were still lacquered straight above dark brows. But her voice held less waver. By the time she handed me the phone, the small space between us had stretched into some uncrossable prairie. She’d moved forever away from me. For my part, I was still skidding around in the slippery, internal districts of childhood. I still half-wondered whether Mother might shoot us as we slept. But Lecia had stopped wondering about such things, had let go wonder altogether. She was set on enduring, no matter what. She’d harden into whatever shape survival required. From that second forward, she had to figure what-all she’d have to lose for that survival, what-all and who. The receiver was warm on my ear. Daddy wanted to know one thing: “You ’bout ready to come on home, Pokey?” I told him I’d been ready. To which he said him too. Early the next morning, we washed our faces. I brushed each tooth with the neat circle stroke Captain Kangaroo had instructed me to; then we buttoned ourselves into church dresses. By dawn, we stood side by side in the full-length mirror. Lecia had tied the hood of my car coat too tight under my chin, so I felt like a sausage in oversmall casing. Her face floating next to mine in the mirror would never again be the face of a child. Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene. Nor can I picture Lecia announcing our leaving, as she must done first thing that morning. Mother would have been smoothing Ben-Gay on her shoulder. The Sunday Times crossword, each box with a penciled capital letter, would have lain between Mother’s body and Hector’s. (She tended to come up with some kind of answer for each square fast, then erase mistakes later, so the puzzle always looked done but seldom was.) But I’m making this up. The French door on that scene never swung open. Any talk with Mother after Lecia’s call was siphoned clean from my head. Mother herself was clipped from my memory, though some days went by before we actually left, and I must have said good-bye to her. We must have wept, being a family of inveterate weepers, the makers-of-scenes in airport terminals. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that, nor does even a ghost of her Shalimar hang in the car that ferried us to the airport.

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

  My first stroke nicked him deep enough to draw blood; a thick drop cut through the white soap. Daddy didn’t flinch at this. His breathing pattern didn’t quicken. Still, Mother had to finish. Afterwards, I held my moon-shaped compact up to his face. He ran his good hand over his smooth chin. “Purty,” he said. The left side of his mouth twisted up in a sharp half smile. With the other half drawn down, he turned into one of those split masks, comedy and tragedy. “Purty goo,” he said. I left the hospital to buy a quart of malt liquor in a paper bag. Inside the cavernous movie cineplex, I drank this fast, then watched three matinees in a row. I sneaked from one theater to another, never paying extra, half daring the pimply young usher to turn his flashlight on me and ask for a ticket stub. A few days later, Dr. Boudreaux came to stand on our porch in the purple dusk. He held his brown Stetson formally in two hands like a suitor with a box of chocolates. He had on a short-sleeved blue shirt going dark at the armpits. The neighborhood kids broke up whatever loud game they’d been playing to stare gaggle-jawed at Dr. Boudreaux while he wiped his feet on the mat before stepping inside. A real doctor was a thing to witness. They stood at the end of our driveway even after he’d come inside. Suddenly, I knew that Daddy was dead, knew it by the train sound rushing in my ears and by the way the room suddenly telescoped, so Mother and the doctor got little. No, Dr. Boudreaux said. It wasn’t that. Some folks might call death a blessing. He didn’t believe that was so. But anyway, Daddy wasn’t any deader than he’d been at suppertime. That was the good news. It’s the money, isn’t it, Mother said. The insurance from the new refinery won’t cover the hospital. Or home nursing after he gets home. You know if it were up to me, Dr. Boudreaux said. He paused and hawked something from the back of his throat. His hands were small and girly. He folded them in his lap. He said the union lawyers might be a help. But Mother didn’t seem to be listening. She’d moved to the door to shoo the kids away from their staring. They scattered like buckshot. She stepped back in. Dr. Boudreaux said it wasn’t his decision. Hell, he’d treated plenty of folks on credit, times when a strike drug on. Outside the kids divided into two teams for a game. You take Barbara, and we get Bob, a voice said. No fair, if we take Barbara, we get Bob and Robbie too, the other voice said. You cheating sack of shit, the first voice said. Then I heard a slap and the sound of two small bodies falling on the grass to the cheers of other kids.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I wept and wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world. I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. And the tribe of cartoonists. And the tribe of chronic masturbators. And the tribe of teenage boys. And the tribe of small-town kids. And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners. And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers. And the tribe of poverty. And the tribe of funeral-goers. And the tribe of beloved sons. And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends. It was a huge realization. And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay. But it also reminded me of the people who were not going to be okay. It made me think of Rowdy. I missed him so much. I wanted to find him and hug him and beg him to forgive me for leaving. [image "An illustration of two boys holding hands while jumping into a body of water. Text reads, ‘Boys can hold hands until they turn nine. Rowdy and me in third grade, jumping into Turtle Lake.’" file=image_rsrc4TE.jpg] Talking About Turtles [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] The reservation is beautiful. I mean it. Take a look. There are pine trees everywhere. Thousands of ponderosa pine trees. Millions. I guess maybe you can take pine trees for granted. They’re just pine trees. But they’re tall and thin and green and brown and big. Some of the pines are ninety feet tall and more than three hundred years old. Older than the United States. Some of them were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president. Some of them were alive when George Washington was president. Some of them were alive when Benjamin Franklin was born. I’m talking old. I’ve probably climbed, like, one hundred different trees in my lifetime. There are twelve in my backyard. Another fifty or sixty in the small stand of woods across the field. And another twenty or thirty around our little town. And a few way out in the deep woods. And that tall monster that sits beside the highway to West End, past Turtle Lake. That one is way over one hundred feet tall. It might be one hundred and fifty feet tall. You could build a house using just the wood from that tree. When we were little, like ten years old, Rowdy and I climbed that sucker.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  John the Evangelist indeed takes the trouble to interrupt the majestic cadences of his opening Gospel hymn to let us know with a certain banality that the Baptist was ‘not the light, but came to bear witness to the light’ (John 1.8). [4] The movements may have started out in rivalry before their ostentatious reconciliation through Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan. Jesus did not leave any clear line of development for baptism, and John the Evangelist further claims that the Lord did not himself perform the rite, leaving it to his disciples (John 4.2). This directly contrasts with Jesus’s direct institution of the breaking of bread and distributing of wine in the ‘Eucharist’ (from the Greek for ‘thanksgiving’), around which Christian life has been organized ever since. The institution of the Eucharist is one of the few parts of Jesus’s teaching or practice that Paul thinks fit to record (1 Cor. 11.23–25), in a fashion later echoed by the Synoptic Gospels. By contrast, it is Paul who dwells on and spells out the crucial nature of baptism: ‘as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ’ (Gal. 3.27). More than that, he goes on to say that ‘in Christ’ (that is, among those that are baptized in the name of Christ), ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek…neither slave nor free…neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3.28). There is much to be read out of this profound statement about the relation of Saviour to believer, but, at one level, it is a startlingly simple statement of fact. [5] The basis of identity for the people of God has been overturned. Instead of the Covenant in the Hebrew Scripture witnessed by an outward sign of mutilation to male genitalia, the act of initiation for a Christian is a washing in water, baptism, which can make a full Christian out of a woman just as much as it does a man. Jesus himself said nothing that has survived about circumcision, positive or negative; he may well have taken it for granted in traditional Judaistic fashion. We first hear this fundamental change discussed by Paul, without any word from the Lord. In Acts (Ch. 15), a definitive rejection of circumcision for Gentile (non-Jewish) converts to Christianity is presented as being confirmed in Jerusalem through debate and a general

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other people, and experience is nothing more than sensation—so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, give one the rich, full life. They thus lose what it was they so bravely set out to find, their own personalities, which, having been deprived of all nourishment, soon cease, in effect, to exist; and they arrive, finally, at a dangerous disrespect for the personalities of others. Though they persist in believing that their present shapelessness is freedom, it is observable that this present freedom is unable to endure either silence or privacy, and demands, for its ultimate expression, a rootless wandering among the cafés. Saint Germain des Près, the heart of the American colony, so far from having absorbed the American student, has been itself transformed, on spring, summer, and fall nights, into a replica, very nearly, of Times Square. But if this were all one found in the American student colony, one would hardly have the heart to discuss it. If the American found in Europe only confusion, it would obviously be infinitely wiser for him to remain at home. Hidden, however, in the heart of the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking: the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the world. This, which has so grandiose and general a ring, is, in fact, most personal—the American confusion seeming to be based on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced him. This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears. What is overwhelmingly clear, it seems, to everyone but ourselves is that this history has created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and individual past. It is, indeed, this past which has thrust upon us our present, so troubling role. It is the past lived on the American continent, as against that other past, irrecoverable now on the shores of Europe, which must sustain us in the present. The truth about that past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give. It is this demand which the American student in Paris is forced, at length, to make, for he has otherwise no identity, no reason for being here, nothing to sustain him here. From the vantage point of Europe he discovers his own country. And this is a discovery which not only brings to an end the alienation of the American from himself, but which also makes clear to him, for the first time, the extent of his involvement in the life of Europe.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was startling information, but once I had been introduced to these ideas, I read the gospels and epistles with new eyes. All kinds of anomalies and contradictions in the text, which were easily overlooked when you read it piecemeal or heard it recited in a liturgical setting, now made sense. I could see why this had not been included in my diploma course, however. This was dynamite. It gravely undermined many of the theological assumptions of my Catholic years. I had realized that much Christian theology was man-made, but I had not appreciated how shaky were its very foundations. All my original ideas for the television series had to be revised. It was Saint Paul, not Jesus, who was the founder of Christianity, and even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters. I now discovered that Paul’s epistles are the earliest extant Christian documents and that the gospels, all written years after Paul’s own death, were penned by men who had adopted Paul’s version of Christianity. Far from Paul perverting the gospels, the gospels, it seemed, owed their vision to Paul. The only Jesus we knew was the Jesus bequeathed to us by Paul. Further, it appeared that not all the epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him. And this radically altered my view of Paul himself. Some of the most misogynist passages, for example, were almost certainly written by Christians some sixty years after Paul’s death. Perhaps he wasn’t the monster I had imagined.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again. Notes of a Native Son BEACON PRESS 25 Beacon Street Boston, MA 02108-2892 www.beacon.org Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 1955, renewed 1983, by James Baldwin Introduction © 1984 by James Baldwin Introduction © 2012 by Edward P. Jones First edition published by Beacon Press in 1955 First Beacon paperback published in 1957 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (hc.) 15 14 13 12 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (pbk.) This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992. Text design and composition by Kim Arney Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baldwin, James, 1924–1987. Notes of a native son / James Baldwin ; with a new introduction by Edward P. Jones. — Revised ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-8070-0624-5 ISBN 978-0-8070-0611-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-8070-0623-8 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. African Americans—Civil rights. 2. African Americans—Social conditions—To 1964. 3. United States—Race relations. 4. Baldwin, James, 1924–1987. I. Jones, Edward P. II. Title. E185.61.B2 2012 305.8’96073—dc23 2012021246