Relief

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 Another Country (1962)

  Then he joined the line, and moved slowly toward the door. The hostesses stood there, smiling and saying good-bye. The sun was bright on their faces, and on the faces of the disembarking passengers; they seemed, as they turned and disappeared, to be stepping into a new and healing light. He held his newspapers under one arm, shifted his package from hand to hand, straightened his belt, trembling. The hostess with whom he had flirted was nearest the door. “Au revoir,” she said, with the bright and generous and mocking smile possessed by so many of his countrywomen. He suddenly realized that he would never see her again. It had not occurred to him, until this moment, that he could possibly have left behind him anything which he might, one day, long for and need, with all his heart. “Bon courage,” she said. He smiled and said, “Merci, mademoiselle. Au revoir!” And he wanted to say, Vous êtes très jolie, but it was too late, he had hit the light, the sun glared at him, and everything wavered in the heat. He started down the extraordinary steps. When he hit the ground, a voice above him said, “Bonjour, mon gar. Soyez le bienvenue.” He looked up. Eric leaned on the rail of the observation deck, grinning, wearing an open white shirt and khaki trousers. He looked very much at ease, at home, thinner than he had been, with his short hair spinning and flaming about his head. Yves looked up joyously, and waved, unable to say anything. Eric. And all his fear left him, he was certain, now, that everything would be all right. He whistled to himself as he followed the line which separated him from the Americans, into the examination hall. But he passed his examination with no trouble, and in a very short time; his passport was eventually stamped and handed back to him, with a grin and a small joke, the meaning but not the good nature of which escaped him. Then he was in a vaster hall, waiting for his luggage, with Eric above him, smiling down on him through glass. Then even his luggage belonged to him again, and he strode through the barriers, more high-hearted than he had ever been as a child, into that city which the people from heaven had made their home. Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961 JAMES BALDWINJames Baldwin was born in 1924. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. He died in 1987. [image file=image_rsrc400.jpg] ALSO BY JAMES BALDWIN Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Notes of a Native Son (1955) Giovanni’s Room (1956) Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) Another Country (1962) The Fire Next Time (1963)

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

  When I returned that night I was presented to Mike: I found him a big, good-looking Irishman who thought his wife a wonder and all she did perfect. “Mary”, he said, winking at me, “is one of the best cooks in the wurrld and if it weren’t that she’s down on a man when he has a drop in him, she’d be the best gurrl on God’s earth. As it is, I married her and I’ve never been sorry: have I Mary?” “Ye’ve had no cause, Mike Mulligan.” Mike had nothing particular to do next morning and so he promised he would go and get my little trunk from the Custom House. I gave him the key. He insisted as warmly as his wife that I should stay with them till I got work: I told them how eager I was to begin and Mike promised to speak to his chief and some friends and see what could be done. Next morning I got up about five-thirty as soon as I heard Mike stirring, and went down Seventh Avenue with him till he got on the horse-car for down-town and left me. About seven-thirty to eight o’clock a stream of people began walking down-town to their offices. On several corners were bootblack shanties. One of them happened to have three customers in it and only one bootblack. “Won’t you let me help you shine a pair or two?”, I asked. The bootblack looked at me: “I don’t mind”, he said and I seized the brushes and went to work. I had done the two just as he finished the first: he whispered to me “halves” as the next man came in and he showed me how to use the polishing rag or cloth. I took off my coat and waistcoat and went to work with a will; for the next hour and a half we both had our hands full. Then the rush began to slack off but not before I had taken just over a dollar and a half. Afterwards we had a talk and Allison, the bootblack, told me he’d be glad to give me work any morning on the same terms. I assured him I’d be there and do my best till I got other work. I had earned three shillings and had found out I could get good board for three dollars a week, so in a couple of hours I had earned my living. The last anxiety left me. Mike had a day off, so he came home for dinner at noon and he had great news. They wanted men to work under water in the iron caissons of Brooklyn Bridge and they were giving from five to ten dollars a day. “Five dollars”, cried Mrs. Mulligan, “it must be dangerous or unhealthy or somethin’—sure, you’d never put the child to work like that.”

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

  Such efforts to reach out can go awry, especially if the young adult is trying to magically restore the father she had wanted but never had. Some men do not welcome their child’s interest. They’ve put that part of their life far behind them. But other fathers are very responsive. The father-child relationship takes off on a new and better basis as long as the older man doesn’t expect to rewrite history. One of the men in our study was elated. He told me, “My daughter finally asked my advice about something. I can hardly believe it.” His daughter was thirty-four. Building a Bridge I WONDERED IF Paula’s relationship with her mother had also improved. “How do you and your mom get along these days?” I asked. “It’s like we’re finally becoming friends after all these years. I’ve grown up and she’s mellowed. She’s happy with Dan, he loves her, and she’s finally being able to relax a little. We’ve talked about stuff that happened when I was growing up. I told her how angry I was and how alone I felt. She actually listened. And she told me some of what it was like for her. We never did that before.” “Did you just start talking? Did something happen to open both of you up?” I wanted to know. “Well, I wrote a paper for my English class called ‘The Single-Minded Mom’ about our life after they divorced. I read it to her and that started us talking. I know I blamed her for their divorce. At the same time, I now understand what she had to go through. I understand her now, like I couldn’t before Racer was born.” “And does she understand you better?” “I hope so. She told me she did notice the bad things I was doing but she just couldn’t do much about me. She was doing the best she could and hoped that her kids would do the same. She even told me that she spent years waking up in the middle of the night with her heart pounding, worrying about us. But she had to get up and get out early in the morning so she learned to shove those feelings aside and put on a no-nonsense attitude. That attitude I remember real well. It’s helped me a lot to know now that her coldness was a cover-up in order to get her through the day. I began to clue in to how hard life had been for her when I was around eighteen. I realize now that she hadn’t meant for me to have been so unhappy and lonely when I was a kid. I’m beginning to realize, too, that she was really happy in her marriage until Dad fell apart financially, but then she was really trapped after the divorce. I was trapped with her. And then I trapped myself when I married Brad.” With grim humor she said, “I’m an expert on traps.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  2My numerous childhood illnesses brought my mother and me still closer together. As a little boy, I showed an abnormal aptitude for mathematics, which I completely lost in my singularly talentless youth. This gift played a horrible part in tussles with quinsy or scarlet fever, when I felt enormous spheres and huge numbers swell relentlessly in my aching brain. A foolish tutor had explained logarithms to me much too early, and I had read (in a British publication, the Boy’s Own Paper, I believe) about a certain Hindu calculator who in exactly two seconds could find the seventeenth root of, say, 3529471145760275132301897342055866171392 (I am not sure I have got this right; anyway the root was 212). Such were the monsters that thrived on my delirium, and the only way to prevent them from crowding me out of myself was to kill them by extracting their hearts. But they were far too strong, and I would sit up and laboriously form garbled sentences as I tried to explain things to my mother. Beneath my delirium, she recognized sensations she had known herself, and her understanding would bring my expanding universe back to a Newtonian norm. The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event. One day, after a long illness, as I lay in bed still very weak, I found myself basking in an unusual euphoria of lightness and repose. I knew my mother had gone to buy me the daily present that made those convalescences so delightful. What it would be this time I could not guess, but through the crystal of my strangely translucent state I vividly visualized her driving away down Morskaya Street toward Nevski Avenue. I distinguished the light sleigh drawn by a chestnut courser. I heard his snorting breath, the rhythmic clacking of his scrotum, and the lumps of frozen earth and snow thudding against the front of the sleigh. Before my eyes and before those of my mother loomed the hind part of the coachman, in his heavily padded blue robe, and the leather-encased watch (twenty minutes past two) strapped to the back of his belt, from under which curved the pumpkin-like folds of his huge stuffed rump. I saw my mother’s seal furs and, as the icy speed increased, the muff she raised to her face—that graceful, winter-ride gesture of a St. Petersburg lady. Two corners of the voluminous spread of bearskin that covered her up to the waist were attached by loops to the two side knobs of the low back of her seat. And behind her, holding on to these knobs, a footman in a cockaded hat stood on his narrow support above the rear extremities of the runners.

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

  Many hours afterwards I awoke: it was night, candles were burning and Dr. Richards was leaning over me: “do you know me?” he asked and at once I answered: “Of course I know you, Richards”, and I went on jubilant to say: “I’m saved: I’ve won through. Had I been going to die, I should never have recovered consciousness.” To my astonishment his brow wrinkled and he said, “drink this and then go to sleep again quietly: it’s all right”, and he held a glass of whitish liquid to my lips. I drained the glass and said joyously: “Milk! how funny you should give me milk; that’s not prescribed in any of your books.” He told me afterwards it was Castor-oil he had given me and I had mistaken it for milk. I somehow felt that my tongue was running away with me even before he laid his hand on my forehead to quiet me saying: “There please! don’t talk, rest! please!” and I pretended to obey him; but couldn’t make out why he shut me up! I could not recall my words either—why? A dreadful thought shook me suddenly: had I been talking nonsense? My father’s face too appeared to be dreadfully perturbed while I was speaking. “Could one think sanely and yet talk like a madman? What an appalling fate!” I resolved in that case to use my revolver on myself as soon as I knew that my state was hopeless: that thought gave me peace and I turned at once to compose myself. In a few minutes more I was fast asleep. The next time I awoke, it was again night and again the Doctor was beside me and my sister: “Do you know me?” he asked again, and again I replied: “Of course I know you and Sis here as well.” “That’s great”, he cried joyously, “now you’ll soon be well again.” “Of course I shall”, I cried joyously, “I told you that before: but you seemed hurt; did I wander in my mind?” “There, there”, he cried, “don’t excite yourself and you’ll soon be well again!” “Was it a near squeak?” I asked. “You must know it was”, he replied, “you took sixty grains of belladonna fasting and the books give at most quarter of a grain for a dose and declare one grain to be generally fatal. I shall never be able to brag of your case in the medical journals”, he went on smiling, “for no one would ever believe that a heart could go on galloping far too fast to count, but certainly two hundred odd times a minute for thirty odd hours without bursting. You’ve been tested”, he concluded, “as no one was ever tested before and have come back safe! But now sleep again”, he said, “sleep is Nature’s restorative.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I am feeling more like an Audre I recognize, thank the goddess for Dr. Rosenberg, and for Dagmar for introducing me to her. I’ve been reading Christa Wolf’s The Search for Christa T., and finding it very difficult. At first I couldn’t grapple with it because it was just too painful to read about a woman dying. Dagmar and a number of the women here in Berlin say the author and I should meet. But now that I’m finished I don’t know if I want to meet the woman who wrote it. There is so much pain there that is so far from being felt in any way I recognize or can use, that it makes me very uncomfortable. I feel speechless. But there is one part of the book that really spoke to me. In chapter 5, she talks about a mistaken urge to laugh at one’s younger self’s belief in paradise, in miracles. Each one of us who survives, she says, at least once in our lifetime, at some crucial and inescapable moment, has had to absolutely believe in the impossible. Of course, it occurs to me to ask myself if that’s what I’m doing right now, believing in the impossible by refusing a biopsy. It’s been very reassuring to find a medical doctor who agrees with my view of the dangers involved. And I certainly don’t reject nondamaging treatment, which is why I’m taking these shots, even though I hate giving myself injections. But that’s a small price balanced against the possibility of cancer. June 20, 1984 Berlin I didn’t go to London because I loved book fairs, but because the idea of the First International Feminist Bookfair excited me, and in particular, I wanted to make contact with the Black feminists of England. Well, the fact remains: the First International Feminist Bookfair was a monstrosity of racism, and this racism coated and distorted much of what was good, creative, and visionary about such a fair. The white women organizers’ defensiveness to any question of where the Black women were is rooted in that tiresome white guilt that serves neither us nor them. It reminded me of those old tacky battles of the seventies in the States: a Black woman would suggest that if white women wished to be truly feminist, they would have to examine and alter some of their actions vis-à-vis women of Color. And this discussion would immediately be perceived as an attack upon their very essence. So wasteful and destructive.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I hear the pages rustle from behind closed doors. Moving Out or The End of Cooperative Living I am so glad to be moving away from this prison for black and white faces assaulting each other with our joint oppression competing for who pays the highest price for this privilege I am so glad I am moving technicoloured complaints aimed at my head mash themselves on my door like mosquitoes sweep like empty ladles through the lobby of my eyes each time my lips move sideways the smile shatters on the in thing that races dictator through our hallways on concrete faces on soul compactors on the rhetoric of incinerators and plastic drapes for the boiler room on legends of broken elevators blowing my morning cool avoiding me in the corridors dropping their load on my face down 24 stories of lives in a spectrumed madhouse pavillion of gnats and nightmare remembering once we all saved like beggars to buy our way into this castle of fantasy and forever now I am so glad to be moving. Last month a tenant was asked to leave because someone saw him wandering one morning up and down the tenth floor with no clothes on having locked himself out the night before with the garbage he could not fit into the incinerator but it made no difference the floor captain cut the leads to his cable TV and he left covered in tangled wires of shame his apartment was reconsecrated by a fumigator I am so glad I am moving Although workmen will descend at $100 an hour to scrape my breath from the walls to refinish the air and the floors with their eyes and charge me with the exact amount of whatever I have coming back to me called equity I am so glad to be moving from the noise of psychic footsteps beating a tune that is not my own louder than any other sound in the neighborhood except the blasting that goes on all day and all night from the city’s new toilet being built outside the main entrance from the spirits who live in the locks of the other seven doors bellowing secrets of living hells revealed but not shared for everybody’s midnights know what the walls hide our toilets are made of glass wired for sound [image file=image_rsrc6HF.jpg] 24 stories full of tears flushing at midnight our only community room children set their clocks to listen at the tissue walls gazing upward from their stools from one flight to another catching the neighbors in private struggles next morning it will all be discussed at length in the elevators with no secrets left I am so glad to be moving no more coming home at night to dream of caged puppies grinding their teeth into cartoonlike faces that half plead and half snicker then fold under and vanish back into snarling strangers I am so glad I am moving. But when this grim house goes

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

  I’m not used to that.” Although I understood that Karen felt starved for kindness, it baffled me why a bright, attractive woman like her would feel she had so few options other than a loveless relationship. She cried bitterly as she described the loneliness of her life with Nick and the strain of his passive dependence on her. “I knew it was a mistake one day after we moved in together,” she said. “But I can’t leave him. There’s no way I could hurt him that way.” And that is how I left her, standing at a crossroads, struggling with a decision whether to leave or stay. Thus I awaited her arrival the following Thursday, two days before her wedding, with equal measures of hope and concern—hope that she had turned her life around and worry that she hadn’t. What had she done between age twenty-five and thirty-four? Had she broken free of her fears? Of her sorrow? Was she still taking care of her family while feeling guilty for never doing enough? Was the man she was marrying a good choice? Was she no longer afraid of loving and being loved? As Karen came through my front door, she looked radiant. I was suddenly aware that in all the years we’ve known each other, I had rarely seen her happy. She was dressed very simply in black wool slacks, white pullover, and herringbone suit jacket, and as always, she was beautiful. The last few years had made her somehow softer, more relaxed in her shoulders and arms. Her stunning blue eyes had a new twinkle that flashed as we greeted each other warmly. I told her how lovely she looked and congratulated her on her forthcoming marriage. “Who’s the lucky man?” “We’re both lucky,” she said, settling on the sofa. “Gavin and I did everything differently compared to how I lived my life before.” And she launched into her story. Within months of our last meeting, she had moved out of the apartment she shared with Nick and said good-bye. As she had anticipated, he was devastated, begged her to come back, wailed, and made her feel guiltier than ever. “How were you able to leave?” I asked, aware of her long-standing difficulty in turning away anyone who needed her care. She was silent and then answered slowly, her face pale. “I felt like I was dying. It has to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done and it took all my courage.” She described how she would come home after work and find her partner lying on the couch, waiting for her to take charge. It was just like taking care of her mom. At that point, she realized she had to get out. Her escape took her to the East Coast, graduate school, and ultimately into a dream job—directing a regional public health program for handicapped children in five southern states.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  A brooklet of time in comparison to its frozen lake on the chessboard, my watch showed half-past three. The season was May—mid-May, 1940. The day before, after months of soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered to the right rat at the right office and had resulted finally in a visa de sortie which, in its turn, conditioned the permission to cross the Atlantic. All of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close. Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality of my relief. Sleeping in the next room were you and our child. The lamp on my table was bonneted with blue sugarloaf paper (an amusing military precaution) and the resulting light lent a lunar tinge to the voluted air heavy with tobacco smoke. Opaque curtains separated me from blacked-out Paris. The headline of a newspaper drooping from the seat of a chair spoke of Hitler’s striking at the Low Countries. I have before me the sheet of paper upon which, that night in Paris, I drew the diagram of the problem’s position. White: King on a7 (meaning first file, seventh rank), Queen on b6, Rooks on f4 and h5, Bishops on e4 and h8, Knights on d8 and e6, Pawns on b7 and g3; Black: King on e5, Rook on g7, Bishop on h6, Knights on e2 and g5, Pawns on c3, c6 and d7. White begins and mates in two moves. The false scent, the irresistible “try” is: Pawn to b8, becoming a knight, with three beautiful mates following in answer to disclosed checks by Black; but Black can defeat the whole brilliant affair by not checking White and making instead a modest dilatory move elsewhere on the board. In one corner of the sheet with the diagram, I notice a certain stamped mark that also adorns other papers and books I took out of France to America in May 1940. It is a circular imprint, in the ultimate tint of the spectrum—violet de bureau. In its center there are two capital letters of pica size, R.F., meaning of course République Française. Other letters in lesser type, running peripherally, spell Contrôle des Informations. However, it is only now, many years later, that the information concealed in my chess symbols, which that control permitted to pass, may be, and in fact is, divulged. [image file=image_rsrc13K.jpg] A Nansen passport picture taken in Paris in April 1940, of the author’s wife, Véra, and son Dmitri, aged five. A few weeks later, in May, the last chapter of our European period was to end as it ends in this book.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I remember Ellen talking of the horror of hitting Jo’burg alone, and how you never know what the South African police might be planning for you at the airport, nor why. The night before we part we swim in the pool beneath the sweet evening of the grapevines. “We are naked here in this pool now,” Wassa says softly, “and we will be naked when we go back home.” We told the women we would carry them in our hearts until we were together again. Everyone is anxious to go back home, despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, despite the dangers. There is work to be done. August 12, 1986 New York City Wonderful news! My liver scan shows both tumors slightly diminished. It feels good to be getting on with my life. I feel vindicated without ever becoming complacent—this is only one victory of a long battle in which I’ve got to expect to win some and lose some. But it does put a different perspective upon things to know that pain can be a sign of a disintegrating tumor. Of course, my oncologist is surprised and puzzled. He admits he doesn’t understand what is happening, but it is a mark of his good spirit that he is genuinely pleased for me, nonetheless. I’m very pleased for me, too. A good autumn coming, if I remember to take it easily. I have interesting classes, and SISSA is planning a benefit this fall around the quilt Gloria and I brought back from the Zamani Soweto Sisters in europe. I’ll be doing another benefit for Kitchen Table in Boston. That feels real good. It will be six years next month since the vision of KTP became a reality through the hard work of Barbara [Smith] and Cherrie [Moraga] and Myrna and the others. August 15, 1986 New York City Women of Color in struggle all over the world, our separateness, our connectedness, so many more options for survival. Whatever I call them, I know them for sister, mother, daughter, voice and teacher, inheritor of fire. Alice of Soweto cursing the mission songs: “We have our own political songs now for the young people to sing—no more damn forgiveness!” Her voice is almost hysterically alone in the shocked silence of the other hymn-singing women. Katerina stands in the Berlin hall, two hours into the discussion that follows the poetry reading by her and other Afro-German women. “I have had enough,” she says, “and yes, you may need to continue to air your feelings of racism because for you they are a new discovery here tonight. But I have known them and lived with them all of my life and tonight it is now time for me to go home.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Hannah sings a spirited and humorous song about marriage being a stamping out of a woman’s freedom, just like her signature in the marriage register is a stamping out of her own name as written in the book of life. All the other women join in the high-spirited chorus with much laughter. This is one of their favorite songs. Hannah talks about mothers-in-law, and how sometimes when they finally get to have their own way, they take it out on their sons’ wives. And by tradition, the daughters-in-law must remain meek and helpful, blowing their lungs out firing the wood braziers and coal stoves for the rest of the family every morning. She tells of her own young self rising at 4:00 a.m., even on the morning after her wedding night, lighting the fire to fix her father-in-law his coffee. But she not only eventually stopped this, she even joined her daughter once in punching out her daughter’s philandering husband, caught in the act in his wife’s bed. Mary, the oldest woman in the group, is called Number One. Witty, wise, and soft-spoken, she says love and concern came to her very late in life, once she started to work with Zamani. She is very grateful for the existence of the group, a sentiment that is often expressed by many of the other women in various ways. When we part she kisses me on my lips. “I love you, my sister,” she says. Wassa, round-cheeked and matter-of-fact, talks of her fear of reentry into Johannesburg. “But at least we will be all together,” she says, “so if something happens to one of us the others can tell her people.” I remember Ellen talking of the horror of hitting Jo’burg alone, and how you never know what the South African police might be planning for you at the airport, nor why. The night before we part we swim in the pool beneath the sweet evening of the grapevines. “We are naked here in this pool now,” Wassa says softly, “and we will be naked when we go back home.” We told the women we would carry them in our hearts until we were together again. Everyone is anxious to go back home, despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, despite the dangers. There is work to be done. August 12, 1986 New York City Wonderful news! My liver scan shows both tumors slightly diminished. It feels good to be getting on with my life. I feel vindicated without ever becoming complacent—this is only one victory of a long battle in which I’ve got to expect to win some and lose some. But it does put a different perspective upon things to know that pain can be a sign of a disintegrating tumor. Of course, my oncologist is surprised and puzzled. He admits he doesn’t understand what is happening, but it is a mark of his good spirit that he is genuinely pleased for me, nonetheless. I’m very pleased for me, too.

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

  In AD 52, there came to Corinth as its new governor a Roman called Gallio. He was famous for his charm and gentleness. The Jews tried to take advantage of his newness and good nature, and brought Paul to trial before him on a charge of teaching contrary to their law. But Gallio, with impartial Roman justice, refused to have anything to do with the case or to take any action. So, Paul completed his work in Corinth and moved on to Syria. The Correspondence with Corinth It was when he was in Ephesus in AD 55 that Paul, learning that things were not all well in Corinth, wrote to the church there. There is every possibility that the Corinthian correspondence as we have it is not in the correct order. We must remember that it was not until AD 90 or thereabouts that Paul's correspondence was collected. In many churches, it must have existed only on scraps of papyrus, and putting it together would have been a problem; and it seems that, when the Corinthian letters were collected, they were not all discovered and were not arranged in the right order. Let us see if we can reconstruct what happened. (i) There was a letter which preceded i Corinthians. According to the Revised Standard Version, in i Corinthians 5:9 Paul writes: `I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral men.' This obviously refers to some previous letter. Some scholars believe that letter is lost without trace. Others think it is contained in 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1. Certainly, that passage suits what Paul said he wrote about. It occurs rather awkwardly in its context, and, if we take it out and read straight on from 2 Corinthians 6:13 to 7:2, we get excellent sense and connection. Scholars call this letter `the Previous Letter'. (In the original letters, there were no chapter or verse divisions. The chapters were not divided up until the thirteenth century and the verses not until the sixteenth century; and, because of that, the arranging of the collection of letters would be much more difficult.) (2) News came to Paul, from various sources, of trouble at Corinth. (a) News came from members of the household of Chloe (I Corinthians i:ii). They brought news of the disputes with which the church was torn. (b) News came with the visit of Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus to Ephesus (i Corinthians 16:17). By personal contact, they were able to fill in the gaps in Paul's information. (c) News came in a letter in which the Corinthian church had asked Paul's guidance on various problems. In i Corinthians 7:1, Paul begins: `Now concerning the matters about which you wrote . . .' In answer to all this information, Paul wrote i Corinthians and despatched it to Corinth, apparently by the hand of Timothy (i Corinthians 4:17).

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  It is noteworthy that blasphemy is one of the few crimes covered by biblical law which is mentioned in the Scrolls. It may be that the entrance requirements were so strict and the community so closely knit that the more mundane crimes were not a problem. 141 At any rate, the offences against the sectarian regulations or against the sect itself were dealt with by expulsion or some variation, such as exclusion from certain com- munal activities, plus a reduction in the food allowance. The various provisions for the punishment of transgression show with striking clarity the way in which the religion functioned. Commandments were given which a man was to obey. Perfect obedience was the aim, and, within the tightly ordered community structure, was not considered a totally impossible goal. Infractions were punished, and the acceptance of the punishment, together with perseverance in obedience, led to full restoration of fellowship. 142 It must be recalled, however, that the individual member thought of himself as having been appointed to the community in the first place by the grace of God. Before leaving the theme of the punishment of the transgressions of the sectarians, we should note a group of passages in the community hymns in which the psalmist thinks of his own sins and considers his suffering to be God's chastisement for them. Thus in IQH 9.23f. the psalmist mentions his being 'rebuked' by God, but says that God's rebuke (toka~at) will become his joy while his (the psalmist's) affliction (nega') will turn to healing. Simi- larly in 9.33 the psalmist mentions receiving God's just rebuke. IQH 17.22 mentions God's chastisement (yissureka) upon the one whom he has chosen. When the psalmist says (11.8f.) that 'In Thy wrath are all chastisements (mishpe[e nega' ), but in Thy goodness is much forgiveness', he seems to be assigning all suffering, whether that of the wicked or the righteous, to God's 141 Transgression of the Sabbath is mentioned in CD 12.4-6, but the death penalty is expressly forbidden. CD 9. I apparently prescribes the death penalty by the gentiles for 'devoting' a man to death, referring to Lev. 27.29, but tlIC point of the ordinance is obscure. The death penalty is referred to vaguely, without mention of specific crimes, in CD 9.6, 17; 10.1. 4Q159 apparently prescribes death for sexual offences. See on all this Forkman, The Limits of the Religious Community, pp. 43, 6ef. 142 Braun ('Tora-Verschirfung', pp. 349f.; cf. 'Umkehr', Studitn, pp. 78f. and Radilea/ismus I, pp. 28f.) emphasizes the requirement to do all the commandments (which he sets over against Rabbinic Judaism's supposed requirement to have fulfilments simply outweigh transgressions), and concludes that a man is lost ( wrloren) if he does not fulfil all. This overlooks tlIC actual remedies for transgressions in IQSand CD. 5] Fulfilment and transgression punishment of transgressions. Yet it is not perfectly clear in all the com- munity hymns that suffering is considered to be punishment for sin.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  A brooklet of time in comparison to its frozen lake on the chessboard, my watch showed half-past three. The season was May—mid-May, 1940. The day before, after months of soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered to the right rat at the right office and had resulted finally in a visa de sortie which, in its turn, conditioned the permission to cross the Atlantic. All of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close. Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality of my relief. Sleeping in the next room were you and our child. The lamp on my table was bonneted with blue sugarloaf paper (an amusing military precaution) and the resulting light lent a lunar tinge to the voluted air heavy with tobacco smoke. Opaque curtains separated me from blacked-out Paris. The headline of a newspaper drooping from the seat of a chair spoke of Hitler’s striking at the Low Countries. I have before me the sheet of paper upon which, that night in Paris, I drew the diagram of the problem’s position. White: King on a7 (meaning first file, seventh rank), Queen on b6, Rooks on f4 and h5, Bishops on e4 and h8, Knights on d8 and e6, Pawns on b7 and g3; Black: King on e5, Rook on g7, Bishop on h6, Knights on e2 and g5, Pawns on c3, c6 and d7. White begins and mates in two moves. The false scent, the irresistible “try” is: Pawn to b8, becoming a knight, with three beautiful mates following in answer to disclosed checks by Black; but Black can defeat the whole brilliant affair by not checking White and making instead a modest dilatory move elsewhere on the board. In one corner of the sheet with the diagram, I notice a certain stamped mark that also adorns other papers and books I took out of France to America in May 1940. It is a circular imprint, in the ultimate tint of the spectrum—violet de bureau. In its center there are two capital letters of pica size, R.F., meaning of course République Française. Other letters in lesser type, running peripherally, spell Contrôle des Informations. However, it is only now, many years later, that the information concealed in my chess symbols, which that control permitted to pass, may be, and in fact is, divulged. [image file=image_rsrc13K.jpg] A Nansen passport picture taken in Paris in April 1940, of the author’s wife, Véra, and son Dmitri, aged five. A few weeks later, in May, the last chapter of our European period was to end as it ends in this book.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Uncle Konstantin was in the diplomatic service and, in the last stage of his career in London, conducted a bitter and unsuccessful struggle with Sablin as to which of them would head the Russian mission. His life was not particularly eventful, but he had had a couple of nice escapes from a fate less tame than the draft in a London hospital, which killed him in 1927. Once, in Moscow, on February 17, 1905, when an older friend, the Grand Duke Sergey, half a minute before the explosion, offered him a lift in his carriage, and my uncle said no, thanks, he’d rather walk, and away rolled the carriage to its fatal rendezvous with a terrorist’s bomb; and the second time, seven years later, when he missed another appointment, this one with an iceberg, by chancing to return his Titanic ticket. We saw a good deal of him in London after we had escaped from Lenin’s Russia. Our meeting at Victoria Station in 1919 is a vivid vignette in my mind: my father marching up to his prim brother with an unfolding bear hug; he, backing away and repeating: “Mï v Anglii, mï v Anglii [we are in England].” His charming little flat was full of souvenirs from India such as photographs of young British officers. He is the author of The Ordeal of a Diplomat (1921), easily obtainable in large public libraries, and of an English version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov; and he is portrayed, goatee and all (together with Count Witte, the two Japanese delegates and a benevolent Theodore Roosevelt), in a mural of the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty on the left side of the main entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History—an eminently fit place to find my surname in golden Slavic characters, as I did the first time I passed there—with a fellow lepidopterist, who said “Sure, sure” in reply to my exclamation of recognition. 2Diagrammatically, the three family estates on the Oredezh, fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, may be represented as three linked rings in a ten-mile chain running west-east across the Luga highway, with my mother’s Vyra in the middle, her brother’s Rozhestveno on the right, and my grandmother’s Batovo on the left, the links being the bridges across the Oredezh (properly Oredezh’) which, in its winding, branching and looping course, bathed Vyra on either side. Two other, much more distant, estates in the region were related to Batovo: my uncle Prince Wittgenstein’s Druzhnoselie situated a few miles beyond the Siverski railway station, which was six miles northeast of our place; and my uncle Pïhachev’s Mityushino, some fifty miles south on the way to Luga: I never once was there, but we fairly often drove the ten miles or so to the Wittgensteins and once (in August 1911) visited them at their other splendid estate, Kamenka, in the Province of Podolsk, S.W. Russia.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Uncle Konstantin was in the diplomatic service and, in the last stage of his career in London, conducted a bitter and unsuccessful struggle with Sablin as to which of them would head the Russian mission. His life was not particularly eventful, but he had had a couple of nice escapes from a fate less tame than the draft in a London hospital, which killed him in 1927. Once, in Moscow, on February 17, 1905, when an older friend, the Grand Duke Sergey, half a minute before the explosion, offered him a lift in his carriage, and my uncle said no, thanks, he’d rather walk, and away rolled the carriage to its fatal rendezvous with a terrorist’s bomb; and the second time, seven years later, when he missed another appointment, this one with an iceberg, by chancing to return his Titanic ticket. We saw a good deal of him in London after we had escaped from Lenin’s Russia. Our meeting at Victoria Station in 1919 is a vivid vignette in my mind: my father marching up to his prim brother with an unfolding bear hug; he, backing away and repeating: “Mï v Anglii, mï v Anglii [we are in England].” His charming little flat was full of souvenirs from India such as photographs of young British officers. He is the author of The Ordeal of a Diplomat (1921), easily obtainable in large public libraries, and of an English version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov; and he is portrayed, goatee and all (together with Count Witte, the two Japanese delegates and a benevolent Theodore Roosevelt), in a mural of the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty on the left side of the main entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History—an eminently fit place to find my surname in golden Slavic characters, as I did the first time I passed there—with a fellow lepidopterist, who said “Sure, sure” in reply to my exclamation of recognition. 2Diagrammatically, the three family estates on the Oredezh, fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, may be represented as three linked rings in a ten-mile chain running west-east across the Luga highway, with my mother’s Vyra in the middle, her brother’s Rozhestveno on the right, and my grandmother’s Batovo on the left, the links being the bridges across the Oredezh (properly Oredezh’) which, in its winding, branching and looping course, bathed Vyra on either side. Two other, much more distant, estates in the region were related to Batovo: my uncle Prince Wittgenstein’s Druzhnoselie situated a few miles beyond the Siverski railway station, which was six miles northeast of our place; and my uncle Pïhachev’s Mityushino, some fifty miles south on the way to Luga: I never once was there, but we fairly often drove the ten miles or so to the Wittgensteins and once (in August 1911) visited them at their other splendid estate, Kamenka, in the Province of Podolsk, S.W. Russia.

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

  As we see it, the answer is no. It is incredible that any disciple would put into Paul's mouth a claim to be the chief of sinners (i Timothy 1:15); the tendency would be to stress Paul's holiness, not to talk about his sin. It is incredible that anyone writing in the name of Paul would give Timothy the homely advice to drink a little wine for the sake of his health (i Timothy 5:23). The whole of 2 Timothy 4 is so personal and so full of intimate, loving details that no one but Paul could have written it. Where can we find the solution? It may well be that something like this happened. It is quite obvious that many letters of Paul were lost. Apart from his great public letters, he must have had a continuous private correspondence, and of that we possess only the little letter to Philemon. It may well be that in the later days there were some fragments of Paul's correspondence in the possession of some Christian teacher. This teacher saw the church of his day and his locality in Ephesus threatened on every side. It was threatened with heresy from outside and from within. It was threatened with a fall away from its own high standards of purity and truth. The quality of its members and the standard of its officebearers were degenerating. He had in his possession little letters of Paul which said exactly the things that should be said; but, as they stood, they were too short and too fragmentary to publish. So he amplified them and made them supremely relevant to the contemporary situation and sent them out to the church. In the Pastoral Epistles, we are still hearing the voice of Paul, and often hearing it speak with a unique personal intimacy; but we think that the form of the letters is the work of a Christian teacher who summoned the help of Paul when the church of the day needed the guidance which only he could give. 15Philemon More than a SlaveThe Unique Letter In one respect, this little letter to Philemon is unique. It is the only private letter of Paul which we possess. Doubtless Paul must have written many private letters; but, of them all, only Philemon has survived. Quite apart from the grace and the charm which pervade it, this fact gives it a special significance. Onesimus, the Runaway Slave There are two possible reconstructions of what happened. One is quite straightforward; the other, connected with the name of the American scholar E. J. Goodspeed, is rather more complicated and certainly more dramatic. Let us take the simple view first.

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

  Carpenter writes: "There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actions which were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention, and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to be volitional; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of will is required to sustain them when they have been once set going, or that the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the two actions—the maintenance of the train of thought, and the maintenance of the train of movement. But if only an infinitesimally small amount of will is necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to saying that they go on by a force of their own? And does not the experience of the perfect continuity of our train of thought during the performance of movements that have become habitual, entirely negative the hypothesis of oscillation? Besides, if such an oscillation existed, there must be intervals in which each action goes on of itself; so that its essentially automatic character is virtually admitted. The physiological explanation, that the mechanism of locomotion, as of other habitual movements, grows to the mode in which it is early exercised, and that it then works automatically under the general control and direction of the will, can scarcely be put down by any assumption of an hypothetical necessity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our composite nature." [147] But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate antecedents of each movement of the chain are at any rate accompanied by consciousness of some kind. They are sensations to which we are usually inattentive, but which immediately call out attention if they go wrong. Schneider's account of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In the act of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirely off, "we are continuously aware of certain muscular feelings; and we have, moreover, a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibrium and to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there, and doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensation of its movements as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulse to set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter keeps up her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively talk. But if we ask her how this be possible, she will hardly reply that the knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling of it, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit, and that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and regulated by the sensations associated therewithal, even when the attention is called away.

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

  In fact, the reaction-time experiments are a case to which we can immediately apply what we have just learned about the summation of stimuli. 'Expectant attention' is but the subjective name for what objectively is a partial stimulation of a certain pathway, the pathway from the 'centre' for the signal to that for the discharge. In Chapter XI we shall see that all attention involves excitement from within of the tract concerned in feeling the objects to which attention is given. The tract here is the excito-motor arc about to be traversed. The signal is but the spark from without which touches off a train already laid. The performance, under these conditions, exactly resembles any reflex action. The only difference is that whilst, in the ordinarily so-called reflex acts, the reflex arc is a permanent result of organic growth, it is here a transient result of previous cerebral conditions. [114] I am happy to say that since the preceding paragraphs (and the notes thereto appertaining) were written, Wundt has himself become converted to the view which I defend. He now admits that in the shortest reactions "there is neither apperception nor will, but that they are merely brain-reflexes due to practice." [115] The means of his conversion are certain experiments performed in his laboratory by Herr L. Lange, [116] who was led to distinguish between two ways of setting the attention in reacting on a signal, and who found that they gave very different time-results. In the 'extreme sensorial' way, as Lange calls it, of reacting, one keeps one's mind as intent as possible upon the expected signal, and 'purposely avoids' [117] thinking of the movement to be executed; in the 'extreme muscular' way one 'does not think at all' [118] of the signal, but stands as ready as possible for the movement. The muscular reactions are much shorter than the sensorial ones, the average difference being in the neighborhood of a tenth of a second. Wundt accordingly calls them 'shortened reactions' and, with Lange, admits them to be mere reflexes; whilst the sensorial reactions he calls 'complete,' and holds to his original conception as far as they are concerned. The facts, however, do not seem to me to warrant even this amount of fidelity to the original Wundtian position. When we begin to react in the 'extreme sensorial' way, Lange says that we get times so very long that they must be rejected from the count as non-typical. "Only after the reacter has succeeded by repeated and conscientious practice in bringing about an extremely precise co-ordination of his voluntary impulse with his sense- impression do we get times which can be regarded as typical sensorial reaction-times." [119] Now it seems to me that these excessive and 'untypical' times are probably the real 'complete times,' the only ones in which distinct processes of actual perception and volition occur (see above, pp. 63-4).

• From The Hours (1998)

  It seems, somehow, that she has left her own world and entered the realm of the book. Nothing, of course, could be further from Mrs. Dalloway’s London than this turquoise hotel room, and yet she imagines that Virginia Woolf herself, the drowned woman, the genius, might in death inhabit a place not unlike this one. She laughs, quietly, to herself. Please, God, she says silently, let heaven be something better than a room at the Normandy. Heaven would be better furnished, it would be brighter and grander, but it might in fact contain some measure of this hushed remove, this utter absence inside the continuing world. Having this room to herself seems both prim and whorish. She is safe here. She could do anything she wanted to, anything at all. She is somehow like a newlywed, reclining in her chamber, waiting for . . . not her husband, or any other man. For someone. For something. She reaches for her book. She has marked her place with the silver bookmark (“To My Bookworm, With Love”) given her by her husband several birthdays ago. With a sensation of deep and buoyant release, she begins reading. She remembered once throwing a sixpence into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow on the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open: Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages.