Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  Parents taking either path—those who decide to stay together in a troubled marriage and those who decide on divorce—will both convey to the listening child how much they value marriage and family. In both circumstances, they will have shown their capacity to deal honestly and bravely with life’s problems, sharing the hard-won wisdom that human relationships are both bitter and sweet. Most of all, they will have made clear to the child and future adult what family is about. All of us need courage and the will to keep trying. Are all divorcing parents capable of this? Of course not. No one knows better than I how difficult this assignment is for angry, unhappy, even tormented people to do. However, I’m repeatedly surprised by how much parents are willing to do if they’re convinced that it’s in their children’s interest. I have no doubt that many parents can have honest conversations with their children, whether they decide to leave or stay in a troubled marriage. To Stay or GoI LOOKED BACK at Gary. “Tell me, do you think your parents were right to stay in the marriage or should they have divorced? How would it have been different for you?” “Wow, that’s a humdinger.” “You mean you haven’t thought about it?” “As a matter of fact I have. For me it was definitely better that they stayed together. But that’s because they were great parents. My brother, sister, and I had a good home. We never doubted that they loved us. I’ll never really know if Dad was unfaithful. My mom was lonely and, as I look back, probably depressed, but she continued to be very interested in us and our schoolwork and our activities. We never doubted that we’d go on to college with substantial financial support or even to grad school if we opted for that. In other words, our world was protected. But if they had split up, I’d lay you bets that my father would have been remarried in a flash. And maybe had a couple more kids. We would have definitely lost out.” “How?” “I can imagine that if my dad had a new wife and kids, he wouldn’t have been around for me. I doubt that my mom would have remarried, although who knows? Maybe she’d have been happier with a different guy. I imagine she would. So to answer your question, of course it was better for me and my brother and sister to have a stable place and good parents, even if our folks missed out on some goodies of life. I know that’s selfish of me.” “Why do you say that?” “Because I have no idea how unhappy my parents were or whether they had regrets. After all, there are a lot of other things in life besides kids. I would have liked to see them both happier with their lives. Now that I’m an adult, I feel terribly sorry for both of them.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  1 Foster things Gi told me we were moving again. If you count foster homes and living in cars, where I, as the youngest, slept in the footwell, we’d moved at least fifteen times already. And I was only eight years old. This move was worse, though. In this move, I was losing my sisters. The oldest of us, Cherie, had already left to live on her own. The rest of us had found ourselves, once again, to be wards of the state: Camille at seventeen, Gi, almost fourteen, Norm, twelve, and me. We were in an upstairs bedroom of a house we called the Toad House, because it was drab gray with big front windows that looked like hooded eyes. My clothes were in this room but I’d never slept here. Gi, Norm, and I were like a litter of pups, curling up every night in the living room together where we felt safe. Months ago, our mother, Cookie, had abandoned the four of us in the Toad House. Later that same day, Camille moved into her best friend’s house. She didn’t want to leave us behind, but she thought maybe if she had a real home and didn’t have to worry about food, she could get a few odd jobs and make enough money to buy food for us. When Cookie finally returned two nights ago, she beat Gi so violently that there were raised bruises like purple walnuts running from her brow to her cheek. Around Gi’s swollen and now-lopsided lips were craggy lines of scabs. Gi thought it was probably her social studies teacher, Mr. Brown, who called Social Services the next day. Gi told me she hadn’t realized how bad she looked until she saw Mr. Brown’s face turn white at the sight of her. It’s always harder to ignore the truth when you see that truth in someone else’s eyes. Now Cookie was in the kitchen with a silver-haired social worker, and another social worker sat in the living room. She was a pretty blond-haired lady who looked just like Mrs. Brady from The Brady Bunch. “Why can’t I go with you?” I asked Gi. We were looking out the window at the two gray cars parked on the gravel driveway. One was waiting to take Norm

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

  This feeling of having no choice can lead to a combination of anger and powerlessness that has long-term effects on their initiative later in life. Tell them soberly that adults who divorce one another continue to love and care for their children until the children are grown. Talk about good plans and what you’ll do together. But don’t get carried away. Schedule another meeting to discuss future plans after everyone has had a chance to think, so you can mutually explore what’s possible. Most of all, you need to tell your children that divorce is very sad for both of you and that you are very sorry. Keep in mind that this is one of the saddest days in any child’s life and nothing will save you from having to face it. Level with them that things will be discombobulated for a while, but that you promise to keep them informed. End by saying how much you all need to help each other. Talk about courage, that you all need to try not to be cranky, but it’s okay to cry and be angry. You may all slip, but it’s important to try. At the next meeting tell them what’s happening and when things will be settled. Talk about plans for the future and how you will implement them. At this meeting tell them that sometimes children blame themselves. They think that they’re responsible for the breakup and that if they weren’t here Dad and Mom would get along fine. Say that the trouble is between you, the parents, and that they didn’t do it and that they can’t fix it. Assure them again that they are still a very good part of the marriage. Tell them again about plans for parents and children—where you and they will live, changes in parents’ schedules, changes in theirs. Make sure you talk about your concern for continuity in their interests in teams, after-school activities, staying close to best friends. Be honest about disruptions and moves. Make a date to show them where Dad and Mom will be living and plan the first visit together. Obviously, this kind of talk should stretch out over time. Many parts will need to be repeated because children can’t hear everything the first or second time. And of course, the style, language, and timing of all these messages should be matched to the child’s age and capacity to understand. What will you accomplish? Like Gary’s father, you will be providing an example of moral behavior in which every family member receives full consideration. As you and your spouse express your sorrow, the children will not feel constrained to disguise their angry and frightened feelings. They’ll learn that parents in crisis can be trusted not to disappear but to be reliable and available as before, perhaps even more so.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Camille after all. My eyes burned with tears of frustration. “Here are two more trouble makers for ya.” Mrs. Callahan pointed at Norm and me. “These things seem a little dense to me, so you better tell them the rules again.” She turned and went down the stairs with Becky following. Our bunkmates filed in, each of them watching us as if we were cats about to claw them. Black-haired Brian was the first to speak. He was creaky and stiff with legs that moved like they were made of aluminum pipes and arms that he spastically bent and straightened like folding yardsticks. Brian stuttered when he spoke, and his eyelids fluttered like nervous butterflies. “I’m th-th-thirteen,” he said, after telling us his name. “Hopefully I’ll s-s-s- stop twitching when I’m f-f-f-fourteen, ’cause no one likes t-t-t-t-to hang out with a twitcher.” I thought I would hang out with a twitcher, but I was too shy to say so and, also, I figured a thirteen-year-old boy wouldn’t want anything to do with an eight-year-old girl. A little blond boy hung over the edge of the bunk bed, his hands dangling like he was about to jump into a handstand. “I’m Charlie,” he said. “I’m nine and my parents are in jail but I’ve got grandparents who like to see me when they have time. Are your parents in jail?” Norm shook his head no and I shook my head yes—though I knew my previously jailed father was dead. Charlie didn’t notice. He just kept talking. “That’s Hannah.” Charlie pointed to the girl in the bunk below him. Then he pointed to the boy in the bunk across from him. “And that’s Jason. They’re brother and sister, just like you. Hannah is ten and Jason is—” “I’m eleven,” Jason said. “Hannah doesn’t speak,” Charlie said. Hannah didn’t look up. With her head dropped like that I could see how knotted her wavy hair was. I felt bad for her that she didn’t have a sister like Gi to comb out her hair every night and every morning. And then I felt bad for myself because who was going to comb my hair now? “Hannah hasn’t talked in a year,” Jason said. “But I like talking, so I do it all the time.” Hannah continued to look at her knees, Brian jerked and spasmed, and Charlie hung like a little white-haired chimp while Jason monologued about how his dad lost his job and started getting drunk every day. His dad didn’t mean to hurt anyone, Jason claimed, but he couldn’t help himself when he was drunk and so the social worker thought he and Hannah were better off here while their

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We had many stop signs on our block. They weren’t always there. There was this woman named Marsha down the street. She was overweight and had hair like a rancher’s widow, a kind of mullet cut with thick bangs. She would go door-to-door, hobbling on her bad leg, gathering signatures for a petition to put up stop signs in the neighborhood. She has two boys herself, she told you at the door, and she wants all the kids to be safe when they play. Her sons were Kevin and Kyle. Kevin, two years older than me, overdosed on heroin. Five years later, Kyle, the younger one, also overdosed. After that Marsha moved to a mobile park in Coventry with her sister. The stop signs remain. The truth is we don’t have to die if we don’t feel like it. Just kidding. — Do you remember the morning, after a night of snow, when we found the letters FAG4LIFE scrawled in red spray paint across our front door? The icicles caught the light and everything looked nice and about to break. “What does it mean?” you asked, coatless and shivering. “It says ‘Merry Christmas,’ Ma,” I said, pointing. “See? That’s why it’s red. For luck.” They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.” The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine? It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be yet another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop. There was a war, the man on TV said, but it’s “lowered” now. Yay, I think, swallowing my pills. — The truth is my recklessness is body-width.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Without ambitions and without joy, like many a man who from year to year thus effaces himself more and more, he had come to put a fanatic application into minor matters to which he limited himself. I have myself known these honorable temptations to meticulousness and scruple. Experience had produced in my father a skepticism toward all mankind in which he included me, as yet a child. My success, had he lived to see it, would not have impressed him in the least; family pride was so strong that it would not have been admitted that I could add anything to it. I was twelve when this overburdened man left us. My mother settled down, for the rest of her life, to an austere widowhood; I never saw her again from the day that I set out for Rome, summoned hither by my guardian. My memory of her face, elongated like those of most of our Spanish women and touched with melancholy sweetness, is confirmed by her image in wax on the Wall of Ancestors. She had the dainty feet of the women of Gades, in their close-fitting sandals, nor was the gentle swaying of the hips which marks the dancers of that region alien to this virtuous young matron. I have often reflected upon the error that we commit in supposing that a man or a family necessarily share in the ideas or events of the century in which they happen to exist. The effect of intrigues in Rome barely reached my parents in that distant province of Spain, even though at the time of the revolt against Nero my grandfather had for one night offered hospitality to Galba. We lived on the memory of obscure heroes of archives without renown, of a certain Fabius Hadrianus who was burned alive by the Carthaginians in the siege of Utica, and of a second Fabius, an ill-starred soldier who pursued Mithridates on the roads of Asia Minor. Of the writers of the period my father knew practically nothing: Lucan and Seneca were strangers to him, although like us they were of Spanish origin. My great uncle Aelius, a scholar, confined his reading to the best known authors of the time of Augustus. Such indifference to contemporary fashion kept them from many an error in taste, and especially from falling into turgid rhetoric. Hellenism and the Orient were unknown, or at best regarded frowningly from afar; there was not, I believe, a single good Greek statue in the whole peninsula. Thrift went hand in hand with wealth, and a certain rusticity was always present in our love of pompous ceremony.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Others have had to go. If I can’t entertain a young man to afternoon tea …’ ‘You mean I am the cause of all this, it can’t be.’ He nodded at me as if to say that he too found it incredible—indeed, as if not sure that I believed it. ‘He is not normal,’ he explained. ‘But he will have to get used to it, when you come again.’ I thought for a moment about the implications of this. ‘I don’t want to make things worse for you,’ I insisted. ‘We could have tea somewhere else.’ ‘It’s important to me that you come here,’ Charles said calmly. ‘There are things I want to show you, and ask you, too. It’s quite a little museum I have here.’ He looked around the room, and I politely did the same. ‘I’m the prime exhibit, of course, but I’m afraid I’m about to be removed from display; returned to my generous lender, as it were.’ How does one treat such baleful jokes from the elderly? I looked blank, as if not with him—and so perhaps showed that I knew it to be true. ‘I’m sure you must have some fascinating things. Of course I still don’t know anything about you. I still haven’t looked you up.’ He grunted, but his mind was clearly running on to something else, so that he broke through my following platitudes: ‘Come on, let me show you around.’ We were still on our first cup of tea. He had begun to push himself out of his armchair and I jumped up to help him. ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ he confirmed mysteriously. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll come back here—want to take a biscuit with you?’ I gave him my arm and we made for the door. ‘So much stuff in here,” he complained. ‘God knows what it all is … books, of course. Need more shelves but don’t want to spoil the room. Still, it won’t matter soon.’ In the hall he hesitated. His suited forearm lay along my bare brown one, and his hand gripped mine, half-interlocked with it. It was a broad, mottled, strong hand, the knuckles slightly swollen by arthritis, the fingertips broad and flattened, with well-shaped yellow nails. My hand looked effete and inexperienced in its grasp. ‘Straight across,’ he decided.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  My wife had just died in her residence at the Palatine, which she had preferred to the end to Tibur, and where [Hadrian 258a.jpg] Coin Struck for Adoption of Aelius Caesar The Hague, Royal Coin Collection [Hadrian 258bc.jpg] Aelius Caesar (bronze) London, British Museum Marcus Aurelius as a Boy Rome, Capitoline Museum [Hadrian 258d.jpg] Hadrianic Coin with Symbols of Aeternitas The Hague, Royal Coin Collection she lived surrounded by a small court of friends and Spanish relations, who were all that she cared about. The polite evasions, the proprieties, the feeble efforts towards understanding had gradually terminated between us, and had left exposed only antipathy, irritation, and rancor, and, on her part, hatred. I paid her a visit in the last days; sickness had further soured her morose and acid disposition; that interview was occasion for her for violent recrimination; she gained relief thereby, but was indiscreet in speaking thus before witnesses. She congratulated herself on dying childless: my sons would doubtless have resembled me, she said, and she would have had the save aversion for them as for their father. That avowal, in which such bitterness rankled, is the only proof of love which she has ever given me. My Sabina: I searched for the few passably good memories which are left of someone when we take the trouble to look back for them; I recalled a basket of fruit which she had sent me for my birthday, after a quarrel; while passing by litter through the narrow streets of the town of Tibur and before the small summer house which had once belonged to my mother-in-law Matidia, I thought bitterly of some nights of a summer long ago, when I had tried in vain to arouse some amorous feeling for this young bride so harsh and so cold. The death of my wife was less moving for me than the loss of the good Arete, the housekeeper at the Villa, stricken that same winter by fever. Because the illness to which the empress succumbed had been put poorly diagnosed by the physicians, and towards the last caused her cruel intestinal pain, I was accused of having had her poisoned, and that wild rumor was readily believed. It goes without saying that so superfluous a crime had never tempted me. The death of Sabina perhaps pushed Servianus to risk his all: her influence in Rome had been wholly at his disposal; with her fell one of his most respected supports. And further, he had just entered upon his ninetieth year; like me, he had no more time to lose. For some months now he had tried to draw around him small groups of officers of the Praetorian Guard; sometimes he ventured to exploit the superstitious respect which great age inspires in order to assume imperial authority within his four walls.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘He was a good administrator, loyal, fair, stayed on longer than me, went back in fifty-six to help with the independence arrangements: utterly sound—Eton, Magdalen. Not a breath of imagination in his body. It was reading his book—what’s it called? A Life in Service—that made me realise I didn’t want to write anything of that kind. There is a book in my life, but it’s almost entirely to do with imagination and all that. The facts, my sweet William, are as nothing.’ I looked on abashed. ‘You have published something about the Sudan though?’ ‘Oh—yes, I did a little book in the war; part of a series that Duckworth brought out on various different countries, I can’t quite remember why. It wasn’t much good. Fortunately almost all the stock was destroyed when a bomb hit the warehouse. It’s probably worth a fortune now.’ He laughed hollowly; and then lapsed into a vacant half-smile. I was trying to decide whether or not he was looking at me, whether this lull was an enigmatic path of our intercourse or merely one of Charles’s unsignalled abstentions, a mental treading water, ‘blanking’ as he called it. I thought, not for the first time, how odd it was to know so much about someone I didn’t know. A person could only reveal himself as Charles had done to me in love or from a deliberate distance. For half a minute, as I took in his heavy frame, the eyes dark and somnolent in his pink, slightly sunburned head, either reading seemed possible. ‘If you’ve looked at the diaries for when I first went out,’ he said, ‘then you’ll understand how young and aspiring we were. We were quite sophisticated in a way, but with that kind of sophistication which only throws into relief one’s childlike ignorance. It was a bizarre system, when you think about it. There was one of the vastest countries in the world, and they sent out to govern it a handful of boys each year who had never in their brief lives experienced anything even remotely comparable. It wasn’t like India, of course, there wasn’t the same element of domination—indeed, the whole enterprise was utterly different. Anyone could go to India, but for the Sudan there was this careful selection, screening don’t they call it nowadays. They got some worthy Leslie Harrap types of course, and plenty of sprinters and blues to keep things running on time, and they also got their share of cranks and unconventional fellows. There were possibly more of the latter. It was an absurd system and yet very, very subtle, I’ve come to believe. It singled out men who would give themselves.’ ‘They didn’t make objections to people’s—private lives?’ I carefully queried, reaching across with the teapot.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Paul begins by confessing his “great anguish and sorrow” for his kinsmen. After blessing God for the privileges that he has bestowed upon Israel—their family status as his children, the glorious divine presence in Jerusalem’s temple (reduced to just “glory” in most English translations!), the covenants, the giving of the Torah, the temple cult [often translated bloodlessly as “the worship”], the promises, the patriarchs, and the messiah (Rm 9.4–5)—Paul proceeds to draw a distinction between “Israelites” and “Israel”: “Not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham’s children are his true descendants.” Paul then narrates a rapid sketch of Israel’s history encompassing Genesis, Exodus, and the prophets, pointing out those times when God, for his own sovereign reasons, has directed that history. Not all of Abraham’s children were Israel, only those through Isaac; nor all of Isaac’s children, but only Jacob, not Esau, a decision God made before they had been born. (Why? So that “God’s purpose of election might continue,” Rm 9.11.) Is God unjust in doing so? Paul asks rhetorically (“Of course not!” 9.14), next alluding to God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. God can have mercy on whomever he wants, and he can harden whomever he wants, because he’s God, who explained to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth” (9.17). Nodding toward Isaiah and Jeremiah, Paul continues: God is the potter and humanity the pots, all made from the same lump of clay. God can make whatever kind of pots he wants: “Who are you, 0 man, to argue with God?” (9.19–25). This review sweeps into Paul’s lament for his people, who cause Paul “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” (9.2); in the words of Isaiah, God will “save” only a remnant of Israel (9.27). Romans chapter 9 had set a plumb line in older, traditional interpretations of Paul, constraining the reading of the rest of the letter: those Jews like Paul who “have faith” are the “saved remnant”; the ones who do not have faith “have stumbled” and will not be saved until and unless they change (9.27). Most of Israel, says Paul, are unenlightened, insubordinate to God’s plan, uncomprehending, disobedient (10.1–21). Things look bad for the (non-Christian) Jews.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Achilles Tatius has transformed mundane social prejudice into high art. That there were two fates for women was a fundamental and unchanging tenet of ancient sexual ideologies. Down one path lay promiscuity and shame, personified in the prostitute; down the other lay chastity and honor, personified in the virgin and the matron. These two fates were deeply embedded in patterns of social reproduction, loosely codified in public law, and actively reinforced by the social technology of honor and shame. It is an achievement of Leucippe and Clitophon that the story has so openly contemplated the inscrutable economy of fortune, in the stunning contrast between its beneficiary and its victim. The fate of the prostitute seems only more capricious and unjust in a novelistic universe where there is no redemption beyond life, only the prospect of salvation through conjugal eros. In the cosmos created by the author, the prostitute’s grotesque demise serves only to exhibit the good fortune of Leucippe in even greater contrast. The norms attaching to male sexual behavior inevitably attract the lion’s share of the attention from historians. It is an obvious and insurmountable fact that our informants are almost exclusively male. More subtly, expectations of female sexual behavior can seem uniform and immobile: good girls remain pure until marriage, faithful within marriage. The imposition of these limits is as unsurprising as the dawn. The effort to control female sexuality is precultural, a permanent fixture of sexual competition. The regulation of female sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean shared all the predictable features of a patriarchal culture. Nevertheless, the actual mechanics and specific inflections of feminine sexual norms in the pre-Christian world merit closer inspection. The peculiar complexion of classical sexual culture derived from the institutionalization of a stark, binary opposition between women who possessed and women who lacked sexual honor. The great polarization of feminine types not only animated a whole code of signs and gestures, it actively gave structure to the material formation of classical societies. And in the Roman period, the reliance of female sexual ethics on patterns of socialization even became the object of philosophical reflection, though not a matter for reform, as the author of Leucippe and Clitophon well knew.31

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  * * * * * CXXIX “The little Rose Merchant.” See Dionysius (Anth. Pal. V-81): “Little vendor of roses, thou art fair as thine own flowers. But what sellest thou? thyself? or thy roses? or both together?” * * * * * CXXXII “She has a good bed.” See Antipater (Anth. Pal. V-109): “For a drachma one may have Europa the Athenian, without fear of rivals or refusals. She has a soft bed and, if the night is cold, a fire. Surely, O Zeus, there was no need for thee to make thyself a bull!” * * * * * CXL “My autumn.” See Paulus Silentiarius (Anth. Pal. V-258): “Philinna, thy wrinkles are preferable to the fresh tints of young girls. I love less in my hands their straight, hard breasts than thine which incline like full-blown roses. Thine autumn is fairer than their springtime; their summer is colder than thy time of snows.” * * * * * CXLIII “The True Death.” Compare Rufinus (Anth. Pal. V-76): “Once I had soft skin, firm breasts and pretty feet; my body was supple, mine eyebrows arched, my hair undulating. Time has changed all. Not one treasure of my youth remains....” For the theme developed, see François Villon’s “Les regrets de la belle Heaulmière.” INDEX BUCOLICS IN PAMPHYLIA Life of Bilitis iii I. The Tree 3 II. Pastoral Song 4 III. Maternal Advice 5 IV. The Naked Feet 6 V. The Old Man and the Nymphs 7 VI. Song 8 VII. The Passer-By 9 VIII. The Awakening 10 IX. The Rain 11 X. The Flowers 12 XI. Impatience 13 XII. Comparisons 14 XIII. The Forest River 15 XIV. Come, Melissa 16 XV. The Symbolic Ring 17 XVI. Dances by Moonlight 18 XVII. The Little Children 19 XVIII. The Stories 20 XIX. The Married Friend 21 XX. Confidences 22 XXI. The Moon with Eyes of Blue 23 * Reflections (not translated) XXII. Song 24 XXIII. Lykas 25 XXIV. The Offering to the Goddess 26 XXV. The Complaisant Friend 27 XXVI. A Prayer to Persephone 28 XXVII. The Game of Dice 29 XXVIII. The Distaff 30 XXIX. The Flute 31 XXX. The Hair 32 XXXI. The Cup 33 XXXII. Roses in the Night 34 XXXIII. Remorse 35 XXXIV. The Interrupted Sleep 36 XXXV. The Wash-woman 37 XXXVI. Song 38 XXXVII. Bilitis 39 XXXVIII. The Little House 40 * Pleasure (not translated) XXXIX. The Lost Letter 41 XL. Song 42 XLI. The Oath 43 XLII. The Night 44 XLIII. Cradle-Song 45 XLIV. The Tomb of the Naiads 46 ELEGIACS AT MYTILENE XLV. To the Vessel 49 XLVI. Psappha 50 XLVII. The Dance of Glottis and Kyse 51 XLVIII. Counsels 52 XLIX. Uncertainty 53 L. The Meeting 54 LI. The Little Terra Cotta Astarte 55 LII. Desire 56 LIII. The Wedding 57 * The Bed (not translated) LIV. The Past Which Survives 58 LV. Metamorphosis 59 LVI. The Nameless Tomb 60 LVII. The Three Beauties of Mnasidika 61 LVIII. The Cave of the Nymphs 62

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  were not overstated. Sandy stretched almost two thousand miles as it traveled up the Atlantic coastline. Adding to the depth of the storm was a disastrously timed high tide in a full moon cycle, resulting in tremendous storm surges. Sandy brought parts of the Northeast to a standstill and resulted in extensive flooding in Manhattan and the shorelines of both New York and New Jersey. And sadly, as predicted, Sandy brought many untimely deaths and utter devastation to some of our communities. At one point during the storm, electric service was lost to several million customers in New York alone. The loss of power crippled hospitals, fuel ports, fuel terminals and gas stations, mass transportation, and telecommunications. The impact this had on the region led New York’s Governor Cuomo to issue an executive order creating what is referred to as the Moreland Commission on Utility Storm Preparation and Response that was charged with investigating the emergency preparedness and storm response of utilities within the state, with recommendations for stricter oversight of utilities and to assist in determining how best to restructure the Long Island Power Authority to provide safer transmission and distribution to its customers going forward—in emergencies and fair weather. On November 13, 2012, he appointed a panel of esteemed commissioners to preside over this investigation . . . and on November 20, Governor Cuomo appointed me as the Commission’s executive director. As I write this epilogue, I am a few weeks into the Commission’s vital tasks. My sister Camille is still working to build up her strength from multiple consecutive strokes, and her doctors still have not concluded what caused them on that cloudy September day. It was while Camille’s entire family was huddled around her hospital bed that I suggested we change the topic and try, as a family, to select a title for this story. Considering the main events I’d detailed in the manuscript, we reflected on our countless homes—fragile, temporary sand castles that we were forced to create in the most resourceful ways, only for them to be knocked down by the rising tides and uncontrollable elements around us. Thus, we decided together that my book should be titled Etched in Sand. I am also writing this on December 16, a day which I acknowledge is the anniversary of Cookie’s death—but I much prefer to remember it as Aunt Julia’s birthday. This is the first year since 1999 that I have not called nor visited Julia for her birthday: She passed in April 2012, one day before the passing of my uncle Sonny. That simple, beautiful message that Rosie wrote almost three years ago has closed that gaping hole in my heart that was ripped open on that dark November

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  “Tori-tortue, what doest thou amongst us?--I wind the wool and the thread of Milet.--Alas! Alas! Why dost thou not dance?--I am very sorrowful. I am very sorrowful. “Tori-tortue, what doest thou amongst us?--I cut a reed for a funereal flute.--Alas! Alas! What has befallen him!--I will not tell. I will not tell. “Tori-tortue, what doest thou amongst us?--I press the olives for oil for the stèle.--Alas! Alas! And who, then, is dead?--Canst thou ask? Canst thou ask? “Tori-tortue, what doest thou amongst us?--He has fallen into the sea....--Alas! Alas! And how is that?--From the backs of white horses. From the backs of white horses.” VII THE PASSER-BY As I was seated in the evening before the door of the house, a young man passed by. He looked at me, I turned away my head. He spoke to me but I did not answer. He wished to approach me. I took a sickle from the wall and I would have cut open his cheek if he had advanced another step. Then, drawing back a little, he began to smile and breathed in his hand toward me, saying: “Receive the kiss.” And I cried! And I wept! So much so that my mother hastened to me. Alarmed, believing that I had been stung as though by a scorpion, I wept: “He embraced me.” My mother also embraced me and carried me away in her arms. VIII THE AWAKENING It is already light I should rise. But the drowsiness of morning is sweet and the warmth of my bed enfolds me closer. I long to remain lying so. Soon I will go to the stable. I will give the goats grass and flowers and a flask of fresh water drawn from the well where I will drink with them. Then I will fasten them to the post and milk their soft, warm udders; and if the kids are not jealous, I will suck with them from the supple teats. Amaltheia, has she not fed Dzeus? Therefore I will go. But not yet. The sun has risen too soon and my mother is not yet awake. IX THE RAIN The fine rain has fallen over all things, gently and in silence. It still rains a little. I will go out among the trees. My feet shall be naked, so that I will not soil my shoes. The rain of springtime is delicious. The branches, laden with moist flowers, have a perfume which bewilders me. One sees the sparkle of the sun on the delicate bark. Alas! how many flowers upon the ground! How pitiful, these flowers which have fallen. They should not be gathered and mixed with the mud but saved for the bees. The beetles and the snails traverse the path between the puddles of water; I would not tread upon them nor frighten the golden lizard which stretches out, blinking his eyelids. X THE FLOWERS

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

  It had been three days since his arrest. “Charlie, my name is Bryan. Your grandmother called me and asked me if I would come and see you. I’m a lawyer, and I help people who get in trouble or who are accused of crimes, and I’d like to help you.” The boy wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He was tiny, but he had big, beautiful eyes. He had a close haircut that was common for little boys because it required no maintenance. It made him look even younger than he was. I thought I saw tattoos or symbols on his neck, but when I looked more closely, I realized that they were bruises. “Charlie, are you okay?” He was staring intensely to my left, looking at the wall as if he saw something there. His distant look was so alarming that I actually turned to see if there was something of interest behind me, but it was just a blank wall. The disconnected look, the sadness in his face, and his complete lack of engagement—qualities he shared with a lot of the other teenagers I’d worked with—were the only things that made me believe he was fourteen. I sat and waited for a very long time in the hope that he would give me some kind of response, but the room remained silent. He stared at the wall and then looked down at his own wrists. He wrapped his right hand around his left wrist where the handcuffs had been and rubbed the spot where the metal had pinched him. “Charlie, I want to make sure you’re doing okay, so I just need you to answer a few questions for me, okay?” I knew he could hear me; whenever I spoke, he would lift his head and return his gaze to the spot on the wall. “Charlie, if I were you, I’d be pretty scared and really worried right now, but I’d also want someone to help me. I’d like to help, okay?” I waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. “Charlie, can you speak? Are you okay?” He stared at the wall when I spoke and then back at his wrists when I was finished, but he didn’t say a word. “We don’t have to talk about George. We don’t have to talk about what happened; we can talk about whatever you want. Is there something you want to talk about?” I was waiting for longer and longer stretches after each question, desperately hoping that he would say something, but he didn’t. “Do you want to talk about your mom? She’s going to be fine. I’ve checked, and even though she can’t visit you, she’s going to be fine.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  He reaches behind the door for a folding chair and as he pulls it out the seat falls smoothly into place with a satisfying click. I sit down while Mr. Larson pads down the hall to get me a glass of water. He is accommodating and resourceful but clearly unimpressed, like a plumber in the presence of a medium clog. While he’s gone Linda takes my hair in her hands and winds it softly, lets it drop. She points to the hull of a metal-sided casket. “I like that one,” she says. She wanders over and peers inside, touches the lid. She turns after a moment. “Can you keep doing this or do you need to leave?” I shrug. Better now than later, which could end up being Christmas morning. The casket she’s touching looks like the Titanic , gunmetal gray, waiting to be launched. “What a waste, don’t you think? All those gorgeous trees being chopped down just to get planted all over again,” she said. “Here comes your guy.” He crouches to hand me the cup of water, hands on knees, wrinkled-up brow. It tastes like water from a bathroom sink. “We think we might get her a metal one,” I tell him, rising. “We like the wooden ones but they’re too nice to put in the ground.” I look to Linda and she nods in support. “Plus,” she says, “you know.” She thinks for a second while we wait and then it comes back to her. “They go in a vault,” she finishes. “So who cares.” She looks at him probingly. Her eyes have soft blue pouches underneath and she’s getting a dangerous air about her. “We have to get going anyway,” I tell him. “We have to get back before she wonders where we are.” In her hospital bed, bent like a branch against the pain, she watches the clock, anticipates the arrival of a daughter. Where have you been? Her voice vanished three days ago, leaving eyes and hands for communicating. I’ve been here all alone, no one would stay in the room with me, you’re the only one and you left . This is my shift alone with her. The afternoon pulls itself along. On the rolling lunch tray is a plate of Christmas cookies decorated with glaring Santas and crooked reindeer shapes. One kind has maroon jelly poured into a reservoir in the center and I take a small bite. I have a thing about red jelly but creaky old Velma Edwards made it so I’m willing to give it a shot. Ready, aim, it lands with a crumbling thud in the wastebasket. My mother rolls her gray, diminishing eyes and gives an invisible smirk. Linda has eaten almost all the good ones, left the jelly and green sugar for me. Where did you girls go? She has a clear tube poked up her nose nowadays, connected to an oxygen tank like an astronaut prepared to leave the ship.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The clock is halted, the desert gives up its heat. A finger- size lizard with infrared spots and oval eyes finds itself, one second too late, in the damp cotton of a mouth. Power lines gleam and bounce their signals on the ground, startling the brain waves of small mammals, putting thoughts in their heads. Something swims through the medium of sand and surfaces, pinches hard and holds on. In the endless black of deep space a small comet hurtles along, tossing iceballs and dirt behind it, on a perpetual path, around and around and around, pointless and energetic. Propelled by the force of its combustion, the comet passes within a light year of Sirius, burning out of control. Under the press of gravity and air, inside the earth’s atmosphere, the coyote reads the signals in the ground, whirls, stops, and sprays a bush. He begins loping again, without awareness, the desire widening, a dark basin, until he cries as he runs, low and controlled. They are somewhere. The moon is gone and Eric has fallen asleep beside me. Planets and stars. I know only the ones that everyone knows: the sun, the moon, the dippers, Gemini and Cancer. They move into formation, still and distant as dead relatives, outlining the shape of my mother’s mouth. Nothing moves. Inside my head images emerge and retreat, emerge and retreat. I have to open my eyes. In the vivid blackness overhead a diamond falls through the sky, trailing its image, a split-instant of activity. By the time I realize I’ve seen it, the sky has recovered. I can’t breathe in this emptiness. I turn on my side on the hard picnic table and look at Eric. He is awake, watching me. He knows the desert is making me sad, that I have these moments; he smiles and moves up close. I can feel the sky on my face, the warm flannel of the desert floor below. I can feel the face of the man beside me. In the silence of the monument he begins whispering the names of the constellations while I listen: Cygnus the Swan, Pegasus the Horse, Canis Major the Great Dog, Cassiopeia, Arcturus. I am on planet Earth. They are near. He pulls in the scent with loud snorts, running from bush to rock to bush again. This is a clearing, a high naked spot. On the distant rise, just ahead, waiting, they are still invisible, but the scent rises in the air around him, palpable as mist. He opens his mouth wide and stands frozen, ears back, eyes pressed shut. The dirt beneath his pads is hard and dry, devoid, the moon is gone.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Rae didn’t back down. Men were a new audience, she observed, and men (and a few women too, but nowhere near as many) were mad. Lawrence was their stand-in. But as Rae says, It wasn’t about him. It was about her. In this she echoes the thinking of Esther Perel, the therapist and author of Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, who challenges us to move beyond our paradigm of personal betrayal in thinking about infidelity. Perel wants us to consider that the affair may not be an indictment of the person being cheated upon. Nor a sign that he or she—the person who has been “betrayed”—has failed. Or that the relationship necessarily has big problems. Maybe, but maybe not. Not infrequently, Perel has found, infidelity has nothing to do with him or her or the relationship at all. Hard as it is to imagine that something that causes so much pain, something a partner does that devastates us so thoroughly, might be somewhat unrelated to us, it is sometimes the case. This idea may feel terrifying, because it shows how little control we have over what a spouse or partner does. Even if we’re “perfect” they might step out. People have affairs or extra-pair involvements because they want to. Not necessarily because they don’t love us or don’t want us or because they can’t commit to us or because they are afraid of how much they love us. Not because something is wrong with the relationship. They might do it because they were attracted to someone else and went for it. Rae says it was so for Issa. Lawrence wasn’t being such a great boyfriend. Then he was. It didn’t matter. Eventually Lawrence discovers Issa’s secret, her one-time indiscretion—as is so often the case, her cell phone is her initial betrayer—and leaves her. He quickly finds a gorgeous new girlfriend, and then another, while Issa is utterly miserable. She cries. She loses her focus at work and nearly loses her job. She fantasizes about getting back together with Lawrence. She goes on a series of awful dates. On one of them, she breaks into one of her rhyming reveries, faux cheerfully, desperately denouncing herself, calling herself a liar and a cheat, and advising her date, “Run away!” When Issa finally began to recover and reemerge into the world for a little fun, the Twitterverse had a lot to say. Much of it along the lines of: Issa hasn’t been punished enough yet for stepping out. Thus, anyone “siding with Issa” was a target by proxy. Anyone on #TeamIssa was trash AF; Issa was a toxic person. There were tweets about how anyone on #TeamIssa was a ho. The gender war was ratcheting up. But why, some wondered. As Damon Young wrote on VerySmartBrothas.com, “Lawrence, essentially, is a proxy for all the men…who enjoy seeing women experience some sort of comeuppance. Team Lawrence exists to shame Issa.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I broke down one night and called Helen. “I think I want to marry you,” I remember saying. “Are you sure?” I heard her say over and over on the phone. “Are you sure you want to marry me?” “Yeah,” I said. “I love you baby and I want to marry you.” Next thing I knew she was flying across the country with two screaming kids to meet my family. I met her at the airport. She was wearing red tights and I remember she had cut her hair. I’d really liked her hair long but when I went to the airport her hair was short and the kids looked terrible too. I didn’t know how to tell her about her hair. I remember she wanted to go to church that day to say a few prayers for something or other. I drove her over there but I wouldn’t go in. I sat in the car and turned up the radio. A song was playing called “Bye-Bye Miss American Pie” and I remember listening to it and feeling real sad inside, real low like I wanted to cry or kill someone. She came back into the car and we drove all over the neighborhood. I kept stopping and introducing her to people I knew. “Helen and I are getting married,” I said. I even introduced her to Castiglia, who was visiting his folks that weekend, pushing away from him in the wheelchair after I told him I was going to marry her. By the time we left Massapequa we were fighting about everything all the time and I was getting sick of the whole thing. She was always talking to me about going back to church and meeting married couples and building a strong family for the future. We hadn’t even been able to sleep together much. I’d had to stay on the couch on the porch and she was down in Sue’s room with the kids. My mother and dad never wanted a man and woman that weren’t married sleeping together even if the woman was divorced and had two kids. We tried living together for a while when we got back to California, first at my house and then at hers. I don’t know why I ever did it or why I ever asked her to marry me, but back then it seemed really important to have someone like Helen to hold on to. I even ended up going down to the V.A. hospital in Long Beach and seeing a marriage counselor for paralyzed men. The counselor and I sat out in the sun a lot and fed birds and shouted at each other but it never worked. Every time I came home from the sessions I threw up and finally I couldn’t even sleep near Helen anymore. I knew I had to be alone for a while. I found a small house on Hurricane Street in Santa Monica and moved into it.

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

  The bio-anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was among the first to theorize about female evolutionary response to infanticide in her 1981 book, The Woman That Never Evolved. At that time, female primates were often described as sexually and socially inert individuals that merely responded passively to male social dominance and hierarchy. Drawing from her years of work on langurs in India, Hrdy emphasized that female old-world monkeys are active, evolved agents in pursuit of their own social and sexual interests. Hrdy observed that in evolutionary response to infanticide, many female primates attempt to mate with multiple subdominant males during their estrous periods. Why? Hrdy hypothesized that a female mates multiply to convince other males that they might be the father of her offspring. Consequently, that male may be less likely to kill offspring that could be his. Thus, female monkeys evolved to mate promiscuously as a way of obtaining “insurance policies” against future infanticide should any of these males ascend to social dominance. Like coevolved duck vaginal morphologies, this paternity assurance strategy proposed by Hrdy is a coevolved defensive response to sexual conflict. Primate females do not actually achieve sexual autonomy through multiple mating. Rather, they are making the best of a terrible situation. Females seek out multiple mates not because they prefer them but because females who mate multiply with socially ambitious males may prevent the future murder of their offspring. The primatology literature is filled with detailed descriptions of female strategies to deceive other males into imagining their paternity without threatening the dominant male’s sexual control. But like the defensive vaginal morphology of the ducks, this defensive mating strategy also has a big downside, because it, too, initiates a violent sexual arms race. Dominant males will respond to a female’s promiscuity with ever more aggressive efforts to control her reproductive life. These amped-up coercive strategies include mate guarding, violent physical punishment, and social intimidation. Sexually speaking, the average female old-world monkey is caught between a rock and a hard place. It cannot be that fun to be a female monkey. Things have not improved much among most of our closest relatives within the African apes. Gorillas have similar male-dominated group structure, but usually with one large, dominant male in each multiple-female social group. Because the dominant male physically excludes all (or nearly all) other males from the group, there is little sexual conflict over mating. However, males still use violence to create an atmosphere of social intimidation that enforces their dominance. Thus, gorilla females who are newcomers to a group will receive higher rates of aggression from males, as one primate researcher has put it, as they “strive to develop new relationships with these new females.” Some relationship!