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 Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  (Courtesy of The Predicament) CHAPTER 12They Hand Out RosesYou get right down to it, it’s a lousy deal. For years, the Borschels, along with these countless other families whose kids never did get the first-place payoffs that people like Jay and Dan and Kyle and Mitch and Joey got repeatedly, have arranged whole chunks of their years around the questions of when the boys would wrestle and where. And all of this traveling, all of these tournaments and this incremental improvement and advance—it all ultimately has brought the Borschels right back to Marion, to the Linn-Mar team of which Jay now is almost finished being a member. To heartbreak, basically. For Carol, there was never going to be a way to make it easy at the end. She can be in denial with the best of them when it suits her purpose, and prior to this exact moment Carol has done a magnificent job of ignoring the reality that is creeping in around her where it concerns Jay. She is running out of chances to watch her oldest child do the thing he is the best at in the world. A night like this, kids like Matt McDonough can scarcely process—it’s so far away for them, beyond the scope of relevance. But Carol could tell you that it gets here faster than you think. A couple of days ago Jay was the freshman, making his first Linn-Mar varsity team, finding a niche at the lightest weight on the list. Now Jay is the senior who has grown beyond all measure, the one coming into the hallway to greet his mother and walk with her and Jim into the Linn-Mar gymnasium to shake Doug Streicher’s hand and listen to the words spilling out of Kevin McCauley as the assistant coach rattles off Jay’s astonishing athletic accomplishments—and the other things, too. He mentors an elementary-school student once a week. He maintains a 3.4 grade-point average. He’s a founding member of the Tailgating Club, which is basically an excuse to goof around in the parking lot before football games. He can eat a full meal and still make weight. Some things defy the odds. The Linn-Mar gym is a big, bright place, with huge bleachers that come way out without actually even getting close to the basketball court or the wrestling mats. Of course, for the wrestling team no such deep bleachers are needed; Jay is used to that and long ago stopped thinking about it. He has chosen a sport that, at Linn-Mar, has almost nothing to do with fans or attractive girls or mass appeal—that even living in Iowa, one can be a raging success at and largely anonymous at the same time. Of course, that was before Jay became the guy going for a four-timer while ditching his home state to go wrestle in the East. Now the people around here see him coming, for better and for worse.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  by people on foot, who, coming from Oleron, wish to pass the Gave. The abbot, very well pleased at their incurring an expense which would increase the number of pilgrims, fur- nished them with workmen ; but he was so miserly that he would not contribute a farthing of his own. The workmen, however, having declared that it would take at least ten or twelve days to construct the bridge, the company began to grow tired. Parlamente, the wife of Hircan, always active and never melancholy, having asked her husband's permis- sion to speak, said to old dame Oisille, " I am surprised, madam, that you, who have so much experience that you fill the place of a mother to the rest of us women, do not devise some amusement to mitigate the annoyance we shall suffer from so long a delay ; for unless we have something agree- able and virtuous to occupy us, we are in danger of falling sick." "What is still worse," said Longarine, the young widow, " we shall grow cross, which is an incurable malady ; the more so as there is not one of us but has cause to be extremely sad, considering our several losses." " Everyone has not lost her husband like you," said Enna- suite, laughing. " To have lost servants is not a matter to break one's heart, since they can easily be replaced. How- ever, I am decidedly of opinion that we should pass the time away as agreeably as we can." Nomerfide, her companion, said it was a very good idea, and that if she passed one day without amusement, she should be dead the next. The gentlemen all warmly approved of the proposal, and begged dame Oisille to direct what was to be done. " You ask a thing of me, my children," replied the old lady, " which I find very difficult. You want me to invent an amusement which shall dissipate your ennui. I have been in search of such a remedy all my life long, and I have never found but one, which is the reading of Holy Writ. It is in §uch reading that the mind finds its true and perfect joy 8 PROLOGUE

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He hugged her, then put his hands behind his back, leaning on one of hisleg, placing his other foot on tiptoe, and watched her walk away, with the same brooding and introverted gaze that his tawny eyes shaded with bluish had at the corpse of his grandmother, at the death of his father, at the dissolution of the large households and many a less external experience of a similar kind... In his view, the old Ida's farewell logically followed the other processes of crumbling, ending, closing, decomposition that he had witnessed. Such things no longer alienated him; oddly enough, it had never alienated him. Sometimes, when he raised his head with its curly light brown hair and lips that were always a little twisted and the fine wings of his nose opened sensitively, it was Whenever Mrs. Permaneder called on her sister-in-law, she pulled her nephew to her to tell him about the past and to tell of that future which Buddenbrooks, next to the grace of God, should have him, little Johann, to thank for. The more unpleasant the present presented itself, the less she could get enough of describing how elegant life was in the houses of her parents and grandparents and how Hanno's great-grandfather drove across the country in fours... One day she suffered a severe attack of stomach cramps as a result of the fact that Friederike, Henriette and Pfiffi Buddenbrook had unanimously claimed that Hagenstroms were the cream of society... There was sad news about Christian. The marriage did not seem to have affected his health in a favorable way. Uncanny delusions and obsessions had recurred in him to a greater extent, and at the instigation of his wife and a doctor he had now gone to an institution. He didn't like being there, wrote lamenting letters to his family and expressed a keen wish to get out of this institution, in which he was very much treatedstrictseemed to be freed again. But they held him tight, and that was probably best for him. In any case, it enabled his wife to continue her former independent life without regard or hindrance, without prejudice to the practical and ideal advantages she owed the marriage. Second chapter The clockwork snapped and rattled dutifully and cruelly. It was a hoarse and cracked sound, a rattle more than a ring, for she was veteran and worn; but it took a long time, hopelessly long, for she was thoroughly teased. Hanno Buddenbrook was deeply shocked.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-JEROME. He warms himself at the fire in the hall, with the servants. The hall of the High-Priest is the enclosure of the world, the servants are the devils, with whom whosoever remains cannot weep for his sins; the fire is the desire of the flesh. BEDE. (ubi sup.) For charity is the fire of which it is said, I am come to send fire on the earth, (Luke 12:49) which flame coming down on the believers, taught them to speak with various tongues the praise of the Lord. There is also a fire of covetousness, of which it is said, They are all adulterers as an oven; (Hosea 7:4) this fire, raised up in the hall of Caiaphas by the suggestion of an evil spirit, was arming the tongues of the traitors to deny and blaspheme the Lord. For the fire lit up in the hall amidst the cold of the night was a figure of what the wicked assembly was doing within; for because of the abounding of iniquity the love of many waxes cold. Peter, who for a time was benumbed by this cold, wished as it were to be warmed by the coals of the servants of Caiaphas, because He sought in the society of traitors the consolation of worldly comfort. It goes on, And the Chief Priests and all the council sought for witness against Jesus to put him to death. (Matt. 24:12) THEOPHYLACT. Though the law commanded that there should be but one High Priest, there were then many put into the office, and stripped of it, year by year, by the Roman emperor. He therefore calls chief priests those who had finished the time allotted to them, and had been stripped of their priesthood. But their actions are a sign of their judgment, which they earned on as they had prejudged, for they sought for a witness, that they might seem to condemn and destroy Jesus with justice. PSEUDO-JEROME. But iniquity lied as the queen did against Joseph, and the priests against Susannah, but a flame goes out, if it has no fuel; wherefore it goes on, And found none. For many bare false witness against him, but their witness agreed not together. For whatever is not consistent is held to be doubtful. There follows, And there arose certain, and bare false witness against him, saying, We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands. It is usual with heretics out of the truth to extract the shadow; He did not say what they said, but something like it, of the temple of His body, which He raised again after two days. THEOPHYLACT. For the Lord had not said, I will destroy, but, Destroy, nor did He say, made with hands, but, this temple.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " Sorrows, afflictions, long maladies," replied No- merfide. " Those who have to sustain such extreme pangs of body or of mind that they come to despise death and complain of its too tardy approach are in the out- skirts of death, and they will tell you how the inns are named in which they have sighed more than reposed. The lady in question could not help losing her husband by death ; but her brother's anger saved her from the pain of seeing him for a long time an invalid or ill- tempered, and she could deem herself happy in convert- mg to the service of God the satisfaction and joy she had with her husband." " Do you count for nothing the shame she underwent and the tedium of her prison ? " said Longarine. "lam persuaded," replied Nomerfide, "that when one loves well, and with a love founded on God's com- mand, one makes no account of shame, except so far as it lessens love ; for the glory of loving well knows no shame. As for her prison, as her heart was wholly devoted to God and her husband, I imagine she hardly felt the loss of her liberty ; for where one cannot see what one loves, the greatest blessing one can have is to think of it incessantly. A prison is never narrow when the imagination can range in it as it will." " Nothing can be truer than what Nomerfide alleges," said Simontault; "but the madman who effected this separation ought to have deemed himself a very wretch, offending as he did God, love, and honour." " I am astonished," said Geburon, " thai there is so Fourth day:\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 34^ much diversity in the nature of women's love ; and I see plainly that those who have the most love have the most virtue, but those who have the least love are the virtuous in false seeming." " It is true," said Parlamente, " that a heart that is virtuous towards God and man loves with more passion than a vicious heart, because the former is not afraid that the real nature of its sentiments should be apparent.'' " I have always understood," said Simontault, " that men are not blameable for paying court to women ; for God has put into the heart of man love and the boldness to sue, and into that of woman fear and the chastity to refuse. If a man has been punished for having used the power implanted in him, he has been treated with injustice."

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  But from a distance Mitko didn’t seem to feel anything at all; these were only my own thoughts, I knew, they brought me no nearer him, this man I had in some sense loved and who had never in the years I had known him been anything but alien to me. He set off again, shaking the cup of yogurt he had never lowered from his ear, and I watched him until he turned out of sight, headed toward the boulevard and the bus that would carry him away. I stood there for some time, gazing at the corner from which he had vanished. Then I stepped inside, and sitting where he had been just a moment before beside me, I lowered my face into my hands. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An earlier version of the first section of this novel was published as a novella in 2011. Thank you to Keith Tuma, Dana Leonard, and everyone at Miami University Press. Special thanks to David Schloss. * * * Anna Stein created a place in the world for this book by the sheer force of her belief in it. Thank you also to Alex Hoyt, Sally Riley, and Nishta Hurry. I’m grateful to Mitzi Angel for her heroic editing, and to everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for being so welcoming of this novel and its author. Thank you especially to Will Wolfslau for his invaluable help. * * * It has been a privilege to spend the last two years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Thank you to Connie Brothers, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, and Kelly Smith. I’m grateful to Lan Samantha Chang for her generous and brilliant teaching, and to the members of her Fall 2013 novel workshop, especially Micah Stack, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and D. Wystan Owen. Work on this book was supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship and a Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship; many thanks to the University of Iowa and the Guthrie family for their generosity. * * * For advice and encouragement, thank you to Elizabeth Frank, Kyle Minor, Peter Cameron, Elizabeth Kostova, Honor Moore, Paul Whitlatch, Margot Livesey, Robert Boyers, and Stephen McCauley. For the inspiration of their teaching and example, thank you to Frank Bidart, Kevin Brockmeier, Carolyn Forché, Carl Phillips, Jorie Graham, and James Longenbach. For pointing me toward a title, thank you to Meredith Kaffel. For checking my Bulgarian, thank you to Maria Manahova and Boian Popunkiov. * * * For reading first and final drafts, thank you to Mary Rakow, Ilya Kaminsky, and Ricardo Moutinho Ferreira. * * * It is impossible to imagine my life without Alan Pierson and Max Freeman, my chosen family. Finally, thank you to Luis Muñoz, por una canción largamente esperada . A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko , which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BEDE. (ubi sup.) As being God, dwelling in the body, He shews the frailty of flesh, that the blasphemy of those who deny the mystery of His Incarnation might find no place; for having taken up a body, He must needs also take up all that belongs to the body, hunger, thirst, pain, grief; for the Godhead cannot suffer the changes of these affections. THEOPHYLACT. But some have understood this, as if He had said, I am sorrowful, not because I am to die, but because the Jews, my countrymen, are about to crucify me, and by these means to be shut out from the kingdom of God. PSEUDO-JEROME. By this also we are taught to fear and to be sorrowful before the judgment of death, for not by ourselves, but by Him only, can we say, The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me. (John 14:30) There follows: Tarry ye here, and watch. BEDE. He does not mean natural sleep by the sleep which He forbids, for the time of approaching danger did not allow of it, but the sleep of unfaithfulness, and the torpor of the mind. But going forward a little, He falls on His face, and shews his lowliness of mind, by the posture of His body. Wherefore there follows: And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. iii. iv) He said not, if He could do it, but if it could be done; for whatever He wills is possible. We must therefore understand, if it be possible, as if it were; if He is willing. And lest any one should suppose that He lessened His Father’s power, he shews in what sense the words are to be understood; for there follows, And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee. By which He sufficiently shews, that the words, if it be possible, must be understood not of any impossibility, but of the will of His Father. As to what Mark relates, that he said not only Father, but Abba, Father, Abba is the Hebrew for Father. And perhaps the Lord said both words, on account of some Sacrament contained in them; wishing to shew that He had taken upon Himself that 1sorrow in the person of His body, the Church, to which He was made the chief corner stone, and which came to Him, partly from the Hebrews, who are represented by the word Abba, partly from the Gentiles, to whom Father belongs.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  HILARY. (de Trin. x. 10.) I suppose that there are some who offer here no other cause of His fear than His passion and death. I ask those who think thus, whether it stands with reason that He should have feared to die, who banished from the Apostles all fear of death, and exhorted them to the glory of martyrdom? How can we suppose Him to have felt pain and grief in the sacrament of death, who rewards with life those who die for Him? And what pangs of death could He fear, who came to death of the free choice of His own power? And if His Passion was to do Him honour, how could the fear of His Passion make Him sorrowful? HILARY. (in loc.) Since then we read that the Lord was sorrowful, let us discover the causes of His agony. He had forewarned them all that they would be offended, and Peter that he would thrice deny his Lord; and taking him and James and John, He began to be sorrowful. Therefore He was not sorrowful till He took them, but all His fear began after He had taken them; so that His agony was not for Himself, but for them whom He had taken. JEROME. The Lord therefore sorrowed not from fear of suffering, for for this cause He had come that He should suffer, and had rebuked Peter for his fearfulness; (Matt. 14:31.) but for the wretched Judas, for the offence of the rest of the Apostles, for the rejection and reprobation of the Jewish nation, and the overthrow of unhappy Jerusalem. DAMASCENE. (Fid. Orth. iii. 23.) Or otherwise; All things which have not yet been brought into existence by their Maker have a natural desire of existence, and naturally shun non-existence. God the Word then, having been made Man, had this desire, through which He desired food, drink, and sleep, by which life is supported, and naturally used them, and contrariwise shunned the things that are destructive of life. Hence in the season of His Passion which He endured voluntarily, He had the natural fear and sorrow for death. For there is a natural fear wherewith the soul shrinks from separation from the body, by reason of that close sympathy implanted from the first by the Maker of all things. JEROME. Our Lord therefore sorrowed to prove the reality of the Man which He had taken upon Him; but that passion might bear no sway in His mind, He began to be sorrowful by pro-passion;s for it is one thing to be sorrowful, and another to be very sorrowful. REMIGIUS. By this place are overthrown the Manichæans, who said that He took an unreal body; and those also who said that He had not a real soul, but His Divinity in place of a soul1

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  There were dogs of all types and a range of sizes, though it was clear a certain bulk was necessary for survival, and most were muscular and medium-sized, with bullish features and square jaws, solid dogs with a brutal elegance that appealed to me, as did their short coats, mottled and tawny, so that as they slept they looked like fawns curled in the unmown grasses. Not all of the dogs were hostile, some were friendly enough, emerging to trot beside me for a few steps, swinging their low tails. Normally I would have felt sympathy for them, especially for the gentlest of them, a beautiful dog that trotted beside me longer than the others and that bore an extraordinary scar along his right side. The skin had been ripped open and had unevenly healed; it was puckered and hairless and raw, as if something had half melted the flesh along the whole length of him. It was a terrible scar, from an injury he was lucky to have survived, and yet he was the least savage of the dogs, the most eager for my attention; at one point he even nudged against my hand with his nose, the hand in which I held the news of my father. It was cruel not to acknowledge him but I didn’t acknowledge him, and I had the sense that he stuck with me as long as he dared before he reached some invisible border and turned back. I didn’t turn back, I walked farther, to the very edge of habitation, where the blokove gave out finally at the rim of a steep hill. Down the embankment there were grasses and scattered trees and beyond the trees a huge clearing extending for kilometers; and on the other side of the clearing there was another district of concrete towers, so that it was like a bay, the half ring of blokove braced against the grasses like waters. Where I stood the pavement was broken, marking an uncertain border, a not quite wild place; and then suddenly without deciding to I was making my way down the steep bank. It was difficult to climb down, especially in the shoes I had been wearing in the classroom, black dress shoes of the sort my father had taught me to take care of when I was a child, polishing them until they shone. They were a sign of who I was, he said, and I was never careful enough, I would forget I was wearing them and run with them on, they would get dirty or scuffed and he would say I had no sense of the worth of things, or worse that I had no pride, the pride it was incumbent upon me as his son to have. It was difficult to stay upright as the ground beneath me shifted, and soon my shoes were caked with mud from gouging the side of the hill.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Whether they wear it anywhere else in their lives, upon entering this place they don a mask of toughness that will enable them to get through a day of competition that, while it doesn’t always deliver something horrifying or graphic, holds out at least the promise of such dark wonders with astonishing regularity. And the mothers—the parents, that is—understand about wrestling. There isn’t a mother of a wrestler who is going to confuse a weekend tournament with summer camp at Boys State. The parents know the score. But they were also raised with wrestling if they’re from Iowa, or at least raised with the recognition that wrestling matters and will be accepted, glory and gore alike. When I told Jeff Nelson, the father of Linn-Mar wrestler Jason Nelson, that I was headed off to the Little Lynx tourney at North-Linn, he smiled and nodded knowingly. “Talk to me when you get back,” he said. “I’ll be interested to hear how you think it went.” As it happens, Jeff knows exactly how it will go. Years of working the junior programs (at Linn-Mar, it’s the Little Lions Club) have honed his understanding of the parent-fan to a fine edge. Nelson has seen the best and the worst of it; his view is that it gets grimier as you go down the age brackets to the wee ones. “They’re just new to the whole thing,” Jeff says, “and they can’t figure out how to handle it. You’ll see all sorts of things at the tournaments that you almost never see as the kids get older—parents fighting and all that. Wait till you see ours.” The Little Lion tournament, he means, referring to a massive wrestler hoedown the day before Valentine’s Day. On this day at North-Linn, things are proceeding routinely, which is to say the place is all but on fire. Parents, who technically can be classified as “coaches” and thus allowed match access in these kinds of nonteam settings, pack themselves down around the four mats. They crowd into corners and the spaces by the far walls of the gym in order to close a few more feet of distance between themselves and the wrestlers on the mat at whom they are screeching their ever-changing sets of instructions. “I never actually hear any of that when I’m wrestling,” Dan says, but of course he has trained himself to filter out most of the noise and words during a match. At the younger ages, the kids hear everything. They just can’t help it. At the north end of the gym, on the farthest mat, two wrestlers are finishing a match that had started even, but now is beginning to spiral out of control. One youngster has established his dominance and is asserting it. The other kid is…well, he’s 5 years old, is what he is. He wrestles the way you’d expect a 5-year-old to wrestle, awkwardly and with nine parts effort to one part technique.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Having despatched his business with the king, he joined the army, but looked so melancholy and so changed that the ladies and the captains with whom he was intimate could hardly believe he was the same man. He wore only black clothes, and those of a much coarser kind than was requisite for the mourning he wore osten- sibly for his wife, whose death served as a convenient pretext for his sadness. Amadour lived in this way for three or four years without returning to court. The Countess of Aranda, hearing that her daughter was piteously changed, wanted her to come back to her, but Florida would not ; for when she learned that Amadour had acquainted her mother with their mutual friendship, and that her mother, though so discreet and virtuous, had so much confidence in Amadour that she approved of it, she was in marvellous perplexity. On the one hand, she considered that if she told her mother the truth it might occasion mischief to Amadour, which she would not have done for her life, believing that she was quite able to punish his insolence without any help from her relations. On the other hand, she foresaw that, if she concealed his misconduct, her mother and her friends would oblige her to speak with him and show him a fair countenance, and thereby, as she feared, en- courage his evil intentions. However, as he was far away, she said nothing of what was past, and wrote to him when the countess desired her to do so ; but it was plain, from the tone of her letters, that they were written not from her spontaneous impulses, but in obedience to her mother, so that Amadour felt pain in reading them instead of the transports of joy with which he had for- merly received them. First day. \ QUEEIV OF NAVARRE. 95

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We sat, as before, in the little library, Charles’s den, the only part of the house which did not come under Graham’s orderly care. Each time I visited it there were signs of new disturbances, books moved from table to floor, old Kalamazoo folders stacked or scattered, as if some task of sorting and searching were being executed, leaving only greater confusion, like a site turned over for coins and amulets by amateurs. Books whose titles had caught my eye last time atop their teetering plinths were now cast down or overlaid by other strata: atlases with cracked spines, popular sheet-music (the ‘Valse’ from Love-Fifteen), magazines whose colour printing had freaked with sun and age and, Gauguin-like, showed brown royalty, pink dogs, pale blue grass. I felt at home there. As we sat on either side of the empty hearth, I was reminded of my Oxford tutorials, and the sense I often used to have of inadequacy and carelessness in the face of my tutor, whose hours with me, he came to imply, were needless distractions from his own, decades-long work on succession and the law. There was a similar maleness and candour to it, that scholarly inversion of the rules of the drawing-room that allowed one to talk about sodomy and priapism as though one were really talking about something else. There was a similar toleration of silence. ‘Most tiresome,’ Charles enigmatically resumed. ‘One lives in the past fully enough as it is, without people coming back like that.’ ‘Your grocer’s boy. Yes, I confess to having been a bit disappointed.’ ‘He couldn’t see that he only had meaning in the past, poor fellow.’ ‘I think Martyrs were perhaps a bit much for him.’ Charles smiled wistfully. ‘I thought they’d scare him off, but he rather took to them.’ ‘I can see that he must have been pretty hot stuff once,’ I conceded. ‘And the shop-boy thing is so glamorous, all the whistling and the boredom, and the way they’re trapped there, on show.’ ‘He used to go out on a bicycle,’ Charles corrected my over-warm reconstruction. ‘He did the deliveries with an apron on.’ I lifted the fluted shallow teacup to my lips, and my eyes rose again, as they inevitably did in this room, to the chalk drawing above the fireplace. Taking a risk on it, I said, ‘Is that Taha in that picture?’ Charles was looking at it too, and repeated the name, but stressing it differently. ‘Yes, yes, that’s him,’ he said, with a sad breeziness. ‘He’s very beautiful,’ I said honestly. ‘Yes. It’s not an especially good likeness. Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa—you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance … He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Now Ben is going, too, and during his emotional speech to his parents—“It was worth it, huh?”—it is all Mike can do to keep it together. But he does, and for a reason: With the kids’ speeches concluded, the soon-to-be-former wrestling parent stands up from the bleachers and walks to the floor. “I think it’s time for us to start a new tradition here,” Mike says, and with that he calls all the eighth-grade wrestlers out of the stands, the guys who are going to go out for the varsity and JV teams next season. One by one, Mike has each boy walk through the line of outgoing seniors, shake their hands, and promise to try to maintain the increasingly strong presence that North-Linn wrestling has become. It is a presence that helps to define the school, the area. They wrestle around here, and it makes North-Linn good. The young boys move slowly down the glossed hardwood floor of the basketball court, looking people like Ben and Dan in the eye, saying out loud, “I’ll do my best.” The parents, the coaches, the existing teammates look on mostly in silence, and then begin a slow and sustained applause, even though they know the truth: Only time and the turns of events will determine whether Mike’s idea becomes one of the rites of winter. Cake is served in the foyer, and leftover pizza from the banquet in Des Moines the night before, and pictures are taken in groups and little breakout sessions; and slowly, one by one, the wrestlers and their families drift out into the Sunday afternoon and away from the season. They shake hands and hug, and promise to see each other soon, which of course they will. It’s a small enough place, this part of the world, and you’ll see everybody again eventually. You could probably hang out for a day or so at Hocken’s gas station, at least until they change the name, and wind up seeing half the people from the entire school district. They will see each other again. But it won’t be the same. Shannon is going on, now. Dan will take his medals and the example he set for the other North-Linn wrestlers and he will go on into his shimmering future, until maybe, someday, if the pieces all fall together, he will find his way back to Coggon, back home, that is, to the farm. It isn’t the most farfetched thought in the world. Maybe someday Dan will return to take over the LeClere land, although Doug and Mary have more realistic hopes that either Michael or the young one, Chris, will ultimately want to work the property. But maybe Dan will find his way back all the same.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  There are bad people, he said, speaking in the abstract as he always did when making his threats, gesturing to that gallery of faces or masks any of which he might choose to put on, though for now he let them hang. There are bad people who might say what you are, he said, they might not keep your secrets, they might make trouble, he said, and as he spoke a deeper sadness came over me, not at the betrayal this implied but at how futile it was, that it was the only threat he could make, or that he thought it was a threat at all. It was a threat in a different world, in his world perhaps but not in mine. But Mitko, I said, speaking gently, not in fear but in pity, I am an open person, I don’t have these secrets, everyone knows what I am, and I used his formula though it made me uneasy, tova koeto sum . Everyone, he said, incredulous, at the College too, your colleagues, your students? Of course, I said as if it could never be otherwise, from the first day I’ve told them, everyone knows, and as he looked down, shrugging his shoulders again, I felt a strange disappointment, as if I regretted my own safety, as if I missed the threat that lay now out of his reach. Mite , I said, using again my favorite name for him, his nighest name or the nighest to me, I’m sorry, it’s time for you to go, and as I spoke the words I found that I was sorry, knowing that I would truly be rid of him now. Yes, he said, agreeing, trugvam si , but he didn’t get up to go; he remained perched on the edge of the couch, his hands on the cup of yogurt he had emptied. I got up and took my wallet from my coat, which was hanging beside the door. The bus to Varna would be thirty leva, or had been not long before, so I took out twice that, and then a little more, and folded the notes until they were a tight coil in my palm. Here, I said, holding this out to him, this will get you to Varna, and there’s money for food. He looked at the money I held out but didn’t move to take it, as if his unfocused gaze didn’t quite recognize what it saw. Here, I said again, you should go to Varna, you should be with your mother. He nodded at this, he wiped his hands on his jeans and then took the money from me and stood up. He was visibly better now, he wasn’t quite steady but he didn’t stumble. Mersi , he said, nothing more, as he slid the money into his pocket.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Walking along with Jay, she is every bit the proud parent. “I don’t think it’ll really hit her until after all of this is over and Jay starts getting ready to move,” Jim says, and it’s a compliment. Carol knows plenty about landing on one’s feet. She joined her husband right out of school at his residence-hall management jobs on college campuses in Illinois and Arizona and made those places work, and she was with Jim when the two of them decided they wanted to raise their family back home and simply bolted for Marion. She went on faith. She is the product of a huge music- and art-loving family, growing up with virtually no interest in sports; she converted herself into a rabid wrestling fan to accommodate the reality of her own family. And she will land on her feet through this emotional turbulence, because she does it every day, loses Jay a little bit more every day. And even though the thought of Jay actually leaving town is crushing, it is also indisputably true, she tells herself, that he is going to something and not just from something. Jay is heading straight into his future. The Borschels, no strangers to road trips themselves, can appreciate the quality of that adventure. Carol accepts her rose and smiles as the gathered crowd—you would call it a decent crowd, not a huge one—brings forth its applause. A few in the crowd stand up in recognition of the wrestlers and parents who may be leaving the Linn-Mar program forever. Carol says, to no one in particular, “Next December is going to roll around, and where am I going to go? I’ve been coming in here for four years.” “You could always cheer on the other kids,” someone answers feebly. It’s ludicrous, naturally. Going there would only remind the Borschels that Jay is gone, and wrestling doesn’t really work that way. Still, there are these kids to root for, kids like Matt McDonough, so good and so young, whose improvement from the beginning of the season until now you could see with your own eyes. (One night later, Jay will say of Matt, “He could place this year” at the State Tournament, a huge possibility considering that McDonough was barely on the rankings radar when the season began.) Matt is still way small and he got pummeled by the Iowa City kid, Nate Moore, just last weekend; but things can change, things can change. So there is Matt, and there is Jason Nelson, Jeff’s son, another kids-club alumnus who could bring glory to Linn-Mar. And there is the athletic and quick Wes Shetterly, who with a little more strength could be tough to beat; and maybe Bryan Telgenhoff, the sophomore who has suffered through such an exquisitely crappy year, not always working hard enough or smart enough, knowing the moves but not always being able to execute them.

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

  “I tell them that, I know. They’re just desperate, like I was desperate before y’all helped me. Marsha, Ashley, Monica, Patricia are sweatin’ me to have you send someone to help.” — We met Marsha Colbey shortly after that and began working on her appeal. We decided to challenge the State’s case and the way the jury had been selected. Charlotte Morrison, a Rhodes Scholar and former student of mine, was now a senior attorney at EJI. She and staff attorney Kristen Nelson, a Harvard Law grad who had worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, the nation’s premier public defender office, met with Marsha repeatedly. She would talk about her case, the challenge of keeping her family together while she was in prison, and a range of other problems. But it was the sexual violence at Tutwiler that most frequently came up during these visits. Charlotte and I took on the case of another woman who had filed a federal civil suit after she was raped at Tutwiler. She had had no legal help; because of defects in her pleadings and the allegations she made in her complaint, we could secure only a small settlement judgment for her. But the details of her experience were so painful that we could no longer look past the violence. We started an investigation for which we interviewed over fifty women; we were truly shocked to see how widespread the problem of sexual violence had become. Several women had been raped and become pregnant. Even when DNA testing confirmed that male officers were the fathers of these children, very little was done about it. Some officers who had received multiple sexual assault complaints were temporarily reassigned to other duties or other prisons, only to wind up back at Tutwiler, where they continued to prey on women. We eventually filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice and released several public reports about the problem, which received widespread media coverage. Tutwiler made a list of the ten worst prisons in America compiled by Mother Jones; it was the only women’s facility to be so dishonored. Legislative hearings and policy changes at the prison followed. Male guards are now banned from the shower areas and toilets, and a new warden has taken over the facility.

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

  He kept grinning. “Did you bring me a chocolate milkshake? I want a chocolate milkshake.” The trip, the Confederate truck, the harassment from the guard, and now a request for a milkshake—this was becoming a bizarre day. I didn’t hide my impatience. “No, Mr. Jenkins, I didn’t bring you a chocolate milkshake. I’m an attorney. I’m here to help you with your case and try to get you a new trial. Okay? That’s why I’m here. Now I need to ask you some questions and try to understand what’s going on.” I saw the grin fade quickly from the man’s face. I started asking questions and he gave single-word answers, sometimes just grunting out a yes or no. I realized that he was still thinking about his milkshake. My time with the officer had made me forget how impaired this man might be. I stopped the interview and leaned forward. “Mr. Jenkins, I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize you wanted me to bring you a chocolate milkshake. If I had known that, I would absolutely have tried. I promise that the next time I come, if they let me bring you in a chocolate milkshake, I’ll definitely do it. Okay?” With that, his smile returned, and his mood brightened. His prison records revealed that he often experienced psychotic episodes in which he would scream for hours. He was generally kind and gentle in our meeting, but he was clearly ill. I couldn’t understand why his trial records made no reference to mental illness, but after the George Daniel case, nothing surprised me. When I returned to my office, we began a deeper investigation into Mr. Jenkins’s background. What we found was heartbreaking. His father had been murdered before he was born, and his mother had died of a drug overdose when he was a year old. He’d been in foster care since he was two years old. His time in foster care had been horrific; he’d been in nineteen different foster homes before he turned eight. He began showing signs of intellectual disability at an early age. He had cognitive impairments that suggested some organic brain damage and behavioral problems that suggested schizophrenia and other serious mental illness.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I’m not a liar, Mitko said, standing still now, don’t call me a liar, I’ve never lied to you. I thought I could see him gathering his forces, trying to put on that face I had seen in Varna so many months before; but it was as though he couldn’t quite manage it, as though it were beyond him now, and with a sadness I couldn’t explain I watched it fade before it had formed. Come on, he said, are be , give me the money and I’ll go, I won’t bother you anymore. But I shook my head. I won’t, I said, speaking gently now, I’m through. I touched his shoulder, not sure what I wanted it to mean, and then I turned my back to him and went inside, where I shuddered almost violently at the sudden warmth. I must have been sleeping deeply, one night that spring, I must have been in a state beneath dreams or any kind of thought, when suddenly I bolted awake. Just for an instant, I felt what I had felt a few weeks before, when in the dead of night there was a violent jolt and shuddering, a movement that violated not just my sense of physical law but some deeper certainty I had taken for granted. I was pinned to my bed by an animal fear as the world shifted with a sound I had never heard before, a deep grinding thunder and the sound of alarms, all the cars of my neighborhood shrieking their warnings, a bewildering cacophony of patterns and tones. It was the strongest earthquake to strike Bulgaria in a century, the papers would say the next morning, though really it had only been of a middling strength. In Sofia the blokove had swayed but none had fallen, and there wasn’t much damage beyond broken windows and cracked facades; even in the villages only the oldest structures collapsed. There was one death, the articles said, an old woman whose heart stopped at the shock of it. It was the first earthquake I had ever experienced, and the first time I had known that absolute disorientation and helplessness, the first time I had felt in that incontrovertible way the minuteness of my will, so that underlying my fear, or coming just an instant after it, was total abandon, a feeling that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, a kind of weightlessness. It was the noise that made me feel that fear again, just for a moment, and then I was on my feet as I realized the sound that had woken me wasn’t a calamity, but someone pressing again and again the whirring chime of my door, while at the same time striking the door itself, not knocking but pounding, quickly and heavily. I knew who it was, of course, though he had stayed away for many weeks. I had promised R.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  But my father’s past had always been opaque to me, he spoke of it so seldom and it seemed so complex, a tangle of half brothers and cousins, too many to track. And he didn’t speak to most of them; Bad blood, he would say whenever their names came up, cutting off any conversation. Do you know how young she was, my sister said, when our father was born she was still just a kid, only fourteen, can you imagine? When our father started school they rode the bus together, she for her final year and he for his first. There were other children too, three sons, and a daughter who died, none of them by the same father. She was a scandal, my sister said, can you imagine what it must have been like for her in that place? I couldn’t reconcile what G. said with the small woman I had known, always at a remove, who seemed so proper and content when we visited her once a year or so in the house she shared with a man I thought of as my grandfather, though I guess I knew he wasn’t, or not by blood, since my father only ever called him by his first name. My sister was right, she must have been a scandal in that town, and to her parents something worse than a scandal. They were the ones who took care of my father, especially his grandmother, who alone among his relations was spared his future scorn. He always called her Ma, the single syllable, and even now I have no other name for the woman I remember seeing only once, slight to the point of disappearance, with her beautiful white hair spread about her on the sheets in whatever hospital or facility she had been taken to to die in. I don’t remember what time of year it was, or how far we had traveled, or why I was alone with my father, who lifted me up to set me gingerly on the bed next to that woman who was impossibly old, older than anyone I had ever seen, and whose image, though so much else is lost, remains vivid to me as day. My father sat on the other side and fed her like a child, spooning food from a dish; he murmured words of encouragement or recrimination when she rejected the food, sealing her lips against it or spitting it back into the bowl.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He shrugged a little, still stirring the mixture of yogurt and milk, pointlessly now; maybe the motion was like his chant, a rhythm he had fallen into, something he did for the feel of it. There are bad people, he said, speaking in the abstract as he always did when making his threats, gesturing to that gallery of faces or masks any of which he might choose to put on, though for now he let them hang. There are bad people who might say what you are, he said, they might not keep your secrets, they might make trouble, he said, and as he spoke a deeper sadness came over me, not at the betrayal this implied but at how futile it was, that it was the only threat he could make, or that he thought it was a threat at all. It was a threat in a different world, in his world perhaps but not in mine. But Mitko, I said, speaking gently, not in fear but in pity, I am an open person, I don’t have these secrets, everyone knows what I am, and I used his formula though it made me uneasy, tova koeto sum . Everyone, he said, incredulous, at the College too, your colleagues, your students? Of course, I said as if it could never be otherwise, from the first day I’ve told them, everyone knows, and as he looked down, shrugging his shoulders again, I felt a strange disappointment, as if I regretted my own safety, as if I missed the threat that lay now out of his reach. Mite , I said, using again my favorite name for him, his nighest name or the nighest to me, I’m sorry, it’s time for you to go, and as I spoke the words I found that I was sorry, knowing that I would truly be rid of him now. Yes, he said, agreeing, trugvam si , but he didn’t get up to go; he remained perched on the edge of the couch, his hands on the cup of yogurt he had emptied. I got up and took my wallet from my coat, which was hanging beside the door. The bus to Varna would be thirty leva, or had been not long before, so I took out twice that, and then a little more, and folded the notes until they were a tight coil in my palm. Here, I said, holding this out to him, this will get you to Varna, and there’s money for food. He looked at the money I held out but didn’t move to take it, as if his unfocused gaze didn’t quite recognize what it saw. Here, I said again, you should go to Varna, you should be with your mother. He nodded at this, he wiped his hands on his jeans and then took the money from me and stood up. He was visibly better now, he wasn’t quite steady but he didn’t stumble.