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 Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  I replied, as gently as possible, that such heavy focus on the applause deterred from his presentation and might lead some readers to conclude that he was overinvested in the applause. He wrote back immediately, saying, “Irv, you just won’t understand—you weren’t there: they DID rise and applaud five times.” Even the best of us are sometimes blinded by our wounds and our need for praise. Very recently, I read an autobiographical account of student days at the Medical University of Vienna in the 1960s written by Professor Hans Steiner, a Stanford colleague and friend, who offered another perspective. As a student in Vienna, Hans had had an extremely positive experience with Viktor Frankl: he described him as an excellent teacher, whose creative approach felt like a breath of fresh air in contrast to the rigidity of the other psychiatric faculty in Vienna. Years later Viktor Frankl and I both spoke at a large psychotherapy conference and I attended his lecture on Man’s Search for Meaning . As always, he enthralled the audience and received a thunderous ovation. We met afterward and I got a warm hug from him and his wife, Eleanor. Years later, when writing Existential Psychotherapy , I reviewed his work thoroughly and realized, more than ever, the importance of his innovative and fundamental contributions to our field. More recently, I visited a psychotherapy graduate school institute in Moscow that offered a PhD in logotherapy, and I was captivated by a life-sized photograph of Viktor. While gazing at it, I suddenly became aware of the magnitude of his courage as well as the depth of his pain. I knew from his book how the horrors of his stay in Auschwitz had traumatized him, but in those early encounters with him in Vienna and Stanford I was not ready to empathize fully with him or offer the support I might have given. Later, in my relationship with other leading figures in the field, such as Rollo May, I would not repeat that error.

• From Push (1996)

  I gotta get outta here. I go down to kitchen where house mother is. "Miz Mom!" "Stop screaming!" she say. "What's wrong with you?" "You could get Abdul from nursery, feed him, and keep a eye on him till I get back so I could go to Body Positive meeting?" "Tonight's not your night—" "Pleeezzze I gotta get outta here!" "What happened with your mama?" " 'You cain't blame all what happened to Precious on me. I wanted my man for myself? " I imitate Mama. "I wanted my man for myself! Now ain' that one to go down in the history books. Yeah, Til keep that little oP bad boy! You got a lot of time before six-thirty, why don't you git you some dinner before you run out of here?" "I was gonna take my journal book and write on the bus, 'steadda taking the train." She go in her pocket get out that oP blue change purse, so oP it look like somebody blue grandmother and hand me three dollars. Something tear inside me. I wanna cry but I can't. It's like something inside me keeps ripping but I can't cry. I think how alive I am, every part of me that is cells, proteens, nutrons, hairs, pussy, eyeballs, nervus sistem, brain. I got poems, a son, friends. I want to live so bad. Mama remind me I might not. I got this virus in my body like cloud over sun. Don't know when, don't know how, maybe hold it back a long long time, but one day it's gonna rain. I start to cry but it's 'cuz I'm mad. Miz Mom wipe my face give me two more dollars! "Umm, I should cry more often!" "Ain' you about a mess! Git outta here!" I git my jacket 'n my shades. Everybody in this house go to meetings, in "recovery." What I'm in recovery for? I ain' no crack addict. I git so mad sometimes. Mama jus' pour my life down the drain like it's nothing. I got all this shit to deal wif. "Don't forget your notebook," Miz Mom. Everybody know I write poems. People respect me. I get outside. It's raining. Good. The meeting is good, it's for HIV positive girls 16-21. Ms Rain say people who help you most (sometimes) is ones in the same boat. I started putting my story in the big book at school. I want to get it done before I graduate out to G.E.D. Last week we went to the museum. A whole whale is hanging from the ceiling. Bigger than big! OK, have you ever seen a Volkswagen car that's like a bug? Um huh, you know what I'm talking about. That's how big the heart of a blue whale is. I know it's not possible, but if that heart was in me could I love more? Ms Rain, Rita, Abdul?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  One of the cardinal rules here is that we do not talk about our illness at mealtimes or at any social gathering, so everyone is very polite and small-talky and banal, because of course we are all preoccupied with our bodies and the processes going on within them or else we wouldn’t be here. I don’t know what makes the anthroposophs think this sort of false socializing is not more stressful than expressing real feelings, but I find it terribly wearing. Mercifully, I can usually retreat behind the language barrier. December 19, 1985 Arlesheim I sit lie paint walk dance weep in a Swiss hospital trying to find out what my body wants to do, waiting for doctors to come talk with me. Last night my stomach and liver cried all night. “So this is the way of dying,” I thought, my body feeling almost transparent. In the sunlight now I think someone was dying next door, and I felt the sadness through the walls coupled with my own. When the sun came up I felt a lot better, until I saw the bed stripped down in the hallway, and the next-door buzzer silent at last. The village of Arlesheim is very lovely and picturesque. Frances and I go for long walks in the park holding hands in our coat pockets, giving each other courage, and wondering about the future. I have written no letters, no poems, no journals except these notes, trying to make sense out of it all. I am often in pain and I fear that it will get worse. I need to sharpen every possible weapon against it, but even more so against the fear, or the fear of fear, which is what is so debilitating. And I want to learn how to do that while there is still time for learning in some state before desperation. Desperation. Reckless through despair. There is no more time left to decide upon strange afflictions. December 20, 1985 Arlesheim A men’s choir from the village sang Christmas carols tonight in the hospital stairwells, their voices echoing through the halls, sweet and poignant, and I cried for Christmases I have had that are past. But I simply cannot allow myself to believe that there will never be any more of them, so there surely must be. How different this season is from any holiday season I could possibly have foreseen. Dear goddess! How many more? Frances’ being here makes it complete in an essential way no matter what, and at least we can wander about the village in the afternoons together looking at the shops, or walk the hills enjoying the countryside and the manicured little winter gardens. I stretch to be able to appreciate the loveliness in its own—european—right, before it is gone, too, and I no longer have a chance to explore it for whatever it can mean for me. December 21, 1985 Arlesheim

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  There was dim Miss Rachel, whom I remember mainly in terms of Huntley and Palmer biscuits (the nice almond rocks at the top of the blue-papered tin box, the insipid cracknels at the bottom) which she unlawfully shared with me after my teeth had been brushed. There was Miss Clayton, who, when I slumped in my chair, would poke me in the middle vertebrae and then smilingly throw back her own shoulders to show what she wanted of me: she told me a nephew of hers at my age (four) used to breed caterpillars, but those she collected for me in an open jar with nettles all walked away one morning, and the gardener said they had hanged themselves. There was lovely, black-haired, aquamarine-eyed Miss Norcott, who lost a white kid glove at Nice or Beaulieu, where I vainly looked for it on the shingly beach among the colored pebbles and the glaucous lumps of sea-changed bottle glass. Lovely Miss Norcott was asked to leave at once, one night at Abbazia. She embraced me in the morning twilight of the nursery, pale-mackintoshed and weeping like a Babylonian willow, and that day I remained inconsolable, despite the hot chocolate that the Petersons’ old Nanny had made especially for me and the special bread and butter, on the smooth surface of which my aunt Nata, adroitly capturing my attention, drew a daisy, then a cat, and then the little mermaid whom I had just been reading about with Miss Norcott and crying over, too, so I started to cry again. There was myopic little Miss Hunt, whose short stay with us in Wiesbaden came to an end the day my brother and I—aged four and five, respectively—managed to evade her nervous vigilance by boarding a steamer that took us quite a way down the Rhine before recapture. There was pink-nosed Miss Robinson. There was Miss Clayton again. There was one awful person who read to me Marie Corelli’s The Mighty Atom. There were still others. At a certain point they faded out of my life. French and Russian took over; and what little time remained for the speaking of English was devoted to occasional sessions with two gentlemen, Mr. Burness and Mr. Cummings, neither of whom dwelt with us. They are associated in my mind with winters in St. Petersburg, where we had a house on the Morskaya Street.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: As we have already stated ([2382]Q[8], A[5]) about the gift of understanding, not everyone who understands, has the gift of understanding, but only he that understands through a habit of grace: and so we must take note, with regard to the gift of knowledge, that they alone have the gift of knowledge, who judge aright about matters of faith and action, through the grace bestowed on them, so as never to wander from the straight path of justice. This is the knowledge of holy things, according to Wis. 10:10: “She conducted the just . . . through the right ways . . . and gave him the knowledge of holy things.” Whether the third beatitude, “Blessed are they that mourn,” etc. corresponds to the gift of knowledge?Objection 1: It would seem that the third beatitude, “Blessed are they that mourn,” does not correspond to the gift of knowledge. For, even as evil is the cause of sorrow and grief, so is good the cause of joy. Now knowledge brings good to light rather than evil, since the latter is known through evil: for “the straight line rules both itself and the crooked line” (De Anima i, 5). Therefore the aforesaid beatitude does not suitably correspond to the gift of knowledge. Objection 2: Further, consideration of truth is an act of knowledge. Now there is no sorrow in the consideration of truth; rather is there joy, since it is written (Wis. 8:16): “Her conversation hath no bitterness, nor her company any tediousness, but joy and gladness.” Therefore the aforesaid beatitude does not suitably correspond with the gift of knowledge. Objection 3: Further, the gift of knowledge consists in speculation, before operation. Now, in so far as it consists in speculation, sorrow does not correspond to it, since “the speculative intellect is not concerned about things to be sought or avoided” (De Anima iii, 9). Therefore the aforesaid beatitude is not suitably reckoned to correspond with the gift of knowledge. On the contrary, Augustine says (De Serm. Dom. in Monte iv): “Knowledge befits the mourner, who has discovered that he has been mastered by the evil which he coveted as though it were good.” I answer that, Right judgment about creatures belongs properly to knowledge. Now it is through creatures that man’s aversion from God is occasioned, according to Wis. 14:11: “Creatures . . . are turned to an abomination . . . and a snare to the feet of the unwise,” of those, namely, who do not judge aright about creatures, since they deem the perfect good to consist in them. Hence they sin by placing their last end in them, and lose the true good. It is by forming a right judgment of creatures that man becomes aware of the loss (of which they may be the occasion), which judgment he exercises through the gift of knowledge. Hence the beatitude of sorrow is said to correspond to the gift of knowledge.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  And I had watched her in the Conference Hall ox-solid ​ black electric hair straight as a deer’s rein ​ fire-disc eyes sweeping over the faces like a stretch of frozen tundra we were two ends of one taut rope stretched like a promise from her mouth singing the friendship song her people sang for greeting There are only fourteen thousand of us left it is a very sad thing ​ it is a very sad thing when any people ​ any people ​ dies “Yes, I heard you this morning” I said ​ reaching out from the place where we touched poured her vodka ​ an offering which she accepted like roses leaning across our white Russian interpreters to kiss me softly upon my lips. Then she got up and left with the Latvian delegate from Riga. There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women What do we want from each other after we have told our stories do we want to be healed ​ do we want mossy quiet stealing over our scars do we want the powerful unfrightening sister who will make the pain go away mother’s voice ​ in the hallway you’ve done it right the first time ​ darling you will never need to do it again. Thunder grumbles on the horizon I buy time with another story a pale blister of air cadences of dead flesh obscure the vowels. from The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993) To My Sister Pat Parker, Poet and Comrade-in-Arms In Memoriam and to my blood sisters Mavis Jones Marjorie Jones Phyllis Blackwell Helen Lorde Making Love to Concrete An upright abutment in the mouth of the Willis Avenue bridge a beige Honda leaps the divider like a steel gazelle ​ inescapable sleek leather boots on the pavement rat-a-tat-tat ​ best intentions going down for the third time stuck ​ in the particular You cannot make love to concrete if you care about being non-essential ​ wrong or worn ​ thin if you fear ever becoming diamonds or lard you cannot make love to concrete if you cannot pretend concrete needs your loving To make love to concrete you need an indelible feather white dresses before you are ten a confirmation lace veil ​ milk-large bones and air raid drills in your nightmares no stars till you go to the country and one summer when you are twelve Con Edison pulls the plug on the street-corner moons ​ Walpurgisnacht and there are sudden new lights in the sky stone chips that forget ​ you need to become a light rope ​ a hammer a repeatable bridge garden-fresh broccoli ​ two dozen dropped eggs and a hint of you Thaw The language of past seasons collapses ​ pumpkins in spring false labor slides like mud off the face of ease and whatever I turn my hand to pales in the sun.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Well too did He say, not eternal life, but treasure, saying, And thou shalt have treasure in heaven; for since the question was concerning wealth, and the renouncing of all things, He shews that He returns more things than He has bidden us leave, in proportion as heaven is greater than earth. THEOPHYLACT. But because there are many poor who are not humble, but are drunkards or have some other vice, for this reason He says, And come, follow me. BEDE. (ubi sup) For he follows the Lord, who imitates Him, and walks in His footsteps. It goes on: And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) And the Evangelist adds the cause of his grief, saying, For he had great possessions. The feelings of those who have little and those who have much are not the same, for the increase of acquired wealth lights up a greater flame of covetousness. There follows: And Jesus looked round about, and said unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God. THEOPHYLACT. He says not here, that riches are bad, but that those are bad who only have them to watch them carefully; for He teaches us not to have them, that is, not to keep or preserve them, but to use them in necessary things. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) But the Lord said this to His disciples, who were poor and possessed nothing, in order to teach them not to blush at their poverty, and as it were to make an excuse to them, and give them a reason, why He had not allowed them to possess any thing. It goes on: And the disciples were astonished at his words; for it is plain, since they themselves were poor, that they were anxious for the salvation of others. BEDE. But there is a great difference between having riches, and loving them; wherefore also Solomon says not, He that hath silver, but, He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied, with silver. (Eccl. 5:10) Therefore the Lord unfolds the words of His former saying to His astonished disciples, as follows: But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard it is for them that trust in their riches to enter the kingdom of God. Where we must observe that He says not, how impossible, but how hard; for what is impossible cannot in any way come to pass, what is difficult can be compassed, though with labour. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Or else, after saying difficult, He then shews that it is impossible, and that not simply, but with a certain vehemence; and he shews this by an example, saying, It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  One hundred and fifty years ago, when the state of Victoria was declared a reality for european settlers, there were still 15,000 Black Aboriginal people living on this land that is now called Victoria. Where we sit now today, Wurundjeri women once dreamed and laughed and sang. They nurtured this earth, gum tree and wattle, and they were nurtured by it. I do not see their daughters sitting here among you today. Where are these women? Their mothers’ blood cries out to me. Their daughters come to my dreams nightly in the Windsor Hotel across the street from your Parliament. And their voices are haunting and brave and sad. Do you hear them? Listen very carefully, with your hearts open. They are speaking. Out of their mouths come what you have said you most want to hear. Their history is my history. While white immigrant settlers in Australia were feeding Wurundjeri women and children bread made from arsenic and flour, white immigrant settlers in North America were selling seven-year-old African girls for $35 a head. And these same white immigrant settlers were giving blankets lethal with smallpox germs to the indigenous peoples of North America, the American Indians. Each of you has come here today to touch some piece of your own power, for a purpose. I urge you to approach that work with a particular focus and urgency, for a terrible amount of Wurundjeri women’s blood has already been shed in order for you to sit and write here. I do not say these things to instigate an orgy of guilt, but rather to encourage an examination of what the excavation and use of the true language of difference can mean within your living. You and I can talk about the language of difference, but that will always remain essentially a safe discussion, because this is not my place. I will move on. But it is the language of the Black Aboriginal women of this country that you must learn to hear and to feel. And as your writing and your lives intersect within that language, you will come to decide what mistress your art must serve. October 24, 1985 East Lansing, Michigan Tomorrow is the second anniversary of the invasion of Grenada. The smallest nation in the western hemisphere occupied by the largest. I spoke about it to a group of Black women here tonight. It’s depressing to see how few of us remember, how few of us still seem to care. The conference on “The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora” being held here is problematic in some ways, particularly in the unclear position of Ellen Kuzwayo, who had come all the way from South Africa to give the keynote address and arrived here to find the schedule shifted. But it was so good to see Ellen again. I’m sorry to hear her sister in Botswana has had another mastectomy.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " Would to God," said he, " that they were as favour- able to me as I am disposed to speak so of them. To show you that I have endeavoured to do honour to the virtuous of their sex by the pains I have taken to learn their good actions, I will relate one of those to you- I will not say, ladies, that the patience of the gentleman of Pampelune and of the president of Grenoble was not great, but I maintain that their vindictiveness was no less so. In praising a virtuous man, we must not so much exalt a single virtue as to make it serve as a cloak and cover for so great a vice. A woman who has done a virtuous action for the love of virtue itself is truly laudable. An instance of this I will give you in the story I am about to tell you of a young married lady, whose good deed had for motive only the honour of God and the salvation of her husband." Fourth day\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE 331 NOVEL XXXVII. Judicious proceedings of a wife to withdraw her husband from a low intrigue with which he was infatuated. A CERTAIN lady of the house of Loue was so good and virtuous that she was loved and esteemed by all her neighbours. Her husband with good reason con- fided to her all his affairs, which she managed so discreet- ly that in a short while their house became under her hands one of the richest and best furnished in Anjou and Touraine. She lived long with her husband, and had several fine children by him ; but as there is no en- during felicity here below, hers began to be crossed. Her husband, not feeling satisfied with a life of such perfect ease, had a mind to try if trouble would increase his enjoyment. His wife was no sooner asleep than he used to get up from beside her, and not return till day- light. The lady took this conduct so much to heart that falling into a profound melancholy, which yet she tried to conceal, she neglected the affairs of her house, her person, and her family, thinking she had lost the fruit of her labours in losing her husband's love, to preserve which there was no pains she would not willingly have sustained. But as she saw he was lost to her, she be- came so negligent of everything else that the conse- quences were soon seen in the mischief that ensued. On the one hand, the husband spent without order or measure ; on the other hand, the wife no longer attend- ing to the affairs of the house, they soon became so in- volved that the timber began to be felled, and the lands to be mortgaged. One of her relations, who knew her secret grief, remonstrated with her on the fault she com- 332 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE iNoi'd j/.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  After the company had heard mass and dined, they sent 10 see if it were possible to pass the Gave river, and were in consternation at hearing that the thing was impracticable, at which the abbot entreated them many times to remain with him until the waters had abated. This they agreed to for that day, and in the evening, when they were about to go to bed, there arrived an old monk who used to come regularly every September to our Lady of Serrance. Being asked news of his journey, he stated that, in consequence of the flood, he had come by the mountains, and travelled over the worst roads he had ever seen in his life. He had beheld a very sad spectacle. A gentleman named Simontault, tired of waiting till the river should subside, had resolved to attempt the pas- sage, relying on the goodness of his horse. He had made his domestics place themselves round him to break the force of the current ; but when they reached the middle of the stream, the worst mounted were swept away and were seen no more. Thereupon the gentleman made again for the bank he had quitted. His horse, good as it was, failed him at his need ; but by God's will this happened so near the bank that the gentleman was able at last to scramble on all fours to the land, not without having drunk a good deal of water, and so exhausted that he could hardly sustain himself. Happily for him, a shepherd, leading back his sheep to the fields in the evening, found him seated on the stones, dripping wet, and deploring the loss of his people, who had perished before his eyes. The shepherd, who understood his need both from his appearance and his words, took him by the hand and led him to his cabin, where he made a little fire, and dried him as well as he could. That same evening, Providence conducted to the cabin the old monk, who told him the way to Our Lady of Serrance, and assured him that he would be better lodged 6 PROLOGUE there than elsewhere, and that he would find there an aged widow named Oisille, who had met with an adventure as dis- tressing as his own.

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

  We, will especially examine whether the counsel given by Christ to the young man (Matt. 19:21): “If you would be perfect, go, sell all that you have, and give to the poor” was addressed to that youth only, or to all men. We can best consider this passage by referring to its context, where Peter says: “See, we have left all things and have followed You.” And our Lord promises the reward to all men saying, “Everyone who has left house or brethren etc. for my name’s sake... shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting.” Thus we see that this counsel is no less to be followed by all men than if it had been given to each individually. Hence St. Jerome, writing to the presbyter Paulinus, says: “You have heard our Saviour’s words: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and come, follow me.’ Put these words then into practice. Strip yourself of all, and thus, following the Cross of poverty, you will more speedily and more easily ascend Jacob’s ladder.” And, although our Lord addressed the counsel of poverty individually to the rich young man, He nevertheless gave the same advice to all mankind (Mt 16:24): “If anyone will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” St. Chrysostom, commenting on this text, says, “He addresses this teaching to the whole world, saying, ‘If anyone’—be it man or woman, king, free man, or serf.” Now self-denial, according to St. Basil, means complete forgetfulness of past things and the abnegation of our own will. In it, therefore, is included the disposal of the property which we possess of our own will. Therefore the counsel given to the young man is to be understood as given to all.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  My mother had roasted two chickens and cut them up into dainty bite-size pieces. She packed slices of brown bread and butter and green pepper and carrot sticks. There were little violently yellow iced cakes with scalloped edges called “marigolds,” that came from Cushman’s Bakery. There was a spice bun and rock-cakes from Newton’s, the West Indian bakery across Lenox Avenue from St. Mark’s School, and iced tea in a wrapped mayonnaise jar. There were sweet pickles for us and dill pickles for my father, and peaches with the fuzz still on them, individually wrapped to keep them from bruising. And, for neatness, there were piles of napkins and a little tin box with a washcloth dampened with rosewater and glycerine for wiping sticky mouths. I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother reminded me for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those same hands had been just before. My mother never mentioned that Black people were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947. As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she ignored. Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention. I learned later that Phyllis’s high school senior class trip had been to Washington, but the nuns had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis “would not be happy,” meaning, Daddy explained to her, also in private, that they did not rent rooms to Negroes. “We will take among-you to Washington, ourselves,” my father had avowed, “and not just for an overnight in some measly fleabag hotel.” American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in america and the fact of american racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a very strange injunction coming from my mother, who looked so much like one of those people we were never supposed to trust. But something always warned me not to ask my mother why she wasn’t white, and why Auntie Lillah and Auntie Etta weren’t, even though they were all that same problematic color so different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in-between.

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

  “All right,” she said eagerly, “I’ll tell all I know: it’s not much,” she added bitterly; “I’m not twenty yet; but you’d have taken me for more, now wouldn’t you?” “No,” I replied, “you look about eighteen: in a few minutes we were climbing the stairs of a tenement house. The girl’s room was poorly furnished and narrow, a hall bedroom just the width of the corridor, perhaps six feet by eight. As soon as she had taken off her thick cloak and hat, she hastened out of the room saying she’d be back in a minute. In the silence, I thought I heard her running up the stairs; a baby somewhere near cried; and then silence again, till she opened the door, drew my head to her and kissed me: “I like you,” she said, “though you’re funny.” “Why funny?” I asked. “It’s a scream,” she said, “to give five dollars to a girl and never touch her: but I’m glad for I was tired tonight and anxious.” “Why anxious?” I queried, “and why did you go out if you were tired?” “Got to,” she replied through tightly closed lips. “You don’t mind if I leave you again for a moment?” she added and before I could answer she was out of the room again. When she returned in five minutes I had grown impatient and put on my overcoat and hat. “Goin?” she asked in surprise: “Yes”, I replied, “I don’t like this empty cage while you go off to someone else.” “Someone else” she repeated and then as if desperate: “it’s my baby if you must know: a friend takes care of her when I’m out or working.” “Oh, you poor thing,” I cried, “fancy you with a baby at this life!” “I wanted a baby”, she cried defiantly. “I wouldn’t be without her for anything! I always wanted a baby: there’s lots of girls like that.” “Really?” I cried astounded. “Do you know her father?” I went on. “Of course I do,” she retorted. “He’s working in the stock yards; but he’s tough and won’t keep sober.” “I suppose you’d marry him if he would go straight?” I asked. “Any girl would marry a decent feller!” she replied. “You’re pretty,” I said. “D’ye think so?” she asked eagerly pushing her hair back from the sides of her head. “I used to be but now—this life—” and she shrugged her shoulders expressively. “You don’t like it?” I asked. “No,” she cried; “though when you get a nice feller, it’s not so bad; but they’re scarce,” she went on bitterly, “and generally when they’re nice, they’ve no bucks. The nice fellers are all poor or old,” she added reflectively.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Less than a year ago there was in Cremona a gen- tleman named Messire Jean Pierre, who had long loved a lady in his neighbourhood ; but for all he could do he had never been able to obtain from her the response he longed for, though she loved him with all her heart. The poor gentleman was so distressed at this that he secluded himself at hoine, resolving to abandon a vain pursuit in which he was wasting his life. Thinking to detach himself from his cruel fair one, he remained some days without seeing her, and fell into such a pro- found melancholy that no one would have known him, so altered were his looks. His relations sent for physi- cians, who, seeing his face yellow, thought it was an obstruction of the liver, and bled him. The lady who had been so coy, knowing very well that his illness was nothmg but grief that she had not responded to his love, sent a trusty old woman with orders to tell hiin that, as she could no longer doubt that his love was genuine and sincere, she had made up her mind to grant him what she had so long refused ; and to that end she had con- trived means to leave home and go to a place where he might see her without impediment. The gentleman, who had been let blood that morn- ing from the arm, finding himself more relieved by this embassy than by all the remedies of his physicians, sent her word that he would not fail to meet her at the ap- 42 2 THE HEPTAMEKON OF THE \_Noz^d ^q.

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

  In the space of just a few months, this cheerful, chatty, always available young mother whom Paula and Joan had known and counted on was transformed into a strained, quiet, driven, desperately tired stranger who came home only to scream at her daughters and the babysitter for not cleaning up the mess in the house or to sit, silent and resentful, eating the TV dinners that had replaced home-cooked meals. Every night she stumbled directly to her bedroom after ordering her daughters to bed without the stories and cuddling they had always shared together. Paula’s mother is one of an army of women for whom divorce brings economic nightmares. The statistics are well documented. 2 Divorced mothers as a group earn a lot less than divorced fathers do, and child support does not make up the difference. Studies show that women and children who were in the upper economic group prior to divorce suffer the most precipitous decline in income. In 1991, 40 percent of all divorced women with children were living below the poverty level. The situation was even more desperate for those women with children below the age of six, like Paula’s mother. Over half of these mostly younger women with young children were living below the poverty level. Divorced women are not only poor after divorce but remain poor for many years. 3 This is because, despite improved collection of child support, the average amount that they receive, when it is paid, is much less than the cost of raising a child. Moreover, when the women seek employment, many, like Paula’s mother, are handicapped in the marketplace. They lack the requisite skills to begin with or they have spent the years prior to the divorce taking care of children and working part-time or working full-time as homemakers. After the divorce they are faced with the double burden of acquiring a new education or updating their former skills and simultaneously supporting their children and themselves. Many take night jobs, shift jobs, temp jobs, or real estate jobs that keep them away from home all weekend. They are physically exhausted and emotionally depleted as they run in place, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland —the faster she runs, the more she stays in one place. Their valiant efforts to feed, clothe, and house their children tragically diminishes their availability as parents. As Paula told me, “I have no memory of her sitting down and reading to me or playing or just hanging out. It still makes me mad and sad to think about this.” Of course, in the flesh-and-blood world of a child living in a postdivorce family, economic issues are not separate from psychological is-sues—a fact that is rarely talked about.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Homophobia and heterosexism mean you allow yourselves to be robbed of the sisterhood and strength of Black Lesbian women because you are afraid of being called a Lesbian yourself. Yet we share so many concerns as Black women, so much work to be done. The urgency of the destruction of our Black children and the theft of young Black minds are joint urgencies. Black children shot down or doped up on the streets of our cities are priorities for all of us. The fact of Black women’s blood flowing with grim regularity in the streets and living rooms of Black communities is not a Black Lesbian rumor. It is sad statistical truth. The fact that there is widening and dangerous lack of communication around our differences between Black women and men is not a Black Lesbian plot. It is a reality that is starkly clarified as we see our young people becoming more and more uncaring of each other. Young Black boys believing that they can define their manhood between a sixth-grade girl’s legs, growing up believing that Black women and girls are the fitting target for their justifiable furies rather than the racist structures grinding us all into dust, these are not Black Lesbian myths. These are sad realities of Black communities today and of immediate concern to us all. We cannot afford to waste each other’s energies in our common battles. What does homophobia mean? It means that high-powered Black women are told it is not safe to attend a Conference on the Status of Women in Nairobi simply because we are Lesbians. It means that in a political action, you rob yourselves of the vital insight and energies of political women such as Betty Powell and Barbara Smith and Gwendolyn Rogers and Raymina Mays and Robin Christian and Yvonne Flowers. It means another instance of the divide-and-conquer routine. How do we organize around our differences, neither denying them nor blowing them up out of proportion? The first step is an effort of will on your part. Try to remember to keep certain facts in mind. Black Lesbians are not apolitical. We have been a part of every freedom struggle within this country. Black Lesbians are not a threat to the Black family. Many of us have families of our own. We are not white, and we are not a disease. We are women who love women. This does not mean we are going to assault your daughters in an alley on Nostrand Avenue. It does not mean we are about to attack you if we pay you a compliment on your dress. It does not mean we only think about sex, any more than you only think about sex.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I can only distinguish One thread within running hours You . . . flowing through selves Toward you. Spring III Spring is the harshest Blurring the lines of choice Until summer flesh Swallows up all decision. I remember after the harvest was over When the thick sheaves were gone And the bones of the gaunt trees Uncovered How the dying of autumn was too easy To solve our loving. To a Girl Who Knew What Side Her Bread Was Buttered On He, through the eyes of the first marauder Saw her, catch of bright thunder, heaping Tea and bread for her guardian dead Crunching the nut-dry words they said And (thinking the bones were sleeping) He broke through the muffled afternoon Calling an end to their ritual’s tune With lightning-like disorder: Leave the bones, Love! Come away From these summer breads with the flavour of hay— Your guards can watch the shards of our catch Warming our bones on some winter’s day! Like an ocean of straws the old bones rose Fearing the lightning’s second death. There was little time to wonder At the silence of bright thunder As, with a smile of pity and stealth She buttered fresh scones for her guardian bones And they trampled him into the earth. Father Son and Holy Ghost I have not ever seen my fathers grave. Not that his judgment eyes have been forgotten Nor his great hands print On our evening doorknobs One half turn each night and he would come Misty from the worlds business Massive and silent as the whole day’s wish, ready To re-define each of our shapes— But that now the evening doorknobs Wait, and do not recognize us as we pass. Each week a different woman Regular as his one quick glass each evening— Pulls up the grass his stillness grows Calling it weed. Each week A different woman has my mother’s face And he, who time has Changeless Must be amazed, who knew and loved but one. My father died in silence, loving creation And well-defined response. He lived still judgments on familiar things And died, knowing a January fifteenth that year me. Lest I go into dust I have not ever seen my father’s grave. Generation How the young attempt and are broken Differs from age to age We were brown free girls Love singing beneath their skin Sun in their hair in their eyes Sun their fortune The taste of their young boys’ manhood Swelling like birds in their mouths. In a careless season of power We wept out our terrible promise Now these are the children we try For temptations that wear our face And who came back from the latched cities of falsehood Warning—the road to Nowhere is slippery with our blood Warning—You need not drink the river to get home For we purchased bridges with our mothers’ bloody gold We are more than kin who come to share Not blood, but the bloodiness of failure.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It was actually quite sad. Dr. Lorenz had just told her that her breast cancer has spread to her bones, and she doesn’t know what she is going to do. She has to make plans for her elderly mother for whom she now cares at home but will no longer be able to. There is no one she knows to whom she can turn for help because her sister died last year. I felt very sorry for her. Here it is, almost New Year’s Eve, and there isn’t even anyone she can talk to about her worries except two strange americans in a tea shop. Then she went on to explain that she and her sister had had to live with foreign workers (she meant Italians) in the factory where they worked during World War II, and that the foreigners were very dirty, with lice and fleas, so she and her sister would sprinkle DDT in their hair and their beds every night so as not to catch diseases! And she is sure that is why the cancer has spread to her bones now. There was something so grotesque about this sad lonely old woman dying of bone cancer still holding on to her ethnic prejudices, even when she was realizing that they were going to cost her her life. The image of her as a young healthy aryan bigot was at war inside me with the pathetic old woman at our table, and I had to get out of there immediately. December 31, 1985 Arlesheim Old Year’s Day, the last day of this troubled year. And yes, all the stories we tell are about healing in some form or the other. In this place that makes such a point of togetherness and community, Frances and I sat through an ornate New Year’s Eve dinner tonight surrounded by empty chairs on each side of us, an island unto ourselves in the festive hall. It’s good that we have each other, but why should I have to suffer through this ostracism and pay for it as well? I guess because the point is not that I enjoy it but that I gain from it, and that’s up to me. As Gloria said on the phone, “Take what you can use and let the rest GO!” They don’t have to love me, just help me. My Maori jade tiki is gone forever, either lost or stolen from my room. How much more do I have to lose before it is enough?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  When she was young, and open to any fever Wearing gold like a veil of fortune on her face, She waited through each rain a dream of light. But the sun came up Burning our eyes like crystal Bleaching the sky of promise and My sister stood Black, unblessed and unbelieving Shivering in the first cold show of love. I saw her gold become an arch Where nightmare hunted Down the porches Of her restless nights. Now through the echoes of denial She walks a bleached side of reason Secret now My sister never waits, Nor mourns the gold that wandered from her bed. My sister has my tongue And all my flesh unanswered And I presume her trustless as a stone. Now that I Am Forever with Child How the days went While you were blooming within me I remember each upon each— The swelling changed planes of my body— And how you first fluttered, then jumped And I thought it was my heart. How the days wound down And the turning of winter I recall, with you growing heavy Against the wind. I thought Now her hands Are formed, and her hair Has started to curl Now her teeth are done Now she sneezes. Then the seed opened. I bore you one morning just before spring— My head rang like a fiery piston My legs were towers between which A new world was passing. From then I can only distinguish One thread within running hours You . . . flowing through selves Toward you. Spring III Spring is the harshest Blurring the lines of choice Until summer flesh Swallows up all decision. I remember after the harvest was over When the thick sheaves were gone And the bones of the gaunt trees Uncovered How the dying of autumn was too easy To solve our loving. To a Girl Who Knew What Side Her Bread Was Buttered On He, through the eyes of the first marauder Saw her, catch of bright thunder, heaping Tea and bread for her guardian dead Crunching the nut-dry words they said And (thinking the bones were sleeping) He broke through the muffled afternoon Calling an end to their ritual’s tune With lightning-like disorder: Leave the bones, Love! Come away From these summer breads with the flavour of hay— Your guards can watch the shards of our catch Warming our bones on some winter’s day! Like an ocean of straws the old bones rose Fearing the lightning’s second death.

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

  In the intact family, even among troubled intact families, a successful father is eager for his child to follow in his footsteps. Both parents are proud when their son or daughter attends their alma mater and many are pleased when their children join the same fraternities or sororities or live in the same dormitories. Other parents expect to attend alumnae events, both to enjoy with their children and to nostalgically recall their youth. As these passionate connections are revived, both generations feel part of a historic chain. But in divorced families, the line of succession between father and child is somehow weakened. The connection is strangely blunted by the marital rupture, by remaining anger between the couple, and by the many years of partial separation and the possible presence of a new wife and new children. An in-house parent is very different psychologically from a parent who lives far away. The child you see daily evokes different feelings of love and allegiance than the child you see at scheduled intervals, no matter how frequent they are. Despite their blood relationship some divorced fathers do not see their children as their moral or social heirs. They acknowledge their legal responsibility to help take care of the children, but this obligation ends at age eighteen. Although many fathers stay in close touch with their children and visit regularly, they nevertheless fail to contribute to their children’s college support. What is it with these dads? For clues, we can look to our study. Contrary to what many believe, the amount of past or present acrimony between parents was irrelevant to a father’s willingness to help pay for college. I was very surprised to discover that the fathers who insisted on court-ordered visiting and held the children to a rigid schedule despite the youngsters’ protests contributed partially or not at all to college expenses. When I asked these fathers about their failure to support their children at this juncture, none pleaded poverty or even temporary financial reverses. A few cited their greater obligations to their new family. Some felt a greater obligation to send their stepchildren to college over their biological children. None denied the value of a college education. Most said that they had paid child support over many years in accord with court orders and that they were finished with their legal obligations. “I did all that was required” was the recurrent theme.