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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  When we finished, we exchanged our notebooks and read each other’s work before moving on to the next theme. Muriel had written: The Year 1955 Audi Me got a new job started therapy sent out some poems NOTHING! is going back to school I stared at the notebook page in silence, feeling like cold water had been thrown at me. I reached over and took her hand. It lay cool and still beneath my fingers, without movement. I did not know what to say to Muriel. The idea that anyone could measure herself against me and find that self wanting was truly shocking. The fact that it was my beloved Muriel who was doing it was nothing less than terrifying. I thought of our life as a mutual exploration, a progress through the strength of our loving. But as I read and re-read the stark outline in her notebook, I realized that Muriel saw that joint becoming in terms of achievements of mine which somehow defined her inabilities. They were not mutual triumphs, the notebook said in inescapable terms, and there was nothing either I or our loving could do to shield her from the implications of that truth, as she saw it. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 29 I walked down those three little steps into the Bagatelle on a weekend night in 1956. There was an inner door, guarded by a male bouncer, ostensibly to keep out the straight male intruders come to gawk at the “lezzies,” but in reality to keep out those women deemed “undesirable.” All too frequently, undesirable meant Black. Women stood three-deep around the bar and between the tables, and in the doorway to the postage-stamp-sized dance floor. By 9:00 P.M., the floor was packed solid with women’s bodies moving slowly to the jukebox beat of Ruth Brown’s When your friends have left you all alone and you have no one to call your own or Frank Sinatra’s Set ’em up, Joe I got a little story… When I moved through the bunches of women cruising each other in the front room, or doing a slow fish on the dance floor in the back, with the smells of cigarette smoke and the music and the hair pomade whirling together like incense through charged air, it was hard for me to believe that my being an outsider had anything to do with being a lesbian. But when I, a Black woman, saw no reflection in any of the faces there week after week, I knew perfectly well that being an outsider in the Bagatelle had everything to do with being Black.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 10. --Of the Life of Mortals, Which is Rather to Be Called Death Than Life. For no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, than we begin to move ceaselessly towards death. [590]For in the whole course of this life (if life we must call it) its mutability tends towards death. Certainly there is no one who is not nearer it this year than last year, and to-morrow than to-day, and to-day than yesterday, and a short while hence than now, and now than a short while ago. For whatever time we live is deducted from our whole term of life, and that which remains is daily becoming less and less; so that our whole life is nothing but a race towards death, in which no one is allowed to stand still for a little space, or to go somewhat more slowly, but all are driven forwards with an impartial movement, and with equal rapidity. For he whose life is short spends a day no more swiftly than he whose life is longer. But while the equal moments are impartially snatched from both, the one has a nearer and the other a more remote goal to reach with this their equal speed. It is one thing to make a longer journey, and another to walk more slowly. He, therefore, who spends longer time on his way to death does not proceed at a more leisurely pace, but goes over more ground. Further, if every man begins to die, that is, is in death, as soon as death has begun to show itself in him (by taking away life, to wit; for when life is all taken away, the man will be then not in death, but after death), then he begins to die so soon as he begins to live. For what else is going on in all his days, hours, and moments, until this slow-working death is fully consummated? And then comes the time after death, instead of that in which life was being withdrawn, and which we called being in death. Man, then, is never in life from the moment he dwells in this dying rather than living body,--if, at least, he cannot be in life and death at once. Or rather, shall we say, he is in both? --in life, namely, which he lives till all is consumed; but in death also, which he dies as his life is consumed? For if he is not in life, what is it which is consumed till all be gone? And if he is not in death, what is this consumption itself? For when the whole of life has been consumed, the expression "after death" would be meaningless, had that consumption not been death. And if, when it has all been consumed, a man is not in death but after death, when is he in death unless when life is being consumed away?

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Marcela held three fingers together and circled and swizzled over her clit hood, while Lanasha’s finger darted and dithered in her ass. As she began to come, her cunt muscles tried to close around Bono’s motionless blood-pulsing truncheon. “Now!” she said. Bono pulled out almost to the helmet and slide-slammed back into her slippery salope, then out, then back in, and once more, and then five hard short strokes. “UHLLLLLLLL!” he said, followed by lots of snuffling. She felt a cold spray of sweat droplets on her back, and, inside, she again felt the long warm twitch of liberated jizm. “Oh, that’s it, fill me up with all that goodness.” She lay panting on the massage table. Lanasha rubbed the backs of her legs with a cool washcloth. Shandee Wears the Sponge Gloves Shandee left Dave’s arm to sleep late in the hotel room. She met Zilka for melon and a croissant at the terrace restaurant overlooking the Garden of the Wholesome Delightful Fuckers. Zilka was wearing a striped shirt with the collar up. Her hair was amazing. Shandee wanted to know more about how she had lost her clit, but she didn’t want to ask her about it right away, so instead she asked how Zilka spent her days. Zilka said she helped Lila, and after work she went out to the Trou or hung out at the Darkrooms. “The Darkrooms are good because you can just talk to a guy,” Zilka said. “Before I lost my clit I would have been dancing or sleeping with somebody—not now.” “So—how did it happen?” Shandee asked. “When I was a stripper, I headlined at the Wiggle Room in San Antonio for almost a year, and I flew all over the Midwest. I was going through security, and this awful woman with bad hair stole my clit from me.” “That’s terrible,” said Shandee. “Yeah, it kind of is.” Zilka was sad and silent for a moment, and then she pointed. “You see that cable over there? That’s a ride called Fuck the Lake. Over there’s the midway, where you can do Spank the Pretty Ass, or Hold the Young Hung Hard-on. The Masturboats are over on the river. They’re moored right now.” “Zilka, can you tell me how it happened?” said Shandee. “Oh, I was at the airport in St. Louis, and they told me my flight was out of a certain gate in Terminal O.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  He squeezed her very hard to him and breathed in her hair and shuddered out everything he had into her. “I give you everything,” he said. Later in the shower, Henriette remembered this and got on her knees and said, “Oh, Ruzty, oh, Ruzty,” and came. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Dune Tells Mindy How He Lost His Penis [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Mindy, the documentary filmmaker, was standing in her room at the House of Holes Hotel, working on a jigsaw puzzle of marbles in a bowl and listening to “32 Flavors” by Ani DiFranco. There was a knock on her door. She opened it and saw a long-haired, dark-eyed man standing in the hallway, wearing a fringed suede jacket. He was wildly handsome, and he smelled like old cigarettes. “Hey, I’m Dune,” he said. “They took away my penis, and I wonder if you can help me.” “If I can I will,” said Mindy. “What happened?” “Well, they did a switcheroo on me,” Dune said. “I’ve got a vagina now, and it’s a hot one, but every day of my life I want my own tackle back. You’re Mindy, am I correct?” “I am,” said Mindy. “Would you mind if I set up a video camera and got your story? I’m making a film about this place.” “That’s what I heard.” Mindy kicked the tripod mounts out and got her camera running. “Should I sit here?” Dune sat down heavily. “Hoo, I’m wiped.” “Would you like something to eat? I could make you an omelet.” “I’d love an omelet,” said Dune. “I’ve been flying a pornsucker around Providence, Rhode Island and I ache all over, and frankly I need the attention of a good woman.” Mindy cooked him a three-egg omelet and he ate it. “That was fine food,” he said. “What’s your secret?” “Butter and salt.” “So simple. Butter and salt. I’ll be fried.” Mindy cleared the plate away and clipped a microphone to Dune’s lapel. “So how exactly did you lose your penis?” Dune told Mindy all about when he lost control on the midway and stuck his pinky into Shandee’s pussy. Mindy, nodding encouragingly, checked the sound levels to be sure she was getting all of it. “So then I went to Lila and she said, ‘Okay for you, Mr. Pussyfinger,’ and she called in this woman who said she needed her own penis and a pair of balls—the whole desk set. She got what she wanted, from me.” Dune looked down and laughed sadly. “Ah, Mindy, you don’t want to hear my problems. I’m just broke, and I don’t have money for smokes.” Mindy brightened. “I have a couple of those little Winchester cigars in my purse for emergencies, hold on,” she said. “I just quit smoking, that’s why I’m doing this jigsaw puzzle.” “Thanks.” Dune lit the cigar and took a long squinty drag. “Hm, a nice little Winchester. My dad smoked Winchesters. ‘A whole nother smoke.’ ”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  The last thing Muriel did before she left Seventh Street for the last time was to burn all of her poetry and her journals in a galvanized tin bucket which she set on the floor in front of the green couch in the middle room. The bottom of the pail left a permanent burn in the shape of a ring upon the old flowered linoleum. Felicia and I cut out the old square and pieced in a remnant of the same pattern which we found on Delancey Street the following spring. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 31 Gerri was young and Black and lived in Queens and had a powder-blue Ford that she nicknamed Bluefish. With her carefully waved hair and button-down shirts and grey-flannel slacks, she looked just this side of square, without being square at all, once you got to know her. By Gerri’s invitation and frequently by her wheels, Muriel and I had gone to parties on weekends in Brooklyn and Queens at different women’s houses. One of the women I had met at one of these parties was Kitty. When I saw Kitty again one night years later in the Swing Rendezvous or the Pony Stable or the Page Three—that tour of second-string gay-girl bars that I had taken to making alone that sad lonely spring of 1957—it was easy to recall the St. Alban’s smell of green Queens summer-night and plastic couch-covers and liquor and hair oil and women’s bodies at the party where we had first met. In that brick-faced frame house in Queens, the downstairs pine-paneled recreation room was alive and pulsing with loud music, good food, and beautiful Black women in all different combinations of dress. There were whip-cord summer suits with starch-shiny shirt collars open at the neck as a concession to the high summer heat, and white gabardine slacks with pleated fronts or slim ivy-league styling for the very slender. There were wheat-colored Cowden jeans, the fashion favorite that summer, with knife-edge creases, and even then, one or two back-buckled grey pants over well-chalked buckskin shoes. There were garrison belts galore, broad black leather belts with shiny thin buckles that originated in army-navy surplus stores, and oxford-styled shirts of the new, iron-free dacron, with its stiff, see-through crispness. These shirts, short-sleeved and man-tailored, were tucked neatly into belted pants or tight, skinny straight skirts. Only the one or two jersey knit shirts were allowed to fall freely outside. Bermuda shorts, and their shorter cousins, Jamaicas, were already making their appearance on the dyke-chic scene, the rules of which were every bit as cutthroat as the tyrannies of Seventh Avenue or Paris.

• From The City of God

  When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust described it, it was not "utterly wicked and profligate," as he says, but had altogether ceased to exist, if we are to admit the reasoning of that debate maintained on the subject of the republic by its best representatives. Tully himself, too, speaking not in the person of Scipio or any one else, but uttering his own sentiments, uses the following language in the beginning of the fifth book, after quoting a line from the poet Ennius, in which he said, "Rome's severe morality and her citizens are her safeguard. ""This verse," says Cicero, "seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of an oracle. For neither would the citizens have availed without the morality of the community, nor would the morality of the commons without outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long to maintain in vigor so grand a republic with so wide and just an empire. Accordingly, before our day, the hereditary usages formed our foremost men, and they on their part retained the usages and institutions of their fathers. But our age, receiving the republic as a chef-d'oeuvre of another age which has already begun to grow old, has not merely neglected to restore the colors of the original, but has not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general outline and most outstanding features. For what survives of that primitive morality which the poet called Rome's safeguard? It is so obsolete and forgotten, that, far from practising it, one does not even know it. And of the citizens what shall I say? Morality has perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as criminals charged with a capital crime. For it is through our vices, and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and have long since lost the reality. "

• From The City of God

  509 The City of God’s Journey through History A ugustine’s city outlived him by merely a matter of months. The Vandals—kind of the Visigoths’ barbarian cousins—had made their way through Gaul, over the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and across the North African coast. By the summer of 430, they were besieging Hippo. Augustine died there on August 28, 430, knowing his city was surrounded, and no rescue was coming from Carthage. The city itself surrendered in the spring of 431, and it was occupied by its new overlords. It went into decline at once. The trans- Mediterranean economy that had let it flourish for perhaps 1,000 years fell into decrepitude, and it shrank back into a fishing town with a local farmer’s market. Within 100 years there was little left functional of the city that Augustine had served. Roman North Africa fell with it. The Vandals established their own kingdom, which they ran until the Byzantines tried to take it back a century later in the wars of the Eastern Emperor Justinian and his General Belisarius. They mostly succeeded in destroying much of what civilization was left. By the time the Muslim armies flooded across the Maghreb, 200 years after Augustine’s death, little trace of the greater Roman presence remained, and the peasants they encountered accepted their new overlords as readily as they had the Byzantines and the Vandals before them. By the time all that had happened, Augustine’s world had been largely forgotten. But he, in a way, survived the sack and its subsequent collapse. After his death and the end of the siege, somehow his staff saved his library, including all his own writings. They made it across the sea to Italy sometime in the 6 th century, and they were copied and Lecture 24 Transcript

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Rhea was addicted to having affairs with men who were only interested in shafting her, literally and figuratively. She was in tears. Art had told her, while they were in bed, that he was going to be married to the nineteen-year old daughter of one of their progressive comrades. At thirty-one, Rhea was sure it was her age. On the other hand, I was sure it was because he was getting some from Rhea and not getting some from his teenager. But I couldn’t say that to Rhea in her condition. Half my mind, besides, was on the collection of people in the house and how was I going to explain them to Rhea? Not that I had to explain, really, but after all it was her bed that Bea and Lynn and Gloria were sharing. “That’s awful, Rhea,” I said as I took her coat. “Let me heat up some coffee.” “It’ll be all right,” Rhea said abstractedly, wiping her eyes and managing a brave little smile. Her long voluptuous black hair was all awry. “I just want to go to bed for now.” “Well,” I hesitated only a moment, “There’re some people in your bed, honey; some friends came over and you said you didn’t think you’d be home…” Tears welled up in Rhea’s eyes again as she reached distractedly for her pocketbook and the shoes which she’d so gallantly dyed to match her dress, an electric-blue taffeta, just a few hours before. “But I’ll wake them right up,” I said hurriedly, as I saw her heading for the front door. Her cousin lived two floors down, but I could never bear to see Rhea cry. “I’m getting them right up.” And that’s exactly what I did, posthaste. Sleepily, the three girls moved, and we all crawled back into bed, spoon-wise, in the middle room with Muriel. Rhea went to her troubled sleep in her own bed. By this time, it was almost dawn and too late for me to sleep any more. Anyway, I had gotten my second wind. And I loved being the first one up in the mornings. I took some obetrol and sat reading in the john until dawn. Tiptoeing past the sleeping women, I leaned out of the seventh-story front window, looking eastward through the still streets to the lightening sky. The air was mild for January, and I caught a faint whiff of malt from the Hartz Mountain birdseed factory across the East River. The January thaw. It reminded me with a start that spring was only three months away. Yet it seemed forever. I was tired of winter. I switched on the radio softly; on this holiday morning it was mostly stale news, except for the automobile fatalities and the results of the recent congressional censure of McCarthy.

• From The City of God

  The same author had also used the expression, "the evil contentments of the mind. " [684]So that good and bad men alike will, are cautious, and contented; or, to say the same thing in other words, good and bad men alike desire, fear, rejoice, but the former in a good, the latter in a bad fashion, according as the will is right or wrong. Sorrow itself, too, which the Stoics would not allow to be represented in the mind of the wise man, is used in a good sense, and especially in our writings. For the apostle praises the Corinthians because they had a godly sorrow. But possibly some one may say that the apostle congratulated them because they were penitently sorry, and that such sorrow can exist only in those who have sinned. For these are his words:"For I perceive that the same epistle hath made you sorry, though it were but for a season. Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance; for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For, behold, this selfsame thing that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, what carefulness it wrought in you! " [685]Consequently the Stoics may defend themselves by replying, [686] that sorrow is indeed useful for repentance of sin, but that this can have no place in the mind of the wise man, inasmuch as no sin attaches to him of which he could sorrowfully repent, nor any other evil the endurance or experience of which could make him sorrowful. For they say that Alcibiades (if my memory does not deceive me), who believed himself happy, shed tears when Socrates argued with him, and demonstrated that he was miserable because he was foolish. In his case, therefore, folly was the cause of this useful and desirable sorrow, wherewith a man mourns that he is what he ought not to be. But the Stoics maintain not that the fool, but that the wise man, cannot be sorrowful. [677] Isa. lvii. 21. [678] Matt. vii. 12. [679] Ecclus. vii. 13. [680] Luke ii. 14. [681] Cat. i. 2. [682] Ter, Andr. ii. 1, 6. [683] AEneid, vi. 733. [684] AEneid, v. 278. [685] 2 Cor. vii. 8-11. [686] Tusc. Disp. iii. 32.

• From The City of God

  This is the confession of Cicero, long indeed after the death of Africanus, whom he introduced as an interlocutor in his work De Republica, but still before the coming of Christ. Yet, if the disasters he bewails had been lamented after the Christian religion had been diffused, and had begun to prevail, is there a man of our adversaries who would not have thought that they were to be imputed to the Christians? Why, then, did their gods not take steps then to prevent the decay and extinction of that republic, over the loss of which Cicero, long before Christ had come in the flesh, sings so lugubrious a dirge? Its admirers have need to inquire whether, even in the days of primitive men and morals, true justice flourished in it; or was it not perhaps even then, to use the casual expression of Cicero, rather a colored painting than the living reality? But, if God will, we shall consider this elsewhere. For I mean in its own place to show that--according to the definitions in which Cicero himself, using Scipio as his mouthpiece, briefly propounded what a republic is, and what a people is, and according to many testimonies, both of his own lips and of those who took part in that same debate--Rome never was a republic, because true justice had never a place in it. But accepting the more feasible definitions of a republic, I grant there was a republic of a certain kind, and certainly much better administered by the more ancient Romans than by their modern representatives. But the fact is, true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if at least any choose to call this a republic; and indeed we cannot deny that it is the people's weal. But if perchance this name, which has become familiar in other connections, be considered alien to our common parlance, we may at all events say that in this city is true justice; the city of which Holy Scripture says, "Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God. "

• From The City of God

  Chapter 3. --That the Sin is Caused Not by the Flesh, But by the Soul, and that the Corruption Contracted from Sin is Not Sin But Sin's Punishment. But if any one says that the flesh is the cause of all vices and ill conduct, inasmuch as the soul lives wickedly only because it is moved by the flesh, it is certain he has not carefully considered the whole nature of man. For "the corruptible body, indeed, weigheth down the soul. " [646]Whence, too, the apostle, speaking of this corruptible body, of which he had shortly before said, "though our outward man perish," [647] says, "We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven:if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened:not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up in life. " [648]We are then burdened with this corruptible body; but knowing that the cause of this burdensomeness is not the nature and substance of the body, but its corruption, we do not desire to be deprived of the body, but to be clothed with its immortality. For then, also, there will be a body, but it shall no longer be a burden, being no longer corruptible. At present, then, "the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things," nevertheless they are in error who suppose that all the evils of the soul proceed from the body. Virgil, indeed, seems to express the sentiments of Plato in the beautiful lines, where he says,-- "A fiery strength inspires their lives, An essence that from heaven derives, Though clogged in part by limbs of clay And the dull 'vesture of decay;'" [649] but though he goes on to mention the four most common mental emotions,--desire, fear, joy, sorrow,--with the intention of showing that the body is the origin of all sins and vices, saying,-- "Hence wild desires and grovelling fears, And human laughter, human tears, Immured in dungeon-seeming nights They look abroad, yet see no light," [650]

• From The City of God

  But because God does not wholly desert those whom He condemns, nor shuts up in His anger His tender mercies, the human race is restrained by law and instruction, which keep guard against the ignorance that besets us, and oppose the assaults of vice, but are themselves full of labor and sorrow. For what mean those multifarious threats which are used to restrain the folly of children? What mean pedagogues, masters, the birch, the strap, the cane, the schooling which Scripture says must be given a child, "beating him on the sides lest he wax stubborn," [1653] and it be hardly possible or not possible at all to subdue him? Why all these punishments, save to overcome ignorance and bridle evil desires--these evils with which we come into the world? For why is it that we remember with difficulty, and without difficulty forget? learn with difficulty, and without difficulty remain ignorant? are diligent with difficulty, and without difficulty are indolent? Does not this show what vitiated nature inclines and tends to by its own weight, and what succor it needs if it is to be delivered? Inactivity, sloth, laziness, negligence, are vices which shun labor, since labor, though useful, is itself a punishment.

• From The City of God

  If these emotions and affections, arising as they do from the love of what is good and from a holy charity, are to be called vices, then let us allow these emotions which are truly vices to pass under the name of virtues. But since these affections, when they are exercised in a becoming way, follow the guidance of right reason, who will dare to say that they are diseases or vicious passions? Wherefore even the Lord Himself, when He condescended to lead a human life in the form of a slave, had no sin whatever, and yet exercised these emotions where He judged they should be exercised. For as there was in Him a true human body and a true human soul, so was there also a true human emotion. When, therefore, we read in the Gospel that the hard-heartedness of the Jews moved Him to sorrowful indignation, [708] that He said, "I am glad for your sakes, to the intent ye may believe," [709] that when about to raise Lazarus He even shed tears, [710] that He earnestly desired to eat the passover with His disciples, [711] that as His passion drew near His soul was sorrowful, [712] these emotions are certainly not falsely ascribed to Him. But as He became man when it pleased Him, so, in the grace of His definite purpose, when it pleased Him He experienced those emotions in His human soul.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Her eyes so sharp and furious before, now just looked tired and sad. “Child, why you worry your head so much over fair or not fair? Just do what is for you to do and let the rest take care of themselves.” She smoothed straggles of hair back from my face, and I felt the anger gone from her fingers. “Look, you hair all mess-up behind from rolling around with foolishness. Go wash your face and hands and come help me dress this fish for supper.” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 9 Except for political matters, my father was a man of few words. But he carried on extensive conversations with himself in the bathroom every morning. During the last years of the war, my father could be found more often away from home than not, or at best, sleeping a few hours before going back out to his night job at the war plant. My mother would rush home from the office, market, fuss with us a little, and fix supper. Phyllis, Helen, or I would have put on the rice or potatoes already, and maybe my mother had seasoned some meat earlier in the day and left it on the stove with a note for one of us to turn on the fire low under the pot when we came home. Or perhaps there would be something left on purpose from last night’s supper (“Leave some of that for your father’s dinner tomorrow!”). On those afternoons, I didn’t wait for my mother to come home. Instead, I packed the food up myself and took off downtown on the bus, headed for my father’s office. I heated each separate portion until it was piping hot. Carefully, I packed the hot rice and savory bits of meat stew or spicy chicken and gravy into scoured milk bottles which we saved for that purpose. I packed the vegetables separately in their own bottle, with a little pat of butter if we could get it, or margarine, on top. I wrapped each bottle in layers of newspapers, and then in an old towel, to keep the food warm. Placing them in a shopping bag together with the shirt and sweater that my mother had left for me to take to my father, I set off by bus down to the office, heavy with a sense of mission and accomplishment. The bus from Washington Heights ran downtown and across 125th Street. I got off at Lenox Avenue, and walked the three blocks up to the office, past bars and grocery stores and small groups of people in lively conversation on the street. Sometimes when I arrived, my father was downstairs in the office already, poring over receipt books or taxes or bills.

• From The City of God

  [118] Alluding to the sanctuary given to all who fled to Rome in its early days. [119] Virgil, AEneid, i. 278. Book III.Argument--As in the foregoing book Augustin has proved regarding moral and spiritual calamities, so in this book he proves regarding external and bodily disasters, that since the foundation of the city the Romans have been continually subject to them; and that even when the false gods were worshipped without a rival, before the advent of Christ, they afforded no relief from such calamities. Chapter 1. --Of the Ills Which Alone the Wicked Fear, and Which the World Continually Suffered, Even When the Gods Were Worshipped. Of moral and spiritual evils, which are above all others to be deprecated, I think enough has already been said to show that the false gods took no steps to prevent the people who worshipped them from being overwhelmed by such calamities, but rather aggravated the ruin. I see I must now speak of those evils which alone are dreaded by the heathen--famine, pestilence, war, pillage, captivity, massacre, and the like calamities, already enumerated in the first book. For evil men account those things alone evil which do not make men evil; neither do they blush to praise good things, and yet to remain evil among the good things they praise. It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man's greatest good to have everything good but himself. But not even such evils as were alone dreaded by the heathen were warded off by their gods, even when they were most unrestrictedly worshipped. For in various times and places before the advent of our Redeemer, the human race was crushed with numberless and sometimes incredible calamities; and at that time what gods but those did the world worship, if you except the one nation of the Hebrews, and, beyond them, such individuals as the most secret and most just judgment of God counted worthy of divine grace? [120]But that I may not be prolix, I will be silent regarding the heavy calamities that have been suffered by any other nations, and will speak only of what happened to Rome and the Roman empire, by which I mean Rome properly so called, and those lands which already, before the coming of Christ, had by alliance or conquest become, as it were, members of the body of the state. [120] Compare Aug. Epist. ad Deogratias, 102, 13; and De Praed. Sanct. , 19.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I asked, not wanting to pry, but fascinated by her story. “Oh, lots of things, in very short order. I’ve always been a hard drinker, and she never liked that. Then when I had to speak my mind in the column about the whole Sobell business, and the newspaper started getting itchy, Karen thought I was going to lose that job. I didn’t, but my immigration status was changed, which meant I could still work in Mexico, but after all these years I could no longer own property. That’s the one way of getting uppity americans to keep their mouths shut. Don’t rock big brother’s boat, and we’ll let you stay. That was right up Karen’s alley. She bought me out and opened the dress shop.” “Is that why you broke up?” Eudora laughed. “That sounds like New York talk.” She was silent for a minute, busying herself with the overflowing ashtray. “Actually, no,” she said finally. “I had an operation, and it was pretty rough for both of us. Radical surgery, for cancer. I lost a breast.” Eudora’s head was bent over the ashtray, hair falling forward, and I could not see her face. I reached out and touched her hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Yeah, so am I,” she said, matter-of-factly, placing the polished ashtray carefully back on the table beside her bed. She looked up, smiled, and pushed the hair back from her face with the heels of her hands. “There’s never enough time to begin with, and still so damn much I want to do.” “How are you feeling now, Eudora?” I remembered my nights on the female surgery floor at Beth David. “Did you have radiation?” “Yes I did. It’s almost two years since the last one, and I’m fine now. The scars are hard to take, though. Not dashing or romantic. I don’t much like to look at them myself.” She got up, took down her guitar from the wall, and started to tune it. “What folksongs are they teaching you in that fine new university up the mountain?” Eudora had translated a number of texts on the history and ethnology of Mexico, one of which was a textbook assigned for my history class. She was witty and funny and sharp and insightful, and knew a lot about an enormous number of things. She had written poetry when she was younger, and Walt Whitman was her favorite poet. She showed me some clippings of articles she had written for a memorial-documentary of Whitman. One sentence in particular caught my eye. I met a man who’d spent his life in thinking, and could understand me no matter what I said. And I followed him to Harleigh in the snow.

• From The City of God

  Yet those gods, guardians of the Roman empire, and, as it were, theatric spectators of such contests as these, were not satisfied until the sister of the Horatii was added by her brother's sword as a third victim from the Roman side, so that Rome herself, though she won the day, should have as many deaths to mourn. Afterwards, as a fruit of the victory, Alba was destroyed, though it was there the Trojan gods had formed a third asylum after Ilium had been sacked by the Greeks, and after they had left Lavinium, where AEneas had founded a kingdom in a land of banishment. But probably Alba was destroyed because from it too the gods had migrated, in their usual fashion, as Virgil says: "Gone from each fane, each sacred shrine, Are those who made this realm divine. " [146] Gone, indeed, and from now their third asylum, that Rome might seem all the wiser in committing herself to them after they had deserted three other cities. Alba, whose king Amulius had banished his brother, displeased them; Rome, whose king Romulus had slain his brother, pleased them. But before Alba was destroyed, its population, they say, was amalgamated with the inhabitants of Rome so that the two cities were one. Well, admitting it was so, yet the fact remains that the city of Ascanius, the third retreat of the Trojan gods, was destroyed by the daughter-city. Besides, to effect this pitiful conglomerate of the war's leavings, much blood was spilt on both sides. And how shall I speak in detail of the same wars, so often renewed in subsequent reigns, though they seemed to have been finished by great victories; and of wars that time after time were brought to an end by great slaughters, and which yet time after time were renewed by the posterity of those who had made peace and struck treaties? Of this calamitous history we have no small proof, in the fact that no subsequent king closed the gates of war; and therefore with all their tutelar gods, no one of them reigned in peace. [142] AEneid, x. 821, of Lausus: "But when Anchises' son surveyed The fair, fair face so ghastly made, He groaned, by tenderness unmanned, And stretched the sympathizing hand," etc. [143] Virgil, AEneid, vi. 813. [144] Sallust, Cat. Conj. ii. [145] Ps. x. 3. [146] AEneid, ii. 351-2.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 22. --That God Foreknew that the First Man Would Sin, and that He at the Same Time Foresaw How Large a Multitude of Godly Persons Would by His Grace Be Translated to the Fellowship of the Angels. And God was not ignorant that man would sin, and that, being himself made subject now to death, he would propagate men doomed to die, and that these mortals would run to such enormities in sin, that even the beasts devoid of rational will, and who were created in numbers from the waters and the earth, would live more securely and peaceably with their own kind than men, who had been propagated from one individual for the very purpose of commending concord. For not even lions or dragons have ever waged with their kind such wars as men have waged with one another. [566]But God foresaw also that by His grace a people would be called to adoption, and that they, being justified by the remission of their sins, would be united by the Holy Ghost to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being destroyed; and He knew that this people would derive profit from the consideration that God had caused all men to be derived from one, for the sake of showing how highly He prizes unity in a multitude. [566] ^ "Quando leoni Fortior eripuit vitam leo? quo nemore unquam Exspiravit aper majoris dentibus apri? Indica tigris agit rabida cum tigride pacem Perpetuam; saevis inter se convenit ursis. Ast homini,"etc. Juvenal, Sat. xv. 160--5. --See also the very striking lines which precede these.

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

  After talking to physicians, teachers, clinicians, and others who treat these children, I learned that marital distress and divorce are high among families with such children. The job of raising a child who needs round-the-clock nursing, frequent doctor appointments, or special classes at school is daunting. Some parents thrive under the pressure, but alas, many cannot cope and find themselves blaming each other or the marriage for the strain they face each day. Billy’s story is about a child born with a congenital heart defect who was protected in his early years by a doting mother. But after his parents divorced, Billy’s world collapsed and he was never able to adjust to the changes demanded of him. Like Karen, Larry, and Paula, the divorce shaped his personality, but unlike the others, he grew more and more isolated and unhappy. What happened to Billy is another example of how the divorce experience in childhood can lead to changed lives and different outcomes in adulthood. I MET BILLY for his twenty-five-year interview at the Berkeley bakery and coffeehouse where he works—a large establishment with hardwood floors, lots of green plants, and skylights atop fifteen-foot-high ceilings. The smell of cinnamon rolls followed Billy as he emerged from the kitchen in a floury apron, his long hair tied back in a net. Billy had invited me to join him for breakfast at nine o’clock, which is when his early morning shift ends and he can begin what for the rest of us would be lunch break. He was almost breathless. “We have a special order just coming out of the oven and I’ll be a while. I apologize. Here, Sue will take care of you.” A waitress showed me to a table and gave me coffee. “Billy is so conscientious,” Sue said to me shyly. “He oversees every order and he’s the one they trust to do the really delicate cases.” I pondered her words “the really delicate cases.” I first met Billy when he was nine years old and he had certainly been a “delicate case.” Small-boned, pale, and seeming to want to make himself invisible, he sat huddled in an oversized San Francisco Giants parka. I remember the sour, miserable look on his face and his refusal to answer most of my questions. His mother complained that he had been rude and jealous of her friends since the divorce. His father told me that Billy was spoiled. Born with a congenital heart defect that had been only partially repaired surgically when he was six months old, Billy had been on medication all his life and needed extra care and protection. Small, thin, and weak, his activities and diet had to be closely monitored. He was hospitalized several times and missed a considerable amount of school. Throughout his early years Billy’s mother was his nurse, overseer, adviser, and closest friend.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  It was a make-up present that Charlie had bought for Cora’s dinner, and when Cora found out she threatened to throw Ginger out of the house. Ginger decided then that this was all getting too costly. Long goodnight kisses on the back porch were definitely not enough; so she finally made her own move. By the beginning of November, autumn was closing down. The trees were still incandescent colors, but the edge of winter was already in the air. The days were getting shorter and shorter, and this made me unhappy. There was very little time after work before sunset. If I went to the library, it was dark by the time I walked back to Mill River Road. Keystone was a daily trial that did not seem to get better nor easier, despite Ginger’s warm-hearted attempts to cheer me up during our frightful days. One Thursday after work, Ginger borrowed her brother’s old beat-up Ford and we went downtown to cash our checks alone, without Cora, or Charlie, or any of the boys. It was still light when we were through, and I could tell Ginger had something on her mind. We drove around town for a while. “What’s up?” I asked. “C’mon,” Ginger said. “Let’s go up on the hill.” Ginger was not much of a nature lover, but she had taken me to see her favorite spot, a wooded hill on the west edge of town where, hidden from view by the overgrown bushes and trees, we could sit on two old tree stumps left from long ago, smoking and listening to Fats Domino and watching the sun go down. I found ma’ thrill-l-l-l-lll On Blueberreeeeee Hill—lllll. We left the car and climbed to the top of the hill. The air was chill as we sat on the stumps to catch our breaths. “Cold?” “No,” I said, pulling my ragged suede jacket, inherited from CeCe, around me. “You ought to get a warm coat or something, winters around here ain’t like in New York.” “I’ve got a coat, I just don’t like to wear it, that’s all.” Ginger cut her eyes at me. “Yeah, I know. Who you think you kidding? If it’s money, I can lend you some till Christmas.” She knew about the two-hundred-dollar phone bill The Branded had run up that summer at Spring Street, which I was now paying off. “Hey, thanks, but I don’t need a coat.” Ginger was walking back and forth now, puffing nervously on her Lucky Strike. I sat looking up at her. What was going on, and what was Ginger wanting me to say?