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 Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  580 Biographical Notes (Lectures 73–84) and appeared weekly until 1895. In the same year, her mother’s death led to her fi rst mental breakdown, and another followed the death of her father in 1904. The Stephen family then moved to the Bloomsbury section of London and gathered about them a set of writers, artists, and philosophers who came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1915, three years after Woolf married Leonard Woolf and while she continually fought suicidal depression, Duckworth published her fi rst novel, The Voyage Out , which was cordially received. She and Leonard then moved to Hogarth House in Richmond, where they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917; among other books, it published T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919) and The Waste Land (1922). Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919), was largely realistic, like her fi rst; however, in the language and narrative technique of Jacob’ s Room, her third novel (1922), she deployed the kind of innovations that made her a celebrity in her own time and have since marked her as a quintessential Modernist. She then produced four more novels—Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937)—as well as two landmark books on the professional rights of women, A Room of One’ s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). In 1941, after she drowned herself, her fi nal novel, Between the Acts, was published posthumously. Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939). Born in Dublin, he was the eldest child of a well-to-do Protestant landowner who brie fl y practiced law before giving it up to study art. After two boyhood years in Sligo (the Irish county of his ancestors), plus schooling in London and Dublin, William himself briefl y studied art before settling down in London to write. His fi rst book of prose was a collection of Irish fairy and folk tales published in 1888. Then came his fi rst book of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889). Six years later, after he had published a play, The Countess Kathleen (1892), and co-edited The Works of William Blake (1893), his second book of poems appeared as simply Poems (1895). In 1899, when The Countess was produced in the fi rst season of the Irish Literary Theatre, its highly unorthodox heroine (played by Maud Gonne) sparked angry protests. Shortly afterward, Yeats coauthored Cathleen ni Hoolihan with his friend and patron Lady Gregory, and it was produced in Dublin in 1902. In 1904, after a lecture tour in America, Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre, which he ran for the next several years. Then, turning back to poetry, he produced a steady succession of volumes: The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), Responsibilities

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Everyone noticed I was moping, but there were larger glooms about the house that rendered mine unimportant. My great-aunt Tina was very ill; Charlie kept deferring his visit to Lisanne's parents (who weren't at all sure it was a good idea) and tinkered pointlessly with circuitry in his room; and though nothing was said to me, it was obvious my father was doing less work and that there was a new caution about money. He had begun to cancel engagements. He was pale and withdrawn. I would ask him if he was okay, and he would push out his chest as if about to sing and say, "I'll be all right—a bit out of sorts." But our fortnight at Kinchin Cove was off that year; and the trading-in of our rusting Humber Snipe, a suffocating monster which, if never entirely new in our experience, had been a sign of prosperity six years before, was again deferred: it began to resemble one of the broken-voiced old hulks on the forecourt at the Flats. I had always been thrilled by cars and was deflated and embarrassed. I was told that my school-fees cost more than a car, and knew that I wasn't allowed to complain. After the first week, I took to ringing Dawn's number two or three times a day from a phone-box in town, though there was never any reply. They must have gone on holiday: he was somewhere different entirely, showing off on a beach, chasing his sisters, picking them up and spanking them, being clumsily macho for their protesting fun. I felt trapped in the house, but didn't want to miss a phone-call if it came. We had a smart, trilling phone but it was on a party-line, and I imagined Dawn baffled and kept at bay by the engaged tone as our talkative neighbours (whom we knew only from the inane fragments of chat that obstructed us when we tried to ring out) were maundering on. I began to hallucinate the cheep of the phone in the routine undertones and overtones of the house—in the burble and chink of the fridge, inside the dreary howl of the hoover, in the tinkling drops of a filling cistern. Perhaps I was going mad with desolation. I lay on the floor a lot, gazing across the landing to where the sunlight slanted along the carpet of the front bedroom, showing up various boxes that had been stowed away beneath the bed. Once when everyone was out, I went into the sitting-room and stormed up and down on the piano, which I had refused to learn, with clumsy ferocity—Sibelius standing thoughtfully beside me, as if ready to turn the page.

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

  Young and attractive, Billy’s mother started dating the minute her husband packed his bags and within weeks was spending all her time with Tom, the man she would later marry. “Billy adores Tom,” she exclaimed. In fact, Billy and his mother spent most of that first summer visiting Tom in Petaluma where Tom owns a sporting goods store, away from Billy’s friends and regular summer activities. “All Billy does is sit home on the couch and mope,” she said. “It drives me nuts. The more he demands my attention, the more obnoxious he gets. I’ve devoted my life to this child,” she said earnestly, leaning toward me. “He has to realize that I need a life of my own!” Billy’s mother was a gregarious woman who was an accomplished amateur musician. His father, a native Australian, built a successful restaurant franchise and spent the rest of his time engaged in his true passion, racquet sports. The parents had an active social life but maintained predictable routines at home for Billy. When they went out in the evenings, Billy was cared for by a retired nurse whom he had known all his life. One of the only times that Billy came out of his shell during our first interview together was when I asked if it was hard for him to miss so much school. He looked at me sharply and then his eyes fell on the bony little hands tightly laced in his lap. In a low voice, he muttered, “Mom made it okay. We used to do things together.” “What sorts of things?” Billy huddled into his parka. He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t going to respond. Then he said, softly, “We had games we played only on those days. We’d use my spelling words and it was really fun to learn them that way. We made multiplication dominos and I knew all the times tables up to twelve even before third grade ended. We read the kid’s National Geographic and made up stories to go with it. And we had big maps of imaginary worlds that we kept adding to and coloring.” His voice trailed off and he looked very sad. “That sounds wonderful!” I said, glad to have found a topic that evoked some interest in him. Billy looked at me almost angrily and again twisted his hands. “Yeah, but she doesn’t do it anymore.” I met Billy’s dad a week later at his well-appointed office near North Beach in San Francisco. The entire wall behind his desk was filled with trophies and ribbons from his various sports victories.

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

  REPLY TO THE ABOVE ARGUMENTSWE must, in the first place, observe that there are certain probable signs of original sin in the human race. For since God watches over men’s actions, so as to assign rewards to good deeds, and punishments to evil deeds, as we have already shown, we can conclude that where there is punishment, there has been sin. Now the whole human race suffers various punishments, both bodily and spiritual. Of bodily punishments the chief is death, to which all others are conducive and subordinate, such as hunger, thirst, and so on. Of spiritual punishments, the principal is weakness of reason, the result being that man encounters difficulty in acquiring knowledge of the truth, and easily falls into error; also that he is unable wholly to overcome his animal propensities, which sometimes even obscure his mental vision. Someone however might reply that these defects, whether of body or of soul, are not penalties but natural defects, and a necessary consequence of the conditions of matter. For the human body, being composed of contrary elements, must needs be corruptible; and the sensitive appetite must needs incline to things in which the senses delight, and which at times are contrary to reason. Again, the possible intellect is in potentiality to all things intelligible, and has none of them actually, but has by its very nature to acquire them through the senses, and therefore with difficulty acquires the knowledge of truth, and is easily led astray by the imagination.

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

  21. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. 22. And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxix) Our Lord after having relieved the spirits of the disciples by the promise of the Holy Spirit, again depresses them: A little while, and ye shall not see Me. He does this to accustom them to the mention of His departure, in order that they may bear it well, when it does come. For nothing so quiets the troubled mind, as the continued recurrence to the subject of its grief. BEDE. (Hom. 1. Dom. See. Par. Oct. Pasch.) He saith, A little while, and ye shall not see Me, alluding to His going to be taken that night by the Jews, His crucifixion the next morning, and burial in the evening, which withdrew Him from all human sight. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxix. 1) But then, if one examines, these are words of consolation: Because I go to the Father. For they shew that His death was only a translation: and more consolation follows: And again, a little while, and ye shall see Me: an intimation this that He would return, and after a short separation, come and live with them for ever. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. c. 1) The meaning of these words however was obscure, before their fulfilment; Then said some of His disciples among themselves, What is this that He saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not see Me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see Me: and, Because I go to the Father. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxix. 1) Either sorrow had confused their minds, or the obscurity of the words themselves prevented their understanding them, and made them appear contradictory. If we shall see Thee, they say, how goest Thou? If Thou goest, how shall we see Thee? What is this that He saith unto us, A little while? We cannot tell what He saith. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. ci. 1) For above, because He did not say, A little while, but simply, I go to the Father, He seemed to speak plainly. But what to them was obscure at the time, but by and by manifested, is manifest to us. For in a little while He suffered, and they did not see Him; and again, in a little while He rose again, and they saw Him. He says, And ye shall see Me no more; for the mortal Christ they saw no more.

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

  Adult children of divorce are telling us loud and clear that their parents’ anger at the time of the breakup is not what matters most. Unless there was violence or abuse or unremitting high conflict, they have dim memories of what transpired during this supposedly critical period. Indeed, as youngsters then and as adults now, all would be profoundly astonished to learn that any judge, attorney, mediator—indeed, anyone at all—had genuinely considered their best interests or wishes at the breakup or at any time since. It’s the many years living in a postdivorce or remarried family that count, according to this first generation to come of age and tell us their experience. It’s feeling sad, lonely, and angry during childhood. It’s traveling on airplanes alone when you’re seven to visit your parent. It’s having no choice about how you spend your time and feeling like a second-class citizen compared with your friends in intact families who have some say about how they spend their weekends and their vacations. It’s wondering whether you will have any financial help for college from your college-educated father, given that he has no legal obligation to pay. It’s worrying about your mom and dad for years—will her new boyfriend stick around, will his new wife welcome you into her home? It’s reaching adulthood with acute anxiety. Will you ever find a faithful woman to love you? Will you find a man you can trust? Or will your relationships fail just like your parents’ did? And most tellingly, it’s asking if you can protect your own child from having these same experiences in growing up. Not one of the men or women from divorced families whose lives I report on in this book wanted their children to repeat their childhood experiences. Not one ever said, “I want my children to live in two nests—or even two villas.” They envied friends who grew up in intact families. Their entire life stories belie the myths we’ve embraced. The Longitudinal Study T HE ADULTS ON whom this work is based are among the vanguard of an ever increasing army of adults raised in divorced families. Since 1970, at least a million children a year have seen their parents divorce—building a generation of Americans that has now come of age. 3 It bears repeating that they represent a quarter of the adults in this country who have reached their forty-fourth birthdays. 4 Demographers also report that 40 percent of all married adults in the 1990s have already been divorced. 5 The lives of these children of divorce now grown to adulthood and the important lessons I have learned from them are the main topics of this book. It is the only study in the world that follows into full adulthood the life course of individuals whose parents separated when they were young children.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was a little crisis for him as well, of course. He had stood by with an ironic mime as I told his father that Luc had run away again—his gestures were still the moue and wiggle of the head of Lilli Vivier, his protecting friend, maybe even of his remembered mother. When I said that Sibylle had gone too I had quite forgotten for a second how Marcel worshipped her. I saw him caught by a real discovered feeling of his own—he stepped forward. Then Paul had calmly proposed that Marcel come with me and made the condition that we speak only in English—it was to be a lesson of a kind. Marcel hesitated—he wasn't quite sure of the momentum of the thing; and again I saw his father rather clownishly encourage him, rather bruisingly exaggerate and publicise his blushing little tendresse. I put a hand on the kid's shoulder out of generalised sympathy. It was true he was a friend of Sibylle's: he knew far more of her than I did. I thought Sibylle herself probably didn't know, or at least kindly overlooked, the full extent of his feelings, however vague and ideal they may have been. As I glanced across at him in the car I wondered if it was my own failure of imagination—there was no reason he shouldn't be just as filthy-minded as I had been at sixteen. For a mad moment I thought I should tell him what Luc and I had done last night; but the moment passed and left me more wretched than before. "I expect they'll have to tell the police," Marcel said. "Ooh, let's hope we can get to them first," I said; though I saw he thought the police would be best, both at finding them and at somehow punishing Luc. "It's a bit early for that. As a matter of fact I know Sibylle's father wants this kept very quiet—it could be embarrassing for him, and Luc's father too, of course." I'd stood by as Mrs Altidore rang both these figures, and watched her persuade them of her exciting and ridiculous plan. De Taeye had been called out of an important meeting and had evidently spoken under some constraint; he had jumped at the idea of my going to sort things out. I heard her give me an incredible reference, a summing-up not exactly of insights, but of a high regard she'd never hinted at to me in person; and Martin Altidore too had been right behind me: I picked up from his wife's reactions his opening tone of shifty exasperation and then his relief, almost a shout when she proposed me as an envoy. As before I thought, I don't know what I'm doing, or why these people trust me so much. Their expectations crowded on to me and became a reason in themselves. "Were the police involved the last time?" I said.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And not many of Harlem's Negroes go downtown fo r their entertain ment because they do not fe el welcome there. The comparison !:>�.!ween th_e_ rt:_la�ye spontaneity and free d_Q J11_of whites_ aJ1d _hlacks . .i��d . There are some relatively free and spontaneous white people, not very many; and some relatively free and spontaneous Negroes, not, in my experience, very many more. A person's fr eedom can only be judged in terms of his flexibility, his openness toward life; it is not his sit i latit)i1which makes film free, but himself. Some rare peop1Cbec6me fr ee ·d1rough oppression; most do not. COLOR Some people, at least equally rare, release themselves fr om the delusion that they were born free and go on to establish an approximation of that personal order which will allow them to become so. Most people are not able to look on each other as human beings, and, in spite of everything, to treat each other that way. Until this happ_j:OS, fre&_dom is only an empty word. In the meantime, what one's contrasting is a matter of style, i.e., ways of life, and contrasting these, moreover, in their most public manifestations. The atmosphere of a Harlem nightclub must be different from that of the Copacabana be cause of the way oflife which has produced it, and the peculiar needs it serves. White nightclubs do not draw people from a community, but from all over this peculiar country. And white people are as isolated from each other in the nightclub as they are all over America, in their daily lives. A nightclub being no place to establish a human relationship, they walk out as un touched as they were when they walked in. It is this cumu lative and grinding inability to reach out to others which makes nightclub life, downtown, so grim. But it is because the world looks on them with such guilt, that they seem freer in their pleasures than white people do. White Americans know v ery little a b out_ p Leasure because they are so afraid of pain. But people dulled by pain can sin g and qaoce rjll morn i n g and find no pleasure in it. 16 O( <: �c->_(' : ' · tr�·, o -1 ;- ----:: ::..._ _____ L::.=-=-= c=_:: =-:- - c -r- v , .1 r' - . Esquire, December 1962 A Ta lk to Teachers T ET ' s BJ?GIN by saying that we _ are living through a very .L dangerous time. Everyone in this room is m one way or anot h er a \ vare of that.

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

  If this describes you, I think you should seriously consider staying together for the sake of your children. The couples who stayed unhappily married in this study struggled with all the problems that beset modern marriage—infidelity, depression, sexual boredom, loneliness, rejection. Few problems went away as time wore on, but that’s not what mattered most to these adults. Given their shared affection and concern for their children, they made parenting their number one priority. As one woman explained, “There are two relationships in this marriage. He admires me as a wonderful mother. As a wife, I bore him in every way possible. But our children are wonderful and that’s what counts.” If a couple can maintain their loving, shared parenting without feeling martyred, this is a choice to consider seriously. Many people make it. The notion that open conflict is always the hallmark of unhappy marriages is simply not true. That children are aware of their parents’ unhappiness and are themselves unhappy because of it is also not true. It depends on whether the parents are able with grace and without anger to make the sacrifice required to maintain the benefits of the marriage for their children. For those parents who decide to divorce, I have other advice. First, don’t act impulsively. A visit to an attorney will give you very important information about finances, your legal rights and other aspects of the law, and court or mediation practice. This is vital information but only a small part of what you will need. Think realistically about what your life will be like after divorce. If you need to go back to school, think about doing it before you divorce. Add up the pros and cons carefully. Keep in mind that you will need to spend far more time with your children, giving them extra support and encouragement after the divorce, and that your presence may be even more needed during their adolescence. This means you won’t have time to look for the new lover you may have dreamed about or to begin a new marriage right away, especially if your new partner has children. Your children may well be more demanding, more symptomatic, angrier, and harder to handle than ever before. No matter what custody arrangement you work out, you will still be a single parent in decision making, in responsibility, and in guiding your child. So be prepared for a lonely, hectic time. Yes, it can be done. Yes, it’s much harder than you think. At least one parent, you or your ex-spouse, must be willing to give the children priority.

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

  Of going upstairs. Of being alone. I try to take care of him. I go into his room every night, so he won’t cry.” Many young girls voluntarily move to fill the vacuum created by parents who collapse emotionally, and sometimes physically, after divorce. The caregiver child’s job, as she defines it, is to keep the parent going by acting in whatever capacity is needed—mentor, adviser, nurse, confidante. The range is wide depending on the parent’s need and the child’s perception. One ten-year-old in this group got up regularly with her insomniac mother at midnight to watch television and drink beer. She frequently stayed home from school to make sure that her mother would not become depressed and suicidal or take the car out when she was drinking. A father told me how his twelve-year-old daughter had packed his clothing, helped him to find an apartment, and arranged to do his shopping. She called him nightly to make sure that he had gotten home safely, and to beg him to stop smoking. Although most caregivers are girls, we’ve seen several dramatic instances of boys who undertook similar roles. One fourteen-year-old boy, whose mother abandoned the family, stopped going to school and undertook all of his mother’s responsibilities, including shopping, cooking, cleaning, and caring for his father who was in a state of collapse. Such children soon sacrifice their friends, school activities, and, most important, their sense of being children—childhood itself. In return, they gain a sense of pride and the feeling that they have saved a parent’s life. When there are siblings at home, the caretaker child moves forthrightly into the parental role and takes charge of running the house, making dinners, seeing that homework is done, putting little ones to bed, cleaning bathrooms late at night. Karen was well suited for this caretaking job and quickly learned to keep her own feelings under tight control. To her great credit, Karen had enormous compassion for both of her parents and was especially comforting to her mother, who in turn acknowledged how much she depended on her ten-year-old. With no hint of embarrassment, Mrs. James told me, “Karen takes care of me. She understands me without words.” Like most parents who come to rely heavily on their children, she had little or no awareness of the child’s heavy sacrifice of her own playtime and friendships. She wasn’t aware of the fact that Karen was missing school and not paying attention to classroom work. Instead, she spoke as if Karen were an adult or even a much older person. “When she sees me sitting alone in the evening, she knows that I feel sad and she puts her arms around me. She is also very wise. She told me to get rid of my boyfriend. ‘He will only hurt you,’ she said. I’ve learned to listen to her.” And who, I wondered, does Karen turn to for soothing words?

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  We drove home in silence after Mamaw explained that if Mom lost her temper again, Mamaw would shoot her in the face. That night we stayed at Mamaw’s house. I’ll never forget Lindsay’s face as she marched upstairs to bed. It wore the pain of a defeat known by only a person who experiences the highest high and the lowest low in a matter of minutes. She had been on the cusp of achieving a childhood dream; now she was just another teenage girl with a broken heart. Mamaw turned to retire to her couch, where she would watch Law & Order , read the Bible, and fall asleep. I stood in the narrow walkway that separated the living room from the dining room and asked Mamaw a question that had been on my mind since she ordered Mom to drive us home safely. I knew what she’d say, but I guess I just wanted reassurance. “Mamaw, does God love us?” She hung her head, gave me a hug, and began to cry. The question wounded Mamaw because the Christian faith stood at the center of our lives, especially hers. We never went to church, except on rare occasions in Kentucky or when Mom decided that what we needed in our lives was religion. Nevertheless, Mamaw’s was a deeply personal (albeit quirky) faith. She couldn’t say “organized religion” without contempt. She saw churches as breeding grounds for perverts and money changers. And she hated what she called “the loud and proud”—people who wore their faith on their sleeve, always ready to let you know how pious they were. Still, she sent much of her spare income to churches in Jackson, Kentucky, especially those controlled by Reverend Donald Ison, an older man who bore a striking resemblance to the priest from The Exorcist . By Mamaw’s reckoning, God never left our side. He celebrated with us when times were good and comforted us when they weren’t. During one of our many trips to Kentucky, Mamaw was trying to merge onto the highway after a brief stop for gas. She didn’t pay attention to the signs, so we found ourselves headed the wrong way on a one-way exit ramp with angry motorists swerving out of our way. I was screaming in terror, but after a U-turn on a three-lane interstate, the only thing Mamaw said about the incident was “We’re fine, goddammit. Don’t you know Jesus rides in the car with me?” The theology she taught was unsophisticated, but it provided a message I needed to hear. To coast through life was to squander my God-given talent, so I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother’s sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan. Mamaw often told a parable: A young man was sitting at home when a terrible rainstorm began.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Where do they come from? how did they become-these faces-so cruel and so sterile? they are related to whom? they are related to what? They do not relate to the buildings, cer tainly-no human being could; I suspect, in fact, that many of us live with the carefully suppressed terror that these build ings are about to crash down on us; the nature of the move ment of the people in the streets is certainly very close to panic. You will search in vain for lovers. I have not heard anyone singing in the streets of New York for more than twenty years. By singing, I mean singing for joy, for the hell of it. I don't mean the drunken, lonely, 4-AM keening which is simply the sound of some poor soul trying to vomit up his anguish and gagging on it. Where the people can sing, the poet can live-and it is worth saying it the other way around, too: where the poet can sing, the people can live. When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far fr om the slaughter of the innocents. Everyone is rushing, God knows where, and everyone is looking for God knows what-but it is clear that no one is happy here, and that something has been lost. Only, sometimes, uptown, along the river, perhaps, OTHER ESSAYS I've sometimes watched strangers here, here for a day or a week or a month, or newly transplanted, watched a boy and a girl, or a boy and a boy, or a man and a woman, or a man and a child, or a woman and a child; yes, there was something recognizable, something to which the soul responded, some thing to make one smile, even to make one weep with exul tation. They were yet distinguishable from the concrete and the steel. One felt that one might approach them without freezing to death. 2 A European friend of mine and myself were arrested on Broadway, in broad daylight, while looking for a taxi. He had been here three days, had not yet mastered English, and I was showing him the wonders of the city of New York. He was impressed and bewildered, though he also seemed rather to wonder what purpose it served-when, suddenly, down from heaven, or up through the sidewalk, two plain-clothes men appeared, separated us, scarcely a word was spoken. I watched my friend, carried by the scruff of the neck, vanish into the crowd.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (And I knew that this was exactly what would have happened to Bill, if such a mob had ever got its hands on her.) Unlike the later Ox-BoJV I11cident, in which a similar lynching is partially redeemed by the read ing of a letter, which, presumably, will cause the members of the mob to repent the horror of what they have done and resolve to become better men and women, and also unlike the later Intruder in the Dust, which suggests the same hopeful improbability, They Won)t F01;get ends with the teacher dead and the politician triumphantly re-elected. As he watches the widow walk down the courthouse steps, he mutters, seeming, almost, to stifle a yawn, I wonder if he 1'eally did it ) afte1' all. And, yes: I was beginning to understand that. Sylvia Sidney was the only American film actress who re minded me of a colored girl, or woman-which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality. All of the others, without exception, were white, and, even when they moved me (like Margaret Sullavan or Bette Davis or Carole Lombard) they moved me fr om that distance. Some instinct caused me profoundly to distrust the sense of life they projected: this sense of life could certainly never, in any case, be used by me, and, while His eye might be on the sparrow, mine had to be on the hawk. And, similarly, while I admired Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney (and, on a more demanding level, Fredric March), the only actor of the era with whom I identified was Henry Fonda. I was not alone. A black fr iend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wmth, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don)t walk like that! and he +9 + THE DEVIL FINDS WORK imitated Fonda's stubborn, patient, wide-legged hike away ti·om the camera. My reaction to Sylvia Sidney was certainly due, in part, to the kind of film she appeared in during that era-Fury; Mary Burns, Fugitive; You and Me; Street Scene (I was certain, even, that I knew the meaning of the title of a film she made with Gene Raymond, which I never saw, Behold My Wife). It was almost as though she and I had a secret: she seemed to know something I knew. Every street in New York ends in a river: this is the legend which begins the film, Dead End, and I was enormously grateful fi>r it. I had never thought of that bcfi>rc. Sylvia Sidney, facing a cop in this film, pulling her black hat back fr om her forehead: One of you lousy cops gave me that.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a pair of shoes, made of webbed orange-coloured leather, shucked at forty-five degrees, the heel of one on top of the other, like a first position in ballet. They were intensely horrible, alien in design, scuffed and lopsided from wear. I was lying on my side at the mattress's edge, the bedding just reaching to the line of my shoulders and hips. I was afraid the weight of my stomach would topple me over on to the floor. The shoes were the focus of my dry misery, and I closed my eyes again and ran yearningly back through the dream-fade to catch and remember everything I could. How he had loved me. How he had clung to me. I was fixed in my position by the rough heel of a foot pushed against my calf and the lightly adhesive pressure of a biggish bottom pressed against my own. I tried shoving slowly but firmly backwards, but met with unconscious, heavy resistance. Squinting at my watch on the floor I saw it was only 6.15; daylight was hardening on the wall and all I longed for was warmth and oblivion. I slipped out of bed, walked round and climbed into the cold welcome of the other side. The pillow there had the yeasty smell of dried semen—fresh and stale at once. I looked at the big stubbly face of—who was it? Frits. From Holland. A keen uncritical lover of English literature. Perhaps the coppery lighting of the Cassette and the benign warp of drink had lent him a glow as he stood against the wall reading Of human Bondage —misled himself, I suspected, by that potent noun, but still stubbornly hoping after two hundred pages. He'd looked shelteringly big and artisanal, with a touching mixture of clumsiness and adroitness about him; I imagined him doing something expertly with wood. He seemed pleasantly surprised when I asked him back to my place, as if our talk about Maugham might have been an end in itself; as if I were offering him a lift that took me somewhat out of my way. "Thanks very much," he said. It was clear to me as we walked across the empty town that I had picked up a pretty heavy bore; every time I pushed the conversation gratingly towards men and sex he said "Yes, yes" as though he didn't quite understand, and then went on in his dogged English about Richard Adams. I began to wonder if he knew the Cassette was a gay bar.

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

  We hosted a premiere of the film at our office, and I invited Walter and Bo to address the audience. About seventy-five people from the community gathered in EJI’s meeting room, where we screened the film. Walter struggled. He was more terse than usual and looked at me frantically whenever someone asked him a question. I told him that he wouldn’t have to do any more presentations. His sister told me that he’d started wandering in the evenings and getting lost. He began drinking heavily, something he’d never done before. He told me that he was anxious all the time and that the alcohol calmed his nerves. Then one day he collapsed. He was at a hospital in Mobile when they reached me in Montgomery. I drove down to speak with his doctor, who told me that Walter had advancing dementia, likely trauma-induced, and that he would need constant care. The doctor also said the dementia would progress and that Walter would likely become incapacitated. We met with Walter’s family at our office and agreed that he should move to Huntsville to live with a relative who could provide consistent care. It worked for a while, but Walter became agitated there, and he was out of money, so he moved back to Monroeville, where his sister Katie Lee agreed to watch him. For a while, he did much better in Monroeville, but then his condition began to deteriorate again. Soon, Walter needed to be moved into the sort of facility that provided care for the elderly and infirm. Most places wouldn’t take him because he had been convicted of a felony. Even when we explained that he was wrongfully convicted and later proved innocent, we couldn’t get anyone to admit him. EJI now had a social worker on staff, Maria Morrison, who began working with Walter and his family to find a suitable placement for him. It was an extremely frustrating and maddening process. Maria eventually found a place in Montgomery that agreed to take Walter for a short stay—no longer than ninety days. He went there while we figured out what to do next. The whole thing made me incredibly sad. Our workload was increasing too quickly. I had just argued Joe Sullivan’s case at the U.S. Supreme Court, and I was anxiously awaiting that judgment. The Alabama Supreme Court had scheduled execution dates for several death row prisoners who had completed the appeals process. For years we’d been fearing what would happen when a sizable number of condemned prisoners exhausted their appeals. More than a dozen people were now vulnerable to execution dates, and we knew that it would be extremely difficult to block those executions given the current legal climate in Alabama, combined with the limits on federal court review in capital cases. I met with our staff, and we made the difficult decision to represent all of the people who were scheduled for execution and didn’t have counsel.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We stopped just in time. Tom’s boy (who improves on acquaintance—farcically rustic, of course, but his hands are magnificent, an octave and a half, I shd think) said there had been a fair few hares—but he’d been kicking about in the lane for hours, marking the spot, & it seemed fairly hopeless. At this stage I wd have been glad to find myself back in Oxford, & Sandy was pretty tragically keen on the idea of bed, a darkened room & a bottle of aspirins. Still, off we set, for what turned out to be an utterly futile morning’s sport, with poor visibility, a kind of clinging drizzle in the air, the mud making things very tricky, & not a sniff of a hare less than several hours old. Eventually Tim called off & we toiled through to another road, up which Tom’s boy miraculously appeared in Hubert’s car, looking absolutely terrified, with the lunch in the back. This was Hubert’s idea, rather than go over to the public house as normal where we had felt less than welcome before when S. was very drunk & indiscreet (not to say made up like a Regent Street margery); but the question was, where to have it? Some said in the car & Tim said we cd take it to the house of someone he knew not far away, but Eddie’s friend with the broken nose said he owed that someone a thousand pounds, so that wd never do. Then Tom’s boy suggested what he called the Old Castle, which was in the wood we cd see not far ahead, looming out of the mist. Tom said he thought it wd be acceptable to us—it was designed for just this, he said. The boy opined that it was an old place, but Tom scorned this vigorously & said it was just a ‘make-believe’, a ‘fairy-tale castle’, so we gathered it was some kind of folly or woodland lodge. We went on up the lane & then cut along the side of a field. The fence at the edge of the wood was no more than a few rotten posts, sticking out of the bracken. Many of the trees were dead or decrepit, & there was a surprising number of yews, which made the wood even darker. It must have been deathly quiet when free of people like us, swearing and pranking about. Sandy & I rather fell back & came on after the others, arm-in-arm, enjoying the melancholy mood, I thought, until S. said ‘God, I feel sick!’ & I realised his was the silence of a man who’s had too much the night before. I cd see too that he felt anxious about Tim, from the way he pretended to pay no attention to him & then I wd catch him looking at him through his eyebrows—full of humiliated fondness.

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

  He chuckled, and people laughed. I met Herbert’s bride and her family and spent the next forty-five minutes with one eye on the clock, knowing that at 10:00 P.M. the guards would take Herbert to the back, and we would never see him alive again. Herbert tried to keep things light. He told his family how he had persuaded me to take his case and bragged that I only represented people who were smart and charming. “He’s too young to have represented me at trial, but if he had been there I wouldn’t be on death row now.” He said it with a smile, but I was starting to feel shaken. I was really struck at how hard he was working to make everyone around him feel better in the face of his own death. I had never seen him so energetic and gracious. His family and I smiled and laughed, but all of us felt the strain of the moment. His wife became more and more tearful as the minutes ticked away. Shortly before 10 P.M ., the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the warden, and several other men wearing suits gestured to the visitation officer. She came into the room meekly and regretfully said, “It’s time, folks. We’ve got to end the visit. Say your goodbyes.” I watched the men in the hallway; they had clearly been expecting the officer to do something more decisive and effective. They wanted things to proceed on schedule and were clearly ready to move to the next stage to prepare for the execution. One of the state officials walked over to the guard when she left the room and pointed at his watch. Inside the room, Herbert’s wife began to sob. She put her arms around his neck and refused to let him go. After a couple of minutes, her crying turned into groaning, distressed and desperate. The officials in the lobby were growing more impatient and gestured at the visitation officer, who came back into the room. “I’m sorry,” she said as firmly as she could muster, “but you have to leave now.” She looked at me, and I looked away. Herbert’s wife began sobbing again. Her sister and other family members began to cry, too. Herbert’s wife grabbed him even more tightly. I hadn’t thought about how difficult this moment would be. It was surreal in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In an instant a flood of sadness and tragedy had overtaken everyone, and I began to worry that it would be impossible for this family to leave Herbert. By now the officials were angry. I looked through the window and saw the warden radio for more officers to come into the area. Someone else gestured for the officer to go back into the room and bring the family members out. I heard them tell her not to come out without the family. The officer looked frantic.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I didn't know Colin well, hadn't much liked him, couldn't see why Dawn should have liked him—loved him—either. He popped into the back bar of the George sometimes, forty-fiveish, lean, straight-looking, in honey-coloured cords with turn-ups, suede brogues, striped shirts. He was plausible, unamusing, a genuine connoisseur of English furniture. Dawn more than hinted that he was no thrill in bed, but had the sweetest nature; he was certainly an angel to him in his first big scare, when he thought he was going to die. But he was not a terminus I could ever have predicted to the line of lovers in which I was the first and over which I kept a futile, regretful watch. Dawn was at ease in the shop. The last time I talked to him he was pottering around there, and we sat among the merchandise, me in a snug little Windsor chair with a £700 price-tag, him in the carver of an eight-piece Regency dining suite which crowded vacantly behind him and was marked at six thousand. At one point I watched him nearly persuade an American couple to buy a commode, and smiled at the dumb camp with which he pulled out the drawer with the china po still in situ. Later we stood in front of a time-foxed mirror, and I hugged him loosely, beefily, from behind. He was thin, seemed breakable, like something priceless he was selling. The mirror was meant for a mantelpiece, we should have been toasting ourselves at a big log fire. Our talk had been blandly constructive, but it faltered rather as we held each other's gaze in the spotted depths where everything was reversed. I thought, he is looking at his death. He slipped free and started talking antiques. He knew a lot by now; and if the journey of his heart was inscrutable to me I could follow the steps of his career more confidently. Perhaps it had all been a slow winding down towards this precious shop, its still, polish-scented air, caught in the tradeless doldrums of a deep recession. But for a long time it had seemed a different progress.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  through my mouth so the smell won’t drive me crazy. I never used to notice such smells before, but day in and day out putting wax between their legs, I can’t help it, my nose has be come very nosey. I’m not so nosey that I ask them questions or anything, but these ladies tell me anyway about why they like to be waxed down there. These thin-thin ladies like Mrs. Nariman and Mrs. Dastur say that it makes them feel clean, because there’s no hair for anything to get stuck to down there. Then the gray hair ladies like Mrs. Patel and Mrs. Loelka say it makes them feel like innocent little girls again, and they even talk with gig gly, high voices. But worst of all are the lazy, fat ones like Mrs. Singh and Mrs. Vaswani, who tell me it’s so much better than getting a massage, giving so much more energy to the body, keeping the blood going all day and all night. Mostly I don’t listen to what they say, but one lady, Mrs. D’Souza, told me a very sad story. She said that she was mar ried so many years, and her husband never liked to do the man’s work in her and so they had no children. Finally she got angry and asked him what was wrong with him and he said that it was all her fault, that the hair on her thing was so rough that it poked like pins right into his skin so he couldn’t come near her. Poor man! Since then this lady makes me wax her thing every week, even when I can’t find one single hair. The whole time, she lies there saying prayers to Mother Mary. At least these days someone like Mrs. D’Souza can wax. In olden days what must have happened to these poor ladies? My mother in the village still lives like in olden times. I tried to explain to her that I do waxing to make money, but she just can’t understand. She stays in the house all day, covered from head to toe in her cotton sari, so how will she under stand? These city ladies are not like that. They understand

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  James liked the insularity of his flat, liked having a place all to himself, but was clearly affected by this mood of transience, a sense of valuelessness despite the climbing prices and the mortgage. He could never bring himself to do much to it, and though he loved pictures seemed not to notice the half-furnished bareness of his own few rooms. He had a fine Piranesi—all tumbled masonry and sprouting bushes—that he had bought years ago in a sale but had never framed. It was propped, sagging in its mount, on the mantelpiece, above the dusty and ornate black ironwork of the blocked-off grate. There were comfortable, nondescript armchairs, and a heavyweight stereo system. He was obsessed with Shostakovich and had innumerable records of baleful quartets and sarcastic little songs. They put me into a gloom and a fidget within seconds but I think their bleakness met some otherwise inarticulate inner compulsion of his own, of a piece perhaps with the featurelessness of the apartment and his fatalistic disdain of possessions. I heated up some coffee in the kitchen. James’s life—like Phil’s in a way—followed such awkward and demanding patterns, was so thrown out for the service of others, that ordinary things like mealtimes and provisions obeyed a quite different logic. Often he would live for weeks on three-minute snacks, and he was used to breakfasting at five in the morning or lunching at five in the afternoon. The fridge and cupboards were always full of little items to eat, many of them bought from the local Japanese supermarket. I riffled through packets of seaweed, red-hot crackers and the sprouts of various beans before deciding that coffee alone, perhaps, would be the thing. There were two kinds of specialist publication James took. As I sat on a stool and leafed through to the end of the Guardian, I was alarmed to find one of them underneath, lying on the kitchen work-top. This was Update, a medical monthly that kept GPs abreast of the latest in sores, goitres, growths and malformations of all kinds. The articles were sober to a fault, and cast an assumption of disturbing normality over conditions which the accompanying photographs showed to be quite revoltingly unusual. This effect was worsened by the colour spectrum used, a flashlight glare which lent to the contorted limbs, the misted-over eyes and weeping wounds the high tonality of well-hung game. It was hard to imagine looking forward to the arrival of Update as one might to that of Autocar or Hampshire Life.