Shame

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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  Around eight in the evening, the hall would house an accumulation of greatcoats and overshoes. In a committee room, next to the library, at a long baize-covered table (where those beautifully pointed pencils had been laid out), my father and his colleagues would gather to discuss some phase of their opposition to the Tsar. Above the hubbub of voices, a tall clock in a dark corner would break into Westminster chimes; and beyond the committee room were mysterious depths—storerooms, a winding staircase, a pantry of sorts—where my cousin Yuri and I used to pause with drawn pistols on our way to Texas and where one night the police placed a fat, blear-eyed spy who went laboriously down on his knees before our librarian, Lyudmila Borisovna Grinberg, when discovered. But how on earth could I discuss all this with schoolteachers? 5The reactionary press never ceased to attack my father’s party, and I had got quite used to the more or less vulgar cartoons which appeared from time to time—my father and Milyukov handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry and that sort of thing. But one day, in the winter of 1911 I believe, the most powerful of the Rightist newspapers employed a shady journalist to concoct a scurrilous piece containing insinuations that my father could not let pass. Since the well-known rascality of the actual author of the article made him “non-duelable” (neduelesposobnïy, as the Russian dueling code had it), my father called out the somewhat less disreputable editor of the paper in which the article had appeared. A Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety. It took the editor several days to make up his mind whether or not to accept the challenge. On the last of these days, a Monday, I went, as usual, to school. In consequence of my not reading the newspapers, I was absolutely ignorant of the whole thing. Sometime during the day I became aware that a magazine opened at a certain page was passing from hand to hand and causing titters. A well-timed swoop put me in possession of what proved to be the latest copy of a cheap weekly containing a lurid account of my father’s challenge, with idiotic comments on the choice of weapons he had offered his foe. Sly digs were taken at his having reverted to a feudal custom that he had criticized in his own writings. There was also a good deal about the number of his servants and the number of his suits. I found out that he had chosen for second his brother-in-law, Admiral Kolomeytsev, a hero of the Japanese war. During the battle of Tsushima, this uncle of mine, then holding the rank of captain, had managed to bring his destroyer alongside the burning flagship and save the naval commander-in-chief.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  4Belonging, as he did by choice, to the great classless intelligentsia of Russia, my father thought it right to have me attend a school that was distinguished by its democratic principles, its policy of nondiscrimination in matters of rank, race and creed, and its up-to-date educational methods. Apart from that, Tenishev School differed in nothing from any other school in time or space. As in all schools, the boys tolerated some teachers and loathed others, and, as in all schools, there was a constant interchange of obscene quips and erotic information. Being good at games, I would not have found the whole business too dismal if only my teachers had been less intent in trying to save my soul. They accused me of not conforming to my surroundings; of “showing off” (mainly by peppering my Russian papers with English and French terms, which came naturally to me); of refusing to touch the filthy wet towels in the washroom; of fighting with my knuckles instead of using the slaplike swing with the underside of the fist adopted by Russian scrappers. The headmaster who knew little about games, though greatly approving of their consociative virtues, was suspicious of my always keeping goal in soccer “instead of running about with the other players.” Another thing that provoked resentment was my driving to and from school in an automobile and not traveling by streetcar or horsecab as the other boys, good little democrats, did. With his face all screwed up in a grimace of disgust, one teacher suggested to me that the least I could do was to have the automobile stop two or three blocks away, so that my schoolmates might be spared the sight of a liveried chauffeur doffing his cap. It was as if the school were allowing me to carry about a dead rat by the tail with the understanding that I would not dangle it under people’s noses. The worst situation, however, arose from the fact that even then I was intensely averse to joining movements or associations of any kind. I enraged the kindest and most well-meaning among my teachers by declining to participate in extracurricular group work—debating societies with the solemn election of officers and the reading of reports on historical questions, and, in the higher grades, more ambitious gatherings for the discussion of current political events. The constant pressure upon me to belong to some group or other never broke my resistance but led to a state of tension that was hardly alleviated by everybody harping upon the example set by my father.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  I must tell you that during this ambulatory conver- sation, in order to prevent suspicion, they frequently passed to and fro before the bench on which the good women were seated, taking care always to talk of trivial and indifferent matters, and now and then romping in the garden. After the old ladies had been accustomed to the noise for half an hour, Jacques made a sign to Olivier, who played his part with the other girl so well, that she did not notice the two lovers going into an or- chard full of cherries, and inclosed with thick hedges of roses and very tall gooseberry-bushes. They pretended to go into a corner of the orchard to pluck almonds, but it was to pluck prunes. There Jacques, instead of giving his mistress a green gown, gave her a red one, for the colour flushed into her cheeks to find herself surprised before she was aware. They had so quickly gathered their prunes, because they were ripe, that Olivier could not have believed it, but that the girl drooped her head, and looked so ashamed. This betokened the truth to him, for before she walked with her head erect, without any fear that the vein in her eye, which ought to be red, should be seen to have the azure hue. Perceiving her confusion, Jacques recalled her to her usual deportment by suitable remonstrances. The lovers took two or three more turns about the garden, but not without much crying and sobbing on the part of the fair one. " Alas !" she exclaimed, "was it for this you loved me ? If I could have thought it — my Fifth day\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 387 God ! What shall I do ? I am undone for ever. What account will you make of me henceforth, at least if you are one of those who love only for pleasure ? Oh, that I had died before committing such a fault!" Then fol- lowed another violent burst of tears. But Jacques ex- erted himself so much to console her, and made such promises, confirmed by so many oaths, that before they had taken three more turns about the garden, Jacques made another sign to his friend, and they entered the orchard again by another path. In spite of all "^he could do, she could not help receiving more pleasure from this second green gown than from the first. In short, she liked it so well that they resolved then and there to seek means for meeting oftener and more commodiously, until such time as her father "should be more favourably inclined.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  “Oh, yes,” she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. “Yes, I know all that,” and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the déjà vu. A streak of sectarianism ran through her direct ancestry. She went to church only at Lent and Easter. The schismatic mood revealed itself in her healthy distaste for the ritual of the Greek Catholic Church and for its priests. She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need in the support of any dogma. The appalling insecurity of an afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts. Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  becoming my mother draped in my fathers bastard ambition growing dark secrets out from between her thighs and night comes into me like a fever my hands grip a flaming sword that screams while an arrogant woman masquerading as a fish plunges it deeper and deeper into the heart we both share like beggars on this moment of time where the space ships land I have died too many deaths that were not mine. A Litany for Survival For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours; For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive. Portrait Strong women know the taste of their own hatred I must always be building nests in a windy place I want the safety of oblique numbers that do not include me a beautiful woman with ugly moments secret and patient as the amused and ponderous elephants catering to Hannibal’s ambition as they swayed on their own way home. Therapy Trying to see you my eyes grow confused it is not your face they are seeking fingering through your spaces like a hungry child even now I do not want to make a poem I want to make you more and less a part from my self. Recreation Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen neither care nor profit whether we write or not but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting we cut the leash you create me against your thighs hilly with images moving through our word countries my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. Touching you I catch midnight

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  After the Catholic came the Protestant—a Lutheran of Jewish extraction. He will have to figure here under the name of Lenski. My brother and I went with him, late in 1910, to Germany, and after we came back in January of the following year, and began going to school in St. Petersburg, Lenski stayed on for about three years to help us with our homework. It was during his reign that Mademoiselle, who had been with us since the winter of 1905, finally gave up her struggle against intruding Muscovites and returned to Lausanne. Lenski had been born in poverty and liked to recall that between graduating from the Gymnasium of his native town, on the Black Sea, and being admitted to the University of St. Petersburg he had supported himself by ornamenting stones from the shingled shore with bright seascapes and selling them as paperweights. He had an oval pink face, short-lashed, curiously naked eyes behind a rimless pince-nez and a pale blue shaven head. We discovered at once three things about him: he was an excellent teacher; he lacked all sense of humor; and, in contrast to our previous tutors, he was someone we needed to defend. The security he felt as long as our parents were around might be shattered at any time in their absence by some sally on the part of our aunts. For them, my father’s fierce writings against pogroms and other governmental practices were but the whims of a wayward nobleman, and I often overheard them discussing with horror Lenski’s origins and my father’s “insane experiments.” After such an occasion, I would be dreadfully rude to them and then burst into hot tears in the seclusion of a water closet. Not that I particularly liked Lenski. There was something irritating about his dry voice, his excessive neatness, the way he had of constantly wiping his glasses with a special cloth or paring his nails with a special gadget, his pedantically correct speech and, perhaps most of all, his fantastic morning custom of marching (seemingly straight out of bed but already shod and trousered, with red braces hanging behind and a strange netlike vest enveloping his plump hairy torso) to the nearest faucet and limiting there his ablutions to a thorough sousing of his pink face, blue skull and fat neck, followed by some lusty Russian nose-blowing, after which he marched, with the same purposeful steps, but now dripping and purblind, back to his bedroom where he kept in a secret place three sacrosanct towels (incidentally he was so brezgliv, in the Russian untranslatable sense, that he would wash his hands after touching banknotes or banisters).

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The New Left, civil rights, and Black Power movements of the 1960s had helped to jump- start the second-wave feminist movement, yet identity politics was not the possession of the left alone. Richard Nixon rode into office in 1968 by claiming to represent the interests of the “Silent Majority” of Americans who saw themselves as hardworking, middle American homeowners dutifully paying their taxes and demanding little of the federal government. 1 One could argue that identity has always been a part of politics, that aspiring people adopt identities the same way that they change their style of dress. Yet this is only part of the story. Some people can choose an identity, but many more have an identity chosen for them. White trash folks never took on that name for themselves, nor did the rural poor describe their plight in recognition of having been cast out of society as “waste people,” “rubbish,” or “clay-eaters.” As we have seen, Union soldiers and Lincoln Republicans embraced the intended insult of “mudsill” when it was hurled at them from across the Mason-Dixon Line. But that was because they possessed the cultural power to shape political discourse. The dispossessed had no such power. Eventually, self-identified “white trash” who had come up in the world began defending their depressed class background as a distinct (and perversely noble) heritage. Before the end of the 1980s, “white trash” was rebranded as an ethnic identity, with its own readily identifiable cultural forms: food, speech patterns, tastes, and, for some, nostalgic memories. If immigrants had foreign origins to reflect on, white trash invented a country of their own within the United States. In its most benign incarnation, this substratum of the amorphous American class system was no longer to be categorized as an inferior “breed” (with undesirable genetic traits) so much as a product of cultural breeding that could easily be shed and later recovered—a tradition, or identity, that one did not have to shy away from in order to gain acceptance in mainstream society. In its worst form, however, white trash identity dredged up a person’s early traumatic experiences, repressed childhood memories. A not insignificant part of that was sexual deviance, a problem that still hovers over white trash America today. Hollywood gave the country an enduring symbol of that deviance, and the unwanted’s recourse to barbarism, in its adaptation of James Dickey’s violent thriller Deliverance (1970).

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

  In the evening he used to send me to bed early: even before nine o’clock, though Vernon always let me stay up with him reading till eleven or twelve o’clock. One night I went up to my bedroom on the next floor, but returned almost at once to get a book and have a read in bed, which was a rare treat to me. I was afraid to go into the sitting-room; but crept into the dining-room where there were a few books, though not so interesting as those in the parlour; the door between the two rooms was ajar. Suddenly I heard my father say: “He’s a little Fenian.” “Fenian”, repeated Vernon in amazement, “really, Governor, I don’t believe he knows the meaning of the word; he’s only just eleven, you must remember.” “I tell you” broke in my father, “he talked of James Stephen, the Fenian Head-Centre, today with wild admiration. He’s a Fenian alright, but how did he catch it?” “I’m sure I don’t know”, replied Vernon, “he reads a great deal and is very quick: I’ll find out about it.” “No, no!” said my father, “the thing is to cure him: he must go to some school in England, that’ll cure him.” I waited to hear no more but got my book and crept upstairs; so because I loved the Fenian Head-Centre I must be a Fenian. “How stupid Father is”, was my summing up, but England tempted me, England—life was opening out. It was at the Royal School in the summer after my sex-experiences with Strangways and Howard that I first began to notice dress. A boy in the sixth form named Milman had taken a liking to me and though he was five years older than I was, he often went with Howard and myself for walks. He was a stickler for dress, said that no one but “cads” (a name I learned from him for the first time) and common folk would wear a made-up tie: he gave me one of his scarves and showed me how to make a running lover’s knot in it. On another occasion he told me that only “cads” would wear trowsers frayed or repaired. Was it Milman’s talk that made me self-conscious or my sex-awakening through Howard and Strangways? T couldn’t say; but at this time I had a curious and prolonged experience. My brother Vernon hearing me once complain of my dress, got me three suits of clothes, one in black with an Eton jacket for best and a tall hat and the others in tweeds: he gave me shirts, too, and ties, and I began to take great care of my appearance. At our evening parties the girls and young women (Vernon’s friends) were kinder to me than ever and I found myself wondering whether I really looked “nice” as they said.

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

  2. Its not being eaten uncooked shows us that we must not believe that Jesus is a mere man. Also, its not being cooked with water shows that we must not believe that Jesus was conceived or born like other men. Again, because they ate it cooked with fire, we must believe that the Incarnation of the Word and the consecration of His Body are worked by the power of the Holy Ghost. 3. They were commanded to eat the head of the lamb with the feet and the purtenance. From that we must believe that in this Sacrament, Christ is contained and received whole and undivided, with Godhead, Body, and Soul. (2) The second part of this type is the three accompaniments with which they were wont to eat the lamb: 1, wild lettuce; 2, unleavened bread; 3, the lamb’s blood. The wild lettuce signifies sorrow for sin; the unleavened bread signifies a pure intention with good works; the lamb’s blood signifies the memory and imitation of our Lord’s Passion, by which things the faithful soul ought to be ready. 1. St. Gregory says, ‘The wild lettuce is very bitter, and the flesh of the Paschal lamb is to be eaten with this, because we ought to have very great sorrow for our sins when we receive the Body of our Lord, that the bitterness of penance may take away all love of a sinful life.’ 2. St. Paul tells us not to feast with the old leaven, that is, in the corruption of pride, which is against God; nor with the leaven of malice, which is against our neighbour; nor with the leaven of wickedness, which is against ourselves; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, that is, in freedom from sin and in the truth of good works; so that we may strive always to live in newness of life, without any deceitfulness of the olden leaven. St. Gregory says, ‘He eats unleavened bread who does good works without that corruption of vain-glory which comes from the leaven of malice.’ ‘He eats bread without the leaven of malice who does works of mercy without admixture of sin, taking care not to gain wrongly what in a sense he gives rightly. This is the sacrifice of praise about which Scripture speaks. He offers a sacrifice of praise with leaven who brings to the Lord a sacrifice of that which he has gained by robbery in the leaven of wickedness.’ Now, the soul that ate leavened bread in the forbidden time had to perish from Israel. To eat leavened bread thus is to take delight in any filthiness of sin which we commit in ourselves.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 189 ff.). Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own. I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has 'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not. Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Around eight in the evening, the hall would house an accumulation of greatcoats and overshoes. In a committee room, next to the library, at a long baize-covered table (where those beautifully pointed pencils had been laid out), my father and his colleagues would gather to discuss some phase of their opposition to the Tsar. Above the hubbub of voices, a tall clock in a dark corner would break into Westminster chimes; and beyond the committee room were mysterious depths—storerooms, a winding staircase, a pantry of sorts—where my cousin Yuri and I used to pause with drawn pistols on our way to Texas and where one night the police placed a fat, blear-eyed spy who went laboriously down on his knees before our librarian, Lyudmila Borisovna Grinberg, when discovered. But how on earth could I discuss all this with schoolteachers? 5The reactionary press never ceased to attack my father’s party, and I had got quite used to the more or less vulgar cartoons which appeared from time to time—my father and Milyukov handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry and that sort of thing. But one day, in the winter of 1911 I believe, the most powerful of the Rightist newspapers employed a shady journalist to concoct a scurrilous piece containing insinuations that my father could not let pass. Since the well-known rascality of the actual author of the article made him “non-duelable” (neduelesposobnïy, as the Russian dueling code had it), my father called out the somewhat less disreputable editor of the paper in which the article had appeared. A Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety. It took the editor several days to make up his mind whether or not to accept the challenge. On the last of these days, a Monday, I went, as usual, to school. In consequence of my not reading the newspapers, I was absolutely ignorant of the whole thing. Sometime during the day I became aware that a magazine opened at a certain page was passing from hand to hand and causing titters. A well-timed swoop put me in possession of what proved to be the latest copy of a cheap weekly containing a lurid account of my father’s challenge, with idiotic comments on the choice of weapons he had offered his foe. Sly digs were taken at his having reverted to a feudal custom that he had criticized in his own writings. There was also a good deal about the number of his servants and the number of his suits. I found out that he had chosen for second his brother-in-law, Admiral Kolomeytsev, a hero of the Japanese war. During the battle of Tsushima, this uncle of mine, then holding the rank of captain, had managed to bring his destroyer alongside the burning flagship and save the naval commander-in-chief.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Then stealing up into the alcove where the princess was fast asleep, he got into bed to her without ceremony, re- gardless of her high birth and the obligations he was under to her, and without having in the first instance ob- tained her consent. The first intimation she had of his arrival was to find herself in his arms ; but being- astrons: woman she broke loose from his grasp, and, demanding who he was, made such good use of her hands and nails that he tried to stuff the quilt into her mouth for fear she should cry out. But he never could accomplish his purpose, for as she found that he was doing his best to dishonour her, she did her best to defend herself, and called out to her lady of honour, an aged and very pru- dent woman, who slept in the same room, and she has- tened in her shift to her mistress's aid. The gentleman, finding he was discovered, was so much afraid of being recognized that he hurried away through his trap-door as fast as he could, no less over- come at the plight in which he returned from his enter- prise than he had been keen-set and confident when he entered upon it. The candle was still burning on the table before his mirror, which showed his face all scratched and bitten, and the blood streaming from it over his fine shirt. " Thou art rightly served, per- nicious beauty ! " he said, apostrophising his own lacer- ated visage. " Thy vain promises set upon an impossi- ble enterprise, and one which, far from increasing my good fortune, will, perhaps, bring upon me a world of trouble. What will become of me if she knows that I have committed this folly in violation of my promise .'' The least that can happen to me will be to be banished from her presence. Why did I employ fraud to steal what my birth and my good looks might have obtained for me by lawful ways } Could I expect to make myself 38 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE INnel 4 master of her heart by violence ? Ought I not have waited till love put me in possession of it in recompense for my patience and my long service ? For without love all the merits and power of man are nothing."

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

  A. The first way of eating the Body of our Lord is the sacramental way only. Bad Christians eat in this way. Being in mortal sin, and thus receiving with polluted lips the adorable Body of Jesus, they shut up their souls by their uncleanness and their hardness, as if with mud and stone, against the inflowing of the virtue of His goodness. These eat and do not eat. They eat, indeed, because they receive the Lord’s Body sacramentally; and yet they do not eat, because they do not receive the spiritual virtue of the Sacrament, that is, salvation of soul. St. Gregory says, ‘In sinners and unworthy receivers there are indeed the true Flesh and the true Blood of Christ, that is, by presence and essence, but not with life-giving power.’ St. Augustin says, ‘He who is without Christ eats not His Flesh nor drinks His Blood; and if he daily receive the Sacrament of so great a thing, he receives it to judgment. He is without Christ who turns his heart away from Him and gives it up to sin. Such a one may be called wretched indeed, because so great a good as this comes to him often, and he neither receives nor perceives any spiritual gain.’ R. There are three kinds of persons among those who receive sacramentally only: (1) the malicious; (2) the deceitful; (3) the presumptuous. The first receive the Lord’s Body with a will to go on in sin. The second are hypocrites, who, seeming outwardly good and being inwardly bad, yet come to the Altar as if they were in a state of grace. The third are those who are bad in the highest degree, and yet dare presumptuously to go to Communion. We will consider the first two kinds in this Meditation, and the presumptuous in the next. (1) The first kind of bad communicants is the malicious. These draw near to God with their lips by receiving the Holy Sacrament, but their hearts are far from Him by their will to sin. Three great evils follow them: a, deepening of their sin; b, further separation from the grace of Christ; c, condemnation to unending punishment. a. St. Augustin says, ‘Because they have a will to go on sinning, I assert that they are darkened and not purified by receiving the Holy Eucharist.’ b. The longer they cherish their bad thoughts the worse they grow, and the more they are separated by them from God. c. St. Ambrose says in terrible words, ‘He is unworthy who comes to the Holy Eucharist with an indevout mind. He who abides in a will to sin is guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord; that is, he shall be punished as if he had slain Christ.’

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensible pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the represented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expectation of reward is not the self-satisfaction, and the mere apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about with him, and which is independent of the objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent. That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his powers to the end. One may say, however, that the normal provocative of self-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one holds in the world. "He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy am I." A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have planted?" [262] Whereas he who has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can really cope. The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips.

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

  One day my father sent for me and I went with a petty officer to his vessel in the harbor: my right ear had bled on to my collar. As soon as my father noticed it and saw the older scars, he got angry and took me back to the school and told Mrs. Frost what he thought of her, and her punishments. Immediately afterwards, it seems to me I was sent to live with my eldest brother Vernon, ten years older than myself, who was in lodgings with friends in Galway while going to the College. There I spent the next five years, which passed leaving a blank. I learned nothing in those years except how to play “tig”, “hide and seek”, “footer” and ball. I was merely a healthy, strong, little animal without an ache or pain or trace of thought. Then I remember an interlude at Belfast where Vernon and I lodged with an old Methodist who used to force me to go to church with him and drew on a little black skullcap during the Service, which filled me with shame and made me hate him. There is a period in life when every thing peculiar or individual, excites dislike and is in itself an offense. I learned here to “mitch” and lie simply to avoid school and to play, till my brother found I was coughing and having sent for a doctor, was informed that I had congestion of the lungs; the truth being that I played all day and never came home for dinner, seldom indeed before seven o’clock, when I knew Vernon would be back. I mention this incident because, while confined to the house, I discovered under the old Methodist’s bed, a set of doctor’s books with colored plates of the insides and the pudenda of men and women. I devoured all the volumes and bits of knowledge from them stuck to me for many a year. But curiously enough the main sex fact was not revealed to me then; but in talks a little later with boys of my own age. I learned nothing in Belfast but rules of games and athletics. My brother Vernon used to go to a gymnasium every evening and exercise and box. To my astonishment he was not among the best; so while he was boxing I began practicing this and that, drawing myself up till my chin was above the bar, and repeating this till one evening Vernon found I could do it thirty times running: his praise made me proud.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  21 Jackson and his supporters worked on a different image. During three successive presidential campaigns (1824, 1828, 1832), General Jackson was celebrated as “Old Hickory,” in sharp contrast to Crèvecoeur’s tame analogy of Americans as carefully cultivated plants. Rising up in the harsh hinterland of what was once the western extension of North Carolina, the Tennessean with the unbending will and rigid style of command was a perfect match for the tough, dense wood of Indian bows and hickory switches from which he acquired his nickname. 22 Jackson’s personality was a crucial part of his democratic appeal as well as the animosity he provoked. He was the first presidential candidate to be bolstered by a campaign biography. He was not admired for statesmanlike qualities, which he lacked in abundance in comparison to his highly educated rivals John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. His supporters adored his rough edges, his land hunger, and his close identification with the Tennessee wilderness. As a representative of America’s cracker country, Jackson unquestionably added a new class dimension to the meaning of democracy. But the message of Jackson’s presidency was not about equality so much as a new style of aggressive expansion. In 1818, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida without presidential approval; as president, he supported the forced removal of the Cherokees from the southeastern states and willfully ignored the opinion of the Supreme Court. Taking and clearing the land, using violent means if necessary, and acting without legal authority, Jackson was arguably the political heir of the cracker and squatter. • • • Over the two decades leading up to Andrew Jackson’s election as president, the squatter and cracker gradually became America’s dominant poor backcountry breed. Not surprisingly, it was their physical environment that most set them apart. In 1810, the ornithologist and poet Alexander Wilson traveled along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, cataloguing not only the sky-bound birds but also the earth-hugging squatters, whom he found to be an equally curious species. Writing for a Philadelphia magazine, Wilson identified their “grotesque log cabins” that scarred the otherwise picturesque wilderness. Weeds surrounded the cabins and huts that the naturalists happened upon. The land showed no sign of toil. Wilson described these questionable homes in mocking poetry as a “cavern’d ruin,” which “frown’d a fouler cave within.” The entire family slept on a single bed, or as Wilson put it, “where nightly kennel’d all.” Kittens crawled into a broken chest, a pig took shelter in a pot, and a leaky roof let in the rain. The squatter patriarch stared from beneath his tattered hat, wearing a shirt “defiled and torn,” his “face inlaid with dirt and soot.”

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

  When King Sennacherib … slew many of the children of Israel, Tobias buried their bodies. But when it was told the king he commanded him to be slain, and took away all his substance. But Tobias, fleeing naked away with his son and with his wife, lay hid, for many loved him. Tob. 1:21–23. c. For the crown; Behold David is hid in the hill of Hachila. 1 Kings 26:1. 2. Bodily beauty; a. By poorness of dress; I have sewn sackcloth upon my skin, and have covered my flesh with ashes. Job 16:16. He said to her, That man is my master: but she quickly took her cloak and covered herself. Gen. 24:65. If a woman be not covered, let her be shorn. But if it be a shame to a woman to be shorn or made bald, let her cover her head.… Therefore ought the woman to have a power over her head because of the Angels. 1 Cor. 11:6, 10. b. By austerities; God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world. Gal. 6:14. c. By perseverance in good; Thou hast made his soul to waste away like a spider. Ps. 38:12. The yoke and the thong bend a stiff neck, and continual labours bow a slave. Ecclus. 33:27. Do not consider me that I am brown, because the sun hath altered my colour. Cantic. 1:5. There is no beauty in him nor comeliness; and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness that we should be desirous of him. Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmity; and his look was, as it were, hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed him not. Is. 53:2, 3. 3. The intention of good works; The kingdom of Heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field: which a man having found hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field. St. Matt. 13:44. a. Alms-deeds; When thou dost an alms-deed sound not a trumpet before there, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and the streets, that they may be honoured by men. Amen I say to you, they have received their reward. But when thou dost alms let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth; that the alms may be in secret; and thy Father who seeth in secret will repay thee. St. Matt. 6:2–4.

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

  One day my father sent for me and I went with a petty officer to his vessel in the harbor: my right ear had bled on to my collar. As soon as my father noticed it and saw the older scars, he got angry and took me back to the school and told Mrs. Frost what he thought of her, and her punishments. Immediately afterwards, it seems to me I was sent to live with my eldest brother Vernon, ten years older than myself, who was in lodgings with friends in Galway while going to the College. There I spent the next five years, which passed leaving a blank. I learned nothing in those years except how to play “tig”, “hide and seek”, “footer” and ball. I was merely a healthy, strong, little animal without an ache or pain or trace of thought. Then I remember an interlude at Belfast where Vernon and I lodged with an old Methodist who used to force me to go to church with him and drew on a little black skullcap during the Service, which filled me with shame and made me hate him. There is a period in life when every thing peculiar or individual, excites dislike and is in itself an offense. I learned here to “mitch” and lie simply to avoid school and to play, till my brother found I was coughing and having sent for a doctor, was informed that I had congestion of the lungs; the truth being that I played all day and never came home for dinner, seldom indeed before seven o’clock, when I knew Vernon would be back. I mention this incident because, while confined to the house, I discovered under the old Methodist’s bed, a set of doctor’s books with colored plates of the insides and the pudenda of men and women. I devoured all the volumes and bits of knowledge from them stuck to me for many a year. But curiously enough the main sex fact was not revealed to me then; but in talks a little later with boys of my own age. I learned nothing in Belfast but rules of games and athletics. My brother Vernon used to go to a gymnasium every evening and exercise and box. To my astonishment he was not among the best; so while he was boxing I began practicing this and that, drawing myself up till my chin was above the bar, and repeating this till one evening Vernon found I could do it thirty times running: his praise made me proud.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " Pour cetts fois, la Reine de Navarre D'un c'etoit moi naif autant que rare, Entretiendra dans ces vers le lectear.'' Fifth day.] QUEEN- OF NA VARRE. 397 there is no greater pain than to love and not to be loved." '• In order to be loved," said Parlamente, " one should turn to those who love ; but very often those women who will not love are the most loved, and those men love most who are the least loved." " That reminds me," said Oisille, " of a tale which I had not intended to introduce among good ones." " Pray tell it us," said Simontault. " I will do so with pleasure," replied Oisille. NOVEL XLVI. A sanctimonious Cordelier attempts to debauch the wife of a judge, and actually ravishes ayoung lady, whose mother had foolishly authorized him to chastise her for 1} ing too late in bed. In Angouleme, where Count Charles, father of King Francis, often resided, there was a Cordelier named De Vale, who was esteemed a learned man and a great preacher. One Advent he preached in the town before the count, and was so admired that those who knew him eagerly invited him to dinner. Among these was the Judge of Exempts of the county, who had married a handsome and virtuous wife, of whom the Cordelier was dying for love, though he had not the boldness to tell her so ; she, however, perceived it, and held him and his passion in disdain. One day he observed her going up to the garret all alone, and thinking to surprise her, he went up after her : but on hearing his steps she turned round, and asked him whither he was going. " I am 398 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [JVozW 46^ coming after you," he replied. " I have a secret to tell vou." " Don't come after me, good father," said the judge's wife, " for I do not choose to talk with such as you in secret, and if you come another step higher you shall repent of it." The friar, seeing her alone, took no heed of her words, and ran up ; but she, being a woman of spirit, as soon as he was at the top gave him a kick in the belly, saying, " Down, down, sir," and sent him rolling from the top to the bottom. The poor friar was so much ashamed of his discomfiture that he forgot his hurt, and ran out of the town as fast as he could, for he was sure she would not conceal the matter from her husband. No more she did, nor from the count and countess, so that the Cordelier durst not appear again in their presence.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  O, I was awesome to behold! Myself a leopard, wild and bold. His flaming rage, his yells were mine —a subdued caterwauling sounded behind me; it might have come from young Rzhevuski, with whom I used to attend dancing classes, or Alec Nitte who was to win some renown a year or two later for poltergeist phenomena, or one of my cousins. Gradually, as Lenski’s reedy voice went on and on, I became aware that, with a few exceptions—such as, perhaps, Samuel Rosoff, a sensitive schoolmate of mine—the audience was secretly scoffing at the performance, and that afterward I would have to cope with various insulting remarks. I felt a quiver of acute pity for Lenski—for the meek folds at the back of his shaven head, for his pluck, for the nervous movements of his pointer, over which, in cold, kittenish paw-play, the colors would sometimes slip, when he brought it too close to the screen. Toward the end, the monotony of the proceedings became quite unbearable; the flustered operator could not find the fourth slide, having got it mixed up with the used ones, and while Lenski patiently waited in the dark, some of the spectators started to project the black shadows of their raised hands upon the frightened white screen, and presently, one ribald and agile boy (could it be I after all—the Hyde of my Jekyll?) managed to silhouette his foot, which, of course, started some boisterous competition. When at last the slide was found and flashed onto the screen, I was reminded of a journey, in my early childhood, through the long, dark St. Gothard Tunnel, which our train entered during a thunderstorm, but it was all over when we emerged, and then Blue, green and orange, wonderstruck With its own loveliness and luck, Across a crag a rainbow fell And captured there a poised gazelle.