Yearning

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 The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  And she always wore a old blue-flowered bonnet.” Daddy fans his hands behind his head to show the bonnet. “The sun was going down to the west, which was her right side. So that bonnet th’owed a shadow across’t her face. Kept us from seeing her. But I could tell by how she was stomping through those weeds that she was mad. Plus she’d already cut herself a piss elum pole about as long as she was tall. Like she’d got it in her head already to whup us. I whisper over my shoulder to A.D. not to tell her we went in. Just to say we watched the other boys. And he says okay. “Not a minute later she stops square on that path in front of me. ‘J.P.,’ she says, ‘you go in that river?’ “‘No’m,’ I says, ‘we just watched them other boys.’ And she says fine. Then she reaches that pole around behind me and taps A.D. on the shoulder. Just light enough to get his attention. ‘A.D., did you go in that river?’ And damned if he don’t say, ‘Yes’m. I went in, and he come in with me,’ And I thinks to myself, you sorry sonofabitch.” I watch Ben draw a cake pan of biscuits out of the oven. He uses a pointy bottle opener to pop a triangular hole in a brand-new yellow can of sugarcane syrup. I like to poke a hole in a biscuit with my thumb, then fill it with that syrup so it gushes out the sides when you bite down. I figure on doing that, which fills the back of my mouth up with longing for the sweetness of it. I’m still holding that sweetness like a thirst when Daddy starts up. “Lemme tell you fellas, my momma at that time wasn’t no bigger than Mary Marlene here.” He jerks his thumb at me so I can prove his mother’s tininess. I ignore this by faking big-time interest in slitting open the fat belly of this goose. “Probably didn’t weigh ninety pounds with boots on, my momma. Anyways, she took us out on the screened-in back porch—we slept out there in the summer. Started in on him with that pole and like to have killed him. Brought it down on his back in one narrow swatch, like she was trying to cut a groove through his flesh. I’d laugh like hell every time his eyes caught mine. I figured she was getting wore out on him. So’s my turn wouldn’t be as bad.” Shug says, “My daddy beat me and my brother thataways. Taking turns, so one watched the other.” “Now you’re interrupting!” Cooter says, slapping the table. “Why don’t nobody stop him interrupting?” The veins are standing out on Cooter’s neck. Ben tells him to get the plates down and stop feeling sorry for hisself. Daddy drops the mallard in the tub like he’s all of a sudden exhausted by thinking again about that whipping.

• From The Art of Memoir

  2.On proper names: “I have not given the right names to my teachers or fellow students. . . . But all these people are real, they are not composite portraits. In the case of my near relations, I have given real names [as with] neighbors, servants and friends.” 3.On the nature of her memory: “There are several dubious points in this memoir. . . . Just when we got the flu seems to be arguable. According to newspaper accounts, we contracted it on the trip. This conflicts with the story that Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula brought it with them. My present memory supports the idea that someone was sick before we left, but perhaps we didn’t ‘know’ it was [that lethal] flu.” 4.Or on the nature of the false, implanted memory: “We did not see [our father draw a revolver]. . . . I heard the story from my other grandmother. When she told me, I had the feeling that I almost remembered it. That is, my mind promptly supplied me with a picture of it.” The memoirist’s truth has been devolving (or evolving) since Girlhood. In McCarthy’s later book, Intellectual Memoirs (1992), our culture’s truth transformation was nearing completion. She talks almost scornfully about “the fetishism of fact,” but in Girlhood, she’s still heeling to that notion. Whatever your deal with the reader, I argue for stating it up front, like Harry Crews in his 1978 A Childhood. His concept of “truth” is way more wiggly than the Wolffs’ and mine, but he admits it. With his first sentence, he embraces gossip and hearsay and all manner of apocrypha. My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born and takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. Lest you disparage this type of gossip, the gospels are probably all stories passed on by folks who heard them from other folks. Without other people’s stories, Crews cannot hook himself to his long-lost ghost father, and we embrace his method partly from empathy for his yearning for his old man—and partly because it’s all so fun to read. Did what I have set down here as memory actually happen? Did the two men say what I have recorded, think what I have said they

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It is still a rare thing for most of us to sit with what we feel, how we feel, the reality that we carry memories and feelings from what our ancestors experienced, and that we carry our current continuous collective trauma together. The pain can open to other feelings, more nuanced and clear. It can begin to make authentic connection and collectivity more possible. Every mass movement, every collective effort, is made up of relationships that exist between members of the larger group. Around friends old and new, somatics helped me begin to gauge what I truly wanted and needed from connections, from political space. I got clearer on what I could offer. I got in touch with a feeling of restlessness and wandering that let me know when I didn’t want to be somewhere or with someone or with a political project. I could also feel the distinct energy of moving toward, or forward, that let me know when I did want to be around someone, did want to join in an effort from a place of authentic alignment, rather than obligation. This awareness extended until I could begin to feel when I wanted to be in a certain place, job, political project, or even city. And when it was time to go. Yes is an embodiment. Yes is a future. In physical connections, I was able to stay more present.77 I learned that I had a no, a visceral, clear “hell no.” If I listened to the no, if I honored it and set boundaries, it made more room for my yes. And the beautiful, miraculous new possibility is: I am able to stay present in my yes. I can feel the yes in person, I can feel it at a distance. I can feel my face flush, my heart pound, a smile I can’t swallow. I can feel my body get wet and warm, open. I can feel myself move toward an idea, a longing, a vision. I am a whole system; we are whole systems. We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out. For me, from that yes, I am learning to communicate in real time, both what I want and what I don’t want. To be with the twisting gut and pounding heart that don’t want to speak uncomfortable truths, the burrowing, masking tucked chin of shame, the circular, overthinking busyness of my brain, and with the deep breath and interconnected dignity that allow me to be more honest every day. To be with the tingling spine and warm solar plexus that hint that I am feeling love. To pull in my energy when I am in a situation where I need better boundaries. And to keep bringing my attention back to center, back to the present moment, to show up where I am.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  How to search for an absence. When Ma stews the apricots we steal, she never asks where we get them. She knows nothing belongs to us, and that’s why she won’t let us sit on chairs until she wraps them in cheesecloth or scrubs off our skin. We can’t put pictures on the walls, if we had any, or fully unpack— she still thinks we’ll have to give everything back. Jie’s mouth is still magnetized to the word sister, but outside of her dreams she’s stopped asking for names. Jie goes to church and her English has gotten so good she’s started reading aloud the billboards outside our house. One of them is the phone number of a divorce lawyer. One is for bail bonds. One is for a casino, which tempts Ba until Ma throws her quilt basket at him, tells him to sit down or she’ll snip his balls off and sew them to his earlobes. Jie and I can’t stop imagining Ba wearing his balls like earrings, and we laugh until we piss, the stains in our laps symmetrical. _ We dig beneath so many trees we’ve given them nicknames: The one with the bent knees. The one that sways like a drunk. The one with a woman’s hips. The gold is under none of them. It’s the earthquake that finally wounds a way to the gold: I sleep through it, but Jie claims it felt like the whole earth was operating on itself, scraping back its own skin, rearranging its organs. On our porch, one of the floorboards splits open and shakes off its scab of moss. Light spits from it and we flock to the crack like moths. Underneath the porch is a finger of gold, bedazzled with flies and reclined on a sheet of butcher paper. Ma dances on the kitchen table for a whole hour, her feet forgoing gravity. She stacks the gold on the not-altar, directly to the left of the photo so flat and dull in its frame. The gold is too exposed, like looking directly at someone’s bones. We are all looking at it now, the gold and the photo, our eyes alternating between the glow and its shadow, the payment and the cost. DAUGHTER Hu Gu Po (I) California, a generation later Mothers ago, there was a tiger spirit who wanted to live inside a woman. One night when the moon was as brown as a nipple, the tiger spirit braided itself into a rope of light and lowered itself into a woman’s mouth, rappeling down her throat and taking the name of Hu Gu Po. But the price of having a body is hunger.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  This article maps the initial leg of the long feminist journey to getting off—the intellectual foreplay, if you will, that preceded Pleasure Politics. It focuses on one of three distinct, personal, moments that helped me to identify specific challenges BFT faces in theorizing black women’s pleasure. The first takes place at a lecture at Stanford University, where a student’s query forced me to confront the dearth of available language in BFT to account for the ways the erotic can potentially shape BFT or how black ethnicity and US black transnational identities complicate the master narrative of black female sexuality. The second—a recently shared bit of family history—underscores what feminist novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to as “the danger of the single story” by elucidating the master narrative’s potential for erasure and excision in ways that foreclose possibilities of pleasure for black female subjectivities.59 The third identifies the pedagogical challenges in teaching students to read pleasure—both in black women’s visual culture and their own—when pleasure as an affective response is deemed illegitimate or uncritical. Or when black women’s cultural products are read solely through a representation politic that routinely discounts black female interiority. While interiority is widely understood as the quiet composite of mental, spiritual and psychological expression, black female interiority is that—and then some. I use the term specifically to excavate the broad range of feelings, desires, yearning, (erotic and otherwise) that were once deemed necessarily private by the “politics of silence.” Now frequently expressed in black women’s cultural expressions specifically for the purpose of observance and consumption, it demands a black feminist reckoning. Black female interiority is the codicil to cultural dissemblance. More than two decades ago, Evelynn M. Hammonds famously charged BFT with moving from a “politics of silence” about black women’s sexuality to a “politics of articulation.”60 Referencing an insular, triangulated conversation between historians, literary critics and feminist theorists, Hammonds conceded that black feminism’s long-standing focus on the politics of respectability, cultural dissemblance and similar discourses of resistance—interventions that theorized black women’s sexuality as an accumulation of unspeakable acts or positioned black women in “binary opposition to white women”—succeeded in identifying black women’s sexuality as a site of intersecting oppressions. What they failed to do, she argued, was to produce the “politics of articulation” necessary to disrupt them.61 Without it, Hammonds cautioned, these discourses inadvertently reified black female sexuality as pathologized, alternately invisible and hypervisible.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I tell you all houses are made of skin: Once you’ve left one, it stitches shut again. You say if it’s skin, it is always open. It’s made of holes, hairs, pores. It’s my own body I’m returning to. An hour in, your brother says he needs to pee. I say, Do it out the window. I’m not stopping. Your brother hunches, holds his bladder like it’s a bomb. I hear the door rattle open, the air outside climbing onto our laps. Your brother peeing through the crack in the door, ribbons of piss fluttering around us. Framing our flight in gold. His piss hits a windshield behind us and the man honks, swerves. You tell me to accelerate, press the pedal to mud, take us to the woman who birthed me who birthed you. The car shrinks to the size of your mouth. The radio has your voice in it and I remember the Dolly Parton song that was playing the time Jie and I ditched work to drive downtown. I asked Jie to translate the lyrics and she sang about sewing a coat of tongues, when all I wanted was to never know a needle again, to never be the girl at the factory who falls asleep and runs her thumb through the machine, stitching herself to what will be sold. You try to sing along to the radio, but there’s only static on. Your brother once convinced you that static is an alien language spoken by the moonborn, so you listen as if it means something. You bob up and down in the backseat like a buoy. A warning: The water ahead will wreck me. Keep away. The only thing that keeps my hands on the wheel: If I don’t look at the city ahead, if I watch your face in the rearview mirror instead, I can pretend I’m driving toward you, you: the only home that owns me. Look-look, you say, you sing sweet as toothache: Here’s the city, the honeydew moon above it, waiting for us to bash it open and begin. DAUGHTER Rabbit moon (II) When my brother propped his penis in his palm and peed out the door, wetting a mile of highway with rain, my mother said he must have the bladder of a horse. I asked how she knew about the anatomies of horses and she said she knew what it is to be ridden. We rode up the highway to a city of factories: concrete buildings converted into showrooms, the upper windows blacked out, headless mannequins haunting the sidewalks. We circled twice around Ama’s block. Hers was a house sitting on its haunches, afraid to stand all the way up.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But we were not mary-annes; we were only a couple of blushing toms, hesitating between desire and the deed, while the winter slid by, and the year grew slowly older - and Eleanor Marx stayed fixed to the wall, grave and untidy and ageless. The change came in February, on quite an ordinary day. I went to Whitechapel, to the market - a very regular thing to do, I did it often. When I came home, I came through the yard; I found the back door slightly open, and so entered the house quite noiselessly. As I put my parcels down upon the kitchen floor I heard voices in the parlour - Florence‘s, and Annie’s. The doors between were all ajar, and I could hear them perfectly: ‘She works at a printer‘s,’ Annie was saying. ‘The handsomest woman you ever saw in your life.’ ‘Oh Annie, you always say that.’ ‘No, really. She was sitting at a desk at a page of text, and the sun was on her and making her shine. When she raised her eyes to me I held my hand out to her. I said, “Are you Sue Bridehead? My name’s Jude ... ”’ Florence laughed: they had all just been reading the latest chapter of that novel, in a magazine; I daresay Annie would not have made the joke, had she known how the story would turn out. Now Florence said: ‘And what did she say to that? That she wasn’t sure, but thought Sue Bridehead might work at the other office... ?’ ‘Not at all. What she said was: Allelujah! Then she took my hand and - oh, then I knew I was in love, for sure!’ Flo laughed again - but in a thoughtful kind of way. After a second she murmured something that I did not catch, but which made her friend laugh. Then Annie said, still with a smile to her voice: ‘And how is that handsome uncle of yours?’ Uncle? I thought, moving to warm my hands against the stove. What uncle is that? I didn’t feel like an eavesdropper. I heard Florence give a tut. ‘She’s not my uncle,’ she said - she said it very clearly. ‘She’s not my uncle, as you well know.’ ‘Not your uncle?’ cried Annie then. ‘A girl like that - with hair like that - growling about in your parlour in a pair of chamois trousers like a regular little bricksetter ...’ At that, I didn’t care if I were eavesdropping or not: I took a swift silent step into the passageway, and listened rather harder. Florence laughed again. ‘I promise you,’ she said, ‘she’s not my uncle.’ ‘Why not? Why ever not? Florrie, I despair of you. It’s unnatural, what you’re doing. It’s like - like having a roast in the pantry, and eating nothing but bits of crusts and cups of water.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And can I let people into where my visioning happens? Can we be intimate at the level of our longings? What as a society can we truly long for? Can I truly say out loud? So yes, all of that. Cara. And before we close, I do want to say that my work with Southerners on New Ground really was transformative in how we moved work.44 I’m talking like ten years ago or eight years ago. I was living in the South for seventeen years. Our organizing was moved by the questions: How do we move toward liberation with our longing and desire? And what do we long for? And these questions were a beautiful realization that “what do we long for?” to me holds “what do we remember? What can we imagine? What do we desire?” And that’s a very different language from “protect and defend,” which is critical too, but we’re on a spectrum of understanding, our heart must be in this. Our spirit must be in this. Our memory is in this. Our collective bodies and desires must be in this. And all of that is integral to our transformation. amb. Fuck yes. Thank you for taking this time. Cara. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you do. Peace. 31 This conversation took place on April 13, 2017, transcription by ill Weaver.32 Cara was the executive director of the Audre Lorde Project for five years.33 There will be an audiobook! I hope it will include Cara’s voice.34 See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this volume, p. 27.35 Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Penguin Random House, 1980); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984).36 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.37 Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (New York: Scribner Poetry, 1997).38 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.39 amb note to self: Make sure you hound Cara until you actually get to see this cool young ripe performance!40 James Baldwin, The Amen Corner: A Drama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1961).41 Here, Cara is referencing my work as a healer, somatic teacher, and bodyworker.42 Adaku Utah is the founder and a collective member of Harriet’s Apothecary.43 When Cara said this, I snapped and heard the snaps of a million ancestors, who also at that moment said, “Oh, snap!”44 Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a regional queer liberation organization made up of people of color, immigrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, working-class and rural and small town LGBTQ people in the South.A Spoilerific Gush on How Octavia Butler Turns Me OnI once sat on Octavia Butler’s face. It was stitched onto a pillow in a tent in Dubai, and we were in public, but I still flush at the sheer longing I felt in that moment.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body. _ By the creek, Jie teaches me to read out of the Bible. We sit under a grove of trees belled with apples. The branches applaud in the wind and drop what they hold, concussing us with fist-hard fruit. Last week, rain rutted a hole in our roof and everything flooded, so we’re drying the Bible on a tree branch, its pages flapping like moths. I can pronounce only easy words, no proper names, no verbs. Jie says fluency is forgetting. Says I’ve got to un-name my mouth and crack my tongue like a whip. When I pronounce the word tongue with two syllables, Jie pushes me facedown into the mud. When I get up from the riverbank, I swallow the mud of my tongue. Jie says she once saw two girl ghosts kissing in the creek. I mishear her and think she means they were cleaning the creek. Why? I say. Jie says, Because a god made them want but didn’t give them a word for it. I think Ma is made that way too, unable to name her need. Jie and I climb the trees and pretend to be monkeys, swinging to steal the neighbor’s apricots like we’re Sun Wukong thieving a peach of immortality from the garden of gods. He was punished for this, but we can’t remember what the punishment was, so we swallow our apricots whole and without mercy. We shit the pits out, and they rattle the pipes of our toilet when we flush. Ma can’t stand us dirty when we come in from the yard, but she’s the kind who calls the sky a stain, who tries to bleach a bruise. Two months ago the church people got a toilet installed for us. When we first used it, we squatted on top with our feet on the seat. It was Jie who told us we were doing it wrong: Our asses were supposed to go inside the halo. Don’t laugh—there was a time you didn’t know how to do this either, when I told you that the toilet is an ear that the sea hears through, and even now I sometimes see you with your head inside the bowl, conversing with another country. _ A boy at the Old Colonial Diner teaches Jie how to make a metal detector out of a radio, a broomstick, cardboard, copper wire. I won’t tell you all the details, in case you try to build one yourself. In return for the lesson, Jie lets him finger her in the back of the diner. Jie washes dishes at the sink while he stands behind, three of his fingers spidering around inside her. His nails snag on her pubic hair and she hisses, twists the faucet hotter, scalds off her calluses. We use the metal detector in the yard behind the house to search for the gold.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  GwenHi, I am a twenty-two-year-old college junior, majoring in psychology with an emphasis in sexuality issues. I come from a white middle-class background. My parents had an almost loveless marriage, staying together mostly because that’s how they were raised. I know that I am very cynical on the subject of marriage for myself. I don’t think that I ever want to get married, nor do I ever want to have children. That is something I’m sure of. I don’t have the patience nor the desire to raise children on my own. I think that most of my sexuality has been something that I came to realize on my own. My parents, well at least my mother, was very open when it came to my questions on the differences in anatomy between men and women. My father wasn’t a positive or a negative influence, he was simply my father. I grew up in a Christian home, spending most of my childhood in church. I think the constant rules on sex and relationships between men and women given there did have something to do with my views on sexuality. I didn’t fall for it. I knew that there had to be more. I was a late bloomer compared to most of my friends. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was nineteen, drunk at a party. I didn’t really become sexually active until I was twenty-one. At that time I met a man who was ready to settle down and start a family. Although I had an incredible sex life with him, one that was very experimental, I just couldn’t give in to his outlook on a family. It wasn’t me. The one single person that has seriously influenced my sexuality was my best friend. When I first met him I fell deeply in love with him, and was sure that he was “the one” that I was destined to marry. When he told me that he was gay about a year later it hurt, but we had become such close friends that it didn’t matter any longer. Since that time, I have begun to seriously explore my own sexuality. I’ve never been with a woman sexually but it is something that I someday would like to experience. I have been kissed by a woman, and it wasn’t a good or a bad experience, it mostly took me by surprise. I don’t think that I’m a lesbian. I do think that I could be bisexual, because I’m attracted to both men and women. I’ve never told anyone this, not even my best friend to whom I tell everything. I do have a sexual fantasy that I like to use when I am masturbating, several times a week, which can become difficult when you have two roommates in a two bedroom apartment. (I share a room with my best friend.) Here it goes:

• From The Art of Memoir

  –The Monopoly icon image says I am using imagined scenes from my adult point of view. –Saying “I told Mother something like” proves I’m reconcocting talk, not working from a diary or objective script. Most of all, the scene holds core emotional truths that will eventually shape the whole book. The teen me wanted to be like Mother—artistic, boho. We wind up reading a great novel together. But wanting to become Mother doomed me to become a drunk, an emotional car wreck, and not much of a nurturer. I mean, she got potted nightly with seventeen-year-old me as if we were sorority sisters. Teen me also longed to escape my suckhole hometown, which Mother likewise resented and blamed me for keeping her stranded in—so to add to my angst, I felt guilty leaving her behind. The revision tries to infuse the scene with some undercurrent of the psychic torrents trapped in that car’s small space—two squirrels in a coffee can, Daddy might have said. 22 | An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions. It’s elitist.) Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost For those of you with a naturally generative talent, able to bang out pages by the ream, this chapter may only help you later in the process, when it’s time to revise and organize and tighten. But mostly I’m writing for that human creature who sits down brimming with a story, then thinks, Oh, shit. What first? This chapter answers that, so far as I can. It should also lend some comfort: ts’ok to be lost. Being lost—as I’ve said elsewhere—is a prelude to finding new paths. And any curious writer will have to do a lot of wandering before any book’s done. You won’t have most of your elements on day one. You should have: 1.Crisp memories—that carnal world in your head 2.Stories and a passion to tell them 3.Some introductory information or data to get across 4.The self-discipline to work in scary blankness for some period of time (for me it takes three to five weeks to find a way in, though I’ve been in the weeds for a year at a pop)

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The whole ancient world had for its object to seek the true religion; but this people alone finds its being and honor on earth exclusively in the true religion, and thus it enters upon the stage of history."54 Judaism, in sharp contrast with the idolatrous nations of antiquity, was like an oasis in a desert, clearly defined and isolated; separated and enclosed by a rigid moral and ceremonial law. The holy land itself, though in the midst of the three Continents of the ancient world, and surrounded by the great nations of ancient culture, was separated from them by deserts south and east, by sea on the west, and by mountain on the north; thus securing to the Mosaic religion freedom to unfold itself and to fulfil its great work without disturbing influenced from abroad. But Israel carried in its bosom from the first the large promise, that in Abraham’s seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Abraham, the father of the faithful, Moses, the lawgiver, David, the heroic king and sacred psalmist, Isaiah, the evangelist among the prophets, Elijah the Tishbite, who reappeared with Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration to do homage to Jesus, and John the Baptist, the impersonation of the whole Old Testament, are the most conspicuous links in the golden chain of the ancient revelation. The outward circumstances and the moral and religious condition of the Jews at the birth of Christ would indeed seem at first and on the whole to be in glaring contradiction with their divine destiny. But, in the first place, their very degeneracy proved the need of divine help. In the second place, the redemption through Christ appeared by contrast in the greater glory, as a creative act of God. And finally, amidst the mass of corruption, as a preventive of putrefaction, lived the succession of the true children of Abraham, longing for the salvation of Israel, and ready to embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah and Saviour of the world. Since the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey, b.c. 63 (the year made memorable by the consulship of Cicero. the conspiracy of Catiline, and the birth of Caesar Augustus), the Jews had been subject to the heathen Romans, who heartlessly governed them by the Idumean Herod and his sons, and afterwards by procurators. Under this hated yoke their Messianic hopes were powerfully raised, but carnally distorted. They longed chiefly for a political deliverer, who should restore the temporal dominion of David on a still more splendid scale; and they were offended with the servant form of Jesus, and with his spiritual kingdom. Their morals were outwardly far better than those of the heathen; but under the garb of strict obedience to their law, they concealed great corruption. They are pictured in the New Testament as a stiff-necked, ungrateful, and impenitent race, the seed of the serpent, a generation of vipers.

• From The Art of Memoir

  However many intellectual pleasures a book may offer up, it’s usually your emotional connection to the memoir’s narrator that hooks you in. And how does she do that? A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they’ve disclosed their soft underbellies. Seeing someone naked thrills us a little. Maybe I can help prospective writers feel better about disrobing. My lessons and tips for anyone seeking to write a memoir are sprinkled in like pepper—“Why Not to Write a Memoir” or “Carnality” or “How to Choose a Detail.” They’re small and pithy enough that the general reader can pole-vault over those technical blips for students. In a late chapter on Michael Herr, there’s an initial section for the general reader, and section two is a line-by-line analysis that a nonwriter might find tedious. But the book’s mostly shaped for the general reader, and while I hope it can help such a human hone an affection for memoir as a form, I really hope to prompt some reflection about the reader’s own divided selves and ever-morphing past. For everybody has a past, and every past spawns fierce and fiery emotions about what it means. Nobody can be autonomous in making choices today unless she grasps how she’s being internally yanked around by stuff that came before. So this book’s mainly for that person with an inner life big as Lake Superior and a passion for the watery element of memory. Maybe this book will give you scuba fins and a face mask and more oxygen for your travels.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Walking across the main street after one such meal, I watched the streetlight bob in the wind blowing down off the peaks. What a godforsaken country, I thought. Mother leaned on Lecia and Hector on me to cross. The sole driver whose headlights slid off my face must have taken Hector, lurching across the road like Frankenstein, for my daddy, which made me want to tap on his windshield and explain things. Back at the hotel, they passed out, and Lecia nagged me to brush my teeth. “You don’t want those scummy green teeth like Ray back at the stable,” she said. And I said no ma’am, I didn’t. In the mirror, I saw the wooden button from Hector’s peacoat had pressed a half-moon dimple into one cheek where he’d been leaning on me. I’d always wanted cheek dimples, like Shirley Temple. Lecia spent some time trying to fix a matching one on the other cheek. First, she pinched with her thumbnail till I squealed. Then she pressed the toothpaste lid in the flesh while I counted to a hundred. But we never got the marks lined up right. Mother rented a colonial house turned out in chintz and claw-footed mahogany. It belonged to the town’s last bank president (who’d gone to jail, if I remember right, for embezzlement). Lecia and I had never been in a two-story house before. We walked through it whispering, craning up at the high ceilings, the long drapes tied back with silk tassels. We curtsied to each other before sitting stiff-backed on the very edge of the rose love seat to pour fake tea. The house had scope. The dining table was long and dusty enough for us to write our names on, with room left over. I pointed out that the twelve matching chairs were like for the Last Supper, minus Jesus. They were deep as dentist chairs, with padded bottoms in royal blue satin. Comedy masks grinned down from the carved corner moldings. In the living room, a baby grand piano sat under a chandelier whose glass teardrops had gone a dull amber. French doors led from there to a small parlor, where Hector and Mother set up their bed, so we’d be less likely to pad in. Upstairs, Lecia and I had our own bedrooms for the first time. Mine had a tall cherry highboy with drawers deep as culverts so even the clothes Mother ordered from Denver seemed paltry once I’d wadded them up in there. Lying next to it at night, I always expected one of the drawers to slide open and some midget corpse to sit up. So I got in the habit of crawling in with Lecia. She stayed asleep even if I was bold enough to weave my fingers in with hers. The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Think about it. Adam and Eve wanted to smooch. Hamlet wanted to avenge his father. Harriet Tubman wanted freedom. Luke Skywalker wanted to find his father. But I’m getting carried away with all the hating and the wanting. I want you to like me, maybe even to love me. Heck, we all want to be liked and loved. But you can’t jump around like a stray dog and tell people that you want to be liked and loved. And past the age of ten, you certainly can’t ask to be liked or loved. That’s just desperate. But, hey, wait a minute, I am desperate. So what can I do to make you love me? Should I pull a rabbit out of a hat? Read poems to you? Juggle chainsaws? Draw cartoons? [image "A person with glasses is juggling a rabbit, a book titled ‘Poems About Pine Trees,’ and a chainsaw. Speech bubbles say ‘LOVE ME!’ multiple times." file=image_rsrc4TS.jpg] I drew a cartoon just for you. Does it make you happy? Or sad? Or just plain confused? Well, let me make something clear. I am happy and sad and confused all at the same time. I always feel clumsy. No, I always feel awkward. “Awkward” is a better word. “Awkward” is the perfect word for what I feel like. And I always feel like I’m going to bump into something and break my collarbone or my heart. But there I go again, talking about my life like it’s a soap opera. And I hate soap operas. So I must confess that my life on the rez is not so horrible. It’s actually pretty decent. If I had to guess, I’d say my life is about 52 percent good and 48 percent bad, and that’s a dang good score in a world where approximately 90 percent of the people are 90 percent sad. So I should probably stop whining. After all, I am loved and I do love. And I’ll prove it, too. These are the eight things that I love with all my heart and soul: my grandmother my mother and father (the parental units count as one) my big sister math (especially geometry) my best friend drawing cartoons any sport involving a ball the beautiful girl named X Jess Walter Interviews Sherman AlexieNote: This interview has been abridged. The full interview is available in the audiobook edition. Sherman Alexie: Hello, everybody, this is Sherman Alexie. I’m sitting in the studio with Jess Walter, and we’re going to have a discussion about the tenth anniversary edition of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I’m laughing because I just did an event in Oregon and the Oregon State librarian couldn’t remember the title and called it The Partially Part-Time True Story of a Full-Time Worker or something.…[Laughs] I get into trouble with my long titles.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  alienating—more commonly the first, because of intrinsic qualities of the religious enterprise as such, but in important instances the second. In all its manifestations, religion constitutes an immense projection of human meanings into the empty vastness of the universe—a projection, to be sure, which comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers. Needless to say, it is impossible within the frame of reference of scientific theorizing to make any affirmations, positive or negative, about the ultimate ontological status of this alleged reality. Within this frame of reference, the religious projections can be dealt with only as such, as products of human activity and human consciousness, and rigorous brackets have to be placed around the question as to whether these projections may not also be something else than that (or, more accurately, refer to something else than the human world in which they empirically originate). In other words, every inquiry into religious matters that limits itself to the empirically available must necessarily be based on a “methodological atheism” (36). But even within this inevitable methodological restraint one further point should be made once more: The religious enterprise of human history profoundly reveals the pressing urgency and intensity of man’s quest for meaning. The gigantic projections of religious consciousness, whatever else they may be, constitute the historically most important effort of man to make reality humanly meaningful, at any price. Our discussion of religious masochism has indicated one price that has been paid for this. The great paradox of religious alienation is that the very process of dehumanizing the socio-cultural world has its roots in the fundamental wish that reality as a whole might have a meaningful place for man. One may thus say that alienation, too, has been a price paid by the religious consciousness in its quest for a humanly meaningful universe. 121 II Historical Elements 122

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I shook my head. “Why are you here?” My voice was raspy—too much screaming. My white streak dangled in front of my eye, I tucked it and looked at the flames. “Because you are.” I didn’t know what he meant. Did he feel responsible for me because he found me? I lay back down and curled up. He sat on the floor in front of the couch where I was lying, facing the fire. I closed my eyes and slept. When I woke he was gone. I sat up and stared around the room. Light was creeping in through the kitchen window, which meant I’d slept straight through the night. I had no reference for what time he carried me inside. I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and walked barefoot to the kitchen. Had he taken off my shoes after he carried me inside? I didn’t remember. I might not have been wearing shoes. There was fresh coffee in the pot and a clean mug sitting next to it. I picked up the mug and underneath he had left another card. Clever. He’d written something along the bottom. Call me if you need anything. Eat something. I crumpled the card in my fist and tossed it in the sink. “I won’t,” I said out loud. I turned on the faucet and let the water smear the words. I took a shower. Got dressed. Started another fire. Stared at the fire. I added a log. I stared at the fire. Around four o’clock I wandered into my office and sat behind my desk. My office was the most sterile room in the house. Most authors filled their writing space with warmth and color, pictures that inspire, chairs that allow them to think. My office consisted of a black lacquered desk in the center of an all white room: white walls, white ceiling, white tile. I needed emptiness to think, a clear white canvas to paint on. The black desk grounded me. Otherwise I’d just float around in all the white. Things distracted me. Or maybe they complicated me. I didn’t like to live with color. I wasn’t always like that. I learned to survive better. I opened my MacBook and stared at the cursor. One hour, ten minutes, a day … I’m not sure how much time passed. The doorbell rang, jarring me. When did I come in here? I felt stiff as I stood up. A long time. I walked down the stairs and stopped in front of the door. Every one of my movements was robotic and forced. I could see Doctor Asterholder’s car through the peephole; charcoal sitting atop my wet, brick driveway. I opened the door and he blinked at me like this was normal—him being on my doorstep.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And, okay, I know that sounds hateful, like I’m some communist rebel trying to stick it to THE MAN, but I don’t even know who THE MAN is. Though I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that THE MAN lives in a nice house with an intelligent wife and talented children and they all have enough food to eat, so I think I’d rather be and eat like THE MAN than hate THE MAN. Trust me, I’d rather love and be loved. I am not a hateful person. I’m just a poor Indian kid who wants to have a better life. A great life. An amazing life. And I know you’re probably thinking, “How can a dirt-poor reservation kid live an amazing life?” Well, to tell the truth, I don’t have a clue where to begin. But I want the amazing; I want it so bad, so maybe the wanting is the beginning. Maybe wanting is the beginning of every story. Think about it. Adam and Eve wanted to smooch. Hamlet wanted to avenge his father. Harriet Tubman wanted freedom. Luke Skywalker wanted to find his father. But I’m getting carried away with all the hating and the wanting. I want you to like me, maybe even to love me. Heck, we all want to be liked and loved. But you can’t jump around like a stray dog and tell people that you want to be liked and loved. And past the age of ten, you certainly can’t ask to be liked or loved. That’s just desperate. But, hey, wait a minute, I am desperate. So what can I do to make you love me? Should I pull a rabbit out of a hat? Read poems to you? Juggle chainsaws? Draw cartoons? I drew a cartoon just for you. Does it make you happy? Or sad? Or just plain confused? Well, let me make something clear. I am happy and sad and confused all at the same time. I always feel clumsy. No, I always feel awkward. “Awkward” is a better word. “Awkward” is the perfect word for what I feel like. And I always feel like I’m going to bump into something and break my collarbone or my heart. But there I go again, talking about my life like it’s a soap opera. And I hate soap operas. So I must confess that my life on the rez is not so horrible. It’s actually pretty decent. If I had to guess, I’d say my life is about 52 percent good and 48 percent bad, and that’s a dang good score in a world where approximately 90 percent of the people are 90 percent sad. So I should probably stop whining. After all, I am loved and I do love.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Friends wished him to settle in Athens as a teacher of eloquence, but he left there in his thirtieth year, and returned through Constantinople, where he took with him his brother Caesarius, a distinguished physician,1971 to his native city and his parents’ house. At this time his baptism took place. With his whole soul he now threw himself into a strict ascetic life. He renounced innocent enjoyments, even to music, because they flatter the senses. "His food was bread and salt, his drink water, his bed the bare ground, his garment of coarse, rough cloth. Labor filled the day; praying, singing, and holy contemplation, a great part of the night. His earlier life, which was anything but loose, only not so very strict, seemed to him reprehensible; his former laughing now cost him many tears. Silence and quiet meditation were law and pleasure to him."1972 Nothing but love to his parents restrained him from entire seclusion, and induced him, contrary to talent and inclination, to assist his father in the management of his household and his property. But he soon followed his powerful bent toward the contemplative life of solitude, and spent a short time with Basil in a quiet district of Pontus in prayer, spiritual contemplations, and manual labors. "Who will transport me," he afterwards wrote to his friend concerning this visit,1973 "back to those former days, in which I revelled with thee in privations? For voluntary poverty is after all far more honorable than enforced enjoyment. Who will give me back those songs and vigils? who, those risings to God in prayer, that unearthly, incorporeal life, that fellowship and that spiritual harmony of brothers raised by thee to a God-like life? who, the ardent searching of the Holy Scriptures, and the light which, under the guidance of the Spirit, we found therein?" Then he mentions the lesser enjoyments of the beauties of surrounding nature.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It seemed impatient as it blinked at me, waiting for me to find the words. The only words I could hear were the words of the song that Isaac Asterholder left on my windshield. They invaded my white thinking space until I slammed shut my computer and marched back downstairs to the drawer. I dug out the cardboard sleeve from where I’d shoved it underneath the catalogs and bills, and dropped it into the trash. I needed something to distract myself. When I looked around, the first thing I saw was the fridge. I made a sandwich with the bread and the cold cuts Isaac kept stocked in my vegetable bin, and ate it sitting cross-legged on my kitchen counter. For all of his save the earth with hybrids and recycling bullshit, he was a soda fanatic. There were five variations of carbonated, stomach-eating, sugar-infested soda in my fridge. I grabbed the red can and popped the tab. I drank the whole thing watching the snow fall. Then I dug the CD from the trash. I listened to it ten times … twenty? I lost count. When Isaac walked through the door sometime after eight, I was draped in a blanket in front of the fire, my arms wrapped around my legs. My bare feet were tapping to the music. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. I wouldn’t look at him, so I kept to the fire, focused. He moved to the kitchen. I heard him cleaning up my sandwich mess. After a while he came in with two mugs and handed me one. Coffee. “You ate today.” He sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the sofa. He could have sat on the couch, but he sat on the floor with me. With me. I shrugged. “Yeah.” He kept staring at me and I squirmed, pressed down by his silver eyes. Then, what he said hit me. I hadn’t fed myself since it happened. I would have starved if not for Isaac. That sandwich was the first time I’d taken action to live. The significance felt both dark and light. We sat in silence drinking our coffee, listening to the words he left me. “Who is it?” I asked softly. Humbly. “Who is singing?” “Her name is Florence Welch.” “And the name of the song?” I sneaked a glance at his face. He was nodding slightly, like he approved of me asking. “ Landscape .” I had a thousand words, but I held them tightly in my throat. I wasn’t good at saying. I was good at writing. I played with the corner of my blanket. Just ask him how he knew. I squeezed my eyes shut. It was so hard.