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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Going to Meet the Man: Stories," by James Baldwin.

They hated him, and this hatred was blacker than their hearts, blacker than their skins, redder than their blood, and harder, by far, than his club. Each day, each night, he felt worn out, aching, with their smell in his nostrils and filling his lungs, as though he were drowning—drowning in ni**ers; and it was all to be done again when he awoke. It would never end. It would never end. Perhaps this was what the singing had meant all along. They had not been singing black folks into heaven, they had been singing white folks into hell.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "My Broken Language," by Quiara Alegria Hudes.

 

My brat pack came to wave me off and started in on the obscene gestures whenever mom turned her back. Chien was first-­generation Vietnamese. Ben and Elizabeth, first-­gen Cambodian. Rowetha lost her Amharic after leaving Ethiopia. We all spoke English, unlike our parents, who all spoke different languages from one another. This was my West Philly crew, my pampers–­to–­pre-­K alphabet soup. I assumed all blocks everywhere were like it — ­as many languages as sidewalk cracks, one boarded-­up home for every lived-­in, more gum wads than dandelions.  

Malvern was only an hour outside Philly, but it was a whole different universe. The woods, donkeys, and horses didn’t account for the half of it. We had moved to a monolingual, pale world. Its language uniformity was so complete as to be creepy, zombie-esque. How the shopkeepers and mailmen spoke English confidently and pronounced all their vowels the same exact way. How within houses I visited, the kids, parents, and elders shared the same language and never paused for translation or to remember a word. Though Malvern folks didn’t pray to ancestors like mom did, I could tell that if they did, even their ghosts would speak English. 

 

I determined to get dad's take straight up, like I'd done with god. He met he at the train for a weekend visit and with each curve of the country road I wrestled my nerves. Did you have an affair with...Too accusatory. Did you cheat on...Too blunt. Did you have sex with...No way. Finally, we pulled into the driveway and my time was up. "Did you take off your clothes and get under the covers with Susan?" Even I was embarrassed by the naive wording. For a second, I worried he's misinterpreted my question as a birds-and-bees inquiry. But the way he slumped when switching off the ignition meant he knew. 

“They have no idea what they’re calling me! How do you say ‘whore’ en el barrio?” mom asked. How do you say it?”

“‘Puta?’”

“How else? Now tell me, Quiara, what is a ho?”

“‘Ho!’”

“¡Exacto! Ho! Who’s shamed for her sexuality is a ho?”

“It’s the shame men have given us from the get-go. The shame that is written into the Bible. But think, Quiara, what else is a ho? I want you to make this connection yourself.”

I came up short.

“‘HO!’” she yelled, as if volume was a code-cracker. “AZADA! AZADA! AZADA! What is a ho, Quiara?”

“A gardening tool.”

“And what does a hoe do?” she asked.

“It digs.”

“It’s an ancient tool with a sharp blade for clearing and turning the soil. When the earth gets tired, you break the earth, you wound the earth, digging narrow troughs and trenches so you can do what?”

“Plant seeds.”

“Plant seeds!” she rejoiced, all affirmation. “They think they’re shaming us, but they have no clue that they’re praising me. We are not whores, but we are hoes. We plant seeds of potential! We plow the land, we plow our reality! I am hoeing the potential of my hoeing in Sedo’s community. I have been hoeing my potential since day one, hija!”   

Mom, if you ever read this book (and make it this far without disowning me), I ask you one favor: break this English language today and the day after and the day after and bestow it new life upon this cracked colonial tongue. You language genius. This is your English. You earned it. I am only a guest here.

 

 

 

I corrected her in the car. I corrected her in the living room. No cash register or playground was too public to fix her pronunciation and should. As if the others ought to lease a mystical giantess. It was embarrassing which I pretended was too possible to fix for her. Sometimes it was the know-it-all cockiness of youth, but I never once said, "Fuck you, child, stop colonizing my ass."But she never changed her pronunciation, either.

 

 

 

At some birthday, back in grade school when I still spent weeks at Carroll Lane, he remembered my birthday, he made an event of driving me to Circuit City. Together we mazed through television aisles and surround-sound displays to the most extraordinary corridor in retail history: word processors. “Give ’em a spin,” he said. I typed my name on one machine after another, all the way up and down the aisle. One model could do italics and bold. One had built-in memory and could print copies. One did the accent in Alegría. Another could erase words or even sentences: I pressed delete and Quiara vanished from the page. Each had a three-digit price and I knew money was contentious between him and Sharon, but dad said choose anything. He bought me paper, ink ribbons, font inserts. Happiness tickled us in the checkout line. It was levity by the time the register guy called next! I was dad’s first child, the only one who knew his long hair and twenty-something laughter. If he had since pushed me from the airplane, the typewriter was a parachute made of our composite dreams. I set it up that same afternoon, typed in a frenzy about teenage heartthrobs, short stories. Treacly poems, fan essays, short stories. There was no connective aesthetic or topical focus, simply the act of imagination as a way to pass lonely days. When I wrote, I soared. If I ran out of ideas, I typed Top 40 lyrics to keep the jubilant racket going full-tilt. Dad took pride in the clatter: noisy proof of a fatherly triumph. He'd peek into my room, keep it up kid, then disappear again.

I didn't cry when mom and Pop drove off the freshman quad and Gabi craned back for one last wave. But betrayal's heavy veil descended when they turned onto Elm Street, out of view. I was a sister-leaver. I was cold turkey in an indifferent world. College meant abandoning Gabi midcourse, entrusting her flourishing to sinister hands. My fears, it turned out, were dead-on. Mean teachers would taunt the Norf Philly in her cadence, declare her remedial, put her in an ESL class. Four years of schoolyard fat jokes would pummel her. And I would miss it all, offer no nightly antidote.

 

 

You are a child of three catastrophes. You are born of three holocausts. The Native. The African. And the Jewish. You are a descendent of the survivors. It’s in your blood. The resilience. The deep memory and experience of survival.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

I stood looking at him for a moment. For all his tattooing he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this I have been making about, thought to myself – the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs.

Just Fooling Around

 

Yesterday's post was an April Fools. "Old airplays of" is an anagram of "April Fool's Day." And I haven't yet figured out what's next for me after I leave my current job next month, not even close. Visiting Y's around the country would be absolutely dreamy though, so that's no fooling - and if anyone in Y USA wants to make this happen, call me!. No, I'm still at my current job and I still haven't figured out what's next, just living in the exhilaration and terror of the unknown in between.

Dreams Do Come True

 

I have an important personal update to announce. I had promised myself I would not seek my next job until after I finished my current one. But sometimes opportunities seek you out. And this one is perfect for me: "secret shopper" for the YMCA. That's right, I will be going to Y's around the country, partaking of the facilities, chatting up the staff, and then writing an evaluation for headquarters. 

I don't start until the summer and they're still working out my itinerary, but I do know that my first stop is a road trip away, so I'm looking forward to packing my workout gear (and my golf clubs) and firing up old airplays of 80's Top 40 countdowns to keep me company (is there a better accompaniment on a road trip than the voice of Casey Kasem?). If you know me, this job is an absolute dream come true!

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Native Son," by Richard Wright.

He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fulness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

He left her standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, exactly as he had found her. He did not know just how to take her; she made him feel that she would judge all he did harshly but kindly. He had a feeling toward her that was akin to that which he held toward his mother. The difference in his feelings toward Mrs. Dalton and his mother was that he felt that his mother wanted him to do the things she wanted him to do, and he felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do. But he did not want to go to night school. Night school was allright; but he had other plans. Well, he didn’t know just what they were right now, but he was working them out.

Holding up Blum ought not take more than two minutes, at the most. And it would be their last job. But it would be the toughest one that they had ever pulled. All the other times they had raided newsstands, fruit stands, and apartments. And, too, they had never held up a white man before. They had always robbed Negroes. They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes. For months they had talked of robbing Blum’s, but had not been able to bring themselves to do it. They had the feeling that the robbing of Blum’s would be a violation of ultimate taboo; it would be a trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an alien white world would be turned loose upon them; in short, it would be a symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them; a challenge which they yearned to make, but were afraid to. Yes; if they could rob Blum’s, it would be a real hold-up, in more senses than one. In comparison, all of their other jobs had been play.

“Bigger, you ain’t done nothing to that girl, is you?” 

He stiffened with fear. He felt suddenly that he wanted something in his hand, something solid and heavy: his gun, a knife, a brick. 

“If you say that again, I’ll slap you back from this table!”

He had heard that Mr. Dalton owned the South Side Real Estate Company, and the South Side Real Estate Company owned the house in which he lived. He paid eight dollars a week for one rat-infested room. He had never seen Mr. Dalton until he had come to work for him; his mother always took the rent to the real estate office. Mr. Dalton was somewhere far away, high up, distant, like a god. He owned property all over the Black Belt, and he owned property where white folks lived, too. But Bigger could not live in a building across the “line.” Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this.

“I hope Ma won’t be there.” 

“I asked her to come. I want the judge to see her,” Max said. 

“She’ll feel bad.” 

“All of this is for you, Bigger.” 

“I reckon I ain’t worth it.” 

“Well, this thing’s bigger than you, son. In a certain sense, every Negro in America’s on trial out there today.” 

“They going to kill me anyhow.” 

“Not if we fight. Not if I tell them how you’ve had to live.”

“Every time he comes in contact with us, he kills! It is a physiological and psychological reaction, embedded in his being. Every thought he thinks is potential murder. Excluded from, and unassimilated in our society, yet longing to gratify impulses akin to our own but denied the objects and channels evolved through long centuries for their socialized expression, every sunrise and sunset makes him guilty of subversive actions. Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!"

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe," by Brian Greene.

The purpose of this book is to provide that clarity. We will journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the beginning to the closest science can take us to the very end. We will explore how life and mind emerge from the initial chaos, and we will dwell on what a collection of curious, passionate, anxious, self-reflective, inventive, and skeptical minds do, especially when they notice their own mortality. We will examine the rise of religion, the urge for creative expression, the ascent of science, the quest for truth, and the longing for the timeless. The deep-seated affinity for something permanent, for what Franz Kafka identified as our need for “something indestructible,” will then propel our continued march toward the distant future, allowing us to assess the prospects for everything we hold dear, everything constituting reality as we know it, from planets and stars, galaxies and black holes, to life and mind. 

Across it all, the human spirit of discovery will shine through. We are ambitious explorers seeking to grasp a vast reality. Centuries of effort have illuminated dark terrains of matter, mind, and the cosmos. During millennia to come, the spheres of illumination will grow larger and brighter. The journey so far has already made evident that reality is governed by mathematical laws that are indifferent to codes of conduct, standards of beauty, needs for companionship, longings for understanding, and quests for purpose. Yet, through language and story, art and myth, religion and science, we have harnessed our small part of the dispassionate, relentless, mechanical unfolding of the cosmos to give voice to our pervasive need for coherence and value and meaning. It is an exquisite but temporary contribution. As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of earth’s cant. And though less sensational than a planetary collision, both the earth and the moon endured periods of significant pummelings by smaller meteors. The moon’s lack of eroding winds and its static crust have preserved the scars but earth’s thrashing, less visible now, was just as severe. Some early impacts may have partially or even fully vaporized all water on earth’s surface. Despite that, the zircon archives provide evidence that within a few hundred million years of its formation, earth may have cooled sufficiently for atmospheric steam to rain down, fill the oceans, and yield a terrain not all that dissimilar from the earth we now know. At least, that’s one conclusion reached by reading the crystals.

Every molecule of DNA is configured in the famous spiral of the double helix, a long twisting ladder whose rungs consist of pairs of struts, shorter molecules called bases, usually denoted A, T, G, and C (the technical names won’t matter for us, but these stand for adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine). Members of a given species mostly share the same sequence of letters. For humans, the DNA sequence runs about three billion letters long, with your sequence differing from that of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or William Shakespeare or anyone else by less than about a quarter of a percent, roughly one letter out of every string of five hundred.23 But while basking in the glow of possessing a genome so similar to that of any of history’s most revered luminaries (or infamous villains), note that your DNA sequence also has a 99 percent overlap with any given chimpanzee’s. Minor genetic differences can have major impact.

The functions that keep a typical cell alive for just a single second require the energy stored in about ten million ATP molecules. Your body contains tens of trillions of cells, which means that every second you consume on the order of one hundred million trillion (1020) ATP molecules.

As I sit here, typing out my thoughts, I am unfazed by the realization that at the level of fundamental particles everything I’m thinking and everything I’m doing constitutes the unfolding of physical laws that are beyond my control. What matters to me is that unlike my desk and unlike my chair and unlike my mug, my collection of particles is able to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviors. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m pleased they did. Sure, that reaction, too, is nothing but my particle army carrying out their quantum mechanical marching orders, but that doesn’t diminish the reality of the feeling. I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.

During our inquiry into the origin of language, one proposal featured the role of gossip in maintaining hierarchies and fostering alliances. Frivolous as such conversation may be viewed in the modern age, psychologist Jesse Bering places gossip at the nexus of religion’s adaptive role in the ancient world. Before we acquired the capacity to speak, a rogue in our midst might misbehave—stealing food, borrowing sexual partners, hanging back during the hunt—but if the witnesses to the transgression were small in number and weak in status the culprit could get away scot-free. Once language took hold, that changed. With even a single but widely discussed infraction, the culprit’s reputation would suffer and reproductive opportunities would plummet. Bering’s suggestion is that if a would-be transgressor imagines that there is always a powerful witness—hovering in the wind, or in trees, or in the sky—he would be less likely to transgress, less likely to be fodder for unfavorable gossip, and less likely to become a social outcast. Consequently, he would be more likely to have offspring and pass on his god-fearing instincts. A predisposition for religion protects his genetic lineage and so becomes self-perpetuating.

The light each galaxy emits does travel through space. And much as a kayaker will be stymied if she’s paddling upstream at a speed that’s less than that of the stream itself, the light emitted by a galaxy that is sprinting away at superluminal speed will fight a losing battle as it tries to reach us. Traversing space at light speed, the light cannot overcome the faster-than-light-speed increase in the distance to earth. As a result, when future astronomers look past nearby stars and focus their telescopes on the deepest parts of the night sky, all they will see is velvety black darkness. The distant galaxies will have slipped beyond the bounds of what astronomers call our cosmic horizon. It will be as if the distant galaxies have dropped off a cliff at the edge of space.

I’ve focused on distant galaxies because those that are relatively nearby, a cluster of about thirty galaxies known as the Local Group, will continue to be our cosmic companions. Indeed, by the eleventh floor, the Local Group, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, will likely have merged, an anticipated future union astronomers have christened Milkomeda (I would have lobbied for Andromilky). The stars of Milkomeda will all be close enough for their mutual gravitational pulls to withstand the expansion of space and keep the stellar collection intact. But our severed contact with the more distant galaxies will be a profound loss. It was through careful observations of distant galaxies that Edwin Hubble first realized that space is expanding, a discovery confirmed and refined by a century of subsequent observations. Without access to the distant galaxies, we will lose a primary diagnostic tool for tracing spatial expansion. The very data that guided us toward our understanding of the big bang and cosmic evolution will no longer be available.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens.

"If you hear in my voice--I don't know that it is so, but I hope it is--if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!"

“I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response to that written appeal of a fellow-countryman which lies before you. I demand no more than the opportunity to do so without delay. Is not that my right?”

“Emigrants have no rights, Evrémonde,” was the stolid reply.

 Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world--the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. 

"President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life. Who and where is the false conspirator who says that I denounce the husband of my child!"

"Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the Republic."

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and with warmth resumed.

"If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent!"

“If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me more courage.”

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young fingers, and touched his lips.

“Are you dying for him?” she whispered.

“And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.”

“O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?”

“Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.”

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent here there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

"Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little."

"Tell me what it is."

"I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in a farmer's house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she knows nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how should I tell her! It is better as it is."

"Yes, yes: better as it is."

"What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor, and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she may live a long time: she may even live to be old."

"What then, my gentle sister?"

"Do you think:" the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and tremble: "that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the better land where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?"

"It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there."

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Toni Morrison: The Last Interview."

HUNTER-GAULT: This book, Beloved, has received almost, uh, no, uh, critical, uhm, reviews. I mean, just total acclaim. But one of the things that critics have said both about this book in the character of Sethe and other works of yours is that you draw characters that are larger than life. Does that disturb you, or is that even a criticism as far as your concerned? 

MORRISON: It used to disturb me. But I realized that what they are saying is that life is small. My characters are not bigger than life. They are, in fact, as big as life. And life is really very big. We tend to cut it down these days, smaller and smaller and smaller, to make it fit—I don’t know what—a headline or a room.

JAFFREY: You don’t feel you need to protect yourself from listening to critics? 

MORRISON: You can’t. 

JAFFREY: You need to know what’s being said? 

MORRISON: I know there are authors who find it healthier for them, in their creative process, to just not look at any reviews, or bad reviews, or they have them filtered, because sometimes they are toxic for them. I don’t agree with that kind of isolation. I’m very much interested in how African American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It’s been a long, hard struggle, and there’s a lot of work yet to be done. I’m especially interested in how women’s fiction is reviewed and understood. And the best way to do that is to read my own reviews, for reasons that are not about how I write. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the work. I’m not entangled at all in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it, how I succeeded at doing it. So it doesn’t have that kind of effect on me at all. But I’m very interested in the responses in general. And there have been some very curious and interesting things in the reviews so far.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Metamorphoses," by Ovid.

Where other animals walk on all fours and look to the ground,

Man was given a towering head and commanded to stand erect, with his face uplifted to gaze upon the stars of heaven. 

Thus clay, so lately more than a crude and formless substance, 

was metamorphosed into the strange new figure of Man. 

But now the clouds that he needed to cover the whole wide earth 

and the rain to pour from the sky were lacking. So what was the answer? 

A thunderclap! Next a bolt was carefully poised by his right ear. 

Jupiter hurled it at Phaéthon, flinging both driver from chariot 

and life from body at once. He quenched one fire with another. 

The horses stampeded. Rearing up in different directions, 

they slipped the yoke from their necks and tore the reins as they broke loose. 

Here the bridle was tossed, and there the pole with the ripped-off 

axle, there the spokes of the shattered wheels and, scattered 

all over the ether, the fragments of metal which once were a chariot. 

Phaéthon’s corpse spun down head first, with the fire of the thunderbolt 

scorching his flame-red hair. He fell through the sky in a long trail, 

blazing away like a comet which sometimes appears in a clear sky, 

never to land upon earth, but looking as if it is falling. 

Callisto entered a forest whose trees no axe had deflowered, 

and here she removed the quiver she wore on her shoulder and 

loosened 

the string of her supple bow; then laid herself down on the 

greensward, 

resting her pure white neck on her painted quiver for pillow. 

When Jupiter spied her lying exhausted and unprotected, 

he reckoned: ‘My wife will never discover this tiny betrayal; 

or else, if she does, oh yes, the joy will make up for the scolding!’ 

So when his wife and her paramour entered the chamber together, 

the husband’s exquisite art and ingenious netting enabled 

the pair to be caught, unable to move, in the midst of their love- 

making. 

Instantly Vulcan threw open the ivory doors and admitted 

the other gods. There were the guilty ones lying together, entwined 

in their shame! The gods were amused, and one of them murmured: “If only 

I could be shamed like that!” Then all of them burst into laughter. 

This story went the rounds of the sky for a long time afterwards. 

He spoke without daring to look at the man he was begging to spare 

him. 

Then Perseus gave him his answer: ‘Phineus, you spineless coward, 

no need to be scared. I'll allow you all that I can — a handsome 

gift for a weakling like you. You shan’t be put to the sword, man. 

No, I shall make you a lasting memorial for all posterity. 

You’ll be on permanent view in the house of my father-in-law, 

that my wife may console herself with her former intended’s 

likeness.’ 

With that he quickly carried Medusa across to display her 

where Phineus had turned his quivering head. As the cowering villain 

attempted to shift his eyes away once again, his neck 

grew stiff and the tears running down his cheeks were hardened to 

stone. 

But still a coward’s face and the suppliant’s look were preserved 

in marble, along with the pleading hands and the cringing 

posture. 

The loser, who’d fought with Hector in single combat, who’d often 

withstood the assaults of fire and sword and of Jupiter, only 

failed to withstand his own anger. The hero whom no one had 

beaten 

was beaten at last by resentment. Grasping his sword he cried, 

‘This at least is mine! Or is this also claimed by Ulysses? 

It must be wielded against myself. The weapon so often 

stained with the blood of the Trojans must now be stained with its 

master’s. 

No one shall have the power to conquer Ajax, but Ajax!’ 

He spoke, and into the breast which had never been wounded before* 

he drove his murderous sword till he buried it up to the hilt. 

His hands were too weak to draw out the deeply embedded weapon; 

was only expelled by the force of his blood, which reddened theearth 

and there gave rise to a purple flower from the soft green turf, 

a flower which had once been born from the wound of the young 

Hyacinthus. 

Both boy and man were recalled in the letters inscribed on the petals, 

AIAI* for a cry of lament, AIAI for the name of a hero. 

To these advances Glaucus replied, 

‘While Scylla is living, my love for her will not alter, till foliage 

grows in the ocean and seaweed sprouts on the peaks of the 

mountains!’ 

In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays 

unchanged. 

All is in flux.* Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. 

Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. 

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, 

nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream 

by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, 

so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. 

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; 

every moment that passes is new and eternally changing. 

Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy — 

not Jupiter’s wrath,* nor fire or sword, nor devouring time. 

That day which has power over nothing except this body of mine 

may come when it will and end the uncertain span of my life. 

But the finer part of myself shall sweep me into eternity, 

higher than all the stars. My name shall be never forgotten. 

Wherever the might of Rome extends in the lands she has conquered, 

the people shall read and recite my words. Throughout all ages, 

if poets have vision to prophesy truth, I shall live in my fame.