IN 1957 WHEN Governor Faubus of Arkansas refused to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, if President Eisenhower with all his enormous prestige had personally led a black child up the steps to where the authorities were blocking the school entrance, it might have been one of the great moments in history. It is heart-breaking to think of the opportunity missed.
Nothing in American history is more tragic surely than the relationship of the black and white races. Masters and slaves both were dehumanized. The Jim Crow laws carried the process on for decades beyond the Emancipation. The Ku Klux Klan and its like keep going forever. Politically, economically, socially, humanly black people continue to be the underdog. Despite all the efforts of both races to rectify the situation and heal the wounds, despite all the progress that has been made, it is still as hard for any black person to look at any white person without a feeling of resentment as it is for any white person to look at any black person without a feeling of guilt.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark
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IT IS SUPPOSED TO be good for the heart, the lungs, the muscles, and physical well-being generally. It is also said to produce a kind of euphoria known as joggers' high.
The look of anguish and despair that contorts the faces of most of the people you see huffing and puffing away at it by the side of the road, however, is striking. If you didn't know directly from them that they are having the time of their lives, the chances are you wouldn't be likely to guess it.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark
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JOBS ARE WHAT people do for a living, many of them for eight hours a day, five days a week, minus vacations, for most of their lives. It is tragic to think how few of them have their hearts in it. They work mainly for the purpose of making money enough to enjoy their moments of not working.
If not working is the chief pleasure they have, you wonder if they wouldn't do better just to devote themselves to that from the start. They would probably end up in bread-lines or begging, but even so the chances are they would be happier than pulling down a good salary as an insurance agent or a dental technician or a cab driver and hating every minute of it.
"What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?" asks the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 1:3). If he's in it only for the money, the money is all he gains, and when he finally retires, he may well ask himself if it was worth giving most of his life for. If he's doing it for its own sake—if he enjoys doing it and the world needs it done—it may very possibly help to gain him his own soul.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark
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IF YOU LOSE YOURSELF in your work, you find who you are.
If you express the best you have in you in your work, it is more than just the best you have in you that you are expressing.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark
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Godric is traveling to Rome.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO Rome, they say, and ours leads us a crooked way. Great cities come and go. In Tours I catch a flux. In Lyons Aedwen twists her foot so I must load her on my back again. In Genoa a man found murdering a maid with child is cruelly punished. We watch them rope his arms and legs to four hot horses, then drive them to a rage with rods till each pulls hard a different way. But the man is young and stout and will not tear until the hangman risks their flying hooves to hack him with a sword about the joints, whereat he comes apart at last, and Aedwen swoons.
Except that there they have no end, the pains of Hell can be no sharper than the pains we suffer here, nor the Fiend himself more fiendish than a man. Oh Queen of Heaven, pray for us. Have pity on the pitiless for thy dear Son our Savior's sake.
-Originally published in Godric
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