Essayists From The United States

"Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death."

"Your baby is crying," says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanaian way of saying your cell phone is ringing."

"They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all. They were dreamer-women.Very dangerous women who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become."

"In fact, conservatism is not a body of principles, but a tone, an attitude. That attitude does indeed tend to conduce towards a respect for the wisdom acquired by human beings through long ages and towards skepticism of social blueprints..."

"[His fusionism is all about] utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends."

"You come to a certain age and you know there is no event that can ruin your life. Or completely change it."

"Children who seem unlikely to do well ... sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn't have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, "too clever for her own good," but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team."

"This place was not divine. It was enchanted, which was a different thing altogether."

"Men called me a philosopher once, but as the years burdened me further I cared less and less for the pressing questions of astronomy and geomancy and metaphysics and the like. They had been pressing since long before I was born, and I knew they would continue to be so as long as there were two students left to argue over the difference between the real and the ideal."

"Nothing frightens a miser more than the prospect of not getting paid."

"Prophecies and mysteries. The world was full of them. He didn’t care."

"“What’s the matter?” said Gutharad after a while. “You seem glum suddenly.” “I was thinking of something.” “Well don’t. If you forget your troubles and just go where your feet take you, you’ll be happy. That’s the real secret of life. Not that load of camel crap I fed you this afternoon.”"

"At last he understood that he was a prisoner within the palace as much as he was within his own body, that it was not his power which mastered anything, that he would no more rule the world than the glove on a king’s hand actually holds the scepter."

"“I wish something would happen,” he said after a long silence. Amaedig stood beside him, fidgeting with a clump of ivy. “Don’t,” she said. “What?” “Don’t wish something would happen. If it does, you probably won’t like it.”"

"“What can I do without you?” “Whatever is within you.”"

"“Listen, and listen well. This is the wisdom to end wisdom, the secret of all secrets.” They both leaned very close, and he told them. “Some people…will believe…anything!”"

"Now he truly knew, for the first time, that there was no one out there to hear him, that any prayer he might utter would drift and tumble through eternity like a shard of a broken mirror falling through the space beyond the world, turning over and over, glittering, never, never coming to rest."

"I saw again in the morning with the holy Tancred, Bishop of Anjou, of Averoigne, and Poictesme, stood before the troops in the dim light of dawn with the walled city at his back. There was complete silence, save for the cawing of expectant crows and the flapping of banners in the brisk wind. He spoke: “Soldiers of Christ, in yonder city wait ten thousand pagans, idolaters, devil-worshipers, atheists, and Jews, each of them by every breath he breathes an affront to the God who created him and a triumph for the Adversary who corrupted him. This is your task, mighty men of valor and virtue, your task set for you by God on high, to rid the land of this infection, to cleanse with fire and sword the very pavement on which the unclean ones walk. I have prayed for victory this day, and just before I came to you I had a vision. I saw in the sky, above the hills and above the pagan city, the great sign of the Cross, blazing as it did for Constantine when he embraced the Saviour, in this sign we too shall conquer. Jesus looks on. His Holy Mother waits to take any who die today in her own arms into paradise. Onward! For Christ and the Cross! “Christ and the Cross!” The cry returned from every throat, and the host surged thunderously forward like an inexorable tide. The first wave broke against the stone walls of the city, and the battle was joined. “Christ and the Cross!” men shouted as they fell screaming beneath curtains of molten iron poured from above. “Christ and the Cross!” resounded once more as mangonels, catapults, and ballistas filled the air with death."

"I lost my faith on a foreign shore, in the shade of the conscience tree. In the shade of the conscience tree, on a foreign shore, where the sand ran wet with the blood of children."

"“Stand here and look,” he said. “Look, and you’ll see the Earth as it always was, even before the death of The Goddess. I come here sometimes to reflect, when the toils of my station are more than I can bear. I come out here to where it seems that mankind and all his works have made no more impression on the Earth than the passing shadow of a cloud. I told myself not to worry, to face what I must face with courage and dignity, for nothing matters ultimately. I come out here to watch the sun rise.”"

"I listened to all this with the dull incomprehension of a pig in the slaughterhouse overhearing the talk of two butchers."

"“One more thing I will tell you, the great secret I learned through my experience.” “What was that?” “Never listen to idle tales. They make you mad and lead you through the bowels of a god.” “Of course,” said one of the disciples after he had left, “it is the nature of the madness that one never heeds these warnings.”"

"I am going into a far country, from which I shall never return. They say that when we depart thence, when we walk the last long road, if we are brave and true and avoid all the perils, we come to paradise, and sit there listening to The Musician play beautiful songs for all of eternity. But this is uncertain, for no witness has ever come back to report it."

"Horror is not quite as elusive as science fiction, for which there are as many definitions as definers. Most modern practitioners will agree that it's a matter of mood, not of specific content. A story can be horrific without being supernatural or even fantastic, as much of Edgar Allan Poe readily demonstrates. In the simplest sense, a horror story is one that scares us."

"“Were you not at the Holy City when the army of the faithful burst in? Did you not yourself partake in the slaughter of the pagans, and the women and infants of the pagans, those who were born in lands where the gospel never reached? Did you not do this and much more, all for the glory of God? And does not that same All Mighty and All Merciful God damn men for sins of weakness and ignorance when He himself made them imperfect and prone to weakness, and taught them not so that they remained ignorant? Did He not allow the serpent to enter the Garden, make no move to stop it, then punished severely his beguiled servants?” “Lady, as you said, you know the answers. All these things are true.” “Then I ask you, Julian, are these actions of a loving God?” “I—I—don’t—” “Know! But you do. This knowledge is the heritage of all men. You know they are not, and yet more shall you know. God is mad, Julian. He babbles on his throne of light, and the sound of his gurgling fills his angels with fear. He sends them forth with flaming swords to raze the cities of men, and when thousands upon thousands have been slain, and the smoke of their pyres rises into the heights of the sky, when pestilence and famine slay thousands more, then God laughs and roars like some mindless beast, ‘THIS IS PLEASING TO ME!’” “Why do you tell me these things? Why have I been brought here?” “Because you are to join us in our war against the Father. He has grown weak in his madness, so preoccupied with dreaming new ways to torture men that he will not notice when the very gates of Hell fly open and the armies of his old Adversary issue forth.”"

"“Have I come to a second Bedlam? Are you all mad here?” “Madness is the order of the day,” the lord replied. “Even God is mad. We follow divine example.”"

"Behind her, far away, filling the skies that were not of Earth, was the face of another, a mountainous Dark One who sat awash in a lake of molten metal with a sword in his hand. When I gaze upon him I knew the truth of all. I knew that if God is mad, and the signs show that he is, his Foe is mad also, and there can be no hope for the world between them, for creation is but a battleground for two maniacs in their death struggle."

"So now the tale is done. What moral? There was in the abbey a learned man who insisted that all things have a greater meaning, that life is but a symbol of motions on a higher plane. Nothing, he said, is random. Nothing is without purpose. Yet I blundered into my adventure and out of it, seeking only to save my own life. I came to the only place a wretched fugitive could have come on such a night, and my escape was miracle enough. A meaning? A purpose? When others, as the ballads tell, pass into Faerie, or into the lands of the dead, it is for some lofty purpose, to learn some deep wisdom, or to rescue a loved one, or to save a kingdom. It was not like that with me. My life will make a poor amusement if it is ever told. There is no form to it, no order. No conclusion, no moral, no answers. Only more questions."

"The true horror story requires a sense of evil, not in necessarily in a theological sense; but the menaces must be truly menacing, life-destroying, and antithetical to happiness."

"“Christ and Satan!” “Swear by whomever you like,” laughed the King. “Why not Jupiter, Thor, Mithra, and Ahura-Mazda also? It’ll do you as much good.”"

"These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen."

"Over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Oates, and Scott. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure."

"I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluge with catalogs for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent."

"The search for identity and belonging is also a motif for the human condition of the twentieth century-a century defined by displacements and migrations."

"In the house where I grew up in Santiago de Chile I heard a Babel of whispers, songs, prayers, and languages. Spanish was my language, my mother tongue spoken in the fiestas, in the schools, and in the poetry books I loved and read out loud as poetry should be read. My maternal grandparents spoke German and Yiddish. My paternal grandparents spoke Russian and often sang to the music of a balalaika bought in a flea market at the outskirts of the city. At school I learned Hebrew and songs in Ladino. At first I seemed to be confused with too many languages, but as the years progressed all of these languages were and continue to be a part of my inheritance as a Jew, as a poet, and as a woman. It was truly enchanting to hear and feel the depth of these many languages that embedded the narratives of the Jewish people throughout our history-an ancient people carrying their prayers and their legacy across the earth."

"Here in the United States where I have lived since I was a young girl, the solitude of exile makes me feel that so little is mine; that not even the sky has the same constellations. The trees and the faunas do not have the same names or sounds, or the rubbish the same smell. How does one recover the familiar? How does one name the unfamiliar? How can one be another or live in a foreign language? These are the dilemmas of one who writes in Spanish and lives in translation."

"Those devoted to the study of Latin American poetry can identify the names of poets such as Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, and César Vallejo, all twentieth century male poets. It is only because she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 that Gabriela Mistral's voice is not ignored. Male critics have often ascribed the poetry of women such as Mistral to the ideology that they represent; at other times, they have simply denied or ignored the literary production of women. The poetry of these women, created in patriarchal societies, has not achieved recognition within the canon of contemporary literature. In general, anthologies of Latin American poetry include very few women."

"Poetry, which is always with me and brings me to privileged horizons and uncertain but always true pathways"

"Though women have always been close to words, they have often been barred from speaking: Saint Paul, in the Holy Scriptures, ordered women to be silent in church, thus censuring their means of public expression. Numerous cultural maxims that attempt to predispose women to remain silent have been internalized by the female psyche, e.g., "En boca cerrada no entran moscas." ("No flies will enter a closed mouth.") Yet women have continued speaking their minds, often through the sacred language of poetry, where there is an abundance of intuition and the possibility of reclaiming power through language."

"Throughout history, women have always been close to language. Transmitters of legends, healers, magicians and fortune tellers, women possess a tapestry of stories that are slowly beginning to be transcribed. Curiously, with the advent of authoritarian governments in Latin America, women have left the private spaces of house, church, and marketplace to begin to poeticize their experiences through the written word that had previously been denied to them. We must not forget that even with the Cuban Revolution and the political effervescence that followed in the 1960s, the arts in Latin America continued to be dominated by men. Women were only allowed to participate through their relationships with men: the "companero," the boss, and the patriarch."

"Writing is a body of human expression, in which the daily conventions of our lives join with the ambiguities and subtleties of literature. But we must add in the bodies of the disappeared without identity, without memory-and this becomes the existential body of this literature that is not quieted by the dominant ideology or its power to deny what is happening. In the context of the early 1970s, it is impossible to deny the bodies floating by the banks of the Mapocho River in Santiago. It is impossible to look at the streets of El Salvador and not see the mutilated bodies strewn throughout. The literature of this period gathers the victimized bodies and arms them with words; it restores them and offers them dignity."

"Human rights were implemented by a group of Western nations in response to the moral crimes that occurred during World War II. Yet the same nations that ratified their declaration remain unable to protect their own citizens. The strength of a literature that denounces and questions, that speaks and implies that its own citizens can decide through the power of their voices and words, becomes effective in denouncing the moral vacuum in which the abuses took place."

"The possibilities of language reside in the possibilities of faith; they are a form of redeeming and correcting world history and paying tribute to life in all its wonder. These poems were written by a spirit that wishes to be part of a history that does not cover but on the contrary reveals and is clear in the blinding light of every silence."

"For me, my exile had nothing to do with an expulsion or with the impossibility of remembrance, because somehow or other one always returns. Dictators perish and borders change. However, the desire endures. The desire for a fragrance or for the way in which certain vines cling to doorways. The desire to wake up and recognize oneself in one's own language but more than anything to be recognized by others."

"antisemitism has always existed in Latin America, as evidenced by the many nations that remained neutral during the Second World War. The barbarism of the Nazis was often praised in military circles, and some Latin American countries only joined the Allies because of pressure from the United States. One of the few Latin American intellectuals who stood up against fascism and spoke about the impending fate of European Jews was Gabriela Mistral..."

"These narrators show that written history contains the lyricism of poetry and the rational insanity of passion. They teach us that History and these smaller histories spring from an intimate, delicate conscience where memory attempts not only to preserve the great events of History such as wars, conquests, and triumphs, but also in the daily history that is created in a park, in the depths of the ocean, or in the ancient icon of the family."

"More than anything, fantastic literature offers territories and spaces for subversion, disorder and illegality by using the only code possible: the imaginary. The fantastic, whatever genre it occupies, has the option or, better said, the desire to act through what has been culturally defined as forbidden and marginal. By talking and writing about the forbidden, about zones of silence, fantastic literature resides in the area of the always possible."

"a beautiful poet of the soul"

"I don't by any ways believe that we are the chosen people—but what is so amazing is how we have blossomed in the diaspora and that we are still here as a people in spite of centuries of discrimination and genocide, even from the expulsion of Spain or even before the destruction of the second temple. And I think what has kept the Jews together is the idea of home and the idea of memory, which is the ideas that I write about: home as an inner center, and memory as giving voice to the invisible and becoming a witness."

"Anyone familiar with the vast corpus of Marjorie’s work will agree that we have lost a literary giant in the field of Latin American Jewish Studies. Without a doubt, she stood out as the most eloquent, knowledgeable, profound, and prolific Latin American Jewish woman poet and writer residing in the United States. Hers was an essential voice in redefining the border between America and América in ways that challenged all presuppositions. She was a key founder of the field of Jewish Latina writing and escritura judía latinoamericana, connecting homelands and diasporas in original ways. Long before it became commonplace, she called attention to the unique hybridity of “Jewtina” identity and built a literary community for women writers who shared this mixed heritage."