I Resemble My Father Quotes

i don't know when love became elusive what i know, is that no one i know has it my fathers arms around my mothers neck fruit too ripe to eat, a door half way open when your name is a just a hand i can never hold everything i have ever believed in, becomes magic. i think of lovers as trees, growing to and from one another searching for the same light, my mothers laughter in a dark room, a photograph greying under my touch, this is all i know how to do, carry loss around until i begin to resemble every bad memory, every terrible fear, every nightmare anyone has ever had. i ask did you ever love me? you say of course, of course so quickly that you sound like someone else i ask are you made of steel? are you made of iron? you cry on the phone, my stomach hurts i let you leave, i need someone who knows how to stay.

I've been down by the stream collecting berries. Would you care for some?" I would, actually, but I don't want to relent too soon. I do walk over and look at them. I've never seen this type before. No, I have. But not in the arena. These aren't Rue's berries, although they resemble them. Nor do they match any I learned about in training. I lean down and scoop up a few, rolling them between my fingers. My father's voice comes back to me. "Not these, Katniss. Never these. They're nightlock. You'll be dead before they reach your stomach." Just then the cannon fires. I whip around, expecting Peeta to collapseto the ground, but he only raises his eyebrows. The hoovercraft appears a hundred metres or so away.What's left of Foxface's emaciated body is lifted into the air.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.

For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he hides these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them.

The only woman's body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?

We left him there. Louie. We left him.” I watched my father lean into his own arms and sob. There was something about the sound of a man in pain that resembled the sound of a wounded animal. My heart was breaking. All this time, I’d wanted my father to tell me something about the war and now I couldn’t stand to see the rawness of his pain, how new it was after so many years, how that pain was alive and thriving just beneath the surface.

Had he not resembled My father as he slept I had done't!

When you have a despicable person as a parent, I truly believe you can't escape hating any part of yourself that resembles him or her. Whether it's a physical similarity, a talent, a propensity or an inclination that you share, all commonalities are abhorrent to you. I look like my father. I have his thick dark hair and bright blue eyes. I have my mother's nose, but I have my father's wide, full mouth and his height. I am his child, and I hate the man. I hate that I look like him.

As I watched the men throw more earth into the grave, I dug into the cold soil of my own mind, and it became suddenly clear—the way things always become clearer only after they have happened—that Ikenna was a fragile delicate bird; he was a sparrow. Little things could unbridle his soul. Wistful thoughts often combed his melancholic spirit in search of craters to be filled with sorrow. As a younger boy, he often sat in the backyard, brooding and contemplative, his arms clasped over his knees. He was highly critical of things, a part of him that greatly resembled Father. He nailed small things to big crosses and would ponder for long on a wrong word he said to someone; he greatly dreaded the reprove of others. He had no place for ironies or satires; they troubled him.

GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we're all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him. Maybe he's sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, 'Shit, I didn't even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly here was this big band and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs...

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.

My son, you are just an infant now, but on that day when the world disrobes of its alluring cloak, it is then that I pray this letter is in your hands. Listen closely, my dear child, for I am more than that old man in the dusty portrait beside your bed. I was once a little boy in my mother’s arms and a babbling toddler on my father's lap. I played till the sun would set and climbed trees with ease and skill. Then I grew into a fine young man with shoulders broad and strong. My bones were firm and my limbs were straight; my hair was blacker than a raven's beak. I had a spring in my step and a lion's roar. I travelled the world, found love and married. Then off to war I bled in battle and danced with death. But today, vigor and grace have forsaken me and left me crippled. Listen closely, then, as I have lived not only all the years you have existed, but another forty more of my own. My son, We take this world for a permanent place; we assume our gains and triumphs will always be; that all that is dear to us will last forever. But my child, time is a patient hunter and a treacherous thief: it robs us of our loved ones and snatches up our glory. It crumbles mountains and turns stone to sand. So who are we to impede its path? No, everything and everyone we love will vanish, one day. So take time to appreciate the wee hours and seconds you have in this world. Your life is nothing but a sum of days so why take any day for granted? Don't despise evil people, they are here for a reason, too, for just as the gift salt offers to food, so do the worst of men allow us to savor the sweet, hidden flavor of true friendship. Dear boy, treat your elders with respect and shower them with gratitude; they are the keepers of hidden treasures and bridges to our past. Give meaning to your every goodbye and hold on to that parting embrace just a moment longer--you never know if it will be your last. Beware the temptation of riches and fame for both will abandon you faster than our own shadow deserts us at the approach of the setting sun. Cultivate seeds of knowledge in your soul and reap the harvest of good character. Above all, know why you have been placed on this floating blue sphere, swimming through space, for there is nothing more worthy of regret than a life lived void of this knowing. My son, dark days are upon you. This world will not leave you with tears unshed. It will squeeze you in its talons and lift you high, then drop you to plummet and shatter to bits . But when you lay there in pieces scattered and broken, gather yourself together and be whole once more. That is the secret of those who know. So let not my graying hairs and wrinkled skin deceive you that I do not understand this modern world. My life was filled with a thousand sacrifices that only I will ever know and a hundred gulps of poison I drank to be the father I wanted you to have. But, alas, such is the nature of this life that we will never truly know the struggles of our parents--not until that time arrives when a little hand--resembling our own--gently clutches our finger from its crib. My dear child, I fear that day when you will call hopelessly upon my lifeless corpse and no response shall come from me. I will be of no use to you then but I hope these words I leave behind will echo in your ears that day when I am no more. This life is but a blink in the eye of time, so cherish each moment dearly, my son.

But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.

I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories… My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them… Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds: To write: To try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

I can’t do this anymore, Ezra. All my life, I’ve worked overtime at trying to please everyone around me, everyone who gave anything that resembled love. My mother, my father, my friends, my job”—she could barely utter—“you. If no one else does before I leave this earth, I have to account for my own love. I have to do what’s best for me. I’m going home.

For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself? I

All I want is my father back. I want his heavy footsteps to tread outside my door. I want his stupid sayings, & his angry bellow, & rapid Spanish, & his eyes that misted over when his favorite song played. There are pieces of him all over the house, all over New York City, & beyond that to the island, but I can't bundle them together to make anything, anyone resembling him.

How was your journey?" he asked. "You don't have to make small talk with me," she said. "I don't like it, and I'm not very good at it." They paused at the shade of portico, beside a sweet-scented bower of roses. Casually Lord St. Vincent leaned a shoulder against a cream-painted column. A lazy smile curved his lips as he looked down at her. "Didn't Lady Berwick teach you?" "She tried. But I hate trying to make conversation about weather. Who cares what the temperature is? I want to talk about things like... like..." "Yes?" he prompted as she hesitated. "Darwin. Women's suffrage. Workhouses, war, why we're alive, if you believe in séances or spirits, if music has ever made you cry, or what vegetable you hate most..." Pandora shrugged and glanced up at him, expecting the familiar frozen expression of a man who was about to run for his life. Instead she found herself caught by his arrested stare, while the silence seemed to wrap around them. After a moment, Lord St. Vincent said softly, "Carrots." Bemused, Pandora tried to gather her wits. "That's the vegetable you hate most? Do you mean cooked ones?" "Any kind of carrots." "Out of all vegetables?" At his nod, she persisted, "What about carrot cake?" "No." But it's cake." A smile flickered across his lips. "Still carrots." Pandora wanted to argue the superiority of carrots over some truly atrocious vegetable, such as Brussels sprouts, but heir conversation was interrupted by a silky masculine voice. "Ah, there you are. I've been sent out to fetch you." Pandora shrank back as she saw a tall msn approach in a graceful stride. She knew instantly that he must be Lord Sy. Vincent's father- the resemblance was striking. His complexion was tanned and lightly time-weathered, with laugh-lines at the outer corners of his blue eyes. He had a full head of tawny-golden hair, handsomely silvered at the sides and temples. Having heard of his reputation as a former libertine, Pandora had expected an aging roué with coarse features and a leer... not this rather gorgeous specimen who wore his formidable presence like an elegant suit of clothes. "My son, what can you be thinking, keeping this enchanting creature out in the heat of midday?

O most sensitive heart of St. Joseph, who, resembling the tender heart of Mary, felt the sorrows of the Most Holy Mother, tell me, what did you feel, hearing the terrible prophecy of Simeon? Yet with what generosity, with what silence and unalterable resignation did you accept from the hands of God even the sword of sorrow for our good! How can I show you my thanks? O my sweetest saint, I want to imitate your generosity, and to any painful news I will say with you: God’s will be done.7 — Blessed Bartolo Longo

In a private room down the hall, a tired but delighted Cecily was watching her husband with his brand-new son. Cecily had thought that the expression on Tate’s face at their wedding would never be duplicated. But when they placed the tiny little boy in his father’s gowned arms in the delivery room, and he saw his child for the first time, the look on his face was indescribable. Tears welled in his eyes. He’d taken the tiny little fist in his big, dark hand and smoothed over the perfect little fingers and then the tiny little face, seeking resemblances. “Generations of our families,” he said softly, “all there, in that face.” He’d looked down at his wife with unashamedly wet eyes. “In our son’s face.” She wiped her own tears away with a corner of the sheet and coaxed Tate’s head down so that she could do the same for him where they were, temporarily, by themselves. Now she was cleaned up, like their baby, and drowsy as she lay on clean white sheets and watched her husband get acquainted with his firstborn. “Isn’t he beautiful?” he murmured, still awed by the child. “Next time, we have to have a little girl,” he said with a tender smile, “so that she can look like you.” Her heart felt near to bursting as she stared up at that beloved face, above the equally beloved face of their firstborn. “My heart is happy when I see you,” she whispered in Lakota. He chuckled, having momentarily forgotten that he’d taught her how to say it. “Mine is equally happy when I see you,” he replied in English. She reached out and clasped his big hand with her small one. On the table beside her was a bouquet of roses, red and crisp with a delightful soft perfume. Her eyes traced them, and she remembered the first rose he’d ever given her, when she was seventeen: a beautiful red paper rose that he’d brought her from Japan. Now the roses were real, not imitation. Just as her love for him, and his for her, had become real enough to touch. He frowned slightly at her expression. “What is it?” he asked softly. “I was remembering the paper rose you brought me from Japan, just after I went to live with Leta.” She shrugged and smiled self-consciously. He smiled back. “And now you’re covered in real ones,” he discerned. She nodded, delighted to see that he understood exactly what she was talking about. But, then, they always had seemed to read each others’ thoughts-never more than now, with the baby who was a living, breathing manifestation of their love. “Yes,” she said contentedly. “The roses are real, now.” Outside the window, rain was coming down in torrents, silver droplets shattering on the bright green leaves of the bushes. In the room, no one noticed. The baby was sleeping and his parents were watching him, their eyes full of warm, soft dreams.

There is no one to speak to about my headache and stomachache when I leave my bedroom and encounter this beautiful prison that my parents have built, when I see pictures of me on the walls and side tables that bear no resemblance to the me they cannot see. Sometimes I stare at the family that owns me and I wish I were a different person, with white skin and the ability to tell my mother and my father, especially my father, to fuck off without consequence, and sometimes I stare at the white cards of the Bible verses Reverend Olumide has gifted me and think that there is still a chance to change my ways.

Easing farther inside, he found a woman within who resembled Mariketa. Beside her stood a man who crossed thick arms over his chest, raising his brows at Bowe. At that moment, Bowe realized that he was meeting Mari’s parents—and that, in addition to his bare feet and unshaven, rough appearance, his shirt was on backward. And inside out. “This is the male she’s been seeing?” the man muttered. “He can’t even dress himself.” Bowe just stifled the urge to point out that though he might not be able to dress himself, he sure as hell could perceive when a bairn was on his shoulders. Instead he bit his tongue. This warlock, though arrogant, was Bowe’s future father-in-law. “A werewolf, Jill? Really.” “Hush.” The woman slapped the back of her hand against his stomach, then said, “I’m Jillian. And this is my husband, Warren. We are Mari’s parents. And we know you’re Bowen MacRieve of the Lykae clan.” He gave her a nod. To Bowe, Warren demanded, “Aren’t you a bit old for my daughter?” When Bowe scowled, Jillian blithely continued, “We’ve been waiting for you.

—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu." "Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—" "No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?" She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow." "Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?" "I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—" "Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?" "What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?" "The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it." She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly. "Well, Father? What have you got to say?" Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. "Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—" "If that's how you feel," she interrupted, "you're just not thinking it out." "My good woman!" said Father Bleu gently. "Pay attention to me!" Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. "I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that's an idea your mind can get hold of, isn't it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it's like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy's tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can't, Father Bleu. And that's what death is at it's worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead." She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears. "Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father." The priest glanced up, startled. "What?" "The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it's death that has the sting." In the pause the furnace door behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out. "I know what I'm talking about, Father. I've been there." Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down her frail veined arms, she had to be carried out. The party broke up at once.

You’re good at this,” said Ronan. “What?” He leaned to touch the baby’s head. “Being a mother.” “What is that supposed to mean?” Ronan looked awkward. Then he said glibly, “Nothing, if you don’t like it.” He glanced at Benix, Faris, and the others, but they were discussing thumbscrews and nooses. “It didn’t mean anything. I take it back.” Kestrel set the baby on the grass next to Faris. “You cannot take it back.” “Just this once,” he said, echoing her earlier words during the game. She stood and walked away. He followed. “Come, Kestrel. I spoke only the truth.” They had entered the shade of thickly grown laran trees, whose leaves were a bloody color. They would soon fall. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to have a child someday,” Kestrel told Ronan. Visibly relieved, he said, “Good. The empire needs new life.” It did. She knew this. As the Valorian empire stretched across the continent, it faced the problem of keeping what it had won. The solutions were military prowess and boosting the Valorian population, so the emperor prohibited any activities that unnecessarily endangered Valorian lives--like dueling and the bull-jumping games that used to mark coming-of-age ceremonies. Marriage became mandatory by the age of twenty for anyone who was not a soldier. “It’s just--” Kestrel tried again: “Ronan, I feel trapped. Between what my father wants and--” He held up his hands in flat-palmed defense. “I am not trying to trap you. I am your friend.” “I know. But when you are faced with only two choices--the military or marriage--don’t you wonder if there is a third, or a fourth, or more, even, than that?” “You have many choices. The law says that in three years you must marry, but not whom. Anyway, there is time.” His should grazed hers in the teasing push of children starting a mock fight. “Time enough for me to convince you of the right choice.” “Benix, of course.” She laughed. “Benix.” Ronan made a fist and shook it at the sky. “Benix!” he shouted. “I challenge you to a duel! Where are you, you great oaf?” Ronan stormed from the laran trees with all the flair of a comic actor. Kestrel smiled, watching him go. Maybe his silly flirtations disguised something real. People’s feelings were hard to know for certain. A conversation with Ronan resembled a Bite and Sting game where Kestrel couldn’t tell if the truth looked like a lie, or a lie like the truth. If it was true, what then?

The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife's career had begun to slowly deflate. Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playdates at each other's houses, and one day I went to the Thalberg house in Santa Monica, where Irving Sr. had died eighteen months before. Norma was in bed, where, I was given to understand, she spent quite a bit of time so that on those occasions when she worked or went out in public she would look as rested as possible. She was making Marie Antoinette at the time, and to see her in the flesh was overwhelming. She very kindly autographed a picture for me, which I still have: "To Cadet Wagner, with my very best wishes. Norma Shearer." Years later I would be with her and Martin Arrouge, her second husband, at Sun Valley. No matter who the nominal hostess was, Norma was always the queen, and no matter what time the party was to begin, Norma was always late, because she would sit for hours—hours!—to do her makeup, then make the grand entrance. She was always and forever the star. She had to be that way, really, because she became a star by force of will—hers and Thalberg's. Better-looking on the screen than in life, Norma Shearer was certainly not a beauty on the level of Paulette Goddard, who didn't need makeup, didn't need anything. Paulette could simply toss her hair and walk out the front door, and strong men grew weak in the knees. Norma found the perfect husband in Martin. He was a lovely man, a really fine athlete—Martin was a superb skier—and totally devoted to her. In the circles they moved in, there were always backbiting comments when a woman married a younger man—" the stud ski instructor," that sort of thing. But Martin, who was twelve years younger than Norma and was indeed a ski instructor, never acknowledged any of that and was a thorough gentleman all his life. He had a superficial facial resemblance to Irving Thalberg, but Thalberg had a rheumatic heart and was a thin, nonathletic kind of man—intellectually vital, but physically weak. Martin was just the opposite—strong and virile, with a high energy level. Coming after years of being married to Thalberg and having to worry about his health, Martin must have been a delicious change for Norma.

In fact, if I really think about it, what I loved best in my daughters was what seemed alien to me. In them—I felt—I liked most the features that came from their father, even after our marriage stormily ended. Or those which went back to ancestors of whom I knew nothing. Or those which seemed, in the combining of organisms, an ingenious invention of chance. It seemed to me, in other words, that the closer I felt to them, the less responsibility I bore for their bodies. But that alien closeness was rare. Their troubles, their griefs, their conflicts returned to impose themselves, continuously, and I was bitter, I felt a sense of guilt. I was always, in some way, the origin of their sufferings, and the outlet. only of obvious resemblances but of secret ones, those we become aware of later, the aura of bodies, the aura that stuns like a strong liquor. Barely perceptible tones of voice. A small gesture, a way of batting the eyelashes, a smile-sneer. The walk, the shoulder that leans slightly to the left, a graceful swinging of the arms. The impalpable mixture of tiny movements that, combined in a certain way, make Bianca seductive, Marta not, or vice versa, and so cause pride, pain. Or hatred, because the mother’s power always seems to be that she gives unfairly, beginning in the living niche of the womb.

In the very nature of being—that is, God—it must be hard—and divine history shows how hard—to create that which shall be not himself, yet like himself. The problem is, so far to separate from himself that which must yet on him be ever and always and utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence of an individual, and be able to turn and regard him—choose him, and say, 'I will arise and go to my Father,' and so develop in itself the highest Divine of which it is capable—the will for the good against the evil—the will to be one with the life whence it has come, and in which it still is—the will to close the round of its procession in its return, so working the perfection of reunion—to shape in its own life the ring of eternity—to live immediately, consciously, and active-willingly from its source, from its own very life—to restore to the beginning the end that comes of that beginning—to be the thing the maker thought of when he willed, ere he began to work its being. I imagine the difficulty of doing this thing, of effecting this creation, this separation from himself such that will in the creature shall be possible—I imagine, I say, the difficulty of such creation so great, that for it God must begin inconceivably far back in the infinitesimal regions of beginnings—not to say before anything in the least resembling man, but eternal miles beyond the last farthest-pushed discovery in protoplasm—to set in motion that division from himself which in its grand result should be individuality, consciousness, choice, and conscious choice—choice at last pure, being the choice of the right, the true, the divinely harmonious. Hence the final end of the separation is not individuality; that is but a means to it; the final end is oneness—an impossibility without it. For there can be no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where there is but one. Two at least are needed for oneness; and the greater the number of individuals, the greater, the lovelier, the richer, the diviner is the possible unity.

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of the world. But their wallets always waited cold sober in the cloakroom while the Icelandic purse lay open for all in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. “Reputation is king, the rest is crap!” my Bæring from Bolungarvík used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything else was a defeat. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet of Jón Pre-Jón popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough. The resemblances were small and exact: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I instantly acquired a physical intolerance for the father, and forbade him to come in and see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in the bass voice out in the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on I made it a rule: I sacked my men by calling a car. ‘The taxi is here,’ became my favourite sentence.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

Agnete had walked over to one of the taller works, the school of fish, and fingered a small piece of metal slightly darker than the others, its shape not quite symmetrical as the rest of the pieces swimming through the air in swirling, upward drifts. Upon closer scrutiny, Stephen saw she had changed the spacing of this one piece of metal in relation to the others, as well as the weight of it. When the wind blew, it did not move in the same pattern as the rest; instead, it twitched and wavered in a way that suggested it was swimming harder, against the tide, in an effort to catch up. "I'm that fish," she said. "I grew up in this house. It's the only place I've ever lived, and I love it here. But everyone in town knew that Therese, even though she raised me, wasn't my mother. Everyone knew that whoever my father was, he wasn't around. I survived adolescence by convincing myself I didn't care; I told myself being different didn't make me any less." She pulled her hair away from her face, and Stephen was struck by the resemblance to her father. He could feel Bayber's hand, an iron clamp squeezing his wrist. Her father, had he been around, would likely have scared away anyone brave enough to come within five feet of Agnete. "I made this piece because I've always had a feeling of being separated from everyone else, which I was fine with, but at the same time, a fear of being left behind. Does that make sense?" Her explanation resonated with him, though he'd have been hard-pressed to articulate it as clearly. He'd stared at the ground, scowling in concentration, unable to say more than "Yes, I understand what you mean. Maybe I'm that fish, as well." "Then there are two of us. We'll be our own school.

Here I wake up because the pregnant woman is touching my face with her fingers. "Pane,"* she says to me, "you're calling out in your sleep and tossing about. I'll arrange a bed for you in another corner because you're pushing my father." She raises her thin legs and rounded abdomen and removes the blanket from the sleeping man. Lying on his back is an old man, dead. His glottis has been torn out and his face split in two; his beard is clotted with blue blood resembling a piece of lead. "Pane," says the Jewess, shaking the mattress, "the Poles killed him, and he begged them: 'Kill me in the back yard so that my daughter doesn't see how I die.' But they did as it was most convenient to them. He died in this room, thinking of me. And now I'd like to know," cried the woman with sudden terrible violence, "I'd like to know where you'd find in the whole world another father like my father!

Little did anyone know what addictions and sins I was subjected to as a child from a similar ‘fallen angel’. I couldn’t bear sharing what had happened to me at the group AA meetings—too humiliating. I only shared the secret with a select few and requested it be kept confidential. More than the special attention the priest received, I was overwhelmed with the eerie resemblance he had to my abuser. His pale freckled skin and strawberry-blond hair made me uncomfortable in his presence. I could feel my abuser’s satanic touch when in the same room as that man. But I was in a mechanical state, staying the course, hoping something miraculous would pull me out of my miring in the past. This perseverance contributed to being the turning point of my recovery, that being when I told him what had happened. “What’s the name of this priest, Marco?” Father Todd said. I told him. To which he replied, “He was arrested for molesting another boy, and he did some prison time.” “I did hear about that, Father,” I said. “You should go to the diocese. They’ll appoint a therapist to you. I’ll give you the contact names,” he said, pulling out a pad of paper with all the information I'd need.

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!” She held him closer round the neck and rocked him on her breast like a child. “If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I have come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it! And if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father who is living, and of my mother who is dead, you learn that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore his pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake and wept all night, because the love of my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for it, weep for it! Weep for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his sacred tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank God for us, thank God!

But the point of anguish at which my mother killed herself was taken over by strangers, possessed and reshaped by them. The collection of Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father. It was as if the clay from her poetic energy was taken up and versions of my mother made out of it, invented to reflect on the inventors, as if they could possess my real, actual mother, now a woman who had ceased to resemble herself in those other minds. I saw poems such as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" dissected over and over, the moment that my mother wrote them being applied to her whole life, to her whole person, as if they were the total sum of her experience.

I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did. At the end of the day, I’m happy to have my father’s feet and my mother’s eyes with me at all times. If I ever go back to that beach in Wildwood, I want my daughter to be able to find me in the crowd by spotting my soda-case hips. I want her to be able to pick me out of a sea of highlighted-blond women with fake tans because I’m the one with the thick ponytail and the greenish undertones in my skin. And

Breakfast in the shed of the pear groves  was an experience, made by Mizrahi. I remember his unique and diverse Shakshuka. I remember the side dishes and refreshing coffee. Nothing resembled that stolen sandwich, I used to eat in Kinneret under the shade of the banana trees. No one here was in a rush and no one urged you to finish. There was no stressful work atmosphere. I could not help but make the comparison of the working conditions here, to my  father's in the banana plantations of Kinneret.

The mechanism of the clock was enclosed in a box resembling a large cupboard, but I was disappointed with the workings. They were much smaller than I had anticipated. The clock was worked by heavy weights suspended on long cables. My father picked up a handle like the crank handle of a car and wound them up. There were two of them. One to work the hands, the other controlling the hammer which struck out the hours on a large bell. Then the mousetraps were set, Not to catch mice, but to control the lighting. Previously my father had to make a special trip each evening to switch on the lights of the clock, returning near midnight to switch them off. To obviate this he invented a method of light control which may have been unique. Two switches, one for switching on and the other for switching off were used. They were fixed on the inside wall of the tower. A mousetrap mounted near each switch was so arranged that when the trap sprung, the arc traversed by the closing trap enabled the switch to be flicked on or off as required. Adjustable sleeves were set along the the cables for required times. The sleeves on the descending cables tripped the mouse traps which actuated the switches.

I used to think of you, when ye were small,” Jamie was saying to Bree, his voice very soft. “When I lived in the cave; I would imagine that I held ye in my arms, a wee babe. I would hold ye so, against my heart, and sing to ye there, watching the stars go by overhead.” “What would you sing?” Brianna’s voice was low, too, barely audible above the crackle of the fire. I could see her hand, resting on his shoulder. Her index finger touched a long, bright strand of his hair, tentatively stroking its softness. “Old songs. Lullabies I could remember, that my mother sang to me, the same that my sister Jenny would sing to her bairns.” She sighed, a long, slow sound. “Sing to me now, please, Da.” He hesitated, but then tilted his head toward hers and began to chant softly, an odd tuneless song in Gaelic. Jamie was tone-deaf; the song wavered oddly up and down, bearing no resemblance to music, but the rhythm of the words was a comfort to the ear. I caught most of the words; a fisher’s song, naming the fish of loch and sea, telling the child what he would bring home to her for food. A hunter’s song, naming birds and beasts of prey, feathers for beauty and furs for warmth, meat to last the winter. It was a father’s song—a soft litany of providence and protection. I

It was on the morning of the first day at my school after the long summer break this year that I noticed something stunning as I was about to enter my school through the rock garden gate. As usual, I was so much eager to have a first glimpse of my favourite red brick house from a distance, but instead something even redder captured my eyes. It was an elegant tree full bloomed with red coloured flowers in the morning sun waiting to welcome me back to school after the break, which immediately lifted little remaining home sickness. The guard uncle told that the majestic tree is called Krishnachura. Again I was awed by the beauty of the name. I have seen this tree a plenty in my locality at Salt Lake, but they never ever drew my attention the way this tree did at the school gate at the backdrop of the red building that summer morning. After returning home, I immediately searched for more details of the Krishnachura and found that the tree originally belongs to the islands of the Madagascar. In other parts of India, this tree is known as the Gulmohar. They are also fondly called “Flames of forest”, which somebody rightly resembled them to the flames of the bushfires in hot dry summer. I also found that in many countries, e.g. in Japan, every school must plant at least few flowering cherry trees in their premises. These cherry blossoms have influenced the Japanese society and its art and culture tremendously. Similarly, the Krishnachura has also influenced many poets and appears in the Indian literature and music. However, in our country, they are not mandatorily planted in our school. I am so fortunate to have these trees in my school. I again realized the visions of the founders and subsequent nurturers of my school. I have been seeing this tree since my nursery days, but probably, I was too little to be conscious about its beauty. I told about this to my father, but he further astonished me when he told me that even he looks forward every year for the blossom. Probably, me too will be waiting every year henceforth for the Krishnachura to bloom, but the trail of the sight of the tree of my school that very morning of June with remain with me forever.

At the substantive level, there is a complete break between the intention of the people and the intention of Christ, but at the level of the concrete event there is continuity. Because these two levels must remain, an isolated word must remain ambiguous. In my course on salvation I have almost finished the presentation of your theory and my book. I am now beginning to engage with [la confrontation avec] the tradition. The central idea of the Church Fathers was: redemption = paideia (education) through the Logos. There is the whole problem of the Logos, as you show in your book. But there is also the whole problem of paideia. The excellent book by Werner Jaeger, Paideia,100 shows that all Greek thinking was dominated by the issue of paideia. Plato especially sought nothing other than the man of virtue, the mastery of desire and of violence through the education of man; and education is made possible, according to him, by the knowledge of the good. Jaeger shows that “the State” of Plato was nothing but a corporation engaged in the business of education (albeit a company that closely resembles a concentration camp). Jaeger also shows that the Greek idea of the “paideia” was totally centered on the “paradeigma” (model) and “mimesis.” But that idea of mimesis was very different from your idea of mimesis. The Greek idea: the one who imitates a virtuous man becomes virtuous and the man who imitates bad people becomes bad. The problem of rivalry is not in evidence.—But it is easily shown anyway. There are texts in Seneca where the idea of imitating the gods leads to the idea of surpassing the gods. I see now in the idea of education the great tendency of humanity to try to overcome rivalry and violence without getting to the truth of the scapegoat. The great ideal of the Age of Enlightenment: the education of humanity (Rousseau, Lessing, Herder, Goethe). The great ideal of Mao: the education of the new man (in a state that looks a bit like the state of Plato).

Morning,” comes a voice at my ear, and I jump. It’s Jefferson McCauley Kingfisher, bleary faced and yawning, suspenders hanging at his sides. His black hair is badly mussed, like a family of mice nested there during the night. “What’s got you so tickled?” he grumbles in response to my smile. “You have Andrew Jackson hair.” Jefferson frowns like he just bit into a sour persimmon. “He’s the last fellow I care to resemble. You know what he did.” I wince. “I was just thinking about the picture they had at school and . . . I mean, I’m sorry.” He runs his fingers through his hair. “Well, so long as I don’t have Andrew Jackson eyebrows, I’m still the finest-looking fellow for at least”—he glances back at our distant camp, toward Becky Joyner at the griddle, the Hoffman boys helping their father check the wagon, Henry Meek grooming his scant beard—“a hundred feet.” I harrumph at that. Jefferson is the finest-looking young man for a hundred miles, but I’d never say so aloud. Wouldn’t want it to go to his mussy-haired head

Mind you, doctors are not all bad. If you want a real bastard, hire a lawyer. One of these imps of Satan came up from the Middle Temple offering to write out an inventory of my goods so I could make a will. ‘After all,’ he commented, looking slyly at me, ‘you have so many offspring.’ I asked the bastard what he meant? He replied with a knowing leer how many of the young men and women in the surrounding villages bear more than a passing resemblance to my goodself. My little fart of a chaplain nods, but I am not ashamed. I have, in many ways, been a true father to my people. Anyway, back to the lawyer! I soon wiped the grin off his silly face when I asked him if he was a good runner. ‘Swift as a hare,’ he declared. I hope he was. I gave him five minutes’ start and loosed my dogs on him.

What does it mean?” “What?” “That word. ‘Sexy.’ What does it mean?” He looked down, suddenly shy. “I can’t tell you.” “Why not?” “It’s a secret.” He pressed his lips together, so hard that a bit of them went white. “Tell me the secret. I want to know.” Rohin sat on the bed beside Miranda and began to kick the edge of the mattress with the backs of his shoes. He giggled nervously, his thin body flinching as if it were being tickled. “Tell me,” Miranda demanded. She leaned over and gripped his ankles, holding his feet still. Rohin looked at her, his eyes like slits. He struggled to kick the mattress again, but Miranda pressed against him. He fell back on the bed, his back straight as a board. He cupped his hands around his mouth, and then he whispered, “It means loving someone you don’t know.” Miranda felt Rohin’s words under her skin, the same way she’d felt Dev’s. But instead of going hot she felt numb. It reminded her of the way she’d felt at the Indian grocery, the moment she knew, without even looking at a picture, that Madhuri Dixit, whom Dev’s wife resembled, was beautiful. “That’s what my father did,” Rohin continued. “He sat next to someone he didn’t know, someone sexy, and now he loves her instead of my mother.

You’re right. You and Millie look more like your mom,” I said... “That’s because we spent more time with her,” Henry said seriously, as if it were common knowledge, as if resemblances were based on nurture instead of nature. It was true, to a point. Mannerisms, quirks, style. All those things could be learned and copied. “So if I spend a lot of time with Kathleen, do you think she’ll start to look like me?” I asked him, steering the focus away from his father. Henry looked doubtfully from me to my grunting, banana-bearded child and back again. “I hope so,” he said. Georgia snickered, and I hooted and held my hand in the air so Henry could give me five. “You hear that, Georgia? Henry hopes so,” I crowed. “I guess that means your baby daddy is a beautiful man.” Henry obviously didn’t mean to be funny, and he totally left me hanging. Georgia reached up and slapped my hand and winked at me.

He points at a fourth man who’s gliding toward the small group of men. The newcomer is tall, blond, and looks like a male model. He’s snapping on a black helmet as he joins the others. “Dude,” gripes the player at the end of the bench. “That’s my dad.” I examine the teen, instantly noting the resemblance. His name is Beau, and although his hair is a shade darker than his father’s, he has the same green eyes and chiseled features. He hasn’t completely filled out yet, but he’s already tall and built. I fear for the opponents he’ll be facing in a couple years.

I observed my father’s face out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to squash the adoption rumour, find some irrefutable proof in our resemblance, some connections laid down by nature. When I got tired of excavating the mine of his face, I imagined other fathers for myself. After all, if a father could adopt a son, couldn’t a son also adopt a father?

Whenever anything remotely resembling anger had threatened to emerge, and especially during my teenage years, my mother would clench her jaw, look me hard in the eyes, and tell me that I was “just like my father.” That would be the man who had beaten her regularly throughout their (blessedly short-lived) marriage. As you can imagine, that did the job. I looked like my father; it was easy enough to believe I might unknowingly harbor some of his worse personality characteristics too.

By this the boy that by her side lay killed Was melted like a vapor from her sight, And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled A purple flower sprung up, checkered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. She bows her head the new-sprung flower to smell, Comparing it to her Adonis’ breath, And says within her bosom it shall dwell, Since he himself is reft from her by death. She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears Green-dropping sap, which she compares to tears. “Poor flower,” quoth she, “this was thy father’s guise— Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire— For every little grief to wet his eyes; To grow unto himself was his desire, And so ’tis thine, but know it is as good To wither in my breast as in his blood. “Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast; Thou art the next of blood, and ’tis thy right. Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest; My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night. There shall not be one minute in an hour Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love’s flower.

Remembering the careful way the cooks she'd met chose their ingredients--- the snails at L'Ami Louis, Taeb's saffron, Baldwin's asparagus--- Stella thought Django was more like a magician, conjuring dishes out of thin air. By the time George nudged Stella aside to poke his nose in the door, Lucie was strewing crisp breadcrumbs on top of a thick vegetable potage, and Django was stirring a tart lemon pudding. Downstairs, customers lingered, people who had intended on stopping in for a moment stayed on as increasingly seductive scents wafted through the shop. Unwilling to admit that he was pleased, George tasted the pudding and grumbled, "You've used up all the eggs. And I wanted gingerbread for tonight's reading." "Gingerbread!" Django pulled a face. "Nous sommes en France. I will make something more appropriate." Still standing in the doorway, Stella wondered how he would manage this; he'd used everything in the kitchen except an aged pound cake resembling a rock, a handful of desiccated dried apricots, and the sour milk. "We'll make some coffee." Django was tearing up the stale cake. As she watched, he produced curds from the sour milk, cooked the apricots into jam, and soaked the cake in coffee. With a flourish, he pulled a bar of chocolate from his pocket. "J'ai toujours du chocolat sur moi." He melted the chocolate, stirring in the last of the coffee. "I always have chocolate. You never know when you will need it." Against her better judgement, Stella was charmed. Lucie stood close by, watching him layer the coffee-drenched cake with jam, curds, and chocolate, grabbing each spoon as he finished. "Will you make this for my birthday?" she asked. "No." "Please," she begged. "For your birthday I will make something better.

My skin was darker, my eyes rounder, and my jaw more angular with a cleft in the center. Perhaps I resembled my father? I did not know; I had never met him.

However, I had gone only a little way when I heard a call and turned to see Olive running after me with something in her hand. Churning along that high pavement in her apron and cardigan and her old felt slippers, she bore with her, I saw with a shock, a whole family of resemblances: my parents were there, mother as well as father, and my dead brother, and I, too, I was there, and so was my lost child, my lost little daughter, and a host of others, whom I knew but only half recognised. This is how the dead come back, borne by the living, to throng us round, pale ghosts of themselves and of us.

I see.” Julius reclined in the chair and crossed one of his long legs over the other, his face deep in thought. “Your sisters take after your mother more than you do. Although your resemblance of her is still apparent,” he nodded at her, apparently uninhibited by the inappropriate intimacy of the entire conversation. “In what way do I resemble my mother?” she asked cautiously. “You have her lips.” Eden started, and her tea splashed over her saucer. “I—do?” His eyes fell to them, and something in his eyes darkened. “Unfortunately. And you inherited the fine almond shape of her eyes. But the eyebrows, the intelligence in your eyes, the mischief in them—those are from your father.” Eden was astonished. Never had she been thus spoken to. Her face was scarlet. “Are there any other features of mine you wish to trace to their parentage?” she managed. His eyes flicked over her bosom, tightly buttoned up beneath the faded bodice, past her disappearing waist to the curved, perky bottom perched so tensely on the chair. "The curves I must attribute to the mother, but the lightness of figure, the graceful athleticism, and restlessness to the father." A great din of a clanging from outside had drown out his words so she could not hear them. “I beg your pardon?” Eden said over the din. “The stage coach,” was all he said. “Oh,” was her only reply. The clanging finished. “I’m afraid I missed what you said earlier.” "Nothing of import." He leaned forward for another grape.

felt, all I cared about was that he did not hold me anymore. Messy, dictatorial, irresponsible and whimsical as he was, he had always held me. He had, perhaps against his doctrines and even his own will, encompassed my entire world and endowed it with meaning and something resembling lawfulness, however precarious this last term might have been when applied to him. His was such a confident chaos. Over time and through a mysterious transmutation I had derived a sense of safety from all that was erratic and unstable in our life together. Despite everything, I had consistently chosen to respect and look up to him. Only now did I realize how active and conscious that choice had been. Sometimes he made it easy for me, and it was a joy. More often it fell entirely on me to make a father of him. Year after year I had made up for his shortcomings. Helped him be my parent. And

My mother lived in dread of my father. I think that’s pretty much all I can say about her, leaving aside her obsession with gardening and miniature goats. She was a thin woman, with long limp hair. I don’t know if she existed before meeting him. I imagine she did. She must have resembled a primitive life form—single-celled, vaguely translucent. An amoeba. Just ectoplasm, endoplasm, a nucleus, and a digestive vacuole. Years of contact with my father had gradually filled this scrap of nothing with fear.

I could not watch the first dirt fall on William K's face so I kicked the first layer with the back of my heel. Once his head was covered I spread more dirt and rocks until it bore some resemblance to a real grave. When I was finished, I told William K that I was sorry. I was sorry that I had not known how sick he was. That I had not found a way to keep him alive. That I was the last person he saw on this earth. That he could not say good-bye to his mother and father, that only I would know where his body lay. It was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K.

Many years ago I confronted a political activist whose inordinate desire for power was suddenly exposed. Instead of covering up and denying, he said to me: “I do not want to be an insect, like my father.” This shocking admission is something that Nietzsche, as the psychologist of the “will to power,” addressed with the following lines: What the father has hid comes out in the son; and oft have I found in the son the father’s revealed secret. Inspired ones they resemble; but it is not the heart that inspires them — but vengeance. And when they become subtle and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that makes them so. Their jealously leads them also into thinker’s paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy — they always go too far: so that their fatigue has at last to go to sleep on the snow. In all their lamentations sounds vengeance, in all their eulogies is maleficence; and being judge seems to them bliss.

I flung the pages of the letter into the air and watched them flutter aimlessly to the floor, and dad's make-believe hopes with them. I went to the washstand, poured every drop of cold water into the bowl, and glared at the man in the mirror, wanting to growl at the resemblance to my father. I let my hands soak, drowning what was possible to drown, than dried them and changed my clothes, put on a tie, and brushed my hair till my head hurt. When I walked out the door to go down for dinner, I looked like a new man. Cottage pie sounded terrific.

Meditation at Lagunitas" All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Now if I were sitting at that funeral we visualized earlier, and one of my children was about to speak, I would want his life to represent the victory of teaching, training, and disciplining with love over a period of years rather than the battle scars of quick fix skirmishes. I would want his heart and mind to be filled with the pleasant memories of deep, meaningful times together. I would want him to remember me as a loving father who shared the fun and the pain of growing up. I would want him to remember the times he came to me with his problems and concerns. I would want to have listened and loved and helped. I would want him to know I wasn’t perfect, but that I had tried with everything I had. And that, perhaps more than anybody in the world, I loved him. The reason I would want those things is because, deep down, I value my children. I love them, I want to help them. I value my role as their father. But I don’t always see those values. I get caught up in the “thick of thin things.” What matters most gets buried under layers of pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors. I become reactive. And the way I interact with my children every day often bears little resemblance to the way I deeply feel about them. Because I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my deepest values. I can realize that the script I’m living is not in harmony with those values, that my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I have deferred to circumstances and other people. And I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past. I can become my own first creator.

It was the first time I thought about my age in terms of being old, but it didn’t take me long to forget about it. I became accustomed to waking every day with a different pain that kept changing location and form as the years passed. At times it seemed to be the clawing of death, and the next day it would disappear. This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father. I must be condemned to eternal youth, I thought, because my equine profile will never look like my father’s raw Caribbean features or my mother’s imperial Roman ones. The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside. In

With as little effort as though she weighed no more than a pillow, he lifted her up and laid her on the billiards table. She was vaguely aware of the balls scattering. Leaning over her, he braced his arms on either side of her head, his gaze intent. “Don’t marry him,” he urged, his voice low and sensual until it more closely resembled a caress. “I have to.” “Because of the kiss in the garden?” Her heart slammed into her ribs. “What do you know of the garden?” “Only rumors. The rest of your life shouldn’t be determined by a kiss.” Yet here she was thinking that if she weren’t betrothed, the kiss he had just delivered would have been the guiding star for the remainder of her life. No one else’s would ever measure up. A broken betrothal . . . Litton would sue. Her father wouldn’t allow that sort of scandal to happen. “You’re being a bit hypocritical. You’re asking me to change the direction of my life because you managed to steal a kiss that left me breathless. You had your chance with me, Chetwyn. You chose another. Now so have I.” “I can explain.

He toys with the hem of his polo shirt. “Cecelia isn’t my biological daughter. So any resemblance between the two of us is, you know, coincidental.” Wow, I can’t stop putting my foot in my mouth. “Oh. I didn’t realize…” “It’s not a big deal.” His brown eyes are trained on the back door, waiting for Cecelia to return. “I met Nina when Cecelia was a baby, so I’m the only father she’s ever known. I think of her as my daughter. It’s the same difference.

But my father and I never had the time to develop anything resembling an unspoken language.