Washington Square Quotes

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places.

As I stand in the elevator, dazed, I realise that a massive winning lottery ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present, and I start to laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run down the stairs to the street I see Clare running across Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears and I don't know why.

Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it.

... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

Oh," said Catherine, with some eagerness, "it doesn't take long to like a person—when once you begin.

Poor Catherine's dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far.

... he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much the most competent and most formidable.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.

Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in the background.

I hardly knew what to do. I wanted, of course, to rush down to Washington Square and grip the poor blighter silently by the hand; and then, thinking it over, I hadn't the nerve. Absent treatment seemed the touch. I gave it him in waves.

Mrs. Penniman always, even in conversation, italicised her personal pronouns.

... was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk.

Catherine had not understood all that she said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian’s ease of manner and flow of ideas.

In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone.

He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.

Nevertheless, he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of Poughkeepsie.

Tell the world what scares you the most” says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says “Save the world with some advice from the future” Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read. On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.” Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss in the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift and card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle. Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads: Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random useless facts that are all we have left from our education” A kiss and the card’s on it’s way toward Lake Washington. From Seth: When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” A kiss and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard. Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.” Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write: I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again. Beandy is waiting to rake the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net. While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net Brandy reads another card from Seth. We are all self-composting” I write another card from the future and Brandy reads it: When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves” An updraft lifts up my worst fears from the suicide net and lifts them away. Seth writes and Brandy reads. You have to keep recycling yourself”. I write and Brandy reads. Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” I write and Brandy reads. The one you love and the one who loves you are never ever the same person.

I imagined us sitting around a table together, sharing a good meal and laughing about all the crazy things we’d done in our lives. Including that time I wrestled the god of old age in Washington Square Park.

And much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton.

The city was a real city, shifty and sexual. I was lightly jostled by small herds of flushed young sailors looking for action on Forty-Second Street, with it rows of x-rated movie houses, brassy women, glittering souvenir shops, and hot-dog vendors. I wandered through Kino parlors and peered through the windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant’s Raw Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles of fresh oysters. The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and one felt the flux of its history. The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects. I walked for hours from park to park. In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself … This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem oppressive to anyone.

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

The thing to do when you’re impatient,” he proceeded, “is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.

... there was something superior even in his injustice, and absolute in his mistakes.

When a man decides to do something he must go all the way,” he said, “but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them.

To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them.

This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money--it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity.

You see, people forget you

What the hell, it always rains in sad love stories. And in happy ones too. Must be a reason, though perhaps not necessarily metaphysical.

MARRY JANE: What are you doing here? SPIDER-MAN: A 500 ft. geyser in Washington square and you're wondering what I'm doing here?

A “place to sit” ends up being Washington Square Park, where we find a bench and Oliver lays out his sandwich and I pop open my seltzer.

Harry had been down to Washington Square to hear an open-air concert of chamber music. How you could play chamber music outdoors Chester didn't understand—but it was New York and anything could happen.

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

Because you see darling, darling, there are no false questions. All questions in life are true questions. Answers may be false, but questions cannot be false. Sure,they can be dumb, they can be stupid, but never false.

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor’s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico’s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s.

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.

I want to know why you don’t like me, Malloy. I like you, even if you do hit people.” He sighed. “I never said I didn’t like you, Mrs. Brandt.” Reasonable again. She wanted to smack him. “And why don’t you ever call me Sarah? You think I’m beautiful, but you never call me Sarah.” He muttered something she didn’t understand. “You do think I’m beautiful,” she insisted. “You said so!” “Yes, I do,” he said grudgingly. “And I do like you, Sarah. Now let’s talk about something else, because you’re going to be very embarrassed if you remember any of this conversation tomorrow.

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings.

She sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume

(...) It simply appeared to him proper and reasonable that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her fortune on her back. (...)

American girls are the best girls,” he said cheerfully to his young companion.

Most love stories are nocturnal. That's what makes them so fascinating.

Her aunt seemed to her aggressive and foolish, and to see it so clearly—to judge Mrs. Penniman so positively—made her feel old and grave. She did not resent the imputation of weakness; it made no impression on her, for she had not the sense of weakness, and she was not hurt at not being appreciated. She had an immense respect for her father, and she felt that to displease him would be a misdemeanour analogous to an act of profanity in a great temple; but her purpose had slowly ripened, and she believed that her prayers had purified it of its violence.

And I still want to know why you hit that man in front of me. You wanted me to see it, didn’t you?” “Why would I want you to see it?” Sarah was getting very annoyed with him. He usually wasn’t this dense. “Because you wanted me to think badly of you, and I demand to know why!” “You do, do you?” he said in a very odd tone. “Yes, I do, and I’m not getting out of this cab until you tell me!” “I don’t want to tell you.” “Then what do you want?” She knew he was looking at her, although she doubted he could see very much in the darkness. “I want to show you,” he said.

The court exonerated Admiral Kimmel of all charges and laid the blame squarely on Washington. The Army Pearl Harbor Board also concluded that Washington had full foreknowledge of the attack.

Moinous reaches for Sucette's hand and squeezes it. Oh but I do love you, I do, I swear, in spite of them. However, for the first time in his life Moinous understands what quicksand love is.

If she is to have a fall,” said Mrs. Almond, with a gentle laugh, “we must spread as many carpets as we can.” And she carried out this idea by showing a great deal of motherly kindness to the girl.

FEDERAL LANDOWNERSHIP (TOP 12 STATES) STATE TOTAL SQUARE MILES % OWNED BY FEDERAL GOV. 1. Nevada 61,548 87.6 2. Utah 35,723 68 3. Alaska 244,627 67 4. Idaho 34,520 65.2 5. Oregon 34,084 55.5 6. California 49,842 49.9 7. Wyoming 30,902 49.7 8. Arizona 32,228 44.3 9. Colorado 25,851 38.9 10. New Mexico 28,143 36.2 11. Washington 13,984 32.8 12. Montana 29,718 31.9 Source: National Wilderness Institute

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.” —Don Juan

Well I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual It's just that the moon is full And you happened to call And here I sit Hand on the telephone Hearing a voice I'd known A couple of light years ago Heading straight for a fall As I remember your eyes Were bluer than robin's eggs My poetry was lousy you said Where are you calling from? A booth in the midwest Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks You brought me something We both know what memories can bring They bring diamonds and rust Well you burst on the scene Already a legend The unwashed phenomenon The original vagabond You strayed into my arms And there you stayed Temporarily lost at sea The Madonna was yours for free Yes the girl on the half-shell Could keep you unharmed Now I see you standing With brown leaves falling all around And snow in your hair Now you're smiling out the window Of that crummy hotel Over Washington Square Our breath comes out white clouds Mingles and hangs in the air Speaking strictly for me We both could have died then and there Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague 'Cause I need some of that vagueness now It's all come back too clearly Yes I loved you dearly And if you're offering me diamonds and rust I've already paid

These things belonged here, in this house: it was as if the house itself had grown them, as if they were something living that would shrivel and die were they moved elsewhere. And then he thought: was the same not true for him? Was he not also something the house had, if not spawned, then nourished and fed? If he left Washington Square, how would he ever know where he truly was in the world? How could he leave these walls that had stared blankly, plainly back at him through all of his states?

It’s funny the way you sometimes remind me of myself,” he went on. “I too did not want to take the path of a warrior. I believed that all that work was for nothing, and since we are all going to die what difference would it make to be a warrior? I was wrong. But I had to find that out for myself. Whenever you do realize that you are wrong, and that it certainly makes a world of difference, you can say that you are convinced. And then you can proceed by yourself. And by yourself you may even become a man of knowledge.

In all the media coverage of militias and militants, Hamas, Fateh, and the Israeli army, one forgets that they operate in the midst of these large numbers of innocent people, crammed into 360 square kilometers, an area “slightly more than twice the size of Washington, DC.

Long ago, when New York City was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definition of his birthplace and the confinement of his past. I first saw Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets, one block west of Broadway and a few blocks east of Washington Square Park. Bob was playing back-up harmonica for various musicians and as a duo with another folksinger, Mark Spoelstra, before he played sets by himself. Mark played the twelve string guitar and had a melodious singing voice. Bob’s raspy voice and harmonica added a little dimension to the act. Their repertoire consisted of traditional folk songs and the songs of Woody Guthrie. They weren’t half bad. Bob was developing his image into his own version of a rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.

the BASK-8 had finally arrived! The Cyborg Queen and Commander Newters observed the park from the window of the Command Bridge. “I believe this is the park we’ve been looking for, Your Majesty,” Commander Newters said. “Oh yes, this is definitely Washington Square Park, I can see it’s filled with the boxy soldiers we agreed to defeat.” “This city has more square parks than all my planets combined,” the Cyborg Queen said. “Anyhoo, I can see we’re a little tardy. Send the Cyborgs to assist the metallic lumberjack and his vertically challenged friend.

She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips—it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.

But then he knew. It was not just the fact of his grandfather's tears; it was because he knew that, with them, his grandfather was acknowledging that he understood that David would, finally, disobey him. And with that, David knew as well that his grandfather would not yield, and that when he left Washington Square, he would be leaving it behind forever. He sat, immobile, understanding that this would be the last time he would sit in this drawing room, before this fire, the last time this would be his home. He understood that now his life was not here. Now his life was with Edward.

I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Philadelphia, the city had fallen victim to a fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there.

At different spots in the room stood the six resident geniuses to whose presence in the home Mr. Pett had such strong objections, and in addition to these she had collected so many more of a like breed from the environs of Washington Square that the air was clamorous with the hoarse cries of futurist painters, esoteric Buddhists, vers libre poets, interior decorators, and stage reformers, sifted in among the more conventional members of society who had come to listen to them. Men with new religions drank tea with women with new hats. Apostles of Free Love expounded their doctrines to persons who had been practising them for years without realising it. All over the room throats were being strained and minds broadened.

Erect and somber, Washington rode into the middle of a hollow square formed by New York and Connecticut regiments while a chirpy throng of civilians ringed the greensward. A uniformed aide spurred his horse forward; the crowd hushed as he unfolded his script and began to read: “In Congress, July 4, 1776.” Even the most unlettered private recognized that something majestic was in the air. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The decades that she devoted to conserving her husband’s legacy made Eliza only more militantly loyal to his memory, and there was one injury she could never forget: the exposure of the Maria Reynolds affair, for which she squarely blamed James Monroe. In the 1820s, after Monroe had completed two terms as president, he called upon Eliza in Washington, D.C., hoping to thaw the frost between them. Eliza was then about seventy and staying at her daughter’s home. She was sitting in the backyard with her fifteen-year-old nephew when a maid emerged and presented the ex-president’s card. Far from being flattered by this distinguished visitor, Eliza was taken aback. “She read the name and stood holding the card, much perturbed,” said her nephew. “Her voice sank and she spoke very low, as she always did when she was angry. ‘What has that man come to see me for?’” The nephew said that Monroe must have stopped by to pay his respects. She wavered. “I will see him,” she finally agreed. So the small woman with the upright carriage and the sturdy, determined step marched stiffly into the house. When she entered the parlor, Monroe rose to greet her. Eliza then did something out of character and socially unthinkable: she stood facing the ex-president but did not invite him to sit down. With a bow, Monroe began what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, stating “that it was many years since they had met, that the lapse of time brought its softening influences, that they both were nearing the grave, when past differences could be forgiven and forgotten.” Eliza saw that Monroe was trying to draw a moral equation between them and apportion blame equally for the long rupture in their relationship. Even at this late date, thirty years after the fact, she was not in a forgiving mood. “Mr. Monroe,” she told him, “if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.” Monroe took in this rebuke without comment. Stunned by the fiery words delivered by the elderly little woman in widow’s weeds, the ex-president picked up his hat, bid Eliza good day, and left the house, never to return.

This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began. In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth.

George Washington is the quintessential American public ancestor. Americans worship him before an obelisk in Washington, a statue in Baltimore, a square in New York, an engraving on the dollar, and Stuart prints hanging from coast to coast. (Washington couldn't have known that the obelisk to be dedicated in memory of him, on February 21, 1885, would be the world's largest replica of a 3,500-year-old monument to the Egyptian sun god.)

To commit the act of felo-de-se is a form of delusion. You see, my love, to leave one's life unfinished implies the possibility of success. What is left unlived may contain the potential truth one always seeks. Those who kill themselves do so with the conviction that they would have reached that truth eventually had they lived to the proper end. They die in the illusion of hope which in a way keeps the rest of us alive. Reason, therefore, for not committing suicide.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

home of Elon Simpson. We were right off of Washington Square, a part of the city marked by well-appointed brownstones with shuttered windows and a park hailing back to this country’s birth. Here was the seat of this city’s Quality—and the seat of our dead. I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Pennsylvania, the city had fallen victim to a wave of fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

Here is a cutting from the Ladies’ Home Journal of Philadelphia: Uncle Sam set apart a royal pleasure ground in North Western Wyoming and called it Yellowstone National Park. To give an idea of what its size—3,312 square miles—really means, let us clear the floor of the park and tenderly place some of the great cities of the world there, close together as children do their blocks. First put in London, then Greater New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Paris, Boston, Berlin, St. Louis, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Washington. The floor of the park should be about half covered, then lift up Rhode Island. Carefully, so as not to spill any of its people, set it down and press in the West Indies. And even then there are 200 square miles left.

For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled kurobuta (Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with shichimi tōgarashi seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said. "How do you prepare it?" I asked. "Slice and eat." The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo!

Richard Durham was a black writer whose credits in radio would run a gamut from Irna Phillips serials to prestige plays for such as The CBS Radio Workshop. But in Destination Freedom Durham wrote from the heart. Anger simmers at the foundation of these shows, rising occasionally to a wail of agony and torment. On no other show was the term “Jim Crow” used as an adjective, if at all: nowhere else could be heard the actual voices of black actors giving life to a real black environment. There were no buffoons or toadies in Durham’s plays: there were heroes and villains, girlfriends and lovers, mothers, fathers, brutes; there were kids named Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, who bucked the tide and became kings in places named Madison Square Garden and Ebbets Field. The early historical dramas soon gave way to a more contemporary theme: the black man’s struggle in a modern racist society. Shows on Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver gave way to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the lives of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Nat King Cole. The Tiger Hunt was a war story, of a black tank battalion; Last Letter Home told of black pilots in World War II. The stories pulled no punches in their execution of the common theme, making Destination Freedom not only the most powerful but the only show of its kind.

Monty küçük tuvaletin kapısını kilitleyip, klozetin kapalı kapağının üstüne oturdu. Biri tuvalet kağıdı rulosunun takılı olduğu plastiğin üzerine, cehenneme kadar yolunuz var, yazmıştı. Kesinlikle diye düşündü o da. Ama senin de cehenneme kadar yolun var. Herkesin. Kapıdaki Fransız kadının, şarap içerek yemek yiyenlerin, siparişleri alan garsonların, hepinizin canı cehenneme. Bu kentin ve içindeki herkesin canı cehenneme. Sokak köşelerinde sırıtarak dilenen serserilerin, türbanlı Sihlerin, sarı taksileriyle birbiriyle yarışan yıkanmak bilmez Pakistanlıların da. Göğüs kıllarını alıp, memelerini büyüten Chelsea'li ibnelerin de. Hepsinin canı cehenneme. Aşırı pahalı meyvelerinden piramitler yapan Koreli manavların, onların plastik ambalajlara sarılı lale ve güllerinin de. Beşinci Cadde'de sahte Gucci satan beyaz cübbeli Nijeryalıların da. Brighton Sahili'nde küp şekerleri dişlerinin arasında tutarak çaylarını cam bardaklardan içen Rusların da. Hepsinin canları cehenneme. 47. Cadde'de elmas satan şapkalı, kirli gabardin takımlı, Mesih'in gelmesini beklerken sürekli para sayıp duran Yahudilerin de. Sokaklarda sürtenlerin, yaşlıların ve de spastiklerin de. Kendini beğenmiş, metrolarda sürekli gazete okuyan, kolonya sürünmüş Wall Street borsacılarının da. Hepsinin canı cehenneme. Washington Square Park'ta, bellerinden cüzdan zincirleri sarkan patenli punkçıların, her yere bayrak asan, otomobillerinin açık camlardan dinledikleri müziği bangır bangır herkese dinleten Porto Rikoluların da. Naylon eşofmanları ve St. Anthony madalyonlarıyla gezip, saçlarına durmadan briyantin süren Bensonhurst İtalyanlarının da. Enginarı Balducci'den, eşarbı Hermes'ten alan, büzük dudaklı, asık suratlı ev kadınlarının da. Asla pas vermeyi bilmeyen, savunma yapmayan, her turnikeye girişte bir adım fazladan atan varoş çocuklarının da. Babaları Tokyo'ya iş gezisine giderken mutfakta oturup esrar çeken okullu uyuşturucu müptelalarının da. Mavi giysileri içinde kabadayılık taslayarak dolaşan, kalın enseli, Krispy Kreme'e giderken bile kırmızı ışığı takmayan polislerin de. Knicks'in, Indiana'ya karşı oyunu nedeniyle Patrick Ewing'in, Charles Smith ve onun Chicago maçındaki başarısız uzaktan atışlarının, John Starks'ın Houston maçındaki korkunç şutlarının da canı cehenneme. Jordan'ı hiç yenemedikleri için cehennemin dibine kadar yolları var. Sürekli söylenip duran bücür Jakob Elinsky'nin de canı cehenneme. Hep sevgililerimin kıçlarına bakıp duran Frank Slattery'nin de canı cehenneme. Ben gidince özgürlüğünü ilan edecek Naturelle Rosariao'nun da canı cehenneme. Güvendiğim ama beni gammazlayan Kostya Novotyny'in de. Karanlık odasında film banyo edip duran babamın da. Karlar altında çürüyen annemin de. Bu kadar çabuk kurtulan İsa'nın da canı cehenneme. Çarmıhta yalnızca birkaç saat, cehennemde bir hafta sonu sonra melek ordusuyla eğlence. Bu şehrin ve içindeki her şeyin canı cehenneme. Astoria'daki tek katlı evlerden Park Avenue'daki dublekslere, Brownsville'deki projelerden, Soho'daki mağazalara, Bellevue Hastanesi'nden Alphabet City'deki meskenlere, Park Slope'un kahverengi taşlarına kadar her şeyin canı cehenneme. Bırakın Araplar her tarafı bombalasınlar, bırakın sular yükselsin ve bu fare delikleri yok olsun, depremler yıksın tüm bu yüksek binaları, alevler sarsın her yanı. Yaksın, yıksın, bitirsin. Ve senin de canın cehenneme Montygomery Brogan. Her şeyi mahveden asıl sensin.

Radiation from the Big Bang may give us a clue to dark matter and dark energy. First of all, the echo, or afterglow, of the Big Bang is easy to detect. Our satellites have been able to detect this radiation to enormous accuracy. Photographs of this microwave background radiation show that it is remarkably smooth, with tiny ripples appearing on its surface. These ripples, in turn, represent tiny quantum fluctuations that existed at the instant of the Big Bang that were then magnified by the explosion. What is controversial, however, is that there appear to be irregularities, or blotches, in the background radiation that we cannot explain. There is some speculation that these strange blotches are the remnants of collisions with other universes. In particular, the CMB (cosmic microwave background) cold spot is an unusually cool mark on the otherwise uniform background radiation that some physicists have speculated might be the remnants of some type of connection or collision between our universe and a parallel universe at the beginning of time. If these strange markings represent our universe interacting with parallel universes, then the multiverse theory might become more plausible to skeptics. Already, there are plans to put detectors in space that can refine all these calculations, using space-based gravity wave detectors. LISA Back in 1916, Einstein showed that gravity could travel in waves. Like throwing a stone in a pond and witnessing the concentric, expanding rings it creates, Einstein predicted that swells of gravity would travel at the speed of light. Unfortunately, these would be so faint that he did not think we would find them anytime soon. He was right. It took until 2016, one hundred years after his original prediction, before gravity waves were observed. Signals from two black holes that collided in space about a billion years ago were captured by huge detectors. These detectors, built in Louisiana and Washington State, each occupy several square miles of real estate. They resemble a large L, with laser beams traveling down each leg of the L. When the two beams meet at the center, they create an interference pattern that is so sensitive to vibrations that they could detect this collision. For their pioneering work, three physicists, Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, and Barry C. Barish, won the Nobel Prize in 2017. For even greater sensitivity, there are plans to send gravity wave detectors into outer space. The project, known as the laser interferometry space antenna (LISA), might be able to pick up vibrations from the instant of the Big Bang itself. One version of the LISA consists of three separate satellites in space, each connected to the others by a network of laser beams. The triangle is about a million miles on each side.

Nor was her support for the urban realists a one-off affair. In 1907 she set up an apartment and studio in Greenwich Village, remodeling a stable at 19 MacDougal Alley, just north of Washington Square, and made it available for informal exhibitions. In 1914 she bought the adjacent building (8 West 8th Street) and established therein a professional gallery, the Whitney Studio,

A city is different things to us at different times - of the day, of the year, of our life. Many years have passed since I was in the backseat of the car, taken with the razzle-dazzle. Today, I'm more drawn to the neighborhood coffee shops, or modest old parks like Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, where farmers come to sell cheese and eggs under the London Plane trees. I have a soft spot for the little urban island like McCarthy Square, with its birdhouses - some with simple peak roofs; others with multiple stories and decks, made of miniature wood logs, like ski chalets - that poke out from shrubs and evergreens. I like the quiet of the West Village in the morning, where sidewalk chalkboards outside restaurants and coffee shops promise caffeine and better days, and streets paved with setts - Jane, West 12th, Bethune, Bank - feed into Washington Street like streams emptying into a river.

In February 1939, a Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City drew 20,000 supporters. Marching to the beat of snare drums, men in Nazi uniforms carrying American flags and swastikas had paraded into the Garden where they were greeted by rally organizers. In front of a towering portrait of George Washington, a speaker exhorted the crowd to “protect ourselves . . . against the slimy conspirators and the parasite hand of Jewish Communism.” Meanwhile, a newsreel camera chronicled Nazi guards beating a lone man who dared to protest.

On the way to Washington Square she thought to herself that some kid would probably fall off the slide and cut his lip. Later, in the park, Matt fell from the swing and cut his lip. Cassandra held a Kleenex to the cut, fought back her own tears. What's the matter with me? What more do I want? God, let me just see the good things. She forced herself to look around, out of herself, and, in fact, the cherry blossoms were in bloom.They had been coming out little by little, but it was that day they were lovely. Then, as if because she saw the trees, the fountain turned on. Look, Mama! Matt cried and began to run. All the children and their mothers ran to the sparkling fountain. The postman walked right by it as usual. He seemed not to notice that it was on, got wet by the spray. One/two. One/two.

Barack (with the help of Sam Kass) had chosen a restaurant near Washington Square Park that he knew I'd love for it's emphasis on locally grown foods, a small, tucked away eatery called Blue Hill.

Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age. Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us. Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true. We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one. OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process? History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.

May 19: At 2:00 p.m., Marilyn arrives at Madison Square Garden for a brief rehearsal. She departs to have her hair styled by Kenneth Battelle at a cost of $150. Then she returns to her New York apartment for a $125 makeup session with Marie Irvine. Finally, her maid, Hazel Washington, helps hook Marilyn into her Jean Louis gown, and she arrives at Madison Square Garden approximately three hours before she is to perform. Introduced to an audience of fifteen thousand as the “late Marilyn Monroe” after she delays her entrance (all part of the carefully rehearsed show), Marilyn performs flawlessly as the last of twenty-three entertainers and is clearly the highlight of the evening. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen describes Marilyn as “making love to the president of the United States.” Marilyn also attends a party at the home of Arthur Krim, president of United Artists. She is photographed in a group of Kennedy supporters watching Diahann Carroll sing. To her right is Maria Callas and Arthur Miller’s father, Isidore. She is also photographed with both Robert and John Kennedy, as well as presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Schlesinger and Robert Kennedy playfully compete to dance with Marilyn. Contrary to sensationalistic reports, Marilyn spends the rest of the evening in her New York apartment with her friend Ralph Roberts and James Haspiel, one of her devoted fans.

Amid this social intercourse, however, he avoided sedulously a meeting with Mrs. Annice; he had decided not to see her for a while. Indeed, it was not till an evening late in February, after dinner, that he took a cab to her house near Washington Square. He found her at home, and had not waited a minute before she came into the room. She was a tall woman, and wonderfully handsome by gaslight; but she had that tiresome habit, which many women have, of talking intensely--in italics, as it were: a habit found generally in women ill brought up-women without control of their feelings, or command of the expression of them. ("The Bargain of Rupert Orange")

Most of the trees are already dying. All across North America from Mexico to Alaska, forests are dying. Seventy thousand square miles of forest—that's as much land as all of the state of Washington—that much forest has died since I was born. What if I am growing up in a world that will not have trees anymore by the time I am my grandfather's age?

As he was discussing this with Sarao, it occurred to me that a large part of a city librarian’s job is to be a property manager. Szabo is responsible for seventy-three large structures that are spread across the 503 square miles of the city of Los Angeles. To even visit each one of the branches is a major proposition. Szabo’s days seesaw between big thoughts on the future of global information systems and minutiae such as requisitioning a city gardener to trim the weeds around the Washington Irving library.

Dorothy Parker who wrote witty stories, did not foresee that spectacles would be- come fashion accessories. “Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.” And today, in Washington Square Park I thought of her, Miss Parker, and what she might say assessing the spectacles of our day: “Even the nicest lasses Have tattoos on their asses.

Lower Fifth Avenue and Washington Square were already sprouting palaces of brownstone and marble. Though there was still no Central Park to give Fifth Avenue a garden view for much of its length, that wide thoroughfare running up the spine of Manhattan was already becoming the city’s best residential address.

Mayor Hone knew better—he knew it was a park. Soon, the city purchased the land east and west of the former graveyard and began landscaping. By 1828, the pretense that Washington Square was a place for militia companies to drill had been almost entirely dropped.

I clicked on her account, noting that her hiatus had lasted all of twenty-five minutes before she posted again with a video of her face trying not to move or blink, like she was one of those living statues you find in Washington Square Park. “I love you like Kanye loves Kanye,

Potentially the weakest link in the long chain that led to Pearl Harbor was actually one of the strongest. This was the busy eyes of Ensign Yoshikawa, the ostensibly petty bureaucrat in the Honolulu consulate of Consul General Nagao Kita. Presenting himself as a Filipino, he washed dishes at the Pearl Harbor Officers Club listening for scuttlebutt. He played tourist on a glass bottom boat in Kaneohe Bay near the air station where most of the Navy’s PBYs were moored. He flew over the islands as a traveler. As a straight-out spy, he swam along the shore of the harbor itself ducking out of sight from time to time breathing through a reed. He was Yamamoto’s ears and eyes. The Achilles heel to the whole operation was J-19, the consular code he used to send his information back to Tokyo. And Tokyo used to give him his instructions. Rochefort, the code breaker in Hypo at Pearl Harbor, besides being fluent in Japanese could decipher eighty percent of J-19 messages in about twelve hours. The most tell-tale of all was message 83 sent to Honolulu September 24, 1941. It instructed Yoshikawa to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid so vessels moored in each square could be pinpointed. This so-called “bomb plot” message was relayed to Washington by Clipper in undeciphered form. The Pan American plane had been delayed by bad weather so 83 wasn’t decoded and translated until October 9 or 10. Washington had five times as many intercepts piling up for decoding from Manila than Honolulu because Manila was intercepting higher priority Purple. When he saw the decrypt of 83, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of the Far Eastern Section of Army G-2 or intelligence, was brought up short. Never before had the Japanese asked for the location of ships in harbor. Bratton sent the message on to Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division with General Marshall and Secretary Stimson marked in.

The Folly, the slightly shopworn centre of magic in the British Empire, sits on the south side of a garden square not too dissimilar in size and character to Washington Square, although this being New York, the fountain here was bigger and there was a copy of the Arc de Triomphe sitting opposite the start of Fifth Avenue.

Coast, endangering US shipping. But there is a problem. The American ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, is dazzled by Adolf Hitler. He reports back to the White House that he thinks German troops will soon march through Trafalgar Square. Roosevelt does not replace Kennedy, a powerful political force in his own right. However, he isolates the ambassador, refusing to give him any information from the White House.

That year, I was converted to John Egerton's vision of the South and the Southern Foodways Alliance's role in it. His book, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, chronicles the prehistory of his ideal. He will detail this philosophy from the podium, but he articulates it best for you at Ajax Diner or Off Square Books after he has feasted well in the company of old friends and we have all drunk deeply from the Jack Daniels bottle. He will tell you that ours is a large table stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Washington, D.C., from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mexican border. He will tell you that this coming together at our table and the breaking of our various breads is an act of defiance. It is a speaking now, mouth full and spirit nourished, against the days when certain feet, those deemed too dark or too dirty, were violently separated from this supper. He will tell you that this fried chicken, these sweet potato pies are related to regular food in much the same way as communion hosts are related to regular white bread.

Do We Need a Eulogy or a Birth Announcement? Like most African-Americans my age and older, I have been touched by the virtue and disturbed by the failures of the African-American church. I have had some of the richest times of celebration and praise in local black churches. And I’ve also experienced some of the most perplexing and discouraging situations in this same institution. It was an African-American preacher who vouched for me when I was facing criminal charges as a rising junior in high school, making all the difference in my future. And it was the membership of a black Baptist congregation that nearly poisoned my love for the church when, as a new Christian, I witnessed the “brawl” of my first church business meeting. The preaching of the church gave me biblical tropes and themes for building a sense of self in the world. But a low level of spiritual living among many African-American Christians tempted me to believe that everything in the Black Church was show-and-tell, a tragic comedy of self-delusion and religious hypocrisy. I left the Black Church of my youth and converted to Islam during college. I became zealous for Islam and a staunch critic of the Black Church. I welcomed much of the criticisms of radicals, Afrocentrists, and groups like the Nation of Islam. I cut my teeth on the writing and speaking of men like Molefi Kete Asante, Na’im Akbar, Wade Noble, and Louis Farrakhan. The institution that helped nurture me I now deem a real enemy to the progress of African-Americans, an opiate and a tool of white supremacy. I had experienced enough of the church’s weakness to reject her altogether. The immature and undiscerning rarely know how to handle the failures of its heroes, to evaluate with nuance and critical appreciation. That was true of me before the Lord saved me. In July 1995, sitting in an African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church in the Washington, DC, area, a short, square, balding African-American preacher expounded the text of Exodus 32. With passion and insight, he detailed the idolatry of Israel and exposed the idolatry of my heart. As he pressed on, more and more I felt guilty for my sin, estranged from God, and deserving of God’s holy judgment. Then, from the text of Exodus 32, he preached Jesus Christ, the Son of God who takes away the sin of the world and reconciles sinners to God. He proclaimed the cross of Jesus Christ, where my sins had been nailed and the Son of God punished in my place. The preacher announced the resurrection of Christ, proving the Father accepted the Son’s sacrifice. Then the pastor called every sinner to repent and put their trust—not in themselves—but in Jesus Christ alone for righteousness, forgiveness, and eternal life. It was as if he addressed me alone though I sat in a congregation of eight thousand. That morning, under the preaching of the gospel from God’s Word, the Spirit gave me and my wife repentance and faith leading to eternal life. I was a dead man when I walked into that building. But I left a living man, revived by God’s Word and Spirit.

After all, Stoddard Associates was a high-powered private intelligence firm. A corporate espionage agency, though Jay Stoddard would never use those words. An august and influential, if shadowy, enterprise. Not some cheesy gumshoe operation with frosted-glass windows and the lingering stench of stale cigar smoke. We occupied twelve thousand square feet of the ninth floor of a sleek office tower at 1900 K Street in Washington, with a curved façade of glass and stainless steel and slate spandrels. K Street, as everyone knew, was the Champs Élysées of Washington lobbyists.