A portrait of an artist as a young man: James Joyce at age 22, roughly a year after graduating college and prior to the publication of any of his major works.

What is more, any anger I felt at that moment was directed, not against the Kapo, but against my father. I was angry with him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak. That is what concentration camp life had made of me.

- Night by Elie Wiesel, pg. 66

Elie Wiesel’s autobiographic account is a chillingly personal story of the holocaust that stands far apart from the mere textbook-styled descriptions and statistics. Yet it is Wiesel’s portrayal of the de-personalization of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps that makes for work’s most haunting moments. Wiesel’s treatment of the horrors he experienced, with crisp prose and a brisk pace, place the reader in the desensitized position of one who has already witnessed too many horrors. The most frightening result of the holocaust can be seen in passages like the above, where loving children, as a result of the terrible conditions to which they were submitted, have been dehumanized to the point where they blame their own parents for being beaten without cause.

When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the farther they went from me, sacrificing to the Baals and burning incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.

- Hosea 11, 1-4 from The New American Bible 

The depiction of God in the old testament is often one involving wrath, fire and brimstone. It is the version of God that first came to mind to many of us when we were children, and it’s the version of God that is most often subject to parody today. Yet here we see a depiction of God in the old testament - from a prophet, no less - that is anything but. The God we see in this achingly beautiful passage from Hosea overflows with an intimate paternal love for his people, and a touching sorrow as he watches them wandering astray. I think this is what everyone, in some way, longs to discover: an unwavering, sincere, overwhelming love.

“You learned there was a lot in what your father—in all our misgivings, but learning it never changed your essential opinion of him, did it? You found you could realize both things at once.”

- A Death in the Family by James Agee, pg. 117

James Agee was known in his lifetime for his film criticism (he also wrote the script for The African Queen) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collection of prose and photographs detailing the life of southern sharecroppers in the 1930s (musicians may recognize Agee for his poem “Sure on this Shining Night”). A Death in the Family is an autobiographical yet stunningly lyrical portrait of a father’s death and its impact on his children, wife and extended family. Agee’s work was sadly cut short by his own pre-mature death, and the manuscript was assembled and published posthumously. The dual realization quoted above is one of work’s central aspects. The father’s death is in part shadowed by his flaws, yet his family is able to reconcile his triumphs with his failings as necessary parts of a life that was beautiful nonetheless, a point made especially clear in the novel’s beautiful final pages. In this light, the surviving characters are ultimately able to more fully understand and affirm the lives of each other as well.

Then in my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold father symbol, his hand outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient binding.

- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, pg. 36 

While Ralph Ellison’s only completed novel is centered on a black man and problems unique to African Americans in the mid-century, a significant reading of the novel can reach beyond race. The racial experience in Invisible Man also functions to portray a more universal issue: how to negotiate one’s individuality in a world where identity is associated with subscription to a group. There are several frighteningly potent passages in Invisible Man that work with this duality, one of which is quoted above. This early excerpt sets the tone for the novel; each supposed discovery of individuality is really only another method of its subjugation. The only way to avoid remaining obscure, unknown, is to actually be obscured, annexed into a restrictive cause. How this issue might be result remains unclear to the narrator.

William Faulkner spent two terms as writer in residence at the University of Virginia. The series of recordings made during his time there, though low in audio quality, provide great insight into his work and process. In this particular clip, Faulkner discusses the notion of truth and how it functions in fiction, in the context of his brilliant novel Absalom, Absalom!

Question (not included in audio): Mr. Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom! does any one of the people who talks about Sutpen have the right view, or it is more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?

(More at http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/FAULKNER/wfatuvahp.html.)

He did all he could to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation. When the Lord’s call came, he wished it to be a voice from out of a clear and empty sky, the trumpet of the Lord God Almighty, untouched by any fleshly hand or breath. He expected to see wheels of fire in the eyes of unearthly beasts.

- The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor pg. 22 

Flannery O’Connor is one of the more unique figures in the American literary tradition. O’Connor, who tragically died of lupus at age 39, is best known for her short stories and gothic, brutal style. O’Connor was a committed Catholic, and her faith serves as the central focus of her work. This passage is taken from Tarwater, the novel’s teenage protagonist who struggles between the vocation bequeathed to him by his prophet great-uncle and the urging of his uncle to reject faith in favor of pure reason. Tarwater’s frustration here is one commonly encountered by O’Connor’s characters; reality seems coarse and pathetic, and he feels that he would be able to answer God’s call if only it were to somehow transcend the ordinary. This, of course, is not possible, and Tarwater must accept reality as either ugly and Godless or possessing some deeper divine beauty.

We had perhaps better consider the universal good and discuss thoroughly what is meant by it, although such an inquiry is made an uphill one by the fact that the Forms have been introduced by friends of our own. Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philosophers or lovers of wisdom; for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

 - Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, 1096a-10

Aristotle is one of the most significant thinkers of all time. Though Aristotle lived in the 300s BC, his work, covering a wide range of topics, still plays a significant role in academics. In this particularly beautiful selection (unusual for a philosopher known for his difficult style), Aristotle prepares the reader for a critique of Plato’s Forms. Aristotle had studied under Plato at the latter’s academy for many years; the “friends of our own” whom he must oppose were thus indeed his good friends and former associates. While Aristotle decides that truth must be pursued above all else, the emotion evident in his language here shows that the choice is not without some sorrow.

We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me.

- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, pg. 81

A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real.

- Bona and Paul (from Cane) by Jean Toomer

Cane, Jeam Toomer’s magnum opus, is a collection of intimately related short stories and poems first published together in 1923. Like Paul in this particular story, Toomer was racially indeterminate and removed from the south, two elements that resurface in many different forms throughout the work and serve to obscure the supposed line between races. Despite speculation, Paul’s friends remain uncertain in regards to his racial identity, but in this excerpt Paul comes to a definite realization of his own, a realization in which his racial heritage is much more real than merely an ambiguous mix of black and white.