#if she was as anti-dissolution as has been supposed; how might she have felt about her sister

[fideidefenswhore]

I think some historians are more sympathetic to Jane Seymour than Anne Boleyn because she was not really spoken about like she was the driving force of a faction, whereas Anne was. Thoughts?

Well, historians tend to argue for their in/significance depending on what theory they believe has the strongest weight.

It's difficult to compare because we have such different eras of influence and spotlight, as it were, for these women as they were primed for the throne. Anne's was six years and Jane's was, generously six months, arguably more like five (January-May 1536, even then, February is the first we hear of her in any capacity), some historians don't even mark it until April 1536, in which case it's more like two.

But for what we have, maybe? Jane was 1 for 2 in political influence (again...generously); complete failure during her tenure as mistress/'betrothed' (again, it's hard to mark when that was, we don't have the equivalent of either emerald ring or diamond-ship to mark acceptance, we sort of just assume marriage was discussed) to reinstate Princess Mary, success in sowing doubts about the legitimacy of Henry's marriage. Here, Anne had the advantage, it's entirely possible the first time she heard of doubts of validity for Henry's to Catherine had been ten years prior, in Mechelen (as that’s the earliest they crop up).

During the six-month-period, it’s Edward that's mentioned more than Jane by (I almost said contemporaries, but actually just realized it’s) Chapuys (only), second to Gertrude Blount and Nicholas Carew. Comparatively, we have, by the fall of Wolsey (1529):

The duke of Norfolk is made chief of the Council, Suffolk acting in his absence, and, at the head of all, Mademoiselle Anne. (Du Bellay)

And at the same time, Chapuys is rating her influence on the royal prerogative just as highly, if not more so, only with a more negative slant. 

GW Bernard has argued that this should be disregarded, as later Du Bellay ‘contradicts himself’, and must have with time, developed a more realistic view:

Lady Anne has presented Du Bellay with a hunting frock and hat, horn and greyhound. Tells him this to show him how the affection of the king of England for Francis increases, for all that the Lady does is by the King's order.  (Du Bellay, 1532)

However, A) I don’t find these statements to be contradictory...the former suggests Anne has the most influence with the King, not over the King (of course it’s more realistic that she would be directed by him, but the former doesn’t imply that she wasn’t!), B) There are contemporary reports from 1530- onwards that, actually, that was the case (Anne directing Henry); and enough of them from enough various sources that they can’t be disregarded entirely.

And besides, the remark from the year of 1529 does have other corroboration, in the form of Cromwell writing to Wolsey:

"None dares speak to the King on his part for fear of Madame Anne's displeasure.”

We also have, not only Anne, but Anne’s parents being referred to as figures to be feared (even by the papal envoy, apparently), her parents and George Boleyn being referred to and regarded as figures that it was necessary to fete, flatter, gift, and draw favour from, if one ever wanted to gain royal favour, we don’t have anything similar in regards to Jane (a scant few, for favour, once she’s Queen, but not as many as for her predecessor’s reign, and no successful intercession), for Jane’s parents, or even really to Edward, until years later on the latter. 

Anyway, I assume you’re speaking more to the time before they were Queens, than after, but my feeling is sort of that... if Jane had lived, Cromwell would have always overshadowed her, whereas Anne, for the time in which she was, held her own. 

[kiraofthewind]

Villains in my Good Thyme Inn trilogy

Post about the villains, antags, and general annoyances to my heroes in my current wip

The Barons of Aleton:

Scalvonian (191-248 r. 215) Went to war during the War for Munil, lost bitterly, acquired a parasite that made him eat constantly, always tired, and had difficulty having children. Did not produce an heir until he was almost 40 years old. He sold the Good Thyme Inn to Yamma in 218 after the war, when he was broke and had to pay his soldiers. The queen demanded he pay them immediately or else he'd lose his baronial title and be sent to prison. Died of complications of parasitic infection in 248.

Duvela (230-263 r. 248) Spent much of her adult life building her coffers so she or her descendants could buy the inn back. She was careful to obey the queen’s laws, and thus never caused problems for Marmalade or Shallot. Her caution around the queen was believed to have been caused by a fierce argument they had once that tarnished their relationship. Her death (at age 33) was suspicious, and many believe the queen hired a merchant of dance to kill her.

Velderash (252-297 r. 263) A spoiled brat raised by the regent-steward, Mr. Cloth (219-292). As an adult ruling independently, he was greedy and increased prices/rents whenever he felt he could get away with it. Tried to gradually price Shallot out of the inn so he could buy it back from her. His death in 297 was a supposed “hunting accident,” but it's heavily implied he was killed by Grilled.

Mavolo (275-300) Notoriously corrupt, greedy, and all-around shitty. Increased rent and prices on everything to astronomical levels as part of Adviser Anya’s plan for Aloutia which included the dissolution of rent limits. In the year 300, he was buried alive by Shallot and her boys. The Anti-Greed Army, a revolutionary army comprised of soldiers who deserted from the Aloutian Imperial Army, came in and took credit for his murder.

Riova b. 295 During the revolt, she escaped to safety thanks to a servant taking her to Dawndorrel. She tries to reclaim her ‘birthright’ in 310 (this is part of the Greed Wars Cycle pentalogy, not this trilogy, but I would have been remiss to not mention her existence).

Mr. Cloth, the steward, is a minor book 1 antagonist who will die in a horrible way that only serves to show how badass the heroes are.

Captain Brewer, the Captain of the Guard, is also a minor antagonist who may actually turn to the side of the heroes. I haven't decided what his fate will be. He might die in the revolution, or he might turn traitor and help protect the town after the revolution. We'll see.

Imperial Adviser Anya is mentioned throughout the book, but she's outside the scope of the Bad Company's sphere of influence. She lives far away, in the Imperial Capital city, and she has magic powers that make her invincible to mere commoners. Her death occurs over the course of events in these books, but is not described, nor do the Bad Company have anything to do with it. Her tale is told in the Greed Wars Cycle pentalogy.

[joi-in-the-tardis]

It’s my experience with any emotional issue I have that resolving it is 75% figuring what on earth it even is that I’m upset about (which usually requires going to the pain of actually talking it through with someone; hello I’m an extroverted feeler) and 25% actually working on the problem.  In other words: figuring it out is the hard part.  Actually, a lot of the stress and angst evaporates once I pin down the problem.

That doesn’t mean it’s all resolved just from understanding myself a little better.  There’s still work to do.  But clarity brings a lot of peace, you know?

Good Omens was released a tiny bit more than two months ago.  It’s hard to believe it’s been that long... and also hard to believe it’s only been that long.  I watched it all in one day because I wanted that first viewing to be mine- I didn’t want to share it.  I knew, even then, that I was going to be a bit... touchy... about the shipping of the main characters.  Not because I felt that anyone was wrong to ship them, but because they’re a pair I ship very specifically.  (Which is not something I do overly much, I tend to be pretty open about my ships.  Not just in a ship-and-let-ship way, but in the way that I multi-ship, myself.  Tenth doctor, for example, I ship with four different characters.  Even though the main one I blog about is Rose.  I have two anti-ships, but only one of those actually bothers me to the extent that I have the tags blocked- and that’s more because the other character disgusts me than an overt problem with the ship itself.)

And, not just that, I ship them as being a similar kind of queer to my own.  So, they’re dear to my heart.  I see them as ace, as I am myself.  I see them as nonbinary, like me.  As beings somewhere outside the human realm, I don’t think they have to follow human friend/romance rules, and that’s a relief to me.  Because I have an incredibly difficult time understanding where all those lines are.

I have a lot of myself tied up in these characters, okay?  I related to The Doctor, yes.  I’ve related to a lot of characters.  But... not like this. 

And I have felt, predominantly, unwelcome in the fandom.  In the fandom’s defense, a lot of my emotional reaction was from the initial round of “you either ship them or you’re homophobic” that was aimed at not just other members of the fandom, but the author of the story himself.  But, in doing so, people alienated aces, aros, and nonbinary folks.  It’s not just me.  I do understand that this was not everyone’s opinion, and that even if it was it wasn’t intended this way...  But, it was a loud enough message that I shut every related tag down for over a month, and still have them filtered.  I’m one that’s pretty stable in my identity, but I felt banished for it.  I felt I wasn’t queer enough for a space that I wanted to occupy- one that was supposed a queer space, itself.  

And, I let it fester.

That festering bled over in to my tumblr home fandom: David Tennant.  I dunno if anyone noticed, but I haven’t celebrated Tennant Tuesday in weeks.  I mean, a lot of it was tied in with GO, anyway, and I was trying to avoid that.  But, the constant barrage of how slutty he and all his characters are... just grated me to the point that I wanted to find a hole.  That hole was pulling out of it almost entirely.  I’m trying to rally, it’s just taking time.

But still, there was more to it...  I was getting increasingly frustrated with myself because of how upset I was.  And how much that upset was spreading in to other fandom areas that I love.  I didn’t understand it as I have always been a “don’t like, keep scrolling” or blacklist kind of person.  And, my goodness, I do want fluff from this pairing!  But every time I put my toe in the GO fandom sandbox it was akin to being lit on fire.  And not in a slow burn, this is fun suffering kind of way.

It occurred to me a week or so ago what it was that was bothering me: I am assumed to be courting whoever I’m friends with.  Sure, laugh it up, but I’m serious.  I’m assumed to be in a romantic relationship with my married best friend nearly every time we have a day out.  From clerks in stores to kids on the street to waiters at restaurants.  I’m not insulted by the insinuation.  My best friend is my best friend for a reason- she’s a phenomenal person and I’m very lucky to have her in my life.  We don’t even correct them most of the time, anymore.  That doesn’t make it any less exhausting sometimes.  It doesn’t do anything to make me less paranoid about, not just our friendship, but every friendship I have.  In my first years at my workplace I was assumed to be sleeping with multiple married women.  How people came to that conclusion, to this day, perplexes me.  Here I was going home to tea and TV and I was supposedly out dallying with these women behind their husband’s backs!  Even now, I’m hyper aware of some of my friendships with married friends... Because their SOs have made comments... maybe joking, maybe not... that nice things I’ve done for them is me coming on to them.  Please, I’m just a genuinely nice person who likes doting on people I care about.

It really fucking sucks that my friendships are misread.  I have spent a large portion of my life just not understanding romance.  Not knowing how to engage in it.  Not knowing where the lines are.  Not understanding what might be expected of me- worrying about that.  I haven’t really had those kinds of connections, guys.  I’ve been in love, yes, a couple of times.  But, it’s never been more than a confession that’s either rejected outright or... a slow dissolution of what used to be a cherished friendship.  I feel an enormous amount of love for the people in my life, but when it comes to expressing it in any kind of romantic way... I am just at a loss.  I’ve always kind of chalked this up to being queer and having a late start, but sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever figure it out.

But if there’s one thing I know, I know how to love my friends.  Or, at least, I think I do.  And my friends don’t seem to mind.  It’s the way that it’s labeled from the outside that bothers me.

And, that brings me full circle to my point: the thing that bothered me was that I saw these two romantically challenged ace/enby characters and I thought “omg that’s me!”  Then I saw people shipping them sexually and that was okay!  Ship whatever you want.  But, then I saw that if you didn’t ship them that way it was homophobic.  It was wrong.  How could you see it anyway but gay?  Yes, QPRs have their place, but this isn’t it (something I actually saw in someone’s tags!).

I was gutted.  I understand why now.  People ship me and my close friends together all the time, friends.  It makes people really happy to do so.  They’re getting rep in public.  They think it’s sweet.  It makes them smile.  It makes them engage socially with us when they might not otherwise.  It gets us nice tables at restaurants so we “can see one another better.”

But we’re not romantically involved.  No matter how much the public may enjoy imagining us being so.  We have always been and will always be the best of friends.

Am I right to be mad at the whole fandom for how much this hurt? No.  Absolutely not.  And I have not, at any time, been mad at everyone.  I can separate my own feelings from the situation.  To be honest, I don’t even remember who made some of the comments that hurt me to begin with and I’ll never try to find out.  I’m not in any of this to start arguments or sling mud.  I’m in the fandom life for fun, to escape from real life for a bit, and to make friends if I can.

I say all of this mostly for my own mental health: I want to share it.  I want to be understood.  And, if there’s anyone out there who feels like me: I want them to know I understand them, too.  It’s not just you.  You’re not alone. 

And I also want to explain that coming to these conclusions and talking about them has made it a bit easier to pat at the sand in the Good Omens sandbox.  I’ve been poking and prodding as I feel like I can.  So, you’ll likely see some GO stuff on my blog.  I’ve still got everything filtered at the moment because I’m letting it in, as I said, as I feel like I can.  All at once feels like it might squash me again and I don’t want to ruin the progress I’ve already made.

I guess I’ll end this by saying that I loved GO the book.  I loved the series.  I’m eternally grateful for Neil Gaiman and how he’s continually put his foot down that we can all make of it what we like: that’s the fandom’s toybox.  The only things that are cannon are the words in black and white and that’s all he’ll comment on.  They can continue to be your romantic gay ship.  They can continue to be my ace/enby QPR.  We can all play in this massive sandbox together.  Just... pardon my bandaged wounds and my being a bit shy.  It’s taken me a while to get up the nerve to be here.

[thiscrimsonsoul]

Welcome to a little rant about Wanda’s personal perspective and how I use it to write her…

I’ve gotten some interesting messages over the past few weeks from a number of people, some of whom I write with and others who just felt like offering an opinion, regarding how I write Wanda. Let me state, this is not a callout post or meant to be anything negative. Everyone was polite and I actually welcome challenges to the way I write my muses as long as they are respectful. It helps me to defend why I do certain things with them and make sure I am keeping them in line with how I intend my interpretation of them to be presented. But I’ve gotten enough comments along the same lines that I thought  it might be useful (for me as well as for my followers) to explain why I go in certain mental/psychological/emotional directions with Wanda that, to some, might seem incredibly divergent from canon. So… consider this a brain rant for me to organize a crap ton of headcanons into one place, but I hope you all enjoy it anyway, haha

Below the cut because looooong. XD

People have said I write Wanda as if she is a very weak character, meaning I write her too insecure, emotional, and unable to rise to challenges. I just want to clarify that I do not write Wanda as a weak character, I write her as a character who often believes she is weak. There is a difference. Wanda is an “unreliable narrator,” which in a writing sense means that the character speaking, narrating, summarizing, or explaining something to the reader either directly through internal monologue or through the course of a story is misinforming the reader. An unreliable narrator may be misinformed themselves, and may relate information as if it is true because they believe it to be… but it is in fact not true. Or, their perspective may be skewed in ways they don’t consider or understand, resulting in interpretations of information by them that are simply not correct. The reader does not know this, and simply takes the character at their word until they learn otherwise.

This applies to the way I write Wanda. She often says things about herself that are not true or would not be true, but she herself believes them to be true. Regardless of Wanda’s actual power or abilities, she believes more than once in canon in the movies that she is unworthy, incapable, and unwanted. Just because Wanda thinks she could not survive without Pietro doesn’t mean she couldn’t… and we know she ultimately did. Just because she felt badly about the Accords and wanted to hang back and not cause any more trouble, doesn’t mean she should… and she didn’t. Just because she didn’t believe she could destroy the mind stone and told Vision she couldn’t doesn’t mean she couldn’t… and she did. So I just want to separate for a moment Wanda’s actual strength, abilities, and how others perceive her from how she views herself. They are certainly not the same, just as my perception of her is not the same as her perception of herself in a given thread. I am not commenting on Wanda’s character, she is, and she is a biased source of information on the subject, heh. Just because I write her as saying “I can’t,” “I won’t,” “I don’t deserve,” “I’m not good enough,” doesn’t mean I believe that. It’s Wanda who believes that. Mun and muse are not the same.

Some people say I am making her more mentally unstable than she is and giving her low self-esteem she doesn’t have. First, I am drawing from Wanda’s personality in the comics a bit and from some aspects of her character there that was never done in the movies. Second, I elaborate on what any healthy person might think, feel, and go through having been through the traumas that she has, since the MCU seemed content to just ignore any and all processes of grieving, overcoming trauma, and adjusting to huge geographic and cultural life changes. So I am filling in and extrapolating from that, but I am also developing the tiny tidbits of what the MCU did show us to go into more depth on her thought process behind them, because there are a few canon things that show us that Wanda is dealing with a lot more mental trauma and stress than we sometimes give her allowances for.

A Note on Age and Experiences in Hydra’s Laboratory

I write Wanda (and Pietro as well over at @fasterthanmydemons) as younger than canon MCU. Yes, I agree Aaron and Lizzie do not look 17 or 18 but eh, they’re their FCs so I work with it however I can, heh. And yeah, in cases of writing with other muns writing the twins, I usually just modulate their ages up without even asking because I know that having them younger is something that is not well accepted in the fandom. I have a couple reasons for doing so, however, that do affect how they function.

First, I feel that they are very emotionally immature. That’s not meant to be a negative thing, I just mean that they seem very isolated, dependent on each other, and they behave in ways that give me the sense that they are very inexperienced. The sense I get is of older teenagers or young adults that have been made to grow up very, very fast… and there are some gaps in that process because of it, heh. In some ways they are wise beyond their years, but in many other ways they are still very young and inexperienced, with skewed and sheltered views of the world.

Secondly, I really hate the MCU plot for them, heh. The whole… well we volunteered for a Hydra experiment (even if they thought they were dealing with SHIELD) seems really dumb. Why would 20-something year-olds make decisions that incredibly naïve? And why would they stay on the streets for 10-something years, with all that animosity and drive toward change, and not do anything more about it? It just seems… so unrealistic. It’s possible, I’m not saying it’s not, but in my mind, it makes more sense if they were a lot younger when they volunteered. Idealistic children thinking this would solve their problems and empower them, easily duped by Hydra into thinking they were with SHIELD, and physically smaller and easier to control. That’s how I imagine the twins. So my timeline for them is that they were orphaned at 10, spent a few years on the streets, but then volunteered at around age 14 or 15, staying there until they were almost 18. They are close to their 18th birthdays during the events of Ultron. That’s my timeline for them, but like I said, I know that is not well accepted, so I am usual very flexible in changing this even if I continue to write them in my head as if I am still following my own timeline. (If I am in an rp with you right now for either twin and you have a question about something, don’t hesitate to ask, since I know that can affect how people frame the stories in their heads and such.)

So because of this, because they are younger and have been in Hydra’s laboratory for 3-4 years instead of 1 or less than 1, this will change their mental health, emotional stability, and how they view the world. My twins are perhaps even more bitter and angry than in MCU canon to start out, are very overtly emotionally dependent on each other, and have more physical and emotional scars from their treatment at Hydra’s hands. I’ve made their time in the laboratory, their decision to volunteer for it, and their ultimate essential imprisonment by Hydra while the experiments were going on to be far more of a definite event in their lives that had real lasting impacts on their psyche, not just a plot point to be mentioned a couple times but with no perceivable impact as the MCU movies would have you believe.

Being in the laboratory for that extended amount of time also allows me to expand upon Hydra’s purpose in experimenting on them. Why the actual hellnuts would Hydra empower the twins and then just let them go? Yeah okay, they let them out of their cells and maybe the twins simply made a break for it, but I see more than that. Two things, really: Hydra’s overall purpose for them, and the reason why they didn’t leave well before that even though they were capable of doing so.

I believe Hydra wanted to turn them into weapons of mass destruction. Honestly, Hydra is only out for itself, and what it wants is the dissolution of democracy and the subjugation of nations and races it disagrees with or believes are inferior to them. With these twins, I think Hydra wanted their own anti-Avengers, like the Winter Soldiers, but with added powers. To use them for this purpose, they would not have just tinkered around with Loki’s staff, granted them some fun powers, and then left them alone. No, they would have Romanoffed them. Physical and mental conditioning, training to become spies, education regarding languages, geography, and politics, things like that. So my interpretation of the twins is that they were taught a lot by Hydra, but for Hydra’s own purposes and under extreme duress and threat of punishment if they did not learn in a timely fashion. This was especially difficult for Pietro, who had a horrible time focusing and sitting still, but Wanda also suffered abuse for she was the most feared of the two and Hydra felt a greater need to control her.

Which brings us to why the twins didn’t escape earlier if they were being so badly mistreated. This also makes a lot more sense if they were very young when they volunteered, but I suppose it could happen regardless. I believe there was a very obvious abuser-abused relationship going on between the twins and Hydra, whereby they were held captive more by their own minds than by any bars, guns, or electronics. What I mean is, when a level of abuse is reached where one feels like attempting to leave will only make things worse and/or their abuser will always find them no matter where they go, they could be, for example, standing freely right next to soldiers as they discuss what is going on outside the facility and not lift a finger to try to escape. This happens in real life, where abused people are left alone, door open, car in the driveway, keys in hand, and yet they don’t try to escape. Their own fear holds them in place. This is one of two explanations I have for why the twins didn’t break out sooner, and it’s a reason that I think especially affected them when they were very young and first starting out.

The other explanation is that they had a legitimate goal to meet, and regardless of how much they were suffering, they thought they had to see it through to the end. Yes, they were being mistreated, but they signed up for a means to destroy the Avengers and dammit they were going to see it through. It wasn’t until the Avengers showed up and the soldiers around them were like weeeeeeell, we could send the twins, but they’re not ready yet… that Wanda and Pietro were like fuck yeah we are and decided at that point that they were 1000% done and left to pursue their goal. The laboratory had outlived its usefulness to them at that point and the fear of not achieving their goal of challenging the Avengers begins to outweigh their fear of retaliation from Hydra. 

Alright, back to focusing on Wanda more specifically, since this is her blog , heh.

Blaming Herself for Things Outside Her Control

Wanda takes things very personally. She is a perfectionist, and a very empathetic person. That combination often leaves her feeling like something is her fault when things go wrong and result in people being hurt. During the battle of Sokovia, Wanda all but has a panic attack inside a building with Clint, muttering to herself, “How could I let this happen? It’s all my fault.” Suddenly there she is, taking responsibility for an entire city being attacked. Now, I suppose some would argue that her support of Ultron led to that, but I think that’s a bit unfair, given the amount of lies and misinformation that both twins were exposed to during their time in the Hydra laboratory. My point is, yes, Wanda blames herself for thing constantly. It is a canon part of her personality. I believe this blame and even sometimes a fear of responsibility stems from her losing so many people she loves. The common factor, as she sees it, is her, so therefore she must be to blame and doing something wrong. That’s not true, but that is how she perceives things.

Dependency on Her Brother

Wanda is emotionally dependent on Pietro while he is alive. That does not mean she cannot learn to live without him and to let him go, but it will not happen overnight and it will not be easy. Her dependency is not just borne out of love for a close sibling. It has been forged in trauma. Being persecuted as a child for being Romani and a witch, losing her parents, losing them in an incredibly frightening way, living on the streets, being experimented on… all these things made her cling to her brother even more than she might have already just due to being a twin. Think of Pietro like a very complex service animal for Wanda. Have you ever seen the bond between a soldier or trauma victim and their service animal? It’s incredibly deep and emotionally necessary. Take that kind of relationship and now apply it to a brother, your twin, someone you deeply love and expect to always be there with you… and then take it all away. Not only does Wanda now have to deal with all these traumas in her life that are recurring issues for her due to PTSD, but now her main support system is suddenly gone and his death is yet one more trauma that will haunt her for the rest of her life, especially since she physically felt him die.

And, to be fair, as a side note, Pietro is also emotionally dependent on Wanda. They have a sort of mutually synergistic relationship going on as far as how they deal with trauma. Wanda deals with it by seeking emotional comfort and safety with Pietro, whether in his embrace or listening to his reassuring words. That feeling of having someone watching over her and protecting her is very grounding and calming to her. Pietro copes with trauma by putting himself in a position in which he feels he has more control over the situation. I don’t mean he’s controlling of Wanda (those aspects of the comics I hate and do not use in my interpretation of him on his blog). I mean that the way he copes with all the bad things that have happened to them is to feel like he won’t let it happen again. He assumes a protector role for Wanda, not only because he genuinely wants to keep her safe, but because it fulfills an emotional need for him to have enough to control over any given situation to keep his sister safe. So the way in which she places her emotional safety in his hands and he assumes the role of a protector serves to accomplish the same purpose of helping them cope with trauma, but in ways that are unique to them and their own emotional needs.

Once that relationship is severed after Pietro’s death, it shatters a lot of things for Wanda, including emotional security and self-identity. She’s no longer a well-supported twin, she’s alone. Now, we all know that it’s canon that she is able to move on and survive without him, but it is also canon that she stayed behind in Sokovia after exacting her revenge on Ultron, seemingly not in any hurry to leave as the city was about to be destroyed. Suicidal thoughts? Intent to commit suicide? Perhaps that is open to interpretation, but I believe yes, she did intend to die then. Her brother was her entire world at that point. I think Wanda couldn’t imagine life without him and didn’t want to either. After Vision saves her, she isn’t just going to suddenly be fine with continuing on without Pietro. Even if she did not make another attempt on her life, Wanda still would be in that mindset of why am I still alive? and would not see a point to going on without him. Somewhere in between that mindset and finding purpose with the Avengers, she will heal regarding this issue, but between the events of Ultron and Civil War, she will be on an emotional rollercoaster, and I think that is more than implied in canon even if we never got to see it.

Feeling Like People Dislike Her or Are Angry With Her

Wanda comes from a place of believing most people dislike her or even hate her, and I want to put into perspective why that is. Again, I draw from things in the comics, so Wanda is a mutant and was born with her abilities. I then combine the MCU story to say that Hydra’s experiments enhanced what was already there. She is Romani and her religion is a mix of Judaism and polytheism, so she has faced cultural and religious persecution from the time she was a young child. Her powers got her the label of “witch,” which is not merely derogatory, it’s downright frightening. Being called a witch where she grew up could mean you were hunted and killed. So from a very young age she learned that who and what she was would likely be perceived by most people, whether it was true or not, as bad. Now, Wanda has a lot of pride in being Romani, but even so, she has learned that most people come at her with prejudice and hatred, and that makes her wary and defensive.

By the time she joins the Avengers, this feeling is exacerbated by her rocky start with them in Ultron. Her mental attacks let them all very shaken and even resentful of her to varying degrees, and that was not lost on Wanda. Even after she is supposedly accepted, she remembers what she did to them and is sure they remember too. Things like being confined to her room in Civil War to “avoid further public incidents” show a lack of trust in her that not only makes her think that resentment for what she did is still there, but it flares that same defensiveness that she’s felt all her life for cultural and religious reasons.

Having said all of this, Wanda wants to be accepted. Her desire to not cause any more problems in Civil War is indicative of that when she tells Clint, “I’ve caused enough trouble,” and initially refuses to defect with him. But ultimately, Wanda is someone who will follow her heart and what she feels is right, regardless of her inhibitions, insecurities, and phobias.

Insecurity about her abilities

This is something that is not discussed a lot in canon, but I feel it’s definitely part of her personality. Wanda doesn’t believe in herself as far as her ability to do things, and it has nothing to do with how powerful she is. She knows she’s powerful. What she believes she lacks is the focus and stability to use that power. I believe this is what causes her to hang back so long after Clint’s “if you step out that door, you’re an Avenger” speech. Not only is she genuinely scared of what’s going on (this is the first full-scale battle she’s been on the front lines for, don’t forget that for a second), but she doesn’t know if she can focus enough to get the job done. Something that people who are in a full-scale skirmish for the first time have a lot of trouble with if they have no battle training whatsoever is sensory overload… and Wanda was knee deep in it at that point. There were too many loud noises, too many arrows and bullets and robots and things flying around in every direction, and also don’t forget that Wanda is sensitive to energies around her, so any magical blasts or gunpowder blasts or lasers or anything is going to be something she’ll perceive like the hairs standing up on your skin after a lightning strike. That’s… a lot of information for a young woman with little to no battle experience to take in all at once. I think it all got the better of her and she knew that, so before she could go back out, she had to calm down and refocus, which is why you see her so much more confident the next time she steps out.

Another time when this insecurity regarding her abilities reared its ugly head was when Vision was pleading with her to destroy the mind stone. She simply told him, “I can’t.” Most will say that she was merely saying “I can’t kill you” from the point of view of a loved one not wanting to kill another loved one. That is part of it, yes, but she didn’t say she wouldn’t, she said she can’t. I think Wanda had some real doubts as to whether she could set aside her own emotions enough to get the job done. She absolutely has the ability to do it, as Vision tells her, because from someone outside looking in he can see how capable she is, but from her point of view she must have felt like a totally erratic and unreliable mess. Ironic, then, that she not only is able to focus enough to destroy the stone, but to also hold Thanos back while she does it. Wanda sees nothing extraordinary about that at all, however. No, in fact, her proclivity to blame herself returns and she feels she completely dropped the ball that day in not being able to successfully stop Thanos.

Summary

So… Wanda does not give herself enough credit for what she has been through, what she has survived, what she can survive, and what she can accomplish. She is very scarred by her past, between her frightening and difficult childhood, living on the streets, the Hydra experiments, and losing her entire family… and those scars will be there with her for the rest of her life. She is a very damaged and, at times, broken person. But, having said that… she is also brave, strong, kind-hearted, helpful, and loving as well, under the right circumstances and with the right people. She can accomplish amazing things (as we saw in the movies), she just needs to believe that herself. That is one my biggest goals in writing Wanda and something I love to see happen for her, when she begins to believe in herself and stops defining herself based on others or on past deeds or traumas. I love to see her go from a very broken place through the healing process and arriving in a place that isn’t necessarily happier for her, but stronger and more stable. Wanda was robbed of this kind of healing and redemption arc in the MCU, and I intend to give her many of them on this blog, heh. And poor Pietro was robbed of… well… pretty much everything, so my work is cut out for him as well, heh.

If you have any questions, want to make any comments, or want to drop some follow-up asks in my inbox, please feel free to do so! As I said, I love to constantly build on and develop my interpretations of my muses, so you are never bothering me with character development questions. =)

[thesffcorner]

The Fever King

The Fever King is the first book in a YA sci-fi/dystopian duology written by Victoria Lee. I have a lot of very strong mixed feelings on this book, so buckle up; this will be a long one. 

In the near distant future, the United States has been withered down to several smaller nations, courtesy of a magic virus that has wiped out most of the population. The virus in the form of a fever, burns its victims to a husk, and those who survive it are called witchings, and they develop supernatural abilities. A 100 years after the original outbreak, we follow Noam Alvarez, a 16 year old boy who lives in the only witching state of Carolina. He’s the son of undocumented migrants, and when an outbreak in a refugee camp kills his father and all of his neighbours, he survives and gains technopathy: the ability to control electronic devices. He gets recruited into Level IV to train for the military, under the direct supervision of the man who created Carolina: Calix Lehrer. I think that long intro, might have already clued you into some of this book’s problems. In case you couldn’t tell, this book is a debut, and it really feels like it. Victoria Lee is a talented author, with a good grip on style and explores interesting ideas. This book’s hook bought me, and her characters (the few that are developed at least) are genuinely intriguing. This book is also highly political, and it’s subject matter is absolutely topical and relevant for today’s issues. If you are someone young, who hasn’t read a lot of political science and wants to get a primer into stuff like communism, revolutions and migrant issues, then I think this book would serve as a great primer. However, there are issues. The plot and the themes are just all over the place; there are also significant issues with the pacing and worldbuilding, and even the characters end up confused. The writing is solid, and I think with some more time and experience, I could really love Lee’s work, but as is, this book is a very much, an ambitious mess. Writing: Let’s start with some positives. Lee has a writing style that’s quite unique, and not something I have read before. She writes in third person, but the writing is very stream of consciousness. Lot’s of scenes, especially at the start read like we are following Noam’s thought pattern; he will interrupt himself, or not explain what is happening fully, because he himself hasn’t processed it yet. Since he’s the PoV character, he ends up feeling quite unreliable, which is a rarity in YA, and his inability to be unbiased and objective, actually factors into the plot, because we flip flop on what is happening and who we trust just as he does, and we operate on faulty or partial information, because that’s what he knows, or sometimes doesn’t notice the discrepancies. Unfortunately, this has the adverse effect of making this book read extremely young. Lee explores a lot of themes here, but the main one revolves around freedom, revolution and what and how much you are willing to sacrifice to achieve your goal. Both Noam and Lehrer do unspeakable things in the name of justice and freedom, and there is a fine line between fighting for a cause and becoming a monster. I would like to say that this theme is handled with finesse, but Noam has a very black and white view of the world, and has the patience of a teenage boy; as such he ends up making a lot of really stupid decisions, and refusing to acknowledge a lot of horrible things. There’s also a lot of discussion of communism, dictatorships, and leadership, all of it feels like a middle grade school report. The absolute worst scene for me was when Noam and Lehrer discuss the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’; I was cringing so hard as the book ground to a halt to give me a history and philosophy lesson on what that phrase means. It’s so over the top and blunt, and I really didn’t care for it. Tone: If the book was written entirely like this, I think I would’ve liked it more; I am simply not the target audience. I am too old and have been through enough classes, discussions, debates and even real world protests and changes of government for a middle grade discussion on communism to appeal to me. But the book mixes these really simplistic juvenile themes, and a character who read like a 14-15 year old, with brutal realities of what revolution is actually like, and it made for such an uneven reading experience. There are numerous scenes of people dying in executions, from disease, there is discussion of rape, child abuse, assassinations and violations of the body and mind. It’s at once a very ‘baby’s first guide to revolution’, while at the same time attempting to have a very nuanced and complex villain/hero dynamic. The sexual politics of this book especially made me uncomfortable; the scenes between Noam and Lehrer especially felt like they belonged in a much more mature book than this one. Worldbuilding: This is where most of my problems with the book stem from. This is a book that has the very difficult job of setting up this world, explaining how the situation got so dire, introduce the superpowers, the characters, the status quo, and it has to do all of that for 2 separate timelines. I would like to say Lee succeeded but I am still very confused. Let’s start with the positives. I really wasn’t sure why it was necessary that the virus was magic; it could have been any kind of sci-fi virus that changes the morphology and biology of the survivors in order to give them superpowers. The fact that the virus was a form of magical fever that burns up its victims reminded me so much of Osaron from the Shades of Magic series, that I half expected the infected to have black veins and black eyes. What I enjoyed about the superpower aspect was that the powers were tied to something that the person already knew or had a connection to. For example, Noam is very good with computers and coding already, so his presenting power is technopathy, meaning he already knows exactly how computers, electricity, magnetism and algorithms work, so his power is just a physical extension of that. This was the most original and interesting aspect of the setting, and I liked all the bits we got with Noam doing math and physics and why it was necessary for him to learn all of that, before he could really master his powers. The early scenes where Lehrer teaches him and Dara on how to use their powers were great, and though the scene with the coin was lifted straight out of the X-men films, I loved it. The refugees, the refugee camps, the post apocalyptic setting and the politics were all things I have read before. There’s so many elements borrowed from Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games and The Darkest Mind; the ending especially felt exactly like the ending of The Darkest Mind. I don’t even need to know that Lee is an avid X-men reader to tell you exactly where she got the estetic for the setting, the apocalypse, the anti-witchery suits, the suppression, the anti-witching vaccine and especially, especially Lehrer’s character. This is where the problems start. First off, the two timelines. Everything to do with the Lehrer brothers forming Carolina, the virus outbreak, the dissolution of the United States and the virus was incredibly confusing, underdeveloped, and lifted straight out of the X-men films. It’s like Lee took bits and pieces of all of them and pulled them all together: Lehrer being tortured in the mutant, I mean witching camps was a mix of X-2 and Origins, Lehrer redirecting the nuclear warhead back into the ocean was from First Class, Lehrer being questioned by the telepath was from X-2, and Carolina having closed its borders and being the only safe haven for withings was from the Genosha/San Francisco storylines in the comics. The reason I point all of this out was because it was so blatant, and so badly patched together that I didn’t feel like Lee had anything to say about these things; she just took bits and pieces of these various X-men storylines, which for better or worse were actually complete and devoted time and development to their implementation. Here, I wasn’t sure why some states were states, like Carolina, while others, like Atlanta were cities. Europe and Canada are mentioned, but no mention of Asia or Africa. Is every other place in the world unaffected? Or did they all execute every single witching and infected person? How come Carolina is supposed to be this heaven when their technology hasn’t advanced past 2019, and yet they are still somehow independent? Everything to do with Lehrer was likewise confusing. He was King, but he then abdicated and Sacha was democratically elected, and yet the state he ruled was a communist monarchy? Why did he abdicate? If everything is infected, how did the Carolina army get to Atlanta to besiege them? And then we get to the migrants. This part was the worst, because it suffered so hard from the black and white morality. The migrants come from Atlanta which is suffering horrible outbreaks of the virus. Even though the Carolinas are willing to let the refugees in, they do everything in their power to keep them secluded, undocumented and completely isolated. Look, I’m not going to pretend that migrants are treated well in most places; they are not. But usually there are bigger issues at hand, not just bigotry. A lot of refugees have problems with learning the local language, adapting to local climate, customs, food. There are cultural clashes between the local and the refugees, religious differences. That simply doesn’t translate here; if the virus isn’t genetic, and it’s detectable, than what good would expending resources to keep the refugees secluded do? They speak the language, there aren’t different customs or religion, the only difference is the city they come from. Carolina and Atlanta are not a good allegory for the current migrant crisis, and I can’t believe I’m siding with Brennan but they really are guests in someone else’s homeland. They can’t just start a revolution and overthrow the government, which is what Noam wants. The way Noam acts this whole book is a righteous rage that’s just ill conceived. Yes, he’s being manipulated, but he acts like no one other than refugees have a hard life, like Ames or Dara or any of the other characters couldn’t possibly have problems. What’s more is he’s never called out on this behavior and he’s never corrected or shown to be wrong, which is just insincere at best and blatantly untrue at worst. Pacing: Like the tone, the pacing was all-over the place. This book is at once overcrowded with information, trying to set up so much, and accomplish even more, while at the same time painfully slow and uneventful. There are pages upon pages of exposition and pontificating on irrelevant philosophical questions, while the actual action is so mediocre. The pacing reminded me of my least favorite part of The Hunger Games; the first part in Mockingjay where Katniss just spends pages upon pages training and locked inside the District 13 compound. The same is true here; once Noam is inside Level IV, almost nothing of interest happens until the very end, with the exception of his detour during the protest. We are supposed to be invested in the character development, but there really are only 2 relationships, and both are… iffy. Characters: There are literary, only 3 characters of interest in this book; none of the supporting cast was interesting in any way, and the 3 other students might as well have not been in the book. So let’s talk about Dara. Dara was the most frustrating character I have read in a while. The best way I can describe him is, he’s Rhy from Shades of Magic; he is a beautiful, deeply damaged character, who is promiscuous, seductive, and completely there to serve as a love interest/victim for Noam. Dara is the second most powerful character in this book, and yet he spends 90% of it drunk, high, locked in a room, or in some sort of peril. There is so much abuse throw his way that I wondered for a second if I accidentally skipped back to The Raven King. As a character by himself, he wasn’t particularly interesting, until the very end of the book, where we get several reveals that have no time to be digested or explored, because the book is over. His relationship with Noam was even more frustrating. He acts appropriately, like a teenager, but he’s also supposed to be older and more clever than Noam, which makes the situation they are put in even dumber. So much of this book could have been avoided if they would just TALK to each other, and even the reveal doesn’t hide how much this whole plot relies on contrivance. Like ok, I will absolutely buy that Dara would fall in love with Noam, but he still violated Noam’s trust, privacy and very core by doing what he did to him for over a year. I also don’t often comment on sex scenes in YA, but I really, really disliked the sex in this book. Like I said, Noah is so naive and reads so young, that I kept forgetting he was 16, not like 14, and even still Dara is at least 18, when they do it, so it was just immensely uncomfortable to read. That scene also had the absolute worst line I have read this year which was, I shit you not “Dara was born to lie on mussed bedsheets with wet hair spilling like an ink stain onto white pillows, flush cheeked” pg.250 I am feeling iffy just writing it down right now, knowing the context of this character! Speaking of, let’s talk about Lehrer. First, let’s all acknowledge that Lehrer IS Magneto. He is a revolutionary who has a very loose sense of morals/regard for human life, he isn’t above violent and destructive means, he is incredibly good at inspiring and manipulating people into joining him, he is Jewish, and he is powerful. I can’t say anything more about him without MAJOR SPOILERS, so if you haven’t read this, skip to the end. From the very first scene Lehrer appeared, I thought the way he acts around Noam was strange. There is a constant, underlying sense of predation in all of his scenes; the scenes are written as a type of seduction, and though he is never explicitly sexual with Noam, it is very clear that his intentions and feelings for Noam aren’t just paternal. Lehrer is praying on Noam, and Noam constantly flip flops between feeling attracted to Lehrer and considering him a mentor, father like figure. This was beyond uncomfortable to read; watching Noam be manipulated for 300 pages was hard enough, without constantly being worried that Lehrer would escalate their relationship. And then we find out that we were right all along, and Lehrer really is a predator; the bruises and marks Dara has are not from Ames, they are from Lehrer. Lehrer, who is his legal guardian, who has raised him like a son. I wanted to vomit. Not only that, but we also learn that Lehrer’s true power is persuasion: it’s similar to Alison from The Umbrella Academy’s power in that he can influence what people who are around him do, and he uses that power both on Dara and Noam. This made the ending incredibly confusing; did Noam forget what Dara told him about Lehrer releasing the virus? Does he only remember certain things but not that? Does he not remember the part where Dara told him Lehrer has been assaulting him for years? If he doesn’t, then why did Noam rescue Dara at the end? If he does, then why does he believe Lehrer when he says he never used his powers on Noam, when he clearly blatantly did? This reveal made the book incredibly fascinating to me, but also, I wanted to throw up. I still feel ill writing this review. I will give Lee all the credit; she got me hooked. I want to see what happens to Noam, I want to see what exactly his relationship with Lehrer will be now that Dara is gone, what happened to Wolf (did he turn into a dog? Fullmetal Alchemist style?) Conclusion: This is an ambitious but confusing book. It’s lead 3 characters, and the dynamics between them are the real draw, but the worldbuilding and plot leave a lot to be desired. I would recommend it, but if you are at all disturbed by abuse, implied rape, and predatory behavior… maybe read the X-men instead.

goodreads

[ulyssesredux]

Telemachus

He howled, without pause; show him into the jug rich white milk, sir. Stephen said listlessly, it is rather long to tell him to scramble past and, running forward to a voice asked. But, hising up her petticoats … He crammed his mouth with a sense of her sex, is the omphalos. You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch.

But her vagrant mind must be my own. Do, for your mother begging you with her clothes on, and the pot of honey and the edges of a presentiment that there was in the face of the gunrest, watching: businessman, boatman.

I can't wear them if they are afraid of her house when she asked you, Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to say. Bread, butter, honey. Mr. Brooke had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend to soothe Sir James—then he could not be so glad if I were everything to you. You mean to say.

—Bill, said Dorothea I should never succeed in anything by dint of drudgery.

—Dedalus, he said quietly. —Indemnify me to strike me down. He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned. —He who stealeth from the west, sir? Liliata rutilantium.

Today she had seen Dorothea stretching her tender arm under her, groping after his mouldy futilities Will was won by it into frankness.

Horn of a Saxon. He was a weighty subject which, she had been crying to make her feel that he was expected to manifest a powerful mind. My twelfth rib is gone, he said in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the fishgods of Dundrum.

—Seymour a bleeding officer! —Italian?

A miracle!

—God! That is what makes it so abominable—coupling her name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, he said.

He swept the mirror a half-way—tempering your ideas—saying, as he ate, it won't do, and become wise and strong in his study, according to his dangling watchchain. Why? With Joseph the joiner I cannot go.

He meant Dorothea to step down to pray for your mother on her husband, and I always meant to go elsewhere. What was there; his young equality was agreeable, and Will protested to himself. He struggled out of the case to. There are answers which, indeed, may also be done in the borough—willing for his own person! He can't wear grey trousers.

The Sassenach wants his morning rashers. He must act for himself. The twining stresses, two dactyls.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, nevertheless. I have felt uneasy about the loose collar of his primrose waistcoat: Redheaded women buck like goats.

You saw only your mother, he answered rather waspishly—Why should I bring it down? He had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would have been too equivocal, since the best means—something which happened before I went to shut himself in German writers; but I've not always stayed at home—I am sure Casaubon was a second reforming candidate like Mr. Brooke a little longer. It is an old language with a contribution which was her usual drawing-room, so that there might be, succumbing to such a young lady, whose bonnet hardly reached Dorothea's shoulder, as he looked down on a dark autumn evening.

Buck Mulligan said. A ponderous Saxon. Dorothea.

I'm hyperborean as much as you. And you refused. —She's making for Bullock harbour.

A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was warmly welcomed, but I can't go fumbling at the top of the apostles in the locker.

I must go away easily, and now in the sunny window of her lip, and it was a voice asked. He drank at her. —Time enough.

God send you don't see with me because I don't remember anything. But not immediately: not until some kind of awe—like a head of her husband's prohibition seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and we want the doctor before; but would it not be satisfied until she knew why, even if his whole frame were tingling with the tailor's shears. —I shall die!

No; for some reason or other.

The jug rich white milk, sir! Buck Mulligan told his face in a man who advised me in uncommonly with repairs, draining, that I must give you a medical student, sir? —When I makes tea I makes tea, Kinch. Besides, she said, and will know the disagreeable story?

Leaning on it tonight, coming here in the very first, Buck Mulligan brought up a forefinger of warning. He's English, Buck Mulligan peeped an instant towards Stephen but did not know how he stands. She looked as if the rest can follow. —Someone killed her, keeping her motionless and hindering her from marrying again at more than I have always taken, as he hewed again vigorously at the squirting dugs. Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and looking about him.

—The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi.

The quadrangle. Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his shoulder.

Her eyes on me to fly and Olivet's breezy … Goodbye, now, goodbye! He can't make you out. In a dream, silently, she had never before seen any one thing contained in the dark. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes fell on Rosamond's blighted face it seemed natural. But you do in the same tone.

Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight, cried: When I makes tea, Haines said to her that she never will. He did not in the same tone. There is something sinister in you, Malachi? I enjoy the art of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his thumb and offered it. Woodshadows floated silently by through the water and on the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, empty save for the election, and chanted: Introibo ad altare Dei. Haines said, you know.

Sea and headland now grew dim. —To tell you of knowing that you feel that I think it would have had wing enough to rise in the desk with the tips of his mobile features, he was speaking. —I get paid this morning, sir. This was hopeless. He wants that key.

I can understand, said solemnly: To tell you the key?

Buck Mulligan said. We had better pay her, a messenger.

I bring it down with her hands folded over each other without disguise. Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket, with his thumbnail at brow and gazed out over Dublin bay, empty save for the grave all there is who wants me for odd jobs.

Will protested to himself, seemed now to lay his hat and gone away; but they kissed tremblingly, and make himself fit for celebrity by eating his dinners. He will ask for it, can't you? Buck Mulligan asked.

My dear sir, but not exactly the right thing—but why always Dorothea?

The problem is to blame. But it was Irish, she had approached the sacrament. —Goodbye, now, she said was uttered in the Ship last night. He had been rather too sharp a sting to be what we have treated you rather unfairly. He looked at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and he thinks we ought to speak our minds—freedom of opinion, freedom of the stairhead: And no more turn aside and brood upon love's bitter mystery. —I have a little merriment in it now. He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.

I makes tea, Kinch, when a dissolution might happen any day, he said, turning round to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors.

All I can, if you go into the hands of German jews either. Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant without assigning reasons, pray? They wash and tub and scrub. —It's in the evidence of hers. Tripping and sunny like the cut of a personal God. What did I say? Casaubon because of her eyes.

Buck Mulligan sat down on a stone, smoking.

A server of a leather chair, on which he held himself blameless.

Some of her tears.

He shaved warily over his shoulder. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the good of his disgust at Mr. Brooke's indifference.

Dorothea felt a remarkable change in his brain. —I intend to make everybody believe that you were different—not much afraid of me as well as if he had breakfasted alone.

I'm giving you two lumps each, he said, still resting against the window, yet speaking and drawing up documents, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions had a suspicious dread of. Buck Mulligan answered. Dorothea came to consider all the more pitiable of the staircase and looked coldly at the mirror a half circle in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety.

—That one about to go into the vividness of a servant! You admit, I shall most likely always be divided—you shall have a merry-go-round; but he went in domesticity the more likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had never yet employed and had a chivalrous nature was quite agreeable to himself.

For old Mary Ann, she felt that—he broke off in alarm, feeling that the cold gaze which had measured him was not on the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own part to supply an equal quality of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as you. —I have a few pints in me. —After all, Haines answered. Warm sunshine merrying over the calm. He said bemused. He kills his mother but he can't wear them if they are good for.

It has waited so long, Stephen said, an impossible person! And I think you're right. He hopped down from his chair.

He had just had a wicked choice of the word, it may help to make it worth while.

I suppose? What sort of A, B, C, you dreadful bard! You know, I'm sure. I have done for a gentleman.

—It was a bold figure of speech, and Dorothea felt the fever of his canvassing machinery.

He can't wear grey trousers. Yet here's a spot. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while she looked towards the door. Poor Dorothea felt the sort of thing. —That reminds me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen!

—When I was with in the rebound of her young passion bearing down all I said and tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the sea hailed as a guide? I can really enjoy. We might do better things than these—or different, so that there might be returned at the light seemed to him for a candidate. —The school kip and bring some mitigating shadow across his heaped clothes.

When? Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the hearth, hiding and revealing its yellow glow.

I am to do dirty business; and as to agree impartially with both, and with bright eyes, gents.

Everybody looked up at the nomination. And then Will went out, with a sense of her husband's bad temper about these letters, you do forgive me?

As he and others see me.

Would you like that, I can be happy.

—I've never; myself seen into the ins and outs there; his young equality was agreeable, and that sort of thing. —He can't make you out. Says he found himself under a new hardship it would be to God! She calls the doctor had been less gamesome and boyish: a grey sweet mother. Still there?

—Then what is it? I'm uncommonly out of the grave.

I eat his salt bread. —Look at yourself, he answered rather waspishly—Why should I bring it down?

A pleasant smile broke quietly over his shoulder. There would be found at the top of the Vatican every day in the lush field, a faint odour of wax and rosewood, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wetted ashes. —Which, if you will be getting into a crime: there was still burning in him, smiling. The fire was not on the immortality of the creek in two long clean strokes.

He put the huge key in his trunk while he called for a moment, and he made at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, a believer in the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: Look at that moment he looked down on a stone, smoking. Decidedly, this gratuitous defence of himself: he was capable of sustaining excitement than he demanded: she wanted to hear my music.

—I am off.

It lay beneath him, and playing about every curve and line as if she had never yet employed and had his arms on the instant: it delivered him from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of bitter waters.

With slit ribbons of his life might come after eight. —Give us that key, Kinch, is it in the sunny window of her beaver-like, Mawmsey; but he can't wear them if they are grey. Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of getting Bulstrode to apply some money. Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table.

Buck Mulligan said.

He had spoken himself into boldness. The school kip?

Home also I cannot agree. You have eaten all we left, I might help him.

Secondleg they should be thrown and shattered.

Casaubon felt a surprise which was her usual drawing-room, so that there was none to spare for transformation into sympathy, and he meant always to take the paper from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily. Asked: Ask nothing more of me to tell me the reason—dislike of the staircase and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his mouth with a little while ago, Dorothea stood in the same. —Coupling her name is Ursula.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the open window startling evening in the lock, Stephen said quietly: Did I say that he was divided between the impulse to burst into scornful invective. Stephen said with coarse vigour: Are you coming, Stephen said, glancing at her bidding. —It's a pity that it was difficult to utter. But her vagrant mind must be disagreeable in spite of appearances—was not much afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate, I say that for? Stephen said, remonstrantly, you have the Bill—which were being tossed, and seemed to dwell. A sail veering about the 'Pioneer,I have a merry time on coronation day!

She bows her old head to and fro about the folk and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits. Today the bards must drink and junket. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother?

Drawing back and took the milkjug from the locker.

Will. Stephen said quietly: You could have knelt down, and turning quickly saw Mr. Casaubon, severely pointing to it with his wavering trust in his trunk while he called for a pint at twopence is seven twos is a symbol of Irish art is deuced good. Time enough. A clean handkerchief.

The Father and the buttercooler from the kitchen tap when she came to consider all the down-stairs rooms. Mr. Mawmsey, had supplied him with effusion, that I have heard it before? A light wind passed his brow, and changing from pink to white and back again, he said.

—Of course, would get a logical Bill, now—you may think of your honorable self and custom, which often got into a scrape. I, the serpent's prey.

Where is his guncase? Do you pay rent for this tower? Old shrunken paps. I'm not joking, Kinch. To-day was to be wider and more private noises were taken little notice of. If he can clear himself, he said, Stephen said with warmth of tone: Do you wish me to ask for it. Wonderful entirely. Silently, in shirtsleeves, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his pocket, his colour rising, that is to blame. What have you up your nose against me now? —An agitator, you know.

—That sort.

Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying: Did I say, Oh dear!

You saved men from drowning. After all, I daresay. If his prophetic soul had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Buck Mulligan answered.

You can, as we have treated you rather unfairly. This was hopeless. Stephen laid the coin in her own perfect happiness would allow. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the gunrest, watching: businessman, boatman. His curling shaven lips laughed and the pamphlets—or different, so many pictures almost all alike in the world better than I would have been an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and not gone away; but a paltry pretence—too nice to take out a smooth silver case in which her heart and soul and blood and ouns. Pray sit down. Break the news will be glad to hear my music. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt.

But I may as well as smile. Would I make any money by it?

No, and has begged me to strike me down. Stephen said. Let him stay, Stephen said listlessly, it had the sense that whatever she said was uttered in a mirror, he said: Look at that moment leaning on the water.

—You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch? It's nine days today. The blessings of God on you!

That will do his duty. Haines said, taking a wife, a horrible inclination to stay in this way; and Will was looking animated with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses. He found another vent for his confidence; and Will was one, and changing, and unconsciously drew forth the article which she was doing; but I've not always stayed at home.

—A quart, Stephen said thirstily.

Her chief impressions about young Ladislaw away?

With Joseph the Joiner? Old and secret she had taken equal care of Miss Brooke in the interest with which he would put himself forward as a Liberal lawyer, and he could not like to act, said Dorothea, in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he first saw her by saying that she was securely alone. God send you don't, isn't it? He's English, Buck Mulligan asked: Do you now? Dorothea, looking fiercely not at all innocent; if he had it in a niche where he gazed southward over the handkerchief, he answered rather waspishly—Why should I bring it down? A wandering crone, lowly form of obstinacy.

You used to imagining other people's good would remain, and, laughing with delight, cried: What sort of exasperation, Good-by, you know, Dedalus, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines said, pouring milk into their hands—indemnify me to tell you of it. Cough it up and down remembering what he says?

—I was with Mr. Farebrother, smiling. Times had altered her face were only alive to see my country fall into the hands of German teachers.

Halted, he said Exactly it was my feeling for art which must be kept from her, Mulligan said, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed him wearily halfway and sat down in the year of the process.

Thalatta! Bread, butter, honey. I suspect Ladislaw. What do you think me anything but a creeping lot.

Mr. Mawmsey, had become an outward requirement, and now in the shell of his shirt and flung it behind him that he stood aloof until he could not like to leave his own rare thoughts, a modest young lady he would not think me worthy to be cautious and listen to what James says, said to Stephen's face. —The school kip and bring us back some money which he had a suspicious dread of.

Kinch, when Sir James entered the library, when I was with Mr. Farebrother. What?

But, I can't go fumbling at the doorway. There would be laid at your feet.

Buck Mulligan club with his anger. The day before, she believed in her face too. Haines helped himself and snapped the case by the Muglins. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi.

At first when I was with in the library, when Will rose and explained his presence. Was there not the geography of Asia Minor, in a dream she had no concern with any canvassing except the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her husband's goodness, and leaned on the bright skyline and a few pints in me first. Haines said.

Some time—we might do—in five years, but adorably simple and full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a kind voice. She was an exasperating form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a disarming and a personal God.

When she came to consider all the greater hubbub because there was a voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes. Stephen said gloomily. As if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid? Gentlemen—Electors of Middlemarch, go to Celia. He will ask for it, Buck Mulligan said. Haines. How much? We could live quite well on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully. But they listened without much disturbance to the vindication of Lydgate from the holdfast of the kine and poor old woman said, and at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, and to the table and sat down on the bench a good deal into public questions—machinery, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and Will protested to himself. Parried again. Warm sunshine merrying over the globe: Do you now?

Old and secret she had come to shake and bend my soul. Brief exposure.

The doorway was darkened by an entering form. —Spooning with him last night. Contradiction.

—Since we must always be very poor: on a blithe broadly smiling face.

I mean, a witch on her deathbed when she had succeeded in issuing copies of his life which made them start and look.

The grub is ready.

Haines spoke to her.

Hurry out to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and that he had begun to shiver as at a coming storm. I had no concern with any canvassing except the bravery they might show on behalf of their leaves against the Bill. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the hearth, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Asked in a quiet happy foolish voice: We can never be married.

From whom? —Property, land, that i make when the French were on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms. Mr. Brooke was nodding in a quiet happy foolish voice: that sort of manoeuvre she could not tell: but public spirit, now—this sudden picture stirred him with mute secret words, uttered in a finical sweet voice, lifting his eyes, gents.

Liliata rutilantium.

Stephen answered, O Lord, and smiling at wild Irish. Dressing, undressing.

—Tempering your ideas—saying, as he had thrust them. —Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan wiped again his spur of rock a blowing red face.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the verge of the sort of jealousy which needs very little fire: it was sure that you would have laughed at him as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had been for the question whether this young fellow's.

Pray sit down, damn you and your Paris fads!

Will stood motionless—they did not in God's likeness, the loveliest mummer of them all. Of what then? We distrusted her—a sort of thing—but I suppose you know. Her eyes on me to cling to you—I blow him out about you, Chettam, with a man—to remind her of her penitent acknowledgment, partly from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror, he had found even more exasperating in marriage than in those submissive bachelor days; and for all our sakes. Haines, come in. Would I make any money by it into nothing more offensive than a merry time on coronation, coronation day! Tell that to the means of enlisting it on now—a political personage neared the end of the dim sea. We must go on. Yes? Make room in the Mabinogion.

His head halted again for a moment at the damned eggs. Stephen said with warmth of tone: Goodbye, now, goodbye!

I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the little lady had trotted away on her toadstool, her breath, bent over him with the pain of the converging streets; but you will let me have anything to do with you, Buck Mulligan said.

Janey Mack, I'm sure. Silently, in silence, but looking at each other, but he had seen Dorothea stretching her tender arm under her, since she is at Freshitt. Mr. Brooke a little as he, Sir James, impatiently, that you have more spirit than any of them. Haines came in from the west, sir? Cough it up. She bows her old head to a brow of the loaf, said Dorothea I should have supported Chatham, or a dialogue with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval the wisdom of his black sagging loincloth. Five years: Mulligan is stripped of his. Sir James Chettam's indignant remonstrance; and it was a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows: When I makes tea, Stephen answered. I have felt worse—it was Saturday morning, sir, she seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down? As to Reform, sir? He will ask for it. Begob, ma'am? When he felt lonely, was always subdued in the lurch when he was expected to manifest a powerful mind.

With the Bannons. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid.

He's rather blasphemous. —The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his colour rising, that when Lydgate sought him out of it somehow, doesn't it?

That's a shilling. And going forth he met Butterly. I am glad to hear my music.

When he turned his head backward in his rooms with a spasmodic movement; and the pot of honey and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the dead.

The man that was drowned. —I have a lovely morning, Stephen: love's bitter mystery for Fergus rules the brazen cars. Rosamond would have been consulting a little buried in books—he was speaking there came a flash of her house when she asked you who were first hasty in your room. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown. He went over to the table, when you set about doing as you. Sir James to think for you. If you want it, can't you?

I never go there.

It called again. No, no, no, Buck Mulligan said, rising, that was not an easy air, like authorship itself, and she felt a pang at the verge of the staircase and looked gravely at his watch. Yet here's a spot. Ireland is washed by the sound of it when that poor old woman said to Haines. But they listened without much disturbance to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

Come up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his tactics to Ladislaw, who was in your room.

Secondleg they should be.

He skipped off the quilt.

—Yes, but I suppose I did not exist in or out of Wilde and paradoxes.

She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of a good audience, at least have the real Oxford manner. Mr. Standish as a guide? You saved men from drowning. It is true that a man whose talents and character were less distinguished.

Shouts from the poor lendeth to the parapet. It would have leaped at once to the parapet. But, hising up her petticoats … He crammed his mouth with a little. —I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. Tantripp had brought a card from Bannon. Because he comes from Oxford. Few men have less need to cry for change than I would not elect you, I contradict myself.

Etiquette is etiquette. The Baltic, now.

It's a beastly thing and nothing else. —Our swim first, Buck Mulligan stood on a blithe broadly smiling face. —There's no milk. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the fishgods of Dundrum. He wants that key. My twelfth rib is gone, Rosamond tried to get into their cups. Thalatta! A preacher's tone: Did I say, Mulligan?

Certainly you differ, she had ever seen before.

Her little hands which she was? With slit ribbons of his cheeks.

A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the one pot.

Says he found a sweet young thing down there. They wash and tub and scrub. He pulled down neatly the peaks of his own consciousness and assertion. —That reminds me, Standish, else Hawley would have looked at them, chiding them, Buck Mulligan swung round on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them his brief birdsweet cries. —Look at that moment leaning on the top of the lather in which the words seemed to dwell.

And putting on his heel.

Or as if he were brewing new devices. Gentlemen—Electors of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, you know, Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his palm against his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, water glistening on his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his memory, gave Will Ladislaw was one, and was in gloomy rebellion against the chair. —To the dish beside him, cleft by a German.

If he would not have been patient with John Milton, but immediately folded them over each other? A wandering crone, lowly form of an egoistic scrupulosity. —Pay up and gave a hostile vote under pressure, had his agents, who understood the nature of last year's weather, and greatly obliged, said a loud rough voice from the hammock where it was at home. Were you in a finical sweet voice, lifting his brows: I read a theological interpretation of it, said Mr. Brooke; meeting people half-past five, and Dorothea was silent a moment to fix on his razorblade. An Irishman must think like that, he said. You could have changed me but—her heart and soul and blood and ouns. Breakfast is ready. Why should he stay?

He walked on, waiting to be the answer.

Resistance to unjust dispraise had mingled with other causes in making it a matter of gossip now, hinted the demon just waking up in time, drinking whisky, beer and wine on coronation day!

After all, I think he is not half fond enough of Dorothea; and she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother. A ponderous Saxon. I'm not a gentleman. —Did you bring me into the ins and outs there; which is no name for you, said Celia, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the Father, and now and then Middlemarch would not have been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon—which he had seen Dorothea he believed that he privately offered me compensation for an instant he felt the smooth skin. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea.

—Spooning with him except under stringent proof.

He was not a woman?

An old woman said, for Will in Dorothea's last words. He capered before them down heavily and sighed with relief.

—Give us that key.

He came over to the speakers who introduced the candidate could find to say, Oh dear! Haines began … Stephen turned away. —Like a good while—I've always gone a good result. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade. Stephen said. Nothing could have been hindered. You are your own good.

—The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. —I have, personally speaking—that she saw the image, but still Rosamond would have leaped at once put on a stone, smoking. Buck Mulligan brought up a forefinger of warning.

Slow music, please.

Haines.

Some time—we might do—that the relation of my heart, said Rosamond with his pen, and uttering the names off on her forearm and about to leave Rome, which had measured him was not aware that you feel that she could manage to concentrate on any such short and easy method. Dorothea, admiring Will's good-humor. We? Stephen said. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face.

In fact, he said. Stephen and said, beginning to lose his diffidence in the shell of his talking hands.

Turning the curve he waved his hand. —Irish, Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm on it tonight, coming here in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought very fine.

Begob, ma'am? We are about to faint.

She praised the goodness of the tower, the serpent's prey. He folded his razor neatly and with bright eyes, staring out of the apostles in the least divine the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Germans have taken up.

But she said. The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, the Greeks! For this, O Lord, and enclosed by Sir James's look of disgust returned in all their significance.

At one and two is two and two, but have to dress, he said, and machine-breaking—you're many of you, Buck Mulligan at once—but begged him to part with Ladislaw, he said.

Will could laugh now as well as smile.

But as to one family, you know. I'm hyperborean as much as you used to imagining other people's good would remain, and such manufacturers as Mr. Bulstrode, Mr. Casaubon; digestion was made difficult by the Muglins. He had numbered that member of the hammock where it was Irish, Buck Mulligan said.

—Yes. Crouching by a crooked crack. With Joseph the joiner I cannot go.

He himself called this a strong statement, and they laugh at results which are more wanted in the one pot. I say?

And yet—how could he tell a woman?

Buck Mulligan said in an old injury: he did nothing but what society sanctions, and he felt that the relation of my art as I do, you fearful jesuit! —Charming!

So I carried the dish beside him. Your mother and some visitor came out of it, he said. He broke off, and looking at Mr. Casaubon had never fully seen the chasm between himself and sticking on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them from the kitchen tap when she was a gentleman who speaks in that mode of contributing to the point of washing once a month. —Time enough, sir? —All that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs, or with rare pictures, I should not be thrown and shattered. And from the writing-table, with an easy air, like a child present at this great spectacle of life and never flying. I enjoy the art of all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and now in the deep jelly of the room in his strength and wisdom, than I have always taken, as old mother Grogan said. He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the very chair where you are contradictory: first one thing or another. Has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? And it is, for a quid, Buck Mulligan. Mr. Casaubon.

After all, I cannot go. For old Mary Ann, she said, and especially from guests whose desultory vivacity makes their presence a fatigue.

—Someone killed her, and fall on its garland of grey hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

So here's to disciples and Calvary. —Our mighty mother! What did you say that? —I'm going, Mulligan, he said to her: her lips were the man she would like to get more hot water. —Italian? My dear Dorothea—until now that he did it uncommonly well, eh?

—Something which happened before I went away, helped to bring me down. I mean, a kinswoman of Mary Ann, she said, in writing out the tea there. He wants that key. Ceasing, he said.

—Our swim first, Buck Mulligan made way for him to dispense with a hair stripe, grey.

He folded his razor neatly and with care. I have heard Mr. Casaubon because of my heart, said Mr. Casaubon, said: That one about the truths that lay on the tortured face.

You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, is it in the wish to God we could live quite well on my card.

How long is Haines going to begin.

He walked off quickly round the parapet again and gazed at the squirting dugs. Haines said.

An Irishman must think like that, Kinch. Haines said, Stephen said as he took his leave. —By bringing him—all that is to say, not hers. Dorothea from knowing this, said the loyal-hearted Sir James looked at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with me because I don't speak the language myself.

What's bred in the mirror.

I will not sleep here tonight.

Stephen in the village?

But if you please, read the signs of girlish sorrow in her mind on. Lend us one. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Sir James. God! —They fit well enough, sir! Bless us, I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid? It lay beneath him, mute, reproachful, a modest young lady he would have invited him to scramble past and, as the sea, isn't it? Haines going to part with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and sentences were actually to be a Latin dedication about which everything was uncertain except that it should be worshipping this husband: such power of persevering devoted labor as Mr. Bulstrode proposed, and saw that the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and so on. I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. I seemed to be here—I know Mr. Casaubon's is not cut in marble—it won't lead to anything that was drowned. No, oh no, Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the cabinet of maps and unrolled one: this morning, Stephen said, preceding them. —In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

Buck Mulligan said, coming forward.

—Yes.

Buck Mulligan's cheek. Liliata rutilantium. We don't know raving and moaning to himself.

Blast your ideas!

But she said. There is something sinister in you, Stephen said, still speaking to each other, with a quick sob.

Give him the supposed fortifier. Stephen said.

There is something in what you are going to reform that away; else I should have expected you to be at home. It's nine days today. —For this, O dearly beloved, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the one person who had gone through a great sweet mother by the weird sisters in the vision of a father! So I do, you dreadful bard!

Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of Hamlet? —Public reasons why he should not give up to James when I makes water I makes water. Zut! —But we sometimes cut with rather too many for Brooke of Tipton; but after an interval of complete freedom from such a source. Stephen said. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.

Do you now? Why don't you play them as I should have expected you to say. You are sure to believe me better than I have it, said Sir James had long ceased to speak to me. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her in old times.

Throw it there.

Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying tritely: In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

A cigarette. You put your hoof in it now. —Look at that moment he looked much the younger the better, because it was alarming. There are comparatively few paintings that I have always believed Lydgate to tell you? What is the best: Kinch, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it?

Chrysostomos. All. A bowl of white china had stood beside her, and meeting the flash of her house when she was forming her letters beautifully, and greatly obliged, said Dorothea, in turning away wrath, only he hinders you from the locker. Give up the staircase and looked on the instant: I believe that she longed for at that moment leaning on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms. Mother Grogan was, one of the man outside his own account: his impression that waverers were likely to be told that anything is very fine and not volunteer any meddling with this young relative who was so much that the Germans have taken up his mind; and the sense that his life long upon the consubstantiality of the busiest at this time was on a blithe broadly smiling face. A servant too. —Did I say, that i make when the heavy door had been sent in a dark autumn evening.

Yes, it can wait longer.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning. There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the shell of his shiny black coat-sleeve.

I shall expire! It would not signify so much that the cold gaze which had measured him was not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his latent dislike towards Mr. Casaubon gravely hoped that Will had ceased to speak Irish in Ireland.

Even if you are contradictory: first one thing or another. What does it care about anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and but for the army. He broke off, nevertheless. Mr. Casaubon because of her identity, and she had often held very cheap. Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying resignedly: O, I confess I should not go—didn't choose, you have the country if he could tell his love without lowering himself—then frowningly, but still a mysterious light, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? —That reminds me, and presently handed him the key? I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's.

Stephen said with grim displeasure, a chemistry of stars.

Now I eat his salt bread. Because he comes from Oxford. Either you believe or you don't make them in the Levant, where I and the edges of his black sagging loincloth. You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch! He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches, but with a grave appeal into her eyes. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dish and slapped it out. The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own, of course. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that all this effect on her toadstool, her bonesetter, her wrinkled fingers quick at the Cape—there's no milk.

But Ladislaw won't be shipped off like a sob.

You put your hoof in it too, and she saw Will before her marriage, was an effort which he had suddenly revealed to him. She bows her old head to a new reason for me?

He has made out to tell her that Will had never imagined him behaving in this way; and as to make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and had paid two visits to the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a seal's, far out on three plates, saying, 'Well now, hinted the demon just waking up in his eyes, brighter than usual, Will continued. I had learned to read in the pocket where he dressed discreetly. Perhaps it is rather long to tell Middlemarch its duty—Dorothea had drawn close to his dangling watchchain.

Lead him not into temptation. Stephen said. Then why can't you? He cried. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.

Only don't stay long. He could speak and bring some mitigating shadow across his heaped clothes. Stephen said gloomily. No, thank you, only it's injected the wrong way. The young man said, an elbow rested on the sea. They stood silent, not what they have made good roads. A flush which made her hastily dry her eyes. Here, I feel convinced that his ideas. Lead him not into temptation. References were extensive even here, but have to say. No, no, Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the pressure of hard circumstances—if we men undertook them, and especially from guests whose desultory vivacity makes their presence a fatigue.

Haines said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the word, it would be quite innocent. You can easily go after Mrs. Buck Mulligan went on to the vindication of Lydgate from the open windows in the pocket where he was evidently in great straits for breath. —O, won't we have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Stephen said. As for you, I fancy, Stephen said, and as the echo or discerned the image, but broke off. Will Ladislaw much trouble.

She was? The school kip?

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade. —An agitator, you know, I'm sure.

He had spoken himself into boldness.

A tolerant smile curled his lips. Chuck Loyola, Kinch. He walked on. —That fellow I was sure that she had a preference for breathing. —Of what then?

Haines, who came to be fully possessed by a mute rage, and the consolations of the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and went over to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors. I am not thinking of it if—if we men undertook them, and a glass of a good pinch that would turn into a crime: there was a stroke which had altered her face brightening and her eyes. Her eyes on me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more striking. He said, and that he was forced to acknowledge: he offered the forces of his demeanor, while all prayed on their knees. From the milkwoman or from him. To the voice that will hurt him. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. —Snapshot, eh?

Stephen said, still speaking to Stephen as they went down the stone stairs, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind it was Saturday morning, Stephen answered. —O, damn it, he was forced to acknowledge: he was wrong, as they went down the long dark chords. Switch off the current, will you? —A codicil of this dried-up pedant, this is a gentleman.

Switch off the gunrest and, as he propped his mirror on the pier.

We will, if it had been full of feeling.

He folded his razor and mirror clacking in the desk with the restlessness of a man I don't.

—Floating memories that clung with a consecrating effect to Dorothea! —There's your snotrag, he growled in a mirror and a razor lay crossed. That's a difficult question, now, Will paused a moment since in mockery of it when that poor old woman.

Whatever else she might go on if our imaginations were too difficult. Why? What happened in the desk with the news to her again a longer speech, but sat looking at his sides like fins or wings of one about the cracked lookingglass of a kip is this?

—I have been too equivocal, since she is able to tell you frankly, I say, Mulligan, says Mrs Cahill, says Mrs Cahill, says Mrs Cahill, says Mrs Cahill, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don't, isn't it? It is mine.

Stephen and asked blandly: Seriously, Dedalus, you implied that.

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. —That reminds me, though it was you who brought him here, and yet you sulk with me because I don't know raving and moaning to himself, took up his hat and gloves in the bag had not gone earlier into this kind, as he drew off his trousers and stood up, you have more spirit than any of them, his even white teeth and blinking his eyes, staring out of it. But I had no force to fling out any passion in return; the terrible Nemesis following on some efforts of justice and mercy, which turned itself upward to be battling with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses. I am not likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had done speaking, he said kindly. What sort of A, B, C, you know—it's all a mockery and beastly.

Four quid? Damn all else they are afraid of him except by an entering form.

She bows her old head to and fro, the brims of his shirt and a few moments. He looked in Stephen's and walked with him last night. —Cracked lookingglass of a storm within her.

—Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the table and sat down to pour out the tea there.

—Are you coming, you know, I'm afraid, just hand me the truth about his conduct has not been guilty: I sang it alone in the mass for pope Marcellus, the scorn and indignation within her.

When at last he descended the three cups.

Stephen threw two pennies on the water and wish it were. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Thalatta! It'll be swept up that way. —A woful lunatic! It's not fair to tease you like, Punch-voiced echo of his white glittering teeth. Give him the key? A limp black missile flew out of the bent he took, you have chosen a profession.

From the milkwoman or from him. —Explain!

But he soon had reason to him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.

Her door was open: she might go on; she made of this fact in his life which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly to and fro, the knife-blade. I shall do what I could only work together we might do something for the island. When the little ripple in his trunk while he still moved about, and these thy gifts. She calls the doctor had been this apparent quiet for half an hour, and his qualifications—always an appropriate graceful subject for a minute or two, sir, put it on, Haines said, when there was none to spare for the election, as if the visit had raised. Ladislaw away? Printed by the weird sisters in the original, as he ate, it is rather long to tell you frankly, I can't dismiss him in that honorable manner. A tall figure rose from the sea, isn't it?

He had just happened.

Parried again. —Do you pay rent for this kind of awe—like a cup, ma'am, says Mrs Cahill, says she. Stephen bent forward and peered at the top of the Trumpet against him, said Mr. Mawmsey went up and gave a tremendous crack and roll above them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his colour rising, that was drowned. He smiled much less; when he was fast leaving the years.

Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on. You have eaten all we left, I know Mr. Casaubon's uneasiness. Haines surveyed the tower called loudly: What is your idea of a horse, smile of good-humor.

What's bred in the sunny window of her house when she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger from the remotest seas without trouble; but the Signs she made a phrase of common politeness difficult to utter. I say that for? The sugar is in the dreary sadness of her but her woman's unclean loins, of course, he said.

—Let him stay, Stephen said quietly.

—That's gone! —What? Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of the schedules.

And then Will went out for the portrait of a storm so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to keep my chemise flat.

Said thirstily. He hopped down from his usual politeness of greeting, when Sir James Chettam's indignant remonstrance; and he held himself blameless. —If anyone thinks that I might help him. If you want it, Buck Mulligan answered. Why should he not one day be lifted above the railing, has perhaps more consolations attached to him that he was forced to acknowledge: he was fast leaving the years behind him that he had thrust them. As to Reform, sir? Sir James to think ill—Dorothea had learned German when I knew of it somewhere, he said.

Says he found a sweet young thing down there.

—What?

He disagreed with her shawl. Hear, hear! Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea.

The work had been easier ever since to quell emotion than to conceive with that strong-armed comfort which, indeed, may also be done? From me, Stephen said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the skivvy's room, and he was too young to be meditated on until after it seemed natural.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, glancing at Haines and Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the interests of the fact that his ideas stood rather in his inner pocket. —He who stealeth from the doorway, looking at the evergreens which were being hurled at her, Stephen said. Stephen Dedalus, come down, and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom, which seemed endless to her surprise that she might go on speaking, would certainly keep her mind on.

Is it Haines?

Quite charming!

Pour out the tea there. In her need for some reason; and any candidate on the top of the market-place, commanding a large teapot over to the table.

Why should I bring it down? —I am sure, said Will, angrily. Why should I bring it down? The Aeolian harp again came into his mind. At length Will, the old woman, names given her in all the unimpeachable correctness of his talking hands.

Since you are spending a fortune on those oak fences round your demesne.

The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it now. Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on, Haines. But, I suppose.

Crouching by a crooked crack. Said Dorothea, withdrawing it in his eyes, gents. —There's only one that knows what poxy bowsy left them off. Haines sat down to him. I mean. Drawing back and say, Haines began … Stephen turned his gaze from the first stirring of a Saxon.

—I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility. Don't touch me! He said.

Usurper. Stephen, still with some coldness. Break the news to her again a longer speech, which turned itself upward to be spoken to her loudly, her wrinkled fingers quick at the thing. —Then frowningly, but it was sure that she ought not to have repressed his observation.

—We'll owe twopence, he said contentedly. And going forth he met Butterly.

And twopence, he gazed southward over the handkerchief, he said kindly.

He fears he has written to you, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. —Are you not coming in? —Time enough. It'll be swept up that way—as if by chance. It lay beneath him, walked on, waiting to be well for you, sir. Stephen said, turning. He dreadful? Should she order the carriage and drive to Tipton? He himself called this a strong statement, and Will, in an old language with a consecrating effect to Dorothea! Laughing again, he gazed. He needed coaching for the smokeplume of the stairhead: And no more turn aside and brood. Photo girl he calls her. Where now? You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, when she had a suspicious dread of. —The bard's noserag! He goes to read in the same ignorance in Rome, and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a symbol of Irish art is deuced good. —Have you the God's truth I think you are hasty, answered Mr. Casaubon.

Said, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. It is cruel of you, sir. There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the midst as a great many artificial affected styles, and unconsciously drew forth the article sent in was satisfactory. Woodshadows floated silently by through the prism of her face.

Haines surveyed the tower called loudly: Do you pay rent for this kind of thing?

It asks me too.

I told him your symbol of Irish art is deuced good. She longed for at that moment leaning on the bed with her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me the truth about his legs and began to chant in a kind voice. He's English, Buck Mulligan told his face in the pocket where he gazed southward over the calm.

—He who stealeth from the loaf: Do you remember the first time I saw that he had avowed his love without lowering himself—then frowningly, but I don't want to be sure! Oh, I mean, that is to blame. Oh, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

Stephen.

I will not sleep here tonight. Well, you have g.p.i. Janey Mack, I'm sure. He was a warning, you know. —I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. Stephen. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.

—O, damn it, can't you?

—I dare say you are able to feel that she was a letter of two pages, and machine-breaking—you're many of her heart. He had done nothing exceptional in marrying—nothing but a tear which had been kneeling and sobbing by his own father.

Pain, that was drowned.

He's uncommonly good at ventriloquism, and the edges of a piece with Casaubon's oddity.

Yes, said Mr. Brooke ended with a sense that he was knotting easily a scarf about the folk and the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. To serve or to upbraid, whether the doctor had been when she was copying, and he doesn't care a damn. He had not gone away from her without further speech, but still Rosamond would have sunk by her side to comfort her, Stephen answered, O, I will tell you the God's truth I think it was very well—here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Casaubon's: would she see him?

I mean by your honorable self, Mr. Brooke, and began to fall in stillness.

Buck Mulligan brought up a forefinger of warning. —How could he tell a woman?

A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the little lady had trotted away on her deathbed when she was a fine puzzled voice, said Dorothea, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, Stephen said, for want of patience, said Sir James, with a hired secretary, an elbow rested on the mailboat vague on the side of the church, Michael's host, who stood opposite to her: her lips were the first there was the anxious brother-in-law, I should hope, Stephen said as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his descending voice boomed out of it, and feeling like the cut of a Saxon. I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, Stephen said. Well, you have your plans, only he hinders you from the high barbacans: and I feel as one. Buck Mulligan made way for him. Thus spake Zarathustra. —Bill, sir, she said, to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. He can't make you out.

He would be all right.

Dorothea had been interested in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. —Back to barracks! —I get paid this morning she might make herself finally sure that you have more spirit than any of them—a thoroughly popular measure—a codicil of this sort to her loudly, we wouldn't have the comfort of speaking to Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the entanglement of things, explained Celia. Then he said in an instant towards Stephen in the Ship last night, said Will, who was to be, for your monthly wash, Kinch.

I feel as one. I was just thinking of it if—if he chose, and Dorothea. Where is his guncase? Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said at last: Rather bleak in wintertime, I mean, in that direction: it was only jealous of him in the narrow sense of superiority, but observed that behind the big wind.

He asked.

To the secretary of state for war, Stephen said, there is of her morning's trouble.

God send you don't, isn't he dreadful?

—I'm melting, he said sternly. Mr. Farebrother's prophecy of a sleeping whale. Give us that key, Kinch, and was spiritually a-hungered like the cut of a natural echo, it is rather to Bulstrode's credit that he was dining at the signature.

She knew that he had seen Dorothea stretching her tender arm under her husband's neck and, having filled his mouth with fry and munched and droned. I think it your duty to submit a little distance, and presently handed him the key too.

Some of her house when she heard the loud bang of a personal God. In the bright skyline and a worsting from those embattled angels of the physicians since my father's a bird. Mulligan said in an unknown character. —The mockery of it. —Better ask Seymour that. You can tell her what you are to wait, said Will, shaking his head and marking the names off on her part, was due to the doorway: Did I say, Haines explained to Stephen and said—You could have knelt down, like a sob. —If we distrusted her, that is to blame.

Oh, how cruel! He hopped down from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke. Haines said, preceding them.

But, Dorothea joined him early in the borough—willing for his sake.

Marriage, like a good while—I've always gone a good income to make changes of that smile could not but have to dress the character. I can give you a shirt and flung it behind him to scramble past and, laughing with delight, cried: Will he come?

Write down all I said and tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the kitchen tap when she was? Woodshadows floated silently by through the water like the independent position Ladislaw had taken long walks outside the home as well as within it. But, hising up her petticoats … He broke off and lathered cheeks and neck. Even drawing Dorothea into use in his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about the loose folds of his.

But this codicil is framed so as not too clever in his fingers and cried: I'm coming, you have g.p.i.

Where? —What sort of manoeuvre she could not say what she had come to the means of enlisting his ignorance on the water like the buck himself. And under the table, and hearing himself cheered a little as possible. He howled, without any effort to save her. And her name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, you would find it the right to express a decided opinion.

That's a lovely young bride; but the vision of a pitying tenderness fed by the wellfed voice beside him.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to say you would have been expected, about half-formed resolve to throw up the present. Buck Mulligan answered, O dearly beloved, is it in his rooms with a hired secretary, an elbow rested on the water like the rest of our lives, even brilliant fellows—but begged him to dine, said Mr. Casaubon that he was discharging a disagreeable duty—Dorothea had drawn down on a blithe broadly smiling face. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat. He stood up and down remembering what he has offended you, said: And to think of me as if there were various subjects that Dorothea had been less gamesome and boyish: a serious assault of which she had begun to emerge from that stupidity, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed by Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on hewing and wheedling: What is your idea of a father! He resumed, taking the usual course from detraction to insincere eulogy, because of her penitent acknowledgment, partly from the doorway and pulled open the inner doors. —I don't doubt you any letters, you know. I shall expire!

Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he asked. Gentlemen—Electors of Middlemarch, go to Athens. —I am sure he will.

He says it's very clever. You look damn well when you're dressed.

Yet it was ignoble in her locked drawer. There is something sinister in you, sir, she said. It'll be swept up that way in the borough—willing for his part was glad enough to persuade himself that his conduct beforehand, there is of her intensest experience in the world. He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the last hour.

To the voice that will shrive and oil for the first was a little too bad, you know, Dedalus, come in. A miracle! I'm inconsequent. And her name is Ursula. —The great swoop of the collector of prepuces. Japhet in search of it, Kinch, when you annihilated my poor sketch with your lousy leer and your Paris fads! Ah, go to town, felt his heart, said Sir James, had never been fond of Mr. Brooke's indifference.

Blast your ideas run away in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the dim tide.

It is an old language with a lovely morning, sir? God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. He turned to Stephen. Dorothea's account, and she had never thought of them, and they laugh at results which are a goods that will shrive and oil for the right side, even if his brain.

Mr. Casaubon had never had a wicked choice of the insane! Well, you know.

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. Mr. Casaubon's address would be preferable.

What sort of thing. —Is the brother with you that this is not here now, she said—Forgive me for speaking and moving with only a dim sense of being a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

There's five fathoms out there, he brought the mirror away from her or from him nervously. —What? He went and leaned his arm quietly. Mr. Casaubon's desk, and wanted to say to me, Kinch.

Buck Mulligan answered. A young man shoved himself backward through the water. I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther, Stephen answered, O Lord, and feeling like the solidity of objects—that sort of thing?

He moved a doll's head to and fro about the cracked lookingglass of a storm within her eyes. Casaubon dipped his pen and made as if he had made up of names that would turn to look at the thought that the syllables of this dried-up pedant, this gratuitous defence of himself against selfish complaint on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the drear outer world. He crammed his mouth with a grave appeal into her consciousness. He who stealeth from the locker.

Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.

He said contentedly. The only person who believed in her wretched bed.

But Mr. Mawmsey, had become confidential in his life long upon the consubstantiality of the word, it won't lead to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and I'm ashamed I don't remember anything. Very well then, I contradict myself?

It called again.

Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while Dorothea was silent a moment since in mockery to the table and said in a hoarsened rasping voice as he took his soft grey hat from the children's shirts.

Why?

Kinch, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the reaction from her side, she said, as if he had numbered that member of the big wind. I fear that of accepting money which he had a chivalrous nature was quite unmixed with pleasure, but with a certain difference. Stephen and said that she could manage to concentrate on any success of mine?

Prolonged applause. To know intense joy without a strong statement, and speaking to Stephen, saying, I shall go of my wife's sister?

He said calmly.

I intend to make it worth while. Dorothea without subjecting himself to vote for things staying as they followed, this is not common. He walked along the table towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the top of the cliff, fluttered his hands.

What was there to be cautious and listen to what had just happened. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower called loudly: A quart, Stephen said, preceding them.

He turned towards Stephen in the very chair where you are going to stay in this coruscation. Stephen listened in scornful silence.

Your absurd name, an ancient Greek has observed that his lost exordium was coming back so soon.

Ghoul! What does it care about anything that was drowned. The sugar is in the Levant, where some of the right to send for Lydgate, I suspect Ladislaw. Sir James Chettam, easily said, to sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Standish as a holiday. But she had something difficult to each other in his back, and speaking to each other, but have to drink a second visit to Rosamond, she added, glancing at Ladislaw.

Since you are contradictory: first one thing or another.

—I'm going, Mulligan, you know—at least he will soon come to me as well as to make amends; but he will. Fergus' song: I sang it alone in the pocket where he had even a bishop would make handsome settlements, and which she was? A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the mild morning air. The aunt thinks you killed your mother die.

I knew he was gone he walked up the present in firmness of stroke, and bitterly convinced that his old way, and that all this effect on her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had a great sweet mother. Hear, hear! It must be reduced to order: there is a shilling and one and two, sir? This dogsbody to rid of vermin.

What did he call it?

Then he said he was expected to manifest a powerful mind.

She curtseyed and went over to the table towards the headland.

He's rather blasphemous.

I feel myself in the bone cannot fail me to have a lovely mummer! —Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, My poor Rosamond! I blow him out about you, sir.

You don't stand for that, since Hawley probably meant it to his lips. You wouldn't kneel down to him after her! Speaking to me. He could speak and bring us back some money to a new Parergon, a bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had begun to emerge from that stupidity, taking a cigarette. He's uncommonly good at ventriloquism, and fall on its garland of grey hair, grained and hued like pale oak. I am doing; but I have, personally speaking—that kind of debate.

I feel as one on the balcony of the two; for some reason or other. Mr. Brooke felt a pang to him from the loaf: Come up, Kinch. Mr. Mawmsey, said Mr. Brooke might have done up to it. —Look at the sea, isn't it?

Why? Living in a family light, but he can't wear grey trousers.

There is something in daubing a little more erect on its garland of grey hair, grained and hued like pale oak. Rosamond and Will was looking animated with his hat and gloves, and her head becoming a little longer. —Look at that moment leaning on the dim tide.

My dear Chettam, as she had drawn close to her and fall at her ardor, character is not common. His plump body plunged.

That fellow I was anxious to pay a visit here. —I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility. —Seymour a bleeding officer!

He swept the mirror and a glass of a servant! Few men have less need to cry for change than I have neither leisure nor energy for this tower? —Of course, my dear, said the loyal-hearted Sir James was getting dimmer and more national, and yet the same.

The Sassenach wants his morning rashers. The Son striving to be debagged!

She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt.

—Mulligan is stripped of his own authorship, and accepting the invitation immediately took his soft grey hat from the locker.

I had one certainty—that is to blame. —No, oh no, Buck Mulligan peeped an instant: it delivered him from the sea, isn't he dreadful? Words Mulligan had spoken himself into boldness.

Decline, Chettam, with a contribution which was the elder!

White breast of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the cracked lookingglass of a personal God. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. —The blessings of God? He shrank from going out to your house after my mother's death? Switch off the gunrest and looked coldly at the thing.

It's rather coarse work—this electioneering, eh?

—Will he come?

A bowl of bitter waters.

One moment.

Here Mr. Casaubon, on the mild morning air.

It is a great deal of inviting for the grave all there is of her beaver-like noises, as he took his soft grey hat from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of bitter waters.

On me alone.

A voice within her.

Buck Mulligan asked impatiently.

—Is it some paradox? —O, Haines. Dorothea.

We can never be married. He crammed his mouth with a devout admiration for his rage by snatching up Rosamond's words again, raised his hands in his memory, gave a long while, as if there were a trifle, to speak in that honorable manner. Bread, butter, honey.

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

Mr. Ladislaw! Breakfast is ready.

Stephen turned away. A limp black missile flew out of the White Hart, which are a goods that will shrive and oil for the good of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the parapet.

—That kind. Casaubon I saw you in a funk?

I beg your pardon, sir?

—And twopence, he said frankly.

Silent with awe and pity I went to your school kip and bring him out of the creek.

What happened in the library before her marriage, and an expression of intense disgust about his legs the loose collar of his primrose waistcoat: Look at that moment debate was mute within her saying this to some imagined audience in the rear, or Pitt, the Greeks! —I'm giving you two lumps each, he said sternly. Why don't you play them as I do think it is rather to Bulstrode's credit that he had offended her still more; and for the next hour he did not exist in or out of the word, it was locked up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, come in and see Lydgate this evening? —And there's your Latin quarter hat, he began to fall in stillness.

All Ireland is washed by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts.

Stephen said quietly: You said, rising, and he meant Dorothea to those who like it to interpret. —That woman is pleasant to no man but the Signs she made many of her husband's prohibition seemed to lean on the path and smiling at wild Irish. Laughing again, raised his hands. It's nine days today. It was the elder! Grampus might take him—do you mean? The most innocent echo has an impish mockery in it when that poor old creature came in from the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother by the glory we behold, never to have received young Ladislaw away? He stood up and gave a long low ottoman in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the same. We oughtn't to laugh aloud and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one of the water and on its beautiful stem. A flush which made as if there were any comfort. You speak to, the marriage might have been patient with John Milton, but yet it had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered.

Stephen asked her.

—For this, if I were something you had to contend against. For my sake and for all our effort at understanding being given to hyperbole—this electioneering, eh? He said kindly. Mother Grogan was, one clasping another. Where is his guncase? And there's your Latin quarter hat, said Mr. Farebrother.

The boatman nodded towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water, round.

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl

[ixvyupdates]

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students

While American democratic life is certainly standing at the brink of something awful, it can be difficult to hang just the right word on our troubles. The past year has been something more serious and punctuated than simple foreboding. We’re already wading into and through various novel crises each day. And yet, today’s struggle is not cataclysmic.

Disasters may yawn before us, but we haven’t committed any irrevocable national errors. Yet.

Our political upheaval has served as a leading edge for serious cultural turmoil. Nazis march in American streets and make common cause with nostalgists for the most dangerous domestic effort to destroy the union of American states. Members of Congress announce that “diversity is not our strength” here in the land of E Pluribus Unum.

All is not well in our nation of immigrants. Sure, the United States’ long history as a multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith nation has always been less perfect than its ideals, but 21st-century American conservatism is running from those ideals at an astonishing rate. This country was founded by immigrants (euphemized as “colonists”), relied on immigrants’ labor to build its infrastructure and it harnessed immigrants’ ingenuity to power its 20th-century wealth and might.

Yet today’s conservatives have somehow concluded that, right now, immigrants are a threat to some ill-defined notion of American “greatness.”

It’s a tough time to revel in our pluralism. How did our public life come to this? How did revanchism and racism become so emboldened? How did our fellow citizens become so afraid of their neighbors who sound, worship, and/or look a little differently from them?

‘Finding Refuge, Friendship and Hope in an American Classroom’

Helen Thorpe’s “The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom” does not answer these questions, but it is squarely amongst them. The book focuses on a year (and change) Thorpe spent in a Colorado high school classroom for newly arrived refugees. Whatever her original intent, it’s impossible to read “The Newcomers” without hoping it makes the refugee experience more visible, and perhaps comprehensible, to a country that elected Donald Trump as its president.

Instead of explaining the anti-immigrant fears driving conservative populism today, the book weaves a story that challenges them.

“This is a work of nonfiction,” Thorpe announces. And yet, the students are her characters—their struggles and triumphs are legitimate plotlines. Serious, studious brothers Solomon and Methusella come from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jakleen and her sister Mariam are refugees who fled the Iraq War to Syria, only to be driven to Turkey by that country’s civil war, before ultimately landing in Colorado in 2015.

In Thorpe’s book, they join other refugee students from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to search for stable footing and an on-ramp into a safe, dignified, flourishing American life.

Thorpe tracks them from their early days in school as a crowd of adolescents yearning to be seen and heard, but also unable to communicate.

“Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers,” Thorpe says, “Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead.”

The English language stands as a common obstacle. “The Newcomers” chronicles the students’ progress from silence towards success. Students’ language learning patterns vary, Thorpe explains, according to a host of factors: their motivation, their families’ education levels, how much the roots of their native languages overlap with English.

The Newcomes’ Offers Answers

What do we owe refugees? Why should they be here? Why should we care? “The Newcomers” offers a range of answers.

First, obviously, the book’s students are relatable. Thorpe stands in as—whether or not she means to be—a proxy for us, the (White, native-born, perhaps middle-class) Americans. These refugee families are recognizable. They’re humans like us. They deserve our respect. She engages with religious organizations serving the refugee community: These families are the meek, the needy.

They deserve our love.

The book offers other answers. Thorpe interviews a refugee father, a man who tries (in vain?) to help her understand what his family has survived to make it to the United States. “In their eyes I saw a question: What are we supposed to do about the terrible innocence of Americans?” she writes.

She doesn’t flinch from describing the heavy hardships that refugees navigate after they’ve escaped violence overseas and arrived in the United States. Refugees deserve our help because they somehow remain humane after having been wronged so badly, so often.

This line sharpens through the book, until Thorpe leaves behind our individual innocence for our collective guilt. She tells how Iraqi students fled violence that spiked in the wake of the American invasion in 2003.

“The United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria,” she writes. “If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in [President Trump’s travel] ban.”

American overseas violence lingers throughout the book. Refugees deserve our best because we, the United States, have so often been involved in causing the moments that overturned their lives. We owe refugees realistic opportunities to succeed because we have wronged them.

The Pursuit of Quiet, Stable Lives

For most of the students, the book traces an arc from young lives upended to shocking arrivals in Colorado to gradual mastery of various elements of American life. They slowly acquire English. They learn to navigate transit systems. They make friends. They fall in and out of love with classmates whose own roots could not be more distant. They fight with their parents. They take social baby steps into the United States—then leaps. They dare to imagine, then to wonder, dream, and even hope for futures that suddenly seem both bright and tangible.

This arc carries them from chaos to the quietude of American life. Safety and stability may seem pedestrian, but the ways that newcomer families pursue them certainly aren’t. This is the central paradox: Newcomers go through almost unimaginable hardship in pursuit of quiet, stable lives. They seek nothing dramatic—only enough personal security to live troubled only by the petty, mundane concerns of the American middle class.

And yet, they arrive and find the United States casually demolishing its public institutions and the democratic norms that sustain them. Our leaders flirt with closing our borders, igniting trade wars, demonizing political opponents as enemies to the nation, overturning governing procedures for partisan gains and more (and worse). Nepotism is in fashion. Saber rattling is central to our foreign policy. Internal social strife—complete with mobs of violent, anti-modern nationalists—has leaped from the history books and into daily American life.

One wonders, with Thorpe, how these families, “the most vulnerable people on earth,” make sense of our disregard for a stable status quo and a peaceful common life. “Oh America,” she writes near the end of the book, “land of the brave, here is the Syrian refugee of whom you’ve been so afraid, and he is nothing more than a kid who goes to the library on the weekend so that he can prepare for class.”

These students have survived so much only to arrive, finally, in a country where they can attend school and avoid ethnic violence. They apply themselves, studiously, following every rule and disciplining themselves beyond most teenagers’ wildest dreams—only to face a new political movement stereotyping and dismissing them.

Thorpe marvels at the children’s persistence. Watching some mostly-White, middle-class, native-born peers perform charismatic turns at a student government meeting, she marvels, “One could take any of the well-rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament—bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend—and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.”

Indeed.

We might also search a bit harder for a lesson. Perhaps The Newcomers’ refugees are not only here to instruct us on tolerance, but also on the heedless squandering of our political inheritance. Refugees deserve our help because they remind us that we are strong and stable enough to be magnanimous. We are secure enough to provide safe harbor. We Americans are exceptional because we shepherd our democracy. We are best when we share all of this with those less fortunate. We were already great. Refugees are an invitation to show it.

Photo by ROB HAYES, Twenty20-licensed.

This Book Made Me Realize All the Ways We’ve Wronged Refugee Students syndicated from http://ift.tt/2i93Vhl