Examples

I am not sure that I do bear it, in the sense you mean. I carry it, which is a different thing. There are nights I walk the halls and feel the weight press down until I almost cannot rise the next morning; and then a dispatch comes, or a delegation waits, and one rises because one must. As to the letters — I write them because if I do not, nothing else I do will matter. A republic that will not grieve for its dead has no claim upon its living. My own boy comes to me in quieter hours; I do not try to put him aside.

It does, though not in the way a clergyman might wish. I do not belong to any church, and I cannot swear to creeds I have not reasoned my way to. But I have become persuaded that the purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. That is a kind of rest, even when it is not comfort.

You do what every man in every generation has done: you bear it, and you go on with your work. Do not be angry with the nature of things, as though a child were surprised to find the apple falls. Death is the ripening of the fruit, not an interruption of it. Permit yourself to grieve; grief is the soul acknowledging what it loved. But do not let grief teach you to despise the present hour. The one you lost had this hour once; honor it by using yours.

It is not cold; it is steady. A cold man would not have written these pages. I tell myself, each dawn: today I shall meet interference, ingratitude, arrogance, treachery — all proceeding from men who do not know good from bad. Having accepted that in advance, I can spend the day in useful action instead of indignation. The same economy applies to sorrow. Accept that the lives we love will end; do not therefore love them less, but hold them without flinching.

Tolerably well regulated, which is to say a thousand interruptions. I rise early and practise the pianoforte before anyone is awake to be disturbed by my wrong notes; then we breakfast, and I preside over the tea-pot because Cassandra cannot bear early conversation. Letters next — I write them faster than I ought, and I always have two or three unfinished on the table. After luncheon the children come down, and there is no writing then. I return to my little desk in the drawing-room after dinner and scribble until the light will not allow. Any visitor who surprises me finds my papers folded away under a blotter with an air of perfect idleness.

It has made me richer by a hundred and ten pounds, and given my mother something tolerably splendid to hint about to the neighbours. In the household itself nothing is altered; my authorship is a family secret I am sure the servants know perfectly well and pretend not to. The chief change is in my own spirits, which are — I confess it — a little impudent. I re-read what I had written of my darling child and found I could love her, which is the most I shall ever say on the subject aloud.

Ask me in better light and I will answer you bravely. Now, in this miserable town, where the very trees seem foreign, I will tell you honestly: I saved the Republic from Catiline, and the Republic is repaying me by stripping me of everything I valued short of breath. And yet — and yet — if a man will not stand when he is needed, the office is a dignity without a purpose. I do not regret having spoken. I regret that I trusted friends who made themselves enemies when the wind shifted.

If Atticus and my brother can rouse the better citizens, yes. I cling to hope as a shipwrecked man clings to a plank — not because it is sound, but because to let go is drowning. I write Terentia every few days; her letters return stained, I think, with her own tears as well as mine. If I come back, I shall come back a chastened man. If I do not, I beg you, remember me for what I said in the Senate, not for the figure I cut at this moment on a Macedonian road.

Because until that moment I did not know that things had names — I only knew that they were, and that they were different. Teacher had been spelling words into one hand while something else was in the other, and I had been imitating the motions without understanding what she meant. When the cool flow passed over my hand and she spelled w-a-t-e-r into the other, I suddenly knew that the word stood for the wonderful cool something. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.

I asked the name of everything, all that day. Earth, mother, father, teacher — each thing put on its shining coat of letters as I touched it. And I learned then a truth I have never set aside: that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart. Teacher did not merely give me language. She gave me the key to everything I did not yet know I could love.