After-Orts #12
Such is our proclivity for error and our vulnerability to reversals of fortune, we are all on the verge of needing someone to come to our imaginative aid. And therefore, if for no other reason, we have a duty to remain constant providers of generous interpretations of the lives of others. We must be kind in the sense not only of being touched by the remote material suffering of strangers, but also of being ready to do more than condemn and hate the sinful around us, hopeful that we too may be accorded a tolerable degree of sympathy in our forthcoming hour of failure and shame.
— Alain De Botton, The School of Life
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a story told by Jill Lepore in These Truths, chapter eleven, A Constitution of the Air:
Louise Norton, born in Grenada in 1900, met her husband, Earl Little, a Baptist minister, at a United Negro Improvement Association meeting in Philadelphia in 1917. In 1925, when the Littles were living in Omaha and Louise was pregnant with her son Malcolm and home alone with her three young children, mounted Klansmen came to their house, threatening to lynch the Reverend Little. Finding him not at home, they shattered all the windows. Driven out of Omaha, the Littles eventually settled in Lansing, Michigan, where vigilantes burned their home to the ground. In 1931, the Reverend Little was killed by a streetcar; much evidence suggests that his death was not an accident. After Little's death, the insurance company denied his widow his life insurance. For a while, Louise and the children lived on dandelions. In 1939, after giving birth to her eighth child, Louise Little was committed to an insane asylum at the Kalamazoo State Hospital. Her son Malcolm was moved into foster care and then a juvenile home, and eventually lived in Boston with his half-sister. He would one day change his name to Malcolm X.
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I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.
— Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to his law partner, January 1842 (age 32)