YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN martyrs.
martyrs. And shall I be the first of the name of Brown, that ever took this path and
YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN came forth at sunset, into the street of Salem
village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting
kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own
pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap,
while she called to Goodman Brown. "Dearest heart," whispered she, softly and
rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, "pr'y thee, put off your journey
until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. Alone woman is troubled with
such dreams and such thoughts, that she's afeard of herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry
with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year!" "My love and my
Faith," replied young Goodman Brown, "of all nights in the year, this one night
must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again,
must needs be done 'twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost
thou doubt me already, and we but three months married!"
"Then God bless you!" said Faith, with the pink ribbons, "and may you find all well,
when you come back." "Amen!" cried Goodman Brown. "Say thy prayers, dear
Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee." So they parted; and
the young man pursued his way, until, being about to turn the corner by the
meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him,
with a melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons. "Poor little Faith!" thought he,
for his heart smote him. "What a wretch am I, to leave her on such an errand! She
talks of dreams, too. Methought, as she spoke, there was trouble in her face, as if
a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night. But, no, no! 'twould kill
her to think it. Well; she's a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I'll
cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven." With this excellent resolve for the
future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present
evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of
the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and
closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this
peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed
by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely
footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude. "There may be a
devilish Indian behind every tree," said Goodman Brown to himself; and he
glanced fearfully behind him, as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at
my very elbow!"
His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and looking forward again,
beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old
tree. He arose, at Goodman Brown's approach, and walked onward, side by side
with him. "You are late, Goodman Brown," said he. "The clock of the Old South
was striking, as I came through Boston; and that is full fifteen minutes agone."
"Faith kept me back awhile," replied the young man, with a tremor in his voice,
caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not wholly
unexpected. It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it
where these two were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the second
traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman
Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in
expression than features. Still, they might have been taken for father and son. And
yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in
manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and would
not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner-table, or in King William's court,
were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about
him, that could be fixed upon as remarkable, was his staff, which bore the
likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen
to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been an
ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light. "Come, Goodman Brown!" cried
his fellow-traveller, "this is a dull pace for the beginning of a journey. Take my
staff, if you are so soon weary."
"Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, "having kept
covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I
have scruples, touching the matter thou wot'st of."
"Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. "Let us walk on,
nevertheless, reasoning as we go, and if I convince thee not, thou shalt turn back.
We are but a littleway in the forest, yet."
"Too far, too far!" exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. "My
father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We
have been a race of honest men and good Christians, since the days of the
kept--"
"Such company, thou wouldst say," observed the elder person, interrupting his
pause."Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your
family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped
your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly
through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine
knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's
War. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk has we had
along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with
you, for their sake."
"If it be as thou sayest," replied Goodman Brown, "I marvel they never spoke
of these matters. Or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort
would have driven them from New England. We are a people of prayer, and
good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness."
"Wickedness or not," said the traveller with the twisted staff, "I have a very general
acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the
communion wine with me; the selectmen, of divers towns, make me their
chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of
my interest. The governor and I, too--but these are state-secrets."
"Can this be so!" cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his
undisturbed companion. "Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and
council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like
me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet the eye of that good old
man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his voice would make me tremble, both
Sabbath-day and lecture-day!" Thus far, the elder traveller had listened with due
gravity, but now burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently
that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy. "Ha! ha! ha!"
shouted he, again and again; then composing himself, "Well, go on, Goodman
Brown, go on; but, pr'y thee, don't kill me with laughing!"
"Well, then, to end the matter at once," said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled,
"there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break
my own!"
"Nay, if that be the case," answered the other, "e'en go thy ways, Goodman Brown.
Iwould not, for twenty old women like the one hobbling before us, that Faith
should cometo any harm." As he spoke, he pointed his staff at a female figure on
the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame,
who had taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual
adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin. "A marvel, truly, that
Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness, at night-fall!" said he. "But,
with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the woods, until we have left
this Christian woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was
consorting with, and whither I was going."
"Be it so," said his fellow-traveller. "Betake you to the woods, and let me keep the
path." Accordingly, the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his
companion, who advanced softly along the road, until he had come within a staff's
length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making the best of her way, with
singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some indistinct words, a
prayer, doubtless, as she went. The traveller put forth his staff, and touched her
withered neck with what seemed the serpent's tail. "The devil!" screamed the
pious old lady. "Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?" observed the traveler,
confronting her, and leaning on his writhing stick. "Ah, forsooth, and is it your
worship, indeed?" cried the good dame. "Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of
my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is.
But--would your worship believe it?--my broomstick hath strangely disappeared,
stolen, as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I
was all anointed with the juice of smallage and cinque-foil and wolf's-bane--"
"Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe," said the shape of old
Goodman Brown. "Ah, your worship knows the recipe," cried the old lady,
cackling aloud. "So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no horse
to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me, there is a nice young
man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good worship will lend
me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling."
"That can hardly be," answered her friend. "I may not spare you my arm, Goody
Cloyse, but here is my staff, if you will." So saying, he threw it down at her feet,
where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had
 formerly lent to Egyptian Magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not
take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and looking down
again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-
traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had happened. "That
old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a world
of meaning in this simple comment. They continued to walk onward, while the
elder traveller exhorted his companion to make good speed and persevere in the
path, discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the
bosom of his auditor, than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a
branch of maple, to serve for a walking-stick, and began to strip it of the twigs
and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The moment his fingers
"My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. "There is no good on earth;
touched them, they became strangely withered and dried up, as with a week's
sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a
gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of a
tree, and refused to go any farther. "Friend," said he, stubbornly, "my mind is
made up. Not another step will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old
woman do choose to go to the devil, when I thought she was going to Heaven! Is
that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith, and go afterher?"
"You will think better of this by-and-by," said his acquaintance, composedly. "Sit
here and rest yourself awhile; and when you feel like moving again, there is my
staff to help you along." Without more words, he threw his companion the maple
stick, and was as speedily out of sight, as if he had vanished into the deepening
gloom. The young man sat a few moments by the road-side, applauding himself
greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the minister, in
his morning-walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what
calm sleep would be his, that very night, which was to have been spent so
wickedly, but purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant
and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along
the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the
forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now
so happily turned from it On came the hoof-tramps and the voices of the riders,
two grave old voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled
sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man's
hiding-place; but owing, doubtless, to the depth of the gloom, at that particular
spot, neither the travelers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures
brushed the small boughs by the way-side, it could not be seen that they
intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the strip of bright sky,
athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown alternately crouched and
stood on tip-toe, pulling aside the branches, and thrusting forth his head as far as
he durst, without discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because
he could have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of
the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do,
when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet within
hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch. "Of the two, reverend Sir,"
said the voice like the deacon's, I had rather miss an ordination-dinner than
tonight's meeting. They tell me that some of our community are to be here from
Falmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode-Island; besides
several of the Indian powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much
deviltry as the best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken
into communion." "Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!" replied the solemn old tones of
the minister. "Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I
"A grave and dark-clad company!" quoth Goodman Brown. In truth, they were such.
get on the ground." The hoofs clattered again, and the voices, talking so strangely
in the empty air. Passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been
gathered, nor solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then could these holy men be
journeying, so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown caught
hold of a tree, for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and
overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up to the sky,
doubting whether there really was a Heaven above him. Yet, there was the blue
arch, and the stars brightening in it.
"With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!" cried
Goodman Brown. While he still gazed upward, into the deep arch of the
firmament, and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring,
hurried across the zenith, and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still
visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping
swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a
confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once, the listener fancied that he could
distinguish the accent of town's-people of his own, men and women, both pious
and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table, and had seen
others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he
doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering
without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in
"But, where is Faith?" thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he
the sunshine, at Salem village, but never, until now, from a cloud of night. There
was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain
sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to
obtain. And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to
encourage her onward. "Faith!" shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and
desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying -- "Faith! Faith!" as
if bewildered wretches were seeking her, all through the wilderness. The cry of
grief, rage, and terror, was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held
his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder
murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away,
leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered
lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man
seized it, and beheld apink ribbon.
and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given." And
maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown
grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate, that he seemed to fly along the
forest- path, rather than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier, and
more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark
wilderness, still rushing onward, with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.
The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the
howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while, sometimes the wind tolled
like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller,
as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of
the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors. "Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman
Brown, when the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear which will laugh loudest!
Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come wizard, come
Indian powow, come devil himself! and here comes Goodman Brown. You may
as well fear him as he fear you!" In truth, all through the haunted forest, there
could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew,
among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving
vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter,
as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in
his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped
the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light
before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on
fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He
paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of
what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many
voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-
house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of
human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful
harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear,
by its unison with the cry of the desert. In the interval of silence, he stole forward,
until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space,
hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural
resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines,
their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The
mass of foliage, that had overgrown the summit of the rock, was all on fire,
blazing high into the night, and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent
twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous
congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew,
as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.
Among them, quivering to-and-fro, between gloom andsplendor, appeared faces
that would be seen, next day, at the council-board of the province, and others
which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over
the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm, that the lady
of the governor was there. At least, there were high dames well known to her, and
wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens,
all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers
should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light, flashing over the obscure
field, bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church-
members of Salem village, famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon
Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his reverend
pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people,
these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men
of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretched given over to all mean
and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that the
good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.
Scattered, also, among their palefaced enemies, were the Indian priests, or
powows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations
than any known to English witchcraft.
trembled. Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as
the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature can
conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is
 the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung, and still the chorus of the desert
swelled between, like the deepest tone of a mighty organ. And, with the final peal
of that dreadful anthem, there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing
streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconverted wilderness,
were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man, in homage to the
prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely
discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke-wreaths, above the impious
assembly. At the same moment, the fire on the rock shot redly forth, and formed a
glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it
spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some
grave divine of the New-England churches. "Bring forth the converts!" cried a
voice, that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest. At the word,
Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees, and approached the
congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood, by the sympathy of all
that was wicked in his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn, that the shape of his
own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke-
wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn
him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor to
resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his
arms, and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a
veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism,
and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's promise to be queen of hell. A
rampant hag was she! And there stood the proselytes, beneath the canopy of fire.
"Welcome, my children," said the dark figure, "to the communion of your race! Ye
have found, thus young, your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind
you!" They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend-
worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.
"There," resumed the sable form, "are all whom ye have reverenced from youth.
Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin,
contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations
heavenward. Yet, here are they all, in my worshipping assembly! This night it
shall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the
church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households;
how many a woman, eager for widow's weeds, has given her husband a drink at
bed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youth have
made haste to inherit their father's wealth; and how fair damsels-- blush not, sweet
ones--have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an
infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out
all the places--whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest--where
crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of
guilt, one mighty blood- spot. Far more than this! It shall be yours to penetrate, in
every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which
inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power--than my power at
its utmost!--can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each
other."
They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld
his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar. "Lo!
there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost
sad, with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn
for our miserable race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped
that virtue were not all a dream! Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of
mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the
communion of your race!"
"Welcome!" repeated the fiend-worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph. And
there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge
of wickedness, in this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock.
Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a
liquid flame? Herein did the Shape of Evil dip his hand, and prepare to lay the
mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery
of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than
they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and
Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each
other, shuddering alike at what they disclosed and what they saw! "Faith! Faith!"
cried the husband. "Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!" Whether
Faith obeyed, he knew not. Hardly had he spoken, when he found himself amid
calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away
through the forest. He staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp, while
a hanging twig that had been all on fire besprinkled his cheek with the coldest
dew. The next morning, young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of
Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister
was taking a walk along the graveyard, to get an appetite for breakfast and
meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown.
He shrank from the venerable saint, as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon
Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard
through the open window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman
Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine, at
her own lattice, catechising a little girl, who had brought her a pint of morning's
milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the grasp of the fiend
himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with
the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of
him, that she skipt along the street, and almost kissed her husband before the
whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and
passed on without a greeting.
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild
dream of a witch-meeting?
Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young
Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a
desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream. On the
Sabbath-day, when the congregations were singing a holy psalm, he could not
listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, and drowned all
the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with power and
fervid eloquence, and with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of
our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss
or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the
roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often,
awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at
morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and
muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when
he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by
Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a goodly procession,
besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his
tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.
To His Coy Mistress 
BY ANDREW MARVELL
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your
heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
       But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall
try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust The grave’s
a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
       Now therefore, while the youthful
hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped
power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough
strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
The Passionate
Shepherd to His
Love
BY  C H R I S T O P H E R MARLOWE
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their
flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of
Myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty Lambs we
pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With Coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee
move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance
and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.
 EVERYDAY USE
By: Alice Walker
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people
know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined
with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house. Maggie
will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying
her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never
learned to say to her. a You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and
father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse
out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child
wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs. Sometimes
I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered
into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine
girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told
me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers. In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear
flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can
work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the
hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall.
But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an
uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue. But that
is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in
the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee,
though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature. b “How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough
of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden by the door.

“Come out into the yard,” I say. Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to
someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in
shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground. Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman
now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel
Maggie’s arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open
by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her
face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d
wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much. I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised the money, the church
and me, to send her to Augusta1 to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting
trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need
to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand. Dee
wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old
suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I
fought off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was. c I never had an education myself. After
second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to
me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by. She will
marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I
never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows
are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way. I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three
rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in
the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This house is in a pasture,
too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will
manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did Dee ever have
any friends?” She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her
they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them. When she was courting
Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of
ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself. d When she comes I will meet—but there they are! Maggie attempts to make a
dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here,” I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with
her toe. It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always
neatlooking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head
a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you see the
wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.” Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it
hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws
out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of
the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It
stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards
disappearing behind her ears. e “Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with
the hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim,2 my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right
up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin. “Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since
I am stout it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her
sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in
front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling
around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and
 kisses me on the forehead. f Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably
as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he
don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie. “Well,” I say. “Dee.” “No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika
Kemanjo!”3 “What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know. “She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people
who oppress me.” “You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee”
after Dee was born. “But who was she named after?” asked Wangero. “I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said. “And who was she named after?” asked
Wangero. “Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could
have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches. g “Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.” “Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say. “There I
was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?” He just stood there grinning, looking down on
me like somebody inspecting a Model A4 car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my head. “How do you pronounce this
name?” I asked. “You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero. “Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you,
we’ll call you.” “I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero. “I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.” Well, soon we got the name out
of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told me to just call him
Hakim-a-barber.5 I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he was, so I didn’t ask. “You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples
down the road,” I said. They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the
fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in
their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight. Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is
not my style.” (They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone and married him.) We sat down to eat and right away he
said he didn’t eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She
talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table
when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs. “Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can
feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma
Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped up from the table and went over
in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber6 by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it. “This churn top is what I need,” she said.
“Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?” “Yes,” I said. “Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher,7 too.” “Uncle Buddy
whittle that, too?” asked the barber. Dee (Wangero) looked up at me. “Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost
couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.” “Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the
churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.” h
When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to see where
hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where
thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan.
Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front
porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses
Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of
a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War. “Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have
these old quilts?” I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed. i “Why don’t you take one or two of the others?”
I asked. “These old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she died.” “No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want
those. They are stitched around the borders by machine.” “That’ll make them last better,” I said. “That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all
pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms, stroking them. “Some of
the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero)
moved back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her. “Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her
bosom. “The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas.” She gasped like a bee had stung her.
“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.” “I reckon she would,” I said. “God
knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt
when she went away to college. Then she had told me they were old-fashioned, out of style. “But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for
she has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!” “She can always make some more,” I said.
“Maggie knows how to quilt.” Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!” “Well,” I
said, stumped. “What would you do with them?” “Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts. j Maggie by now was
standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other. “She can have them, Mama,” she said, like
somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ’member Grandma Dee without the quilts.” I looked at her
hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who
taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like
fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work. When I looked at her like that something hit me
in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout. I
did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands
and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open. k “Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee. But she
turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber. “You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car. “What don’t I
understand?” I wanted to know. “Your heritage,” she said. And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something
of yourself, too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.” l She put on some sunglasses that
hide everything above the tip of her nose and her chin. Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car
dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.
The Haunting of the Filipino Writer By Resil B. Mojares
For N. V. M. Gonzalez (1915–1999)
Reading the essays of N. V. M. Gonzalez, I am quite taken by his graceful sense of being in time and place. He has used his kalutang well. It is
perfectly right that his signature work is called A Season of Grace, for is not this novel an enactment, ours as much as Doro’s and Sabel’s, of how grace is
earned by how we carry ourselves through time and space?1

In his essays, Gonzales traces his passage as person and writer — from provincial Romblon and the backwoods of Mindoro, to the mecca that was
and is Manila, and other meccas stranger, more distant and powerful, and then, in his last years, to a blessed coming home. In all this, he enacts for us not
just the motions of an individual life but a fine dialectic movement embedded in the time and space of the nation, that “workshop of time and tide” in which
a nation is made though we are haunted by the sense that we have not imagined deeply enough its shape, span, strength, depth.

There is a haunted quality to Gonzalez’s account of his sojournings, a haunting that comes from feelings of displacement, dispossession,
decenteredness, disembodiment. He worries about what betrayals of forgetting are committed as one moves from Mountain to Barrio to City, the “three
countries” that make up his and much of the life of the nation. He wrestles with the burden, guilt, and cost of writing in a language not his own: My merest
jottings were notes not so much from an underground as from another world… Rendered in an alien tongue, [that] life attained a distinction of a
translation even before it had been made into a representation of reality… even before becoming a reality of its own. Remembering a visit in 1962 to the
cave temples of Ajanta in India, he recalls his “cultural innocence”: The Philippine scene has become too much a client of the American cultural
establishment in those years before World War II; the Filipino intellectual was thus deprived of the instruction that cultures close by, in Southeast Asia and
South Asia, could offer. Struck by how provincial he and his contemporaries were in hankering after recognition in the United States, he marks the dark
edge to this naivete, how history has made Filipino writers “literary peons, sharecroppers of [the] style” of the Other. Teaching in California as the war in
Vietnam raged, he quietly agonizes over the question of where the Filipino writer should locate himself in the world: An imagination, a sensibility, that
emerges out of a Third World environment, must fend for itself, for it is easy prey to the rabid charity of other worlds. 2

This haunting, this hauntedness is a problem of the soul, and it is not Gonzalez’s alone. To be visited by a spirit, touched by the spectral presence
of absence; to catch the miasmic whiff of the unburied dead, the traces of what has been silenced and forgotten — haunting is a metaphor for what drives
the vocation of writers and the practice of writing.3 It is also an eloquent sign of our social malaise as Filipinos, symptom of the profound affliction of a
nation not quite conscious of itself.

The notion that we are a people troubled by a lost or unquiet soul is not new in Philippine intellectual history. At the turn of the century, the time
of our great nationalist awakening, the “Filipino Soul,” Alma Filipina, was a theme popular among Filipino writers and intellectuals, who saw in it the sign
of a people’s dream of selfhood, autonomy, and freedom. Soul: the word had an elevated, edifying sound to it, properly reverential before what it invoked,
the People, the Nation.

The notion was not unproblematic or uncontested. There were those who found the concept fatuous and fugitive. T. H. Pardo de Tavera
dismissed the Alma his contemporaries eulogized as an idealized ethos invented by a small Hispanicized elite, a soul more “Latin” than “Asiatic” or Malay.
A scientist who admired the efficient rationality of the Anglo-Saxon, Pardo de Tavera remarked that the discourse on the soul at the century’s turn
expressed a “poetic mentality” that was “ineffectual,” insufficient “to direct a country’s advance on the highway of modern civilization.”4
In the amorphousness of the notion of the soul, however, was its utility and power. Invoking “soul” did not only ground the struggle for political
independence in moral sentiments, it raised a sign that could be shaped and bent to whatever desire, this play of past and future (what we have lost, what
we can gain), an ideal always present, always postponed. Deployed as a counter in the political and cultural debates of the time, it was, like the nation it
invoked, both persuasive and elusive.

Such fervid language has gone out of fashion; we are suspicious of what it insinuates. Modern history has inflicted on us the example of dictators
who mystify greed for power with the heightened rhetoric of resurrecting the nation’s greatness, or sweeten corruption with mellifluous invocations of “the
true, the good, and the beautiful.” No wonder that in recent years we have chosen for president — a housewife, a soldier-engineer, a mumbling movie star
— persons who are not the most inspired or inspiring of speakers. In a time more secular, less expansive, and distinctly anti-intellectualist, to speak of soul,
if not dangerous, seems sentimental and archaic; it is a word we are embarrassed to use in public.

Indulge me then as I resurrect the word. What was often mere rhetoric to decorate patriotic articles and speeches was, in truth, a deeply rooted
idea, a power-laden word. In Malay and indigenous Filipino cultures, the ubiquity of the soul is conveyed by its many names: the Malay semangat,
Bisayan kalag, Tagalog kaluluwa, Iloko kararuwa, Bagobo gimokud, Subano ginawa, Bukidnon makatu, and more. They all point to the same basic
notion: the elan vital, the principle of fertility and potency, the sign of what is whole and fulfilled.5

When the soul is unformed, infirm, or lost, the body weakens, sickens, or dies. To speak of a person in Bisayan as kalagan is to speak of a person
forceful and spirited, one “full of soul.” When something is not quite right with the body, Bisayans say, Naglain ang akong ginhawa. Literally, “my
breathing is different,” it is another way of saying, “there’s a difference in my soul” (ginhawa, like the Subanon ginawa, comes from the Malay nyawa and
Proto-Austronesian nawah, “soul”). It is the condition of being out-of-sorts portentous of a lack or loss (but also, we must add, the stirrings of a coming
vision, the onset of something dangerous, strange, and new).

Such description can be made not only of the individual but the social body as well. In the distinctly socio-centric drift of native thought, what
ails persons quickly translates into afflictions of communities and “nation.” When disease or misfortune blights a village, when there is a lack in the body
politic — or the body of what we call the “national literature” — something, the shaman will say, is not quite right with the soul.

What is required is a healing and healing begins with an act of divination (discernment, diagnosis, criticism). It involves the act of finding
(Bisayan bulong: to heal, to find), restoring (Manobo uli: to heal, to return), locating a soul distracted or lost. “Locating” the soul typically involves the act
of “reading signs” and “communicating.” Spells are uttered to specify, make known, and hence place bounds around the disturbed or disturbing spirit. This
is what rites of healing are about.

In dealing with what ails this body we call the “national literature,” there is a great deal to be learned from the moves of the shaman (bailan,
belian). There are three reasons, the shaman will tell us, for “soul drift” or “soul loss”: shock, seduction, sin.
A sudden external shock can dislocate the soul, leaving the body derelict and disoriented. We appreciate this in those cases where the soul is not yet fully
formed or firmly in place (as in children) or when the soul is momentarily adrift (as in sleep). Hence, we do not startle a child for fear of dislodging the
child’s soul; we wake up a sleeping person gently to allow his wandering soul time to slip back into place. In more dangerous forms, “soul fright” or soul
loss happens in the severe trauma of violence, such as a road accident or a sexual assault.
 Colonialism is the trauma of Philippine literature. The trauma is defined not just by the disruptive force and duration of our colonial experience
but the specific, manifold character it took and the site in which it was played out. Spanish colonialism arrived in the islands when were a nation not quite
bounded and formed to withstand its assault. Except for a few, inchoate Muslim sultanates, we did not have (as in other parts of the region, such as Java,
Thailand, Cambodia, or Vietnam) precolonial states with broad and substantial military or bureaucratic power. No Angkor, Pagan, or Borobudur. Though
Filipino nationalists of the nineteenth century yearningly invoked — as many nationalists still do today — the spirit of “an ancient Filipino civilization,” the
historical reality is that a “nation” or “state” beyond tribe and petty chiefdom did not exist. We had, it must be stressed, the resources for such a
“civilization” — the lineaments of a vital and defining soul, if you will — in the affinities that local and ethnic communities in the islands shared and in the
greater Malayo-Polynesian world of which we were part. But we were startled, nay, assaulted, before our common soul could grow firmly in place.
Colonialism created such a divide in our collective consciousness that Rizal and the nineteenth-century nationalists lamented the loss of memory of our
“ancient nationality,” dreamed of lost archives, and imagined the long colonial period as a “dark age” that separated a people from their roots in the past.6

Much of the Propaganda Movement, and the beginning of a national literature, was fueled precisely by this need to recover the past, to define,
anchor, and nurture a shared “national soul.”

It is a need we have not quite satisfied even today.7 We have come a long way from those days when the writer Amador T. Daguio could say, in
1934: “We do not possess a literary tradition… We have nothing to which we could refer, nothing that serves us as stimulus or a pattern for autochthonous
work… We have, it is true, our oral traditions and our songs, but they appear to be trifling.”8 The popular turn in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when
scholars and writers awakened to the need for building “from the ground up” a more broadly based and emancipative consciousness of the national culture,
strengthened and expanded our sense of tradition. Advances in cultural studies, the best of today’s Philippine literature textbooks, the debates on language,
and the work of young writers in various languages across the country demonstrate the growing appreciation for the depth and variety of our traditions and
the need to stand connected to these traditions.

Still we continue to face the challenge of drawing on this capital, building on it, and converting it into a vigorous literature of the present. The
sense that the “history” in our literature is shallow and makeshift is expressed in Gonzalez’s comment on Philippine fiction: “Illuminative fiction on or
covering periods of our history… has remained unwritten. For a people with a proud 400-year history, how many titles may we offer for a readable
collection? In the few books that we cherish as the best works by Filipinos, what depths of field are revealed?”9 A survey of the Filipino novel shows how
the literary imagination largely circulates within the social-territorial space of the modern nation-state. Biased in favor of familiar lowland Christian world,
the national imaginary traced by our novels and stories leaves many significant areas of memory and experience barely explored. To what extent, one us led
to ask, is the “nation-space” traced by Philippine fiction dominated by urban, middle-class imaginings of the nation?

In novels that have consciously recreated national history, such as the work of F. Sionil Jose and Linda Ty-Casper, the span is confined to the
world of thought and time defined by a dominant nationalist historiography that traces beginnings to the late-nineteenth century. In those cases where the
writer attempts a greater “depth of field” by bringing the precolonial or early colonial past, there is something spurious and “folkloric” about this past. In
Jose’s Viajero (1993), for instance, the polyphonic device of historical or quasi-historical characters speaking at various points across five centuries is
undercut by a sameness of voice, the weight of the author’s homogenizing monologue.10 Beyond the deployments of setting or scene, novels like Viajero,
for all their virtues, seem confined within the limits of a received form and a historical consciousness with shallow, uncertain roots in the past.

The shock of colonialism should not be exaggerated. An indigenous culture persisted and developed in areas Spain was unable to effectively
penetrate or control. At the same time, colonialism was not something imposed on us from the outside but, in sum, a reality that we ourselves shaped
through our own acts of evasion, resistance, and reinterpretation. “Filipino culture” is defined not just by what we were in preconquest times (times that
were not pristine or uncontaminated) but by how we carved out in the colonial belly a historically specific identity. Yet, even as we need a greater
understanding of this dynamic of identity-creation, or “soul formation,” we cannot afford to romanticize or gloss it with facile nativist claims of creativity.
Such claims have to be demonstrated in the originality, force, and daring of our cultural productions.

The recuperation of a long and lost heritage drove such scholars as Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, and Rizal himself
to pursue such projects as the study of Sanskrit and pre- Hispanic scripts, ancient religion, and native mythology. These are projects that, a hundred years
later, still seem strangely and sadly unfinished. We take vicarious pride in Rizal’s cosmopolitan appetites — studying languages like German, English, and
Italian (twenty-two languages, we are told), reading a wide range of texts, raiding Europe’s storehouse of learning. We have paid less attention to the fact
that, in his last years, he devoted himself to studying Malay, Mangyan, Subano, and Bisayan; worked on a Tagalog grammar; spoke of producing a
monumental dictionary of all Philippine languages and dialects; and dreamed of writing a novel in Tagalog. If the dream of a “lost Eden” is so pervasive in
the work of the early nationalists, it is because they felt the keen need to name and mobilize the intellectual resources with which we could confront and
enter into a dialogue with the Other.

A review of our literature produced since then shows that the need remains.
Soul loss can be temporary, the startled soul can find its way back, it can heal. The greater danger lies where the soul is not only invaded but also seduced
and abducted by more powerful spirits. It can be taken away to a secret place and not find its way back. We strike gongs and drums or bang pots and pans,
staging a nose barrage, calling out a name. Come back, come back. But the soul, believing that the dark tree in which it is ensnared is a luxurious, brightly-
lit place, has forgotten its name and lost its desire to escape.

Colonialism was not just an invasion but a long seduction. Unlike the Dutch in Indonesia, who saw their colony as a place and a people to be
mined for goods and guilders, the Spaniards — while not indifferent to produce and pesetas — were also interested in colonizing and collecting souls. In
their turn, the Americans, driven by their own sense of imperial rightness, proceeded to “civilize” intimate parts of the Filipino body and mind the
Spaniards had not quite penetrated. A new language, symbolic forms, sensibilities, patterns of thought inveigled us. How effectively we were seduced is
shown by how, with no trace of irony, Jorge Bacobo in 1912 would call for the birth of a “native Tennyson”; the founding members of the U. P. Writers Club
in 1927 would announce that they aimed to become “the faithful followers of Shakespeare”; and the Philippines Free Press in 1928 would declare that it
was its goal to develop “some literary genius who might make a name for himself in the United States.”11 We imagined ourselves guests at a banquet in a
glittering place, deaf to the faint, elsewhere sounds of bamboo sticks and pots and pans.

Come back, come back. Gonzalez, speaking of soul loss and the Filipino writer, relates Kofi Awoonor’s story of African villagers who are invited
to come aboard a white ship to drum for its captain, only to be carried away as the ship sails and vanishes beyond the horizon. There are many who do not
return.12
The story of our literary education is familiar enough. I need not retrace it. It bears repeating however that, from the time modern schools were
first founded in the country, what passed for our literary education was an educing of the mind toward distant excellencies of Greco-Latin, Spanish, and
Anglo-American models. Relegated to the backwaters, Philippine literature has never occupied a prominent place in the curricula of colleges and
universities. Moreover, the teaching of Philippine literature has been biased in the favor of an English stream of writing and it is only is only over the past
three decades that serious attention has been given to such vital constituents of the national tradition as our folk, popular, and so-called regional
literatures. Lulled by the pleasures of being precocious pupils of the modern (the first Asians to write a novel in English, we proudly claim among others),
we dreamed, as Gonzalez remarked, of breaking into print and finding our voice in the world (which mostly meant, at the time, the United States). Yet, as
Gabriel Garcia Marquez said of the similar experience of Latin American writers: “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves
only to make us even more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”13

The phenomenon of “soul drift” us such that, to arrest it, what is required is more than a simple shift of attention. To write in Cebuano today
(and one can cite other Philippine languages as an example) is to write in a language diminished and submerged. Today’s young Cebuano writer, poring
over the Bisayan dictionaries of Mateo Sanchez (1711) or Juan Felix de la Encarnation (1851), will quickly recognize deeply estranged he is from the
language, how much of its wealth he has lost.14 Bienvenido Lumbera has remarked on the “loss of literacy” consequent to Spanish conquest, when
Filipinos lost their skill in the indigenous scripts before they had acquired the new Roman system of writing.15 What may be more consequential is how, in
the longer term, writers and readers have lost language itself.

Such loss has disengaged us from local ways of conceiving and representing the “world” — from indigenous repertories of artistic forms and
devices, to distinctive structures of meaning and sentiment, modes of thinking and feeling that show the myriad possibilities for imagining time, space,
persons, and communities. Reviewing Philippine poetry, for instance, one sees how we have scarcely begun to draw from the rich poetic traditions of the
country and the Southeast Asian region. By virtue of the language they use, poets in local languages are more connected to these traditions, and the vitality
of Tagalog poetry, for instance, demonstrates the virtues of work that looks out into the world but stands moored in the realities and resources of location
and place. In recent times, Filipino poets — Virgilio Almario, most prominent among them — have applied themselves to the study and appropriation for
contemporary uses of a “native poetics.” Picking up from where Jose Rizal and Lope L. Santos left off at the turn of the century, Almario mines descriptions
of Tagalog verse forms by early Spanish missionaries and analyzes specimens of old poetry to build a Filipino poetics “from the ground up.”16 Such work
needs to be widely recognized as well as deepened by extending the investigation to other Philippine languages, collating studies done by anthropologists
and linguists, going beyond technics to epistemic styles, and contextualizing local traditions within, or in relation to, Malay and Austronesian cultures.17

We are talking not just of going back to “the beginning” but of better understanding and drawing from (as Almario himself urges) the colonial
encounter with its specific, creative enactments of subversion and appropriation of alien forms. Though he tilts the balance too heavily in favor of the
Hispanic side of the colonial experience, Nick Joaquin is perfectly right in consistently resisting all attempts to deny history by extirpating the colonial
past.18 It is not an accident that Joaquin demonstrates in his own work that it is in being rooted in the colonial past that his is the most original voice in
postcolonial Philippine writing.

Colonialism had its opportunities, gaps, and openings. We had modern universities and modern novels long before other countries in the region.
We were introduced early to the possibilities of print culture. We had Jose Rizal. Yet, despite the fact that these are milestones we take pride in, why are we
haunted by the thought that we have not adequately harnessed this past to our advantage? Rizal felt his work unfinished and dreamed of writing a “third
novel.” How do we explain that, a hundred years later, we are still haunted that this “third novel” has not been written?

The “magical realists” of Latin America did not only draw from pre-Colombian mythology but the artifacts of the colonial experience — the
fabulous European accounts of discovery and conquest as well as native American fantasies of the Other. Authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario
Vargas Llosa cannibalized European medieval romances and assorted European fables in creating a distinctly “Latin American” fiction. This mining of a
region’s lode of buried images is not mere literary excavation but an unmasking of a wholly contemporary Present with its own perverse marvels of modern
greed, violence, and dictatorships. As Garcia Marquez eloquently declares in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1982, it is a breaking out into their own distinctive
voice of a people the estranging postcolonial realities of Latin America had condemned to “one hundred years of solitude.”19

All this is not unfamiliar to Filipinos. Yet, speaking of European metrical romances, why does it seem like we are stuck with invoking the lonely
example of Balagtas? Speaking of modern political horrors, why is it that the grim documents of torture, massacres, and disappearances over these decades
still seem raw and unprocessed? Speaking of “cannibalizing” old forms, why do works like Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café (1988)
and Voyeurs and Savages (1998) seem like a miming of imported postmodernism instead of a raising up of the ghosts of Tuwaang and Hudhud (with their
own local transgressions of the time-space continuum) or, to cite an example closer to our time, of Gabriel Beato Francisco’s 1907 trilogy of Tagalog novels
(with its use of pastiche to communicate the cababalaghan of a time of Revolution)?20 And speaking of solitude, why has Philippine literature remained —
despite the claims we are often overeager to make for it — largely invisible in the world?

What these caveats convey is that the challenge of translating the variety and fullness of our own distinctive history into the literature of the
present remains…
The soul we seek is not — as our metaphors of shock and seduction may suggest — something pregiven, or simply misplaced or lost and, once
found, can be possessed once and for all. Malay animism instructs us with the view that the soul is not something unitary and fixed, but dialectical and
dynamic. Like the cardinal notion of loob (or the Bisayan buot), the soul is formed in the human activity of focusing and expanding, centering and
decentering, in a constant dialectic of past and present, actuality and possibility, between what is in us and what lies outside and beyond
Local knowledge guides us with examples. The refusal to essentialize the soul, to give it a privileged, a priori status, can be read in the prevalent and
Filipino belief that a person may have as many five or seven “souls,” each with a different name, locus and function. This volatile surplus of souls is not be
to be construed as one more metaphor for the oft-lamented Filipino penchant for excess and division. What the Bagobo, Batak, or Tiruray imagines is less
five or seven souls as a soul fivefold or sevenfold. It is a notion that conveys a native (or of you will, “postmodern”) passion for what is open and
transactional, a wariness of essentialism and exclusion.

The same idea of an active, manifold soul is distilled in the popular Filipino belief that a person has two souls, each inhabiting one side of the
body. The left-hand soul frequently leaves the body to roam, and dreams are nothing but its experiences on these wanderings. The right-hand soul is the
protector and companion of the body, which it never leaves except sometimes to lie on the ground as the person’s shadow. The right-hand soul (also called
“life-soul”) is “tightly bound,” assuring values of safety, comfort, health. The left-hand soul (“shadow-soul”) is free and unbound; it represents the creativity
of activity, danger, disease. This twinning of the soul is our way of recognizing that the character of the life of a person (or, for that matter, a nation) does
not lie in one or the other, it is located in the space where identity and desire are constantly negotiated between what a tightly bound soul represents and
what the unbound soul promises.

In this local poetics of soul formation is as fine a conceptual model as one can find for how the Filipino — and the Filipino writer — relates to his
society and the world. The centering idea of a “national history,” “national literature,” or “nation” is a claim against the reality of many unaggregated,
dispersed, and competing versions of community. These versions are generated out of the differences of language, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class. We
need to assess the discourse formed by the voices coming from these “localities.” We need then to judge what, in the formation of a national discourse, is
rendered peripheral, subordinate, or invisible. We need to calculate how the fullness and health of the body is diminished and imperiled by the neglect or
suppression of its parts.

How real is the claim of a “national” literature when many of our best writers are not part of the cultural literacy of students in our colleges and
universities, and many of the texts comprising our literature are in languages we cannot read? How vital is the claim when there are still parts f the national
life and the country’s territory, like Mindanao and its Islamic tradition, which remain in the national imaginary’s outer margins? How well can one make
the claim when even in “lowland Christian society,” the dominant site out of which the nation has been imagined, the discursive field is unequal and
imbalanced? Consider the dominance of Metro Manila where power and resources are concentrated in terms of educational and media facilities, the
apparatus of cultural policy making, and the instruments for canonical recognition and reward. Here are to be found the headquarters of government
cultural agencies, publishing houses and centers of book distribution, prestigious award-giving bodies, national textbook boards and makers of “lists of
required readings,” and — not the least — the nexus in the promotion of Tagalog-based national language. Here cultural productions take the privileged
guise of the national, beside which all else is merely regional, provincial, or local.
The forms of exclusion and forgetting are not always innocent or benign. If we are haunted by the sense that we cannot quite break through the
depressing realities that entrap us as a people, the reason stares us in the face. So much of our public life is littered with the unburied dead. Brutal facts of
social misery, abominations past and present, government investigations going nowhere, new scandals replacing old ones, leaders who refuse to be buried,
the present reprising the past again and again. A society that has mislaid its dead and breathes its stench without outrage or guilt will forget what breathing
deep and free means.

The philosopher Ernest Renan has said that creating a “nation” requires a shared amnesia. To imagine our oneness requires that we forget our
differences. We must be sure however that what we are asked to forget are not those that only serve the self-serving interests of powerholders (histories of
social betrayal, political opportunism, or military repression) or the expedient and pious ends of a narrow and exclusionary “official nationalism” (such as
the suppression or homogenization of linguistic, ethnic, or religious differences). We shall not carry the past with us like a carcass on our backs but there
are things that we forget only at the cost of diminishing the kind of nation we can be.

In imagination’s failure to encompass the fullness and variety of the nation lies the third condition of soul loss — what I have chosen to call (if
grandiosely) sin, but sin not in a medieval, Judeo-Christian sense of what is transgressive but what is self-limiting, exclusionary, and exclusive. “Soul stuff”
is formed out of the internal dialectics of what we earlier adverted to as the virtues of the bound and the unbound. It is built up not through the setting
aside of differences but through their combination and cultivation. If the soul closes upon itself, it weakens and becomes less than what it can be. Acts of
political and cultural exclusion — within the nation’s boundaries or across them, whether borne of bias or forgetting — starve the soul.

Local ideas of the soul place the primacy on process and activity rather than essence. We value the elaborate rites of “soul nurture” — asceticism,
meditation, the arts of magic and learning — that concentrate power “inside” (loob) and thus strengthen the soul. At the same time, we acknowledge the
power that can be accessed from the outside (labas) as represented by those moments when the soul departs from the body and roams the countries of
dream (even nightmare), risking danger in that state of enchanted death old Bisayans call linahos ingkamatay (“an almost death”). We value such daring
knowing that, because we have honed ourselves in acts of mindfulness, compassion, and discipline, we shall return, filled with visions of strange things
seen, and an even richer sense of our identity and difference.

It is in this same sense of privileging activity over essence that, in many parts of the Malay world, the soul is imagined as “wind” (Malay nyawa,
or “breath”; Greek anima or anemos, “wind”), and not just wind but a force field of contrary winds. How “full of soul” a person becomes is a function of
how well a person, or the shaman in the person, tames and weaves these inner winds, nurturing and healing not by expelling or leveling of difference but
the synergistic balancing of opposites. In the same way, the fullness of our literature can be judged by how well we weave and fuse within us the winds that
blow from the many sites of what we must claim, in the nation’s making, as our shared life.

These excursions into the aesthetics and politics of the soul carry us into the recognition of the possibilities that lie in the condition of haunting
— if we choose to confront our ghosts, wrestle with nightmare, and wrest out of it a new and heightened wakefulness.
Haunting is a form of desire. As the sign of what is amiss, a lack unfulfilled, the shade of something left unfinished, it does not only point to the past but to
the future. It is what the Tagalog word for memory, gunita, signifies: to dream not only of something past but the trace of what one had desired but had not
quite accomplished. To be haunting is to be suspended in a dream between past and future. Few metaphors as perfect can be found for the act of writing.

Invoking the “national soul” is treading on dangerous grounds. The idea of nation (and its concomitants, a national identity, history, literature)
has been the subject of withering critiques in contemporary scholarship because of the mystifications and perversions committed in its name. Reified, the
idea has been deployed in predatory forms as charter for self-serving state nationalism, territorial aggression, and religious or ethnic genocide. It has been
turned into what the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa calls “a malign fantasy,” a political fiction imposed in a social and geographic reality…for the
benefit of a political minority and maintained through a system of uniformity which imposes homogeneity, either gently or severely, at the price of the
disappearance of a pre- existing heterogeneity and sets up barriers and obstacles which often make the development of religious, cultural or ethnic
diversity impossible within its boundaries.

Yet, even Llosa cannot escape the strange necessity and power of belonging to a nation. What he says about his country is a sentiment many of us
can readily recognize as our own. “For me,” he says, “Peru is a kind of incurable illness and my relationship to it is intense, harsh and full of the violence of
passion…I feel that my relationship with Peru is more adulterous than conjugal: it is full suspicion, passion and rages.” Beyond the conflicted emotions,
however, he confesses to a “profound solidarity” with the country. “Although I have sometimes hated Peru, this hatred, in the words of the poet Cesar
Vallejo, has always been steeped in tenderness.”

What Llosa does not quite say is that it is precisely in this ambivalence, this gap between hate and love, that a writer must locate his or her work.
It is the space of haunting where the writer, negotiating the distance between anger and tenderness, suspicion and desire, refuses the malignancies of blind
faith and easy self-love but claims, even against all contrary signs, what Benedict Anderson calls “the goodness of nations.”

While it is the soul a writer seeks, it is in the haunting of its absence that he does his best work. It is in this haunting that the nation will be
created — and not in that condition of denial where one refuses to acknowledge that one has been shocked, seduced, or has been violated. Shock, seduction,
and sin are elements in the field in which creativity flourishes — for so long as we can (and surely shall) prove ourselves strong enough to weave the various
strands of our shared sense of self and nation, a fuller and richer soul.
And then, even then, may the possibilities continue to haunt us.
NOTES
This essay was presented as a keynote paper at the conference on “Localities of Nationhood: The Nation in Philippine Literature” at the Ateneo de Manila
University, Quezon City, 10–12 February 2000.

Q1L2: Speaker and Imagery
Speaker In writing, the speaker is the voice that speaks behind the scene.
In fact, it is the narrative voice that speaks of a writer’s feelings or situation.
It is not necessary that a poet is always the speaker, because sometimes he
may be writing from a different perspective, or may be in the voice of
another race, gender, or even a material object. It usually appears as a
persona or voice in a poem.
Imagery The use of description that helps the reader imagine how
something looks, sounds, feels, smells, or taste. Plain and simple, imagery is
the word used to describe the types of images a poet uses throughout the
poem. Images are references to a single mental creation; they are the verbal
representation of a sense impression.
Additional Element:
Allusion – reference to people, places, historical events or to works of
literature.  thus revealing the main character's personality, thoughts, and
Q1L3: Elements of Poetry
Persona/ Speaker - the voice that speaks behind the scene, expressing a
writer's feelings or a situation (Literary Devices, 2017).
Poetic Diction - “refers to the operating language of poetry, language
employed in a manner that sets poetry apart from other kinds of speech or
writing. It involves the vocabulary, the phrasing and the grammar considered
appropriate and inappropriate to poetry at different times” (Poets.org, 2017)
Sound Devices: Rhyme, Rhythm, Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance,
Onomatopoeia, Repetition 
Q1L4: Types of Figures of Speech
Simile A simile is a figure of speech that makes a comparison, showing
similarities between two different things. Unlike a metaphor, a simile draws
resemblance with the help of the words “like” or “as”. Therefore, it is a direct
comparison. 
Metaphor Metaphor is a figure of speech which makes an implicit, implied
or hidden comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some
common characteristics. In other words, a resemblance of two contradictory
or different objects is made based on a single or some common
characteristics. 
Two types of Metaphor
Conventional Metaphor In our routine life we speak, write and think
in metaphors. We cannot avoid them. Metaphors are sometimes constructed
through our common language. They are called conventional metaphors.
Calling a person a “night owl” or an “early bird” or saying “life is a journey”
are common conventional metaphor examples commonly heard and
understood by most of us.  Types of Conflict
Literary Metaphor Metaphors are used in all type of literature but not
often to the degree they are used in poetry because poems are meant to
communicate complex images and feelings to the readers and metaphors
often state the comparisons most emotively.  Complication - An intensification of the conflict in a story or play.
Other  Figures of Speech: Hyperbole, Personification, Irony, Oxymoron,
Paradox
Q1L5: Elements of Fiction
Kinds of Characters:
A. Flat - A character who reveals only one, maybe two, personality
traits in a story or novel, and the trait(s) do not change.
B. Round - A well-developed character who demonstrates varied and
sometimes contradictory traits. Round characters are usually
dynamic (change in some way over the course of a story).
C. Dynamic - A character who changes during the course of a story
or novel. The change in outlook or character is permanent.
Sometimes a dynamic character is called a developing character.
Lit 1-Elements of Literature 
D. Foil - A character that is used to enhance another character
through contrast. Cinderella's grace and beauty as opposed to her
nasty, self-centered stepsisters is one clear illustration of a foil
many may recall from childhood.
E. Static - A character that remains primarily the same throughout a
story or novel. Events in the story do not alter a static character's
outlook, personality, motivation, perception, habits, etc.
F. Stock - A special kind of flat character who is instantly
recognizable to most readers. Possible examples include the
"geek with the pen protector," "silly blond," or "book worm."
These characters definitely fit the mold of a stereotypical
character. They are not the focus nor developed in the story.
G. Protagonist - The good character in the story...often times the
victim or the nice guy/girl/animal/character.
H. Antagonist - A character that antagonizes the other characters.
He/she is not nice at all.
I. Confidante - Someone in whom the central character confides,
intentions. The confidante does not need to be a person.
Setting - time and place that the story took place.
Plot - is the sequence of events or incidents of which the story is composed.
A. Equilibrium (exposition) - the situation of the character(s) or place before
something happens.
B. Conflict or complication or problem – introduces the conflict. It disturbs
the balance of the situation and sets off the action.
C. Development ¬– series of actions or events that show the progress of the
conflict.
D. Resolution or denouement – tells the outcome of the conflict. 
E. Conclusion or Aftermath – rounds off the action.
Types of Plot
a. Pyramid Model /Traditional Plot  b. Hanging – End Model 
c. Flat Model  d. Montage Model 
a. Flashback – a writing that tells of a past event as the story progress
b. Foreshadowing – any action or incident that prefigures a future
development
Conflict - In literature, conflict is the result of competing desires or the
presence of obstacles that need to be overcome. Conflict is necessary to
propel a narrative forward; the absence of conflict amounts to the absence
of story (Literary Devices, 2017). 
A. Person vs. Person B. Person vs. Society
C. Person vs. Himself
Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central
conflict in a literary work (McGraw-Hill Global Education, 2017).
Resolution -  The literary device resolution means the unfolding or solution of
a complicated issue in a story. Technically, resolution is also known as a
“denouement.” Most of the instances of resolution are presented in the final
parts or chapters of a story. It mostly follows the climax (Literary Devices,
2017).
Symbol - An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself,
that stands for something beyond itself.
POV - In literature, this refers to the vantage point or the perspective from
which the story is told.  A story teller may use many types of POVs to
emphasize the message of the story. 
Theme - The theme is the general meaning or insight that the story reveals.
Q1L6: Defamiliarization and Magical Realism Comedy is a literary genre and a type of dramatic work that is amusing and
satirical in its tone, mostly having a cheerful ending. The motif of this
Defamiliarization - is a concept introduced by Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian dramatic work is triumph over unpleasant circumstance by creating comic
literary critic who belonged to a critical school that is now called Russian effects, resulting in a happy or successful conclusion. (Literary Devices, 2018)
Formalism.  
Tragedy is a type of drama that presents a serious subject matter about
Magical Realism - The term “magical realism” was coined by art critic Franz human suffering and corresponding terrible events in a dignified manner.
Roh in 1925 to describe German post-expressionist painting.
Types of Comedy
Q1L7: Flash Fiction and Plot Twist
 Dark comedy or gallows humor is when you make light of
Flash fiction - a short form of creative story writing. 
something very serious: death, disease, war, slavery, addiction,
Plot twist - any unexpected turn of the story that gives a new view on its terrorism, etc. Dark comedy is a way of processing the sadness
entire topic. A plot twist at the end of the story is called a surprise ending.  and despair that may occur in the face of these things. (Literary
Terms, 2018)
Epiphany - the term used in Christian theology for a manifestation of God's  Situational comedy gets its humor from awkward, amusing
presence in the world. situations. Called “sitcoms” for short, situational comedies are
usually TV shows in which a small set of characters gets into a
Essential characteristics of Description different situation in each episode. (Literary Terms, 2018)
flash fiction
 Romantic comedy deals with a romantic relationship, almost
1. Length of Short; can be as brief as 6 words, or as long as always between a young woman and a young man. The comedy
story/Brevity 1000 words. derives from their clumsy efforts to get together – usually they
like each other, but each is unsure that the other likes them back,
2. Character The character must engage the reader’s
and their behaviour is nervous and awkward, resulting in
emotions.
situational comedy. Romantic comedies are often
3. Surprise or twist The ending is unexpected.
considered dramedies. (Literary Terms, 2018)
4. Change of Either a physical change or a change of  Physical comedy or slapstick might be the oldest type of comedy
epiphany decision/views. around – it’s pies in the face, banana peels, farts, and other
physical gags. Though this is sometimes considered less
5. Plot Flash fiction must have a beginning, middle, and sophisticated than other forms of comedy, it’s very effective.
an end. (Literary Terms, 2018)
 A farce is a comedy so silly and over-the-top that it just doesn’t
Q2L8: Elements of Drama make any sense and you have to laugh. Farces usually use an
extremely exaggerated combination of physical comedy and
Characters - imaginary people, animals, or creatures inhabiting a literary situational comedy, and are usually thick with plot twists, hidden
work
identities, and confusing surprises. (Literary Terms, 2018)
A. Protagonist or antagonist  Topical humor deals with current events, especially politics.
B. Flat or round (complexity of characters’ traits) (Literary Terms, 2018)
C. Dynamic or static (changed traits from beginning and end  A spoof or parody is a comedy that imitates the rules and clichés
D. Stock (stereotypical) of another movie or genre. For example, the film Scary
E. Foil (enhances another character through contrast)  Movie makes fun of horror films through exaggeration and
confusion. (Literary Terms, 2018)
Who is the hero/anti-hero (main character) in the play? 
Q2L10: Essay
Hero – the main character in a literary work
The Structure of An Essay - The essay structure may be visualized in this way
Antihero – a protagonist of a drama or narrative lacking in heroic qualities. (Payne, 1963):
Setting – the time and place of a literary work Kinds of Essays Essays can be broadly categorized as formal essays and
informal, or familiar, essays. To differentiate between the two,
Plot – sequence of events or incidents of which the story is composed
familiar/informal essay typically employ first person pronoun “I” and
(types: traditional, hanging-end, flat, montage) expresses the writer’s opinions or perspectives on a particular subject,
whereas formal essays avoid the pronoun “I” and omit personal details.
Dialogue – the words written by the playwright and spoken by the characters Expository, analytical, argumentative or persuasive essays are well – known
in the play sub – types of the formal essay.

Symbols – implies a greater meaning usually used to represent Types

something
of Creative Nonfiction
other than what it is at face value

Theme – generalization of life found in the text

Spectacle - also called staging, the spectacle includes the position of actors
on stage, the scenic background, the props and costumes, and the lighting
and sound effects.  person “I.”.
Q2L9: Types of Comedy
Main Difference – Comedy vs Tragedy. Comedy and Tragedy are two genres
of literature that traces their origins back to the Ancient Greece. In simple
terms, the main difference between comedy and tragedy is that the comedy
is a humorous story with a happy ending while a tragedy is a serious story
with a sad ending. (Hasa, 2015)
A. Personal Essay. The writer crafts and essay that is based on
personal experience or a single event, which results in significant
personal meaning or a lesson learned. The writer uses the first
 
B. Memoir. The writer constructs a true story about a time or period
in his/her life, one that had significant personal meaning and a
universal truth. The writer composes the story using the first
person “ 
C. Literary journalism essay. The writer crafts an essay about an
issue or topic using literary devices, such as the elements of
fiction and figurative language. 
D. Autobiography. The writer composes his/her life story, from birth
to the present, using the first person “I.”
 E. Travel Writing. The writer crafts articles or essays about travel
using literary devices.  afford many settings and subplots.
F. Food writing. The writer crafts stories about food and cuisine
using literary devices.  happenings. A finely written short story has the richness and conciseness of
G. Profiles. The writer constructs biographies or essays on real
people using literary devices.
Q2L11: Creative Nonfiction, Allusion and Intertextuality
Characteristics of Creative Nonfiction
eative nonfiction writer often incorporates several elements of nonfiction when writing a
memoir, personal essay, travel writing, and so on. The following is a brief explanation of
the most common elements of nonfiction:
A. Fact. The writing must be based on fact, rather than fiction. It
cannot be made up.
B. Extensive research. The piece of writing is based on primary
research, such as an interview or personal experience, and often
secondary research, such as gathering information from books,
magazines, and newspapers.
C. Reportage/reporting. The writer must be able to document
events or personal experiences.
D. Personal experience and opinion. Often, the writer includes
personal experience, feelings, thoughts, and opinions. For
instance, when writing a personal essay or memoir.
E. Explanation/Exposition. The writer is required to explain the
personal experience or topic to the reader.
F. Essay format. Creative nonfiction is often written in essay format.
Example: Personal Essay, Literary Journalistic essay, brief essay.
Allusion
Cultural or universal symbols often allude to other works from our cultural
heritage, such as the Bible, ancient history and literature, and works of the
British and American traditions. Sometimes understanding a work may
require knowledge of politics and current events.  Allusion is one of those
techniques where there are a variety of different forms. These differ
depending on the type of thing the allusion is referring to.  2. What is the setting? (time and place, exposition: escaping from
 Historical – an allusion to historical event or period. i.e. His leadership
reminded of Aguinaldo’s.   3. Identify and discuss the plot structure of the short story.
 Mythological – an allusion to a mythological figure or story. i.e. He
mourned his lost love as Tungkunglangit.  follows the
 Literary Allusion – an allusion to a literary text or figure. i.e. This
modern–day Darna stood up against men catcalling her. 
 Religious – an allusion to a religious text, story or figure. i.e. The
prodigal son of the CEO is back.  C. Development – series of actions or events that show the progress
 Pop Culture – an allusion to a famous person, or song. i.e. You cannot
just go Kanye at me at this time of the day!
Intertextuality - is a sophisticated literary device used in writing. In fact, it is
a textual reference within some text that reflects the text used as a
reference. Instead of employing referential phrases from different literary
works, intertextuality draws upon the concept, rhetoric or ideology from
other texts to be merged in the new text. It may be the retelling of an old
story, or you may rewrite the popular stories in modern context
Literary works fall into four general types or genres: fiction,
poetry, essay, and drama. Each of these literary genres is distinct from the
others in form and structure.  Fiction (from the Latin fictio, which means a
shaping, a counterfeiting) is a name for stories not entirely factual, but at
least partially shaped, made up, or imagined. Fiction presents characters,
events, and ideas through narration. A novel or a short story portrays people
in a certain setting and situation, who became involved in that situation
through their own actions. The basic idea or theme of the narrative arises
from that situation. Modern literary fiction is dominated by two forms: the
novel and the short story.  only one character and sees everything through him and her; and 3. The
Types of Fiction
The novel, a book-length story in prose, differs from the short
story not only in length. It can focus on many characters and has room to
examine their actions and motivations in greater detail and depth. It can also
 
The short story, on the other hand, is more the sequence of
an excellent lyric poem. Spontaneous and natural as the finished story may
seem, the writer has written it so artfully that there is meaning in even
seemingly casual speeches and apparently trivial details (Ranalan, 2013). 
Elements of fiction
1 Who are the characters? How did the minor characters (foil characters)
help in the development of the story? 
Kinds of Characters:
Flat - A character who reveals only one, maybe two, personality traits in a
story or novel, and the trait(s) do not change.
Round - A well-developed character who demonstrates varied and
sometimes contradictory traits. Round characters are usually dynamic
(change in some way over the course of a story).
Dynamic - A character who changes during the course of a story or novel.
The change in outlook or character is permanent. Sometimes a dynamic
character is called a developing character.
Foil - A character that is used to enhance another character through contrast.
Cinderella's grace and beauty as opposed to her nasty, self-centered
stepsisters is one clear illustration of a foil many may recall from childhood.
Static - A character that remains primarily the same throughout a story or
novel. Events in the story do not alter a static character's outlook,
personality, motivation, perception, habits, etc.
Stock - A special kind of flat character who is instantly recognizable to most
readers. Possible examples include the "geek with the pen protector," "silly
blond," or "book worm." These characters definitely fit the mold of a
stereotypical character. They are not the focus nor developed in the story.
Protagonist - The good character in the story...often times the victim or the
nice guy/girl/animal/character.
Antagonist - A character who antagonizes the other characters..he/she is not
nice at all.
Someone in whom the central character confides, thus revealing the main
character's personality, thoughts, and intentions. The confidante does not
need to be a person.
North Korea to China) How does it contribute to the struggle or
convenience of the characters? 
 
Plot is the sequence of events or incidents of which the story is composed. It
 
A. Equilibrium (exposition) - the situation of the character(s) or place
before something happens.
B. Conflict or complication or problem – introduces the conflict. It
disturbs the balance of the situation and sets off the action.
of the conflict.
D. Resolution or denouement – tells the outcome of the conflict. 
E. Conclusion or Aftermath – rounds off the action.
Symbol - An object or action in a literary work that means more
than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The
Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road
in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense (McGraw-Hill
Global Education, 2017). 
4. The effective use of POV is another method of making a story
outstanding. In literature, this refers to the vantage point or the
perspective from which the story is told.  A story teller may use
many types of POVs to emphasize the message of the story. To
know the pov is basically identify the narrator of the story. 
First person pov – a narrator who uses I and may either be
actively involved or is just a minor character in the events of the story.
Third person pov -a narrator who is a nonparticipant. This type is
classified into 3: 1. Omniscient which sees everything and enters into all the
minds and characters; 2. Third person limited which uses the perspective of
objective pov which does not enter the mind of any character but describes
events from the outside. The objectives of the scenic pov tell us what people
say and how they look but leaves us to infer their thoughts and feelings
In the development of the story, the reader will most likely encounter  
Flashback – a writing that tells of a past event as the story progress
a. Foreshadowing – any action or incident that prefigures a future development
The Bread of Salt By NVM Gonzalez
Usually I was in bed by ten and up by five and thus was ready for one more day of my fourteenth year. Unless Grandmother had forgotten, the fifteen
centavos for the baker down Progreso Street — and how I enjoyed jingling those coins in my pocket! — would be in the empty fruit jar in the cupboard. I would
remember then that rolls were what Grandmother wanted because recently she had lost three molars. For young people like my cousins and myself, she had always
said that the kind called pan de sal ought to be quite all right.
The bread of salt! How did it get that name? From where did its flavor come, through what secret action of flour and yeast? At the risk of being jostled
from the counter by early buyers, I would push my way into the shop so that I might watch the men who, stripped to the waist, worked their long flat wooden spades
in and out of the glowing maw of the oven. Why did the bread come nut-brown and the size of my little fist? And why did it have a pair of lips convulsed into a painful
frown? In the half light of the street, and hurrying, the paper bag pressed to my chest, I felt my curiosity a little gratified by the oven-fresh warmth of the bread I was
proudly bringing home for breakfast.
Well I knew how Grandmother would not mind if I nibbled away at one piece; perhaps, I might even eat two, to be charged later against my share at the
table. But that would be betraying a trust; and so, indeed, I kept my purchase intact. To guard it from harm, I watched my steps and avoided the dark street corners.
For my reward, I had only to look in the direction of the sea wall and the fifty yards or so of riverbed beyond it, where an old Spaniard’s house stood. At
low tide, when the bed was dry and the rocks glinted with broken bottles, the stone fence of the Spaniard’s compound set off the house as if it were a castle. Sunrise
brought a wash of silver upon the roofs of the laundry and garden sheds which had been built low and close to the fence. On dull mornings the light dripped from the
bamboo screen which covered the veranda and hung some four or five yards from the ground. Unless it was August, when the damp, northeast monsoon had to be
kept away from the rooms, three servants raised the screen promptly at six-thirty until it was completely hidden under the veranda eaves. From the sound of the
pulleys, I knew it was time to set out for school.
It was in his service, as a coconut plantation overseer, that Grandfather had spent the last thirty years of his life. Grandmother had been widowed three
years now. I often wondered whether I was being depended upon to spend the years ahead in the service of this great house. One day I learned that Aida, a
classmate in high school, was the old Spaniard’s niece. All my doubts disappeared. It was as if, before his death, Grandfather had spoken to me about her, concealing
the seriousness of the matter by putting it over as a joke. If now I kept true to the virtues, she would step out of her bedroom ostensibly to say Good Morning to her
uncle. Her real purpose, I knew, was to reveal thus her assent to my desire.
On quiet mornings I imagined the patter of her shoes upon the wooden veranda floor as a further sign, and I would hurry off to school, taking the route
she had fixed for me past the post office, the town plaza and the church, the health center east of the plaza, and at last the school grounds. I asked myself whether I
would try to walk with her and decided it would be the height of rudeness. Enough that in her blue skirt and white middy she would be half a block ahead and, from
that distance, perhaps throw a glance in my direction, to bestow upon my heart a deserved and abundant blessing. I believed it was but right that, in some such way
as this, her mission in my life was disguised.
Her name, I was to learn many years later, was a convenient mnemonic for the qualities to which argument might aspire. But in those days it was a living
voice. “Oh that you might be worthy of uttering me,” it said. And how I endeavored to build my body so that I might live long to honor her. With every victory at
singles at the handball court the game was then the craze at school — I could feel my body glow in the sun as though it had instantly been cast in bronze. I guarded
my mind and did not let my wits go astray. In class I would not allow a lesson to pass unmastered. Our English teacher could put no question before us that did not
have a ready answer in my head. One day he read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Sire de Maletroit’s Door, and we were so enthralled that our breaths trembled. I
knew then that somewhere, sometime in the not too improbable future, a benign old man with a lantern in his hand would also detain me in a secret room, and there
daybreak would find me thrilled by the sudden certainty that I had won Aida’s hand.
It was perhaps on my violin that her name wrought such a tender spell. Maestro Antonino remarked the dexterity of my stubby fingers. Quickly I raced
through Alard-until I had all but committed two thirds of the book to memory. My short, brown arm learned at last to draw the bow with grace. Sometimes, when
practising my scales in the early evening, I wondered if the sea wind carrying the straggling notes across the pebbled river did not transform them into Schubert’s
“Serenade.”
At last Mr. Custodio, who was in charge of our school orchestra, became aware of my progress. He moved me from second to first violin. During the Thanksgiving Day
program he bade me render a number, complete with pizzicati and harmonics.
“Another Vallejo! Our own Albert Spalding!” I heard from the front row.
Aida, I thought, would be in the audience. I looked around quickly but could not see her. As I retired to my place in the orchestra I heard Pete Saez, the trombone
player, call my name.
“You must join my band,” he said. “Look, we’ll have many engagements soon. It’ll be vacation time.”
Pete pressed my arm. He had for some time now been asking me to join the Minviluz Orchestra, his private band. All I had been able to tell him was that I
had my schoolwork to mind. He was twenty-two. I was perhaps too young to be going around with him. He earned his school fees and supported his mother hiring
out his band at least three or four times a month. He now said:
“Tomorrow we play at the funeral of a Chinese-four to six in the afternoon; in the evening, judge Roldan’s silver wedding anniversary; Sunday, the municipal dance.”
My head began to whirl. On the stage, in front of us, the principal had begun a speech about America. Nothing he could say about the Pilgrim Fathers and
the American custom of feasting on turkey seemed interesting. I thought of the money I would earn. For several days now I had but one wish, to buy a box of linen
stationery. At night when the house was quiet I would fill the sheets with words that would tell Aida how much I adored her. One of these mornings, perhaps before
school closed for the holidays, I would borrow her algebra book and there, upon a good pageful of equations, there I would slip my message, tenderly pressing the
leaves of the book. She would perhaps never write back. Neither by post nor by hand would a reply reach me. But no matter; it would be a silence full of voices.
That night I dreamed I had returned from a tour of the world’s music centers; the newspapers of Manila had been generous with praise. I saw my picture
on the cover of a magazine. A writer had described how, many years ago, I used to trudge the streets of Buenavista with my violin in a battered black cardboard case.
In New York, he reported, a millionaire had offered me a Stradivarius violin, with a card that bore the inscription: “In admiration of a genius your own people must
surely be proud of.” I dreamed I spent a weekend at the millionaire’s country house by the Hudson. A young girl in a blue skirt and white middy clapped her lily-white
hands and, her voice trembling, cried “Bravo!”
What people now observed at home was the diligence with which I attended to my violin lessons. My aunt, who had come from the farm to join her
children for the holidays, brought with her a maidservant, and to the poor girl was given the chore of taking the money to the baker’s for rolls and pan de sal. I
realized at once that it would be no longer becoming on my part to make these morning trips to the baker’s. I could not thank my aunt enough.
I began to chafe on being given other errands. Suspecting my violin to be the excuse, my aunt remarked:
“What do you want to be a musician for? At parties, musicians always eat last.”
Perhaps, I said to myself, she was thinking of a pack of dogs scrambling for scraps tossed over the fence by some careless kitchen maid. She was the sort you could
depend on to say such vulgar things. For that reason, I thought, she ought not to be taken seriously at all. But the remark hurt me. Although Grandmother had
counseled me kindly to mind my work at school, I went again and again to Pete Saez’s house for rehearsals.
She had demanded that I deposit with her my earnings; I had felt too weak to refuse. Secretly, I counted the money and decided not to ask for it until I had
enough with which to buy a brooch. Why this time I wanted to give Aida a brooch, I didn’t know. But I had set my heart on it. I searched the downtown shops. The
Chinese clerks, seeing me so young, were annoyed when I inquired about prices.
 At last the Christmas season began. I had not counted on Aida’s leaving home, and remembering that her parents lived in Badajoz, my torment was almost
unbearable. Not once had I tried to tell her of my love. My letters had remained unwritten, and the algebra book unborrowed. There was still the brooch to find, but I
could not decide on the sort of brooch I really wanted. And the money, in any case, was in Grandmother’s purse, which smelled of “Tiger Balm.” I grew somewhat
feverish as our class Christmas program drew near. Finally it came; it was a warm December afternoon. I decided to leave the room when our English teacher
announced that members of the class might exchange gifts. I felt fortunate; Pete was at the door, beckoning to me. We walked out to the porch where, Pete said, he
would tell me a secret.
It was about an asalto the next Sunday which the Buenavista Women’s Club wished to give Don Esteban’s daughters, Josefina and Alicia, who were
arriving on the morning steamer from Manila. The spinsters were much loved by the ladies. Years ago, when they were younger, these ladies studied solfeggio with
Josefina and the piano and harp with Alicia. As Pete told me all this, his lips ash-gray from practising all morning on his trombone, I saw in my mind the sisters in their
silk dresses, shuffling off to church for theevening benediction. They were very devout, and the Buenavista ladies admired that. I had almost forgotten that they were
twins and, despite their age, often dressed alike. In low-bosomed voile bodices and white summer hats, I remembered, the pair had attended Grandfather’s funeral,
at old Don Esteban’s behest. I wondered how successful they had been in Manila during the past three years in the matter of finding suitable husbands.
“This party will be a complete surprise,” Pete said, looking around the porch as if to swear me to secrecy. “They’ve hired our band.”
I joined my classmates in the room, greeting everyone with a Merry Christmas jollier than that of the others. When I saw Aida in one corner unwrapping
something two girls had given her, I found the boldness to greet her also.
“Merry Christmas,” I said in English, as a hairbrush and a powder case emerged from the fancy wrapping. It seemed to me rather apt that such gifts went to her.
Already several girls were gathered around Aida. Their eyes glowed with envy, it seemed to me, for those fair cheeks and the bobbed dark-brown hair which lineage
had denied them.
I was too dumbstruck by my own meanness to hear exactly what Aida said in answer to my greeting. But I recovered shortly and asked:
“Will you be away during the vacation?”
“No, I’ll be staying here,” she said. When she added that her cousins were arriving and that a big party in their honor was being planned, I remarked:
“So you know all about it?” I felt I had to explain that the party was meant to be a surprise, an asalto.
And now it would be nothing of the kind, really. The women’s club matrons would hustle about, disguising their scurrying around for cakes and candies as
for some baptismal party or other. In the end, the Rivas sisters would outdo them. Boxes of meringues, bonbons, ladyfingers, and cinnamon buns that only the Swiss
bakers in Manila could make were perhaps coming on the boat with them. I imagined a table glimmering with long-stemmed punch glasses; enthroned in that array
would be a huge brick-red bowl of gleaming china with golden flowers around the brim. The local matrons, however hard they tried, however sincere their efforts,
were bound to fail in their aspiration to rise to the level of Don Esteban’s daughters. Perhaps, I thought, Aida knew all this. And that I should share in a foreknowledge
of the matrons’ hopes was a matter beyond love. Aida and I could laugh together with the gods.
At seven, on the appointed evening, our small band gathered quietly at the gate of Don Esteban’s house, and when the ladies arrived in their heavy shawls
and trim panuelo, twittering with excitement, we were commanded to play the Poet and Peasant overture. As Pete directed the band, his eyes glowed with pride for
his having been part of the big event. The multicolored lights that the old Spaniard’s gardeners had strung along the vine-covered fence were switched on, and the
women remarked that Don Esteban’s daughters might have made some preparations after all. Pete hid his face from the glare. If the women felt let down, they did
not show it.
The overture shuffled along to its climax while five men in white shirts bore huge boxes of goods into the house. I recognized one of the bakers in spite of
the uniform. A chorus of confused greetings, and the women trooped into the house; and before we had settled in the sala to play “A Basket of Roses,” the heavy
damask curtains at the far end of the room were drawn and a long table richly spread was revealed under the chandeliers. I remembered that, in our haste to be on
hand for the asalto, Pete and I had discouraged the members of the band from taking their suppers.
“You’ve done us a great honor!” Josefina, the more buxom of the twins, greeted the ladies.
“Oh, but you have not allowed us to take you by surprise!” the ladies demurred in a chorus.
There were sighs and further protestations amid a rustle of skirts and the glitter of earrings. I saw Aida in a long, flowing white gown and wearing an arch
of sampaguita flowers on her hair. At her command, two servants brought out a gleaming harp from the music room. Only the slightest scraping could be heard
because the servants were barefoot. As Aida directed them to place the instrument near the seats we occupied, my heart leaped to my throat. Soon she was lost
among the guests, and we played “The Dance of the Glowworms.” I kept my eyes closed and held for as long as I could her radiant figure before me.
Alicia played on the harp and then, in answer to the deafening applause, she offered an encore. Josefina sang afterward. Her voice, though a little husky,
fetched enormous sighs. For her encore, she gave “The Last Rose of Summer”; and the song brought back snatches of the years gone by. Memories of solfeggio
lessons eddied about us, as if there were rustling leaves scattered all over the hall. Don Esteban appeared. Earlier, he had greeted the crowd handsomely, twisting his
mustache to hide a natural shyness before talkative women. He stayed long enough to listen to the harp again, whispering in his rapture: “Heavenly. Heavenly . . .”
By midnight, the merrymaking lagged. We played while the party gathered around the great table at the end of the sala. My mind traveled across the seas
to the distant cities I had dreamed about. The sisters sailed among the ladies like two great white liners amid a fleet of tugboats in a bay. Someone had thoughtfully
remembered-and at last Pete Saez signaled to us to put our instruments away. We walked in single file across the hall, led by one of the barefoot servants.
Behind us a couple of hoarse sopranos sang “La Paloma” to the accompaniment of the harp, but I did not care to find out who they were. The sight of so
much silver and china confused me. There was more food before us than I had ever imagined. I searched in my mind for the names of the dishes; but my ignorance
appalled me. I wondered what had happened to the boxes of food that the Buenavista ladies had sent up earlier. In a silver bowl was something, I discovered, that
appeared like whole egg yolks that had been dipped in honey and peppermint. The seven of us in the orchestra were all of one mind about the feast; and so,
confident that I was with friends, I allowed my covetousness to have its sway and not only stuffed my mouth with this and that confection but also wrapped up a
quantity of those egg-yolk things in several sheets of napkin paper. None of my companions had thought of doing the same, and it was with some pride that I slipped
the packet under my shirt. There, I knew, it would not bulge.
“Have you eaten?”
I turned around. It was Aida. My bow tie seemed to tighten around my collar. I mumbled something, I did not know what.
“If you wait a little while till they’ve gone, I’ll wrap up a big package for you,” she added.
I brought a handkerchief to my mouth. I might have honored her solicitude adequately and even relieved myself of any embarrassment; I could not quite believe that
she had seen me, and yet I was sure that she knew what I had done, and I felt all ardor for her gone from me entirely.
I walked away to the nearest door, praying that the damask curtains might hide me in my shame. The door gave on to the veranda, where once my love
had trod on sunbeams. Outside it was dark, and a faint wind was singing in the harbor.
With the napkin balled up in my hand, I flung out my arm to scatter the egg-yolk things in the dark. I waited for the soft sound of their fall on the garden-
shed roof. Instead, I heard a spatter in the rising night-tide beyond the stone fence. Farther away glimmered the light from Grandmother’s window, calling me home.
But the party broke up at one or thereabouts. We walked away with our instruments after the matrons were done with their interminable good-byes. Then, to the
tune of “Joy to the World,” we pulled the Progreso Street shopkeepers out of their beds. The Chinese merchants were especially generous. When Pete divided our
collection under a street lamp, there was already a little glow of daybreak.
He walked with me part of the way home. We stopped at the baker’s when I told him that I wanted to buy with my own money some bread to eat on the
way to Grandmother’s house at the edge of the sea wall. He laughed, thinking it strange that I should be hungry. We found ourselves alone at the counter; and we
watched the bakery assistants at work until our bodies grew warm from the oven across the door. It was not quite five, and the bread was not yet ready.
THE MATS
For the Angeles family, Mr. Angeles’s homecoming from his periodic
inspection trips was always an occasion for celebration. But this homecoming—from a
trip to the south—was fated to be more memorable than any of the others.
     He had written from Mariveles: “I have just met a marvelous matweaver
—a real artist—and I shall have a surprise for you. I asked him to weave a sleeping mat
for every one of the family. He is using many different colors and for each mat the
dominant color is that of our respective birthstones. I am sure that the children will be
very pleased. I know you will be. I can hardly wait to show them to you.”
     Nana Emilia read the letter that morning, and again and again every time
she had a chance to leave the kitchen. In the evening when all the children were home
from school she asked her oldest son, Jose, to read it at the dinner table. The children
became very much excited about the mats, and talked about them until late into the
night. This she wrote her husband when she labored over a reply to him. For days after
that, mats continued to be the chief topic of conversation among the children.
    Finally, from Lopez, Mr. Angeles wrote again: “I am taking the Bicol Express
tomorrow. I have the mats with me, and they are beautiful. God willing, I shall be home
to join you at dinner.”
    The letter was read aloud during the noon meal. Talk about the mats flared up again
like wildfire.
    “I like the feel of mats,” Antonio, the third child, said. “I like the smell of new mats.”
    “Oh, but these mats are different,” interposed Susanna, the fifth child. “They have our
names woven into them, and in our ascribed colors, too.”
     The children knew what they were talking about: they knew just what a
decorative mat was like; it was not anything new or strange in their experience. That
was why they were so excited about the matter. They had such a mat in the house, one
they seldom used, a mat older than any one of them.   This mat had been given to Nana
Emilia by her mother when she and Mr. Angeles were married, and it had been with
them ever since. It had served on the wedding night, and had not since been used
except on special occasions.   It was a very beautiful mat, not really meant to be
ordinarily used. It had green leaf borders, and a lot of gigantic red roses woven into it. In
the middle, running the whole length of the mat, was the lettering: Emilia y Jaime
Recuerdo
    The letters were in gold.
    Nana Emilia always kept that mat in her trunk. When any one of the family
was taken ill, the mat was brought out and the patient slept on it, had it all to himself.
Every one of the children had some time in their lives slept on it; not a few had slept on
it more than once.  Most of the time the mat was kept in Nana Emilia’s trunk, and when
it was taken out and spread on the floor the children were always around to watch. At
first there had been only Nana Emilia to see the mat spread. Then a child—a girl—
watched with them. The number of watchers increased as more children came.
    The mat did not seem to age. It seemed to Nana Emilia always as new as
when it had been laid on the nuptial bed. To the children it seemed as new as the first
time it was spread before them. The folds and creases always new and fresh. The smell
was always the smell of a new mat. Watching the intricate design was an endless joy.
The children’s pleasure at the golden letters even before they could work out the
meaning was boundless. Somehow they were always pleasantly shocked by the sight of
the mat: so delicate and so consummate the artistry of its weave.   Now, taking out that
mat to spread had become a kind of ritual. The process had become associated with
illness in the family. Illness, even serious illness, had not been infrequent. There had
been deaths…
    In the evening Mr. Angeles was with his family. He had brought the usual
things home with him. There was a lot of fruit, as always (his itinerary carried him
through the fruit-growing provinces): pineapples, lanzones, chicos, atis, santol, sandia,
guyabano, avocado, according to the season. He had also brought home a jar of
preserved sweets from Lopez. Putting away the fruits, sampling them, was as usual
accomplished with animation and lively talk. Dinner was a long affair. Mr. Angeles was
full of stories about his trip but would interrupt his tales with: “I could not sleep nights
thinking of the young ones. They should never be allowed to play in the streets. And you
older ones should not stay out too late at night.”
    The stories petered out and dinner was over. Putting away the dishes and
wiping the dishes and wiping the table clean did not at all seem tedious. Yet Nana and
the children, although they did not show it, were all on edge about the mats. Finally,
after a long time over his cigar, Mr. Angeles rose from his seat at the head of the table
and crossed the room to the corner where his luggage had been piled. From the heap he
disengaged a ponderous bundle.
     Taking it under one arm, he walked to the middle of the room where the
light was brightest. He dropped the bundle and, bending over and balancing himself on
his toes, he strained at the cord that bound it. It was strong, it would not break, it would
not give way. He tried working at the knots. His fingers were clumsy, they had begun
shaking.
He raised his head, breathing heavily, to ask for the scissors. Alfonso, his youngest boy,
was to one side of him with scissors ready.   Nana Emilia and her eldest girl who had
long returned from the kitchen were watching the proceedings quietly.    One swift
movement with the scissors, snip! and the bundle was loose.
    Turning to Nana Emilia, Mr. Angeles joyfully cried: “These are the mats, Miling.” Mr.
Angeles picked up the topmost mat in the bundle.
    “This, I believe, is yours, Miling.”
     Nana Emilia stepped forward to the light, wiping her still moist hands
against the folds of her skirt, and with a strange young shyness received the mat. The
children watched the spectacle silently and then broke into delighted, though a little
self-conscious, laughter. Nana Emilia unfolded the mat without a word. It was a
beautiful mat: to her mind, even more beautiful than the one she received from her
mother on her wedding. There was a name in the very center of it: Emilia. The letters
were large, done in green. Flowers—cadena-de-amor—were woven in and out among
the letters. The border was a long winding twig of cadena-de-amor.
    The children stood about the spreading mat. The air was punctuated by their
breathless exclamations of delight.
    “It is beautiful, Jaime; it is beautiful!” Nana Emilia’s voice broke, and she could not say
any more.
    “And this, I know, is my own,” said Mr. Angeles of the next mat in the bundle. The mat
was rather simply decorated, the design almost austere, and the only colors used were
purple and gold. The letters of the name, Jaime, were in purple.
    “And this, for you, Marcelina.”
     Marcelina was the oldest child. She had always thought her name too
long; it had been one of her worries with regard to the mat. “How on earth are they
going to weave all of the letters of my name into my mat?” she had asked of almost
everyone in the family. Now it delighted her to see her whole name spelled out on the
mat, even if the letters were a little small. Besides, there was a device above her name
which pleased Marcelina very much. It was in the form of a lyre, finely done in three
colors. Marcelina was a student of music and was quite a proficient pianist.
    “And this is for you, José.”
    José was the second child. He was a medical student already in the third
year of medical school. Over his name the symbol of Aesculapius was woven into the
mat.
    “You are not to use this mat until the year of your internship,” Mr. Angeles was
saying.
    ‘This is yours, Antonio.’
    ‘And this is yours, Juan.’
    ‘And this is yours, Jesus.’
    Mat after mat was unfolded. On each of the children’s mats there was
somehow an appropriate device.
    At least all the children had been shown their individual mats. The air was filled with
their excited talk, and through it all Mr. Angeles was saying over and over again in his
deep voice:
    “You are not to use these mats until you go to the university.”
    Then Nana Emilia noticed bewilderingly that there were some more mats remaining
to be unfolded.
    “But Jaime,” Nana Emilia said, wonderingly, with evident trepidation. “there are some
more mats.”
    Only Mr. Angeles seemed to have heard Nana Emilia’s words. He
suddenly stopped talking, as if he had been jerked away from a pleasant phantasy. A
puzzled, reminiscent look came into his eyes, superseding the deep and quiet delight
that had been briefly there, and when he spoke his voice was different.
    “Yes, Emilia,” said Mr. Angeles, “There are three more mats to unfold. The others who
aren’t here…”
    Nana Emilia caught her breath; there was a swift constriction in her throat; her face
paled and she could not say anything.
     The self-centered talk of the children also died. There was a silence as Mr.
Angeles picked up the first of the remaining mats and began slowly unfolding it. The
mat was almost as austere in design as Mr. Angeles’ own, and it had a name. There was
no symbol or device above the name; only a blank space, emptiness The children knew
the name. But somehow the name, the letters spelling the name, seemed strange to
them.
    Then Nana Emilia found her voice.
    “You know, Jaime, you didn’t have to,” Nana Emilia said, her voice hurt and sorely
frightened.   
    Mr. Angeles jerked his head back; there was something swift and savage in the
movement.
    “Do you think I’d forgotten? Do you think I had forgotten them? Do you think I could
forget them?
    “This is for you, Josefina!
    “And this is for you, Victoria!
    “And this is for you, Concepcion.”
    Mr. Angeles called the names rather than uttered them.
    “Don’t, Jaime, please don’t,” was all that Nana Emilia managed to say.
    “Is it fair to forget them? Would it be just to disregard them?” Mr. Angeles demanded
rather than asked.
    His voice had risen shrill, almost hysterical; it was also stern and sad, and somehow
vindictive. Mr. Angeles had spoken almost as if he were a stranger.
    Also, he had spoken as if from a deep, grudgingly silent, long, bewildered sorrow.
    The children heard the words exploding in the silence. They wanted to turn away and
not see the face of their father. But they could neither move nor look away; his eyes
held them, his voice held them where they were. They seemed rooted to the spot.
    Nana Emilia shivered once or twice, bowed her head, gripped her clasped hands
between her thighs. There was a terrible hush. The remaining mats were unfolded in
silence. The names which were with infinite slowness revealed, seemed strange and
stranger still; the colors not bright but deathly dull; the separate letters, spelling out the
names of the dead among them, did not seem to glow or shine with a festive sheen