The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

I would tell her my story to save myself from myself.

Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness,

I want them to take from you the knowledge of how to be the gentlest, the most perfect brother. Savannah

“Twins,” my grandfather said. “What does that mean?” “Good luck,” the black woman said, returning to my mother. “God smiling twice as hard at a troubled world.”

the wine spreading like velvet in our mouths, the bread, fragrant as earth, softening and melting on the tongue, the butter coating the roofs of our mouths, the priest holding our hands, the smell of the oils of death on his hands,

The priest blessed the host in a dead language, then turned toward the newest Roman Catholic in the world and changed the history of my family’s life forever.

a pilot of dazzling, supernatural gifts.

The story of Sarah Jenkins was told and retold over and over again until I knew it by heart. On the same day, my father had roses placed on the grave of Günter Kraus. Those two heroic figures were as mythic and immemorial to us as any Caesar could ever be.

some obscene joke

The German woman was both his secret and his shame. We are a family of well-kept secrets and they all nearly end up killing us.”

in the unconscious, I began to encounter both wild fruit and vast disciplined vineyards. I

I had lived a singularly uncourageous life, a passive,

My voice would sound a pure noise of witness and I would raise it in a cleansing song.

I longed for their approval, their applause, their pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it years after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have it. To love one’s children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance. I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being. I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try to coax him gently toward his maturity. Again and again, I thought of Sallie and our children. I had married the first woman I ever kissed. I thought I had married her because she was pretty, blessed with horse sense and sass, and unlike my mother in any way. But I had married a fine and comely girl, and with brilliance and craft and all instincts of self-preservation jettisoned, I succeeded over the years, through neglect, coldness, and betrayal, in turning her into the exact image of my mother. Because of

I was not comfortable with anyone who was not disapproving of me.

Because of its hieratic obsession with numbers, baseball was my favorite season,

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of cliché lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché.

She was always a little bit more than the sum of her parts because there were essential parts she withheld. I have spent a lifetime studying my mother,

A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made such flawed husbands.

There is nothing more erotic on earth than a boy in love with the shape and touch of his mother.

Atlanta introduced me to my citizenship in the world.

I want you boys to promise me something. I want both of you to beat up an Atlanta boy every single day.

Remember, you’re country boys and country boys are always fighters.”

Boys never cry. Never. No matter what.”

never cry. Never. No matter what.”

Luke turned toward him and with the unbearable dignity that would be his trademark all his life said in a trembling child’s voice, “I hope you die in Korea. I’m going to pray that you die.” My

From that day, I renounced the part of me that was his and hated the fact I was male.

The care of black widows inspired a patience and concentration rare in young children.

Callanwolde. It was a specific person, a specific place, and a general condition of a world suddenly fearful and a fate uncontrollable. After

woods of Callanwolde

My father often said to her that no woman was raped who had not asked for it.

spider became the first of a number of sacred species in our family chronicle.

violent men are usually most violent at home. They are almost always violent around defenseless people.”

Eventually she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation,

Because I’m an American, I let her die by degrees, isolated and abandoned by her family.

Tolitha took a child’s delight in the bizarre, the surreal, the definitively unique.

For

She traveled to be amazed, transformed into a woman she was not born to be. Not by intent but by example, she became the first philosopher of travel our

Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother.

Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.

Any study of my grandfather becomes a meditation on saintliness. His whole life was one long hymn of praise to the Lord, one long, boring hymn of praise. Prayer was his single hobby;

believing that the Depression was a celestial sign that the Second Coming

radiant volume was that the spoken words of Jesus of Nazareth were printed in vivid red ink. These most expensive Bibles were invariably snatched up by the poorest families,

Amos Wingo had sold more Bibles than anyone in the history of the company

my grandparents were the pale, unindictable executors of my father’s violations against his own children.

uncomplicated joy in each other’s company made our own parents’ marriage appear obscene.

tried to intervene on Luke’s behalf. Savannah and I were struck when we

I lived out my childhood thinking my father would one day kill me. But I dwelt in a world