Barbara McVeigh’s Reviews > Vigil: A Novel > Status Update

What makes the bars of that jail? I said. your pride in the glories you have accomplished. But if your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins…

However: forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit. With the self disavowed, what blame or glory can possibly affix it?

His feelings…were all real & he must suffer them every day, & why? Because he had been born him. But he had not chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. And then life had happened to that him…

He had been done badly, by fate, from the beginning, having been born with certain disadvantages...&…as he grew, had acquired a host of concomitant disadvantages, such as:…a predisposition to be offended