A Death Struck Year Quotes

What I would give right now, to feel nothing.

I’m not afraid of these ghosts, Cleo. I have enough of my own to keep me company.

I know what it’s like to lose a friend and wonder why you’re the one left behind. To think that nothing makes sense. Not one thing.

The rain came before I'd gone a block. A few drops at first, and then a downpour. I didn't turn back. I tipped my face to the sky. Welcomed the coolness on my skin. In this world of mine, it was the rain, it was the rain alone, that made sense.

. When the plague struck Chicago, the townspeople here erected the gargoyles, and nary a soul was lost to the Black Death.” “The bubonic plague predates Chicago by about five hundred years.” He lowered himself to the bench. “I know. I was very disappointed when I found out. Almost as bad as when I learned there were no fairies. The world is much more interesting with goblins and plagues.” “Unless you catch the plague.

The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive. She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over. A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.

It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat. Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged. Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this. They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubles ears, these men were known as Whisperers.

What grief is not taken away by time? What passion will survive an unequal battle with it? I knew a man in the bloom of his still youthful powers, filled with true nobility and virtue, I knew him when he was in love, tenderly, passionately, furiously, boldly, modestly, and before me, almost before my eyes, the object of his passion - tender, beautiful as an angel - was struck down by insatiable death. I never saw such terrible fits of inner suffering, such furious scorching anguish, such devouring despair as shook the unfortunate lover. I never thought a man could create such a hell for himself, in which there would be no shadow, no image, nothing in the least resembling hope... They tried to keep an eye on him; they hid all instruments he might have used to take his own life. Two weeks later he suddenly mastered himself: he began to laugh, to joke; freedom was granted him, and the first thing he did was buy a pistol. One day his family was terribly frightened by the sudden sound of a shot. They ran into the room and saw him lying with his brains blown out. A doctor who happened to be there, whose skill was on everyone's lips, saw signs of life in him, found that the wound was not quite mortal, and the man, to everyone's amazement, was healed. The watch on him was increased still more. Even at the table they did not give him a knife to and tried to take away from him anything that he might strike himself with; but a short while later he found a new occasion and threw himself under the wheels of a passing carriage. His arms and legs were crushed; but again they saved him. A year later I saw him in a crowded room; he sat at the card table gaily saying 'Petite ouverte,' keeping one card turned down, and behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, stood his young wife, who was sorting through his chips.

Folding her arms and closing her eyes, Hatsumi sank back into the corner of the seat. Her small gold earrings caught the light as the taxi swayed. Her midnight blue dress seemed to have been made to match the darkness of the cab. Every now and then her thinly daubed, beautifully formed lips would quiver slightly as if she had caught herself on the verge of talking to herself. Watching her, I could see why Nagasawa had chosen her as his special companion. There were any number of women more beautiful than Hatsumi, and Nagasawa could have made any of them his. But Hatsumi had some quality that could send a tremor through your heart. It was nothing forceful. The power she exerted was a subtle thing, but it called forth deep resonances. I watched her all the way to Shibuya, and wondered, without ever finding an answer, what this emotional reverberation that I was feeling could be. It finally hit me some dozen or so years later. I had come to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlor, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red—my hand, the plate, the table, the world—as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything. In the midst of this overwhelming sunset, the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained—and would forever remain—unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, all-but-seared-in longing: forgotten for years to remember what such feelings had ever existed inside of me. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears. She had been an absolutely special woman. Someone should have done something—anything—to save her. But neither Nagasawa nor I could have managed that. As so many of those I knew had done, Hatsumi reached a certain stage in her life and decided—almost on the spur of the moment—to end it. Two years after Nagasawa left for Germany, she married, and two years after that she slashed her wrists with a razor blade. It was Nagasawa, of course, who told me what had happened. His letter from Bonn said this: “Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something. This is unbearably sad and painful, even to me.” I ripped his letter to shreds and threw it away. I never wrote to him again.

There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive adn who was dead. The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal. Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.

In one hallway, the floor gleaming parquet and the ceiling festooned with golden cherubs, there was a boy in a grumpy cat mask and biker boots, not involved in any sexual activity, legs crossed and leaning against the wall. As a bevy of faeries passed the boy, giggling and groping, the boy scooted away. Alec remembered being younger, and how overwhelming large groups of people had seemed. He came over and leaned against the wall beside the boy. He saw the boy texting, PARTIES WERE INVENTED TO ANNOY ME. THEY FEATURE MY LEAST FAVORITE THING: PEOPLE, ALL INTENT ON MY LEAST FAVORITE ACTIVITY: SOCIAL INTERACTION. “I don’t really like parties either,” Alec said sympathetically. “No hablo italiano,” the boy mumbled without looking up. “Er,” said Alec. “This conversation is happening in English.” “No hablo ingles,” he said without missing a beat. “Oh, come on. Really?” “Worth a shot,” said the boy. Alec considered going away. The boy wrote another text to a contact he had saved as RF. Alec could not help but notice that the conversation was entirely one-sided, the boy sending text after text with no response. The last text read VENICE SMELLS LIKE A TOILET. AS A NEW YORKER, I DO NOT SAY THIS LIGHTLY. The weird coincidence emboldened Alec to try again. “I get shy when there are strangers too,” Alec told the kid. “I’m not shy,” the boy sneered. “I just hate everyone around me and everything that is happening.” “Well.” Alec shrugged. “Those feel like similar things sometimes.” The boy lifted his curly head, pushing the grumpy cat mask off his face, and froze. Alec froze too, at the twin shock of fangs and familiarity. This was a vampire, and Alec knew him. “Raphael?” he asked. “Raphael Santiago?” He wondered what the second-in-command of the New York clan was doing here. Downworlders might be flooding in from all over the world, but Raphael had never struck Alec as a party animal. Of course, he was not exactly coming off as a party animal now. “Oh no, it’s you,” said Raphael. “The twelve-year-old idiot.” Alec was not keen on vampires. They were, after all, people who had died. Alec had seen too much death to want reminders of it. He understood that they were immortal, but there was no need to show off about it. “We just fought a war together. I was with you in the graveyard when Simon came back as a vampire. You’ve seen me multiple times since I was twelve.” “The thought of you at twelve haunts me,” Raphael said darkly. “Okay,” Alec said, humoring him. “So have you seen a guy called Mori Shu anywhere around here?” “I am trying not to make eye contact with anyone here,” said Raphael. “And I’m not a snitch for Shadowhunters. Or a fan of talking to people, of any kind, in any place.” Alec rolled his eyes.

Zeno gave his lectures on the stoa, the covered walkways or porticos that surrounded the Athenian marketplace. His followers were first called Zenonians and later Stoics. He presided over his school for fifty-eight years and the manner of his death at the age of ninety-eight is bizarre. One day, as he was leaving the school, he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Lying there in pain, he struck the ground with his fist and quoted a line from the Niobe of Timotheus, “I come of my own accord; why then call me?” He died on the spot through holding his breath.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time. I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

Eyes to God. My skin erupts in goosebumps. This is identical to the plaque we have in the town square. They position the gallows directly over it so when our necks snap, it's the last thing we'll see, which always struck me as especially cruel. If your neck is broken, how can you look up? Even in death we're a disappointment.

In my own shire, if I was sad Homely comforters I had: The earth, because my heart was sore, Sorrowed for the son she bore; And standing hills, long to remain, Shared their short-lived comrade's pain. And bound for the same bourn as I, On every road I wandered by, Trod beside me, close and dear, The beautiful and death-struck year: Whether in the woodland brown I heard the beechnut rustle down, And saw the purple crocus pale Flower about the autumn dale; Or littering far the fields of May Lady-smocks a-bleaching lay, And like a skylit water stood The bluebells in the azured wood. Yonder, lightening other loads, The season range the country roads, But here in London streets I ken No such helpmates, only men; And these are not in plight to bear, If they would, another's care. They have enough as 'tis: I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; And till they drop they needs must still Look at you and wish you ill.

It was a fine night to die.

The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.

It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister. He merely struck him with the pistol and ran on and crouched behind that table and defied the black blood for the last time, as he had been defying it for thirty years. He crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand.

The thought struck Dennis that a hundred years before he was even born Tinuva undoubtedly knew of the river. Again he realized just how ancient the elven race was and with it came the recognition of just how much they risked when facing battle: it wasn't just a score of years in the balance, it was a score of decades.

No one knows, because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today’s microbes that break hydrocarbons down to their building blocks a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they’ve even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry. “But give it 100,000 years,” says Andrady the optimist. He was in his native Sri Lanka when the Christmas 2004 tsunami hit, and even there, after those apocalyptic waters struck, people found reason to hope. “I’m sure you’ll find many species of microbes whose genes will let them do this tremendously advantageous thing, so that their numbers will grow and prosper. Today’s amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but, eventually, it will all biodegrade. Lignin is far more complex, and it biodegrades. It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making.

Flu pandemics are nothing new. Medical historians think the first one struck in 1510, infecting Asia, Africa, Europe, and the New World. Between the years 1700 and 1900, there were at least sixteen pandemics, some of them killing up to one million people. Yet these were tame compared to the 1918 calamity. It was by far the worst thing that has ever happened to humankind; not even the Black Death of the Middle Ages comes close in the number of lives it took. A 1994 report by the World Health Organization pulled no punches. The 1918 pandemic, it said, “killed more people in less time than any other disease before or since.” It was the “most deadly disease event in the history of humanity.

So I explained to Connie that she needed to send a green light by, for example, talking about her father in a relaxed manner for a few seconds; then, I said, the queries about him would start flooding in. But what struck me as so odd was that I had been acting on this understanding all my life without ever having brought it to consciousness. As the French (and the Paraguayans) say, “A fish does not know the water that it swims in.” And eighteen years later, when I was writing A Fish Called Wanda, I used this realisation, when Archie is trying to explain to Wanda the social straitjacket from which he is desperate to escape: Wanda, do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone, “Are you married?” and hearing, “My wife left me this morning,” or saying, “Do you have children?” and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we’re all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so … dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know; we have these piles of corpses to dinner.

The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another. Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a “happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.” Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of “fanatical vows” and “fanatical declarations” and “fanatical beliefs,” all good things. Göring was described as a “fanatical animal lover.” Fanatischer Tierfreund. Certain very old words were coming into darkly robust modern use, Klemperer found. Übermensch: superman. Untermensch: sub-human, meaning “Jew.” Wholly new words were emerging as well, among them Strafexpedition—“punitive expedition”—the term Storm Troopers applied to their forays into Jewish and communist neighborhoods. Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation—“This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!”—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In late July 1933 Klemperer saw a newsreel in which Hitler, with fists clenched and face contorted, shrieked, “On 30 January they”—and here Klemperer presumed he meant the Jews—“laughed at me—that smile will be wiped off their faces!” Klemperer was struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand years and that all his enemies would be annihilated. Klemperer wondered, Do you talk with such blind rage “if you are so sure of this endurance and this annihilation”?

Yesterday, I went to see Gladwell, who is home for a few days. A terrible blow has struck them, his young sister, so full of life, with dark eyes and hair, had fallen from a horse at Blackheath; they found her unconscious and she died five hours later, without regaining consciousness. She was seventeen years old. As soon as I heard the news, I went to see them, knowing that Gladwell was home. I left at eleven o’clock; and had a long walk to Lewisham. I crossed London from one end to the other and didn’t arrive at my destination until almost five o’clock. They had all just come back from the funeral; the whole household was in mourning. I was happy to have come, but confused, truly upset by the spectacle of a pain so great and so venerable. “Blessed are they that mourn, blessed are they that sorrow, but always rejoice, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are those that find love on their road, who are bound together by God, for to them all things will work together for their good.” I chatted for a long time, until evening, with Harry, about everything, the kingdom of God, the Bible; we chatted further, we walked up and down the station platform. Never will we forget the moments before we said goodbye.

From 235, over a period of 50 years, 49 men were proclaimed emperor by different groups of soldiers. We know that at least 25 of them were killed, not counting the three who committed suicide and one who seems to have been struck by lightning. In fact, apart from Gothicus, only one of them is known to have died a natural death – Valerian, who held on to the job for seven years and was safely locked away as a prisoner of the Persians when he expired in 260.

That's what I feel like now,' I told him. 'I feel like there's a low hanging wooden beam, right in front of me, and I keep walking slap bang into it. A hundred times a day I walk into that beam, and the pain hits me, right here, between the eyes.' ..... In time I could have told him that I never did learn to duck to avoid the pain of losing her. What happened was that I found myself stumbling into it less and less often. Imperceptibly at first: whereas at the start it happened to me a hundred times a day, by the time a month had gone by I was struck by the blow of it perhaps only ninety-five times a day. Another month and it hit me only ninety times in a twenty-four-hour period, and by the time a year had passed, there was sometimes a whole hour when I did not collide with the pain of it. It wasn't that it was any less painful when I did, just that the intervals in between got longer and longer. That's how I came to understand that I was healing.

For years, Zhou had been a follower of Mao Zedong, careful never to utter a word of opposition. In this sense, Zhou had assisted in the creation of the very totalitarian system of which he became the victim. Yet in terms of historical legacy, it is Zhou Enlai who has emerged the victor over Mao. Zhou’s death not only struck the death knell of the Cultural Revolution, but also announced the bankruptcy of the Communist myth. If someone so devoted and loyal as Zhou ended up suffering such pathetic treatment at the hands of the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, how could anyone trust in the aims of the revolution?

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family, consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called, proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays. The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house. Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.

In the past year or so, a disquieting change had come slowly to Pinehaven County: occasional outriders from MS-13 and other Central American gangs, scouting for opportunities like remote and easily concealed locations for meth labs, checking out the strength and determination of local law enforcement. There had been incidents between them and a few deputies, nothing too alarming. But a pretty teenager, Jenna McCall, had vanished without a trace; she’d been a good student, a devoted daughter, not the kind of girl who opted to be a runaway. And Jimmy Talbert, thirteen, had been riding his bike on an unpaved forest-service road when he’d been struck by a hit-and-run driver and left to bleed to death. There hadn’t been a case of hit-and-run in Pinehaven County in thirty-six years. So

ROBERT DEVEREAUX, EARL OF ESSEX, was taken to the place of execution at Tower Green on February 25, 1601. Standing before the crowd in a scarlet waistcoat, Essex made his last speech—a rather long one—with eloquence and dignity, claiming his sins “more numerous than the hairs on his head.” He was still speaking when the executioner struck his first blow. It took two more to sever Devereaux’s head. Despite his undisputed treason, Essex was remembered kindly by the English people. Nearly two years after his death, Londoners were still singing a ballad lauding their “great and celebrated noble warrior,” called “Essex’s Last Good Night.” In Ireland he was likewise revered, considered by many rebel chiefs as an ally, and by the common people as the only one of the queen’s commanders who had come over to their side.

The above letter was written only three days before the tragedy which utterly wrecked Elizabeth Barrett’s life for a time, and cast a deep shadow over it which never wholly passed away — the death of her brother Edward through drowning. On July 11, he and two friends had gone for a sail in a small boat. They did not return when they were expected, and presently a rumour came that a boat, answering in appearance to theirs, had been seen to founder in Babbicombe Bay; but it was not until three days later that final confirmation of the disaster was obtained by the discovery of the bodies. What this blow meant to the bereaved sister cannot be told: the horror with which she refers to it, even at a distance of many years, shows how deeply it struck. It was the loss of the brother whom she loved best of all; and she had the misery of thinking that it was to attend on her that he had come to the place where he met his death.

Frane Selak (born 1929) is a Croatian man who has allegedly escaped death seven times, and afterward won the lottery in 2003, prompting journalists to dub him “the world’s luckiest man”. Encounters with death started in January 1962 when the train he was on crashed into a river, drowning 17 passengers. The next year, he survived an airplane accident that killed 19 people. In 1966, a bus that he was riding in fell into a river, drowning 4 passengers. In 1970 his car caught fire as he was driving, but he managed to escape before the fuel tank blew up. Three years later, in another driving incident, the engine of his car burst into flames. In 1995, he was struck by a bus in Zagreb. In 1996 he eluded a head-on collision on a mountain curve and his car fell 90 metres (300 ft) into a gorge; he was ejected from the car and managed to hold onto a tree. In 2003, two days after his 73rd birthday, Selak won €900,000 (US$1.1 million) in the lottery.

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest? To borrow a trope from the historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death, this book would not be written in a European language

Mollie’s brother-in-law, Bill Smith, was one of the first to wonder if there was something curious about Lizzie’s death, coming so soon after the murders of Anna and Whitehorn. A bruising bulldog of a man, Bill had also expressed deep frustration over the authorities’ investigation, and he had begun looking into the matter himself. Like Mollie, he was struck by the peculiar vagueness of Lizzie’s sickness; no doctor had ever pinpointed what was causing it. Indeed, no one had uncovered any natural cause for her death. The more Bill delved, conferring with doctors and local investigators, the more he was certain that Lizzie had died of something dreadfully unnatural: she’d been poisoned. And Bill was sure that all three deaths were connected—somehow—to the Osage’s subterranean reservoir of black gold. 4  UNDERGROUND RESERVATION The money had come suddenly, swiftly, madly. Mollie had been ten years old when the oil was first discovered, had witnessed, firsthand, the ensuing frenzy. But, as the elders in the tribe had relayed to Mollie, the tangled history of how their people had gotten hold of this oil-rich land went back to the seventeenth century, when the Osage had laid claim to much of the central part of the country—a territory that stretched from what is now Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma, and still farther west, all the way to the Rockies. In

They had shared much of their pasts, most of their fears, and all of their tenuous and fragile hopes, but Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art, or something on which she was working, a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness. Because it was a subtle emotion in a world of erratic oscillations of feeling, of violence, and of lies told by every sense of perception, Deborah had not noticed it in their sick times. But one day the world had cleared enough so that she realised that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back. In their new eagerness for experience and reality, the strange aloofness stood out clearly. [...] She had a dream. In the dream it was winter and night. The sky was thick blue-black and the stars were frozen in it, so that they glimmered. Over the clean white and windswept hills the shadows of snowdrifts drew long. She was walking on the crust of snow, watching the star-glimmer and the snow-glimmer and the cold tear-glimmer in her own eyes. A deep voice said to her, "You know, don't you, that the stars are sound as well as light?" She listened and heard a lullaby made by the voices of the stars, sounding so beautiful together that she began to cry with it. The voice said, "Look out there." She looked toward the horizon. "See, it is a sweep, a curve." Then the voice said, "This night is a curve of darkness and the space beyond it is a curve of human history, with every single life an arch from birth to death. The apex of all of these single curves determines the curve of history and, at last, of man." "I cannot show you yours," the voice said, "but I can show you Carla's. Dig here, deep in the snow. It is buried and frozen - Dig deep." Deborah pushed the snow aside with her hands. It was very cold, but she worked with a great intensity as if there were salvation in it. At last her hand struck something and she tore it up from burial. It was a piece of bone, thick and very strong and curved in a long, high, steady curve. "Is this Carla's life?" she asked. "Her creativity?" "It is bone-deep with her, though buried and frozen." The voice paused a moment and then said, "It's a fine one - a fine solid one!" [...] "Please don't be angry," she said, and then told Carla the dream. [...] She wiped her eyes. "It was only a dream, your dream..." "It's true anyway," Deborah said. "The one place I could never go..." Carla said musing, "...the one hunger I could never admit." When Deborah finished, Furii said, "You always took your art for granted, didn't you? I used to read in the ward reports all the time how you managed to do your drawing in spite of every sort of inconvenience and restriction.

Eleven people have been killed as a result of violence targeted at abortion providers: four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, a clinic escort, and two others. Anti-abortion extremists are considered a domestic terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet violence is not the only threat to abortion clinics. In the past five years, politicians have passed more than 280 laws restricting access to abortion. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have required every abortion clinic to have a surgical suite, and doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of complications. For many clinics, these requirements were cost prohibitive and would have forced them to close. Also, since many abortion doctors fly in to do their work, they aren’t able to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. It is worth noting that less than 0.3 percent of women who have an abortion require hospitalization due to complications. In fact colonoscopies, liposuction, vasectomies…and childbirth—all of which are performed outside of surgical suites—have higher risks of death. In Indiana in 2016, Mike Pence signed a law to ban abortion based on fetal disability and required providers to give information about perinatal hospice—keeping the fetus in utero until it dies of natural causes. This same law required aborted fetuses to be cremated or given a formal burial even if the mother did not wish this to happen.

But even if I do look like someone who is nearly dead, there’s not much I can do about it, he told himself, as he stared at the mirror. Because I really am on the brink of death. I’ve survived, but barely—I’ve been clinging to this world like the discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind. But that fact—that he looked like someone about to die—struck him again, forcefully. He stared fixedly at the image of his naked body for the longest time, like someone unable to stop watching a TV news report of a huge earthquake or terrible flood in a faraway land. A sudden thought struck him—maybe I really did die. When the four of them rejected me, perhaps the young man named Tsukuru Tazaki really did pass away. Only his exterior remained, but just barely, and then over the course of the next half year, even that shell was replaced, as his body and face underwent a drastic change. The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed—everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast. The person here now, the one he saw in the mirror, might at first glance resemble Tsukuru Tazaki, but it wasn’t actually him. It was merely a container that, for the sake of convenience, was labeled with the same name—but its contents had been replaced. He was called by that name simply because there was, for the time being, no other name to call him.

I look down at my body and marvel at its ability to survive something so frightening, and I gaze lingeringly at my limbs as if there were magic blood coursing in my veins. How extraordinary it is, to be alive when one should be dead. The accident happened as the clock struck midnight, when the date changed to 09/09/09. Nine, that’s what the Kabbalist told me; nine, the number of death and rebirth, endings and beginnings, is the sign I was supposed to look out for. I may always look back on this day as the one that divided my life in two. Eli comes to see me in the hospital and I’m furious with him. He had been telling me that the tires on the car were too thin, but he had refused to have them changed. He claimed he couldn’t afford it. “But you could afford to lose me?” I ask bitterly. “Yitzy could have been in that car.” But Eli shows no signs of remorse. He refuses to accept any responsibility for the accident. I don’t want to see his face anymore. I tell him to go home, I will call a friend to come stay with me. I never want to see his face again. Could this be the sign from God, then? That clean break with my past that I was looking for, the emphatic separation between one life and the other? Maybe the fact that I’m not dead is the big miracle I always thought would come my way. Only now can I truly feel invincible, after I’ve been through the worst. I am no longer nervous, no longer uncertain. I have no past to cling to; the last twenty-three years belong to someone else, someone I no longer know.

1. For the space of one entire month (from full moon to full moon), a single leaf from a Mandrake must be carried constantly in the mouth. The leaf must not be swallowed or taken out of the mouth at any point. If the leaf is removed from the mouth, the process must be started again. 2. Remove the leaf at the full moon and place it, steeped in your saliva, in a small crystal phial that receives the pure rays of the moon (if the night is cloudy, you will have to find a new Mandrake leaf and begin the whole process again). To the moon-struck crystal phial, add one of your own hairs, a silver teaspoon of dew collected from a place that neither sunlight nor human feet have touched for a full seven days, and the chrysalis of a Death’s-head Hawk Moth. Put this mixture in a quiet, dark place and do not look at it or otherwise disturb it until the next electrical storm. 3. While waiting for the storm, the following procedure should be followed at sunrise and sundown. The tip of the wand should be placed over the heart and the following incantation spoken: ‘Amato Animo Animato Animagus.’ 4. The wait for a storm may take weeks, months or even years. During this time, the crystal phial should remain completely undisturbed and untouched by sunlight. Contamination by sunlight gives rise to the worst mutations. Resist the temptation to look at your potion until lightning occurs. If you continue to repeat your incantation at sunrise and sunset there will come a time when, with the touch of the wand-tip to the chest, a second heartbeat may be sensed, sometimes more powerful than the first, sometimes less so. Nothing should be changed. The incantation should be uttered without fail at the correct times, never omitting a single occasion. 5. Immediately upon the appearance of lightning in the sky, proceed directly to the place where your crystal phial is hidden. If you have followed all the preceding steps correctly, you will discover a mouthful of blood-red potion inside it.

But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane? All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.

I rail a lot against passion, because I feel like passion can be very exclusionary, and very elitist, and it can leave a lot of people feeling like they don't belong... I'm much more interested in allowing people to follow curiosity, which is a much more gentle impulse that doesn't require that you sacrifice your entire life for something. It's more of kind of a scavenger hunt, where you're allowed to pick up these tiny beautiful little clues along the pathway. It's more of a tap on the shoulder that asks you to turn your attention one inch to the left. Oh that's a little bit mildly interesting - what is that? Okay now I'm going to take that clue... I'm going to take it another inch, and I'm going to take it another inch. Rather than this idea that the symphony is born whole, because you sit down and you're struck by lightening and then you start to create. Curiosity I think, is a far more friendly way to do creativity than passion." ...this is why I say the path of curiosity is the scavenger hunt, because it took my probably three years between "gee it would be nice to put some plants in my backyard" to here I am in the South Pacific exploring the history of moss and inventing this giant novel. You know I think everybody thinks that creativity comes in lightening strikes, but I think it comes with whispers. And then the whispers can grow thunderous over time if you are patient enough to explore it, almost in the way that a scientist would. Be open to - you don't need to know why you are interested in this, it will be revealed if you continue to investigate. That's all that curiosity asks of you. Passion asks you to throw it all in the bonfire. And curiosity is way more generous in that it just says - give me a little bit of your time and let's see what we can do. Fear is part of our make-up, it's something that's inherent in us, it's a protective device. My experience with fear is to permit it to exist and then to figure out how to work with it. And to me working with fear is what courage is. I've never started any project that I wasn't afraid... during the entire thing.And the conversation that I have with fear is not to say you are the death of creativity and I can't be creative because you exist, but rather to say: "You are part of the family of my consciousness. You are one of the emotions that I possess and I hear your complaint. I see your anxiety and I see everything you are putting before me about how this is going to be a disaster, and how I'm going to die and how everyone's going to mock me and how I'm going to fail... and I thank you so much for your contribution, but your sister creativity and I are going to go off on this journey now and do this thing but you are allowed to be in the car. We're going on a road trip, but I don't expect you to not come." And once you allow fear to just be present it seems to quiet down and go to sleep and then you can go about your work. But it's never out of the picture and I don't waste my energy trying to kick it out of the picture because that feels to me just like a colossal exhausting waste of energy. Whereas a radical kind of inclusive self acceptance seems to be a way to create a lot more.

He looks through the windscreen at nothing. They are returning to Cuba. The announcement came after the droids withdrew. An auto-animated voice. It did not proclaim their furlough a success or failure. Ibn al Mohammed does not know if the others will accept implantation. He believes they will not, as he will not. Temptation is legion, yet what does it mean? He is not of Satan’s world. What would implantation bring except ceaseless surveillance within a greater isolation? That, and the loss of his soul. Sun-struck and empty, so immense it frightens, the desert is awesome in its indifference. Even as he stares at it, Ibn al Mohammed wonders why he does so. The life that clings to it is sparse, invisible, death-threatened. Perhaps they will cast him out just here, he and all others who do not cooperate. No matter: he has lived in such a place. Sonora is not the same as Arabia, or North Africa, or The Levant, yet its climate and scant life pose challenges that to him are not unfamiliar. Ibn al Mohammed believes he would survive, given a tent, a knife, a vessel in which to keep water, a piece of flint. Perhaps they will grant these necessities. A knife, they might yet withhold. As if, wandering in so complete a desolation, he might meet someone he would want to hurt. As he watches, images cohere. Human figures made small by distance, yet he knows them. His mother, in a dark, loose-fitting, simple abaya. How does he recognize her, in the anonymous dress? Ibn al Mohammed has not seen his mother in a dozen years. He knows her postures, movements she was wont to make. He sees his sisters, also wearing abayas and khimars. What are they doing? Bending from the waist, they scrounge in the sand. Asna, the eldest, gentle Halima, Nasirah, who cared for him when he was young. They are gathering scraps and remants, camel chips for a fire. Where is their house? Why are they alone? It seems they have remained unmarried—yet what is he seeing? Is it a moment remembered, a vision of the past? Or are these ghosts, apparitions summoned by prophetic sight? Perhaps it is a mirage only. His sisters seem no older than when he left. Is it possible? His mother only appears to have aged. She is shrunken, her back crooked. Anah Kifah, who is patient and struggles. He wonders how they do not see the ship, this great craft that flies across the sky. The ship is in the sky, their eyes are on the ground. That is why they do not see it. Or his windscreen view is magnified, and Halima and Nasirah and Asna and Anah Kifah are much farther away than they seem, and the ship is a vanishing dot on an unremarked horizon. If he called, they would not hear. Also, there is the glass. Still, he wishes to call to them. What is best to say? “Mother … Mother.” Anah Kifah does not lift her head. His words strike the windscreen and fall at his feet, are carried away by wind, melt into air. “Nasirah? It is Ibn. Do you hear me? Halima? Halima, I can see you. I see all my sisters. I see my mother. Asna? How has it been with you? Do you hear me? It is Ibn. I am here—far away, yet here, and I shall come back. They cannot lock me always in a cage, God willing. In a month, in a year, I shall be free. Keep faith. Always know God is with you. God is great. God protects me. God gives me strength to endure their tortures. One day, God will speed my return.” The women do not lift their heads. They prod the sand, seemingly indifferent to what they find. Straining toward them, Ibn al Mohammed cries out, “Mother! Nasirah! I am alive! I am alive!” [pp. 160-162]

They killed everyone in the camps. The whole world was dying there. Not only Jews. Even a black woman. Not gypsy. Not African. American like you, Mrs. Clara. They said she was a dancer and could play any instrument. Said she could line up shoes from many countries and hop from one pair to the next, performing the dances of the world. They said the Queen of Denmark honored her with a gold trumpet. But she was there, in hell with the rest of us. A woman like you. Many years ago. A lifetime ago. Young then as you would have been. And beautiful. As I believe you must have been, Mrs. Clara. Yes. Before America entered the war. Already camps had begun devouring people. All kinds of people. Yet she was rare. Only woman like her I saw until I came here, to this country, this city. And she saved my life. Poor thing. I was just a boy. Thirteen years old. The guards were beating me. I did not know why. Why? They didn't need a why. They just beat. And sometimes the beating ended in death because there was no reason to stop, just as there was no reason to begin. A boy. But I'd seen it many times. In the camp long enough to forget why I was alive, why anyone would want to live for long. They were hurting me, beating the life out of me but I was not surprised, expected no explanation. I remember curling up as I had seen a dog once cowering from the blows of a rolled newspaper. In the old country lifetimes ago. A boy in my village staring at a dog curled and rolling on its back in the dust outside a baker's shop and our baker in his white apron and tall white hat striking this mutt again and again. I didn't know what mischief this dog had done. I didn't understand why the fat man with flour on his apron was whipping it unmercifully. I simply saw it and hated the man, felt sorry for the animal, but already the child in me understood it could be no other way so I rolled and curled myself against the blows as I'd remembered the spotted dog in the dusty village street because that's the way it had to be. Then a woman's voice in a language I did not comprehend reached me. A woman angry, screeching. I heard her before I saw her. She must have been screaming at them to stop. She must have decided it was better to risk dying than watch the guards pound a boy to death. First I heard her voice, then she rushed in, fell on me, wrapped herself around me. The guards shouted at her. One tried to snatch her away. She wouldn't let go of me and they began to beat her too. I heard the thud of clubs on her back, felt her shudder each time a blow was struck. She fought to her feet, dragging me with her. Shielding me as we stumbled and slammed into a wall. My head was buried in her smock. In the smell of her, the smell of dust, of blood. I was surprised how tiny she was, barely my size, but strong, very strong. Her fingers dug into my shoulders, squeezing, gripping hard enough to hurt me if I hadn't been past the point of feeling pain. Her hands were strong, her legs alive and warm, churning, churning as she pressed me against herself, into her. Somehow she'd pulled me up and back to the barracks wall, propping herself, supporting me, sheltering me. Then she screamed at them in this language I use now but did not know one word of then, cursing them, I'm sure, in her mother tongue, a stream of spit and sputtering sounds as if she could build a wall of words they could not cross. The kapos hesitated, astounded by what she'd dared. Was this black one a madwoman, a witch? Then they tore me from her grasp, pushed me down and I crumpled there in the stinking mud of the compound. One more kick, a numbing, blinding smash that took my breath away. Blood flooded my eyes. I lost consciousness. Last I saw of her she was still fighting, slim, beautiful legs kicking at them as they dragged and punched her across the yard. You say she was colored? Yes. Yes. A dark angel who fell from the sky and saved me.

In August, death struck often and quickly, taking among others the stabilizing hand of Captain Gosnold. Inexperience, unwillingness, or inability due to insufficient food, to do the hard work that was necessary and the lack of sufficient information about how to survive in a primeval wilderness led to bickering, disagreements, and, to what was more serious still, inaction.

A middle-aged woman has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital. While on the operating table she has a near-death experience. Seeing God, she asks if this is it. God says, “No, you have another forty-three years, two months, and eight days to live.” Upon recovering, the woman decides to stay in the hospital and have some cosmetic surgery. She has a facelift, liposuction, breast augmentation, and a tummy tuck. She even has someone come in and change her hair color. Since she has so much more time to live, she figures she might as well make the most of it. She finally leaves the hospital, and as she crosses the street she is struck and killed by an oncoming ambulance. Arriving in front of God, she demands, “I thought you said I had another forty-three years!” “I didn’t recognize you.

In the early 1980s, The Buffalo News and The Courier-Express were in a kind of death struggle. Thus, dealing with the union became a game of chicken because if the paper closed down, everyone would lose his job. The union struck on a Monday. Buffett recalled that some union leaders had tears in their eyes because they knew it would put them out of business. Buffett took the position with the union that if you come back in a day, we’re competitive. If you come back in a year, we’re out of business. If you’re smart enough to figure out exactly how far you can push us where we still have a business and you still have a job, you’re smarter than I am, so you go home and figure it out. They came back to work on Thursday, and The Buffalo News made it.(49)

But the laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working quietly. Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses—certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, to practice writing between the lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems extracted from the world they were created to represent. All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom? The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. Some years after I’d left school, after I’d dropped out of college, I heard a few lines from Nas that struck me: Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s love, it is poison Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison That was exactly how I felt back then. I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why—for us and only us—is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I couldn’t crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.

Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck.

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395),

Diane Louise Jordan Diane Louise Jordan is a British television presenter best known for her role in the long-running children’s program Blue Peter, which she hosted from 1990 until 1996. She is currently hosting BBC1’s religious show, Songs of Praise. Also noted for her charity work, Diane Louise Jordan is vice president of the National Children’s Home in England. We all need to be loved--whether we admit it or not. All of us. A friend of mine recalled how, when in Rwanda a few years ago, he was taken to visit a lady in the slums. She was in agony because of an AIDS-related illness and had just hours to live. He described the inadequate dirt-floor shack that was her home among unbearable squalor. And yet he said it wasn’t the intense poverty or painful illness that struck him most, but rather the compassion of her friend who kept vigil. A friend who used no words, just silent tears, to express the deep feelings she had for her dying companion. In a similar way, it wasn’t words that stirred international attention, but the silent image of two people holding hands. One an HIV/AIDS sufferer and the other a “fairy-tale” princess. When Diana, Princess of Wales, held the hand of that seriously ill man back in the 1980s, many boundaries were crossed, many stigmas defeated. At that time, fear of death by AIDS had gripped the world so savagely that we were in danger of losing our humanity. Yet all it took to crush the storm of fear was a simple loving gesture. Princess Diana was good at that. She had the courage to follow her instincts, even if it meant being countercultural. She made it her job to be kind and loving.

4. The Third Step in the Mental Training. To be the lord of mind is more essential to Enlightenment, which, in a sense, is the clearing away of illusions, the putting out of mean desires and passions, and the awakening of the innermost wisdom. He alone can attain to real happiness who has perfect control over his passions tending to disturb the equilibrium of his mind. Such passions as anger, hatred, jealousy, sorrow, worry, grudge, and fear always untune one's mood and break the harmony of one's mind. They poison one's body, not in a figurative, but in a literal sense of the word. Obnoxious passions once aroused never fail to bring about the physiological change in the nerves, in the organs, and eventually in the whole constitution, and leave those injurious impressions that make one more liable to passions of similar nature. We do not mean, however, that we ought to be cold and passionless, as the most ancient Hinayanists were used to be. Such an attitude has been blamed by Zen masters. "What is the best way of living for us monks?" asked a monk to Yun Ku (Un-go), who replied: "You had better live among mountains." Then the monk bowed politely to the teacher, who questioned: "How did you understand me?" "Monks, as I understood," answered the man, "ought to keep their hearts as immovable as mountains, not being moved either by good or by evil, either by birth or by death, either by prosperity or by adversity." Hereupon Yun Ku struck the monk with his stick and said: "You forsake the Way of the old sages, and will bring my followers to perdition!" Then, turning to another monk, inquired: "How did you understand me?" "Monks, as I understand," replied the man, "ought to shut their eyes to attractive sights and close their ears to musical notes." "You, too," exclaimed Yun Ka, "forsake the Way of the old sages, and will bring my followers to perdition!" An old woman, to quote another example repeatedly told by Zen masters, used to give food and clothing to a monk for a score of years. One day she instructed a young girl to embrace and ask him: "How do you feel now?" "A lifeless tree," replied the monk coolly, "stands on cold rock. There is no warmth, as if in the coldest season of the year." The matron, being told of this, observed: "Oh that I have made offerings to such a vulgar fellow for twenty years!" She forced the monk to leave the temple and reduced it to ashes.[FN#238]

I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is “easier” than empiricism. That struck a nerve, and provoked a response I shall be candid enough to report. Mr. Wilson: When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monastery, sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only three and one-half hours of sleep each night until sleep and dream deprivation bring on a temporary psychosis (my own nondescript self); When you have attended four “rains retreats” at the Insight Buddhist Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, for a total of one complete year of no reading, no writing, no speaking, and eyes always downcast (my wife); When you have almost died from the austerities you underwent before you attained enlightenment under a bo tree in India; When you have been crucified on Golgatha; When you have been thrown to lions in the Roman coliseum; When you have been in a concentration camp and held on to some measure of dignity through your faith; When you have given your life to providing a dignified death for homeless, destitute women gathered from the streets of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), or played out her counterpart with the poor in New York City (Dorothy Day); When, Mr. Wilson, you have undergone any one of these trials, it will then be time to talk about the ease of religion as compared with the ardors of empiricism.

One day, almost two years after Keith died, I was on my way down our long driveway toward the mailbox when, in a towering pine tree, there was a sudden crashing of needles and limbs. I stopped walking just in time to avoid being struck by the body of a rabbit and looked up to see the huge wingspan of an eagle as it flew away. I stared at the rabbit for a long moment and was grateful it was dead. If it had been still suffering, I wouldn’t have known what to do to help it. I felt for the first time an acceptance that death could be the right thing, a cure for pain and affliction.

This was it, the last time they would ever eat together beside a fire. The very last time. It was insane to feel sad, but she did. Soon after they finished eating, they arranged their respective beds near the dying fire and retired for the night. Loretta lay on her back, gazing at the stars. Hardly more than an arm’s reach away, Hunter slept. At least she guessed he was asleep. She never knew for sure. He could be still as death one minute and on his feet, wide awake, the next. All afternoon he had been quieter than usual. Perhaps he was a little sad, too. Tomorrow they would have to say good-bye. The word sounded lonely inside her head. And so final. Somehow, God only knew how, she had grown fond of him. Enough to make her wish they might meet again, one day. Crazy. It would be best if their paths never crossed. She had her world, he his, and the two didn’t mix. Never could, not in a million years. She remembered his mother thumping heads with her spoon, Blackbird’s merry laughter. Comanches. The word no longer struck terror in her heart. Would it after he rode off tomorrow? Loretta sighed. Once he left, they would be enemies again. Their truce was tentative. If he came to the farm, Uncle Henry would shoot him. The thought wrenched her heart. “Hunter?” she whispered. “Are you awake?” Silence. She pulled her buffalo robe to her chin and shivered, though she wasn’t cold. Memories of those first few days washed over her. Of his arm around her while she slept, the heat of his chest against her back, how terrified she had been. Suddenly the stars above her blurred, and she realized she was gazing at them through tears. She squeezed her eyes closed, and hot streams ran down her cheeks into her ears. She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t. Couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense. A sob snagged in her throat and made a catching sound. She clamped a hand over her mouth, furious with herself. How could she have come to like a Comanche? Could she forget her parents so easily? It was unthinkable. Unforgivable. “Mah-tao-yo?” Loretta leaped and opened her eyes. Hunter knelt beside her, a dark shadow against the blue-black, starlit sky. “You weep?” “No--yes.” Her voice came out in a squeak. “I’m just feeling sad, that’s all.” He sat down beside her and hugged his knees, gazing off into the endless darkness. “You will stay beside me?

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.

The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did. The government could not investigate every farmer’s purchase of fertilizer and fireworks—could not self-police every deviant brain within its own ranks.

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial, the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened! There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the head of the king—and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey. And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected, which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing; these things became the established order and nature of appointed things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old. Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world—the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.

Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest?

At the same time the cholera epidemic sweeping through Europe struck Paris, bringing not only suffering and death, but also social unrest. As often happens, people began to blame the authorities and supposed carriers of the disease, and there were instances of group violence which sometimes ended in murder, as well as a surge in petty crime. The year 1833 saw strikes and riots in Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Nantes, Avignon and Paris, but they were almost entirely concerned with working conditions and food.8

Cruel randomness [...] Besides, if God really was selecting people to protect on the basis of some bigger picture, then you would not expect the number of people who are killed in various ways to be subject to the rules of probability. However, I can predict with remarkable accuracy the road toll each year, the number of people who will be struck by lightning, the number of people who will be killed by shark attacks, and so on. Each of these causes of death has a certain rate of occurrence that is quite predictable. It is not just the number of deaths that is predictable, it is the whole probability distribution of deaths that is predictable. If you know the average number of deaths by car accidents in a city, then it is possible to calculate all the percentiles for that city. For example, you can estimate the numbers of deaths that would be exceeded only once every ten years. When you do this for many cities, you find that the 1-in-10-year extremes are exceeded in approximately 10% of cities each year. This is exactly what you would expect if the world was random, but not what you would expect if anyone was in control. Car accidents, diseases, and industrial accidents all follow the same probability distribution, known as the “Poisson distribution”. The Poisson probability distribution is based on the assumption that accidents happen randomly. It is simply not possible for tragedies to appear to follow the Poisson probability distribution while actually being controlled by God. Any interventions of God that interfere in the random processes would be detectable. If they are not detectable, then they are random and God is not involved. If we accept that the world is random, and that bad things happen to everyone by chance, where does that leave God? Either he does not exist, or he has no power, or he does not care. Whichever of those answers you prefer, God does not deserve our thanks.

That was the period of our lives when we had least contact. I wrote to Albus, describing, perhaps insensitively, the wonders of my journey, from narrow escapes from chimaeras in Greece to the experiments of the Egyptian alchemists. His letters told me little of his day-to-day life, which I guessed to be frustratingly dull for such a brilliant wizard. Immersed in my own experiences, it was with horror that I heard, toward the end of my year’s travels, that yet another tragedy had struck the Dumbledores: the death of his sister, Ariana.

In the ten-year period of 2004 to 2014, at least 101 police K-9’s died in the line of duty. Two were killed by other animals, two were killed by assault, two were drowned, one died of exposure to toxins, seven died in falls, six in auto accidents, five died due to duty-related illnesses or injury, fourteen were struck and killed by vehicles, sixteen died from heat exhaustion, three were stabbed to death, six were killed by intentional vehicular assaults, three died in training accidents, and thirty-four were killed by gunfire.

Dawn is purely a work of fiction, but I wrote it to look at myself in a new way. Obviously I did not live this tale, but I was implicated in its ethical dilemma from the moment that I assumed my character’s place. Difficult? Not really. Suppose the American army, instead of sending me to France, had handed me a visa to the Holy Land—would I have had the courage to join one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland? And if so, could I have gone all the way in my commitment and killed a man, a stranger? Would I have had the strength to claim him as my victim? So I wrote this novel in order to explore distant memories and buried doubts: What would have become of me if I had spent not just one year in the camps, but two or four? If I had been appointed kapo? Could I have struck a friend? Humiliated an old man? And taking the questions further within the context of the narrative: How are we ever to disarm evil and abolish death as a means to an end? How are we ever to break the cycle of violence and rage? Can terror coexist with justice? Does murder call for murder, despair for revenge? Can hate engender anything but hate? The

It was an odd promise considering the source. Rod’s career, until that point, had been anything but a paradigm of reform. His father-in-law, Dick Mell, was a Chicago alderman and ward boss, and used his influence to get Rod elected to the state legislature in Springfield. After four years of doing little in state government, opportunity struck. Dan Rostenkowski, the longtime congressman from Chicago’s north side, was forced to resign in scandal after being caught writing personal checks on his government account. In the next election, a Republican—Mike Flanagan—managed to win the seat. But this was a Democratic district through and through and whoever won the nomination to oppose Flanagan next time around was guaranteed victory. Rod, although having accomplished literally nothing in his four years in the state legislature, had two things going for him: his innate political skills and his father-in-law. In many ways, Rod exemplified the distinction between the skill set needed to run for office and the skill set needed to serve in office. Rod was an incredible public speaker. Charismatic. Charming. Funny. Self-deprecating. He could go into a black church, sing gospel—unironically—and bring the place down. He knew what you wanted to hear and had no qualms saying it, regardless of what it was or whether he actually meant it. He could shine in a speech to the state legislature, at a union hall, and in a TV ad. His retail political skills were better than anyone I’d ever seen (except maybe Bill Clinton) and when you combined that with his ward boss father-in-law’s clout, beating more-qualified opponents to win the Democratic nomination to the House was within reach.

But centuries later, the High Lords believed her when she told them that the death of her sister had changed her—especially when she opened trade lines between our two territories. The High Lords never knew that those same ships that brought over Hybernian goods also brought over her own personal forces. The King of Hybern didn’t know, either. But we all soon learned that, in those fifty years she was here, she had decided she wanted Prythian for her own, to begin amassing power and use our lands as a launching point to one day destroy your world once and for all, with or without her king’s blessing. So forty-nine years ago, she struck. “She knew—knew that even with her personal army, she could never conquer the seven High Lords by numbers or power alone. But she was also cunning and cruel, and she waited until they absolutely trusted her, until they gathered at a ball in her honor, and that night she slipped a potion stolen from the King of Hybern’s unholy spell book into their wine. Once they drank, the High Lords were prone, their magic laid bare—and she stole their powers from where they originated inside their bodies—plucked them out as if she were taking an apple from its branch, leaving them with only the basest elements of their magic. Your Tamlin—what you saw of him here was a shade of what he used to be, the power that he used to command. And with the High Lords’ power so greatly decreased, Amarantha wrested control of Prythian from them in a matter of days. For forty-nine years, we have been her slaves. For forty-nine years, she has been biding her time, waiting for the right moment to break the Treaty and take your lands—and all human territories beyond it.

four years ago—one plaintive yet manful thought, which has never yet reached the public eye: “Three nights ago, stepping out after midnight and looking up at the stars, which were clear and numerous, it struck me with a strong, new kind of feeling: ‘In a little while I shall have seen you also for the last time. God Almighty’s own theater of immensity—the infinite made palpable and visible to me—that also will be closed—flung too in my face—and I shall never behold death any more.’ The thought of the eternal deprivation even of this, tho this is such a nothing in comparison, was sad and painful to me. And then a second feeling rose upon me: ‘What if Omnipotence that has developed in me these appetites, these reverences, these infinite affections, should actually have said, Yes, poor mortal, such as you who have gone so far, shall be permitted to go further. Hope! despair not!’ God’s will, not ours, be done.

The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship,

He closed his eyes. Swiftly like a predator, the vision of his death struck. This time it would not be denied. The white ground, black rocks, and red drops of his heart's blood growing on the ground like blooming roses. He lost himself in the sensation of liquid warmth flowing between his fingers. When he could finally see again, he found himself kneeling on the floor, shoulders hunched. That damned scene hung like an albatross around his neck, until he almost wished it would go ahead and happen, just so that he could get it the fuck over with. He had carried that albatross for almost two hundred damn years - exactly from the moment when he had responded to a damsel in distress and had embroiled himself in another man's curse.

Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achieve-ments? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? We are the first in milk production. We are number one in remote-sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat. We are the second largest producer of rice. Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred a tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed with the bad news and failures and disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had a picture of a Jewish gentleman who, in five years, had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so negative?

In 1672 a severe economic downturn (the “Year of Disaster”) struck the Netherlands, after Louis XIV and a French army invaded the Dutch Republic from the south (known as the Franco-Dutch War). During the Third Anglo-Dutch War an English fleet and two allied German bishops attacked the country from the east causing more destruction. Many people panicked; courts, theatres, shops and schools were closed. Five years passed before circumstances improved. In the summer of 1675 Vermeer borrowed money in Amsterdam, using his mother-in-law as a surety. In December 1675 Vermeer fell into a frenzy and, within a day and a half, died. He was buried in the Protestant Old Church on 15 December 1675. Catharina Bolnes attributed her husband’s death to the stress of financial pressures.

more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.

Spread over the extravagant supper table was a silk tapestry of moons and stars and the six symbols of death. Talis couldn’t help but stare at the design, for the weavings glowed and the drawing was animated with a nefarious life of its own. A frightful illustration that seemed to follow his eyes as they perused the tapestry. Etched along the tassels flowed a river of blood, the river leading into the Underworld. Farther up, layers of bodies were piled high, their vicious fumes rising as incense to the lesser demons above, who devoured the mortals’ flesh. Then above them were the taskmasters of the Underworld, great demons with spiked whips. They endlessly struck the lesser demons as punishment for the act of consuming the mortals’ flesh. Arranged around the center of the tapestry were the gods themselves. At the head stood Zagros, the Lord of the Underworld, then Ractan, the Lord of the Dragons, and Ishta, the Lord of the Genie Sorcerers. At the other side hovered Nestria, the Goddess of the Sky, and Nacrea, the Goddess of the Sun, and opposite her was Satvis, the God of Darkness. Between both sets of gods sat two mythological heroes: Nyx the Destroyer and Lord Heti of Calabastria. Here were the triumphant gods, playing with the lives and flesh of all mortals. Talis stifled a groan. Atop the tapestry were glass jars filled with what looked like trapped souls. Their ghastly faces peered out, eyes desperate and longing for freedom. How did they get inside? He felt a sickness rising in his stomach. The dark sorcerers studied him with grave looks, as if they glimpsed something distasteful inside. He could tell they were suspicious of him. He was too young, from a strange land untouched by their power, and to their murmuring voices, unsuitable to attend this grand feast. Now, all he could think about was leaving this wretched city. Whatever danger lay ahead, he’d rather face it than fester here in the insidious poison seeping through the black and gold walls of Darkov. “To your charmed fortune.” A sorcerer raised a crystal vial filled with some bubbling substance. The man appeared to be hundreds of years old. Deep, harsh wrinkles lined his eyes and forehead, and yet his hands were perfectly smooth. He wore a black silk cloak fastened around his neck with a gold broach, ornately designed like the sun. He drank the vial and after a while, he appeared as youthful as a young man. Talis was taken aback at the man’s sudden transformation. He steadied his wine cup with his other hand. “Fortune smiles on you...” “Every day.” The sorcerer frowned at Talis. “You’d be wise to remember that. Without fortune shining on you daily”—he leaned in close to Talis—”your life is at risk.” Turning, the man whisked away and disappeared behind another group of sorcerers mingling in the corner of the room. Talis tried to discover where he’d gone, but the man had vanished. Just then Talis felt a cold hand settle on his right shoulder. He turned, glimpsed the eyes of Aurellia, and resisted the desire to flee. “I see you’ve finally joined us here in our illustrious

MARCH 16 Ordeal of Shame In a memoir of the years before World War II, Pierre Van Paassen tells of an act of humiliation by Nazi storm troopers who had seized an elderly Jewish rabbi and dragged him to headquarters. In the far end of the same room, two colleagues were beating another Jew to death. They stripped the rabbi naked and commanded that he preach the sermon he had prepared for the coming Sabbath in the synagogue. The rabbi asked if he could wear his yarmulke, and the Nazis, grinning, agreed. It added to the joke. The trembling rabbi proceeded to deliver in a raspy voice his sermon on what it means to walk humbly before God, all the while being poked and prodded by the hooting Nazis, and all the while hearing the last cries of his neighbor at the end of the room. When I read the Gospel accounts of the imprisonment, torture, and execution of Jesus, I think of that naked rabbi standing humiliated in a police station. I still cannot fathom the indignity, the shame endured by God’s Son on earth, stripped naked, flogged, spat on, struck in the face, garlanded with thorns. Jewish leaders as well as Romans intended the mockery to parody the crime for which the victim had been condemned. Messiah, huh? Great, let’s hear a prophecy.Wham. Who hit you, huh? Thunk. C’mon, tell us, spit it out, Mr. Prophet. For a Messiah, you don’t know much, do you? It went like that all day long, from the bullying game of Blind Man’s Bluff in the high priest’s courtyard, to the professional thuggery of Pilate’s and Herod’s guards, to the catcalls of spectators up the long road to Calvary, and finally to the cross itself where Jesus heard a stream of taunts. I have marveled at, and sometimes openly questioned, the self-restraint God has shown throughout history, allowing the Genghis Khans and the Hitlers and the Stalins to have their way. But nothing—nothing—compares to the self-restraint shown that dark Friday in Jerusalem. With every lash of the whip, every fibrous crunch of fist against flesh, Jesus must have mentally replayed the temptation in the wilderness and in Gethsemane. Legions of angels awaited his command. One word, and the ordeal would end. The Jesus I Never Knew(199 - 200)