Acuity Quotes

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.

Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.

Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.

When distressing realities flood the banks of our firepower, smothering our daily living, and various events keep rushing into our lives through infringement, only the magic of imagination will sharpen perceptual acuity and restore the sparkle of our buoyancy. (“The Infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)

How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?

Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child's smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.

...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")

job, requiring intellectual ability and acuity

Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, 'I just want to be entertained.' This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means that we shouldn't go to movies together.

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him. The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind. Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.

What does it take for a person to be able to recognize evil as it unfolds? To see with foresight and acuity .

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has analyzed this trend with great acuity. As he sees it, mindfulness is “establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism,” by helping people “to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.

Legend claimed Berserkers could move with such speed that they seemed invisible to the human eye until the moment they attacked. They possessed unnatural senses: the olfactory acuity of a wolf, the auditory sensitivity of a bat, the strength of twenty men, the penetrating eyesight of an eagle. The Berserkers had once been the most fearless and feared warriors ever to walk Scotland nearly seven hundred years ago. They had been Odin's elite Viking army. Legend claimed they could assume the shape of a wolf or a bear as easily as the shape of a man. And they were marked by a common feature-unholy blue eyes that glowed like banked coals.

In addition to his instinct for discerning patterns across disciplines, Leonardo honed two other traits that aided his scientific pursuits: an omnivorous curiosity, which bordered on the fanatical, and an acute power of observation, which was eerily intense. Like much with Leonardo, these were interconnected. Any person who puts “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on his to-do list is overendowed with the combination of curiosity and acuity. His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning? Einstein said he marveled about questions others found mundane because he was slow in learning to talk as a child. For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.

you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness-- a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair

You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind. Did they break her mold or what, pal? Or...or did it self-destruct? Still, Laura. The one and the only. Such a plain name for a unique cutie. But perhaps my acuity is not without its problems. I ruin everything: a stupid story to be tapped out on my tomb's stone. I ruined even Laura. And an original ruin is rare. Just ask the archaeologist, "Egypt, again?" Just ask me, "Laura, again?" and we'll both respond: "Yes, again and again. And again.

How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would have got used to it, but I didn't know this at the time. All I knew, was that memory had given pleasure first, then cracking pain.

When you find a true friend, you will know it. There may be challenges in that relationship, but for all that, it thrives on mutual respect, and honours the virtues exchanged. You need no fists to make a space for yourself. No one clings to your shadow – even as they grow to despise that shadow, and the one who so boldly casts it. Your feelings are not objects to be manipulated, with cold intent or emotion’s blind, unreasoning heat. You are heard. You are heeded. You are challenged, and so made better. This is not a tie that exhausts, nor one that forces your senses to unnatural extremes of acuity. You are not to be tugged or prodded, and your gifts – of wit and charm – are not to be denigrated for the attentions they earn.

He wore clothes to cover his nakedness, he drove a car, and he ate with a knife and a fork and a linen napkin. He was gainfully employed in a job that required intellectual ability and acuity. He controlled his sexual urges through various civilized means and would never take a woman against her will. Nevertheless, as he stared at Miss Mitchell and Paul, he realized that he was an animal. Something primitive. Something feral. And something made him want to go over there and rip Paul’s hands from his body and carry Miss Mitchell off. To kiss her senseless, move his lips to her neck, and claim her.

The reverend's sermon that day was beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire life would have been different if I'd grown up in this woman's church instead of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to undermine one's faith.

Sticking your head in the sand does not prevent the tide from coming in.

Everyone shouted at once, mostly at me, mostly with swearing and calling into question my mental acuities. I believe the words dumbass and fuckwit were used on more than one occasion.

Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We thing we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.

Professor Morgulis wrote: “The acuity of the senses is increased by fasting, and at the end of his 31 days’ abstinence from food, Professor Levanzin could see twice as far as he could when his fast began.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

How these humans dispose themselves! Unlike anything else in creation. Or rather like everything else in creation all at once. Legs of one beast. Arms of another. Proportions all awry to a tortoise's eye. Torso too squat. Too little neck. Vastly too much leg. Hands like creatures unto themselves. Senses delicately balanced. And yet each sense dulled by mental acuity. Reason in place of a good nose. Logic instead of a tail. Faith instead of the certain knowledge of instinct. Superstition instead of a shell.

Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I’ll never wash it off.

Komatsu believed that mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.

five categories: grit, mental acuity, drive, leadership, and teamability.

Acuity, ScheduleOnce, Calendly, and, of course, x.ai (to name a few examples among many)

Komatsu believed that mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances

It wasn’t the first time she’d been informed, directly or indirectly, that her womb consumed far too much energy to allow for mental acuity.

Aristotle shows remarkable psychological acuity in seeing that people who need to criticize others constantly have a problem with respecting themselves.

Social Media has become the global dustbin of idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone is there to separate and recycle that.

THERE ARE PEOPLE in the world who—thanks to a lack of intellectual acuity—live a life that is surprisingly artificial. I haven’t run across all that many, but there are certainly a few.

Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life

Mountains are not stadiums where I statisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.... I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment.... my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn

Our eyes contain two types of photoreceptors for vision—rods, which help us see in dim conditions but provide no color, and cones, which work when the light is bright and divide the world up into three colors: blue, green, and red. People who are “color-blind” normally lack one of the three types of cones, so they don’t see all the colors, just some of them. People who have no cones at all, and are genuinely color-blind, are called achromatopes. Their main problem isn’t that their world is pallid but that they really struggle to cope with bright light and can be literally blinded by daylight. Because we were once nocturnal, our ancestors gave up some color acuity—that is, sacrificed cones for rods—to gain better night vision. Much later, primates re-evolved the ability to see reds and oranges, the better to identify ripe fruit, but we still have just three kinds of color receptors compared with four for birds, fish, and reptiles. It’s a humbling fact, but virtually all nonmammalian creatures live in a visually richer world than we do.

Today's the day. The clock is ticking. I have been summoned to speak. I go before the committee with a chance to exonerate myself, to extricate, or at least explain the debacle that has become my life. A statement, a simple speech, a song and dance that will set them straight, an incandescent incantation, a charming presentation, a shoe of sorts, the show of shows, it's the only chance I've got. My appeal must be appealing, not entirely revealing, tucking the tendency to be argumentative, artfully augmenting my audacity with the acuity of my observation and the alarming accuracy of my action. What can I possibly say or do? Act normal.

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness - a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair - then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one - well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.

As I said, I decided to try an experiment: Right now, from within my perception of my current circumstances, and from within the starkness of this realization, I determined to conceive and focus on what I would tell—and what I have told—my younger self, and live with the consequences. Here is what I wrote down: Immediately disassociate from destructive people and forces, if not physically then ethically—and watch for the moment when you can do so physically. Use every means to improve your mental acuity. Every sacrifice of empty leisure or escapism for study, industry, and growth is a fee paid to personal freedom. Train the body. Grow physically strong. Reduce consumption. You will be strengthened throughout your being. Seek no one’s approval through humor, servility, or theatrics. Be alone if necessary. But do not compromise with low company. At the earliest possible point, learn meditation (i.e., Transcendental Meditation), yoga, and martial arts (select good teachers). Go your own way—literally. Walk/bike and don’t ride the bus or in a car, except when necessary. Do so in all weather: rain, snow, etc. Be independent physically and you will be independent in other ways. Learn-study-rehearse. Pursue excellence. Or else leave something alone. Go to the limit in something or do not approach it. Starve yourself of the compulsion to derive your sense of wellbeing from your perception of what others think of you. Do this as an alcoholic avoids a drink or an addict a needle. It will be agonizing at first, since you may have no other perception of self; but this, finally, is the sole means of experiencing Self. Does this kind of advice, practicable at any time of life, really alter or reselect the perceived past, and, with it, the future? I intend to find out. You

Of the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity: The Premier has advanced too far to recede with safety: he is deeply interested to execute his purpose, if possible…. In common life, to retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty…. To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.

These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.

When our internal voice starts criticizing us, lashing out, it can feel like we’re under attack. Because our brain doesn’t distinguish between imagination and reality, these internal attacks are perceived by our mind just as a real, physical attack would be, and they can generate an automatic physical reaction known as the threat response or fight-or-flight response. The effects of this activation are well-known. Just as a zebra reacts to the stress of being chased by a lion, the human body shoots adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormones) through its veins, and directs all its resources toward crucial functions: elevated heart and breathing rates, muscle reaction, vision acuity, and so forth. The body is no longer concerned with living ten more years, but with surviving ten more minutes. It shuts down nonurgent functions such as muscle repair, digestion, and the immune system,6 as well as “superfluous” functions such as cognitive reasoning. In other words, because it’s not critical to survival, intelligent thinking gets shut down.

no matter the acuity of our senses, no matter how educated we are or how good we are or how much conviction we live our lives with, we can never experience the wholeness of the answer within our own fragile and limited selves. We need one another to achieve a vision of wholeness.

In psychotherapeutic work with intelligent schizophrenics on again and again is tempted to conclude that they would be much better off, much more "normal", if they could only somehow blunt the acuity of their thinking and thus alleviate the paralyzing effect it has on their actions.

The most effective lie is always the closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily lives, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use for understanding a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.

Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby, “There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough,” which has not been my experience. After all, prolonged and chronic illness stitches itself into life in a different way than acute illness does. With chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition I can attempt. The absolution from doing more and dreaming big that I experience during surgeries and hospitalization is absent during chronic illness.

Shimrod gave the boy a copper penny. 'Bring me now a goblet of good tawny wine.' By a sleight of magic Shimrod augmented the acuity of his hearing, so that the whispers of two young lovers in a far corner were now clearly audible, as were the innkeeper's instructions to Fonsel in regard to the watering of Shimrod's wine.

I shouldn't have complained, right? I mean, doesn't every girl want a handsome rescuer to sweep in when she's in a pinch? So what if she could've handled the whole thing on her own and the handsome rescuer in question didn't have the verbal acuity she was hoping for? A gal can't afford to be too picky these days, can she?

By this he seems to have meant that acuity and spirituality were not bestowed on human beings by some higher being but were shaped by our life experiences. It was our obligations to others that gave meaning to everything, that created inner satisfaction, that gave life its purpose, and that ought to determine a person’s actions.

DOLMANCE — [...] Now, it is this second kind of cruelty you will most often find in women. Study them well: you will see whether it is not their excessive sensitivity that leads them to cruelty; you will see whether it is not their extremely active imagination, the acuity of their intelligence that renders them criminal, ferocious;

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. “Bind me with the chains of Illusion,” he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police—seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal’s old “abêtissezvous,” the Solitary’s tragic device. A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired intellectual abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble. Nothing more to overturn, if not himself: the last idol to smash … His own debris lures him on. While he contemplates it, he shapes the idol of new gods or restores the old ones by baptizing them with new names. Unable to sustain the dignity of being fastidious, less and less inclined to winnow truths, he is content with those he is offered. By-product of his ego, he proceeds—a wrecker gone to seed—to crawl before the altars, or before what takes their place. In the temple or on the tribunal, his place is where there is singing, or shouting—no longer a chance to hear one’s own voice. A parody of belief? It matters little to him, since all he aspires to is to desist from himself. All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna! Let us be fair: as things stand now, what else could he do? Europe’s charm, her originality resided in the acuity of her critical spirit, in her militant, aggressive skepticism; this skepticism has had its day. Hence the intellectual, frustrated in his doubts, seeks out the compensations of dogma. Having reached the confines of analysis, struck down by the void he discovers there, he turns on his heel and attempts to seize the first certainty to come along; but he lacks the naiveté to hold onto it; henceforth, a fanatic without convictions, he is no more than an ideologist, a hybrid thinker, such as we find in all transitional periods. Participating in two different styles, he is, by the form of his intelligence, a tributary of the one of the one which is vanishing, and by the ideas he defends, of the one which is appearing. To understand him better, let us imagine an Augustine half-converted, drifting and tacking, and borrowing from Christianity only its hatred of the ancient world. Are we not in a period symmetrical with the one which saw the birth of The City of God? It is difficult to conceive of a book more timely. Today as then, men’s minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb.

Here’s the strangeness of having a Tourette’s brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot—coulda been a contender!—at centrality. Personalityness. There’s a lot of traffic in my head, and it’s two-way.

In the earliest times of the discovery of the faculty of judgment, every new judgment was a find. The worth of this find rose, the more practical and fertile the judgment was. Verdicts which now seem to us very common then still demanded an unusual level of intellectual life. One had to bring genius and acuity together in order to find new relations using the new tool. Its application to the most characteristic, interesting, and general aspects of humanity necessarily aroused exceptional admiration and drew the attention of all good minds to itself. In this way those bodies of proverbial sayings came into being that have been valued so highly at all times and among all peoples. It would easily be possible for the discoveries of genius we make today to meet with a similar fate in the course of time. There could easily come a time when all that would be as common as moral precepts are now, and new, more sublime discoveries would occupy the restless spirit of men.

The now pregnant Isis returns to her home in the underworld and gives birth, in due time, to Horus, rightful son of the long-lost king, alienated as he matures from his now corrupted kingdom (something we all experience during our maturation). His primary attribute is the eye—the famous Egyptian single eye—while his avatar is the falcon, a bird that takes precise aim at its prey, strikes the target with deadly accuracy, and possesses an acuity of vision unparalleled in the kingdom of living things.

In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His “will” is completely identical with that of the government. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation. Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes. Grünewald writes that he has never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child. Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents—and in puberty even the views by his own parents—because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Furthermore, the teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.

Distributions can only be based on measurements, but as in the case of measuring intelligence, the nature of measurement is often complicated and troubled by ambiguities. Consider the problem of noise, or what is known as luck in human affairs. Since the rise of the new digital economy, around the turn of the century, there has been a distinct heightening of obsessions with contests like American Idol, or other rituals in which an anointed individual will suddenly become rich and famous. When it comes to winner-take-all contests, onlookers are inevitably fascinated by the role of luck. Yes, the winner of a singing contest is good enough to be the winner, but even the slightest flickering of fate might have changed circumstances to make someone else the winner. Maybe a different shade of makeup would have turned the tables. And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes, a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based.

that rotten feeling of antlike industry. There is really no need to belabor the point, since it is obvious to most of us these days that mathematics has taken possession, like a demon, of every aspect of our lives. Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one’s soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference toward the whole, man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man.

Children are intuitive scientists and armchair philosophers, brimming with such startling observations that it’s hard to believe they’ve come from people barely out of diapers. . . . But, along with their Talmudic wisdom and intellectual acuity, preschoolers can surprise, equally, with their undeveloped motor skills, atrocious impulse control, and venal self-interest. Like teenagers, whom they closely resemble developmentally, preschoolers are a complicated mix of competence and ineptitude. The problem with American early education is how often the grownups misread, and even interchange, those two attributes completely, and at such critical moments for learning.

Many people seeing the sensory homunculus for the first time comment on (even object to) how small the genitals are. They expect that these organs would merit an allotment of territory commensurate with their sensitivity and the disproportionate mindshare they command. The confusion comes from the multiple meanings of the word "sensitive." Sensitive can refer to high acuity. Your fingers, lips, and tongue are sensitive in this sense: generously packed with somatic receptors of every type, able to make extremely fine discriminations. Your genitals are extremely sensitive in a different sense. A penis and a clitoris can tell the difference between one finger and two, but they can't read Braille.

In the great game of “hide-and-seek” played out in the memory when we are trying to recover a name, there is not a series of graduated approximations. We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semidarkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, those transitions are unconscious.

There was one more trend that Thucydides noted. In every free and prosperous country he found a parade of monsters: human beings with oversized egos, with ambitions out of proportion to their ability, whose ideas rather belied their understanding than affirmed it. Whereas, there was one Alcibiades in his own day, there were now hundreds of the like: self-serving, cunning and profane; only they did not possess the skills, or the mental acuity, or beauty of Alcibiades. Instead of being exiled, they pushed men of good sense from the center of affairs. Instead of being right about strategy and tactics, they were always wrong. And they were weak, he thought, because they had learned to be bad by the example of others. There was nothing novel about them, although they believed themselves to be original in all things. J.R.Nyquist

The injured brain cannot heal itself. Now we know that the brain has amazing powers of healing, unsuspected in the past. The brain’s hardwiring cannot be changed. In fact, the line between hard and soft wiring is shifting all the time, and our ability to rewire our brains remains intact from birth to the end of life. Aging in the brain is inevitable and irreversible. To counter this outmoded belief, new techniques for keeping the brain youthful and retaining mental acuity are arising every day. The brain loses millions of cells a day, and lost brain cells cannot be replaced. In fact, the brain contains stem cells that are capable of maturing into new brain cells throughout life. How we lose or gain brain cells is a complex issue. Most of the findings are good news for everyone who is afraid of losing mental capacity as they age.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around us for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason, its significance, its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so early and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, tiny precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

Being a thoughtful person, I always have indulged myself in to things, life brought in my way and come-up with my own definitions and meanings of them. Somewhere deep into myself I always have been making conscious endeavors to improve my nature in order to uplift my life in a way that each moment I live enhance my interest in living the life and enjoy the beauty it encompass in itself. I found life is always "Imperfect". Whenever, I saw flowers, I saw thorns with them as well with which they have made compromise in order to live and look beautiful. I saw butterflies with such little visual acuity that they cannot see the beauty of the garden they roam around. So I realized, these flowers and butterflies are there to beautify somebody else's world and they are not living for their selves only. This is life, that is how it works. So for me, it is interesting and beautiful when it has to do something good with somebody else as well.

Being drawn to intelligence is like having a secret crush on the brainiest person in the room. It's like finding the smartest cookie in the jar and wanting to devour every last crumb of their knowledge. When someone's intellect shines bright, it's like a beacon calling you to explore the depths of your mind. So, if you're attracted to intelligence, own it! Dive into stimulating conversations. After all, who needs cupid's arrow when you've got the allure of a brilliant mind?

Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.

experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us. So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.2

A Typical Description of an NDE (Near Death Experience) I asked Ring to describe for me a typical NDE. He told me: The first thing is a tremendous feeling of peace, like nothing else you have experienced. Most people say like never before and never again. People say [that it is] the peace that passes all understanding. Then there is the sense of bodily separation and sometimes the sense of actually being out of the body. There are studies that show that people can sometimes report veridically what is in their physical environment, e.g., the lint on the light fixtures above themselves. They could see in a three-hundred-sixty-degree panoramic vision. They had extraordinary acuity. Often when they went further into the experience, they went to a dark place that is sometimes described as a tunnel, but not always. They usually feel that there is a sense of motion; that they are moving through something that is vast almost beyond imagination. And yet they feel they don't have the freedom to go anywhere. They feel as if they were being propelled. The extreme sense of motion often seems to be one of acceleration. Some describe that they have felt as if they were moving a the speed of light or faster. One NDEr described this as superluminal-moving beyond the speed of light with tremendous accelerated motion through a kind of cylindrical vortex, and then, in the distance, the person describes a dot of light that suddenly grows larger, more brilliant, and all encompassing. Ring continued: At this stage of the experience there is an encounter with light. It seems to be a living light exuding pure love, complete acceptance, and total understanding. The individual feels that he is made of that light, that he has always been there, and that he has stepped out of time and stepped into eternity. This feeling is accompanied by a sense of absolute perfection. Being out of time introduces another aspect of the experience: a sense of destiny. Ring explained: Then there is a panoramic light review in which you see everything that has ever happened to you in your life. Not [only] just what you have done but the effects of your actions on others, the effects of your thoughts on others. The whole thing is laid out for you without being judged but with a complete understanding of why things were the way they were in your life. The best metaphor I can suggest for this is: as if you were the character in someone else's novel. There would be one moment outside of time where you would have the perspective of the author of that novel, and you have a sense of omniscience about that character. Why he did the things that he did, why he had affected others, and so on. It is a profound moment outside of time when this realization occurs. You see the whole raison d'etre of your life. You may also see scenes or fragments of scenes of your life if you choose to go back to your body. In other words, it is not only that you have flashbacks but you also seem to have flash-forwards of events that will occur almost at though there is a kind of blueprint for your life. And it is up to you at that moment. You have free choice because it is often left to you whether to go back to your life or to leave it behind. The people we talk with of course always make the choice to go back or sometimes are sent back.

It is a combination of man’s mental acuity and self-importance to try and attach any meaning to life. Why can’t we just be an extremely fortunate life form randomly hurtling through space on an ideally-positioned rock? If life has any meaning, it is the basic biological one of passing on our genes to the next generation before we die.

Psychotherapy is the cornerstone of a multidisciplinary treatment plan for dissociative disorders and other trauma-related disorders and must be incorporated into the interventional strategy; whether the mode of psychotherapy is supportive or psychodynamic in nature, or some combination of various approaches, the treatment must be based on the quality and acuity of the patient’s symptoms.

Dominika. He would see her soon, if nothing went wrong in the next two days. He played in his head what he would say to her in Istanbul. Gable would be hovering, watching them, his big sheepdog head turned into the wind, sniffing. Jesus, he wanted to hold Dominika in his arms, put his hands on her back, and pull her tight against him. If he dis that, Gable would feed him to the lions. He knew, just knew, however, that Dominika would fly into a rage if he fended her off; she had done so before. She was of the view that she could be a spy and still be in love with her CIA handler, whom she desire. And she dis not sympathize one bit with his conundrum that his superiors disapproved of them doing what they both wanted to do. She would see to it he was not fired. If they loved each other, that should be enough. If you love me, then nothing else matters, Dominika had told him. Nate resented being in this situation, resented Benford looking over his shoulder all the time, resented Gable’s acuity, resented Dominika’s damn Russian incorrigibility.

What is the wisest choice for a personal life goal? Should a person seek self-actualization or self-realization? Perhaps neither goal is a realistic objective, especially if human beings lack free will. What I do know is that there is dark pit so deep inside myself that I must fill it. I can pad this black hole with dread or pleasure, booze or drugs, religion or vice, action or indolence, love or hatred. Alternatively, I can fill bleakness and emptiness by increasing self-awareness and ascertain my role in the world. With limited energy resources and lack of mental acuity, I might never attain a plane of higher consciousness. I fear remaining forever blocked in a state of psychological deadlock, forevermore exhibiting prolonged mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and plagued by psychogenic abnormalities brought about from social rejection, grief, vocational lapses, and economic and marital setbacks. In a state of mental incapacity, I might lack the ability to blunt immediate personal destruction. I need to begin a journey that leads to a higher state of awareness, and personal survival depends upon how much progress I achieve purging my mind of falsities and other toxic impurities. While personal survival necessities moving forward in order to discover a mental state of silent stasis and reach the desired endpoint of emotional equanimity, perhaps I will never achieve a mirror-like purity of the mind that is capable of reflecting the world as it really is, without distortion by a corrupted mind.

see if your patient can sit up or stand than to listen to the heart sounds. Other high-yield examination elements might include postural blood pressure, inspection of ear canal for cerumen, visual acuity, and foot examination.

the painful acuity of my sensations, even those that bring me joy; the joyful acuity of my sensations, even those that are sad.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

Finally, I applied to one of my roommates, more sagacious than the rest, for advice. Dave, I said. I’m broke and without prospects. I’ve blown my GI Bill on flying lessons. I can’t hide out here in college much longer. What should I do? Well, he said, at this crucial juncture you need to coldly appraise yourself. “I’ve only known you these few short years, but it strikes me you wouldn’t be good for anything important; I’d have to say you’re lazy, self-absorbed, glib and facetious, always ready to mock the suggestions of others, but never offering anything positive of your own. Intellectually shallow, no tap root anywhere, spiritually neutered, without feeling or compassion, unsteady of focus, lacking the fortitude for the long pull, with no fixed belief in anything.” I shook his hand and thanked him. The acuity of his analysis made my path clear. My only hope lay in daily journalism.

Social Media has become the global dustbin of the idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone, is there to separate, and recycle that?

COLD DEFINITION: a sudden or ongoing exposure to uncomfortably low temperatures PHYSICAL SIGNALS: Shivering Blue lips Yawning Eyes that tear up Chattering teeth Tingling extremities Stuttering speech Skin that’s uncomfortably cold to the touch Dry, cracked lips A stiff jaw that makes speech difficult Numbness in one’s extremities A burning sensation in the skin Clumsiness Slow, shallow breaths Lips that tremble Poor dexterity or increased clumsiness Wrapping the arms around the torso Jumping, shuffling, or dancing to get the blood flowing Clapping one’s hands or stamping one’s feet Shoving the hands deep into the pockets Red and swollen patches on the skin (chilblains) Pulling the limbs tightly into the core Slurred speech Rubbing one’s hands together Tucking one’s hands into one’s armpits Pulling a collar or scarf up over the face Huddling inside a jacket Rounded shoulders, the chin dropped down to the chest Cringing and squeezing one’s eyes shut Turning one’s back to the wind or source of cold Pulling down one’s sleeves to cover the hands Curling and uncurling one’s toes to get the blood flowing Rubbing one’s legs; using friction to create warmth Quivering breaths Slapping oneself Shaking out the arms and legs Flexing the fingers Taking deep breaths in an effort to wake up Curling into a ball; making oneself small Sharing body heat with others Blowing into cupped hands to warm them INTERNAL SENSATIONS: Low energy Fatigue or drowsiness The feeling of even one’s insides being cold A weakened pulse Nausea Loss of appetite A burning sensation in the lungs when inhaling A voice that loses strength MENTAL RESPONSES: Confusion Muddled thinking Impaired decision-making A desire to sleep Apathy CUES OF ACUTE OR LONG-TERM COLD EXPOSURE: Frostbite Hypothermia Gangrene Limb amputation Coma Heart failure Death WRITER’S TIP: Emotional attitude makes a difference when dealing with the cold. A person who can maintain mental acuity and focus will withstand the elements much better than someone whose mental condition is compromised by negativity. Return to the Table of Contents

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment...my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.

Values: what makes our existence most worthwhile: safety, excitement, social recognition, happiness, self-respect, status. •   Life goals: the achievements we crave during a lifetime: career success, financial security, travel, adventure, marriage, children. •   Personality: a combination of character and temperament: honesty, mental acuity, kindness, generosity, bravery, commitment to hard work.

The acuity required for survival is a matter of necessity and practice - and also degree. One might learn more than all mankind has learned of this and other mysteries if he could see through the eyes of a wolf for a single day.

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

They were the best at following orders: told to hold the corridor, they would do so or die trying. But they also possessed the same mental acuity and flexibility as a bag of wet mice. Some days, the Princess would need well-armed, violent wet mice. But this was not one of those days.

[She Stoops to Conquer] seems to be a comedy of pure plot; yet there is also psychological acuity under the mathematical ingenuity. This is seen most clearly in the character of Marlow, who is painted as a palpable victim of the English class system. His dilemma is that he is a tongue-tied wreck amongst women of his own class but brimming with sexual bravura with a barmaid or college bedmaker. He himself expresses his dilemma with painful clarity: MARLOW: My life has been chiefly spent in a college or an inn, in seclusion from that lovely part of the creation that chiefly teach men confidence. I don't know that I was ever familiarly acquainted with a single modest woman except my mother. But among females of another class, you know - HASTINGS: Ay, among them you are impudent enough of all conscience. Marlow himself rightly calls this 'the English malady': a paralysing fear, resulting from a monastic education, of women of his own class and an ability to be at ease only with social inferiors whom he can bully, dominate or treat as purchasable commodities. It took an observant Irishman to pin down the damage done to the English male psyche by a punitive educational system. [...] And there is further evidence of Marlow's split personality when Kate accosts him in the guise of a household drudge. Marlow the psychological wreck turns into a brazen lech who, within seconds, is asking to taste the nectar of Kate's lips. Not only that. He is soon bragging of his sexual exploits at a louche London club attended by the likes of Mrs Mantrap, Lady Betty Blackleg, the Countess of Sligo, Mrs Langhorns and old Miss Biddy Buckskin.

Your brain operates with 30% less acuity when you are dehydrated”.

Ehsan Sehgal Quotes about Media — — — * Words matter and mirror if your head is a dictionary of insight and your feelings are alive. * Sure, fake news catches and succeeds attention, but for a while; however, it embraces disregard and unreliability forever. * Media rule the incompetent minds and pointless believers. * A real journalist only states, neither collaborates nor participates. * The majority of journalists and anchors have the information only but not the sense of knowledge. * When the media encourages and highlights the wrong ones, anti-democratic figures, criminals in uniform, and dictators in a supreme authority and brilliant context, sure, such a state never survives the breakdown of prosperity and civil rights, as well as human rights. Thus, the media is accountable and responsible for this as one of the democratic pillars. *Media cannot be a football ground or a tool for anyone. It penetrates the elementary pillar of a state, it forms and represents the language of entire humanity within its perception of love, peace, respect, justice, harmony, and human rights, far from enmity and distinctions. Accordingly, it demonstrates its credibility and neutrality. * When the non-Western wrongly criticizes and abuses its culture, religion, and values, the Western media highlights that often, appreciating in all dimensions. However, if the same one even points out only such subjects, as a question about Western distinctive attitude and role, the West flies and falls at its lowest level, contradicting its principles of neutrality and freedom of press and speech, which pictures, not only double standards but also double dishonesty with itself and readers. Despite that, Western media bother not to realize and feel ignominy and moral and professional stigma. * Social Media has become the global dustbin of idiocy and acuity. It stinks now. Anyone is there to separate and recycle that. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean to constitute insulting, abusing, and harming deliberately in a distinctive and discriminative feature and context, whereas supporting such notions and attempts is a universal crime. * Social media is a place where you share your favourite poetry, quotes, songs, news, social activities, and reports. You can like something, you can comment, and you can use humour in a civilised way. It is social media, but it is not a place to love or be loved. Any lover does not exist here, and no one is serious in this regard. Just enjoy yourself and do not try to fool anyone. If you do that, it means you are making yourself a fool; it is a waste of time, and it is your defeat too. * I use social media only to devote and denote my thoughts voluntarily for the motivation of knowledge, not to earn money as greedy-minded. * One should not take seriously the Social-Media fools and idiots. * Today, on social media, how many are on duty? * Journalists voluntarily fight for human rights and freedom of speech, whereas they stay silent for their rights and journalistic freedom on the will and restrictions of the boss of the media. Indeed, it verifies that The nearer the church, the farther from god. * The abuse, insult, humiliation, and discrimination against whatever subject is not freedom of expression and writing; it is a violation and denial of global harmony and peace. * Press freedom is one significant pillar of true democracy pillars, but such democracy stays deaf, dumb, and blind, which restricts or represses the media. * Press and speech that deliberately trigger hatred and violation fall not under the freedom of press and speech since restrictions for morale and peace apply to everyone without exemption. * Real press freedom is just a dream, which nowhere in the world becomes a reality; however, journalists stay dreaming that.

So goddamn brilliant. I’d known she was perceptive, but a part of me preened at the astounding acuity of my girl’s intuition. My girl … Could Valentina ever be anyone’s girl? A man might as well try to own the wind. Val was her own sovereign entity. Good thing I’d been trained to conquer nations.

Adams had little experience working with others in a legislative setting, and his obdurate manner and natural impatience did not fully suit him for such an undertaking. Yet, his courtroom skills and his pluck or “pertness,” as he referred to it, served him well. Mostly, however, Adams’s star rose because of other factors. The very force of his intellect was crucial to his emergence as an important force in Congress. At each step of his ascent, Adams’s acuity and his imposing intellectual grasp had impressed others.

Mental acuity?” Lich whispered mockingly. “What the fuck’s mental acuity?” “Something you don’t have, knuckle-dragger,” Mac snickered back, though Lich possessed plenty of it.

The rocks of Pennsylvania ranged from smaller than a golf ball to larger than a picnic basket. Some were half buried and immovable toe-stubbers, others shifted dangerously underfoot. They were universally sharp-edged and largely unavoidable. Or at least, bypassing any given one just meant stepping and stumbling over others. The rocks of Pennsylvania provided a level of obstacle heretofore unseen on trail. Ruts and potholes threatened to snap ankles, piercing points stabbed into trail-sore feet and larger stones teetered unexpectedly. More than brute strength or stamina, hiking over these rocks required fine-motor control, balance and mental acuity. Each and every foot placement required blink-quick consideration and an exacting precision that was no less fatiguing than hiking up mountains all day long. The rocks of Pennsylvania weren’t simply physically demanding and mentally taxing. They were emotionally challenging as well. After more than a thousand miles, thru-hikers had grown accustomed to moving along at certain rates of speed. Over rocks, those rates became unrealistic. For many, readjusting to this slower pace was an infuriating experience, much like driving a shiny new Corvette round and round a parking lot littered with speed bumps.

It was her damned acuity, he decided, that had bothered him from the start. She had a way of making a man feel transparent—laid bare. Her perceptiveness had the opposite effect of flirtation: it felt unmanning and unpleasant. If she wished to ward away suitors, her keenness was a better shield than her frumpy get-up would ever be.

She has the acuity to sit inside an emotion and parse it.

The average deaf person has the peripheral vision of a fish-eye lens, almost 180 degrees, and spots the tiniest movement within this range long before the average hearing person can do so. In practical terms this superior visual acuity has led some automobile insurance companies in recent years to give sizable rate discounts to deaf drivers.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

Marie eventually inherited this collection, just as she inherited her father’s acuity for what he called “reading nature.

With the acuity of hindsight, shoving an American microbe onto a Panamanian frog seems overly optimistic, not to mention a bit imperialist.

While he recognized that you were unhappy and unwell, I think he couldn't help but feel that there was some part of you, some part bound inextricably to your illness, that everybody could do with a little more of. Not the melancholy, of course, or even the capacity for quips and one-liners ("Give me lithium or give me death," remember?). Perhaps it was just what he more than once described as a mixture in you of acuity and romanticism that made most other people's versions of sanity appear hollow compromises, or evasions.