Affinity Water Quotes

Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?

Your twisting is done--you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?

How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?" She answered, "She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her; and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her.

Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.

It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary...

The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

You're not sure? Look at your own fingers. Are you not sure, if they are yours? Look at any part of you - it might be me that you are looking at! We are the same, you and I. We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shinning matter. Oh, I could say, I love you - that is a simple thing to say, the sort of thing your sister might say to her husband. I could say that in a prison letter, four times a year. but my spirit does not love yours - it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that or wither! You are like me.

Don’t you think that queer? That a common coarse-featured woman might drink morphia and be sent to gaol for it, while I am saved and sent to visit her—and all because I am a lady?

My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows.

They might be kind, I thought. They might be sensible and good. They will not be like you. But I did not say it. I knew it would mean nothing to her. I said something - something ordinary and mild, I cannot think what. And after a time she came and kissed my cheek, and then she left me.

my spirit does not love yours—it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that, or wither!

You have come to Millbank, to look on women more wretched than yourself, in the hope that it will make you well again.

But the words came from me, I seemed to feel the shape and taste of them as they left my mouth. I might have sat there and been sick upon the table—they could not have silenced me.

There seemed something rather devotional about her pose, the still­ness, so that I thought at last, She is praying!, and made to draw my eyes away in sudden shame. But then she stirred. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. She had a flower there, between her fingers—a violet, with a drooping stem. As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow . . .

He understood her affinity to the water, inspiring as it was beautiful, and soothing to the soul. Standing there that morning, he realized he would never be able to look at the ocean again without thinking of her, and somehow he was still comforted by that thought.

She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me - it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I've seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.

Every poor lady that came to me, that touched my hand, that drew a small part of my spirit from me to her—they were only shadows. Aurora, they were shadows of you! I was only seeking you out, as you were seeking me. You were seeking me, your own affinity. And if you let them keep me from you now, I think we shall die!

He would start it, I think, at the gate of Millbank, the point that every visitor must pass when they arrive to make their tour of the gaols.

I thought that I could make my life into a book that had no life or love in it. . . . Now I can see that my heart has crept across these pages, after all.

My soul left me—I felt it fly from me and lodge in her.

It had three or four book-cases, all of them very full, and a rack of wands, with newspapers and magazines hung out upon them like dripping laundry.

Don’t you know that it is the same for locksmiths with spirits as with love? Spirits laugh at them.

Doesn’t it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?

She said that that was the disadvantage of bringing creatures into the house: one grew used to them, and then, one had the upset of their loss. The

You may say that, now Dawes has gone. You didn’t think our locks so hard—nor our matrons, perhaps—when they kept her neat and close, for you to gaze at!

But Helen, Helen,’ I said, ‘if they expect it to be hard, why don’t they change things, to allow it to be easier?

We are not here to help them, ma’am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.

A book may be on any queer subject, but one can at least always be certain how to turn a page and read it.

She said that; and I knew then that, careful as I have been—still and secret and silent as I have been, in my high room—she has been watching me, as Miss Ridley watches, and Miss Haxby.

Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? 'Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card--mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?

To forget words, common words, because your habits are so narrow you need only know a hundred hard phrases—stone, soup, comb, Bible, needle, dark, prisoner, walk, stand still, look sharp, look sharp!

I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth. I believe this affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted. As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life. We have been human beings for perhaps a million years. But life itself — passes on something of itself to other life — that mysterious entity that moves and is aware of itself and its surroundings, and so is distinguished from rocks or senseless clay — [from which] life arose many hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then it has developed, struggled, adapted itself to its surroundings, evolved an infinite number of forms. But its living protoplasm is built of the same elements as air, water, and rock. To these the mysterious spark of life was added. Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.

It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it.

For a time, all was still: for the yards there, like the grounds, are desperately bleak, all dirt and gravel—there is not so much as a blade of grass to be shivered by the breezes, or a worm or a beetle for a bird to swoop for.

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic experiment, I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company.

As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. …

I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her - I cannot say what would frighten them most - her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or a girl.

Now I have more freedom than I have ever had at any time in my life, and I do only the things I always have. They were empty before, but Selina has given a meaning to them, I do them for her. I am waiting, for her - but, waiting, I think, is too poor a word for it. I am engaged with the substance of the minutes as they pass. I feel the surface of my flesh stir - it is like the surface of the sea that knows the moon is drawing near it. If I take up a book, I might as well never have seen a line of print before - books are filled, now, with messages aimed only at me. An hour ago, I found this: The blood is listening in my frame, And thronging shadows, fast and thick, Fall on my overflowing eyes... It is as if every poet who ever wrote a line to his own love wrote secretly for me, and for Selina. My blood - even as I write this - my blood, my muscle and every fibre of me, is listening, for her. When I sleep, it is to dream of her. When shadows move across my eye, I know them now for shadows of her. My room is still, but never silent - I hear her heart, beating across the night in time to my own. My room is dark, but darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures - darkness like velvet, darkness like felt, darkness bristling as coir or prison wool.

Jack gazed down at the black surface of the sea. He felt and affinity with the ocean, as if it were a kindred spirit. The knowledge that every drop of water had always been a drop of water, practically since the stars were formed. Water was infinite and immortal.

She raised her head when she heard my step, and her gaze met my own, over the matron's dipping shoulder, and her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick. Does it matter if I feel that, that is so small, and silent, and secret?

You believe that to be a medium you must hold your spirit aside to let another spirit come. That however, is not how it is. You must rather be a servant of the spirits, you must become a plastic instrument for the spirits’ own hands. You must let your spirit be used, your prayer must be always May I be used.

There was a prisoner, I said, in the first cell of the second passage. A fair-haired girl, quite young, quite handsome. What did Miss Craven know of her? The matron's face had grown sour when talking of Cook. Now it grew sour again. 'Selina Dawes,' she said. 'A queer one. Keeps her eyes and her mind to herself--that's all I know. I've heard her called the easiest prisoner in the gaol. They say she has never given an hour's trouble since she was brought here. Deep, I call her.' Deep? 'As the ocean.

Summer Beach … Thunder that is still too far away for us to hear presses down on Ben’s ears and he wakes us and leans hot and chesty first against M., then against me, and listens to our slow, warm words that mean we love him. But when the storm has passed, he is brave again and wants to go out. We open the door and he glides away without a backward glance. It is early, in the blue and grainy air we can just see him running along the edge of the water, into the first pink suggestion of sunrise. And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness - his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world. Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift…

I am too weary. For oh, I am so terribly weary at last! I think, in all of London, there is no-one and nothing so weary as I—unless perhaps the river, which flows beneath the frigid sky, through its accustomed courses, to the sea. How deep, how black, how thick the water seems to-night! How soft its surface seems to lie. How chill its depths must be.

As for women and men, she said—well, that was the first thing that must be cast off.

I shall have to lose one life, to gain another. It will be like death.

Just so did they want to crush our friendship, now. It was against the rules. I

You have brought your own ideas with you into the gaol,’ Miss Haxby said, after a moment. ‘But our ways at Millbank—as you can see—are rather narrow ones.

Miss Craven held up a pair she thought would fit me—monstrous great things they were, of course, and I thought she smiled as she held them.

And yet, I seemed to feel my eyes bound, too, with bands of silk. And at my throat there was a velvet collar.

shall grow dry and pale and paper-thin—like a leaf, pressed tight inside the pages of a dreary black book and then forgotten.

I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I’ve seen them hanging in the curtains,

Then I knew how good you were, to come to me, after all you had seen. The first hour they had me there, do you know what frightened me the most? Oh, it was a torment to me!- far worse than any punishment of theirs. It was the thought that you might stay from me; the thought that I might have driven you away, and with the very thing I meant to keep you near me!

I mean this book to be different to that one. I mean this writting not to turn me back upon my own thoughts, but to serve, like the chloral, to keep the thoughts from coming at all.

felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick. Does it matter if I feel that, that is so small, and silent, and secret?

It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister has for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same.

She ran, and leaned to the wall, until her face was close to mine and her breath came on me. I said, 'I'll do it. I'll go with you. I love you, and I cannot give you up. Only tell me what I must do and I will do it!' Then I saw her eye, and it was black, and my own face swam in it, pale as a pearl. And then, it was like Pa and the looking-glass. My soul left me - I felt it fly from me and lodge in her.

There is no single recipe for making the perfect tea, as there are no rules for producing a Titian or a Sesson. Each preparation of the leaves has its individuality, its special affinity with water and heat, its own method of telling a story. The truly beautiful must always be in it. How much do we not suffer through the constant failure of society to recognise this simple and fundamental law of art and life;

She studied me. It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it. That made her colour again; but it also made her sigh. She walked from me and stood at the bed—and I said at once, ‘Don’t go too near the bed! Don’t you know it’s haunted, by our old kisses? They’ll come and frighten you.

But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me! I have been led to it, Helen, by someone marvellous and strange. You won't know this. They will tell you of her, and they will make her seem squalid and ordinary, they will turn my passion into something gross and wrong. You will know, that it is neither of those things. It is only love, Helen - only that. I cannot live, and not be at her side!

I wish that, if anyone should look for faults in this, then they will find them with me, with me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content.

Miss Haxby, I thought, gazed at the plodding women with a kind of satisfaction. ‘See how they know their places,’ she said. ‘There must be kept a certain distance, look, between each prisoner.’ If that distance is breached, the offending woman is reported and loses privileges. If there are women who are old or sick or feeble, or if there are very young girls—‘We have had girls in the past—haven’t we, Miss Ridley?—of twelve and thirteen’—then the matron sets them walking in a circle of their own.

I would rather visit Selina, than go to Garden Court to visit Helen--for Helen is as full of wedding talk as any of them, but Selina they have so removed from ordinary rules and habits, she might be living, cold and graceful, on the surface of the moon.

In the music of the rushing stream sounds the joyful assurance, "I shall become the sea." It is not a vain assumption; it is true humility, for it is the truth. The river has no other alternative. On both sides of its banks it has numerous fields and forests, villages and towns; it can serve them in various ways, cleanse them and feed them, carry their produce from place to place. But it can have only partial relations with these, and however long it may linger among them it remains separate; it never can become a town or a forest. But it can and does become the sea. The lesser moving water has its affinity with the great motionless water of the ocean. It moves through the thousand objects on its onward course, and its motion finds its finality when it reaches the sea.

I said, Had they any Jewesses? and she answered that there were always a number of Jewesses, and they liked to make ‘a particular trouble’ over the preparation of their dishes. She had encountered that sort of behaviour, amongst the Jewesses, at other prisons.

But, the very neatness and the sameness of the corridors and the men made them troubling: I might have been taken on the same plain route ten times over, I should never have known it. Unnerving, too, is the dreadful clamour of the place. Where the warders stand there are gates, that must be unfastened, and swung on grinding hinges, and slammed and bolted; and the empty passages, of course, echo with the sounds of other gates, and other locks and bolts, distant and near. The prison seems caught, in consequence, at the heart of some perpetual private storm, that left my ears ringing.

I wish you will remember me with kindness, not with pain. Your pain will not help me, where I am going. But your kindness will help my mother, and my brother, as it helped them once before. I wish that, if anyone should look for faults in this, then they will find them with me, with me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content. That this has always been true—well, you of course know that, better than anyone. But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me!

And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same.

I said slowly that, yes, I had seen wretched things there. I said I had seen women unable to speak, because the matrons kept them silent. I had seen women harm themselves, for the variety of it. I had seen women driven mad. There was a woman dying there, I said, because she was kept so cold and badly fed. There was another who had put out her own eye—

Things that accord in tone vibrate together. Things that have affinity in their inmost natures seek one another. Water flows to what is wet, fire turns to what is dry. Clouds (the breath of heaven) follow the dragon, wind (the breath of earth) follows the tiger. . . What is born of heaven feels related to what is above. What is born of earth feels related to what is below. Each follows its kind.

There should have been paintings for us to see. Pictures of things real and not real, of landscapes and people. But in that moment, we could find only a portrait of ruin. We watched a hurricane of black pigeons swoop through a hole in the eaves. The floor opened wide and threatened to swallow us. Where it didn't open, it hosted black pools of water. Light winced across the crumbled walls; rats philosophized from their holes.

we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary . . .

we watched them from our high window and they looked small—they might have been dolls upon a clock, or beads on trailing threads. They spilled into the yards and formed three great elliptical loops, and within a second of their doing that, I could not have said which was the first prisoner to have entered the ground, and which the last, for the loops were seamless, and the women all dressed quite alike, in frocks of brown and caps of white, and with pale blue kerchiefs knotted at their throats. It was only from their poses that I caught the humanity of them: for though they all walked at the same dull pace, there were some, I saw, with drooping heads, and some that limped; some with bodies stiff and hugged against the sudden chill, a few poor souls with faces lifted to the sky—and one, I think, who even raised her eyes to the window that we stood at, and gazed blankly at us. There were all the women of the gaol there, almost three hundred of them, ninety women to each great wheeling line. And in the corner of the yards stood a pair of dark-cloaked matrons, who must stand and watch the prisoners until the exercise is complete.

Flowers, you who end in close affinity to the arrangers’ hands (Hands of girls then, hands of girls now), You who cover the garden table from end to end, Grown weak, gently injured, Waiting for water which revives you once more From a death already commenced - and now Again taken up between the opposing, sorting Fingers and their feeling of you, and which can so well Show you favour, give ease more than you had imagined, As you recover yourselves in a jug, Cooling slowly, and the ardour of the girls like confessions Given up by you, seeping forth like muddy and tiresome sins You committed by being plucked, - these are another tie between you, So joined in alliance by both your blossomings.

Birds were made by transformation: growing feathers instead of hair, they came from harmless but light-witted men, who studied the heavens but imagined in their simplicity that the surest evidence in these matters comes through the eye. Land animals came from men who had no use for philosophy and paid no heed to the heavens because they had lost the use of the circuits in the head and followed the guidance of those parts of the soul that are in the breast. By reason of these practices they let their forelimbs and heads be drawn down to the earth by natural affinity and there supported, and their heads were lengthened out and took any sort of shape into which their circles were crushed together through inactivity. On this account their kind was born with four feet or many, heaven giving to the more witless the greater number of points to support, that they might be all the more drawn earthward. The most senseless, whose whole bodies were stretched at length upon the earth, since they had no further need of feet, the gods made footless, crawling over the ground. The fourth sort, that live in water, came from the most foolish and stupid of all. The gods who remolded their form thought these unworthy any more to breathe the pure air, because their souls were polluted with every sort of transgression; and, in place of breathing the fine and clean air, they thrust them down to inhale the muddy water of the depths. Hence, came fishes and shellfish and all that lives in the water: in penalty for the last extreme of folly they are assigned the last and lowest habitation. These are the principles on which, now, as then all creatures change one into another, shifting their place with the loss or gain of understanding or folly.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellite dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inamrmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribih’ty of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman ? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations : her nocturnal predominance : her satellitic dependence : her luminary reflection : her constancy under all the phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning : the forced invariability of her aspect : her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation : her potency over effluent and refluent waters : her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to rener insane, to incite to and aid delinquency : the tranquil inscrutability of her visage : the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity ; her omens of tempest and of calm : the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence : the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence : her splendour, when visible : her attraction, when invisible.

I got off the train And said good-bye to the man I’d met. We’d been together for eighteen hours And had a pleasant conversation, Fellowship in the journey, And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave This chance friend whose name I never learned. I felt my eyes water with tears . . . Every farewell is a death. Yes, every farewell is a death. In the train that we call life We are all chance events in one another’s lives, And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off. All that is human moves me, because I’m a man. All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity With human ideas or human doctrines But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself. The maid who hated to go, Crying with nostalgia For the house where she’d been mistreated . . . All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness. All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart. And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

Erin. “No matter what else has happened, you’re water and your element is welcome in our circle, but we don’t need any negative energy here—this is too important.” I nodded to the spiders. Erin’s gaze followed mine and she gasped. “What the hell is that?” I opened my mouth to evade her question, but my gut stopped me. I met Erin’s blue eyes. “I think it’s what’s left of Neferet. I know it’s evil and it doesn’t belong at our school. Will you help us kick it out?” “Spiders are disgusting,” she began, but her voice faltered as she glanced at Shaunee. She lifted her chin and cleared her throat. “Disgusting things should go.” Resolutely, she walked to Shaunee and paused. “This is my school, too.” I thought Erin’s voice sounded weird and kinda raspy. I hoped that meant that her emotions were unfreezing and that, maybe, she was coming back around to being the kid we used to know. Shaunee held out her hand. Erin took it. “I’m glad you’re here,” I heard Shaunee whisper. Erin said nothing. “Be discreet,” I told her. Erin nodded tightly. “Water, come to me.” I could smell the sea and spring rains. “Make them wet,” she continued. Water beaded the cages and a puddle began to form under them. A fist-sized clump of spiders lost their hold on the metal and splashed into the waiting wetness. “Stevie Rae.” I held my hand out to her. She took mine, then Erin’s, completing the circle. “Earth, come to me,” she said. The scents and sounds of a meadow surrounded us. “Don’t let this pollute our campus.” Ever so slightly, the earth beneath us trembled. More spiders tumbled from the cages and fell into the pooling water, making it churn. Finally, it was my turn. “Spirit, come to me. Support the elements in expelling this Darkness that does not belong at our school.” There was a whooshing sound and all of the spiders dropped from the cages, falling into the waiting pool of water. The water quivered and began to change form, elongating—expanding. I focused, feeling the indwelling of spirit, the element for which I had the greatest affinity, and in my mind I pictured the pool of spiders being thrown out of our campus, like someone had emptied a pot of disgusting toilet water. Keeping that image in mind, I commanded: “Now get out!” “Out!” Damien echoed. “Go!” Shaunee said. “Leave!” Erin said. “Bye-bye now!” Stevie Rae said. Then, just like in my imagination, the pool of spiders lifted up, like they were going to be hurled from the earth. But in the space of a single breath the dark image reformed again into a familiar silhouette—curvaceous, beautiful, deadly. Neferet! Her features weren’t fully formed, but I recognized her and the malicious energy she radiated. “No!” I shouted. “Spirit! Strengthen each of the elements with the power of our love and loyalty! Air! Fire! Water! Earth! I call on thee, so mote it be!” There was a terrible shriek, and the Neferet apparition rushed forward. It surged from our circle, breaking over Erin

Allah wants to hear you talk. If it had been any other way, he would have made you into a fish. Naze listened, now and then dabbing her eyes with the ends of her headscarf. For a moment, she imagined herself as a fish- a big brown trout in the river, its fins glittering in the sun, its spots surrounded by pale halos. Little did she know that her children and grandchildren would, at different times in their lives, feel attached to various kinds of fish, and affinity with the kingdom under the water would run in the family for generations to come.

you’ve done a bit of chemistry, you might recall that sodium carbonate reacts with CO2 to create sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Well, in Klaus’s machines there is a hanging gallery of strands of a ‘sorbent’ resin – impregnated sodium carbonate – which react with the CO2 in the air flowing over them, the captured CO2 helping to create baking soda. Capturing CO2, though, is only one half of the job. Somehow you’ve got to get the CO2 off the sorbent if you want the apparatus to be reusable and therefore cost-effective. Restocking the whole shebang with a new supply of sorbent resin makes things prohibitively expensive and energy hungry. This is where Lackner’s resin comes into its own, by doing something that even Klaus admits is counterintuitive. In the presence of water the resin changes its affinity for CO2, shedding its recently collected bounty. The ‘collection’ reaction takes a reverse step. Sodium bicarbonate becomes sodium carbonate. What this means is that if Klaus pumps water vapour into his machines, CO2 from the sorbent will ‘fall off’ the resin, allowing the whole apparatus to be reused. Condensing that vapour allows the captured CO2 to bubble out the top, in the same way CO2 bubbles rise to the top of champagne. There’s a kind of sweet poetry to one greenhouse gas (water vapour) collecting another (CO2). After all, one of the problems with CO2 in the atmosphere is that it encourages more water vapour into the air, thereby amplifying the warming effect. Here, thanks to the chemistry of Lackner’s sorbent, the opposite is happening. Water vapour is being used as part of a process to take CO2 out of the air.

Above me I feel your love my Goddess Full of the promise that through you my Goddess All things ripen and come to fruition my Goddess As the diaphanous boundary between worlds my Goddess Is illuminated by the white light of your sign my Goddess I ask that some small ray of your love descend my Goddess Fill this seaborne chalice my Goddess So that I might pour it over me my Goddess And take your gentle touch to the children of the night

She’d just finished Sarah Waters’s Affinity. She was hugely impressed by the writing, the Victorian voice. I was so pleased because I’d recommended it to her. It’s such a compliment, isn’t it, when another person becomes passionate about a book you love. It gives you a connection, a sort of intimacy.

To me, the one basking in infinite glory is you; the one fallen from grace is also you. What matters is you, not the state of you. I…admire San Lang very much. I want to understand your everything, so I’m very envious that someone has already met that version of you so early on. That kind of affinity can only come by chance; it can’t be begged for. And whether that bond should live on is three parts fate and seven parts courage!

Ariana had control over water magic, Mirryn’s strongest power was wind, Oriel was an earth elemental, and Caldon, being born to the Vallentis line through his mother’s side, had an affinity toward fire magic. And then there was Jaren, who held sway over all four of the elements.

The tang of residual blood, faint as it was, danced along her senses, like a fizzy drink on her tongue. Everything sharpened, came into focus and awareness: The background buzz of the radio tubes in the other room that was usually inaudible nearly drowned out the music. The miniscule cracks in the enamel sink became a web of flaws. The effect was almost dizzying; Callie never felt more alive than when she took in the coppery scent. Every mage had an affinity for a particular element that strengthened and enhanced spells. Fire, air, water, earth… Hers was blood.

I feel an affinity with the limestone…the place has absorbed me into its pattern. I’m encircled by an expanse of dissolving land, an entrancing work of water worn away over ineffable ages beneath the same passing sun. And over the months, I’ve understood this landscape’s capacity to alter my perception. It has opened me to the unfathomable beauty of distance and deep time, but also proximity; the things revealed when we draw near.

The affinities tested for in this formation are the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water; the minor space-time elements, light and darkness; and the three balance elements: wind, lightning, and fate.

In his Viveka-Cudāmani (vs. 77), the famous Vedānta master Shankara characterizes objects (vishaya) as “poison” (visha), because they tarnish consciousness by distracting it from its real task, which is to mirror reality. Our attention is constantly pulled outward by objects, and this externalization of our consciousness prevents us from truly being ourselves. “When the mind pursues the roving senses,” states the Bhagavad-Gītā (2.67), “it carries away wisdom (prajnā), even as the wind [carries away] a ship on water.” Sense perceptions pollute our inner environment, keeping our mind in a state of turmoil. We are forever hoping for experiences that will make us happy and whole, but our desire for happiness can never be satisfied by external experiences. “Whatever pleasures spring from contact [with sense objects], they are only sources of suffering,” declares the Bhagavad-Gītā (5.22). To find true happiness and peace, we need to unclutter our mind and remain still. The fatal consequences of focusing on objects rather than the ultimate Subject, the Self, are described very well in that ancient Yoga scripture (2.62–63): When a man contemplates objects, attachment to them is produced. From attachment springs desire [for further contact with the objects] and from desire comes anger (when that desire is frustrated]. From anger arises confusion, from confusion [comes] failure of memory; from failure of memory [arises] the loss of wisdom (buddhi); upon the loss of wisdom, [a person] perishes. Emotional confusion (sammoha) profoundly upsets our cognitive faculties: We lose our sense of direction, purpose, and identity. The Sanskrit word for this state is smriti-bhramsha or “failure of memory/mindfulness.” When we fail to “recollect” ourselves, wisdom (buddhi) cannot shine forth. But without wisdom, we, as members of the species Homo sapiens, are doomed to forfeit not only our status as human beings but our very life. Spiritual ignorance is binding and ultimately ruinous. Wisdom can set us free. In Shankara’s Ātma-Bodha (vs. 16), we read: Even though the Self is all-pervading, it does not shine in everything. It shines only in the organ-of-wisdom (buddhi), like a reflection in a clear medium [such as water or a mirror]. The “organ of wisdom,” which is often called the “higher mind,” is predominantly composed of sattva, the lucidity factor of the cosmos. There is a family resemblance between the sattva and the Self, and this curious affinity makes it possible for the Self’s radiant presence to manifest itself to human beings.

Gardnerian magic runs along affinity lines—fire, water, air, earth and light. I have mostly fire. Lots of it.

According to their sacred texts, the earth was created in seven stages. First, the sky came into being—this was an inverted bowl of beautiful stone. Second, the water was created at the bottom of the sky shell, and then third, the earth that floated on water. To this the gods added one plant, one animal, and a bull, and then in the sixth stage, man. Fire was added in the seventh stage, pervading the entire world and residing in seen and unseen places. As a final act of creation the gods assembled and performed the first sacrifice. The primordial plant, the bull, and the man were crushed and from them the vegetable, animal, and human realms were created and populated the earth. New life and death were created, and the world was set in motion.5 The Noble Ones performed rituals that reenacted this primordial sacrifice to maintain cosmic order and ensure the continuation of the lifecycle. Libations were performed in the home, for example, of water or fire to return these vital elements to the gods to support them, and a perpetual fire was kept burning. The Indo-Iranians revered life, and like all pre-axial peoples, they felt a strong affinity between themselves and animals. They ate only consecrated animal flesh that had been offered to the gods with prayers to ensure the animal’s safe return to the soul of the bull. They believed the soul of the bull was the life energy of the animal world, whose spirit was energized through their sacrifice of animal blood. This nourished the deity and helped the gods look after the animal world and ensured plenty.6 The “catholicity” of the Noble Ones, like that of many of the pre-axial religions, was a consciousness of connectivity to the plants, the animals, the sky, and to the whole of nature. They believed gods or spirits in nature influenced human action, and in turn, human action (and ritual) had its effects on nature. Their sense of the whole was a sense of belonging to a web of life guided by supernatural forces or deities. All things shared the same breadth of life—animals, trees, humans. All things were bound together.

That curve is also the containing narrative shape of the Bible, because the mythical shape of the Bible, if we read it from beginning to end, is a comic one. It's a story in which man is placed in a state of nature from which he falls—the word "fall" is something which this diagram indicates visually.7 At the end of the story, he is restored to the things that he had at the beginning. Judaism focuses upon the story of Israel, which in the Old Testament is to be restored at the end of history, according to the way the prophets see that history. The Christian Bible is focused more on the story of Adam, who represents mankind as falling from a state of integration with nature into a state where he is alienated from nature. In symbolic terms, what Adam loses is the tree and the water of life. Those are images that we'll look at in more detail later. On practically the first page of the Bible we are told that Adam loses the tree and the water of life in the garden of Eden. On practically the last page of the Bible, in the last chapter of the Book of Revelation, the prophet has a vision of the tree and the water of life restored to man. That affinity between the structure of the Bible and the structure of comedy has been recognized for many centuries and is the reason why Dante called his vision of hell and purgatory and heaven a commedia.

Description:  You have learned to tap into your city’s water mana well using your affinity’s relic.   Your absence from the Sea’s Edge – your extended acceptance of Fluffy’s rule in your stead, of the Hippie’s insanity, of your place in this world – has only amplified the power collected by your well, providing a bottomless well of power, deeper and wider than any ocean. Well Level:  23 (43% to level 24) Current “Fucks Given:”  -1500/400 “Fucking” Income:  -8 every two days (average).

The jar her hand had chosen—and it was an odd old wooden jar, a recognizable crooked shape under her fingers, a reject because it would not sit straight on a shelf, the only empty jar she could find when at the last minute she’d decided to take a little more honey on her journey, a little of the mysterious honey, the honey that seemed to suggest laughter and joy and a long bright horizon, the strong-tasting honey whose distinguishing source she could not identify. She’d almost laughed when she decanted it because the bigger crock it lived in was also very crooked, not merely a reject but so lopsided that her mother had kept trying to throw it out, and her father kept rescuing it; and when her father died her mother kept it after all, for those memories of him. Mirasol had thought, as she carefully poured, that perhaps this honey had an affinity for those who do not sit securely, who do not rest peacefully, who limp instead of walk. She hadn’t quite been able to laugh, but she’d been smiling when she tucked it into its corner of a saddlebag, and the smile had been as refreshing as cold water Ron a hot day. This was the honey that had given her energy in the sennight past when she had none, the honey she had put last into the cup for her last-of-all stop on the pavilion hill.

As I walked toward it, and the street became more and more familiar, till the dogs that slept on the porches only lifted their heads as I passed (since Sylvie was not with me), each particular tree, and its season, and its shadow, were utterly known to me, likewise the small desolations of forgotten lilies and irises, likewise the silence of the railroad tracks in the sunlight. I had seen two of the apple trees in my grandmother’s orchard die where they stood. One spring there were no leaves, but they stood there as if expectantly, their limbs almost to the ground, miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two. They have lost their bark and blanched white, and a wind will snap their bones, but if ever a leaf does appear, it should be no great wonder. It would be a small change, as it would be, say, for the moon to begin turning on its axis. It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand—like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things.

SATURN Saturn has a dual essence, violent death and disasters associate him with a companionship with Mars. Saturn is cold, brooding and autocratic in authority. As Saturn is one of lower impulse and death, the creative aspects of Saturn are the inspiration of artistic knowledge, bringing ideas into a material form. Saturn is a Lord of Magick, a balanced authority upon the cycles of time and the death-rebirth of earthly life. Saturn has association with the Goat, Donkey, Peacock, Bat, Spider and Goat-Fish. Kronos, Hera, Ea, Ishtar of Erech as the Lady of Heaven and Queen of the Gods, Kali, Shiva, Ptah (Egypt) and Neith the mysterious bride of Set. Saturn rules over the Goat, Capricorn, Water-Bearer and Aquarius are under the influence of Saturn. Saturn is also the Reaper-planet, the affinity of death and regeneration as a cycle in time.

The mutuality of moss and water. Isn’t this the way we love, the way love propels our own unfolding? We are shaped by our affinity for love, expanded by its presence and shrunken by its lack.

Give me a name that will be something — give me a secret name, a name that has, not the worst of you, but the best…