Alternate Universe Love Quotes

A healer's power stems not from any special ability, but from maintaining the courage and awareness to embody and express the universal healing power that every human being naturally possesses.

I can’t tell you the day that I fell in love with you because there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t.” My voice shakes with more joy than I’ve ever known. “You have the purest parts of my heart, and I’m certain that in every alternate universe, I’m always, always in love with you.

I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will and honesty of my best and oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Christianity in general is well given by Chesterton…As to why God doesn't make it demonstratively clear; are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which would be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn't be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona's innocence when it was proved: but that was too late. Lear believed in Cordelia's love when it was proved: but that was too late. 'His praise is lost who stays till all commend.' The magnanimity, the generosity which will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you would have paid the universe a compliment it doesn't deserve. Your error would even so be more interesting and important than the reality. And yet how could that be? How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

We leave this life the same way that we enter it, totally alone, bereft.

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE IN WHICH I AM UNFAZED BY THE MEN WHO DO NOT LOVE ME when the businessman shoulder checks me in the airport, i do not apologize. instead, i write him an elegy on the back of a receipt and tuck it in his hand as i pass through the first class cabin. like a bee, he will die after stinging me. i am twenty-four and have never cried. once, a boy told me he doesn’t “believe in labels” so i embroidered the word chauvinist on the back of his favorite coat. a boy said he liked my hair the other way so i shaved my head instead of my pussy. while the boy isn’t calling back, i learn carpentry, build a desk, write a book at the desk. i taught myself to cum from counting ceiling tiles. the boy says he prefers blondes and i steam clean his clothes with bleach. the boy says i am not marriage material and i put gravel in his pepper grinder. the boy says period sex is disgusting and i slaughter a goat in his living room. the boy does not ask if he can choke me, so i pretend to die while he’s doing it. my mother says this is not the meaning of unfazed. when the boy says i curse too much to be pretty and i tattoo “cunt” on my inner lip, my mother calls this “being very fazed.” but left over from the other universe are hours and hours of waiting for him to kiss me and here, they are just hours. here, they are a bike ride across long island in june. here, they are a novel read in one sitting. here, they are arguments about god or a full night’s sleep. here, i hand an hour to the woman crying outside of the bar. i leave one on my best friend’s front porch, send my mother two in the mail. i do not slice his tires. i do not burn the photos. i do not write the letter. i do not beg. i do not ask for forgiveness. i do not hold my breath while he finishes. the man tells me he does not love me, and he does not love me. the man tells me who he is, and i listen. i have so much beautiful time.

I know, but still. Hear this now, Mina," he paused. "You are the truest of truths and in some alternate universe where people could be whatever they wanted, you would be Queen.

I'm a fucking idiot. No, he was a man in love with a woman who meant the entire universe to him. Like I said, you're a fucking idiot. And for the first time in his life, he was happy being stupid because the only alternative would be existing without her, and now that he'd tasted the sunlight she brought into his world, he never wanted to live in the darkness again. Please don't send me back to the night.

Yeah, and that alternate universes usually have the worst endings with the unhappiest conclusions." ... "But we're in Earth-616, love. We're going to gave our happy ending. It just may take us awhile to get there.

To be sure, I had, and have, spent the better part of my post-college life growing up in the public eye, with my shameful warts, big and ugly, looming there for the world to see; and it has been a mighty battle trying to be a man, a Black man, a human being, a responsible and consistent human being, as I have interfaced with my past and with my personal demons, with friends and lovers, with enemies and haters. As Tupac Shakur once famously said to me, “There is no placed called careful.” On the one hand, Tupac was right: There is not much room for error in America if you are a Black male in a society ostensibly bent on profiling your every move, eager to capitalize on your falling into this or that trap, particularly keen to swoop down on your self-inflicted mishaps. But by the same token, Tupac was wrong: There can be a place called careful, once one becomes aware of the world one lives in, its potential, its limitations, and if one is willing to struggle to create a new model, some new and alternative space outside and away from the larger universe, where one can be free enough to comprehend that even if the world seems aligned against you, you do not have to give the world the rope to hang you with.

They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria. Does this make them more primitive? Many anthropologists have suggested so, which is why they are so concerned about finding out the Pirahãs notions about God, the world, and creation. But there is an interesting alternative to think about things. Perhaps it is their presence of these concerns that makes a culture more primitive, and their absense that renders a culture more sophisticated. If that is true, the Pirahãs are a very sophisticated people. Does this sound far-fetched? Let's ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a believe that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God?

I had thought that my being would collapse when I gifted my soul', said Neville. 'Why is it then that I still breathe, and feel, and move?' 'Because,' said Mary, 'when you gift something wholly and completely and unhesitatingly it returns to you doublefold.

To think, she’d been so close to choosing Paris. In an alternate universe, alternate Farrah was gallivanting around the French capital with a different set of friends, kissing different boys, traveling to different cities, and learning a different language. This Farrah shivered, her heart breaking for every version of herself that wasn’t right here in Blake’s arms, because this was heaven and every other world was a mere imitation.

Irene felt a desperate surge of nostalgia for her Library. Her life was more than just airship chases, cyborg alligator attacks, and hanging out with this alternate universe’s nearest analogue to Sherlock Holmes. She was a Librarian, and the deepest, most fundamental part of her life involved a love of books. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to shut the rest of the world out and have nothing to worry about except the next page of whatever she was reading.

Resources are often limited, and there will never be a universal solution around that, but in many cases it’s still possible to take what you have and make it what you want.

The smile reached down and lifted the corners of her perfect mouth, causing the stars to come out in some alternate universe.

You have the purest parts of my heart, and I’m certain that in every alternate universe, I’m always, always in love with you.

Small particles of evil were scattered throughout the universe, but the sum total of all that evil was as a grain of sand on a vast beach compared to the goodness, abundance, hope, and unconditional love in which the universe was literally awash. The very fabric of the alternate dimension is love and acceptance, and anything that does not have these qualities appears immediately and obviously out of place there.

I hope I wasn't living in some alternate universe where I wasn't actually your first love, too. But this universe is the only one that matters, and I have one last question for you: I didn't get your history wrong, did I?

Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather, God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good is an atheistic dream. ... George Macdonald... represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness for I have no other to give you.' That is the whole conclusion of the matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - the only food that any possible universe can ever grow - then we must starve eternally.

Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna-maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.

The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn’t even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.

A pandemic paradoxically becomes an opportunity to finally be able to deal with ourselves, in a long interval where the world has stopped and everything around us starts to function at a slow pace. Shopping becomes a long and slow business, and if before we hated getting stuck in the traffic or queuing at the post office, today we can do nothing but adapt to this new world of expectations and shifts, and discover the faces of our fellow men, finally looking them in the face (or rather, in the eyes). We have rediscovered the pleasure of cooking and eating, a world that before the quarantine stopped only on TV with masterchef. If before we considered it a waste of time to cook a plate of pasta, now we have had all the time to devote to cakes, pizzas, biscuits and homemade bread as our grandmothers once did. Rediscovering genuine flavors that have little of "fast" and much of "slow". And so we also found time to read the book that we are not never managed to finish, or we pulled our favorite board game off the shelf. These small gestures, sometimes even insignificant in appearance, are rich in meaning, since they are imbued with our time, our dedication, our passion and our love. Characteristics of the human being that have been forgotten for too long. Thus we find ourselves reflecting on our time, on the past and on the future, observing a precipitous past that makes room for a rich and decidedly slower present. We have resumed the taste of walking slowly, to escape and symbolically get closer to its initiatory role ... the road teaches you that you fall, you get up, you go back, you make miraculous encounters and sometimes you are helped by Samaritans or, in cases worst, deceived by demons. But is always a discovery, going towards something new, a unique experience in which the mind is regenerated. Walking is rediscovered today as an existential alternative, as an opposition to speed, to displacement technologies, it is essentially a criticism of the dominant competitive spirit. We have given importance to windows and balconies, from where you can observe small corners of the world. Terraces from which to peer into the universe, to observe the rising sun, setting, to discover that in the sky there is a wonderful creature called the Moon, accompanied by billions of stars. We finally had a chat with our neighbors who are no longer perfect strangers, we made friends with boredom and, let's face it, we found that time, in general, is not just that marked by watches. Suddenly we found ourselves in the present time, immersed in the much-talked about Here and Now, but little frequented. This small temporal space that marks our life, which contains our ugliest and most beautiful experiences, which brings our youth with us and will bring our old age, becomes the protagonist of this pandemic, which if on the one hand has stuck, on the other it gave us the opportunity to look at our life with different eyes, which seemed to really need to stop for a moment to breathe. Because let's put it on our heads, slowness is not a waste of time, but awareness of one's life time!

The thing that's hard about it—the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance—is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now—the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong.

Hand-holding those who don’t share your cultural background to address the needs of people who do, is a tough task. When you are part of a majority or a privileged class, it’s hard to accept that your needs and your perspective are anything but universal. It’s even harder to understand that addressing the needs of the few won’t suddenly marginalize the many. Those “majority needs” and that “privileged perspective” will also be acknowledged and accommodated. That’s fine. They just can’t be the only ones in the spotlight.

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution. The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in a her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankellior Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small.

This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency—given a constant concupiscence coefficient—of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, omnidirectional consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight" flip-flop circuits, since Trurl held here to the position of Dr. Yentzicus, creator of the famous oculo-oscular feel theory. There were also all sorts of auxiliary components, like a high-frequency titillizer, an alternating tantalator, plus an entire set of lecherons and debaucheraries; on the outside, in a special glass case, were enormous dials, on which one could carefully follow the course of the whole decaptivation process. Statistical analysis revealed that the femfatalatron gave positive, permanent results in ninety-eight cases of unrequited amatorial superfixation out of a hundred.

Cesca sipped from her coffee cup as she peered through the windshield into the darkness. Rain was falling hard on a San Francisco she didn’t recognize from her own universe, or from her time in the other Matt’s universe. The real darkness here had nothing to do with night. This San Francisco mirrored the moral corruption and decay of the society which inhabited it. She and Ariel had been here two days, scouring streets filled with perversion and hopelessness; alleyways inhabited by the homeless and mentally ill; sex shops catering to every perversion imaginable and unimaginable; sidewalks teeming with drug addicts and male prostitutes — some dressed as women; street corners inhabited by once lovely young women prematurely aging from selling their bodies to all takers — male and female; children of both sexes, from as young as seven and eight, dressed by pimps to attract pedophiles who cruised this part of the city nightly. Many of the children would be sold on the spot, never to be seen again. Sun-faded and now graffitied wall mosaics of galvanizing yet transient political cult personalities, erected by their blinded followers centuries ago, marked this alternate world’s gradual slide into an ethical, and finally moral abyss, from which it had never crawled out. "God, I can’t believe this is San Francisco,” whispered Ariel from the seat next to Cesca. “I feel like I need to run a bar of soap over my soul.

Somewhere in the universe a star exploded or someone was born or they died or time passed while Regan stood there and missed him, while she mourned him, and then she thought with an equally quiet violence: Maybe I do not have to do it alone. By minute fifteen he was finally gone, turning abruptly and half-sprinting for the doors, and in his absence Regan emptied, watching all their alternate lives begin to wilt. She mourned them like her children, holding their lifeless corpses to her chest, and then she forgot them, slowly, each one vanishing without a trace, until she held nothing at all. Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it. Damn it, I love him. Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.

It is often said that the First World War killed Romanticism and faith in progress, but if science facilitated industrial-scale slaughter in the form of the war, it also failed to prevent it in the form of the Spanish flu. The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport, and it was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth-century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail. ‘Arguably

The church is a people called out of the world to embody a social alternative that the world cannot know on its own terms. We are not simply asking the government to be what God has commissioned the church to be. After all, even the best government can’t legislate love. We can build hundreds of units of affordable housing (a good thing by the way) and people still might not have homes. We can provide universal health care and keep folks breathing longer (another nice move), but people can be breathing and still not truly be alive. We can create laws to enforce good behavior, but no law has ever changed a human heart or reconciled a broken relationship. The church is not simply suggesting political alternatives. The church is embodying one. The idea that the church is to be the body of Christ is not just something to read about in theology books and leave for the scholars to pontificate about. We are literally to be the body of Jesus in the world. Christians are to be little Christs—people who put flesh on Jesus in the world today.

Jason, it’s a pleasure.” Instead of being in awe or “fangirling” over one of the best catchers in the country, my dad acts normal and doesn’t even mention the fact that Jason is a major league baseball player. “Going up north with my daughter?” “Yes, sir.” Jason sticks his hands in his back pockets and all I can focus on is the way his pecs press against the soft fabric of his shirt. “A-plus driver here in case you were wondering. No tickets, I enjoy a comfortable position of ten and two on the steering wheel, and I already established the rule in the car that it’s my playlist we’re listening to so there’s no fighting over music. Also, since it’s my off season, I took a siesta earlier today so I was fresh and alive for the drive tonight. I packed snacks, the tank is full, and there is water in reusable water bottles in the center console for each of us. Oh, and gum, in case I need something to chew if this one falls asleep.” He thumbs toward me. “I know how to use my fists if a bear comes near us, but I’m also not an idiot and know if it’s brown, hit the ground, if it’s black, fight that bastard back.” Oh my God, why is he so adorable? “I plan on teaching your daughter how to cook a proper meal this weekend, something she can make for you and your wife when you’re in town.” “Now this I like.” My dad chuckles. Chuckles. At Jason. I think I’m in an alternate universe. “I saw this great place that serves apparently the best pancakes in Illinois, so Sunday morning, I’d like to go there. I’d also like to hike, and when it comes to the sleeping arrangements, I was informed there are two bedrooms, and I plan on using one of them alone. No worries there.” Oh, I’m worried . . . that he plans on using the other one. “Well, looks like you’ve covered everything. This is a solid gentleman, Dottie.” I know. I really know. “Are you good? Am I allowed to leave now?” “I don’t know.” My dad scratches the side of his jaw. “Just from how charismatic this man is and his plans, I’m thinking I should take your place instead.” “I’m up for a bro weekend,” Jason says, his banter and decorum so easy. No wonder he’s loved so much. “Then I wouldn’t have to see the deep eye-roll your daughter gives me on a constant basis.” My dad leans in and says, “She gets that from me, but I will say this, I can’t possibly see myself eye-rolling with you. Do you have extra clothes packed for me?” “Do you mind sharing underwear with another man? Because I’m game.” My dad’s head falls back as he laughs. “I’ve never rubbed another man’s underwear on my junk, but never say never.” “Ohhh-kay, you two are done.” I reach up and press a kiss to my dad’s cheek. “We are leaving.” I take Jason by the arm and direct him back to the car. From over his shoulder, he mouths to my dad to call him, which my dad replies with a thumbs up. Ridiculous. Hilarious. When we’re saddled up in the car, I let out a long breath and shift my head to the side so I can look at him. Sincerely I say, “Sorry about that.” With the biggest smile on his face, his hand lands on my thigh. He gives it a good squeeze and says, “Don’t apologize, that was fucking awesome.

Both of those alternate universes were wonderful. Different from each other but equally wonderful. In different ways (in the poor Mexican one I enjoyed being close to the streetnote street, not “earth” or “soil”—and being in a familiar place. In the wealthy cosmopolitan one I enjoyed variety and expensive tastes), each was equally complete, an entire world. It’s as if God informed me:  “You turn north, I’ll spin for you an entire world and a wonderful one which you’ll love.”“You turn south, I’ll plant you in a little town and it’ll be a whole universe, that little town, with dreams about other towns in the north, rumors of wealth you will treasure as rumors.”“You decided to live dead-center, and I will show you that the Tao, which is what you have found in Fullerton, because there you do speak in public, you do receive royal guests, but near you is the poor barrio, and you’re stuck in Fullerton forever as if you were poor—you decide on the Tao, the Middle Path, and I will show you that each path is the Middle Path, that there is no universe which I can’t make complete. You can’t be where I am not. And if I am there, which I always am, it is a total world, good as any other.

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.

Someone once asked me if I’ve ever been in love. .. I wasn’t sure how to answer her. Out of all the billions of people in the world, I’ve had a few mysterious encounters, a few scattered occasions where I met someone who seemed to awaken some unknown part in me. On the rare occasion, I’ve lost myself in someone. I became so consumed with her that I lost all sense of time and space. I forgot where I was, what I was, who I was, until there was only the two of us, melting together like a soul on fire, and the world around us faded into oblivion, until we were the only thing left in the entire universe. I felt my skin tingle and my heart grow so full I thought it might explode, and I could not stop thinking about her, and I saw the untapped potential of an alternate future flash before my eyes, all the myriad memories of passion and pain and searing romance all overlapping, layers upon layers, like the stars. Then the world returned and there we were again, two ordinary people full of desperate, trembling longing, with only a dim recollection of the moment we both shared. But the vision of that alternate future still lingered in my mind’s eye. In that world between worlds, I could still feel her, could practically taste her on my lips. Have I ever been in love? I’d like to think so. Because if that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.

And for the four remaining days - the ninety-six remaining hours - we mapped out a future away from everything we knew. When the walls of the map were breached, we gave one another courage to build them again. And we imagined our home an old stone barn filled with junk and wine and paintings, surrounded by fields of wildflowers and bees. I remember our final day in the villa. We were supposed to be going that evening, taking the sleeper back to England. I was on edge, a mix of nerves and excitement, looking out to see if he made the slightest move toward leaving, but he didn’t. Toiletries remained on the bathroom shelves, clothes stayed scattered across the floor. We went to the beach as usual, lay side by side in our usual spot. The heat was intense and we said little, certainly nothing of our plans to move up to Provence, to the lavender and light. To the fields of sunflowers. I looked at my watch. We were almost there. It was happening. I kept saying to myself, he’s going to do it. I left him on the bed dozing, and went out to the shop to get water and peaches. I walked the streets as if they were my new home. Bonjour to everyone, me walking barefoot, oh so confident, free. And I imagined how we’d go out later to eat, and we’d celebrate at our bar. And I’d phone Mabel and Mabel would say, I understand. I raced back to the villa, ran up the stairs and died. Our rucksacks were open on the bed, our shoes already packed away inside. I watched him from the door. He was silent, his eyes red. He folded his clothes meticulously, dirty washing in separate bags. I wanted to howl. I wanted to put my arms around him, hold him there until the train had left the station. I’ve got peaches and water for the journey, I said. Thank you, he said. You think of everything. Because I love you, I said. He didn’t look at me. The change was happening too quickly. Is there a taxi coming? My voice was weak, breaking. Madame Cournier’s taking us. I went to open the window, the scent of tuberose strong. I lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. An airplane cast out a vivid orange wake that ripped across the violet wash. And I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit. The bottle of pastis? he said. I smiled at him. You take it, I said. We lay in our bunks as the sleeper rattled north and retraced the journey of ten days before. The cabin was dark, an occasional light from the corridor bled under the door. The room was hot and airless, smelled of sweat. In the darkness, he dropped his hand down to me and waited. I couldn’t help myself, I reached up and held it. Noticed my fingertips were numb. We’ll be OK, I remember thinking. Whatever we are, we’ll be OK. We didn’t see each other for a while back in Oxford. We both suffered, I know we did, but differently. And sometimes, when the day loomed gray, I’d sit at my desk and remember the heat of that summer. I’d remember the smells of tuberose that were carried by the wind, and the smell of octopus cooking on the stinking griddles. I’d remember the sound of our laughter and the sound of a doughnut seller, and I’d remember the red canvas shoes I lost in the sea, and the taste of pastis and the taste of his skin, and a sky so blue it would defy anything else to be blue again. And I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible./

Hey, Ben,” she says, ignoring the rest of us. “You want to dance?” Ben’s cheeks turn the same scarlet as Rosie’s dress. He and Ryder exchange a pointed look while Lucy and I just stand there gawking. “Go on, man,” Ryder says, nudging him. “You look great, Rosie,” he adds. “Nice dress.” She smiles up at him, her blue eyes seeming to glitter beneath the disco-ball lighting. “Thanks. You don’t look so bad yourself.” She glances from Ryder to me and back to Ryder again. “The two of you…You looked good together up there.” “I know, right?” Lucy nods, and I shoot her a “what are you doing?” glare. She ignores it. “Maybe these two should stop the hating and listen to their parents.” An awkward silence follows. Finally, Ben seems to remember why Rosie came over in the first place. “Um, you want to go dance?” “Yeah. I love this song.” Ben nods. “Okay. Catch you guys later.” Rosie’s smile seems genuine as she follows Ben to the dance floor. I hope that means she’s finally figured out what a sweetheart he is. As soon as they’re gone, Lucy lets out a low whistle. “Whoa, did that just happen?” “I think it did,” I say, watching as Rosie wraps her arms around Ben’s neck. She must have said something funny, because he throws his head back and laughs. Lucy shakes her head in amazement. “I swear, it’s like we’re in some kind of alternate universe tonight.” “Well, in that case, how about you and me, Luce?” Mason says with a cocky grin. “Think you can handle me on the dance floor?” “Oh, what the hell?” Lucy says with a shrug. “Why not!” She reaches for Mason’s hand and drags him toward the dance floor but stops a few feet away and turns back to face Ryder and me. “Hey, you two--behave!” In seconds, she and Mason are swallowed by the crowd. “And then there were two,” Ryder says, reaching for my hand. He leans down, his lips near my ear. “Do you have any idea how badly I want to kiss you right now?” he whispers. “Later,” I say with a shiver. It’s not an empty word. It’s a promise. He gives my hand a squeeze. “So…until then, I guess we dance.” “We dance,” I say as a slow song begins to play. Talk about good timing.

Anyone want to help me start PAPA, Parents for Alternatives to Punishment Association? (There is already a group in England called ‘EPPOCH’ for end physical punishment of children.) In Kohn’s other great book Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, he explains how all punishments, even the sneaky, repackaged, “nice” punishments called logical or natural consequences, destroy any respectful, loving relationship between adult and child and impede the process of ethical development. (Need I mention Enron, Martha Stewart, the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or certain car repairmen?) Any type of coercion, whether it is the seduction of rewards or the humiliation of punishment, creates a tear in the fabric of relational connection between adults and children. Then adults become simply dispensers of goodies and authoritarian dispensers of controlling punishments. The atmosphere of fear and scarcity grows as the sense of connectedness that fosters true and generous cooperation, giving from the heart, withers. Using punishments and rewards is like drinking salt water. It does create a short-term relief, but long-term it makes matters worse. This desert of emotional connectedness is fertile ground for acting-out to get attention. Punishment is a use of force, in the negative sense of that word, not an expression of true power or strength. David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. author of the book Power v. Force writes “force is the universal substitute for truth. The need to control others stems from lack of power, just as vanity stems from lack of self-esteem. Punishment is a form of violence, an ineffective substitute for power. Sadly though parents are afraid not to hit and punish their children for fear they will turn out to be bank robbers. But the truth may well be the opposite. Research shows that virtually all felony offenders were harshly punished as children. Besides children learn thru modeling. Punishment models the tactic of deliberately creating pain for another to get something you want to happen. Punishment does not teach children to care about how their actions might create pain for another, it teaches them it is ok to create pain for another if you have the power to get away with it. Basically might makes right. Punishment gets children to focus on themselves and what is happening to them instead of developing empathy for how their behavior affects another. Creating

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

Creation involves concealment. The word olam, universe, is semantically linked to the word neelam, “hidden”. To give mankind some of His own creative powers – the use of language to think, communicate, understand, imagine alternative futures and choose between them – God must do more than create homo sapiens. He must efface Himself (what the kabbalists called tzimtzum) to create space for human action. No single act more profoundly indicates the love and generosity implicit in creation. God as we encounter Him in the Torah is like a parent who knows He must hold back, let go, refrain from intervening, if his children are to become responsible and mature.

For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to “understand” what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say.

The relation demanded by religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to believe, and which modern science decisively rejects.

For believers who pray the same prayers week after week, who come to the Communion table expecting to be changed, we must claim that it is possible for lives to be rescripted. We must assert that it's possible for habits and language to be reshaped by a different, more powerful story. The seeds for critiquing our behavior, - indeed, for critiquing the tradition itself - are there inside the narrative we claim. The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn't even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.

There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.

see B&P or my name on an event, they know there will be at least 10 black people there. It encourages black people to come out. Even when we throw an event, it’s fully inclusive and we’ll still only make up a small percentage of the attendees, but [black people)] know they will have people there.” The idea that these groups are unnecessary or that they further divide a small community furthers the notion that white experiences are universal experiences. As I’ve stated earlier, on more occasions than I can count, I’ve found myself as the sole person of color at an event for polyamorous people. Although we all had polyamory in common, once the conversations moved to unrelated territory, I’ve found myself struggling to stay engaged with others…or others struggling to stay engaged with me. It’s not an intentional or malicious disconnect, but it’s something that should be acknowledged, discussed, and understood. If spending time in spaces that cater to our cultural similarities can help us find comfort when we’re in the spaces that do not, both spaces have a valid purpose and right to exist.

This is Radical Exoticism: the rule governing the world. It is not a law, for the law is the universal principle of understanding, the regulated interplay of differences, moral, political and economic rationality. It is a rule - and, like all rules, implies an arbitrary predestination. Consider languages, none of which is reducible to any other. Languages are predestined, each according to its own rules, its own arbitrary determinants, its own implacable logic. Each obeys the laws of communication and exchange, certainly, but at the same time it answers to an indestructible internal coherence; a language as such is, and must forever remain, fundamentally untranslatable into any other language. This explains why all languages are so 'beautiful' - precisely because they are foreign to one another. A law is never ineluctable: it is a concept, founded upon a consensus. A rule, by contrast, is indeed ineluctable, because it is not a concept but a form that orders a game. Seduction illustrates this well. Eros is love - the force of attraction, of fusion, of conjunction. Seduction is the far more radical figure of disjunction, distraction, illusion and diversion, a figure that alters essence and meaning, alters identity and the subject. And, contrary to common belief, entropy is on the side not of universal disjunction but of conjunction and fusion, of love and understanding - on the side of the proper use of differences. Seduction - exoticism - is an excess of the other, of otherness, the vertiginous appeal of what is 'more different than different' : this is what is irreducible - and this is the true source of energy. In this predestined world of the Other, everything comes from elsewhere - happy or unhappy events, illnesses, even thoughts themselves. All imperatives flow from the non-human - from gods, beasts, spirits, magic. This is a universe of fatality, not of psychology. According to Julia Kristeva we become estranged from ourselves by internalizing the other, and this estrangement from ourselves takes the form - among others - of the unconscious. But in the world of fatality the unconscious does not exist. There is no universal form of the unconscious, as psychoanalysis claims, and the only alternative to unconscious repression is fatality - the imputation of everything to a completely nonhuman agency, an agency which is external to the human and delivers us from it.

You know nothing says love like a man holding a bucket, waiting for you to hurl into it." "No, offense, you start hurling and I'm going to be needed immediately downstairs in the casino ... I guarantee it." She glared at him with only her one eye open. "That's not very romantic." He scoffed at her aggravated tone. "Excuse me? Did I miss something? What has ever been romantic about vomit?" "A man standing by your side when you're sick. Holding your hair back from your face ... that's romantic." "In what alternate universe do you live? Here in a place I like to call reality, that's disgusting. Who in their right mind would find that romantic?

Forgive me, but," he begins, and I know this can be going nowhere good, "what about the men who watch our channel? Do we really want to look so biased? We can't alienate half our viewership." I see Katherine open her mouth to respond, but then I must enter some kind of alternate reality in which I think I'm the best one to take these questions, as I open my big mouth and beat her to the punch. "Who's to say they'll be alienated, though? Men watch plenty of TV shows and movies led by women. Or if they don't, they certainly should. We've been put through five million Fast and the Furious and James Bond movies, for goodness' sake. And if they're opposed to watching and learning from women, because they think we're boring or don't get our perspectives, well, I reckon they're part of the problem." I fold my arms over my chest defiantly, then lose my remaining nerve and avert my eyes from those of the CEO. When I look at the other women instead, they're all staring at me with some measure of shock, some looking amused and impressed on top of that. Katherine is the first one to shake herself out of it and narrows her gaze on Geoffrey Block, CEO, once more. "It may also be of interest to you that if this series doesn't happen at Friends of Flavor, I plan on hosting it on my personal site, the Kat's Muse. I have advertisers who have long expressed interest in helping me launch my own videos, but I've been reluctant to take any of FoF's thunder. I would feel obligated to make it clear, though, that I was only hosting the series because this channel had rejected the proposal." My jaw drops along with Katherine's figurative mic. She kept that little contingency plan from us yesterday, but damn. Of course she had a secret weapon in her back pocket. Lily pipes up, "And if you all didn't know, men do not make up half of Friends of Flavor viewers. More like thirty percent. Meaning women are seventy percent. Maybe worth looking at who's really getting alienated." Well okay, Lily. For someone who spends so much of the time off in her own mental universe, she sure knows how to pop back down to earth and spit facts when needed.

Why do siblings argue so much? Well, let’s start with a brilliant analogy from Elaine Mazlish and Adele Faber, authors of one of my favorite parenting books, Siblings Without Rivalry. They remind us that when a child gets a sibling, it feels to them similar to how it would feel for you if your partner got a second spouse. Imagine your partner comes home and says, “Amazing news! We’re getting a second wife! You’re going to be a big wife and now we’ll have a little wife and we’re going to be one big happy family!” If you’re like me, you’d look around the room thinking, “WHAT? Am I in an alternative universe? Why is this good for me?” All of your relatives and neighbors ask you if you’re so excited about this new wife, then nine months later everyone showers her with gifts and hugs, and forever after, you’re expected to love this woman and get along swimmingly. Imagine one day you take one of her items—something that used to be yours—out of her hand and everyone yells at YOU about it, saying, “You can’t do things like this! You can’t take a toy from a little wife! Look how small and helpless and innocent she is!” By this point, I think we’d be beyond confused . . . we’d be filled with the rage that comes from feeling unseen. This. Is. Siblinghood.

I lied," the dragon said with a fearful complacency. "Everyone you have ever met has lied to you. Life exists, and all who live are born to suffer. The best moments are fleeting and bought with the coin of exquisite torment. All attachments end. All loved ones die. All that you value passes away. In such a vexatious existence laughter is madness and joy is folly. Shall we accept that it all happens for no reason, with no cause? That there is nobody to blame but ourselves but that accepting the responsibility is pointless for doing so cannot ease, defer, or deaden the pain? Not likely! It is so much more comforting to erect a straw figure on which to blame it all. "Some bow down before the Goddess and others curse her every name. There is not a fart's difference between the two approaches. They cling to the fiction of the Goddess because admitting the alternative is unbearable." "Then what—why—what do you want me for?" To her dismay, tears coursed down Jane's face. Oh how Melanchthon must be enjoying this, she thought. What satisfaction it must give him. "You've toyed with me, made promises, gone through Hell-knows-what machinations to bring me here. Why? What's the point of it?" "I want your help to destroy the universe.

That’s crazy! We can’t go the way of—” “Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder—Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan’s estimate likely to be of use to him. “Remember what we found in the DMZ?” “The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused. “After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him, love.” He looks at Amber. Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he’s stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn’t, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary. “We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. “There’s a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I’m not so sure now. I think it’s something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity—they’re bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else, and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were”—she licks her lips—“lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It’s like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it’s ‘game over’ for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone.

Why would a perfect being, such as God, need to create any less perfect beings? The answer, said Edwards, is that God is perfectly loving and so wishes to share that love with creatures capable of love. Edwards's starting point was that a loving God stands at the heart of the universe. So for Edwards the universe is most essentially personal; it is the creative expression of a person. Edwards's emphasis on personality at the center of reality presents a sharp contrast to most modern views. Since the Enlightenment many modern thinkers have built their theories on the premise that the universe is essentially impersonal, controlled by natural laws. Edwards challenged that view with a vital alternative: that at the core of reality is a loving God, and that love is the dynamic behind the creation of the universe and everything in it. Starting with a sense of God's love at the center of reality then shapes the way we think of true virtue. At the core of reality is the beauty of the love of God pouring forth, so that the highest good is to return that love to God.

chaos in her eyes Sitting with Christine, thinking about the chaos in her eyes, his emotional chaos, plotting to lure her out for a weekend of love, he wished in a chaotic, physical logic,” I wish I could count the number of causes and their probabilities that affect your feelings about me and that will determine what kind of answer I get if I ask you out for a date.” -What? What is that you just said? (An internal voice). By knowing the causes and the probabilities of the order in which they occur, you predict emotions Is that possible? Can we treat human emotions like the weather? Are there sensors to measure our emotions across time points in our history from which we can predict our future actions and their impact on us and others? Is there a computer with enormous capacity that can collect, analyze, and predict them? Do human emotions fall within this randomness? Throughout their history, physicists have rejected the idea of a relationship between human emotions and the surrounding world. Emotions are incomprehensible, they cannot be expected, what cannot be expected cannot be measured, what cannot be measured cannot be formulated into equations, and what cannot be formulated into equations, screw it, reject it, get rid of it, it is not part of this world. These ideas were acceptable to physicists in the past before we knew that we can control the effect of randomness to some extent through control sciences, and predict it by collecting a huge amount of data through special sensors and analyzing it. What affects when a plane arrives? Wind speed and direction? Our motors compensate for this unwanted turbulence. A lightning strike could destroy it? Our lightning rods control this disturbance and neutralize its danger. Running out of fuel? We have fuel meter indicators. Engine failure? We have alternative solutions for an emergency landing. All fall under the category of control sciences, But what about the basic building blocks of an airplane model during its flight? Humans themselves! A passenger suddenly felt dizzy, and felt ill, did the pilot decide to change his destination to the nearest airport? Another angry person caused a commotion, did he cause the flight to be canceled? Our emotions are part of this world, affect it, and can be affected by, interact with. Since we can predict chaos if we have the tools to collect, measure, and analyze it, and since we can neutralize its harmful effects through control science, thus, we can certainly do the same to human emotions as we do with weather and everything else that we have been able to predict and neutralize its undesirable effect. But would we get the desired results? nobody knows… -“Not today, not today, Robert”, he spoke to himself. – If you can’t do it today, you can’t do it for a lifetime, all you have to do now is simply to ask her out and let her chaos of feelings take you wherever she wants. Unconsciously, about to make the request, his phone rang, the caller being his mother and the destination being Tel Aviv. Standing next to Sheikh Ruslan at the building door, this wall fascinated him. -The universe worked in some parts of its paint even to the point of entropy, which it broke, so it painted a very beautiful painting, signed by its greatest law, randomness. If Van Gogh was here, he would not have a nicer one. Sheikh Ruslan knocked on the door, they heard the sound of footsteps behind him, someone opened a small window from it, as soon as he saw the Sheikh until he closed it immediately, then there was a rattle in the stillness of the alley, iron locks opening. Here Robert booked a front-row seat for the night with the absurd, illogic and subconscious.

John’s adolescence was marked by loss. When he was thirteen his father died, swiftly followed by his two sisters. Shortly after he turned seventeen his eldest brother, James, whose progress through his chosen medics, career had taken him to London, became unable to work due to ill health and returned to the farm, lying for days on one of the beds that pulled out from the walls of the two-roomed cottage like drawers, coughing himself to death at least while John watched or was nearby; and I find it hard to imagine, now, when death is largely hedged about with treatment plans, when it does not often come senseless out of nowhere, but can be postposted, or if not, then at least explained, what grief must have been like when that boundary was a curtain you could put your hand through. It is easy to think that when death could be so quickly turned to, a matter of mistral and all families counted lost children in their numbers, that loss must have been a blunter thing- that having so much practice, they must have been better at it, or inoculated, that it cannot have been for them such devastation, this laying waste- as the birth of a tenth child might be of less account in a busy week than the loss of a pair of, so that the date of it was not looked for until later, when it was found to have been forgotten. It is easy to think that in an age without anaesthetics, when legs might be hacked off on kitchen tables, teeth pulled sigh pliers taking gobbets of jaw and gun away with the , that pain must have been somehow a less precise, less devastating thing, the alternative being unthinkable- that it was just the same but persisting, could only be endured, to universal to allow concession; and so John Hunter watched the bodies of those he loved carried out of the tiny farmhouse one by one, making their last journey to the church, and afterwards he went about the business of his day, he went to school or to the fields, and then at last, summoned by William, the sole surviving brother he barely remembered, he went to London and, did not return.

Freud appears to realize that logically one cannot prove a negative—one cannot prove that God does not exist. The only real defense of his worldview is to discredit its alternative. Thus, Freud undertook a systematic and sustained attack on the spiritual worldview. He attacked it with sledgehammer blows. He wrote that the “tales of miracles . . . contradicted everything that had been taught by sober observation and betrayed too clearly the influence of the activity of the human imagination.” He asserted that the Scriptures “are full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications”; he said no intelligent person can accept the “absurdities” or “fairy tales” of believers. Freud wrote that the doctrines of religion “bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity,” that the specific doctrine that “the universe was created by a being resembling a man, but magnified in every respect . . . an idealized superman . . . reflects the gross ignorance of primitive peoples.

To think, she’d been so close to choosing Paris. In an alternate universe, alternate Farrah was gallivanting around the French capital with a different set of friends, kissing different boys, traveling to different cities, and learning a different language.

You had now lived outside India longer than you lived in it. Your relationship with your motherland was complex, so much so that I think you struggled to talk about it. It must have been so bittersweet and even painful for you to visit, catching a glimpse of a parallel universe that held both your past and your alternate present in one view; a place that, like you, had changed so much that neither of you could fully recognize the other anymore; yet simultaneously a place that saw and loved you in a way that your other, permanent home never could. Your grief, like all grief, forced you to hold contradictory emotions at once: longing and repulsion, relief and agitation, freedom and entrapment.