Ambient Quotes

It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store's ambient stereo. The movie ofmy life must be really low-budget.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

If you lower the ambient noise of your life and listen expectantly for those whispers of God, your ears will hear them. And when you follow their lead, your world will be rocked.

Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run.

Disfruto mucho de la Literatura Fantástica por todo lo real que involucra. El Lector está relajado, con las defensas bajas, tratando de disfrutar de una aventura desestructurada. Este particular contexto es el ambiente ideal para que te dejes transportar hacia un mundo imaginario que, paradójicamente, te dejará reflexionando sobre cuestiones de la vida que, por más que no podamos llegar a comprenderlas del todo, poco tienen que ver con la ficción.

I mean, what am I - some clueless animal who needs love and companionship? As it turns out, yes - that is what kind of animal I am. I just never realized it before because there was enough ambient love and companionship around to make it seem like maybe I don't have needs, and that's why it doesn't feel like I need anything.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

We hear the ambient noise of children singing. We hear lions and tigers roar. Hyenas laugh. Some jungle bird or howler monkey declares its existence, screeching a maniac's gibberish. Our entire world, always doing battle against the silence and obscurity of death.

By solemn vision and bright silver dream His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart its choicest impulses.

Un día, los hombres descubrirán un alfabeto en los ojos de las calcedonias, en los pardos terciopelos de la falena, y entonces se sabrá con asombro que cada caracol manchado era, desde siempre, un poema.

Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.

...se enamoró de su porte aristocrático, su apellido y el ambiente que lo rodeaba.

Il presente a volte può essere un pessimo ambiente se arredato con i residui di un passato difficile da dimenticare.

And strong-looking. Like the kind of guy you feel standing next to you before you actually see him, because he’s blocking so much ambient light.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

No hay feminismo sin independencia económica. Eso lo vi claramente en mi infancia con la situación de mi madre. Las mujeres necesitamos disponer de ingresos propios y manejarlos, para eso se requiere educación, capacitación y un ambiente laboral y familiar adecuado.

...los nómadas y sus rebaños tomaban lo que necesitaban y luego se iban, dejando tras de sí una naturaleza aún más rica que antes.

The mime must first of all be aware of this boundless contact with things. There is no insulating layer of air between the man and the outside world. Any man who moves causes ripples in the ambient word in the same way a fish does when it moves in the water.

The journey transforms the destination.

AMBIENT FEAR: background anxiety of everyday life

The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And there’s the work of Robert Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph. I don’t want to list names because lists are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Mi piace leggere i testi in lingua originale, perché con la traduzione è come se perdessero la loro identità. Le parole sono come le persone: solo se le leggi nel loro ambiente quotidiano puoi conoscerle davvero.

...los PCB eran fluidos que nunca dejaban de lubricar; los PBDE, aislantes que nunca dejaban de evitar que el plástico se derritiera, y el DDT, un pesticida que nunca dejaba de matar. Como tales, ahora resultan difíciles de destruir; algunos, como los PCB, apenas muestran signo alguno de biodegradarse.

Discovering Distilled Creativity "Amazing how sitting down to listen with no distractions - no tv, no devices, no radio - can enhance your life; the sigh of the wind the only ambient noise. Then, in that still moment, your distilled creativity comes because you feel so connected to the Universe.

Is the ambient noise level of my life low enough for me to hear the whispers of the Lord?

There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality?

First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself—about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.

La desaparición de la humildad, en un ser humano desaforadamente entusiasmado con la posibilidad de dominarlo todo sin límite alguno, sólo puede terminar dañando a la sociedad y al ambiente.

It is psychotic to draw a line between two places. It is psychotic to go. It is psychotic to look. Psychotic to live in a different country forever. Psychotic to lose something forever. The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic. Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy. It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help. Which is right? Neither. Both. Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.

Ha entrado en escena el Homo sedentarius. Ahora es el alimento el que migra hacia nosotros, junto con artículos de lujo y otros bienes de consumo que no existieron durante la mayor parte de la historia humana.

(...) de que o objetivo do ambientalismo não tem a ver com tentar usar menos, mas antes com tentar ser mais. Não tem a ver com beneficiarmos de menos coisas, mas antes com darmos aquilo que de melhor há dentro de nós. O ambientalismo não tem a ver com o ambiente. Tem a ver com as pessoas. Tem a ver com o sonho de uma vida melhor para as pessoas.

Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting

In life, beginnings are not fixed but ambient. They are happening all the time, without us noticing.

That hideous face turns to us, and it is now, in the ambient light, that I begin to see the true nature of this nightmare roosting in my home.

Un cambio de ambiente es la falacia tradicional sobre la cual descansan los amores -y los pulmones- condenados.

tal vez cada relación con los hombres se limita a reproducir las mismas contradicciones, y en ciertos ambientes incluso las mismas respuestas complacientes.

el ambiente de un verdadero café tiene que reunir estas cualidades: compañerismo, satisfacción del estómago, y cierta alegría y gracia de modales.

I estimated the ambient humidity at roughly a thousand percent, but tipped a little of my sweetened coffee into the saucer and blew on it nonetheless.

Ambient awareness. That’s what social scientists say we create when we relate the most insignificant details of our lives to 796 people.

Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what’s going on in the lives of other people — what they’re thinking about, what they’re doing, what they’re looking at — by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We’re now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people’s lives.

the Barrayaran officer corps favored heterosexual marital stability in its senior members mainly to cut down on the potential for ambient personal dramas slopping over into work, as they tended to do.

One of the most remarkable things about Antonina was her determination to include play, animals, wonder, curiosity, marvel, and a wide blaze of innocence in a household where all dodged the ambient dangers, horrors, and uncertainties. That takes a special stripe of bravery rarely valued in wartime. While

Hay dos clases de fumadores, querida: la de los que fuman para crear un ambiente, una atmósfera para sí mismos y que se hartan tan pronto como lo consiguen; y la de los que fuman, sencillamente, porque están hartos del ambiente. Los primeros pertenecen a la clase de los estetas, a la clase de los que son ligeramente imbéciles, los Orminys; yo pertenezco a la segunda, que es la legítima, que es dogmática sin tapujos.

Aunque ya han aparecido plásticos realmente biodegradables derivados de azúcares vegetales naturales, así como un poliéster igualmente biodegradable hecho a base de bacterias, las probabilidades de que estos reemplacen a los originales derivados del petróleo no son muchas.

International politics is not unlike the jungle: smaller and weaker animals require acute intelligence, sensitive antennae, and nimbleness of footing to assure their own self-preservation; the strong—such as elephants—need pay less attention to ambient conditions and can often do as they wish, and others will get out of the way.

monachopsis n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

Se pure tutti i capi di stato del mondo fossero donne ciò non significherebbe affatto la fine dell'impegno per una società giusta. La società sarà davvero giusta quando le condizioni per raggiungere ciò che si desidera saranno le stesse per tutti, quando il trattamento equo sarà diffuso a tutti i livelli, in qualunque ambiente lavorativo

If I couldn’t manifest homosexuality in myself, I would instead locate it everywhere else. If Nell and I couldn’t be gay together, we could—we would, we did—create for ourselves a separate world in which gayness was ambient and immanent and unrelated to us.

Observé su cara atentamente mientras le desabotonaba los vaqueros, y tiraba de ellos desde abajo, arrastrándola hasta el final de la cama, se rió muy fuerte, restándole algo de tensión al ambiente.... .....Me rozó el cuello con los labios y deslizó una mano dentro de mi camisa. Un momento después, la mayoría de nuestra ropa estaba por el suelo, Holly encima de mí y mis manos por todo su cuerpo.

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

―Linette. Un susurro. Eso era todo lo que había llegado hasta sus oídos. Una brisa que el ambiente había traído hasta ella, pero fue suficiente para que sus ojos parpadearan incrédulos y sus pies dieran un paso hacia delante sin siquiera pensar en ello. Había alguien. «No estoy sola».

To me, at least in retrospect,26 the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows28 it’s about something else, way down.

Podría ser que viviese una vida más real en su fuero interno que en el ambiente tan ingrato de la oficina del administrador. Las evocaciones del desfile, el tumulto de la batalla, las melodías de viejas músicas heroicas, escuchadas treinta años atrás, tales escenas y ecos estaban aún vivos en su recuerdo.

Para obrar de acuerdo a este mundo, hay que morir dentro de uno mismo. El hombre no está en este mundo para ser feliz ni honrado, está en él para realizar grandes cosas para la humanidad, para alcanzar la nobleza y sobreponerse a la vulgaridad del ambiente en que se desarrolló la existencia de la mayoría de los individuos

Es normal que las personas asignen más importancia a su ambiente inmediato, ellas mismas y sus familias, que al más lejano, su ciudad, el país, el mundo. Pero que las personas estén interesadas más en sí mismas no quiere decir que no les importe lo que suceda con los demás. El capítulo I de la Teoría de los sentimientos morales se abre con la siguiente afirmación: «Por más egoísta que se pueda suponer al hombre, existen evidentemente en su naturaleza algunos principios que lo mueven a interesarse por la suerte de otros, y a hacer que la felicidad de éstos le resulte necesaria, aunque no derive de ella nada más que el placer de contemplarla».

And under the influence of the cradle like rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The superego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and dreams; or better yet, it drifts into an ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervade.

Mi mente se subleva ante el estancamiento. Proporcióneme usted problemas, proporcióneme trabajo, déme los más abstrusos criptogramas o los más intrincados análisis, y entonces me encontraré en mi ambiente. Podré prescindir de estimulantes artificiales. Pero odio la aburrida monotonía de la existencia. Deseo fervientemente la exaltación mental.

Cada período del desarrollo humano, Susan, tiene su tipo particular de conflicto, sus problemas distintos que, aparentemente sólo pueden resolverse por la fuerza. Y jamás, por decepcionante que esto sea, la fuerza resuelve el problema. En su lugar, éste persiste a través de una serie de conflictos y se desvanece por sí solo... ¿cómo dice la frase?, no con un estallido, sino con su susurro, a medida que el ambiente económico y social cambia. Y entonces, nuevo problema y nueva serie de guerras. Un ciclo, al parecer, sin fin.

What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers.

'how then does soul differ from spirit?' you're probably asking yourself. although he must have been reasonably sure nobody was. "Well, soul is darker of color, denser of volume, saltier of flavor, rougher of texture, and tends to be more maternalistic than paternalistic: soul is connected to Mother Earth just as spirit is connected to Father Sky. Of course, mothers and fathers are prone to copulation, and in their commingled state, soul and spirit often can be difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Generally, if spirit is the fresh air cent and ambient lighting in the house of consciousness, if the spirit is the electrical system that illuminates that house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dusty wine cellar, the strange creeks we hear in the floorboards late at night. "It's a bit of a cliche to say it, but when you think of soul, you should think of things that are authentic and things that are deep. Anything superficial is not soulful. Anything artificial, imitative, or overly refined is not soulful. Wood has a stronger connection to soul than does plastic, although, paradoxically, thanks to human interface, a funky wooden table or chair can sometimes exceed in soulfulness the soul that may be invoked by a living tree.

In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world — with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility — somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.

Una geiko de categoría es maestra en el arte de crear un ambiente de distensión y esparcimiento, sin embargo, yo no disfruto en particular con la compañía de otros. Una geiko de renombre nunca está sola, pero yo siempre he amado la soledad. ¿No es extraño? Parece que hubiese escogido de forma deliberada el camino que entrañaba para mí mayores dificultades, una senda que me obligase a afrontar y superar mis limitaciones personales.

Screens of tumbling water, breaking the world beyond them into glittering lines and smeared shadows. Kellhus had ceased trying to penetrate them. “Power,” Anasûrimbor Moënghus said, “is always power over. When an infant may be either, what is the difference between a Fanim and an Inrithi? Or between a Nansur and a Scylvendi? What could be so malleable in Men that anyone, split between circumstances, could be his own murderer? “You learned this lesson quickly. You looked across Wilderness and you saw thousands upon thousands of them, their backs bent to the field, their legs spread to the ceiling, their mouths reciting scripture, their arms hammering steel … Thousands upon thousands of them, each one a small circle of repeating actions, each one a wheel in the great machine of nations … “You understood that when men stop bowing, the emperor ceases to rule, that when the whips are thrown into the river, the slave ceases to serve. For an infant to be an emperor or a slave or a merchant or a whore or a general or whatever, those about him must act accordingly. And Men act as they believe. “You saw them, in their thousands, spread across the world in great hierarchies, the actions of each exquisitely attuned to the expectations of others. The identity of Men, you discovered, was determined by the beliefs, the assumptions, of others. This is what makes them emperors or slaves … Not their gods. Not their blood. “Nations live as Men act,” Moënghus said, his voice refracted through the ambient rush of waters. “Men act as they believe. And Men believe as they are conditioned. Since they are blind to their conditioning, they do not doubt their intuitions …” Kellhus nodded in wary assent. “They believe absolutely,” he said.

Candlelight flickered in the adjacent bedroom. She followed the ambient warmth to the threshold and paused there, marveling at what she saw. Lucan’s austere bedroom had been transformed into something out of a dream. Four tall black pillar candles set into intricate silver sconces burned in each corner. Red silk draped the bed. On the floor before the fireplace was a cushioned next of fluffy pillows and even more crimson silk. It looked so romantic, so inviting. A room intended for lovemaking. She took a step farther inside. Behind her, the door closed softly on its own. No, not quite on its own. Lucan was there, standing on the other side of the room, watching her. His hair was damp from a shower. He wore a loosely tied, satiny red robe that skated around his bare calves, and there was a heated look in his eyes that melted her where she stood. “For you,” he said, indicating the romantic setting. “For us tonight. I want things to be special for you.” Gabrielle was moved, instantly aroused by the sight of him, but she couldn’t bear to make love the way things had been left between them. “When I left tonight, I wasn’t going to come back,” she told him from the safety of distance. If she went any closer, she didn’t think she’d have the strength to say what had to be said. “I can’t do this anymore, Lucan. I need things from you that you can’t give me.” “Name them.” It was a soft command, but still a command. He moved toward her with careful steps, as though he sensed she might bolt on him at any second. “Tell me what you need.” She shook her head. “What would be the use?” A few more slow steps. He paused just beyond an arm’s length. “I’d like to know. I’m curious what it would take to convince you to stay with me.” “For the night?” she asked quietly, hating herself for how badly she needed to feel his arms around her after what she’d been through these past several hours. “I want you, and I’m prepared to offer you anything, Gabrielle. So, tell me what you need.

Y lo que, por el contrario, me sucede a mí en las raras horas de placer, lo que para mí es delicia, suceso, elevación y éxtasis, eso no lo conoce, ni lo ama, ni lo busca el mundo más que si acaso en las novelas; en la vida, lo considera una locura. Y en efecto, si el mundo tiene razón, si esta música de los cafés, estas diversiones en masa, estos hombres americanos contentos con tan poco tienen razón, entonces soy yo el que no la tiene, entonces es verdad que estoy loco, entonces soy efectivamente el lobo estepario que tantas veces me he llamado, la bestia descarriada en un mundo que le es extraño e incomprensible, que ya no encuentra ni su hogar, ni su ambiente, ni su alimento.

The skeleton key unlocks the mind and swings open the door of imagination. A far better place than here A much safer place than there The quintessential somewhere The mystical nowhere The enigmatic anywhere My gift to you - the key to everywhere. The mortal will find itself lost while the soul always knows the way it is grateful for the darkness and celebrates the day I can give you peace my peace I give you... but I cannot be your savior or your god - I cannot be the light along your path - I can only give you the lamp and point the way. The blind will see... the deaf will hear... but those who choose reason will never understand. Woe to the ones who think they know the answers they will cease to ask the questions that may be their own salvation. We possess the knowledge of the Universe from conception. Once born we are taught to forget. If we cannot look out at our world and see our children's vision then we are truly blind we are unable to lead them to paradise. "Even people who are in the dark search for their shadows. Shadows exist only if there is light. We will never find total darkness - not even in death... ...and we always cast a shadow no matter how overcast our skies become. You are never alone." Do not listen to the voice that shouts to you from behind desks behind podiums behind altars. Do not pay attention to the orators and the opportunists. Do not be distracted by the promises made behind masks. Listen to the quiet. Listen to the whispers as they gently guide you through the assaults of man's absurdities. Listen to the gentle breathing of your mother and lay your head to rest in her peace and in her warm embrace and understand that truth and power lie within you. Breathe silence. The free bird will always return to the cage sooner or later to seek food and water and the loving hand of it's caretaker.

Além disso, somos individualmente o produto de forças que não escolhemos e que mal compreendemos. Não escolhemos nossos pais nem a época em que nascemos, e assim recebemos uma determinada herança genética sobre a qual não temos controle algum, mas que, até um ponto significante, tem controle sobre nós. Essa herança determina, em parte, as doenças a que somos suscetíveis e os limites de nossas capacidades intelectuais, atléticas e morais. Talvez não totalmente, mas o suficiente. Nascemos num ambiente que vai preencher o pouco espaço que sobra do que foi determinado geneticamente, um ambiente que, novamente, não escolhemos e sobre o qual mal temos controle, pelo menos durante nossos anos de formação. A maneira como somos e aquilo que fazemos são resultados de nossos genes e nosso ambiente, que, juntos, exercem em nós uma influência que compreendemos de forma bastante nebulosa. Era isso que os filósofos existencialistas, com Jean-Paul Sartre, por exemplo, queriam dizer quando afirmavam que somos jogados no mundo.

Esos libros nacían del ambiente en que yo había vivido, de lo que me había fascinado, de las ideas que me habían influido. Había seguido paso a paso mi tiempo, inventando historias, reflexionando. Había identificado males, los había puesto en escena. Había prefigurado no sé cuántas veces cambios salvíficos que, sin embargo, nunca habían llegado. Había utilizado la lengua de todos los días para indicar cosas de todos los días. Había hecho hincapié en algunos temas: el trabajo, los conflictos de clase, el feminismo, los marginados.

A distorted sense of danger isn’t just psychologically taxing; it also encourages us to perceive risk where there isn’t any. Steeping in ominous stories can make people into threats themselves. The news is full of examples of how ambient anxiety gets turned against people of color going about their daily lives—taking a nap in the student lounge; walking down the street; selling lemonade. I thought of the woman who called the cops on two Native American brothers who were on a college tour at Colorado State. The teenagers made the woman “nervous,” she told the 911 operator. “If it’s nothing, I’m sorry. But it actually made me like feel sick and I’ve never felt like that.” Many people are feeling sick these days, for many reasons. But we should all be careful about the stories we tell ourselves to explain why.

is a type D pencilneck: a sassy wannabe paymaster with vestigial humanity. This makes him vastly less evil than a type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis) and somewhat less evil than a type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf), but unquestionably more evil than pencilneck types M through E (real human screaming to escape a soul-devouring professional persona, varying degrees of desperation). No one I know has ever met the type A pencilneck, in much the same way that no one ever reports their own fatal accident; a type A pencilneck would be a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity. They would be odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that it was his job—or hers—and it seemed the next logical step.

Es peligroso y temerario que el ciudadano medio mantenga su ignorancia sobre el calentamiento global, la reducción del ozono, la contaminación del aire, los residuos tóxicos y radiactivos, la lluvia ácida, la erosión del suelo, la deforestación tropical, el crecimiento exponencial de la población.

Mejor no frecuentes gente para matar el tiempo o para no estar solo. Es preferible dejar atrás algunas amistades con las que ya no resuenas, que mantenerlas e invertir tu energía y tu tiempo en algo distinto. Seguir con las compañías de siempre implica que, a la larga, no frecuentes las personas que están aguardando para entrar en tu vida. No vayas a eventos ni frecuentes ambientes que no concuerdan con tus preferencias; recuerda que siempre puedes declinar una invitación. En definitiva, no aceptes nada por debajo de lo que consideras aceptable. Ser auténtico es un acto de honestidad contigo y con los demás.

A common story had begun to circulate: One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, “How is Uncle Adolf?” Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler. Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government. After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.

‎"Você nasceu no lar que precisava nascer, vestiu o corpo físico que merecia, mora onde melhor Deus te proporcionou, de acordo com o teu adiantamento. Você possui os recursos financeiros coerentes com tuas necessidades… nem mais, nem menos, mas o justo para as tuas lutas terrenas. Seu ambiente de trabalho é o que você elegeu espontaneamente para a sua realização. Teus parentes e amigos são as almas que você mesmo atraiu, com tua própria afinidade. Portanto, teu destino está constantemente sob teu controle. Você escolhe, recolhe, elege, atrai, busca, expulsa, modifica tudo aquilo que te rodeia a existência. Teus pensamentos e vontades são a chave de teus atos e atitudes. São as fontes de atração e repulsão na jornada da tua vivência. Não reclame, nem se faça de vítima. Antes de tudo, analisa e observa. A mudança está em tuas mãos. Reprograma tua meta, busca o bem e você viverá melhor. Embora ninguém possa voltar atrás e fazer um novo começo, qualquer um pode começar agora e fazer um novo fim.

Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy he’d had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time’s cadences—jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant—entered his body via several openings, cold the way only damp cold is cold (the phrase he’d once had the gall to imagine he understood was the phrase “chilled to the bone”), shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints’ glassy crunch with every slightest shift of his hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, very cold and slow; and the pain of his breath against his teeth.

Le biblioteche sono dei luoghi stregati e chiunque vi abbia messo piede una volta ne è cosciente. […] Nel momento in cui entrò nella biblioteca della Lucretius, le sembrò di aver varcato l’ingresso di un nuovo mondo, terribilmente surreale. Centinaia e centinaia di libri si arrampicavano audacemente fino alle più alte scaffalature di mogano, e la luce soffusa che proveniva da un enorme lampadario di cristallo conferiva all’ambiente un’atmosfera misteriosa, rarefatta. […] Povera Amabel! Non sapeva che le biblioteche risucchiano il tempo, e mandano avanti le lancette dell’orologio e, prima che tu possa rendertene conto, sei già irrimediabilmente, tremendamente, in ritardo.

El hielo es efímero. Se derrite con la primera oleada de luz solar. Nuestro amor no es así. Nuestro amor es como un árbol, de los que crecen en estos bosques. ¿te imaginas que difícil debe ser para las semillas, florecer en un ambiente tal árido y salvaje como este? Diseñado, no para dar vida, si no para aniquilarla y aun así se convierten en frondosos y fuertes troncos, capaces de proveer a otros seres con refugio y madera, para lo que sea que la necesiten. Resisten ventarrones, frío y desalentadores inviernos, de modo grácil y casi inmortal, como el alma de un vampiro. Y siguen ahí por años, a veces, siglos. Eso somos nosotros, árboles de invierno en Alaska. Así es nuestro amor, mi hermosa niña.

Mi teoría es que se puede dividir en tres grandes grupos a las personas que escriben novelas y nos cuentan algo. Unos escriben siempre sobre sí mismos… y algunos de ellos se cuentan entre los grandes de la literatura. Otros tienen un talento envidiable para inventar historias. Van en el tren, miran por la ventanilla y, de pronto, tienen una idea. Y luego están aquellos que, por así decirlo, son los impresionistas de los escritores. Su talento consiste en encontrar historias. Van por el mundo con los ojos bien abiertos y captan situaciones, ambientes y pequeñas escenas como si cogieran cerezas de los árboles. Un gesto, una sonrisa, el modo en que alguien se pasa la mano por el pelo o se ata los cordones de los zapatos. Instantáneas tras las que se esconden historias. Imágenes que se convierten en historias.

Nel 1939, il giornale a fumetti americano, come i castori e gli scarafaggi della preistoria, era più grande e, voluminoso com'era, più ricco dei suoi moderni discendenti. Aspirava alle dimensioni di una rivista e allo spessore di un pulp, offrendo sessantaquattro pagine (compresa la copertina) di sgargiante abbondanza al prezzo ideale di una monetina da dieci cent. Mentre la qualità delle illustrazioni all'interno era, nel migliore dei casi, esecrabile, le copertine aspiravano alla qualità e all'impostazione grafica di una rivista in carta patinata e alla popolarità del pulp. Le copertine dei giornali a fumetti, in quei primi tempi, erano come il manifesto di un film che faceva sognare, immagini che per due secondi accendevano nella mente una scintilla e poi andavano perdendo il loro splendore fino a spegnersi del tutto prima ancora che venisse aperto il fascicolo di carta scadente. Spesso non erano semplicemente disegnate a inchiostro e colorate, ma dipinte da persone che avevano un nome nell'ambiente, qualificati artigiani dell'illustrazione, che sapevano creare ragazze dalle natiche procaci, avvinte in catene; sinuosi, perfetti giaguari; corpi maschili muscolosi, impeccabili, i cui piedi sembravano veramente sostenerne il peso.

So, for the first time in ten years, there was nothing around but me. I thought that's what I wanted. But when the relief wore off, it was actually a little weird not having anything around that wanted to interact with me. This was confusing, but in a way, I kind of missed it. I think what I'm trying to describe is loneliness. I felt pretty offended by it. I mean, what am I - some clueless animal who needs love and companionship? As it turns out, yes - that is what kind of animal I am. I just never realized it before because there was enough ambient love and companionship around to make it seem like maybe I don't have needs, and that's why it doesn't feel like I need anything. Experiencing real loneliness for the first time is like realizing the only thing you've ever loved is your home planet after migrating to the moon.

Non ho mai desiderato vestiti, scarpe perfette né beni di lusso. Non ho mai desiderato di ricoprirmi di seta. L’unica cosa che desideravo era di poter toccare un altro essere umano con le mani, e soprattutto con il cuore. Conosco il mondo e la sua scarsa compassione, il suo giudizio severo e spiacevole, il suo sguardo algido e risentito. Ci sono cresciuta in mezzo. Ho avuto tutto il tempo che volevo per ascoltare. Per guardare. Per studiare le persone, i luoghi e le alternative. Non dovevo far altro che aprire gli occhi. Non dovevo far altro che aprire un libro e vedere le storie che sanguinavano una pagina dopo l’altra. Vedere i ricordi impressi sulla carta. Ho trascorso un’esistenza intera fra le pagine dei libri. In mancanza di relazioni umane, ho stretto legami con personaggi di carta. Ho sperimentato l’amore e la perdita per mezzo di storie ambientate nel passato; ho vissuto l’adolescenza di riflesso. Il mio mondo è una ragnatela intricata di parole che connettono arto con arto, osso con tendine, pensieri con immagini. Sono una creatura fatta di lettere, un personaggio disegnato da frasi, il prodotto di una fantasia scaturita dalla narrativa. Vogliono cancellare ogni segno d’interpunzione dalla mia vita, e non credo di poterglielo lasciar fare.

Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence. First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire. And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies.

There are many buzzwords that gloss over these operations and their economic origins: “ambient computing,” “ubiquitous computing,” and the “internet of things” are but a few examples. For now I will refer to this whole complex more generally as the “apparatus.” Although the labels differ, they share a consistent vision: the everywhere, always-on instrumentation, datafication, connection, communication, and computation of all things, animate and inanimate, and all processes—natural, human, physiological, chemical, machine, administrative, vehicular, financial. Real-world activity is continuously rendered from phones, cars, streets, homes, shops, bodies, trees, buildings, airports, and cities back to the digital realm, where it finds new life as data ready for transformation into predictions, all of it filling the ever-expanding pages of the shadow text.4

Pero el sentido común no ha entrado en el servicio de salud en cuanto a los partos se refiere. Así, se continúa dando a luz en un paritorio y no en una habitación confortable. Las mujeres soportan rasurado, enemas y rotura de bolsa sin razón aparente. Tampoco se sabe por qué aguantan la dilatación, que puede durar horas, tumbadas e inmovilizadas en vez de poder pasear, estar acompañadas por quienes quieran y emplear métodos agradables para soportar el dolor como darse un baño o un masaje... No se entiende por qué las mujeres no pueden elegir la postura más cómoda para dar a luz: taburete obstétrico, en cuclillas, de lado, en la bañera, de rodillas apoyada en la cama... teniendo la fuerza de la gravedad como aliada. Tampoco, salvo por el motivo de acelerar los partos, se explica que se suministre oxitocina sintética sin consultar a la parturienta cuando esta sustancia provoca contracciones más intensas, seguidas y dolorosas y es causa frecuente de sufrimiento fetal y maternal. Cuando las mujeres no tienen estrés, producen oxitocina naturalmente, pero para eso necesitarían estar en un ambiente tranquilo, agradable, íntimo y... no tener prisa. El parto tiene un ritmo lento, pero hasta esto, tan básico, ha sido olvidado por la medicina, la ginecología y el sistema de atención sanitaria.

Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob McKenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page.

Lying in the hotel bed, Hector conceded that, all through ’93, ’94, and ’95, an ever-widening river of good data, mixed with a steady ambient wash of self-importance, had anesthetized his grief. He’d needed that. But now a maw of emptiness and rage was opening beneath him. Idly, he rubbed his bare, trimmed chest beneath the sheets. He’d faithfully hit the gym through these past years of high-level consultancy, grunting out his misery over barbells and machines. His chest was broad and he wished beyond anything that the arm caressing it at this moment was Ricky’s, not his own. But that sunny, silly cutie, like a blond sliver of sunshine on the timeline that Hector envisioned as his life, had missed the drawbridge, along with Issy and Korie and a baleful lot of others. It had all happened in the very, very worst years of sickness and death, Clinton’s first term, overwhelming loss mingled confusingly with tidings of the coming respite.

Non voleva lasciarsi prendere dallo squallore dell'ambiente, e per far ciò si concentrava sullo squallore dei loro arnesi elettorali--quella cancelleria, quei cartelli, il libriccino ufficiale del regolamento consultato a ogni dubbio dal presidente, già nervoso prima di cominciare--perché questo era per lui uno squallore ricco, ricco di segni, di significati, magari in contrasto uno con l'altro. La democrazia si presentava ai cittadini sotto queste spoglie dimesse, grige, disadorne; ad Amerigo a tratti ciò pareva sublime, nell'Italia da sempre ossequiente a ciò che è pompa, fasto, esteriorità, ornamento; gli pareva finalmente la lezione d'una morale onesta e austera; e una perpetua silenziosa rivincita sui fascisti, su coloro che la democrazia avevano creduto di poter disprezzare proprio per questo suo squallore esteriore, per questa sua umile contabilità, ed erano caduti in polvere con tutte le loro frange e i loro fiocchi, mentre essa, col suo scarno cerimoniale di pezzi di carta ripiegati come telegrammi, di matite affidate a dita callose o malferme, continuava la sua strada.

Você é contratada por uma empresa que vive propalando seu compromisso com “diversidade”, mas você é uma das poucas mulheres na equipe. Dia após dia, você se vê em salas de maioria masculina e branca, passando por eles nos corredores, ouvindo pedidos para ajudá-los em seus projetos, e de repente você começa a pensar se estão te olhando estranho, te escrutinando, porque você é a única diferente no recinto. Um dia, um deles questiona seu trabalho. Outro pergunta, inocentemente ou não, “Você nasceu aqui ou é de fora?”. A pressão vai aumentando e você começa a duvidar de si mesma. Você está brava, irritada, mas também aflita: simplesmente não pode errar, ou vai provar que o estereótipo está certo. Você precisa ser invencível. Aí comete um pequeno erro e começa a espiral de preocupação. É uma espécie de síndrome de Estocolmo institucional, só que pior: uma mistura de síndrome da impostora (fenômeno no qual mulheres e minorias de ótimo desempenho sentem que não fazem parte de um lugar), incluída aí a ameaça do estereótipo (medo de confirmar o pior estereótipo que têm sobre você – e por isso seu desempenho acabar caindo); assim como machismo e racismo reais (sim[…]” Excerpt From: Jessica Bennett. “Clube da luta feminista: Um manual de sobrevivência (para um ambiente de trabalho machista).” Apple Books.

«Te l'ho detto, sono fatto così. Amo incontrare le persone, imparare a conoscerle, sapere come vivono. Voglio vivere un'esperienza e ritornare a casa avendo avuto un'idea di quello che è la vita in generale, delle situazioni più improbabili, dell'inatteso. Vivrò una vita semplice quando ritornerò, avrò un lavoro, un appartamento, una routine di merda dove non avrò la possibilità di incontrare persone che non facciano parte del mio ambiente sociale. E poi francamente, Travis, l’essere umano è così appassionante. Vedo questo viaggio come una lunga esperienza per il mio lavoro. Penso che tutte le esperienze siano degne di essere vissute, che siano la delusione, l'amore, la gioia, o la pena. Vivere significa conoscere ogni tappa sentimentale. Per esempio tutto è da provare, qualunque sia l'ordine, dobbiamo vivere la vita che ci detta il nostro destino, senza riflettere. E per farlo, bisogna incontrare delle persone, avere delle esperienze insolite come prendere lo zaino, la carta di credito e dirsi: “me ne vado per approfittare della mia gioventù prima di avere quarant' anni e realizzare che non ho vissuto”. Ecco io sono così, mi interesso alle persone, non è una cosa che si può spiegare altrimenti, è prendere o lasciare.» «Okay.» Un’unica parola di risposta, per tutto un monologo. Quando dico che questo ragazzo ha un contatore dev’essere senza dubbio vero

RECUERDE LA FLOR DE LOTO Las grandes personas siempre se burlaban de los que se sienten más pequeños que ellos. Un león no se inmuta a la risa que viene de una hiena. Un gorila no se mueve de un plátano lanzado en ello por un mono. Un ruiseñor no para cantar su canción hermosa por la intrusión de un pájaro carpintero molesto. Siempre que usted debe dudar de su autoestima, recuerda la flor de loto. A pesar de que se sumerge a la vida de debajo del lodo, que no permite que la suciedad que lo rodea para afectar a su crecimiento o la belleza. Sé que la flor de loto siempre. No permita que cualquier negatividad o la fealdad en su entorno destruyan su confianza, afectan su crecimiento, o te hacen la pregunta de su autoestima. Es muy normal que uno de malezas feo no quiere estar solo. Recuerda esto siempre. si usted fuera feo, o simplemente tan pequeño como ellos sienten que son, entonces ellos no se sienten tan amargo y envidioso cada vez que se ven obligados a mirar hacia magníficamente Divina USTED ". SUZY KASSEM : filósofo, poeta de la Verdad

La madre di Ferguson fotografava sempre i soggetti nel loro ambiente, si recava nei luoghi in cui vivevano e lavoravano, portandosi dietro stativi portatili per le luci, paraventi pieghevoli e ombrelli telescopici, fotografava gli scrittori nel loro studio pieno di libri o seduti alla scrivania, i pittori fra gli schizzi e lo scompiglio del loro atelier, i pianisti seduti alla tastiera o in piedi accanto al loro lucente Steinway nero, gli attori davanti allo specchio del camerino o seduti soli sul nudo palcoscenico, e per qualche ragione i suoi ritratti in bianco e nero sembravano catturare la loro vita interiore meglio degli altri fotografi che ritraevano le stesse celebri figure, una qualità che forse non dipendeva dall’abilità tecnica ma da un certo non so che nella madre di Ferguson, che si preparava sempre per i suoi lavori leggendo i libri, ascoltando i dischi e guardando i quadri dei suoi soggetti, per avere qualcosa di cui parlare con loro durante le lunghe sedute, e siccome era una brava conversatrice, sempre molto affascinante e attraente, sempre restia a parlare di sé, quegli artisti vanitosi e complicati finivano per rilassarsi in sua presenza, avvertendo un genuino interesse per la loro persona e per quello che rappresentavano, un interesse vero o quasi, quasi sempre, e quando la seduzione riusciva e abbassavano la guardia, la maschera che portavano sul viso scivolava via un po’ alla volta e nel loro sguardo affiorava una luce diversa.

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. And still nothing happened. Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi-fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dustbin, every window, every car, every wineglass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board. Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message. “People of Earth, your attention, please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadraphonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep. “This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.

L'uomo è cattivo. Non nasce così, ma lo diventa perché il suo stile di vita è dettato dalla legge del più forte. Dovunque passa, l'uomo deve essere il migliore, il più ricco, il più bello, il più intelligente e tutto questo per cosa? È più felice una volta che ha un corpo da sogno, una Ferrari o che il suo ambiente lo reputi il migliore in tutto quello che fa? Sono queste cose a renderlo felice? Oppure è la superficialità di questa vita in cui tutto è falso e apparenza, a renderlo veramente felice? Non credo. L'immagine, i desideri di cui non si ha consapevolezza e che sono superflui… tutto questo, io adesso lo evito. Vivere davvero non è questo. La ricerca continua della felicità non si ottiene schiacciando gli altri per arricchirsi, né credendo di essere il migliore. La vita è realizzarsi da soli, senza tanti fronzoli, e cercarsi fino in fondo, una volta che ci si è liberati da tutti quegli strati di inutilità che ci mangiano fino al midollo. Guardarsi allo specchio e vedersi davvero fino in fondo all'anima, è a questo che serve la vita, secondo me, e per arrivarci, l'uomo dovrebbe vivere da solo e non in gruppo come fa, contando sugli altri per ottenere un'immagine di felicità che è solo una menzogna. Mack crede nella bellezza dell'umanità, ma l'umanità non crede in Mack. Lei se ne fotte e continuerà il suo lavoro da formica per essere ancora più stupida e distruggere tutto quello che la circonda per averne sempre di più, senza rendersi conto che alla fine non avrà più niente. L'umanità è stupida e lo resterà. Forse potrebbe rendersene conto prima che sia troppo tardi, che sta solo correndo verso il baratro, ma questo sarebbe dare prova di buonsenso, e non ce l’ha

Che razza di Paese è quello che trasforma i campi di mirtilli in proprietà privata? Quando passo accanto a quei terreni lungo la strada, avverto nel petto un tuffo al cuore. Vedo la rovina incombere sulla terra. In quel luogo un velo si è steso sulla Natura. Mi allontano veloce dal posto maledetto. Niente può sfigurare maggiormente il suo bel volto. Non posso fare a meno d'immaginarlo per sempre come un luogo dove attraenti e gradevoli bacche si convertono in denaro, dove il mirtillo viene oltraggiato. È vero, esiste il diritto di trasformare le bacche in proprietà privata così come esiste quello di fare altrettanto dell'erba e degli alberi - un gesto non più grave di migliaia di altre pratiche accettate dall'uso - ma questa è la peggiore di tutte perché indica quanto esse siano negative e verso quale obiettivo la nostra civiltà e la divisione del lavoro tendano naturalmente, e cioè ad attribuire un prezzo a tutto.

¿Cómo no había yo de ser un lobo estepario y un pobre anacoreta en medio de un mundo, ninguno de cuyos fines comparto, ninguno de cuyos placeres me llama la atención? No soporto estar mucho tiempo ni en un teatro ni en un cine, apenas puedo leer un periódico, rara vez un libro moderno; no puedo comprender qué clase de placer y de alegría buscan los hombres en los hoteles y en los ferrocarriles totalmente llenos, en los cafés repletos de gente oyendo una música fastidiosa y pesada; en los bares y varietés de las elegantes ciudades lujosas, en las exposiciones universales, en las carreras, en las conferencias para los necesitados de ilustración, en los grandes lugares de deportes; no puedo entender ni compartir todos estos placeres, que a mí me serían desde luego asequibles y por los que tantos millares de personas de afan y se agitan. Y lo que, por el contrario, me sucede a mí en las raras horas de placer, lo que para mí es delicia, suceso, elevación y éxtasis, eso no lo conoce, ni lo ama, ni lo busca el mundo más que si acaso en las novelas; en la vida, lo considera una locura. Y en efecto, si el mundo tiene razón, si esta música de los cafés, estas diversiones en masa, estos hombres americanos contentos con tan poco tienen razón, entonces soy yo el que no la tiene, entonces es verdad que estoy loco, entonces soy efectivamente el lobo estepario que tantas veces me he llamado, la bestia descarriada en un mundo que le es extraño e incomprensible, que ya no encuentra ni su hogar, ni su ambiente, ni su alimento.

El hecho de que muchas de nuestras características, posibilidades y limitaciones estén fijadas en nuestro cerebro cuando aún estamos en el útero materno no significa naturalmente que nuestro cerebro esté «acabado» al nacer. Éste sigue desarrollándose en el bebé bajo la influencia de un ambiente cálido, seguro y estimulante, durante el aprendizaje continuo, también de la lengua materna, y por el adoctrinamiento de las creencias religiosas del entorno. Y también en este caso, al igual que en el útero, no se trata del cerebro o del entorno, sino de la estrecha interacción entre ambos. Sin embargo, lo esencial es que cuanto más temprana es la influencia del entorno en el desarrollo cerebral, más fuertes y duraderos son sus efectos; cuanto más desarrollado esté el niño, menos características podrán fijarse aún en su cerebro. El carácter, o sea, nuestros rasgos fijos, van manifestándose cada vez con mayor claridad a lo largo del desarrollo. Es evidente que lo que aprendemos lo vamos almacenando en nuestros sistemas de memoria. Ahí sigue habiendo cierta forma de plasticidad. Por otra parte, después de la primera etapa del desarrollo, la sociedad sigue influyendo en nuestro comportamiento, pero no en nuestro carácter. Los cambios de conducta que psicólogos clínicos y psiquiatras logran, a menudo con grandes esfuerzos, no anulan los problemas de carácter fruto de nuestro temprano desarrollo. No en vano el término «carácter» significa «inscrito». Sin embargo, esos cambios sí pueden conseguir que las personas con trastornos de personalidad aprendan a sobrellevarlos.