Aura Man Quotes

Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.

The auric body of a snake is one of the most remarkable sights that the clairvoyant will ever see, and the secrets concealed within its aura demonstrate why the serpent is the symbol of wisdom among so many nations.

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man! What is called their 'overelaboration' is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted . . . I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.

It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not.

One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel. "There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly …

They're auras, Davey. I see them, too. The longer you stare at them, the wider the energy field expands until more colors begin to show themselves.

People are afraid, very much afraid of those who know themselves. They have a certain power, a certain aura and a certain magnetism – a charisma that can take out alive, young people from the traditional imprisonment.The enlightened man cannot be enslaved – that is the difficulty – and he cannot be imprisoned. …The enlightened man is the greatest stranger in the world, he does not seem to belong to anybody. No organization confines him, no community, no society, no nation

Oscar Wilde said: 'Each man kills the thing he loves.' And it's true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal - when it was only a step away. This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it. Renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.

You will curl your lip and want to spit. But I don't care. A man can carry something like this inside him for only so long. Then it's got to come out.

Nonetheless the man (Hitler) had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs..

As he spoke, the edges of the clay man began shimmering, like air does in intense heat, and the lumpen form gradually became more manlike. "Something's happening!" I cried. I was paralyzed by shock and hope. "Please let it work. Come back, Vincent. You have to come back, I whispered, pleading. Red clay became olive-toned skin, and the bald head became waves of raven black hair. The face that Jules had carefully sculpted became a real nose and mouth and eyes, closed as if in sleep. But it lay there, still unmoving, until, focusing on the air just above, Bran yelled, "Come, bardia spirit, inhabit this body!" He made one final sweeping gesture, as if pulling the aura downward, and touching his fingers to the body's side. The eyes flew open and Vincent took a great gulping gasp, as if trying to swallow all of the oxygen in the room. "Vincent," I said, my heart in my throat. His eyes flew to mine. He reached toward me, and I took his hand and pressed it to my cheek. His skin was burning hot, like with a fever. I kissed his fingers, and his skin smelled like fire and rain-soaked earth. Like the boy I thought I would never touch again.

He opened his arm as I slid next to him. I settled against his side, letting out another deep sigh as his familiar heat and aura closed over me. I laid my head on his shoulder and was rewarded with the pressure of his cheek against the top of my head, a subtle caress. I shut my eyes. It seemed they were leaking again. I had thought I was done with crying. "I thought you were dead," I said for the hundredth time. "I keep thinking you'll vanish, and I'll wake up." "I told you, while you live, I live." He sounded calmer now, the tension leaving him. He settled back into the seat, and I leaned into him, grateful. "I would not abandon you, Dante.

And it is permissible to want to be alone temporarily to “get away from it all.” But if one mentioned at a party that he liked to be alone, not for a rest or an escape, but for its own joys, people would think that something was vaguely wrong with him—that some pariah aura of untouchability or sickness hovered round him. And if a person is alone very much of the time, people tend to think of him as a failure, for it is inconceivable to them that he would choose to be alone.

This radiance is so great that it can-not be limited by the skull and it pours out from the head, especially from the back of the neck where the uppermost vertebra of the spine articulates with the condyles of the occipital bone. It is this light pouring our in a fan-shaped aura around the posterior part of the head that has given rise to the halos of saints and the nimbus so often used in religious art. This light signifies human regeneration and it forms part of the auric bodies of man.

It is precisely the envelopment of sex (and all other natural functions) with an aura of deeper meaning that makes man human and distinguishes him from the rest of animate nature. To remove that meaning, to reduce sex to biology, as all the sexual revolutionaries did in practice, is to return man to a level of primitive behavior of which we have no record in human history. All animals have sex, but only man makes love.

Secrets and silences make life more real: the individual, self-absorbed and inwardly musing, taking himself very seriously, radiates a contagious aura: the tacit communication that the serious and the meaningful exist.

He was a stunning specimen of a man. Big in all the right places. Hairy on the parts that oozed masculinity. Brutal and ruthless with an aura of an animal who took what he wanted and often.

..giving power to negative thoughts or fears was bringing ideas to life in physical world,idea in mind became emotion in heart,emotion turned into words spoken,written,painted,strummed across guitar strings,or vibrantly held note by Tibetan singing bowl, thoughts affected physical world.

You’re cut out for failure, and you know it. Though you’re capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you’re not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you’re not precisely the most honest man I’ve ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you’re capable of work, but you’re just lazy enough so that you can’t work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you’re not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance. And you’re not lucky—not really. No aura rises from you, and you wear a puzzled expression.

Three thousand Blessings Lanterns rose into the night behind the man who had turned to gaze at him. Robes redder than maple, skin as white as snow. A face so handsome that one couldn’t bear to stare for long. There was still a wildness about him and a feral aura on his brow—and a pride that could never be felled.

She understood that her value in the clan, her value to her family, to Hilo, and most of all, in her own mind, lay not in what she could accomplish herself — because a stone-eye was always something of a blank space amid the strong auras around them, a void where gazes and expectations slid off like oil — but in what she made possible for others. She was unable to wield jade herself, but as a White Rat for the Weather Man, she had taken jade to those who could and would use it for the clan’s gain. She had not borne the Pillar a son who could follow in the family’s footsteps, but she had ensured that Niko was brought back to be raised in his rightful place. She could never be a Green Bone herself, as much as she felt she was one at heart, but she could think like a Green Bone. She was an enabler, an aide, a hidden weapon, and that was worth something. Perhaps a great deal.

Jenny slowly awoke on the sacrificial altar to an Ethereal Light that flamed through the east wall, a radiant aura of love dispersing the frightful scene. A glow pulsating from Angeletta's body still burning in the fire pit slowly rose to join the Light. A Heavenly peace infused Jenny as she realized, "There's a man standing in the air straight above me!

My anxieties as to behavior are futile, ever more so, to infinity. If the other, incidentally or negligently, gives the telephone number of a place where he or she can be reached at certain times, I immediately grow baffled: should I telephone or shouldn't I? (It would do no good to tell me that I can telephone - that is the objective, reasonable meaning of the message - for it is precisely this permission I don't know how to handle.) What is futile is what apparently has and will have no consequence. But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted. From the lover's point of view, the fact becomes consequential because it is immediately transformed into a sign: it is the sign, not the fact, which is consequential (by its aura). If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? My answer itself will be a sign, which the other will inevitably interpret, thereby releasing, between us, a tumultuous maneuvering of images. Everything signifies: by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bind myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment. Sometimes, by dint of deliberating about "nothing" (as the world sees it), I exhaust myself; then I try, in reaction, to return -- like a drowning man who stamps on the floor of the sea -- to a spontaneous decision (spontaneity: the great dream: paradise, power, delight): go on, telephone, since you want to! But such recourse is futile: amorous time does not permit the subject to align impulse and action, to make them coincide: I am not the man of mere "acting out" -- my madness is tempered, it is not seen; it is right away that I fear consequences, any consequence: it is my fear -- my deliberation -- which is "spontaneous.

Cookies,"Emily explained. "There isn't a man alive who doesn't appreciate homemade cookies. There's something magical about them--really," she added when Suzannah cast her a doubtful glance."Cookies create an aura of domestic bliss--it sounds crazy, but it's true.A man can't resist a woman who bakes him cookies. They remind him of home and mother and a fire crackling in the fireplace.

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.

I am trying now to re-create in my mind the picture of the man as I saw him in 1939- he, the revered author of Sinister Barriers, I the novice. I think I can rely on my near-photographic memory for the purpose. (I call it "near-photographic" because I can only remember things that happen to be lying around near photographs.) Let's see, as I recall, he is six-feet seven-inches tall (when he is sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Then, too, I distinctly remember, there was a small flashing golden aura about his head, the occasional play of hissing flashes when he moved it suddenly, and the distant rumble of thunder when he spoke.

[The party] was held at her cousin's house and it lasted for three days. For the duration, they all slept only from dawn to noon and lived on little but oysters and champagne and pastry. Each evening there was music and dancing, and then late in the nights, under a moon growing to full, they went out on the slow water in rowing boats. It was a strange time of war fever, and even young men previously considered dull and charmless suddenly acquired an aura of glamour shimmering about them, for they all suspected that shortly many of them would be dead. During those brief days and nights, any man that wished might become somebody's darling.

the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives. Oscar Wilde said: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” And it’s true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal—when it was only a step away. This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.

And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.

Pooley the realist pooh-poohed such notions, but Pooley the mystic, dreamer and romantic sensed the aura of pagan mystery which surrounded the crop-headed man.

A man has to be pulled and kept by the sensual aura of your being.

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it's consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.

... she was impossible not to look at, impossible not to love. She moved through the party like an aura, and even the places she’d been and gone from held something of her radiance, her afterglow.

The girl beside the window looked up. She had straggly, waist-length, dirty blonde hair, very pale eyebrows and protuberant eyes that gave her a permanently surprised look. Harry knew at once why Neville had chosen to pass this compartment by. The girl gave off an aura of distinct dottiness. Perhaps it was the fact that she had stuck her wand behind her left ear for safekeeping, or that she had chosen to wear a necklace of Butterbeer corks, or that she was reading a magazine upside-down. Her eyes ranged over Neville and came to rest on Harry. She nodded. ‘Thanks,’ said Ginny, smiling at her. Harry and Neville stowed the three trunks and Hedwig’s cage in the luggage rack and sat down. Luna watched them over her upside-down magazine, which was called The Quibbler. She did not seem to need to blink as much as normal humans. She stared and stared at Harry, who had taken the seat opposite her and now wished he hadn’t. ‘Had a good summer, Luna?’ Ginny asked. ‘Yes,’ said Luna dreamily, without taking her eyes off Harry. ‘Yes, it was quite enjoyable, you know. You’re Harry Potter,’ she added. ‘I know I am,’ said Harry. Neville chuckled. Luna turned her pale eyes on him instead. ‘And I don’t know who you are.’ ‘I’m nobody,’ said Neville hurriedly. ‘No you’re not,’ said Ginny sharply. ‘Neville Longbottom – Luna Lovegood. Luna’s in my year, but in Ravenclaw.’ ‘Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure,’ said Luna in a singsong voice. She raised her upside-down magazine high enough to hide her face and fell silent. Harry and Neville looked at each other with their eyebrows raised. Ginny suppressed a giggle.

The woman said, “Feel the aura of the moon, it’s so strong tonight.” The man said, “I feel nothing. You are just imagining it.” Every cell of her body is a door through which moon is allowed to enter. While he opened a door only in a few brain cells. She is experiencing the aura while he is imagining the absence of aura. Don’t give too much importance to your brain cells. Every inch of your body is a miracle.

People did usually look at her, because she suggested the engaging young person at a party to whom you would like to be introduced, and others because they knew she was Grady McNeil, the daughter of an important man. There were a few whose eyes she held for a different reason: and it was because, in her aura of willful and privileged enchantment, they sensed she was a girl to whom something was going to happen.

In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it onto motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities. He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Röhm, the chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was one of Hitler’s inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time. Not Stalin, but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution. On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.

An aging woman, an older man needy as a child, a little comfort, a little passion, a small aura round her beloved’s head—and it never occurs to Fräulein Hetty to wonder how this weepy, feeble creature could possibly be the fighter and hero of her imaginings.

And that's the terrible thing about these past trials, is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them, have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich? Legal. Sacco Vanzetti? Quite legal. The Haymarket defendants? Legal. The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where black men were condemned to death? All legal. Jesus? Legal. Socrates? Legal. And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretense.

His aura was too bright and his masculine force affected me physically,” Angelou recalled years later. ʺA hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut. . . . His hair was the color of burning embers and his eyes pierced.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told. You see, I'd never actually been to Florida before the war, much less Miami. I was a newspaper reporter from Chicago before the war and had never even seen the ocean until I was flying over the Pacific for the Air Corp. There wasn't much time for admiring the waves when Japanese Zeroes were trying to shoot you out of the sky and bury you at the bottom of that deep blue sea. It was because of my friend Pete that I knew so much about Miami. Florida was his home, so when we both got leave in '42 I followed him to the warm waters of Miami to see what all the fuss was about. It would be easy to say that I skipped Chicago for Miami after the war ended because Pete and I were such good pals and I'd had such a great time there on leave. But in truth I decided to stay on in Miami because of Veronica Lake. I'd better explain that. Veronica Lake never knew she was the reason I came back with Pete to Miami after the war. But she had been there in '42 while Pete and I were enjoying the sand, sun, and the sweet kisses of more than a few love-starved girls desperate to remember what it felt like to have a man's arm around them — not to mention a few other sensations. Lake had been there promoting war bonds on Florida's first radio station, WQAM. It was a big outdoor event and Pete and I were among those listening with relish to Lake's sultry voice as she urged everyone to pitch-in for our boys overseas. We were in those dark early days of the war at the time, and the outcome was very much in question. Lake's appearance at the event was a morale booster for civilians and servicemen alike. She was standing behind a microphone that sat on a table draped in the American flag. I'd never seen a Hollywood star up-close and though I liked the movies as much as any other guy, I had always attributed most of what I saw on-screen to smoke and mirrors. I doubted I'd be impressed seeing a star off-screen. A girl was a girl, after all, and there were loads of real dolls in Miami, as I'd already discovered. Boy, was I wrong." - Where Flamingos Fly

Good-will produces a great aura of protection about the one who sent it, and “No weapon that is formed against him shall prosper“. In other words, love and good-will destroy the enemies within one’s self, therefore, one has no enemies on the external! “There is peace on earth for him who sends good-will to man!

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

I’ve always had a bit of a feminine aura, but I don’t mind. Russell Brand has one, too.

I understand what you’re saying. I do, and you’re right. You’re not some fragile little thing that needs coddling, but just like you couldn't stop yourself from overreacting and coating me in your aura before, I can’t see you in pain and not try to ease it. It doesn't mean that I think you’re less of a badass vampire or even less of a man. It means that I love you.

Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.

The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!

There was something infinitely impressive about the man, tall, slender, gray-haired, blue-eyed, soft-spoken. He had the looks of the doctors one read about in women's novels. There was something so basically kind and gentle about him, yet something powerful as well. The aura of a highly trained racehorse always straining at the reins, aching to go faster, farther . . . to do more . . . to fight time . . . to conquer odds beyond hope . . . to steal back just one life . . . one man . . . one woman . . . one child . . . one more. And often he won. Often. But not always. And that irked him. More than that, it pained him. It was the cause for the lines beside his eyes, the sorrow one saw deep within him. It wasn't enough that he wrought miracles almost daily. He wanted more than that, better odds, he wanted to save them all, and there was no way he could.

If you are to gain power in your household, you need to come face-to-face with the ways in which you may subtly or overtly idealize men or their power. You need to gain the comfort to face a man down and to strongly assert your wishes and needs for change. As Mahony writes, “Is there any way to expunge the glittery aura of male status? Only by changing one's feelings. Women who can’t will scurry like a scullery maid or live with guilt.

First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.

He did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting “Hallelujah” and “Bless the Lord.” He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no music of the heavens. No elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him. No sense of his absolute, foreordained, unquestionable role as the messenger of God. Not even the whole of the Quran fully revealed, but only a few brief verses. In short, Muhammad did none of the things that might seem essential to the legend of a man who had just done the impossible and crossed the border between this world and another—none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to denigrate the whole story as an invention, a cover for something as mundane as delusion or personal ambition. On the contrary: he was convinced that what he had encountered could not be real. At best it must be a hallucination: a trick of the eye or the ear, or his own mind working against him. At worst, possession, and he had been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. In fact he was so sure that he could only be majnun, literally possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first instinct had been to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he had experienced by putting an end to all experience.

The cleverest women hide it and create an aura of wit and charm instead. Those who can’t wait a moment to prove how much smarter than men they are--Dios, what bores! A man might as well invite a bearded professor to lunch than a female with all her mental pencils sharpened; instead of being an amusing companion she sits for an examination, gobbling food and words and waving her hands about like a merchant in a bazaar. It is probably the Spaniard in me that dislikes the type!

Do not worry over your past misdeeds—for worry itself breeds demons—but eliminate them from your aura, planting instead good seeds with constructive labors. Feel your own personal responsibility in this problem, for the realization of responsibility is good for the soul. Demonstrate this acceptance of responsibility to the higher powers of Cosmos, for when your light shines out, the spirits of evil must slink into the corners and cover their faces with the shadow of their cloaks.

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

The One You Once Loved If the man or woman you once loved Exists now without the bestowal of your affection They, having once been endowed with that love, must still command the respect of that holiness. A residue of your righteous love will forever remain etched in their souls, an unfading aura of your once sacred bond. Permit that old love to persist in your soul -- do not erase, forget or nullify its existence. By affirming rather than negating of this memory, and you will become more whole and more holy.

Now, even though it be neither necessity nor caprice, history, for the authentic reactionary, is not, for all that, an interior dialectic of the immanent will, but rather a temporal adventure between man and that which transcends him. His labors are traces, on the disturbed sand, of the body of a beast and the aura of an angel. History is a tatter, torn from man’s freedom, waving in the breath of destiny. Man cannot be silent because his liberty is not merely a sanctuary where he escapes from deadening routine and takes refuge in order to become his own master. But in the free act the radical does not attain possession of his essence. Liberty is not an abstract possibility of choosing among known goods, but rather the concrete condition in which we are granted the possession of new goods. Freedom is not a momentary judgement between conflicting instincts, but rather the summit from which man contemplates the ascent of new stars among the luminous dust of the starry sky. Liberty places man among prohibitions that are not physical and imperatives that are not vital. The free moment dispels the unreal brightness of the day, in order that the motion of the universe which slides its fleeting lights over the shuddering of our flesh might rise up on the horizon of our soul. If the progressive casts himself into the future, and the conservative into the past, the authentic reactionary does not measure his anxiety with the history of yesterday or with the history of tomorrow. He does not extol what the new dawn might bring, nor is he terrified by the last shadows of the night. His spirit rises up to a space where the essential accosts him with its immortal presence. One escapes the slavery of history by pursuing in the wildness of the world the traces of divine footsteps. Man and his deeds are a vital but servile and mortal flesh that breathes gusts from beyond the mountains. To be reactionary is to champion causes that do not turn up on the notice board of history, causes where losing does not matter. It is to know that we only discover what we think we invent; to admit that our imagination does not create, but only lays bare smooth surfaces. It is not to espouse settled cases, nor to plead for determined conclusions, but rather to submit our will to the necessity that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the exigency that does not compel; it is to find sleeping certainties that guide us to the edge of ancient pools. The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a canceled past, but rather a seeker of sacred shades upon eternal hills.

One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort — youth’s toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.

Hommes et femmes de Londres, me voici. Je vous félicite cordialement d'être anglais. Vous êtes un grand peuple. Je dis plus, vous êtes une grande populace. Vos coups de poing sont encore plus beaux que vos coups d'épée. Vous avez de l'appétit. Vous êtes la nation qui mange les autres. Fonction magnifique. Cette succion du monde classe à part l'Angleterre. Comme politique et philosophie, et maniement des colonies, populations, et industries, et comme volonté de faire aux autres du mal qui est pour soi du bien, vous êtes particuliers et surprenants. Le moment approche où il y aura sur la terre deux écriteaux; sur l'un on lira: Côté des hommes; sur l'autre on lira: Côté des anglais. Je constate ceci à votre gloire, moi qui ne suis ni anglais, ni homme, ayant l'honneur d'être un docteur. Cela va ensemble. Gentlemen, j'enseigne. Quoi? Deux espèces de choses, celles que je sais et celles que j'ignore. Je vends des drogues et je donne des idées. Approchez, et écoutez. La science vous y convie. Ouvrez votre oreille. Si elle est petite, elle tiendra peu de vérité; si elle est grande, beaucoup de stupidité y entrera. Donc, attention. J'enseigne la Pseudodoxia Epidemica. J'ai un camarade qui fait rire, moi je fais penser.

Though you’re capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you’re not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you’re not precisely the most honest man I’ve ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you’re capable of work, but you’re just lazy enough so that you can’t work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you’re not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance. And you’re not lucky—not really. No aura rises from you, and you wear a puzzled expression. In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure.

Gods. Not even with a gun to his head. Whatever does Aurae see in him?” “Truth,” I say. “I’ve never met a man who means what he says more than that one. So when he says Lysander was a man of honor, that he cared about the Rim, that he saved Diomedes’s life and sacrificed his own, do you think that’s a reflection of Octavia or you?

But none of them compared to the dangerous stranger in her room. While the men she was used to were hotter than hell, what they lacked was the fierce aura of power that emanated from this man and his stern, steely features. It was as if he were the deadliest of predators. Feral. That was the only word to do him justice. Surely there wasn’t another soldier in the entire universe who could match him in terms of raw beauty or lethal demeanor. His blond hair was snow white and his features sharp and icy. He wore a pair of black shades that annoyed her since she couldn’t see the upper part of his face or the color of his eyes. Not that it mattered. She saw enough to know that in the land of gorgeous men, he had no competition. As a stark contrast to his white hair, his clothes were a black so deep they seemed to absorb all light, and they were trimmed in silver … No, not silver. Those were weapons tucked into the sleeves and lapels of his ankle-length coat. The left side of it was pulled back, exposing a holstered blaster that was strapped to his left hip. The tall flight boots had silver buckles going up the sides that were fashioned into the image of skulls. At least that’s what she saw at first glance, but as he moved closer she realized those could come off and double as weapons, too. Wow, he was either extremely paranoid or more lethal than a team of League assassins. And that said something.

In the beginning, I assumed she went through all the trouble of disguising herself because she wanted to be a man, which is why I respected her wishes and even addressed her as a man. Turns out, she has to be a man because being a woman is dangerous. She has a natural feminine aura, so does that mean she hasn’t been pretending to be a man for very long?

The unease is very distinctive and sets in only at a certain level in the abstraction process—because abstraction proceeds in levels, rather like exponents or dimensions. Let’s say ‘man’ meaning some particular man is Level One. ‘Man’ meaning the species is Level Two. Something like ‘humanity’ or ‘humanness’ is Level Three; now we’re talking about the abstract criteria for something qualifying as human. And so forth. Thinking this way can be dangerous, weird. Thinking abstractly enough about anything … surely we’ve all had the experience of thinking about a word—‘pen,’ say—and of sort of saying the word over and over to ourselves until it ceases to denote; the very strangeness of calling something a pen begins to obtrude on the consciousness in a creepy way, like an epileptic aura.

Now Creighton, he's a different kind of man, altogether." "We'll only be here a short while, Gram. Don't go wild with your imaginings." "One never knows. Did I tell you I love his aura?" Paisley rolled her eyes. "Last night while we watched old cowboy movies, he watched you. Couldn't you feel his heated gaze? He looked at you like you were the last drumstick in the box and he was a starving man.

What exactly do ‘motion’ and ‘existence’ denote? We know that concrete particular things exist, and that sometimes they move. Does motion per se exist? In what way? In what way do abstractions exist? Of course, that last question is itself very abstract. Now you can probably feel the headache starting. There’s a special sort of unease or impatience with stuff like this. Like ‘What exactly is existence?’ or ‘What exactly do we mean when we talk about motion?’ The unease is very distinctive and sets in only at a certain level in the abstraction process—because abstraction proceeds in levels, rather like exponents or dimensions. Let’s say ‘man’ meaning some particular man is Level One. ‘Man’ meaning the species is Level Two. Something like ‘humanity’ or ‘humanness’ is Level Three; now we’re talking about the abstract criteria for something qualifying as human. And so forth. Thinking this way can be dangerous, weird. Thinking abstractly enough about anything … surely we’ve all had the experience of thinking about a word—‘pen,’ say—and of sort of saying the word over and over to ourselves until it ceases to denote; the very strangeness of calling something a pen begins to obtrude on the consciousness in a creepy way, like an epileptic aura.

declared that he had been directed to make a pilgrimage. His father scoffed—“Gregory has turned pilgrim out of laziness,” said Efim—but Gregory set out and walked two thousand miles to the monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. At the end of two years, when Gregory returned, he carried an aura of mystery and holiness. He began to pray at length, to bless other peasants, to kneel at their beds in supplication when they were sick. He gave up his drinking and curbed his public lunges at women. It began to be said that Gregory Rasputin, the profligate, was a man who was close to God. The village priest, alarmed at this sudden blossoming of a vigorous young Holy Man within his sphere, suggested heresy and threatened an investigation. Unwilling to argue and bored by life in Pokrovskoe, Rasputin left the village and began once again to wander.

The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.

Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situations, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura. For every existential crisis once again puts in question both the reality of the world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious," since on the archaic levels of culture *being* and *the sacred* are one. As we saw, it is the experience of the sacred that founds the world, and even the most elementary religion is, above all, an ontology. In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution notb only because it can be indefinately repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorised as a revelation received from an *other*, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit. This is not the place to develop all the consequences of this close relation between the content and structures of the unconscious on the one hand and the values of religion on the other. We were led to refer to it in order to show in what sense even the most avowedly nonreligious man still, in his deeper being, shares a religiously oriented behavior. But modern man's "private mythologies" -his dreams, reveries, fantasies, and so on- never rise to the ontological status of myths, precisely because they are not experienced by the *whole man* and therefore do not transform a particular situation into a situation that is paradigmatic. In the same way, modern man's anxieties, his experiences in dream or imagination, although "religious" from the point of view of form, do not, as in *homo religiosus*, make part of a *Weltanschauung* and provide the basis for a system of behaviour. -Mircea Eliade, The Sacred And The Profane:The Nature of Religion

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society] The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it. p171-172 The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims. Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade. He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood. In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky. p172-173

As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius were evoked by the names of Milton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Borges, Ray Charles; to lose physical sight, it is thought, is to gain second sight. One door closes and another, greater one, opens. Homer’s blindness, many believe, is a kind of spiritual channel, a shortcut to the gifts of memory and of prophecy. When I was a child in Lagos, there was a blind, wandering bard, a man who was held in the greatest awe for his spiritual gifts. When he sang his songs, he left each person with the feeling that, in hearing him, they had somehow touched the numinous, or been touched by it. Once, in a crowded market at Ojuelegba, sometime in the early eighties, I saw him. It was from quite a distance, but I remember (or imagine that I remember) his large yellow eyes, calcified to a gray color at the pupils, his frightening mien, and the big, dirty mantle he wore. He sang in a plaintive and high-pitched voice, in deep, proverbial Yoruba that was impossible for me to follow. Afterward, I imagined that I had seen something like an aura around him, a spiritual apartness that moved all his hearers to reach into their purses and put something in the bowl his assistant boy carried.

Dominic, with the powerful aura, got under my skin before I had a chance to ward him off and now I’m screwed. Even more now I know his taste and how hard he feels against the soft, wet parts of me. Dominic just introduced me to the most dangerous man in New York. Fuck. Fuck. Clarity pours over me. Does this mean Dominic is a member of the mafia after all? Only it wasn’t only a little kiss, was it? I’m sexually frustrated and Dom is standing there with his hands in his tailored pants pockets, aroused. The bulge is unmistakable. “Gabriella…” God, I’m wet too. If I rub my thighs together, I’ll feel how much. He’s hard, I’m wet… it’s a match made in heaven. “Gabriella…” he says again, thick and tarnished as I look him up and down. “Yeah?” “I said you’re too far away,” he murmurs, cutting his dark gaze my way. Stirring me. “Come here to me, cara.” he hooks two fingers with a motion and smirks like a devil with the key to all my desires. I swear my belly bottoms out as my feet carry me forward. Unable to refuse the invisible rope he has around my waist, pulling me closer. “Bossy aren’t you?” “I am your boss.” “I don’t think you want to remind me of that.” He hums and the rumble hurtles down between my thighs. How does he do that? Turn me on with just a noise. “I guess you’d like it if I called you sir, wouldn’t you?” His eyes flare and then darken, he drops his chin to his chest. “Do you really wish to turn me on right this moment?” Oh, fuck. Do I? I do. Yeah, I really do.

Little by little, his eyes warmed into that dusky shade of brown she'd come to miss. A shadow traced the outline of his body, from the curve in his neck to the powerful slope of his shoulders. As his glimmering blue aura faded, his hair blackened, and his skin, bronzed from years of training under the sun, glowed with life. She had no idea what came over her- impulse or instinct- but she reached for Shang's hand. He looked surprised, and for an instant she wondered whether it was because he could feel her touch, or because she had reached for him. Maybe both. Shang's stance loosened, and he drew her close, not letting go of her hand. "I told you once you were the craziest man I'd ever met. I guess I have to change that to the craziest woman." Mulan laughed. "You're delaying us from leaving Diyu to tell me that?" "And that Ping was right about his sister." Now Mulan lifted her chin, curious. "Why is that?" "She's strong and kind and beautiful and brave...." "And also speaks her mind," Mulan reminded him. "... Honest, in the way that counts most." "And she occasionally disobeys orders," Mulan warned him, "even from her commanding officer." "... She has discerning judgment." Mulan smiled. Tentatively, she reached for a wisp of hair that clung to Shang's temple. She brushed it aside gently, and Shang caught her hand in his and brought it to his chest. Mulan's skin tingled. "I'll never meet another girl like her," he said. "Now that the war is over, I'd be a fool to let her out of my sight.

The other thing preferable about the weekday services is that no one is there against his will. That’s another distraction on Sundays. Who hasn’t suffered the experience of having an entire family seated in the pew in front of you, the children at war with each other and sandwiched between the mother and father who are forcing them to go to church? An aura of stale arguments almost visibly clings to the hasty clothing of the children. “This is the one morning I can sleep in!” the daughter’s linty sweater says. “I get so bored!” says the upturned collar of the son’s suit jacket. Indeed, the children imprisoned between their parents move constantly and restlessly in the pew; they are so crazy with self-pity, they seem ready to scream. The stern-looking father who occupies the aisle seat has his attention interrupted by fits of vacancy—an expression so perfectly empty accompanies his sternness and his concentration that I think I glimpse an underlying truth to the man’s churchgoing: that he is doing it only for the children, in the manner that some men with much vacancy of expression are committed to a marriage. When the children are old enough to decide about church for themselves, this man will stay home on Sundays. The frazzled mother, who is the lesser piece of bread to this family sandwich—and who is holding down that part of the pew from which the most unflattering view of the preacher in the pulpit is possible (directly under the preacher’s jowls)—is trying to keep her hand off her daughter’s lap. If she smooths out her daughter’s skirt only one more time, both of them know that the daughter will start to cry. The son takes from his suit jacket pocket a tiny, purple truck; the father snatches this away—with considerable bending and crushing of the boy’s fingers in the process. “Just one more obnoxious bit of behavior from you,” the father whispers harshly, “and you will be grounded—for the rest of the day.” “The whole rest of the day?” the boy says, incredulous. The apparent impossibility of sustaining unobnoxious behavior for even part of the day weighs heavily on the lad, and overwhelms him with a claustrophobia as impenetrable as the claustrophobia of church itself. The daughter has begun to cry. “Why is she crying?” the boy asks his father, who doesn’t answer. “Are you having your period?” the boy asks his sister, and the mother leans across the daughter’s lap and pinches the son’s thigh—a prolonged, twisting sort of pinch. Now he is crying, too. Time to pray! The kneeling pads flop down, the family flops forward. The son manages the old hymnal trick; he slides a hymnal along the pew, placing it where his sister will sit when she’s through praying. “Just one more thing,” the father mutters in his prayers. But how can you pray, thinking about the daughter’s period? She looks old enough to be having her period, and young enough for it to be the first time. Should you move the hymnal before she’s through praying and sits on it? Should you pick up the hymnal and bash the boy with it? But the father is the one you’d like to hit; and you’d like to pinch the mother’s thigh, exactly as she pinched her son. How can you pray?

Honestly, sir,” I said, “I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss.” We had excused ourselves to speak privately for a moment, leaving poor Charlie politely rocking on his heels in the foyer. The office was warm and smelled of sage and witch hazel, and the desk was littered with bits of twine and herbs where Jackaby had been preparing fresh wards. Douglas had burrowed into a nest of old receipts on the bookshelf behind us and was sound asleep with his bill tucked back into his wing. I had given up trying to get him to stop napping on the paperwork. “You’re the one who told me that I shouldn’t have to choose between profession and romance,” I said. “I’m not the one making a fuss. I don’t care the least bit about your little foray into . . . romance.” Jackaby pushed the word out of his mouth as though it had been reluctantly clinging to the back of his throat. “If anything, I am concerned that you are choosing to make precisely the choice that I told you you should not make!” “What? Wait a moment. Are you . . . jealous?” “Don’t be asinine! I am not jealous! I am merely . . . protective. And perhaps troubled by your lack of fidelity to your position.” “That is literally the definition of jealous, sir. Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’m not choosing Charlie over you! I’m not going to suddenly stop being your assistant just because I spend time working on another case!” “You might!” he blurted out. He sank down into the chair at his desk. “You just might.” “Why are you acting like this?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because things change. Because people change. Because . . . because Charlie Barker is going to propose,” he said. He let his hand drop and looked me in the eyes. “Marriage,” he added. “To you.” I blinked. “I miss a social cue or two from time to time, but even I’m not thick enough to believe all that was about analyzing bloodstains together. He has the ring. It’s in his breast pocket right now. He’s attached an absurd level of emotional investment to the thing—I’m surprised it hasn’t burned a hole right through the front of his jacket, the way its aura is glowing. He’s nervous about it. He’s going to propose. Soon, I would guess.” I blinked. The air in front of me wavered like a mirage, and in another moment Jenny had rematerialized. “And if he does,” she said softly, “it will be Abigail’s decision to face, not yours. There are worse fates than to receive a proposal from a handsome young suitor.” She added, turning to me with a grin, “Charlie is a good man.” “Yes, fine! But she has such prodigious potential!” Jackaby lamented. “Having feelings is one thing—I can grudgingly tolerate feelings—but actually getting married? The next thing you know they’ll be wanting to do something rash, like live together ! Miss Rook, you have started something here that I am loath to see you leave unfinished. You’ve started becoming someone here whom I truly want to meet when she is done. Choosing to leave everything you have here to go be a good man’s wife would be such a wretched waste of that promise.” He faltered, looking to Jenny, and then to the floorboards. “On the other hand, you should never have chosen to work for me in the first place. It remains one of your most ill-conceived and reckless decisions to date—and that is saying something, because you also chose to blow up a dragon once.” He sighed. “Jenny is right. You could make a real life with that young man, and you shouldn’t throw that away just to hang about with a fractious bastard and a belligerent duck.” He sagged until his forehead was resting on his desk.

Bang! Clang! Bang! Clangity bang, rat-a-tat! "Reuben, I have been thinking, what a good world this might be, if the men were all transported far beyond the Northern Sea." "Oh,no!" Willow rose off Rider's lap so fast her forhead bumped his chin. "What is that racket?" he asked, standing and following her to the window overlooking the street. One corner of her mouth quirked in mock disgust. "Take a look for yourself." Clangity bang! Rat-a-tat! The men below beat their pots and pans with wooden spoons and, in a couple cases, gun butts. "Rachel, I have long been thinking, what a fine world this might be, if we had some more young ladies on the side of the Northern Sea. Too ral loo ral. Too ral lee." "Looks like your brothers and the whole Niners team!" Rider laughed. "What are they doing?" "Haven't you ever heard of being shivareed, husband?" Outside the boisterous, drunken voices broke into another chorus of Reuben and Rachel. "Rachel, I will not trasport you,but will take you for a wife. We will live on milk and honey, better or worse we're in for life." Willow chuckled as all up and down Allen Street lights began to glow through every window. Someone in a room down the hall lifted their window, threw a chamber pot at the crooners, and followed it with a foul epithet. Undaunted, the man broke into a chorus of Aura Lea. "They sure have lousy timing," Rider commented wryly. "Just how long does this little serenade last?" Seeing a tall figure in a long frock coat coming up the street, Willow replied, "I think it's about to end very soon now." Virgil Earp's face shone in the gaslight in front of the Grand. "All right, boys," the couple heard him say, "the party's over." He looked up at Rider and Willow with a wide, winsome grin and waved. With that, he ushered the drunken serenaders down the street and into a saloon. Rider turned from the window, shaking his head. "Now where were we? Ah,yes!" he swooped Willow off her feet and tossed her onto the huge bed. "That's not where we were." She laughed. "It's where we were headed, lady, and that's good enough for me.

I got you these.” I flipped open the satchel again, offering him the book on gemstones first and Orion’s jaw went slack as he took the book from my hand, turning it over gently like it was the most precious thing in the world. “Oh my stars,” he gasped, grabbing the bag from me and rifling through the books with a youthful smile on his face. I snorted a laugh as Darius gave me a pointed look, realising I’d just lost myself fifty auras, but the look on Orion’s face was definitely worth it. “I’m afraid Highspell had some of your other ones burned,” I said with a frown and I immediately regretted saying that as Orion looked like I’d just told him I’d murdered his puppy. “Burned them?” he rasped and I nodded, offering him an apologetic look as he hugged the bag of books to his chest like he didn’t want them to hear what had happened to their friends. “Sorry, man.” Darius rested a hand to Orion’s shoulder and he growled. “I’ll murder that fake-faced witch,” he snarled, his fangs on show as he held onto his books even tighter and I was pretty sure he was making that promise to them. Dude would definitely kill in revenge for those books.

Yet the contents and structures of the unconscious are the result of immemorial existential situations, especially of critical situations, and this is why the unconscious has a religious aura. For every existential crisis once again puts in question both the reality of the world and man's presence in the world. This means that the existential crisis is, finally, "religious," since on the archaic levels of culture being and the sacred are one. As we saw, it is the experience of the sacred that founds the world, and even the most elementary religion is, above all, an ontology. In other words, in so far as the unconscious is the result of countless existential experiences, it cannot but resemble the various religious universes. For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It is the paradigmatic solution not only because it can be indefinitely repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorized as a revelation received from an other, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but at the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit,

It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit all around them a radiance to which the crowd is sensitive. So it is that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting reports which we receive, from which an educated man can derive little enlightenment, stimulate in the crowd an emotion by which that man is surprised, and in which, once expert criticism has informed him of the actual military situation, he recognises the popular perception of that ‘aura’ which surrounds momentous happenings, and which may be visible hundreds of miles away. One learns of a victory either after the war is over, or at once, from the hilarious joy of one’s hall porter. One discovers the touch of genius in Berma’s acting a week after one has heard her, in the criticism of some review, or else on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls. But this immediate recognition by the crowd was mingled with a hundred others, all quite erroneous; the applause came, most often, at wrong moments, apart from the fact that it was mechanically produced by the effect of the applause that had gone before, just as in a storm, once the sea is sufficiently disturbed, it will continue to swell, even after the wind has begun to subside. No matter; the more I applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act.

The host of the evening, Lord Westcliff, approached to exchange pleasantries with Beatrix, Amelia, and Catherine. Beatrix had always liked the earl, a courteous and honorable man whose friendship had benefitted the Hathaways on countless occasions. With his rugged features, coal-black hair, and dark eyes, he was striking rather than handsome. He wore an aura of power comfortable and without fanfare. Westcliff asked Catherine to dance with him, a mark of favor that was hardly lost on the other guests, and she complied with a smile. "How kind he is," Amelia said to Beatrix as they watched the earl lead Catherine into the midst of the whirling couples. "I've noticed that he always makes a point of being obliging and gracious to the Hathaways. That way, no one would dare cut or snub us." "I think he likes unconventional people. He's not nearly as staid as one might assume." "Lady Westcliff has certainly said as much," Amelia replied, smiling.

The big, musclebound henchmen threw away their swords and collapsed on their backsides in the blink of an eye. The heavyset man and his flashy followers, on the other hand, were so overwhelmed by Fel’s and Gon’s murderous auras that they couldn’t speak at all, and simply fainted on the spot, though not before a few of them voided their bladders, disgustingly enough.

It gave off the kind of bewitching aura that could seduce a man—”impish” was the word for it.

Corny as it may sound today, I was used to thinking of men in terms of guidance and protection but suddenly no man felt I needed his guidance or protection since I had the aura of money to protect me.

The painting was spectacular; it was of three horsemen in nighttime forest scene. They were all darkly clothed, and the rider in the center had a bow with an arrow nocked, the string drawn back, and a rich golden aura radiating about his head. The man to the left of him had a long golden staff with two serpents circling around it, and the man to his right had a bright lantern in his hand. These three figures had shadow-obscured faces, and the full moon was visible in the painting’s dark blue sky. A brass plaque on the lower part of the frame, under the painting, said: MENS ILLUMINAT

This man’s aura was violence incarnate, pure apex predator, the kind accustomed to never losing a fight.

One day he and Sutcliffe were walking down Madison Avenue when a man they knew came up and told them a mutual friend had just died in San Francisco. “Of it?” they gasped. “No,” the man said, “he was run over by a taxicab.” “Oh, thank God!” They both said in unison. That was where AIDS stood in the hierarchy of misfortune, somehow; in a class by itself—so grim its aura extended to the fact, he thinks as he enters the nursing home, that people who don’t have AIDS imagine somehow they’re not going to die.

The man sneered a little, most probable from gathering her name and linking it to the reason for his friend’s prior street concert. He turned and extended his hand. First, she got stuck by the coldness of his gray eyes. Then, her eyes arrested at the two inch or so scar on his right cheek that hadn’t been visible while he’d allowed her to admire his better half. The wound had cross-hatches like it’d been stitched poorly, and though the facial hair on his cheek concealed it a bit, it was still visible, and too ugly to fit the rest of him. She cringed, yet stared a few seconds more and she caught herself when his eyes flickered in awareness. “Power.” That was all he said, eyes frosty, mouth tight. His voice was deep with a tinge of some sort of accent, maybe South American, or even Caribbean or something. Gloria wasn’t sure; she didn’t meet many people with accents. He wasn’t rude yet he wasn’t pleasant. Gloria took his hand and shook it because she felt compelled to. He was threateningly handsome and had the scar been absent, he’d be visually impeccable. Yet his frigid aura caused her to shiver.

in one comic scene, Brennan and Cooper share the same bed, with Brennan’s arm, at one point, draped over Cooper’s. It is tempting to see Lillian Hellman’s hand in such scenes, since she was assigned to do rewrites of Busch’s script. She specialized in the sexual ambiguity of the ménage à trois, as in These Three (1936), a Goldwyn production that featured two schoolteachers in love with the same man. In The Westerner, it is the off-screen Langtry who links Brennan and Cooper. Her aura envelops Harden and dazzles Bean, especially since Bean has to work overtime to pry out of the laconic Harden luscious details the judge slavers over. Accompanied by Brennan’s moist patter, Cooper dryly doles out his delicacies, including a lock of Langtry’s hair (actually taken from the daughter of a homesteader who has fallen in love with Harden). During the Lux Radio Theatre production of The Westerner (broadcast September 23, 1940), Cooper’s droll delivery evoked more laughter than Brennan’s stridency.

Even though I was very young, I still remember some of the men who would come into my village, the soldiers, the death squads. Most were nothing but jackals, men who killed and raped and looted for fun, because it was the easy thing to do. But some of the killers, they had a fear about them, like an aura of death. They would look at you and your blood would turn to ice and your heart would feel like it had stopped beating in your chest. Those were the men who killed and killed and would never die themselves, time after time. Whether they knew it or not, they had made a pact with the Reaper, a pact to stay alive as long as they kept sending souls in their place.” “And you think Richard is like these men?” “Don't you? Killing is like breathing to him. He has bathed in the blood of countless murders. I have seen him kill three times, and on each occasion, he should have died time and again, but the other men were a heartbeat too slow, or the bullets a few inches to the left or right. No man is so lucky for so long without something making that luck for him.” “Do you think he is evil?” “Killing and evil are not always the same things. I do not think he is a good man, but I don't think he is an evil man, either. I think he is like an earthquake, or a bolt of lightning. If you are in his sights, you die. The only question is, what put you there.” “Do you feel the same aura around Richard that you felt around those men in El Salvador?” “You are comparing a candle to the sun. Those other men, they were apprentices in the ways of Death. Richard is a master.

a deserved aura about this man, not of unapproachability, but of special warmth.

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides--pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. 13 He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the. signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now." He seemed immensely pleased by this.

Joe Acosta sat at a massive glass-and-steel-frame desk in front of a tinted glass wall that framed Biscayne Bay as if it was a photo of Joe’s personal cottage in the woods. In spite of the tint, the late-afternoon light came up off the water and filled the room with a supernatural glow. Acosta stood up as we entered, and the light from the window behind him surrounded him in a bright aura, making it hard to look at him without squinting. But I looked at him anyway, and even without the halo he was impressive. Not physically; Acosta was a thin and aristocratic-looking man with dark hair and eyes, and he wore what looked like a very expensive suit. He was not tall, and I was sure his wife would tower over him in her spike heels. But perhaps he felt that the power of his personality was strong enough to overcome a little thing like being a foot shorter than her. Or maybe it was the power of his money. Whatever it was, he had it. He looked at us from behind his desk, and I felt a sudden urge to kneel, or at least knuckle my forehead. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Sergeant,” he said. “My wife wanted to be here for this.” He waved an arm at the conversation area. “Let’s sit where we can talk,” he said, and he walked around the desk and sat down in the big club chair opposite Alana. Deborah hesitated for a moment, and I saw that she looked a little bit uncertain, as if it had really hit her for the first time that she was confronting somebody who was only a few steps down the chain of command from God. But she took a breath, squared her shoulders, and marched over to the couch. She sat down, and I sat beside her. The

Intoxicated by my Master’s vampire guise, shocks of electric currents vibrated down my arching spine; I willingly offered my bacchá innocence to this erotic aristocrat for his inerrant enjoyment. French kisses filled my urgent provocation as his desires rendered me helpless, and Andy’s tantalizing riposte replaced my bidder’s sweet attraction. Laying me on the loveseat, P’s obsessive glare stirred my uninhibited longing for my lover’s unbridled manhood. Willingly I surrendered to my lover’s sensuality before his consecrated erection encased me in a cocoon of sacramental love. Our glowing auras merged into a halo of sexual unity, bonding our sacred Eucharist, igniting a fiery passion of unimaginable bliss and filling our bodies with flowing essence of milky love. P the voyeur, sat enamored, watching a love story unfold that was as old as the creation of man.

But maybe she’d have herself a little adventure in there somewhere. Maybe on her cruise, on one of her trips. Not with this kind of man, of course. He was too mature, for one thing. One look convinced her—he knew everything about men and women, while she knew very little. He looked a little dangerous and very, very physical. Scary. He had that warrior appearance, complete with tattoos. The sight of him bare-chested had rattled her, but the big horse beneath her had given her plenty of confidence. His shoulders were so large, strong and muscular, and he had a barbed-wire armband tattooed on his rippling left biceps. His belly was flat and hard with a trail of chest hair that disappeared into his jeans. The stubble along his jaw made his grin a little taunting and definitely naughty; it had made her shiver. And he had an aura of carelessness. He would take a bite of her, then pitch her out, forgetting her before morning. But while Shelby had looked him over, everything inside her had grown warm. Something about him, a forbidden quality, was absolutely delicious. Even the damn dirt looked good on him. Despite her common sense, she wondered, wouldn’t that be interesting? And her very next thought was, no, no, no, not him! My adventure will come in a polo shirt, cheeks as smooth as a baby’s butt, styled hair, no tattoos and hopefully an advanced degree. Not some scary Black Hawk pilot who has a Ph.D. in one-night stands! *

Plato's Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle's legacy was a body of knowledge, marking the path of modern learning-accumulating the facts of the world and human experience with an explanation of causes. Aristotle's legacy, then, was not the power of a charismatic personality of grand poetic gifts, but rather the accumulation of a lifetime of scholarly observation. And before Aristotle's writings were recovered by Andronicus, there were centuries of opportunity for his ideas to be distorted. Plato's was an unbroken tradition, Aristotle's was a series of renaissances.

To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into the most indistinctive brand of human being—normal, hiding nothing, a mind like a weather vane that moved with the prevailing winds.

I gasped as his aura rolled over mine. All I could see was gold. I felt his aura. I’d been thinking that it was sunlight, but it really was like the sun. Warm. Kind. He had this deep well of patience and respect for others that I wasn’t sure I had. It was beautiful. My mother had always told me to look for a good man. I never really knew what she meant, but I did now. Lucas was a good man. A really good, tenderhearted, strong man. And

The men in her life were clean-cut, well-bred, reliable, unpretentious and good company. “Diana is an Uptown girl who has never gone in for downtown men,” observes Rory Scott. If they wore a uniform or had been cast aside by Sarah so much the better. She felt rather sorry for Sarah’s rejects and often tried, unsuccessfully, to be asked out by them. So she did washing for William van Straubenzee, one of Sarah’s old boyfriends, and ironed the shirts of Rory Scott, who had then starred in a television documentary about Trooping the Colour, and Diana regularly stayed for weekends at his parents’ farm near Petworth, West Sussex. She continued caring for his wardrobe during her royal romance, on one occasion delivering a pile of freshly laundered shirts to the back entrance of St. James’s Palace, where Rory was on duty, in order to avoid the press. James Boughey was another military man who took her out to restaurants and the theatre and Diana visited Simon Berry and Adam Russell at their rented house on the Blenheim estate when they were undergraduates at Oxford. There were lots of boyfriends but none became lovers. The sense of destiny which Diana had felt from an early age shaped, albeit unconsciously, her relationships with the opposite sex. She says: “I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.” As Carolyn observes: “I’m not a terrible spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what she is doing and she certainly believes that. She was surrounded by this golden aura which stopped men going any further, whether they would have liked to or not, it never happened. She was protected somehow by a perfect light.” It is a quality noted by her old boyfriends. Rory Scott says roguishly: “She was very sexually attractive and the relationship was not a platonic one as far as I was concerned but it remained that way. She was always a little aloof, you always felt that there was a lot you would never know about her.” In the summer of 1979 another boyfriend, Adam Russell, completed his language degree at Oxford and decided to spend a year travelling. He left unspoken the fact that he hoped the friendship between himself and Diana could be renewed and developed upon his return. When he arrived home a year later it was too late. A friend told him: “You’ve only got one rival, the Prince of Wales.

You have a strange aura for a mortal,” my new hooded friend said. “That what you always say before you kill a man?

Our penultimate lot, ladies and gentlemen, exudes an air of mystical melancholy. The tooth itself is crocodilian, but its aura is almost angelic. Note the curve; it is like a wing in ascent. Its owner, Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, was a man of average height. His short, thin legs supported a torso, which was at once solid and svelte. His head was the size of a small coconut, and he had a slender, flexible neck. He was a pantheist.