Both In One Frame Quotes

Images flicker, each one bringing its own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst, an impenetrable and sightless black and at best, a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory if the sorrow it brings.

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

The things they have done to us! The truths they have turned into lies! The ideals they have fouled and made vile. Take Jesus. He was one of us. He knew. When He said that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God—He damn well meant just what He said. But look at what the church has done to Jesus in the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word he spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if He was living today. Jesus would be one who really knows. Me and Jesus would sit across the table and I would look at Him and He would look at me and we would both know that the other knew. Me and Jesus and Karl Marx could all sit at a table and -

The queen-size bed has a wooden frame and a dark-orange duvet cover and pillows. The bedside tables on both sides are identically stocked: three books, a lamp and a glasses case. I wonder if this allows my parents to swap sides during the night. I turn on one of the lamps, lighting the room like a sexy library.

grief. We do and say strange things—sometimes bizarre things—when we are swallowed up in grief. No one should be hard on us when we say thoughtless and selfish things when we are in grief. Both Mary and Martha accused Jesus of being the cause of their brother’s death by not responding immediately to their request: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, 32). Jesus did not rebuke either of them. Instead, He wept with them (see John 11:35). So with all of us. He knows our frame; He remembers we are dust.

I'd tell you to be gentle, but we both know I wouldn't mean it." No, he wouldn't and that knowledge only fueled my desire. Bones might be a master at control, but once pushed past his limit, he made love the same way he fought; ferocious, unbridled, and in exhaustible. I couldn't count how many bed frames we'd ruined in our time together, and I hoped there were many more broken ones ahead of us in our future.

When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.) A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact. A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble. Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person’s relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.

A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice - of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves - appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls "the beauty we have paid for with our shame." Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature.

In his original design the solicitor's clerk seemed to have forgotten the need for a staircase to link both the floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an afterthought. Doorways had been punched in the eastern wall and a rough wooden staircase - heavy planks on an uneven frame with one warped unpainted banister, the whole covered with a sloping roof of corrugated iron - hung precariously at the back of the house, in striking contrast with the white-pointed brickwork of the front, the white woodwork and the frosted glass of doors and windows. For this house Mr.Biswas had paid five thousand five hundred dollars.

The window slid upward. Fire woke in both of Magnus's palms, and magic blazed in the dark, sapphire-blue. A figure pulled its torso through the window and then froze. Framed in the opening was a Shadowhunter in full demon-hunting gear, bow looped over one shoulder. He looked surprised. "Uh, hi," said Alec Lightwood. "I'm home. Please don't shoot me with magical rays." Magnus waved with both hands, blue lights paling, then winking out, leaving faint traces of smoke curling around his fingers. "You usually use the door." "Sometimes I like the change of pace." Alec pulled himself the rest of the way in and closed the window behind him. Magnus gave him a look. "Okay. Truth. A demon ate my keys." "We go through so many keys.

There was a muffled tap again, and I heard a familiar voice whisper faintly, “Kelsey, it’s me.” I unlocked the door and peeked out. Ren was standing there dressed in his white clothes, barefoot, with a triumphant grin on his face. I pulled him inside and hissed out thickly, “What are you doing here? It’s dangerous coming into town! You could have been seen, and they’d send hunters out after you!” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “I missed you.” My mouth quirked up in a half smile. “I missed you too.” He leaned a shoulder nonchalantly against the doorframe. “Does that mean you’ll let me stay here? I’ll sleep on the floor and leave before daylight. No one will see me. I promise.” I let out a deep breath. “Okay, but promise you’ll leave early. I don’t like you risking yourself like this.” “I promise.” He sat down on the bed, took my hand, and pulled me down to sit beside him. “I don’t like sleeping in the dark jungle by myself.” “I wouldn’t either.” He looked down at our entwined hands. “When I’m with you, I feel like a man again. When I’m out there all alone, I feel like a beast, an animal.” His eyes darted up to mine. I squeezed his hand. “I understand. It’s fine. Really.” He grinned. “You were hard to track, you know. Lucky for me you two decided to walk to dinner, so I could follow your scent right to your door.” Something on the nightstand caught his attention. Leaning around me, he reached over and picked up my open journal. I had drawn a new picture of a tiger-my tiger. My circus drawings were okay, but this latest one was more personal and full of life. Ren stared at it for a moment while a bright crimson flush colored my cheeks. He traced the tiger with his finger, and then whispered gently, "Someday, I'll give you a portrait of the real me." Setting the journal down carefully, he took both of my hands in his, turned to me with an intense expression, and said, "I don't want you to see only a tiger when you look at me. I want you to see me. The man." Reaching out, he almost touched my cheek but he stopped and withdrew his hand. "I've worn the tiger's face for far too many years. He's stolen my humanity." I nodded while he squeezed my hands and whispered quietly, "Kells, I don't want to be him anymore. I want to be me. I want to have a life." "I know," I said softly. I reached up to stroke his cheek. "Ren, I-" I froze in place as he pulled my hand slowly down to his lips and kissed my palm. My hand tingled. His blue eyes searched my face desperately, wanting, needing something from me. I wanted to say something to reassure him. I wanted to offer him comfort. I just couldn't frame the words. His supplication stirred me. I felt a deep bond with him, a strong connection. I wanted to help him, I wanted to be his friend, and I wanted...maybe something more. I tried to identify and categorize my reactions to him. What I felt for him seemed too complicated to define, but it soon became obvious to me that the strongest emotion I felt, the one that was stirring my heart, was...love.

You’re sure you want to do this,” Galen says, eyeing me like I’ve grown a tiara of snakes on my head. “Absolutely.” I unstrap the four-hundred-dollar silver heels and spike them into the sand. When he starts unraveling his tie, I throw out my hand. “No! Leave it. Leave everything on.” Galen frowns. “Rachel would kill us both. In our sleep. She would torture us first.” “This is our prom night. Rachel would want us to enjoy ourselves.” I pull the thousand-or-so bobby pins from my hair and toss them in the sand. Really, both of us are right. She would want us to be happy. But she would also want us to stay in our designer clothes. Leaning over, I shake my head like a wet dog, dispelling the magic of hairspray. Tossing my hair back, I look at Galen. His crooked smile almost melts me where I stand. I’m just glad to see a smile on his face at all. The last six months have been rough. “Your mother will want pictures,” he tells me. “And what will she do with pictures? There aren’t exactly picture frames in the Royal Caverns.” Mom’s decision to mate with Grom and live as his queen didn’t surprise me. After all, I am eighteen years old, an adult, and can take care of myself. Besides, she’s just a swim away. “She keeps picture frames at her house though. She could still enjoy them while she and Grom come to shore to-“ “Okay, ew. Don’t say it. That’s where I draw the line.” Galen laughs and takes off his shoes. I forget all about Mom and Grom. Galen, barefoot in the sand, wearing an Armani tux. What more could a girl ask for? “Don’t look at me like that, angelfish,” he says, his voice husky. “Disappointing your grandfather is the last thing I want to do.” My stomach cartwheels. Swallowing doesn’t help. “I can’t admire you, even from afar?” I can’t quite squeeze enough innocence in there to make it believable, to make it sound like I wasn’t thinking the same thing he was. Clearing his throat, he nods. “Let’s get on with this.” He closes the distance between us, making foot-size potholes with his stride. Grabbing my hand, he pulls me to the water. At the edge of the wet sand, just out of reach of the most ambitious wave, we stop. “You’re sure?” he says again. “More than sure,” I tell him, giddiness swimming through my veins like a sneaking eel. Images of the conference center downtown spring up in my mind. Red and white balloons, streamers, a loud, cheesy DJ yelling over the starting chorus of the next song. Kids grinding against one another on the dance floor to lure the chaperones’ attention away from a punch bowl just waiting to be spiked. Dresses spilling over with skin, matching corsages, awkward gaits due to six-inch heels. The prom Chloe and I dreamed of. But the memories I wanted to make at that prom died with Chloe. There could never be any joy in that prom without her. I couldn’t walk through those doors and not feel that something was missing. A big something. No, this is where I belong now. No balloons, no loud music, no loaded punch bowl. Just the quiet and the beach and Galen. This is my new prom. And for some reason, I think Chloe would approve.

It’s the difference between your wife’s passport photograph and the portraits you took when you got engaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, “She looks like this.” The other says, “This is who she is to me. It’s how I feel about her. See how amazing she is?

Tell me what to do." His warm breath tickled my ear. "Relax." "Please, Noah, I don't want to do this wrong. Tell me how to make you feel good." He shifted so that his body rested beside mine, his leg and arm still draped over me. I felt small under his warmth and strength. His chocolate-brown eyes softened. "Being with you feels good. Touching you-"he tucked a curl behind my ear"-feels good. I have never wanted anyone like I want you. There's nothing you can do wrong when just breathing makes everything right." His hand framed my face and his tone was edget with husky authority. "I want you, but only if you want me." I kissed him back, allowing my arms to wrap around him. His fingers gently massaged my neck, releasing the tension, erasing my unease. The kiss became a drug and i craved more with every touch. Our bodies twined so tightly to one another, i had no idea where i began and he ended. Noah felt strong and warm and muscular and safe and he smelled, oh, God, delicious. I couldn't stop kissing him if my life depend it upon it: his lips, his neck, his chest, and Noah seemed as hungry as me. We rolled and we touched and we shed unwanted clothes. I moaned and he moaned and my mind and soul and body stood on the edge of pure ecstasy. And i waited. I waited for that moment of pausing for protection and the burning pain my friends described, but Noah never stopped and the pain never came, not even when i whispered his name and praise God several times in a row. Both of us gasped for air while kissing each other softly and i struggled to comprehend i was still a virgin. He shifted off of me and tugged me close to him. My entire body became lazily warm, happy and sated. I listened to his heartbeat and closed my eyes, enjoying the relaxing pull of his hand in my hair. "Noah," i whispered. "I thought..." we were going to make love. He tipped my chin, forcing me to look at him. "We have forever to work up to that, Echo. Let's enjoy every step of the way." My mind drifted this way and that. Mostly between focusing on his heart, his touch and the sweetest word i had ever heard: forever. One clear thought forced my eyes open. "You 're putting me to sleep." "So?" he asked a little too innocently. I swallowed. "I'll have nightmares." "Then we 'll have an excuse to do this again.

People who want to end polarization by listening to both sides say they are doing so because they recognize the debate is a complex one, but listening to only two sides is kids’ stuff. It’s a product of shallow understanding and an immature spirit. Truly open-minded people don’t have time for that. Open-minded people are listening to too many other sides, and aren’t interested in leaving any of those sides out. Open-minded people understand that learning to accommodate all the sides isn’t weak, but strong; not closed, but open. Which is why—if you want unity—you mustn’t treat everyone working together toward the goal of a just and equitable world as an equal “side” to the people who are being active intentional obstacles to that goal. This is what makes people who accept “both sides” framing in the name of “unity” so toxic.

He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that's how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests that there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make.

It’s impossible to have a relationship with a defense mechanism.  It’s impossible to have an authentic relationship when one or both are unwilling to hear what they need to work on.

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

Why have you done all this for me?" She turned her head to look at him. "Tell me the truth." He shook his head slowly. "I don't think I could have been more terrified of the devil than I was of you," she said, "when it was happening and in my thoughts and nightmares afterward. And when you came home to Willoughby and I realized that the Duke of Ridgeway was you, I thought I would die from the horror of it." His face was expressionless. "I know," he said. "I was afraid of your hands more than anything," she said. "They are beautiful hands." He said nothing. "When did it all change?" she asked. She turned completely toward him and closed the distance between them. "You will not say the words yourself. But they are the same words as the ones on my lips, aren't they?" She watched him swallow. "For the rest of my life I will regret saying them," she said. "But I believe I would regret far more not saying them." "Fleur," he said, and reached out a staying hand. "I love you," she said. "No." "I love you." "It is just that we have spent a few days together," he said, "and talked a great deal and got to know each other. It is just that I have been able to help you a little and you are feeling grateful to me." "I love you," she said. "Fleur." She reached up to touch his scar. "I am glad I did not know you before this happened," she said. "I do not believe I would have been able to stand the pain." "Fleur," he said, taking her wrist in his hand. "Are you crying?" she said. She lifted both arms and wrapped them about his neck and laid her cheek against his shoulder. "Don't, my love. I did not mean to lay a burden on you. I don't mean to do so. I only want you to know that you are loved and always will be." "Fleur," he said, his voice husky from his tears, "I have nothing to offer you, my love. I have nothing to give you. My loyalty is given elsewhere. I didn't want this to happen. I don't want it to happen. You will meet someone else. When I am gone you will forget and you will be happy." She lifted her head and looked into his face. She wiped away one of his tears with one finger. "I am not asking anything in return," she said. "I just want to give you something, Adam. A free gift. My love. Not a burden, but a gift. To take with you when you go, even though we will never see each other again." He framed her face with his hands and gazed down into it. "I so very nearly did not recognize you," he said. "You were so wretchedly thin, Fleur, and pale. Your lips were dry and cracked, your hair dull and lifeless. But I did know you for all that. I think I would still be in London searching for you if you had not gone to that agency. But it's too late, love. Six years too late.

That was true, Iris would sometimes think, about marriage: it was only a boat, too. A wooden boat, difficult to build, even more difficult to maintain, whose beauty derived at least in part from its unlikelihood. Long ago the pragmatic justifications for both marriage and wooden-boat building had been lost or superseded. Why invest countless hours, years, and dollars in planing and carving, gluing and fastening, caulking and fairing, when a fiberglass boat can be had at a fraction of the cost? Why struggle to maintain love and commitment over decades when there were far easier ways to live, ones that required no effort or attention to prevent corrosion and rot? Why continue to pour your heart into these obsolete arts? Because their beauty, the way they connect you to your history and to the living world, justifies your efforts. A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance. At first your notions of your life with another were no more substantial than a pattern laid down in plywood. Then year by year you constructed the frame around the form, and began layering memories, griefs, and small triumphs like strips of veneer planking bent around the hull of everyday routine. You sanded down the rough edges, patched the misunderstandings, faired the petty betrayals. Sometimes you sprung a leak. You fell apart in rough weather or were smashed on devouring rocks. But then, as now, in the teeth of a storm, when it seemed like all was lost, the timber swelled, the leak sealed up, and you found that your craft was, after all, sea-kindly.

Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword? Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status. ... Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd. ... According to the 18th-century writer Mary Wortley Montagu, 'Satire should, like a polished razor keen / Wound with touch that's scarcely felt or seen.' But satire is seldom polished that keenly, and the butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both. The lethal riots in 2005 provoked by the editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (for example, one showing Muhammad in heaven greeting newly arrived suicide bombers with 'Stop, we have run out of virgins!') show that when it comes to the deliberate undermining of a sacred relational model, humor is no laughing matter. (pp. 633-634)

It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.” “You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.” “Yeah,” I said. “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” She turned to her computer, shook her mouse to wake it up, and then clicked an image on her desktop. “I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism. "Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to pose questions such as whether the mind is socially determined, as though the mind and society each posses a substance of their own' [citing Pressler and Dasilva's Sociology]. The profound implications of the individual's embeddedness in the national community is that the community's ethos is prior and therefore historically determinative of all socioepistemic phenomena. And if thought structures are predetermined by intellectual history, by society's inheritance of historical forms of knowledge, then those structures are also a priori predetermined by the linguistic structures in which this history is enveloped, cast, and framed. Like law, nationalism is everywhere: it creates the community and shapes world history even before nationalism comes into it.

Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine). Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.' 'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.' 'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing. 'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.' 'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.' 'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.' 'Is it in the dictionary?' 'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?' And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. 'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously. 'Thanks, thanks.' 'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?' 'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.' Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail.

Granted, vegetarian naming wrests meat eating from a context of acceptance; this does not invalidate its mission. One thing must be acknowledged about vegetarian naming as exemplified in the above examples: these are true words. The dissonance they produce is not due to their being false, but to their being too accurate. These words do not adhere to our common discourse which presumes the edibility of animals. Just as feminists proclaimed that 'rape is violence, not sex,' vegetarians wish to name the violence of meat eating. Both groups challenge commonly used terms. Mary Daly calls the phrase 'forcible rape' a reversal by redundancy because it implies that all rapes are not forcible. This example highlights the role of language in masking violence, in this case an adjective deflects attention from the violence inherent in the meaning of the noun. The adjective confers a certain benignity on the word 'rape.' Similarly, the phrase 'humane slaughter' confers a certain benignity on the term 'slaughter.' Daly would call this the process of 'simple inversion': 'the usage of terms and phrases to label...activities as the opposite of what they really are.' The use of adjectives in the phrases 'humane slaughter' and 'forcible rape' promotes a conceptual misfocusing that relativizes these acts of violence. Additionally, as we ponder how the end is achieved, 'forcibly,' 'humanely,' our attention is continously framed so that the absent referents--women, animals--do not appear. Just as all rapes are forcible, all slaughter of animals for food is inhumane regardless of what it is called.

It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. [...] Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other.… Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions. —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 1844.

I've always found the thousand dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand dollar ones --- if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it's clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it's apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn't well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us. We're not worth it! I want to say. You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild's college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks. Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.

17.  According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one’s plans. [Sun Tzu, as a practical soldier, will have none of the “bookish theoric.” He cautions us here not to pin our faith to abstract principles; “for,” as Chang Yu puts it, “while the main laws of strategy can be stated clearly enough for the benefit of all and sundry, you must be guided by the actions of the enemy in attempting to secure a favorable position in actual warfare.” On the eve of the battle of Waterloo, Lord Uxbridge, commanding the cavalry, went to the Duke of Wellington in order to learn what his plans and calculations were for the morrow, because, as he explained, he might suddenly find himself Commander-in-chief and would be unable to frame new plans in a critical moment. The Duke listened quietly and then said: “Who will attack the first tomorrow—I or Bonaparte?” “Bonaparte,” replied Lord Uxbridge. “Well,” continued the Duke, “Bonaparte has not given me any idea of his projects; and as my plans will depend upon his, how can you expect me to tell you what mine are?”75] 18.  All warfare is based on deception. [The truth of this pithy and profound saying will be admitted by every soldier. Col. Henderson tells us that Wellington, great in so many military qualities, was especially distinguished by “the extraordinary skill with which he concealed his movements and deceived both friend and foe.”] 19. 

Ontological Fourier mathematics is the complete mathematical explanation of Cartesian philosophy. It converts a substance dualism into a dual-aspect substance monism. There is only one substance - mathematics - but it can exist both dimensionlessly (as mind) and dimensionally (as matter, the product of mind). Mind adds the framing dimensions of space (extended real numbers) and time (extended imaginary numbers) to the unextended real and imaginary numbers of the frequency domain. (Ontologically, frequencies are not in space and time. They are instead the source of space and time).

It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other.

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there. It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other. The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it. ("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes")

On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars. But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all. To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want to get ahead. The truth is, you don’t. If you love and want to make movies about issues of social import, get your hands on Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network. Read it. Then watch the movie. Then read it again. If you love and want to make big blockbusters that also have great artistic merit, do the same thing with Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark screenplay and the movie made from it. Think about how the screenplays made you feel. And how the movies built from these screenplays did or didn’t hit you the same way. […] This sounds basic, right? That’s because it is basic. And it’s true. All the information you need is the movies and screenplays you love. And in the books you’ve read and the relationships you’ve had and your ability to use those things.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. Bryant Wedge, a psychiatrist specializing in the field of international relations, studied negotiations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and was able to delineate a number of basic assumptions as to the nature of human beings and society and the world held by Americans which differed dramatically from the assumptions of Russians. These assumptions dictated the negotiating behavior of both sides. Yet neither side was aware of its own assumptions or the fact that the other side was operating on a different set of assumptions. The inevitable result was that the negotiating behavior of the Russians seemed to the Americans to be either crazy or deliberately evil, and of course the Americans seemed to the Russians equally crazy or evil.24 We are indeed like the three proverbial blind men, each in touch with only his particular piece of the elephant yet each claiming to know the nature of the whole beast. So we squabble over our different microcosmic world views, and all wars are holy wars.

In this peaceful city, during Tet, it was traditional to send cups of paper with lit candles floating down the Huong like flickering blossoms, prayers for health, for success, for the memory of loved ones away or departed, for success in business or in love, and perhaps for an end to the war and killing. It made a moving collective display, a vast flotilla of hope, many thousands of tiny flames. They would wind down the wide water without sound, flowing past the bright lights of the modern city to the south, framed to the north by the fortress’s high black walls. People would line both banks of the Huong to savor the spectacle, stepping up and bending to add their own offering. The ritual was Hue’s emblem and signature, a gesture of beauty and calm, of harmony between the living and the dead, an expression of Vietnam’s soul, a place far from the horrors of war. Not this year.

Resistance, in the Western mind, is a mutating concept. While Ukrainian resistance is glorified for its guerrilla warfare tactics, Palestinian resistance—termed “terrorism”—is puzzling, perverted, and pathological. Mainstream media’s insistence on these framings is not due to any fundamental differences in the ways both peoples exercise violence. Nor is it solely because of Ukrainians’ skin color; one needs to look no further than the Irish Republican Army to see that whiteness alone is no golden ticket—at least not in a war against British colonialism. Rather, the tonal shift employed in media coverage is simply in service of the West’s strategic interests. While the Israeli settler-colonial regime is the United States’ most important ally in the Middle East, and practically an offshoot of Europe, created to protect Western imperialism, Russia represents an “existential” threat to the West.35

They both glared at each other, her pink eyes clashing with his ice-cold blue ones. Even when he was annoyed—and being annoying—he was wickedly handsome. His tousled black hair and the shadows of night only added to his charm. The smooth planes of his angular face, the irritated wedge between his brows, and the long lashes framing his tundra-like eyes —he was beautiful even in the dead of night with only moonlight filtering through the thickening snow-laden air.

When she opened her eyes, she returned her attention to the candle, still and unmoving even as it burned unbearably bright. And then it did move, dancing and flickering in an unexpected draft. A draft followed by a great woof and a thud as Trotula left the bed, tail wagging madly, and threw herself at the doors that led out to the narrow balcony just off Pippa's bedchamber. Doors once closed, now open, now framing the man Pippa loved, frozen just inside the room, tall and serious and beautifully disheveled. As she watched, he took a deep breath and ran both hands through thick red hair, pushing it off his face, his high cheekbones and long straight nose stark and angled in the candlelight. He was unbearably handsome. She'd never in her life longed for anything the way she longed for him. He'd promised to teach her about temptation and desire and he'd done powerfully well; her heart raced at the sight of him, at the sound of his heavy breath. And yet... she did not know what came next. "You are beautiful," he said. What came next was anything he wished.

The 1970s and 1980s: feminism, androgyny, modernism, aesthetics In the 1970s and 1980s, Woolf studies expanded in a number of directions, most notably in relation to feminism. Critical interest in Woolf developed at the same time as feminism developed in related academic disciplines. In this period her writings became central to the theoretical framing of feminism, in particular to debates on Marxist and materialist feminism and to the emergent theories of androgyny. Both these areas of debate takeWoolf ’s A Room of One’s Own as a major point of reference... ........... At the same time as feminist approaches to Woolf were developing and expanding, so, too, was the critical interest in her modernist theories and her formal aesthetics. Again, Woolf ’s writing became central to critical and theoretical formulations on modernism. .......... This period also saw considerable critical interest in the influence of the visual arts on Woolf ’s writing, and particularly in the influence of the formalist theories of her Bloomsbury colleagues Roger Fry and Clive Bell.

Thou grievest where no grief should be! thou speak'st Words lacking wisdom! for the wise in heart Mourn not for those that live, nor those that die. Nor I, nor thou, nor any one of these, Ever was not, nor ever will not be, For ever and for ever afterwards. All, that doth live, lives always! To man's frame As there come infancy and youth and age, So come there raisings-up and layings-down Of other and of other life-abodes, Which the wise know, and fear not. This that irks—Thy sense-life, thrilling to the elements—Bringing thee heat and cold, sorrows and joys, 'Tis brief and mutable! Bear with it, Prince! As the wise bear. The soul which is not moved, The soul that with a strong and constant calm Takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently, Lives in the life undying! That which is Can never cease to be; that which is not Will not exist. To see this truth of both Is theirs who part essence from accident, Substance from shadow. Indestructible, Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all; It cannot anywhere, by any means, Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed. But for these fleeting frames which it informs With spirit deathless, endless, infinite, They perish. Let them perish, Prince! and fight! He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!" He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" those both Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain! Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever; Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems! Who knoweth it exhaustless, self-sustained, Immortal, indestructible,—shall such Say, "I have killed a man, or caused to kill?" Nay, but as when one layeth His worn-out robes away, And taking new ones, sayeth, "These will I wear to-day!" So putteth by the spirit Lightly its garb of flesh, And passeth to inherit A residence afresh. I say to thee weapons reach not the Life; Flame burns it not, waters cannot o'erwhelm, Nor dry winds wither it. Impenetrable, Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched, Immortal, all-arriving, stable, sure, Invisible, ineffable, by word And thought uncompassed, ever all itself, Thus is the Soul declared! How wilt thou, then,—Knowing it so,—grieve when thou shouldst not grieve? How, if thou hearest that the man new-dead Is, like the man new-born, still living man—One same, existent Spirit—wilt thou weep? The end of birth is death; the end of death Is birth: this is ordained! and mournest thou, Chief of the stalwart arm! for what befalls Which could not otherwise befall? The birth Of living things comes unperceived; the death Comes unperceived; between them, beings perceive: What is there sorrowful herein, dear Prince?

But it does not in general make sense to suppose that a legislature has an intent in passing a law. Legislation is a political process, in which deals are cut and compromises made. In both the public and the private deliberations about any statute many inconsistent reasons will be offered for framing a clause one way or another; many suggestions, not all of them consonant with one another, will be offered as to what the overall aims of the statute are. To extract from this mishmash of mixed motives a singular coherent intention will usually be impossible.46

The Buddha’s fifth dream evokes both the extraordinary and the ordinary nature of his achievement. He walks on a mountain of dirt and is not fouled by it. Note that the dirt is not transformed into gold or anything. It stays dirty. But the Buddha, astride his pile of dirt, is untouched by it. This is another version of the third dream, in which that which was seen as a barrier to awakening is now known as the foundation upon which it rests. Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything; it means changing one’s frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.

The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimeters, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the color ended like a mask under the eyes, and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed manelike back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant Freak Fighter in Licktown, but the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

How much Dina Aunty relished her memories. Mummy and Daddy were the same, talking about their yesterdays and smiling in that sad-happy way while selecting each picture, each frame from the past, examining it lovingly before it vanished again in the mist. But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be re-created—not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

With snow-white hair and a massive forehead, Bismarck, in military uniform, welcomed Grant with both hands extended. Turning on the charm, he expressed surprise that Grant was only seven years his junior. “That shows the value of a military life,” he remarked, “for here you have the frame of a young man, while I feel like an old one.”70 Grant was entranced by the flow of wit that emanated from the worldly Bismarck with his imposing physique, beautiful manners, ready laugh, and penetrating insights. As they sat in his study, smoking cigars, with the window thrown open to a gorgeous park, the conversation turned to the varied exercises in nation building in which both men had so strenuously engaged. Bismarck commiserated

I couldn't stop picturing you naked and wet." "If you knew the things you've done in my imagination..." "I touched myself while thinking of you." He groaned against her lips. "Jesus Christ, that's one of them." She whimpered in protest as his fingers withdrew from her body. He slid his hands to her bottom and lifted her off her feet, carrying her across the room, to where a floor-length mirror in a thick gilded frame stood propped against the wall. It must have been too heavy to move. He spun her to face it, positioning himself behind her. Their gazes locked in the mirrored reflection. His eyes were dark, fierce, demanding. "Show me." He yanked her skirts to her waist- frock, petticoat, chemise, and all- exposing her completely. "Show me how you touched yourself." Penny's heartbeat stalled. The gruff command both scandalized and excited her. With a rough flex of his arms, he hauled her to him. His erection throbbed against the small of her back. "Show me." Penny stared into the mirror. A bolder, naughtier version of herself gazed back. She placed a hand on her belly and eased it downward, until her fingertips disappeared into a thatch of amber curls. She hesitated, holding her breath. "More," he demanded. "I want to see you." His gruffness aroused her, but she wasn't intimidated. With him, she knew she was safe. She raised her free arm above her head, clasping his neck for balance and resting her head against his chest. He wrapped his arm about her torso, holding her tight and pinning her lifted skirts at the waist. Her joints softened, and her thighs fell slightly apart. "That's it. Spread yourself for me. Let me see." The woman in the mirror did as she was told, sending her fingers downward to part the pink, swollen folds of her sex. A single fingertip settled over the sensitive bud at the crest, circling gently. His ragged breath warmed her ear. "God, you're beautiful." She stared at the reflection, transfixed by the eroticism of the image within. She felt like a woman in a boudoir painting, flushed with desire and unashamed of her body's curves and shadows. Aware of the power she held, even in her vulnerable, naked state. As her excitement mounted, she strummed faster. She was panting, arching her back.

In a hurry to escape he let himself out of the house and walked to the truck. Before he could climb inside Marilee raced down the steps. Breathless,she came to a sudden halt in front of him. At the dark look in his eyes she swallowed. "Please don't go,Wyatt. I've been such a fool." "You aren't the only one." He studied her with a look that had her heart stuttering.A look so intense, she couldn't look away. "I've been neating myself up for days,because I wanted things to go my way or no way." "There's no need.You're not the only one." Her voice was soft,throaty. "You've always respected my need to be independent.But I guess I fought the battle so long,I forgot how to stop fighting even after I'd won the war." "You can fight me all you want. You know Superman is indestructable." Again that long,speculative look. "I know I caught you off guard with that proposal. It won't happen again. Even when I understood your fear of commitment, I had to push to have things my way.And even though I still want more, I'm willing to settle for what you're willing to give,as long as we can be together." She gave a deep sigh. "You mean it?" "I do." "Oh,Wyatt.I was so afraid I'd driven you away forever." He continued studying her. "Does this mean you're suffering another change of heart?" "My heart doesn't need to change. In my heart,I've always known how very special you are.It's my head that can't seem to catch up." She gave a shake of her head,as though to clear it. "I'm so glad you understand me. I've spent so many years fighting to be my own person, it seems I can't bear to give up the battle." A slow smile spread across his face, changing it from darkness to light. "Marilee,if it's a sparring partner you want,I'm happy to sigh on. And if,in time,you ever decide you want more, I'm your man." He framed her face with his hands and lowered his head,kissing her long and slow and deep until they were both sighing with pleasure. Her tears started again,but this time they were tears of joy. Wyatt brushed them away with his thumbs and traced the tracks with his lips. Marilee sighed at the tenderness. It was one of the things she most loved about this man. Loved. Why did she find it so hard to say what she was feeling? Because,her heart whispered, love meant commitment and promises and forever after,and that was more than she was willing to consider. At least for now. After a moment he caught her hand. "Where are we going?" "Your place.It's closer than the ranch, and we've wasted too much time already." "i can't leave the ambulance..." "All right." He turned away from the ranch truck and led her toward her vehicle. "See how easy I am?" At her little laugh he added, "I'm desperate for some time alone with you." Alone. She thought about that word. She'd been alone for so long.What he was offering had her heart working overtime. He was willing to compromise in order to be with her. She was laughing through her tears as she turned the key in the ignition. The key that had saved his life. "Wyatt McCord,I can't think of anything I'd rather be than alone with you.

Because,' he said, 'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you, especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situation in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and the nI've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.' 'That I never would, sir; you know -,' impossible to proceed. [...] The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to predominate - to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak. 'I grieve to leave Thornfield; I love Thornfield; I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright, and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in, with an origin, a vigorous, and expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you forever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.' 'Where do you see the necessity?' he asked, suddenly. 'Where? You, sir, have placed it before me.' 'In what shape?' 'In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman, your bride.' 'My bride! What bride? I have no bride!' 'But you will have.' 'Yes; I will! I will!' He set his teeth. 'Then I must go; you have said it yourself.' 'No; you must stay! I swear it, and the oath shall be kept.' 'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automation? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirits; just as if both had passed through the grace, and we stood at God's feel, equal - as we are!' 'As we are!' repeated Mr. Rochester - 'so,' he added, including me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips; 'so, Jane!' 'Yes, so, sir,' I rejoined; 'and yet not so; for you are a married man, or as good as a married man, and we'd to one inferior to you - to one with whom you have no sympathy - whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union; therefore I am better than you - let me go!' 'Where, Jane? to Ireland?' 'Yes - to Ireland. I have spoke my mind, and can go anywhere now.' 'Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is tending its own plumage in its desperation.' 'I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.' Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him. 'And your will shall decide your destiny,' he said; 'I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions.' 'You play a farce, which I merely taught at.' 'I ask you to pass through life at my side - to be my second self, and best earthly companion.' [...] 'Do you doubt me, Jane?' 'Entirely.' 'You have no faith in me?' 'Not a whit.

I reached down and squeezed his hand. "You are a good brother." He nodded. I could see in the gray light that he was crying a little. "Thanks", he said. "i kind of just want to stay here in this particular instant for a really long time." "Yeah", I said. We settled into silence and I felt the sky's bigness above me, the unimaginable vastness of it all - looking at Polaris and realizing the light I was seeing was 425 years old, and then looking at Jupiter, less than a light-hour from us. In the moonless darkness, we were just witnesses to light, and I felt a sliver of what must have driven Davis to astronomy. There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out. And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything. I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other - maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again and I will be stuck missing him, and isn't that so terrible. But it turn out not to be terrible, because i know the secret that the me lying beneath that sky could not imagine: I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, write it down, how you got here. So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift. You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why. - But underneath those skies, your hand - no, my hand, no - our hand - in his, you don't know yet. You don't know that the spiral painting is in that box on your dining room table, with a Post-it note stuck to the back of the frame. You don't know that you will make a life, see it unbuilt and rebuilt.

Think of this respectable modern idea of fighting against polarization on both sides. You know, that great narrative formulation of our modern age: Both sides. The two sides. The only two sides you have to consider. Please, name the two sides. We might use the standard way of looking at “both sides,” which is to frame it around whether or not somebody agrees or disagrees with a proposition. Take gay marriage. You agree with gay marriage. I disagree with it. We are both sides, though neither of us is gay. We might point out that this framing allows two people who are unaffected by a topic to discuss the topic in a way that erases the person directly affected by the harmful proposition—actually takes them completely outside of it, by postulating two sides, and not including the person affected as either of those two sides. We might point out how this advantages a person who wants to keep the harmful proposition in circulation forever. We might therefore postulate that a better way of framing “both sides” would be to view the two sides along lines of “those who are affected” and “those who aren’t affected.” You agree with gay marriage, I disagree, but neither of us have our humanity up for debate. We are one side. And then there are gay people, for whom marriage is a case of being a part of society or being shunned from it. The other side. I think that’s a better framing, for sure. We should use that framing, if only to understand the ways our thinking has been warped by modern “both sides” narratives, and stop treating real toxic ideas that really harm real people as if they are bloodless abstractions that merit debate.

The curve of her bare breast filled my palm, and we both made a noise of pleasure. I tweaked the hard bead of her nipple, loving the way her lids fluttered as her lips parted. She arched into the touch, her head tilting to the side. I kissed my way along her neck, pinching that sweet nipple, tugging it. Oh, but she liked that, whimpering and wiggling, lifting those sweet tits up higher in encouragement. I dipped down and dragged my tongue along one beaded tip. The sound she made was so dirty, hot, and greedy my dick pulsed. Holding that succulent breast plumped in the palm of my hand, I licked, sucked, and kissed it the way I'd been dying to. "Lucian..." She needed more, her hips grinding on my thigh with uncoordinated motions. My free hand moved to her ass---that spectacular ass----and gripped it. I hauled her up close, my mouth finding hers. "Ride me, honey." I worked her on my thigh, holding her ass as she rocked the slick heat of her sex up and down its length. Emma's breasts tickled my chest with every upward thrust, her lips feathering over mine. Our breath mingled, and I stole a kiss, messy and frantic. My cock throbbed for release, fucking ached for it. But watching her lids flutter, the way her gorgeous face strained with pleasure, made it worth the torture. "I'm going to come if you..."----she gasped, nibbled my lower lip----"keep doing that." "Good," I grunted, flexing my thigh, bouncing her. Oh, she loved that. "Come all over me, honey. Let me see you move." Her head fell to my shoulder, her lips nuzzling my neck. She rocked and ground on my thigh, getting it hot and wet. But her clever hand slid down and found my needy dick once more. I made a noise that sounded a lot like pain, but it was unadulterated pleasure that had me pushing up into the clasp of her hand. "Not without you," she said, jacking my length. Our mouths met, and the kiss became a wild thing. I kissed her until I couldn't breathe, then kissed her again. And she moved on me, her hand stroking and pulling. Heat swarmed my skin, licked up my cock. My abs clenched as I groaned, curling myself around her with a shudder of pure lust. "I'm close." "Are you?" "Yeah." Panting now, we worked with each other, harder, faster. The air steamed, and she trembled. "Now, Lucian. Now." "Fuck." "Oh!" Her deep moan, the way she clenched all around me as her orgasm shuddered through her slim frame, set me off. I released with a shout, pulsing so hard my head went light.

He forced his mind back to the kitchen and the mess she’d created. He found himself smiling for no reason at all. If he wasn’t already falling for her, this mess definitely turned the tide. She’d tried. For him. She had no clue how to cook, but she’d gotten up early, looked up cooking videos and tried to make him breakfast. He went back to his room and got his cell phone so he could take pictures. Lots of them. He added a video of the entire room. He wanted to have both to remember this moment. His woman, doing her best, giving him a priceless gift. The question came up in interview after interview: What did one get for the man who had everything and could get anything he wanted? You gave him this. A messy kitchen and burned pots and pans. Flour all over your face and clothes. You gave him something no one else had ever bothered to do or would think of doing. Yeah. He was falling hard. And he was framing the damn pictures and putting them up on his wall

Your butler informed me you were here. I thought-that is, I wondered how things were going.” “And since my butler didn’t know,” Ian concluded with amused irritation, “you decided to call on Elizabeth and see if you could discover for yourself?” “Something like that,” the vicar said calmly. “Elizabeth regards me as a friend, I think. And so I planned to call on her and, if you weren’t here, to put in a good word for you.” “Only one?” Ian said mildly. The vicar did not back down; he rarely did, particularly in matters of morality or justice. “Given your treatment of her, I was hard pressed to think of one. How did matters turn out with your grandfather?” “Well enough,” Ina said, his mind on meeting with Elizabeth. “He’s here in London.” “And?” “And,” Ian said sardonically, “you may now address me as ‘my lord.’” “I’ve come here,” Duncan persisted implacably, “to address you as ‘the bridegroom.’” A flash of annoyance crossed Ian’s tanned features. “You never stop pressing, do you? I’ve managed my own life for thirty years, Duncan. I think I can do it now.” Duncan had the grace to look slightly abashed. “You’re right, of course. Shall I leave?” Ian considered the benefits of Duncan’s soothing presence and reluctantly shook his head. “No. In fact, since you’re here,” he continued as they neared the top step, “you may as well be the one to announce us to the butler. I can’t get past him.” Duncan lifted the knocker while bestowing a mocking glance on Ian. “You can’t get past the butler, and you think you’re managing very well without me?” Declining to rise to that bait, Ian remained silent. The door opened a moment later, and the butler looked politely from Duncan, who began to give his name, to Ian. To Duncan’s startled disbelief, the door came crashing forward in his face. An instant before it banged into its frame Ian twisted, slamming his shoulder into it and sending the butler flying backward into the hall and ricocheting off the wall. In a low, savage voice he said, “Tell your mistress I’m here, or I’ll find her myself and tell her.” With a glance of furious outrage the older man considered Ian’s superior size and powerful frame, then turned and started reluctantly for a room ahead and to the left, where muted voices could be heard. Duncan eyed Ian with one gray eyebrow lifted and said sardonically, “Very clever of you to ingratiate yourself so well with Elizabeth’s servants.” The group in the drawing room reacted with diverse emotions to Bentner’s announcement that “Thornton is here and forced his way into the house.” The dowager duchess looked fascinated, Julius looked both relived and dismayed, Alexandra looked wary, and Elizabeth, who was still preoccupied with her uncle’s unstated purpose for his visit, looked nonplussed. Only Lucinda showed no expression at all, but she laid her needlework aside and lifted her face attentively toward the doorway.

Ca--Ca--Caspian!” gasped Lucy as soon as she had breath enough. For Caspian it was; Caspian, the boy king of Narnia whom they had helped to set on the throne during their last visit. Immediately Edmund recognized him too. All three shook hands and clapped one another on the back with great delight. “But who is your friend?” said Caspian almost at once, turning to Eustace with his cheerful smile. But Eustace was crying much harder than any boy of his age has a right to cry when nothing worse than a wetting has happened to him, and would only yell out, “Let me go. Let me go back. I don’t like it.” “Let you go?” said Caspian. “But where?” Eustace rushed to the ship’s side, as if he expected to see the picture frame hanging above the sea, and perhaps a glimpse of Lucy’s bedroom. What he saw was blue waves flecked with foam, and paler blue sky, both spreading without a break to the horizon. Perhaps we can hardly blame him if his heart sank. He was promptly sick.

timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time. “I’m sorry, honey.” He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her. But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year. “This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?” She looks off camera, says, “What? Don’t be jealous. You’ll be watching this one day. You’ll carry the knowledge of every moment we spent together, all one hundred and forty-four years.” She looks back at the camera. “I need to tell you, Barry, that I couldn’t have made it this long without you. I couldn’t have kept trying to stop the inevitable. But we’re stopping today. As you know by now, I’ve lost the ability to map memory. Like Slade, I used the chair too many times. So I won’t be going back. And even if you returned to a point on the timeline where my consciousness was young and untraveled, there’s no guarantee you could convince me to build the chair. And to what end? We’ve tried everything. Physics, pharmacology, neurology. We even struck out with Slade. It’s time to admit we failed and let the world get on with destroying itself, which it seems so keen on doing.” Barry sees himself step into the frame and take a seat beside Helena. He puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him, her head on his chest. Such a surreal sensation to now remember that day when she decided to record a message for the Barry who would one day merge into his consciousness. “We have four years until doomsday.” “Four years, five months, eight days,” Barry-on-the-screen says. “But who’s counting?” “We’re going to spend that time together. You have those memories now. I hope they’re beautiful.” They are. Before her mind broke completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living. Helena was right. They were the best years of his lives too. “It’s odd,” she says. “You’re watching this right now, presumably four years from this moment, although I’m sure you’ll watch it before then to see my face and hear my voice after I’m gone.” It’s true. He did. “But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so,

His body was racked with movement and in the semi-darkness he looked like some kind of fairy-tale goblin engaged in a flurry of hocus-pocus. In the harsh spotlight that lit up the rostrum his face was fascinatingly ugly and had a ghastly pallor, ringed as it was by his waving hair. Every little shift in the orchestra was reflected in his sensitive features: one moment he would be dampening something down, which would knot the skin round his eyes into grim folds accompanied by a lifting of his nose; the next moment he would be smiling in confluence with the sweet strains of the orchestra, radiating his approval and enjoyment, so that it was a case of both devils and angels crossing his visage in turn. Lightning flashed from his spectacle lenses with each sharp movement of his head, and from behind the lenses his eyes shone forth, watchful, assertive and demanding attention - every inch of his frame was simultaneously both an instrument of command and a means of expression.

Stop it,” came Eustace’s voice, squeaky with fright and bad temper. “It’s some silly trick you two are playing. Stop it. I’ll tell Alberta--Ow!” The other two were much more accustomed to adventures, but, just exactly as Eustace Clarence said “Ow,” they both said “Ow” too. The reason was that a great cold, salt splash had broken right out of the frame and they were breathless from the smack of it, besides being wet through. “I’ll smash the rotten thing,” cried Eustace; and then several things happened at the same time. Eustace rushed toward the picture. Edmund, who knew something about magic, sprang after him, warning him to look out and not to be a fool. Lucy grabbed at him from the other side and was dragged forward. And by this time either they had grown much smaller or the picture had grown bigger. Eustace jumped to try to pull it off the wall and found himself standing on the frame; in front of him was not glass but real sea, and wind and waves rushing up to the frame as they might to a rock. He lost his head and clutched at the other two who had jumped up beside him. There was a second of struggling and shouting, and just as they thought they had got their balance a great blue roller surged up round them, swept them off their feet, and drew them down into the sea. Eustace’s despairing cry suddenly ended as the water got into his mouth. Lucy thanked her stars that she had worked hard at her swimming last summer term. It is true that she would have got on much better if she had used a slower stroke, and also that the water felt a great deal colder than it had looked while it was only a picture. Still, she kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everyone ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes. She even kept her mouth shut and her eyes open. They were still quite near the ship; she saw its green side towering high above them, and people looking at her from the deck. Then, as one might have expected, Eustace clutched at her in a panic and down they both went.

■​A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. ■​Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. ■​People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. ■​To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. ■​Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. ■​Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart. There are three voice tones available to negotiators: 1.​The late-night FM DJ voice: Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness. 2.​The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. 3.​The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will cause problems and create pushback. ■​Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

For since a kiss is a knitting together both of body and soul, it is to be feared lest the sensual lover will be more inclined to the part of the body than of the soul; but the reasonable lover wotteth well that although the mouth be a parcel of the body, yet is it an issue for the words that be the interpreters of the soul, and for the inward breath, which is also called soul; and therefore hath a delight to join his mouth with the woman’s beloved with a kiss – not to stir him to any unhonest desire, but because he feeleth that that bond is the opening of an entry to the souls, which drawn with a coveting the one of the other, pour themselves by turn the one into the other’s body, and be so mingled together that each of them hath two souls, and one alone so framed of them both ruleth, in a manner, two bodies. Whereupon a kiss may be said to be rather a coupling together of the soul than of the body, because it hath such force in her that it draweth her unto it, and, as it were, separateth her from the body. For this do all chaste lovers covet a kiss as a coupling of souls together.

Mesmerized by the gilt ghastliness of it all, Elizabeth slowly turned in a full circle. Above the fireplace there was a gilt-framed painting of a lady attired in nothing whatsoever but a scrap of nearly-transparent red silk that had been draped across her hips. Elizabeth jerked her eyes away from that shocking display of nudity and found herself confronted by a veritable army of cavorting cupids. They reposed in chubby, gilt splendor atop the mantel and the bed tables; a cluster of them formed the tall candelabra beside the bed, which held twelve candles-one of which the footman had lit-and more cupids surrounded an enormous mirror. “It’s…” Berta uttered as she gazed through eyes the size of saucers, “it’s…I can’t find words,” she breathed, but Elizabeth had passed through her own state of shock and was perilously close to hilarity. “Unspeakable?” Elizabeth suggested helpfully, and a giggle bubbled up from her throat. “U-Unbelievable?” she volunteered, her shoulders beginning to shake with mirth. Berta made a nervous, strangled sound, and suddenly it was too much for both of them. Days of relentless tension erupted into gales of hilarity, and they gave in to it with shared abandon. Great gusty shouts of laughter erupted from them, sending tears trickling down their cheeks. Berta snatched for her missing apron, then remembered her new, elevated station in life and instead withdrew a handkerchief from her sleeve, dabbing at the corners of her eyes; Elizabeth simply clutched the forgotten bust to her chest, perched her chin upon its smooth head, and laughed until she ached. So complete was their absorption that neither of them realized their host was entering the bedchamber until Sir Francis boomed enthusiastically, “Lady Elizabeth and Lady Berta!” Berta let out a muffled scream of surprised alarm and quickly shifted her handkerchief from the corners of her eyes to her mouth. Elizabeth took one look at the satin-clad figure who rather resembled the cupids he obviously admired, and the dire reality of her predicament hit her like a bucket of icy water, banishing all thoughts of laughter. She dropped her gaze to the floor, trying wildly to remember her plan and to believe she could make it work. She had to make it work, for if she failed, this aging roué with the penchant for gilded cupids could very likely become her husband.

The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotional benefits of broad framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequency with which they check how well their investments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains. Once a quarter is enough, and may be more than enough for individual investors. In addition to improving the emotional quality of life, the deliberate avoidance of exposure to short-term outcomes improves the quality of both decisions and outcomes. The typical short-term reaction to bad news is increased loss aversion. Investors who get aggregated feedback receive such news much less often and are likely to be less risk averse and to end up richer. You are also less prone to useless churning of your portfolio if you don’t know how every stock in it is doing every day (or every week or even every month). A commitment not to change one’s position for several periods (the equivalent of “locking in” an investment) improves financial performance.

The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of their descendants to the latest days. It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies. At the time of the framing of our constitution the only physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and do his labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe. Rude machinery, propelled by water power, had been invested sails to propel ships upon the waters and been set to catch the passing breeze – but the application of steam to propel vessels against both wind and current, and machinery to do all manner of work had not been thought of. The instantaneous transmission of messages around the world by means of electricity would probably that day have been attribute to witchcraft or a league with the Devil. Immaterial circumstances had changed as greatly as material ones. We could not and ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated. The fathers themselves would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable.

This stuff is kind of gross,” he says, draining his cup and setting it down. “Yes, it is,” I say, staring at what remains in mine. I drink it in one gulp, wincing as the bubbles burn my throat. “I don’t know what the Erudite are always bragging about. Dauntless cake is much better.” “I wonder what the Abnegation treat would have been, if they had one.” “Stale bread.” He laughs. “Plain oatmeal.” “Milk.” “Sometimes I think I believe everything they taught us,” he says. “But obviously not, since I’m sitting here holding your hand right now without having married you first.” “What do the Dauntless teach about…that?” I say, nodding to our hands. “What do the Dauntless teach, hmm.” He smirks. “Do whatever you want, but use protection, is what they teach.” I raise my eyebrows. Suddenly my face feels warm. “I think I’d like to find a middle ground for myself,” he says. “To find that place between what I want and what I think is wise.” “That sounds good.” I pause. “But what do you want?” I think I know the answer, but I want to hear him say it. “Hmm.” He grins, and leans forward onto his knees. He presses his hands to the metal plate, framing my head with his arms, and kisses me, slowly, on my mouth, under my jaw, right above my collarbone. I stay still, nervous about doing anything, in case it’s stupid or he doesn’t like it. But then I feel like a statue, like I am not really here at all, and so I touch his waist, hesitantly. Then his lips are on mine again, and he pulls his shirt out from under my hands so that I am touching his bare skin. I come to life, pressing closer, my hands creeping up his back, sliding over his shoulders. His breaths come faster and so do mine, and I taste the lemon-syrup-fizz we just drank and I smell the wind on his skin and all I want is more, more. I push his shirt up. A moment ago I was cold, but I don’t think either of us is cold now. His arm wraps around my waist, strong and certain, and his free hand tangles in my hair and I slow down, drinking it in--the smoothness of his skin, marked up and down with black ink, and the insistence of the kiss, and the cool air wrapped around us both. I relax, and I no longer feel like some kind of Divergent soldier, defying serums and government leaders alike. I feel softer, lighter, and like it is okay to laugh a little as his fingertips brush over my hips and the small of my back, or to sigh into his ear when he pulls me against him, burying his face in the side of my neck so that he can kiss me there. I feel like myself, strong and weak at once--allowed, at least for a little while, to be both. I don’t know how long it is before we get cold again, and huddle under the blanket together. “It’s getting more difficult to be wise,” he says, laughing into my ear. I smile at him. “I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.

When Sam told this story to Sadie, she laughed, though she barely seemed to be listening. He had framed the story in a humorous way, smoothed off some of the edges of his hostility toward the woman in the park. But as he told it, he could feel himself back in that dog park. He could feel the dry California heat and the murderous pounding of his heart. Without warning, an anecdote he had meant to be amusing did not feel amusing. Anyone, who had truly looked at Tuesday could not have possibly seen a coyote. But the woman had not truly looked, and the injustice of this hit him. Why was is it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way? Sam was put off by Sadie's laughter. He asked her what was funny. She was confused for a moment---hadn't he wanted her to laugh?---and then she said, annoyed, "You get that this a story about you, right? That's why you lost your mind at a dog park. You're Tuesday. You're the incredibly special dog that no one can classify." It was not long after their huge argument, and things were quite strained between them. Sam told her that she was being reductive, and that her interpretation was insulting to both him and the dog. "It's a story about Tuesday," he insisted. "Maybe it's a story about L.A., too. Maybe it's a story about the kind of people that go to the dog park in Silver Lake. But it's mainly a story about Tuesday." "The text," she said, "perhaps.

There are human tempers, bland, glowing, and genial, within whose influence it is as good for the poor in spirit to live, as it is for the feeble in frame to bask in the glow of noon. Of the number of these choice natures were certainly both Dr. Bretton’s and his mother’s. They liked to communicate happiness, as some like to occasion misery: they did it instinctively; without fuss, and apparently with little consciousness; the means to give pleasure rose spontaneously in their minds. Every day while I stayed with them, some little plan was proposed which resulted in beneficial enjoyment. Fully occupied as was Dr. John’s time, he still made it in his way to accompany us in each brief excursion. I can hardly tell how he managed his engagements; they were numerous, yet by dint of system, he classed them in an order which left him a daily period of liberty. I often saw him hard-worked, yet seldom over-driven, and never irritated, confused, or oppressed. What he did was accomplished with the ease and grace of all-sufficing strength; with the bountiful cheerfulness of high and unbroken energies. Under his guidance I saw, in that one happy fortnight, more of Villette, its environs, and its inhabitants, than I had seen in the whole eight months of my previous residence. He took me to places of interest in the town, of whose names I had not before so much as heard; with willingness and spirit he communicates much noteworthy information.

Poor Superman is about a married man who, much to his own surprise, enters into a passionate love affair—with another man. The experimental theatre which hosted the play here is a small place, and we happened to wind up sitting in the front row. Practically on the stage. The actors were often within a few feet of us. So, during the big love scene, when the two male leads start passionately stroking and kissing each other’s stark naked bodies... and doing this so close to me that I could have touched them both with only a little effort... I sat there in mute panic, thinking, “Please don’t either of you fellows get an erection. Just don’t. Should I look away? Should I close my eyes? Should I just keep watching as if I’m not obsessing about your genitals? Aren’t you done kissing and touching yet? Because if this goes on any longer, one of you could have an involuntary reaction, if you get my drift! And I am a total stranger sitting within four damn feet of you, in case you hadn’t NOTICED!” Though my seat wasn’t as dark as usual, the writing lesson was very memorable: Don’t ever pull your reader out of the frame. Bad research. Anachronistic writing. Self-serving polemics and lectures barely disguised as narrative. Incongruity and lack of continuity. Weak characterization, leaden pacing, lack of motivation, stiff dialogue, lazy plotting... There are a thousand ways for novelist to wind up naked onstage while an appalled audience obsesses about her exposed genitals at a critical moment.

The rifle started to move lazily in a low arc. The man's left hand was at the trigger, his right just in front of the triggerguard, pivoting the gun. They stood still. The man sat lazily looking down at the breech, his chair still tilted against the small door with the yellow Yale lock. The gun slowly traversed Leiter's stomach, then Bond's. The two men stood like statues, not risking a move of the hand. The gun stopped pivoting. It was pointing down the wharf. The Robber looked briefly up, narrowed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The pelican gave a faint squawk and they heard its heavy body crash into the water. The echo of the shot boomed across the harbor. "What the hell d'you do that for?" asked Bond furiously. "Practice," said the man, pumping another bullet into the breech. "Guess there's a branch of the ASPCA in this town," said Leiter. "Let's get along there and report this guy." "Want to be prosecuted for trespass?" asked The Robber, getting slowly up and shifting the gun under his arm. "This is private property. Now," he spat the words out, "git the hell out of here." He turned and yanked the chair away from the door, opened the door with a key and turned with one foot on the threshold. "You both got guns," he said. "I kin smell 'em. You come aroun' here again and you follow the boid 'n I plead self-defense. I've had a bellyfull of you lousy dicks aroun' here lately breathin' down my neck. Sybil my ass!" He turned contemptuously through the door and slammed it so that the frame rattled.

The truth is technical, clinical, not well understood. Essentially, somewhere behind my overactive, often dysfunctional frontal lobe, my hippocampus is getting hot, and in the back of my brain, deep inside the little, almond-shaped amygdala, flashes of light are igniting a fire that burns through my memory like a box of random photos left for too long in a dusty firetrap of an attic. Some are vivid, bright, resplendent in the superior technology that preserves their detail, context, meaning. Truth. Others, many in fact, are so faded I can hardly see the contrast of negative on positive. I can barely remember the incidents, events, places, and people that were, for whatever reason, worth recording. Where does the brain stop and the mind begin? Which part of my movie is merely mechanical, chemical? And how do fantasy, fear, desire, joy, loss emerge to become the story? If there is an answer, it’s all in the editing. For most of my life, my memories have been cut together, if not perfectly, then according to some system that has allowed me reasonable access to my story. To what I wanted to remember and how I chose to remember it. I had final cut. Now they are a mess. A beautiful mess, cut and recut, and playing in no particular order across the insides of my eyelids, running both forward and backward in time as the electrical fire in my brain chases them down and ignites them. I want to reach out my hand. I want to salvage one or two of my favorite frames. But memory is fast and my hands are strapped to this table.

It’s a heady question, how women balance these concerns. Recently, the question has found its way back to the center of a contentious and very emotional debate. If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants. If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for The Atlantic in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required. There’s truth to both arguments. They’re hardly mutually exclusive. Yet this question tends to get framed, rather tiresomely, as one of how and whether women can “have it all,” when the fact of the matter is that most women—and men, for that matter—are simply trying to keep body and soul together. The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.

To summarize my trading strategy for the ABCD Pattern: When I find a Stock in Play, either from my Gappers watchlist or from one of my scanners, or when I’m advised by someone in our chatroom that a stock is surging up from point A and reaching a significant new high for the day (point B), I wait to see if the price makes a support higher than point A. I call this point C. I do not jump into the trade right away. I watch the stock during its consolidation period. I choose my share size and stop loss and profit target exit strategy. When I see that the price is holding support at point C, I enter the trade close to the price of point C in anticipation of moving forward to point D or higher. Point C can also be identified from a 1-minute chart. It is important to look at both time frames in order to gain a better insight. My stop is the loss of point C. If the price goes lower than point C, I sell and accept the loss. Therefore, it is important to buy the stock close to point C to minimize the loss. Some traders wait and buy only at point D to ensure that the ABCD Pattern is really working. In my opinion, that approach basically reduces your reward while at the same time increases your risk. If the price moves higher, I sell half of my position at point D, and bring my stop higher to my entry point (break-even). I sell the remaining position as soon as my target hits or I sense that the price is losing steam or that the sellers are acquiring control of the price action. When the price makes a new low on my 5-minute chart, it is a good indicator that the buyers are almost exhausted.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

Stay there,’ said Mathis. He kicked back his chair and hurtled through the empty window-frame on to the pavement. 6 ....... TWO MEN IN STRAW HATS WHEN BOND left the bar he walked purposefully along the pavement flanking the tree-lined boulevard towards his hotel a few hundred yards away. He was hungry. The day was still beautiful, but by now the sun was very hot and the plane-trees, spaced about twenty feet apart on the grass verge between the pavement and the broad tarmac, gave a cool shade. There were few people abroad and the two men standing quietly under a tree on the opposite side of the boulevard looked out of place. Bond noticed them when he was still a hundred yards away and when the same distance separated them from the ornamental ‘porte cochère’ of the Splendide. There was something rather disquieting about their appearance. They were both small and they were dressed alike in dark and, Bond reflected, rather hot-looking suits. They had the appearance of a variety turn waiting for a bus on the way to the theatre. Each wore a straw hat with a thick black ribbon as a concession, perhaps, to the holiday atmosphere of the resort, and the brims of these and the shadow from the tree under which they stood obscured their faces. Incongruously, each dark, squat little figure was illuminated by a touch of bright colour. They were both carrying square camera-cases slung from the shoulder. And one case was bright red and the other case bright blue. By the time Bond had taken in these details, he had come to within fifty yards of the two men. He was reflecting on the ranges of various types of weapon and the possibilities of cover when an extraordinary and terrible scene was enacted.

We often talk about being kind, but how do we define "kind" at its very root? Where is the root and what is the root of "kind" and "kindness"? I truly believe that kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the flaws of life, the acceptance of the turns life has taken which we couldn't have planned for and that we didn't hope for. Kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the fact that life is a wild thing that cannot ever be caged. Some people are going to get married and divorced seven times before they find the one they are meant to be with; that's okay. Some people are going to be born with disabilities; that's okay. Some people are born in heaven while others are born in hell; both are okay. Some people are born in hell later ending up in heaven while others are born in heaven later ending up in hell; it's all okay. Life, whether belonging to you or to others, is never going to be a painting fitting into your prepared picture frame. How dare we come into this monstrous, joyous, incredible, terrible world, thinking that we can dictate what's wrong and right, what's better and what's lesser? Come into this world with your wings and your claws and your paws and your laughters! With your feathers and your fur! Because you're going to need all of it! And when you look at other people, sometimes they are going to be donning feathers and other times they are going to be clawing things, jumping in and out, screaming or laughing or crying or being quiet; it's all okay. Because we are ALL living with this monstrous and beautiful creature called Life! So, kindness is the realisation of this, the readiness to see this in others, the willingness to embrace everything that happens-- whether it is happening to yourself or to other people. Kindness is waking up to the true and full nature of life, looking her in the eyes, and being ready to embrace her.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, not any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

Harvard pointed. “You know, right there is when the stuntman catches the sword out of frame.” “I know.” Aiden did know. Harvard always told him this fact at this precise moment. Aiden had watched this movie without Harvard once—on a date. Seeing the sword fly without the familiar murmur had upset Aiden enough to turn off the movie. Tonight, Harvard was here with him. They were both lying on their stomachs with their legs kicked up and their hands cupped in their chins, as though they were six years old. They weren’t. Aiden tangled their legs together slightly, deliberately. It felt far more dangerous than crossing swords. Aiden couldn’t imagine a match with so much at stake. “During a date when you stay in,” Aiden said, teaching, “you should try to see if the other person is receptive to you getting closer.” Harvard gave Aiden a look out of the corner of his eye, and let their legs stay tangled, resting with light pressure against one another. Love was a delusion, nothing but an electrical impulse in the brain, but there were many impulses running electric under Aiden’s skin right now. The man in black smiled beneath his mask and switched his sword to his right hand. The clash of swords rang over the sound of the sea. Aiden sneaked another look at Harvard, the shine of his dark eyes and white teeth in the silvery glow from the screen. Harvard caught him looking, but he returned Aiden’s look with a look of his own, warmly affectionate and never suspicious at all. Harvard never suspected a thing. Because Aiden was his best friend, and Harvard trusted him. And Harvard could trust him. Aiden would never do anything to hurt Harvard, not anything at all. Aiden moved in still closer, his arm set against Harvard’s, solid muscle under the thin material of his shirtsleeve. He could put his arm around Harvard’s shoulders or slip an arm around his waist or lean in. He was allowed, just for tonight.

Then I saw the figure standing outside my car door: it was Marlboro Man, who’d come outside to greet me. His jeans were clean, his shirt tucked in and starched. I couldn’t yet see his face, though, which was what I wanted most. Getting out of the car, I smiled and looked up, squinting. The western sunset was a backdrop behind his sculpted frame. It was such a beautiful sight, a stark contrast to all the ugliness that had surrounded me that day. He shut the car door behind me and moved in for a hug, which provided all the emotional fuel I needed to continue breathing. Finally, in that instant, I felt like things would be okay. I smiled and acted cheerful, following him into the kitchen and not at all letting on that my day had sucked about as badly as a day could have sucked. I’d never been one to wear my feelings on my sleeve, and I sure wasn’t going to let them splay out on what was merely my sixth date with the sexiest, most masculine man I’d ever met. But I knew I was a goner when Marlboro Man looked at me and asked, “You okay?” You know when you’re not okay, but then someone asks you if you’re okay, and you say you’re okay and act like you’re okay, but then you start realizing you’re not okay? Then you feel your nose start to tingle and your throat start to swell and your chin start to quiver and you tell yourself, In the name of all that is good and holy, do not do this. Do not do this…but you’re powerless to stop it? And you try to blink it away and you finally think you’ve just about got it under control? But then the cowboy standing in front of you smiles gently and says, “You sure?” Those two simple words opened up the Floodgates of Hell. I smiled and laughed, embarrassed, even as two big, thick tears rolled down both my cheeks. Then I laughed again and blew a nice, clear explosion of snot from my nose. Of all the things that had happened that day, that single moment might have been the worst.

The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects. Training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none. Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

It is raining.  The clock ticks.  I am leaning on my elbow.  The wind blows through the cracks.  The door rattles in its frame.  My arm is tired of staying in one position.  There is a pressure on the wrist.  My temple burns on one side.  I wonder what will happen next.  Someone laughs.  If he had heard the rain, the clock, and the door, he would have kept silent.  Had I been laughing, I would not have heard these things. Gaze into a cat's eye or a gorilla's.  You will notice a peculiar thing that will make you shudder.  sometimes cats claw at human eyes.  Some- times gorillas enrage. Telepathy and death are wound inextricably together.  To see why this is so, you must understand consciousness.  When, late at night in your bed, you hear a distant automobile, you and the driver are parts of yourself.  When you speak, you are alone and the listener is both you and himself.  Two men, one on the mountain and the other in the village, cannot communicate.  Each is looking into a mirror.  Wave, and *he* waves - shout, and *he* replies.  All of us see the same moon and feel the same heartbeat, but we can never admit it.  One says the moon is a pale disc, another that it is a satellite of the Earth, a third that it is a silver world.  My heart thumps, yours clatters, and his booms.  Consciousness is distortion. But much telepathy passes unnoticed.  Dogs in the night, a dream of Mabel, Dr. Rhines' dice games - these are self-conscious tricks that mean nothing.  What of the more obvious examples?  You know when another is lying.  You know who is going down the stair.  You know emotion without seeing it.  You know the intelligence of others.  Some sign gives them away.  It is coincidence?  Guessing games again?   Then think of what you could not possibly know, what no one could tell you.  Is there any doubt you do not know that fellow on the gibbet or the thought of that girl on the stake?  Watch someone die and you may read his mind at ease. You need not got so far.  We human beings understand one another better than we think.  Argue, deny, shout, denounce, destroy.  Nothing alters truth.  You, reader, see my flaws and concentrate on them.  You wonder why I choose this word and not that. My arguments are weak and you can drum up stronger ones against them.  But we are eye to eye for all of that.

The urban isolated individual An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spirltual and emotional life; they are not easily penetrated by propaganda. For example, it is much more difficult today for outside propaganda to influence a soldier integrated into a military group, or a militant member of a monolithic party, than to influence the same man when he is a mere citizen. Nor is the organic group sensitive to psychological contagion, which is so important to the success of Nazi propaganda. One can say generally, that 19th century individualist society came about through the disintegration of such small groups as the family or the church. Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment generally urban and thereby "uprooted." He no longer had a traditional place in which to live. He was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry. An individual thus uprooted can only be part of a mass- He is on his own, and individualist thinking asks of him something he has never been required to do before: that he, the individual, become the measure of all things. Thus he begins to judge everything for himself. In fact he must make his own judgments. He is thrown entirely on his own resources; he can find criteria only in himself. He is clearly responsible for his own decisions, both personal and social. He becomes the beginning and the end of everything. Before him there was nothing; after him there will be nothing. His own life becomes the only criterion of justice and injustice, of Good and Evil. The individual is placed in a minority position and burdened at the same time with a total crushing responsibility. Such conditions make an individualist society fertile ground for modern propaganda. The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference — all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will. The individual left to himself is defenseless the more so because he may be caught up in a social current thus becoming easy prey for propaganda. As a member of a small group he was fairly well protected from collective influences, customs, and suggestions. He was relatively unaffected by changes in the society at large.

They came in to look. I watched them. Most people go through museums like they do Macy's: eyes sweeping the display, stopping only if something really grabs their attention. These two looked at everything. They both clearly liked the bicycle picture. Yup, Dutch, I decided. He was a few steps ahead when he got to my favorite painting there. Diana and the Moon. It was-surprise surprise-of Diana, framed by a big open window, the moon dominating the sky outside. She was perched on the windowsill, dressed in a gauzy wrap that could have been nightclothes or a nod to her goddess namesake. She looked beautiful, of course, and happy, but if you looked for more than a second, you could see that her smile had a teasing curve to it and one of her hands was actually wrapped around the outside frame. I thought she looked like she might swing her legs over the sill and jump, turning into a moth or owl or breath of wind even before she was completely out of the room. I thought she looked, too, like she was daring the viewer to come along. Or at least to try. The Dutch guy didn't say anything. He just reached out a hand. His girlfriend stepped in, folding herself into the circle of his outsretched arm. They stood like that, in front of the painting, for a full minute. Then he sneezed. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue.He took in and, without letting go of her, did a surprisingly graceful one-handed blow. Then he crumpled the tissue and looked around for a trash can. There wasn't one in sight. She held out her free hand; he passed over the tissue, and she stuck it right back into her pocket. I wanted to be grossed out. Instead, I had the surprising thought that I really really wanted someone who would do that: put my used Kleenex in his pocket. It seemed like a declaration of something pretty big. Finally,they finished their examination of Diana and moved on.There wasn't much else, just the arrogant Willings and the overblown sunrise. They came over to examine the bronzes. She saw my book. "Excuse me. You know this artist?" Intimately just didn't seem as true anymore. "Pretty well," I answered. "He is famous here?" "Not very." "I like him." she said thoughtfully. "He has...oh, the word...personism?" "Personality?" I offered. "Yes!" she said, delighted. "Personality." She reached behind her without looking. Her boyfriend immediately twined his fingers with hers. They left, unfolding the map again as they went, she chattering cheerfully. I think she was telling him he had personality. They might as well have had exhibit information plaques on their backs: "COUPLE." CONTEMPORARY DUTCH. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOVE, FOR THE VIEWING PLEASURE (OR NOT) OF ANYONE AND EVERYONE.

Lesson one: Pack light unless you want to hump the eight around the mountains all day and night. By the time we reached Snowdonia National Park on Friday night it was dark, and with one young teacher as our escort, we all headed up into the mist. And in true Welsh fashion, it soon started to rain. When we reached where we were going to camp, by the edge of a small lake halfway up, it was past midnight and raining hard. We were all tired (from dragging the ridiculously overweight packs), and we put up the tents as quickly as we could. They were the old-style A-frame pegged tents, not known for their robustness in a Welsh winter gale, and sure enough by 3:00 A.M. the inevitable happened. Pop. One of the A-frame pegs supporting the apex of my tent broke, and half the tent sagged down onto us. Hmm, I thought. But both Watty and I were just too tired to get out and repair the first break, and instead we blindly hoped it would somehow just sort itself out. Lesson two: Tents don’t repair themselves, however tired you are, however much you wish they just would. Inevitably, the next peg broke, and before we knew it we were lying in a wet puddle of canvas, drenched to the skin, shivering, and truly miserable. The final key lesson learned that night was that when it comes to camping, a stitch in time saves nine; and time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted. The next day, we reached the top of Snowdon, wet, cold but exhilarated. My best memory was of lighting a pipe that I had borrowed off my grandfather, and smoking it with Watty, in a gale, behind the summit cairn, with the teacher joining in as well. It is part of what I learned from a young age to love about the mountains: They are great levelers. For me to be able to smoke a pipe with a teacher was priceless in my book, and was a firm indicator that mountains, and the bonds you create with people in the wild, are great things to seek in life. (Even better was the fact that the tobacco was homemade by Watty, and soaked in apple juice for aroma. This same apple juice was later brewed into cider by us, and it subsequently sent Chipper, one of the guys in our house, blind for twenty-four hours. Oops.) If people ask me today what I love about climbing mountains, the real answer isn’t adrenaline or personal achievement. Mountains are all about experiencing a shared bond that is hard to find in normal life. I love the fact that mountains make everyone’s clothes and hair go messy; I love the fact that they demand that you give of yourself, that they make you fight and struggle. They also induce people to loosen up, to belly laugh at silly things, and to be able to sit and be content staring at a sunset or a log fire. That sort of camaraderie creates wonderful bonds between people, and where there are bonds I have found that there is almost always strength.

Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish. That is, we make it a lemma that all people ought to pursue a good life for themselves as a categorical commitment second to none. It does not follow from this that they ought to pursue any one particular version of the good life, or to cling tenaciously to the one they are pursuing. … Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object—a life. A life has a value as an object, as a whole. It is not always the case that its value as an object will be a function of the value of its spatiotemporal parts considered separately. But it is always the case that an evaluation of the parts will be incomplete until they are understood in the context of the whole life. What seems so clearly valuable (or required or excellent) when we focus on a thin temporal slice of a life (or a single, long strand of a life) may turn out to be awful or optional or vicious when we take a larger view. And it is the life as a whole that we consider when we think about its value in relation to other things, or its value as a part of the cosmos. … In our view, a focus on the parts of a life, or on the sum of its parts, obscures some important features of ethical inquiry. One such feature is the extent to which an agent’s own estimate of the value of his life is necessarily inconclusive: others will have to judge his life as a whole, because its character as a whole is not likely to be predictable while he is around to judge it, and because many important holistic considerations, such as its beauty, excellence, justice, and net effect, are things that he is either not well situated to judge or at least not in a privileged position to judge. Another feature obscured is the range of ways in which a single event or characteristic, without wide causal connections to other elements of one’s life, can nonetheless ruin it; for example, the possibility that a monstrously unjust act can indelibly stain a whole life. A third, related obscurity introduced by ignoring a whole-life frame of reference is the extent to which both aesthetic criteria and the notion of excellence have clear roles in the evaluation of a life. The whole-life frame of reference, together with a plausible account of the variety of ways in which a life can be a good one, keeps Stoicism sharply distinct from Epicurean doctrines, or their modern “welfarist” offshoots. How well my life is going from the inside, so to speak, in terms of the quality of my experience, is only one of the things that enters into a Stoic evaluation of it. We hold that there is a single unifying aim in the life of every rational agent, and that aim, guided by the notion of a good life (happiness, eudaimonia), is virtue, understood as the perfection of agency.

Archer arrived early the next morning. Grey was still asleep on the sofa in his study when he heard tapping on the window. He opened his eyes and immediately regretted it as the sharp light of day pierced his brain. Squinting, he tried to focus on his brother, since he already knew who his visitor was. Only one person ever announced himself so annoyingly. “Open the bloody window, Grey!” Grumbling, Grey slowly rose into a full sitting position. His back and neck were stiff and his head felt as though someone had kicked it repeatedly from all sides. And his mouth! Christ, he didn’t want to even think about what might have died inside it. He staggered to the window, unlatched it and swung it open. “What the hell do you want?” Wide-eyed, Archer made a tsking noise. “Is that any way to greet your favorite brother?” “You’re not my favorite,” Grey scowled. Unaffected, Archer easily adapted. “Is that any way to greet your second-favorite brother?” Grey grinned, he couldn’t help it. Archer had always had a knack for making him smile, just as he had a knack for pissing him off as well. “I’m hung over and feel like shite. What do you want?” “You look like shite. What’s this I hear about you making an appearance at Saint’s Row last night?” “Rose tell you that?” “She did. I’m surprised you took such a risk just to see her.” Grey thought of her in that teal gown, the lights illuminating the luster of her skin. “It was worth it.” “Worth it, eh? So worth it you immediately came home and got sloshed.” “Something like that. And then Rose came home and I got even more sloshed.” Archer’s expression turned to concern as he leaned against the window frame. “What happened?” Grey shrugged. He’d already revealed more than he’d wanted. “Suffice it to say she now knows what kind of man I am.” His brother snorted. “That girl has always known exactly what kind of man you are.” The words were plain enough, but there was a cryptic edge to them that had Grey puzzled. “What the hell does that mean?” Arch shook his head. “Come to the stables with me. I want to show you something.” He looked down at himself. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last night and he was wrinkled beyond hope. Not to mention that he smelled like a distillery-an unwashed one at that. And his mask was up in his room. What if someone happened by and saw him… He wasn’t a coward. He just didn’t wish to be seen looking less than his best. An oath punctuated the early morning air. Grey was grabbed by the front of the shirt and yanked-hard. His only course of action was to brace one booted foot on the bottom sill to keep from falling. Of course, that action only succeeded in making it easier for Archer to haul him completely out onto the lawn. He landed hard on both feet, the impact going straight to his ready-to-implode skull. “What the hell?” Fist cocked, Grey punched his brother in the shoulder. “Jesus, man! What are you about?” Archer punched him back. It hurt, and oddly enough it seemed to wake him up-clear the fog and some of the pressure surrounding his brain. “I’m trying to help you, you bugger.” “To do what?” Grey demanded. “Die?

She wanted all of Thorn's attention as she finally released the words so long trapped inside her. "I-I love you too." She jumped. Thorn had spun around fast as lightning to block her wrist. His reaction was so abrupt, the glint in his eyes so hard, Ophelia thought he was going to push her away once again. With a totally unpredictable opposite movement, he pulled her toward him. The stool tipped over. Ophelia felt as if she were landing with all her weight between Thorn's ribs. As they fell together, to a clattering of steel and an avalanche of boxes, the viewer exploded into fragments of glass on the floor beside them. It was the most spectacular and baffling fall Ophelia had ever experienced. her ears were humming like hives. The frame of her glasses were digging into her skin. She could no longer see a thing, could barely breathe. When she realised that she was crushing Thorn, she wanted to extricate herself, but couldn't. He was imprisoning her in his arms so tightly that she could no longer distinguish between the beatings in their chests. Thorn's bushy beard became buried in her hair as he said, "above all, no sudden gestures." After the way he had just flung them both to the ground, this warning was somewhat incongruous. The arm vice relaxed, muscle by muscle, around Ophelia. She had to lean on Thorn's stomach to back up. Half slumped on the floor, his back against a bookcase, he was watching her with extreme tension, as if expecting her to trigger a catastrophe. "Never - do - that - again," he said, stressing each syllable, "take me by surprise. Never. Have you got that?" Ophelia had too much of a lump in her throat to reply to him. No, she hadn't got it. She was starting to wonder whether had even listened to her declaration. She was dismayed at the sight of bits of metal scattered on the carpet. There wasn't much left of Thorn's leg brace. "Nothing that can't be repaired," he commented. "I have some tools in my bedroom. This, on the other hand, is more problematic," he added, glancing at the shattered pieces of the microfilm viewer. "I'll have to get myself another one. "I don't think that is a priority," Ophelia snapped. She bit her tongue when Thorn pressed his mouth against hers. At that moment, she no longer understood a thing. She felt his beard pricking her chin, his disinfectant smell going to her head, but the only thought that crossed her mind, a stupid obvious one, was that she had her boot stuck in his shin. She wanted to pull away. Thorn stopped her. He cradled her face with his hands, his fingers in her hair, pressing against the nape of her neck, with urgency that knocked them both off balance. The bookcase showered them with papers. When Thorn finally pulled away, short of breath, it was to stare sternly straight through her glasses. "I warn you, the words you said to me, I won't let you go back on them." His voice was harsh, but underlining the authority of his words, there was some sort of crack. Ophelia could see the quickened pulse in the hands he was awkwardly pressing to her cheeks. She had to admit her own heart was swinging to and fro. Thorn was, without doubt, the most disconcerting man she'd ever met. But he did make her feel wonderfully alive. "I love you," she repeated firmly.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else. thing, for one chance— Parisa tousled her hair, switching her part from one side to the other. She didn’t have a bad side. —but I’m done being grateful! I’m done trying to make myself suitable for this family, for this God, for this life. I’m done being small, I’ve outgrown the person who needed you to save her, I don’t even know who she is anymore— She pouted at the mirror and started again, pinching her cheeks to see the color come and go. —and I want more, so much more— Lip balm. Mascara. Lips softer, eyes wider, be something different, something else. —I just want to live, Nas! Just let me live! What was the point of reliving the past? She was hunting her invisible nemeses, grappling for power, finding new methods of control. She should be busy, too busy being the most dangerous person in this or any world to think about why she’d been such an easy target for Atlas Blakely, a man in need of weapons just to make a universe that he could stand. But now— Now she was thinking about Nasser, as if it mattered at all what kind of person she’d been over a decade ago. Just an hour of your time, now and then. That’s all I ask. I know, I know, I’m asking a lot more from you inside my head, but that’s not fair—doesn’t it matter what I choose to put in front of you? Someday maybe you’ll understand that there’s a difference between what a person thinks and who they choose to be— A glint caught her eye from her reflection. A brief, unnatural sparkle in the placid lake of her appearance, the consistency of her beauty, the easy grace she always wore. She leaned forward, forgetting her internal monologue, letting it collapse. Someday the view will be different, eshgh, and I hope you see me in a softer light— “Parisa?” Dalton leaned against the frame of the bathroom door. In his left hand was one of her dresses. In his right hand was her phone. “I don’t care if you want to see your husband. Sorry—Nasser. If you want me to call him that, I will. I suppose you’re right, anyway, you’ll need to see him, because if the Society could find evidence of him in your past then the Forum surely can as well, and so can Atlas. And so can anyone else who wants you dead.” Another pause as Dalton set her phone back on the bathroom counter. “I replied to the physicist for you as well. I think you’ll need to find out what he plans to do about the archives, or at least keep track of what Atlas is doing at the house. Atlas is going to win over both the physicists unless you can convince one of them to do it differently. “What is it?” Dalton asked, frowning at her silence. His gaze traced the placement of her fingers, which had been parsing the thickness of her hair. “I—” Parisa was caught somewhere between laughing and crying. “I found a gray hair.” “So?” Laughter, definitely laughter. It escaped her in something of a rueful bray. Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else. “Nothing.” Only the future loss of her desirability, the collapse of her personhood. The first glimpse of an empire steadily falling to unseen ruin. The fate she already knew was coming, the punishment she’d always known she deserved. What timing!

And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends the beginning of the festive season was attracting a great many people from near and far; as I hastened across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, and lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the ‘everlasting fire’, I discovered an influx of new arrivals (worthy of some Census of the People at Bethlehem such as the Old Flemish Masters painted), gathering there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them; would recommend accommodation elsewhere in the town) for board and lodging, while a kitchen-boy passed by holding a struggling fowl by its neck. Similarly, in the big dining-room, which I had passed through on my first day here on my way to the small room where my friend awaited me, one was again reminded of some Biblical feast, portrayed with the naïvety of former times and with Flemish exaggeration, because of the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the floor in their haste to set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved immediately, but where – for many of the diners were finishing their meal as I arrived – they piled up untouched; it was as if their profusion and the haste of those who carried them in were prompted far less by the demands of those eating than by respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed to the letter but naïvely illustrated by real details taken from local custom, and by a concern, both aesthetic and devotional, to make visible the splendour of the feast through the profusion of its victuals and the bustling attentiveness of those who served it. One of them stood lost in thought by a sideboard at the end of the room; and in order to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to give me an answer, where our table had been laid, I made my way forward through the various chafing-dishes that had been lit to keep warm the plates of latecomers (which did not prevent the desserts, in the centre of the room, from being displayed in the hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently made of crystal but actually of ice, carved each day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, in a truly Flemish manner), and, at the risk of being knocked down by the other waiters, went straight towards the calm one in whom I seemed to recognize a character traditionally present in these sacred subjects, since he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the snub-nosed features, simple and badly drawn, and the dreamy expression of such a figure, already dimly aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect. In addition, and doubtless in view of the approaching festive season, the tableau was reinforced by a celestial element recruited entirely from a personnel of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, his fair hair framing a fourteen-year-old face, was not playing any instrument, it is true, but stood dreaming in front of a gong or a stack of plates, while less infantile angels were dancing attendance through the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless flutter of the napkins, which hung from their bodies like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed ends. Taking flight from these ill-defined regions, screened by a curtain of palms, from which the angelic waiters looked, from a distance, as if they had descended from the empyrean, I squeezed my way through to the small dining-room and to Saint-Loup’s table.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

An excellent illustration of this notion comes from another intriguing experiment conducted on psychology students. In this case students were given, in advance of class, either a complete set of notes on the lecture for the day or a partial set of notes—one that consisted of “headings and titles of definitions and concepts, which required students to add information to complete the notes” (Cornelius & Owen-DeSchryver 2008, p. 8). So the students who received the full notes had the knowledge network for the day handed to them prior to class (through the course learning management system); the students who received the partial notes received only the frame of that knowledge network, and had to fill in the rest on their own. The students in both conditions performed comparably on the first two examinations for the course. On the third and final examinations, however, as the amount of course material increased and required deeper understanding, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their full-note peers. Especially relevant for the argument that connections improve comprehension, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their peers on conceptual questions on the final exam. As the authors explained, “On a [final] test that required knowledge of a large number of concepts, rote memorization was not feasible, so students who encoded the information by actively taking notes throughout the semester may have performed better because they had experienced better conceptual understanding” (p. 10). This experiment has obvious implications for classroom teaching, or even the creation of reading guides or lecture notes for an online courses. However, the important point for now is that the partial notes gave students an organized framework that enabled and encouraged them to see and make new connections on their own.

With tinny drumbeats, the rain pounds the roof My teary eyes compete They can't keep up Breathe Let it go Breathe The vice on my chest tightens its razoring grip I gasp No relief If only tears could soothe the pain Then, I would look upon the tidal waves against these walls without fear Crush and roll me, I'd plead, Mold my body anew But with these tears come no healing, Just death, slow and determined This old girl, this old woman, this old soul lives here inside A tortoise outgrowing this hare's body This youthful skin encasing a crumbling frame I smooth the matted web of curls off my sweaty neck And roll my eyes at the clock How slowly the time squeaks by here in this room, In this comfortless bed I abandon the warmth from under my blanket tower and shiver The draft rattles my spine One by one, striking my vertebrae Like a spoon chiming empty wine glasses, Hitting the same fragile note till my neck shakes the chill away I swipe along the naked floor with a toe for the slippers beneath the bed Plush fabric caresses my feet Stand! Get up With both hands, Gravity jerks me back down Ugh! This cursed bed! No more, I want no more of it I try again My legs quiver in search of my former strength Come on, old girl, Come on, old woman, Come on, old soul, Don't quit now The floor shakes beneath me, Hoping I trip and fall To the living room window, I trudge My joints grind like gravel under tires More pain no amount of tears can soothe away Pinching the embroidered curtain between my knuckles, I find solace in the gloom The wind humming against the window, Makes the house creak and groan Years ago, the cold numbed my pain But can it numb me again, This wretched body and fractured soul? Outside I venture with chants fluttering my lips, Desperate solemn pleas For comfort, For mercy For ease, For health I open the plush throw spiraled around my shoulders And tiptoe around the porch's rain-soaked boards The chilly air moves through me like Death on a mission, My body, an empty gorge with no barriers to stop him, No flesh or bone My highest and lowest extremities grow numb But my feeble knees and crippling bones turn half-stone, half-bone Half-alive, half-dead No better, just worse The merciless wind freezes my tears My chin tumbles in despair I cover myself and sniffle Earth’s scent funnels up my nose: Decay with traces of life in its perfume The treetops and their slender branches sway, Defying the bitter gusts As I turn to seek shelter, the last browned leaf breaks away It drifts, it floats At the weary tree’s feet, it makes its bed alongside the others Like a pile of corpses, they lie Furled and crinkled with age No one mourns their death Or hurries to honor the fallen with thoughtful burials No rage-filled cries echo their protests at the paws trampling their fragile bodies, Or at the desecration by the animals seeking morning relief And new boundaries to mark Soon, the stark canopy stretching over the pitiful sight Will replace them with vibrant buds and leaves Until the wasting season again returns For now, more misery will barricade my bones as winter creeps in Unless Death meets me first to end it

Here are some of the key lessons from this chapter to remember: A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built. Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart. There are three voice tones available to negotiators: The late-night FM DJ voice: Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness. The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will cause problems and create pushback. Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

Most of the Times, Life shows us how difficult this journey is, only at Times when the sun clears we see the Sunshine, but the rain often washes away the clouds and both the clouds and the rain dampen our weary hearts, only to let us see a glimpse of a distant rainbow, once in a while. I guess it's always about the Time, the guardian of this Journey that we have to wait and persevere, that we have to remain resilient in the resolve to walk ahead, to find some way to hold on to the voyage, to not let the ship sink in the hollows of a mirage, to just live. And that is what Life is about, perhaps to know that Gloom and Melancholy is a distinct part of our journey, and actually something that occupies the most part of our journey, and it doesn't have to be a deep Grief it can simply be the mundane sorrow of carrying on this existence knowing that Life is just a short frame holding dark colours as much as the bright ones, sometimes even more of those blackness only to bring out the whites a little bit more. And while all of this goes on, somewhere our heart would know that there is One who is beyond this frame of Life and the space of Time and Cosmos; who is always holding your hand giving you the breath to walk ahead. May be He doesn't take away the blackness but throughout stays firm in your path, holding your shadow and your soul ever so gently to make you become the Light that you could only possibly be by embracing all of your Soul's journey. He doesn't perhaps change the potholes in your way, but He does ensure that even when you tumble you don't end up falling and if you do fall, He makes sure that you rise all over again from the flames of Life's fire with the fury of a phoenix. He doesn't end your suffering but lets you see that throughout your pain He is partaking in an even greater portion of it, alongside you. Simple, He doesn't let you see that He is God, because He shares your Life as a companion, walking beside you hand in hand, to make you live all that your soul had contracted before this journey began and even when He is beyond Time, He lets Time be your friend in a journey that is bound in human flesh and guarded by the tick-tock of that guardian. So when I asked my Soul, what is that troubles me the most, I heard my Soul, Smile in a safe knowledge, when I have Him, need I let my troubles concern me? My heart knew, He has already tucked my mind in the tranquil world of Life's paint-brush and a rainbow is just around the corner. A distant yet distinct rainbow. A rainbow that is churned in Love, the love that only He can provide, the Love that is always lurking on the edges of those clouds and rain, in the silhouette of a rainbow forever promised on the other side of a thunderstorm. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

Going to therapy and talking about healing may just be the go-to flex of our time. It is supposedly an indicator of how profoundly self-aware, enlightened, emotionally mature, or “evolved” an individual is. Social media is obsessed and saturated with pop psychology and psychiatry content related to “healing”, trauma, embodiment, neurodiversity, psychiatric diagnoses, treatments alongside productivity hacks, self-care tips and advice on how to love yourself without depending on anyone else, cut people out of your life, manifest your goals to be successful, etc. Therapy isn’t a universal indicator of morality or enlightenment. Therapy isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that everyone must pursue. There are many complex political and cultural reasons why some people don’t go to therapy, and some may actually have more sustainable support or care practices rooted in the community. This is similar to other messaging, like “You have to learn to love yourself first before someone else can love you”. It all feeds into the lie that we are alone and that happiness comes from total independence. Mainstream therapy blames you for your problems or blames other people, and often it oscillates between both extremes. If we point fingers at ourselves or each other, we are too distracted to notice the exploitative systems making us all sick and sad. Oftentimes, people come out of therapy feeling fully affirmed and unconditionally validated, and this ego-caressing can feel rewarding in the moment even if it doesn’t help ignite any growth or transformation. People are convinced that they can do no wrong, are infallible, incapable of causing harm, and that other people are the problem. Treatment then focuses on inflating self-confidence, self-worth, self-acceptance, and self-love to chase one’s self-centered dreams, ambitions, and aspirations without taking any accountability for one’s own actions. This sort of individualistic therapeutic approach encourages isolation and a general mistrust of others who are framed as threats to our inner peace or extractors of energy, and it further breeds a superiority complex. People are encouraged to see relationships as accessories and means to a greater selfish end. The focus is on what someone can do for you and not on how to give, care for, or show up for other people. People are not pushed to examine how oppressive conditioning under these systems shows up in their relationships because that level of introspection and growth is simply too invalidating. “You don’t owe anyone anything. No one is entitled to your time and energy. If anyone invalidates you and disturbs your peace, they are toxic; cut them out of your life. You don’t need that negativity. You don’t need anyone else; you alone are enough. Put yourself first. You are perfect just the way you are.” In reality, we all have work to do. We are all socialized within these systems, and real support requires accountability. Our liberation is contingent on us being aware of our bullshit, understanding the values of the empire that we may have internalized as our own, and working on changing these patterns. Therapized people may fixate on dissecting, healing, improving, and optimizing themselves in isolation, guided by a therapist, without necessarily practicing vulnerability and accountability in relationships, or they may simply chase validation while rejecting the discomfort that comes from accountability. Healing in any form requires growth and a willingness to practice in relationships; it is not solely validating or invalidating; it is complex; it is not a goal to achieve but a lifelong process that no one is above; it is both liberating and difficult; it is about acceptance and a willingness to change or transform into something new; and ultimately, it is going to require many invalidating ego deaths so we can let go of the fixation of the “self” to ease into interdependence and community care.

The lights flickered and went out, one by one, but still he could see. See what was coming at him down the corridor that was now as narrow and inescapable as a coffin buried six feet below. It was not the drifting ghost he expected or the shambling corpse, but both and neither. A jerking, spasmodic marionette, deranged and surreal, backlit by a dirty yellow illumination. A stark, ghastly figure in fast motion, head whipping from side to side, limbs twitching…like an image sped up on film with every second or third frame removed so that its locomotion was disconnected and intermittent, a strobing and insane animation.

Douglas McGregor, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. In The Human Side of Enterprise, published in 1960, McGregor laid out two theories of human motivation, foreshadowing much of modern motivational theory. The first, “Theory X,” framed people as fundamentally selfish and lazy, willing only to work for themselves and for extrinsic rewards such as money, status, and power. The second, “Theory Y,” hypothesized that people are motivated as much or more by intrinsic rewards—by the pleasures of mastery and autonomy, by the opportunity to build relationships with others, and by the desire for meaning and purpose. Theory Y anticipated much modern research in postulating that people are as much “groupish” as they are selfish, that they are hard wired to enjoy being part of a group and even—under certain circumstances—to act cooperatively and even altruistically. The book was sometimes interpreted as an argument in favor of Theory Y, but McGregor himself insisted that his point was not that Theory Y was correct, but that both theories are useful models, and that to rely on Theory X alone is a dangerous oversimplification that leaves many powerful sources of motivation off the table. One

Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us. But—and this is again one of the messages of the early modernists—beings like us become at home in the world only by acknowledging our ‘fallen’ condition, as Eliot acknowledged it in The Waste Land. Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world, to a ‘kingdom of ends’ in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered. As Plato and Kant both saw, therefore, the feeling for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from a humble sense of living with imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental.

The boy lay still on his deflated Lilo, listening to Dad and Auntie Flip talking in the living room. After a few minutes, Frank’s bedroom door opened a little, and Dad peered in. The boy shut his eyes tight in a pantomime of sleep. “I’m sorry, mate,” whispered Dad, “but I have no choice. I have to do this. For both of us.” Frank opened one eye the tiniest bit. He saw his dad framed in the doorway. It was something Frank thought he’d never see again: his father had his old racing gear on.

When I am carrying an object such as a ruler, and moving fast compared to you, my ruler will be measured by you to be smaller than it is for me. I might measure it to be 10 cm, say: [Image] But to you, it might appear to be merely 6 cm: [Image] Surely, this is an illusion, you might say, because how could the same object have two different lengths? The atoms can’t be compressed together for you, but not for me. Once again, we return to the question of what is “real.” If every measurement you can perform on my ruler tells you it is 6 cm long, then it is 6 cm long. “Length” is not an abstract quantity but requires a measurement. Since measurement is observer dependent, so is length. To see this is possible while illuminating another of relativity’s slippery catch-22s, consider one of my favorite examples. Say I have a car that is twelve feet long, and you have a garage that is eight feet deep. My car will clearly not fit in your garage: [Image] But, relativity implies that if I am driving fast, you will measure my car to be only, say, six feet long, and so it should fit in your garage, at least while the car is moving: [Image] However, let’s view this from my vantage point. For me, my car is twelve feet long, and your garage is moving toward me fast, and it now is measured by me to be not eight feet deep, but rather four feet deep: [Image] Thus, my car clearly cannot fit in your garage. So which is true? Clearly my car cannot both be inside the garage and not inside the garage. Or can it? Let’s first consider your vantage point, and imagine that you have fixed big doors on the front of your garage and the back of your garage. So that I don’t get killed while driving into it, you perform the following. You have the back door closed but open the front door so my car can drive in. When it is inside, you close the front door: [Image] However, you then quickly open the back door before the front of my car crashes, letting me safely drive out the back: [Image] Thus, you have demonstrated that my car was inside your garage, which of course it was, because it is small enough to fit in it. However, remember that, for me, the time ordering of distant events can be different. Here is what I will observe. I will see your tiny garage heading toward me, and I will see you open the front door of the garage in time for the front of my car to pass through. I will then see you kindly open the back door before I crash: [Image] After that, and after the back of my car is inside the garage, I will see you close the front door of your garage: [Image] As will be clear to me, my car was never inside your garage with both doors closed at the same time because that is impossible. Your garage is too small. “Reality” for each of us is simply based on what we can measure. In my frame the car is bigger than the garage. In your frame the garage is bigger than my car. Period. The point is that we can only be in one place at one time, and reality where we are is unambiguous. But what we infer about the real world in other places is based on remote measurements, which are observer dependent.

Competing perspectives can be bridged if (a) one side can adopt the other’s frame without sacrificing their ability to articulate key demands, or (b) both sides can agree to a new frame that gives neither an advantage.

When Congress passed Obamacare it attempted by statute to confer fundamental legislative powers on the executive branch, and even sought to prohibit future Congresses from altering its unconstitutional act. Specifically, Congress created the fifteen-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which ostensibly is responsible for controlling Medicare costs. The board submits a proposal to Congress, which automatically becomes law, and the Department of Health and Human Services must implement it, unless the proposal is affirmatively blocked by Congress and the president. Even then, it can be stopped only if the elected branches agree on a substitute. Obamacare also attempts to prohibit citizens from challenging the board’s decisions in court. Moreover, Obamacare seeks to tie the hands of future Congresses by forbidding Congress from dissolving the board outside of a seven-month period in 2017, and only by a supermajority three-fifths vote of both houses. If Congress does not act in that time frame, Congress is prohibited from even altering a board proposal.42 Apart from all the rest, the abuse of power by one Congress and president in attempting to reorganize the federal government and redraft fundamentally the Constitution outside of the amendment processes, with the intention of binding all future Congresses in perpetuity and leaving citizens with no political or legal recourse, is simply sinister. But it underscores the Statists’ contempt for the Constitution and self-government.

The muscles of his jaw jumped even more until he looked down at her. Then everything in him seemed to freeze. Pausing as his eyes danced over her features. “If we do not see each other again, my kalon, I wish for you to know that I have never been more honored than to have a woman like you at my side.” He swallowed hard again, his eyes still flicking over hers. “I do not know how your people say this.” Oh, this sweet, wonderful man who had no idea how much he had wriggled his way into her heart. She reached up and framed his face with both of her hands, staring into those black eyes that showed so much more than he knew how to say. “We say I love you.” “I have heard this from Mira before.” “From Mira?” she repeated with a laugh. He shook his head. “She has said it to Arges. Tell me what this word means.” “It’s not about the word itself. It’s about the feeling in here.” She moved one of her hands to his chest. “It means that living without you feels wrong. That to be parted from your side makes me miss you more than I miss breathing fresh air. And that I will always think of you, no matter how far I am from you.

Remembrance can be telling on its own, not simply as a foil for history or a scoresheet on which to mark where popular historical consciousness gets it wrong. Remembering is a creative act, one of invention as much as of retrieval. Gaining insight into a community’s experiences requires “taking seriously their ways of structuring experience, their popular narratives, the distinctive manner in which they frame the social and political realities which affect their lives.” Indeed, it is useful to conceive of memory as both “a source and a subject” for historians.

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention. Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.

They both glared at each other, her pink eyes clashing with his ice-cold blue ones. Even when he was annoyed—and being annoying—he was wickedly handsome. His tousled black hair and the shadows of night only added to his charm. The smooth planes of his angular face, the irritated wedge between his brows, and the long lashes framing his tundra-like eyes —he was beautiful even in the dead of night with only moonlight filtering through the thickening snow-laden air.

In a realm of soft hues and blooming blossoms, a young girl lay amidst a field of flowers, a celestial veil gracing her features with a gentle, translucent touch. Her arms extended gracefully above her, eyes closed, she seemed to dance on the edge of dreams. The flowers painted the canvas in shades of blue, purple, and pink, their petals swaying in a tender breeze. Dew-kissed blades of grass formed a sea of diamonds, reflecting the soft glow of an unseen moon. As the girl stirred in her slumber, a distant echo of horse steps reached her ears, a melody that danced through the flowered meadow. Slowly, she rose from her flowery bed, the veil slipping away like morning mist to unveil her enchanting presence. Her gown, a masterpiece of celestial elegance, cascaded around her. A floor-length creation in light blue, it cradled her form with a sweetheart neckline, the bodice adorned in gold, floral designs. Layers of tulle formed the flowing skirt, adorned with accents of blueish flowers, and a train that trailed behind her like a comet's tail. Around her neck hung a pendant, a crescent moon cradling a star, both crafted from silver and adorned with blue gemstones, a twin to the one she wore in the enchanted garden. Her golden locks, a cascade of loose curls, framed her face with ethereal grace, flowing like strands of sunlight. Awakening from the meadow's embrace, her deep blue eyes sought the source of the approaching steps. With a sense of dreamlike purpose, she floated towards the sound, the forest mist enveloping her like a lover's caress. In the heart of the foggy woodland, a clearing revealed itself, trees standing sentinel in the distance. From the shroud of mist emerged a figure on horseback, a man in the regalia of a medieval warrior. The horse, a noble steed of white, carried him forward with determined grace. His attire, a tapestry of dark fabric and gilded accents, spoke of a history steeped in honor and battle. High collars and embroidered shoulder pads, buttons, and chains of gold, all adorned his form. His cape billowed behind him, a canvas of golden threads dancing in the breeze. Their eyes met innocence and determination woven together in the tapestry of fate. As he approached, still astride his noble mount, he extended a hand, a silent invitation. With an innocence that matched the morning dew, she lifted her hand to meet his, and at that moment, the world seemed to swirl and dance around them.

In a realm of soft hues and blooming blossoms, a young girl lay amidst a field of flowers, a celestial veil gracing her features with a gentle, translucent touch. Her arms extended gracefully above her, eyes closed, she seemed to dance on the edge of dreams. The flowers painted the canvas in shades of blue, purple, and pink, their petals swaying in a tender breeze. Dew-kissed blades of grass formed a sea of diamonds, reflecting the soft glow of an unseen moon. As the girl stirred in her slumber, a distant echo of horse steps reached her ears, a melody that danced through the flowered meadow. Slowly, she rose from her flowery bed, the veil slipping away like morning mist to unveil her enchanting presence. Her gown, a masterpiece of celestial elegance, cascaded around her. A floor-length creation in light blue, it cradled her form with a sweetheart neckline, the bodice adorned in gold, floral designs. Layers of tulle formed the flowing skirt, adorned with accents of blueish flowers, and a train that trailed behind her like a comet's tail. Around her neck hung a pendant, a crescent moon cradling a star, both crafted from silver and adorned with blue gemstones, a twin to the one she wore in the enchanted garden. Her golden locks, a cascade of loose curls, framed her face with ethereal grace, flowing like strands of sunlight. Awakening from the meadow's embrace, her deep blue eyes sought the source of the approaching steps. With a sense of dreamlike purpose, she floated towards the sound, the forest mist enveloping her like a lover's caress. In the heart of the foggy woodland, a clearing revealed itself, trees standing sentinel in the distance. From the shroud of mist emerged a figure on horseback, a man in the regalia of a medieval warrior. The horse, a noble steed of white, carried him forward with determined grace. His attire, a tapestry of dark fabric and gilded accents, spoke of a history steeped in honor and battle. High collars and embroidered shoulder pads, buttons, and chains of gold, all adorned his form. His cape billowed behind him, a canvas of golden threads dancing in the breeze. Their eyes met innocence and determination woven together in the tapestry of fate. As he approached, still astride his noble mount, he extended a hand, a silent invitation. With an innocence that matched the morning dew, she lifted her hand to meet his, and at that moment, the world seemed to swirl and dance around them. Yet, just as the dance was about to begin, Princess Mehjabeen's eyes fluttered open, the enchanting dream slipping away like mist beneath the twilight.

There are many kinds of windows, but nothing’s better for your fenestration vocabulary than learning the names of the parts of the most common window style — the double-hung. Now you can talk the talk! Let’s start from the top. The header is the top horizontal piece of the frame. The jamb refers to the vertical side pieces of the frame. The sill is the horizontal part at the bottom of the frame. (Looking at the window from outside, you’d see the stool where the sill is, often supported by a small board called an apron.) Now let’s get to the real business of this window. Double-hungs have two moving pieces, called the sash. The piece on top is the upper sash, which can be lowered from its closed position, and on the bottom is the lower sash, which can be raised. The rails are the horizontal part of the sash frame and the stiles are the vertical parts. The sash, upper and lower, hold the glass portion of the window. A single piece of glass is called a pane. A sash can have one or more panes; the dividers between the panes are called muntins. On both vertical sides of the sash are channels, which guide the sash up or down in a straight line. The small molding piece that runs up the front, at the sides of the lower sash is called the inside stop, which keeps the sash running smoothly in its channel. The sashes lock together by means of a two-piece latch, positioned atop the upper rail of the lower sash, and the bottom rail of the upper sash. If your windows look like double-hungs, but the upper sash doesn’t move, these are called single-hung windows.

A Fearful Demagogue SAVARKAR AND THE MUSLIM QUESTION AS I SUGGESTED in the introduction, only a kaleidoscopic view gives us the full picture of Savarkar’s life and thought. This is particularly important when approaching the development of his anti-Muslim views, which have over the last century become the normative views of the current Hindu right wing. In this chapter, I will weave together not one, not two, but six different strands of Savarkar’s anti-Muslim braid.1 The first strand is the Gandhi-helmed anticolonial nationalist movement in India in the post-World War I period when the colonial government put out yet another “reform” package. The second is the Caliphate as a theory, mourned ideal, and practice in its last iteration in Ottoman and Republican Turkey. The third takes us to the debates in India about the Caliphate, referred to as Khilafat in India, and, relatedly, the discussions of the proposed hijrat (migration) to Afghanistan in India among Muslim intellectuals, leaders, and businessmen.2 The fourth strand returns us to Turkey and Mustafa Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. In the fifth we follow, in summary, the progress of the Indian Khilafat movement (the only such movement in the world). The sixth is the immediate cause for Savarkar’s expostulations, namely his anger about Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement. Savarkar, from house arrest, attacked virtually every iteration of the ideas and events laid out above—the idea of the Khilafat, the movement and its leaders, Gandhi, Muslims, and all Hindus who supported Khilafat. While he did not criticize the reform package, he insisted that Muslims were taking advantage of it. Once I trace the trajectory of each of these strands, I will move on to what Savarkar had to say about the Muslim question. I do this for two reasons. First, the strands allow us a broader look at the regional, national, and global context that framed Savarkar’s views. Second, Savarkar’s views about Muslims build on all of these strands, especially the way in which the Khilafat movement revealed for him the fundamental disloyalty of Muslims to India. But this was not all, for he came to see Muslims as a monolithic community that was defined as much by its proclivity for violence as by its foundational claims for a distinctive—and exclusive—political sovereignty of its own. In both cases, he felt lay extraordinary dangers for Hindus.

It was a strike against the edifice of policy and politics coming to rest upon Keynesian concepts of savings and consumption. Years later, Friedman spelled out the ultimate implications. Dorothy and Rose’s paper fed into a much larger body of research, the permanent income hypothesis, that “removes completely one of the pillars of the ‘secular stagnation’ thesis.” It also had implications for the Keynesian proposition that there was “no automatic force in a monetary economy to assure the existence of a full-employment equilibrium.”9 On the surface, Dorothy and Rose had published a basic research report. Considered in the bigger picture, their conclusions spoke to the politically charged question of consumption. Was the paper deliberately framed as an attack upon Keynes?10 Both women were dedicated empiricists, and the problem in the data was compelling. At the same time, the solution they came up with dovetailed nicely with each woman’s intellectual inclinations. The paper’s emphasis on relative income reflected the traditional approach of consumption research that Dorothy knew well. Dorothy’s long tenure in reformist D.C. agencies suggests that like most consumption economists, she was probably sympathetic to New Deal social spending. By contrast, although Rose has left little trace of her thinking in this period, she was among the most loyal of Frank Knight’s students. His teachings would have primed her to be skeptical of both the New Deal and the Keynesian concepts that were newly popular among economists.

I want you,” she moaned against his lips. “I don’t care how or why this has happened. I want you.” And maybe, just maybe, he wanted her as much as she did him. Like she’d unleashed a shark, he descended upon her. She only had a few moments to realize they were sinking to the sands before her back hit them. A plume of sand covered her vision for a brief moment before his gills fluttered hard enough to push it all away from her. He loomed over her, a dark shadow with a frame of the sea behind him. “I have wanted to taste you for such a long time,” he growled, his voice low and guttural. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know how he would taste her, but... Sure. If that’s what he wanted to do. Nodding frantically, she wrapped an arm around his neck and kissed him again. Arching into him, wanting whatever he would give her. “Then taste me.” He groaned, his body going rigid under her touch. “We are not a gentle people, Alys.” “I don’t want gentle.” “I don’t know how to do this the way your people do, maybe...” She leaned away from him, a full-blown glare on her face. “Do you want me?” “Yes.” The word wrenched out of him like she had pulled it out of his heart. “More than anything.” “Then touch me how you want. Taste me how you want. I don’t even know what that means, but I’m telling you that nothing you do will feel wrong.” She kissed him again, sweeter this time, but with no less desire. “No one has done this before, Imber. I think it’s safe to say that anything we do will be new for the both of us.” He shook his head, gliding his lips over hers. “I don’t want to hurt you.” “I’ll tell you if it hurts.” She didn’t think any of it could

My gaze lingered on one of the smaller frames. The color was duller than the rest. My parents bundled up in a tent. Mom grinning at the camera, pregnant with one of us. Dad looking at her like he’d waited his whole life for her. Both excited for the adventure of a lifetime together.

But we must know this comfort is only the portion of those that give up themselves to Christ's government; that are willing in all things to be disposed of by him. For here we see in this Scripture both joined together, mercy to bruised reeds, and yet government prevailing by degrees over corruptions. Christ so favours weak ones, as that he frames their souls to a better condition than they are in. Neither can it be otherwise, but that a soul looking for mercy should submit itself at the same time to be guided. Those relations of husband, head, shepherd, &c, imply not only meekness and mercy, but government likewise. When we become Christians to purpose, we live not exempt from all service, but only we change our Lord.

Before we had finished the third round of beers, little Johnny and I had been poisoned. Someone must have put something in his beer and mine, but not in his wife's. Imagine that. I was texting and crying with my head down, and they were kissing in love, so we didn't pay attention to who could have reached our bottles on our table. I don't remember how we got to Urgell while both of us were dying from poisoning. It was a couple of blocks away; uphill a few blocks and another few block left towards Plaza Espanya. I was blindly following the way my legs and muscle memory led me, and us, towards the store and Canale Vuo from Universitat. I cannot recall a single memory frame from Nevermind to the Urgell Store, as if I had been poisoned so badly I was literally blind and unable to see. Visual blackout. I remember the three of us, holding onto each other at every step of the way, grabbing each other's arms, squeezing a hand in pain. We must have resembled Benicio del Toro and Johnny Depp attempting to enter Circus Circus in the movie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, under the influence of ether. Or as Hunter S. Thompson and his lawyer must have appeared in real life. Anything could have happened to us that night. His wife was as tiny and fragile as Sabrina; she was just a bit taller. Multiple times we almost fell on the ground as we stumbled through the streets, trying to find our balance as his wife tried to keep us both on our feet with limited success. Johnny's wife was between us, trying to hold both of us up and lead us where my legs were taking us. I was unsure if we would live long enough to see the next day. “Realllllly.” – as Adam would say. It was the first time I had ever met Johnny Maraudin and it was almost our last night in life. We got closer to each other one night, after less than three rounds of beers, than we were with his brother Adam, who’s only friend was Tomas, in need.

Lightning cuts the wild sky and I feel my mind drift back. Who are we, Allie and I? Are we ancient ivy on a cypress tree, tendrils and branches intertwined so closely that we would both die if we were forced apart? Another bolt and the table beside me is lit enough to enable me to see a picture of Allie, the best one I have. I had it framed years ago in the hope that the glass would make it last for ever. I reach for it and hold it inches from my face...and she had never been more beautiful. There are so many things I want to ask her, but I know the picture won't answer, so I put it aside.

A great playwright, Tom Stoppard, once said that laughter is the sound of comprehension. My goal will be to get you to laugh at the end. I need to start with a digression, though. There’s this idea in both comedy and video games called ‘negative transfer.’ The idea is that a rapid switching of one’s frame, in the comedy case, or control scheme, in the video game case, can be both funny and frustrating. As a simple example, think about playing a Nintendo game and you’ve learned since the beginning of time that the left little button on the D-pad moves your character left and the ‘A’ button makes him jump. And then imagine some sort of spell in the game and suddenly all the controls are reversed. That’s called a ‘negative transfer.

NIGHT 1: LEXI Lexi arrives at eleven o’clock wearing a black lace dress that is both sexy and modest at the same time. It comes to just above her knees and the v-neckline reveals a hint of her small, round breasts. She’s wearing black stockings and short heels, and I’m curious to see if she’s wearing a garter belt under there. Her thick brown hair falls to her shoulders and her large brown eyes make her look innocent and doe-like. “Come in,” I say opening the door wide and stepping aside. Lexi hesitates for a second then comes in, looking around at our small studio apartment. The room is dimly lit by shaded lamps, letting most of the light come in through the uncurtained windows. I can see the full moon framed against one pane. In the center of the room is our four-poster king sized bed. Eric is lying on the red silk sheets.

As we pass the mirror in the bedroom, my attention is drawn to the lovely couple in the reflection. There is a man, tall with broad shoulders. His red hair cut short. He has nothing but a towel on. In his arms is a female, slender but muscular. Her wheat colored hair is pulled back in a neat bun on top of her head. Both of their skin is smooth and flawless, a little paler than most, but still complete perfection. You can tell by the way the man holds her, he cares a lot for her. You can also tell that he is afraid of holding her too tight, not wanting to crush her smaller frame into his body. Looking at this young pair in the mirror, one can only wonder of all the possibilities. What led them to this place? What is in store for them? Will there be a happy ending?

In an apt demonstration of the principle of relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the bawdy platter and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position, vis-à-vis Daniel, and hence were, in principle, just as edible as if he had been seated before and the pies had been resting upon a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies, was banging around London. . . . Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel, or any other man alive, to understand relativity, showed no interest in his pie, as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow not a pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still. Position and velocity to him might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to, those properties that were essential to “pie-ness.” All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his—Daniel’s—physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and pie were close together, both in position and velocity, then pie eating became a practical and tempting possibility. If pie were far sundered from Daniel, or moving at a large relative velocity, e.g. being hurled at his face, then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. At the time being however, these were purely scholastic hypotheticals. The pie was on his lap, and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it. Mr. Kat had lent them silver table settings and Daniel, as he spoke, tucked a napkin into his shirt collar, a flag of surrender and unconditional capitulation to the attractions of pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up, knife and fork, Isaac’s question frozen just as he poised these above the flaky top crust. . . . and he stabbed pie.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Lunch with Diana. A big day--a massive, humongous day, in fact. I got there ten minutes early, feeling decidedly nervous. The Kensington Palace front door was opened by her beaming butler. He walked me up the stairs, chatting cheerfully about the weather and my journey, as if a tabloid editor prowling around Diana’s home was a perfectly normal occurrence. He said that the “Boss” was running a bit late, joking that “she’ll be furious you are here first!” and invited me to have a drink. “What does she have?” I asked. “Water, usually,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you rather have a nice glass of wine? She won’t mind in the slightest.” I readily agreed, if only to calm my racing heartbeat. He then left me alone in the suitably regal sitting room. Diana had a perfectly normal piano covered in perfectly normal family snaps. It’s just that this family was the most photographed on the planet. Lots of pictures of her boys, the young heirs, perhaps the men who will kill off, or secure, the very future of the monarchy. To us, they were just soap opera stars, semi-real figments of tabloid headlines and the occasional palace balcony wave. But here they were, her boys, in picture frames, like any other adored sons. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds.

She was standing there, naked as a Greek statue, when the door suddenly opened and a gust of cool night air raised goosebumps all over her body. “I forgot my hat,” Caleb announced flatly, but his amber eyes burned as they moved over Lily’s naked form. She covered both breasts with her arms and lifted one thigh in an attempt to hide herself. She was so angry that for a long moment she just stood there, staring and shivering. Then she snapped, “Get out.” “You should lock the doors at night, Lily,” Caleb reasoned, collecting his hat from the peg beside the door. “I could have been a client.” Lily was seething. “Believe me,” she ground out, “I’ll lock it the moment you step outside.” Caleb chuckled and walked around behind Lily for another perspective. She turned, of course, but she wasn’t quick enough. She watched in helpless fury as he tossed his hat onto the table and raised his hands to his hips. “You know, Lily,” he remarked easily, “if you don’t get on with that bath of yours, the water’s going to get cold.” “I’d be happy to finish my bath,” Lily hissed, “if only you’d leave!” He laughed, then caught her suddenly around the waist with his hands. He raised her out of the water, and she was trapped against his chest. “I want a good-bye kiss first,” he said. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t bite off your nose!” Lily spat. She prayed no one was passing by the window and seeing her naked body silhouetted against Caleb’s frame. “Will I?” He carried her across the room and tossed her onto the bed. Before

Poverty was one of those concerns. In the last days of November 1963, Robert Kennedy found a sheet of paper on which his brother had repeatedly scrawled and circled the word “poverty” during the final cabinet meeting of his life. Bobby framed the paper and hung it in his office at the Justice Department. Poverty was on both Kennedys’ minds that fall; earlier in 1963 they had begun to consider an antipoverty program—not a war but an “offensive” of uncertain magnitude. At the time of the assassination, Walter Heller, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was preparing a comprehensive picture of the poverty problem. By the time Heller placed the memo on President Johnson’s desk the morning of November 23, the fight against poverty had attained the solemnity of a dead man’s last wish.

His mouth slid from hers and dragged roughly along her throat, crossing sensitive places that made her writhe. Blindly turning her face, she rubbed her lips against his ear. He drew in a sharp breath and jerked his head back. His hand came to her jaw, clamping firmly. “Tell me what you know,” he said, his breath searing her lips. “Or I’ll do worse than this. I’ll take you here and now. Is that what you want?” As a matter of fact… However, recalling that this was supposed to be a punishment, a coercion, Beatrix managed a languid, “No. Stop.” His mouth ravished hers again. She sighed and melted against him. He kissed her harder, pressing her back against the slatted side of the stall, his hands roaming indecently. Her body was laced and compressed and concealed in layers of feminine attire, frustrating his attempts to caress her. His garments, however, presented far fewer obstacles. She slid her arms inside his coat, fumbling to touch him, tugging ardently at his waistcoat and shirt. Reaching beneath the straps of his trouser braces, she managed to pull part of his shirt free of the trousers, the fabric warm from his body. They both gasped as her cool fingers touched the burning skin of his back. Fascinated, Beatrix explored the curvature of deep intrinsic muscles, the tight mesh of sinew and bone, the astonishing strength contained just beneath the surface. She found the texture of scars, vestiges of pain and survival. After stroking a healed-over line, she covered it tenderly with her palm. A shudder racked his frame. Christopher groaned and crushed his mouth over hers, urging her body against his, until together they found an erotic pattern, a cadence. Instinctively Beatrix tried to draw him inside herself, pulling at his lips and tongue with her own. Christopher broke the kiss abruptly, panting. Cradling her head in his hands, he pressed his forehead against hers. “Is it you?” he asked hoarsely. “Is it?” Beatrix felt tears slip from beneath her lashes, no matter how she tried to blink them back. Her heart was ablaze. It seemed that her entire life had led to this man, this moment of unexpressed love. But she was too frightened of his scorn, and too ashamed of her own actions, to answer. Christopher’s fingertips found the tear marks on her damp skin. His mouth grazed her trembling lips, lingering at one soft corner, sliding up to the verge of a salt-flavored cheek. Releasing her, he stepped back and stared at her with baffled anger. The desire exerted such force between them that Beatrix belatedly wondered how he could maintain even that small distance. A shaken breath escaped him. He straightened his clothes, moving with undue care, as if he were intoxicated. “Damn you.” His voice was low and strained. He strode out of the stables. Albert, who had been sitting by a stall, began to trot after him. Upon noticing Beatrix wasn’t going with them, the terrier dashed over to her and whimpered. Beatrix bent to pet him. “Go on, boy,” she whispered. Hesitating only a moment, Albert ran after his master. And Beatrix watched them both with despair.

Don’t stop on my account.” I shrieked at the sound of Apollo’s voice and jerked back, tripping over my feet. Aiden caught my arm, steadying me before I face-planted the floor. “Gods,” I muttered, placing a hand over my pounding heart. I’d been so caught up in Aiden I hadn’t even sensed Apollo’s presence. Apollo sat on the edge of the bed, head cocked to the side, one leg crossed over the other. His blond hair was loose, framing a face that was eerily perfect. Vibrant blue eyes stared back at me instead of the creepy all-white eyes of a god. I was surprised that he remembered how much they freaked me out. Aiden recovered first, moving to stand in front of me. He stiffened at the sound of Apollo’s amused chuckle. “How did you get in here?” “The wards on the house faded about three hours ago. Luckily, none of the other gods have realized that and, for the most part, they don’t want Alex dead.” And then he tacked on, “…right at this moment.” I looked at him blandly. “Good to know.” “Maybe next time you’d want to knock?” Aiden suggested, relaxing a fraction of an inch. Apollo’s shoulders lifted. “Where is the fun in that?” But he stood, his head inclining to the side. “We need to talk, but both of you look like you’ve been wrestling in mud.” “We’ve been training,” I pointed out. “Like you suggested.” If he was grateful that we’d actually followed instructions, it didn’t show. “I will be waiting downstairs. Try not to take ten years.” With that, he simply blinked out of existence. A moment later, I heard a startled yelp downstairs. Glad we weren’t the only ones he liked to do that to. I slumped against the wall. “I think he took a few years off my life.” Aiden’s brow arched. “I still think we need to put a bell on him.” My lips twitched. “And I still think that’s a good idea

Prototype frames. Among the most important of the commonplace frames are the prototype frames, where you reason about a category on the basis of some subcategory (real or imagined). The best known is the social stereotype. For instance, both conservatives and progressives use stereotypes of immigrants, though very different ones.

She also took his hand in her own and nuzzled his palm with her nose. “Even your hands smell good.” “When one washes his hands frequently…” Her tongue, hot, wet, and delicate, traced the crease between his third and fourth fingers. Vim rolled up and over her, crouching on his forearms and knees. “For the love God, kiss me, Sophie.” He waited for a long moment while she cradled his jaw then framed his face with both hands. She kissed him on the mouth, a sweet, almost chaste kiss, then ran one hand back through his hair to anchor at his nape. “You kiss me too,” she whispered. “Madly, passionately.” Lust sprang from the starting blocks and raged through Vim’s system. He opened his mouth over hers, desire a voracious force singing in his blood. “Vim.

Thomas’s tall frame dominated the empty space in front of the open bedchamber door. “What are you doing?” His blue eyes were dark and worry dug itself deep into the muscles of his jaw. He hadn’t taken the time to remove his cloak and the long black fabric accentuated the dark of his hair and made his shoulders seem as wide as the doorframe. Eliza sat still, trying not to be overcome by the fluttering in her middle. Kitty too must have felt like a child who’d been caught in the middle of mischief, for she remained motionless. “I just wanted to get cleaned up. Is that such a crime?” Eliza wore an easy smile, hoping to massage away the frustration in his face. He shook his head like a father with two disobedient children, wiped off his cloak, and hung it over the chair by the table in the corner. “I leave you both for a moment and here you are trying to kill yourself all over again.” “It’s not as bad as all that, Thomas. I’m getting better.” Eliza tried lifting her legs back onto the bed to show her improvement, but she winced as a shooting pain gouged into her stomach. Thomas rushed to her side. He put one arm around her shoulder, the other under her knees, and lifted her back to her usual position. His face was much too close, the musky scent of his clothes much too inviting. His warm breath on her ear made her own breathing difficult. Eliza’s gaze moved to Thomas’s face as he propped the pillows behind her. He stilled when their gazes locked, only inches apart. His eyes transformed into sparkling sapphires and for a moment the world around her dissolved. “You just took another year off my life, Eliza.” His rich masculine voice sent a ripple of pleasure flowing down her skin and the compassion in his eyes made her heart stop beating. Why did he have to be so kind? Didn’t he know what it did to her? He looked away too soon, shaking his head. “Don’t try anything like that again.

What's this?" I asked, putting her cup on the counter next to the plate. "Rocky Road Bars," she supplied with a shrug. "Is that some kind of message?" I asked, head dipped. "Message?" she asked, her brows drawing together and proving that it wasn't. "Never mind," I said, shaking my head, feeling a small wave of relief even if she was standing there wound like a clock for some untold reason. Maybe that was the reason that when she shrugged at me and went to reach for her coffee, I reached over the counter, snagged her chin in my thumb and forefinger and leaned in to lick a small bit of chocolate from beside her lips from where she had smudged it. Her entire body stiffened then trembled at the contact. It was all the encouragement I needed. So right there, a dozen eyes no doubt on us, I framed her face in my hands and pressed my lips to hers. There was nothing sweet or chaste about it. I fucking devoured her mouth, my tongue moving to invade, drawing a quiet whimper from her as her hands slammed down on the counter. The sound was enough to remind me that I couldn't take it any further right then and there and better stop before either of us got too worked up. But as I pulled away and her eyes fluttered open and all I could see was a deep desire there, I knew she was a little bit more worked up than I intended. There were a couple chuckles and one brave soul let out a loud whistle as we pulled apart, making my smile tip up slightly, knowing I had just, whether I truly intended it or not, staked a claim. I let the whole town know that I was messing around with one of their favorite daughters. "I hate you right now," she said, her voice airy, her cheeks pink, her lips swollen. "No you don't," I countered, shaking my head. "You just hate that you can't climb over this counter and let me fuck you right here and now. Don't worry, you can have me all to yourself in just a couple of hours. If you can control yourself until then..." "Control myself," she hissed, both looking slightly outraged and equally amused. "I believe you were the one half-mauling me in public." "And I'm pretty sure it was your tongue moving over mine and your whimper I heard, right? Or was that Old Mildred. Hey, Milly..." I started to call, making Maddy's eyes bulge comically as she slammed her hand into my shoulder hard enough to send me back a foot. "Shut up!" she hissed, making me let out a chuckle. "Alright fine. You made your point," she said, shaking her head as she reached for her coffee. "What was my point, exactly?" I asked, curious. "You just like... marked your territory or whatever," she said, rolling her eyes at the very idea, but a small smile pulled at her lips. "So, what, you're mine now?" "Oh, I, well... I thought..." she fumbled, shaking her head at her lack of explanations. "Relax, sweetheart," I said, saving her from her misery. "Like I said last night, I'm in. You were the one who came in all anti-social this morning." "That had nothing to do with you," she informed me, looking almost pained. "Alice?" "My mom needs to find some friends to talk to about sex, Brant. I can't take it. I can't," she said, looking horrified. "I thought I was a cool, mature, experienced, metropolitan woman. But when your mom starts talking about blowjobs, it makes you really, really want to stick your fingers in your ears and scream 'I'm not hearing this, I'm not hearing this' until she shuts up." "Traumatized for life, huh?" "He's coming over tonight. Did I mention that part? He's coming to dinner and then, ah, staying the night. Because apparently it's... serious. Do they still sell earplugs at the pharmacy? I think I might actually die if I have to listen to them doing it.'' I laughed at that, finding myself charmed by her embarrassment. "Tell you what, why don't you come to my place for dinner.

About 41 percent of mothers are primary breadwinners and earn the majority of their family’s income. Another 23 percent of mothers are co-breadwinners, contributing at least a quarter of the family’s earnings.30 The number of women supporting families on their own is increasing quickly; between 1973 and 2006, the proportion of families headed by a single mother grew from one in ten to one in five.31 These numbers are dramatically higher in Hispanic and African-American families. Twenty-seven percent of Latino children and 51 percent of African-American children are being raised by a single mother.32 Our country lags considerably behind others in efforts to help parents take care of their children and stay in the workforce. Of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United States is the only one without a paid maternity leave policy.33 As Ellen Bravo, director of the Family Values @ Work consortium, observed, most “women are not thinking about ‘having it all,’ they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their children’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.”34 For many men, the fundamental assumption is that they can have both a successful professional life and a fulfilling personal life. For many women, the assumption is that trying to do both is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Women are surrounded by headlines and stories warning them that they cannot be committed to both their families and careers. They are told over and over again that they have to choose, because if they try to do too much, they’ll be harried and unhappy. Framing the issue as “work-life balance”—as if the two were diametrically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life? The good news is that not only can women have both families and careers, they can thrive while doing so. In 2009, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober published Getting to 50/50, a comprehensive review of governmental, social science, and original research that led them to conclude that children, parents, and marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers. The data plainly reveal that sharing financial and child-care responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads, and thriving children.35 Professor Rosalind Chait Barnett of Brandeis University did a comprehensive review of studies on work-life balance and found that women who participate in multiple roles actually have lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of mental well-being.36 Employed women reap rewards including greater financial security, more stable marriages, better health, and, in general, increased life satisfaction.37 It may not be as dramatic or funny to make a movie about a woman who loves both her job and her family, but that would be a better reflection of reality. We need more portrayals of women as competent professionals and happy mothers—or even happy professionals and competent mothers. The current negative images may make us laugh, but they also make women unnecessarily fearful by presenting life’s challenges as insurmountable. Our culture remains baffled: I don’t know how she does it. Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

Through the years I experimented with all different types of materials and frames. Finally, I settled upon one that was so simple, easy, and inexpensive to use that it was almost ridiculous. Then I began growing all different types of plants vertically. I originally thought I would need to design some special way to hold up and accommodate heavier fruits such as winter squash and pumpkins, but as it turned out, these plant vines seemed to understand the situation; the stem supporting the heavy fruit grows thicker and heavier as the fruit becomes larger. If you have a framework and support that will hold the plant, the plant will hold the fruit; it is as simple as that! Mother Nature always seems to know best. Pea and bean netting can be stretched taut across a box frame and held in place by four metal posts. Plants will then grow up through the netting and be supported. Best Material I use the strongest material I can find, which is steel. Fortunately, steel comes in tubular pipe used for electrical conduit. It is very strong and turns out to be very inexpensive. Couplings are also available so you can connect two pieces together. I designed an attractive frame that fits right onto the 4 × 4 box, and it can be attached to the wooden box with clamps that can be bought at any store. Or, steel reinforcing rods driven into the existing ground outside your box provide a very steady and strong base; then the electrical conduit slips snugly over the bars. It’s very simple and inexpensive to assemble. Anyone can do it—even you! To prevent vertically grown plants from shading other parts of the garden, I recommend that tall, vertical frames be constructed on the north side of the garden. To fit it into a 4 × 4 box, I designed a frame that measured 4 feet wide and almost 6 feet tall. Tie It Tight Vertically growing plants need to be tied to their supports. Nylon netting won’t rot in the sun and weather, and I use it exclusively now for both vertical frames and horizontal plant supports. It is very strong—almost unbreakable—and guaranteed for twenty years. It is a wonderful material available at garden stores and in catalogs. The nylon netting is also durable enough to grow the heavier vine crops on vertical frames, including watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupes, winter and summer squashes, and tomatoes. You will see in Chapter 8 how easy it is to train plants to grow vertically. To hold the plants to the frame, I have found that nylon netting with 7-inch square openings made especially for tomato growing works well because you can reach your hand through. Make sure it is this type so it won’t cut the stem of the plant when it blows against it in the wind. This comes in 4-foot widths and can easily be tied to the metal frame. It’s sometimes hard to find, so call around.

How long has it been since you last slept with a woman, if you don’t mind my asking?” He didn’t appear to mind. He frowned a little and scratched his chest thoughtfully. “Oh … fifteen years? At least that.” He glanced at me, his expression altering to one of concern. “Oh. I do apologize.” “You do? For what?” I arched one brow. I could think of a number of things he might apologize for, but probably none of those was what he had in mind. “I am afraid I was perhaps not …” he hesitated. “Very gentlemanly.” “Oh, you weren’t,” I said, rather tartly. “But I assure you that I wasn’t being at all ladylike myself.” He looked at me, and his mouth worked a bit, as though trying to frame some response to that, but after a moment or two he shook his head and gave it up. “Besides, it wasn’t me you were making love to,” I said, “and both of us know it.” He looked up, startled, his eyes very blue. Then the shadow of a smile crossed his face, and he looked down at the quilted coverlet. “No,” he said softly. “Nor were you, I think, making love to me. Were you?

Whether it be brand marketers trumpeting the new BMW X5, game developers getting players to spend real money on virtual goods, or someone selling an online nursing degree, the only difference is the time frame in which those different goals occur—in other words, the time between attention and action. If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have. In the former case, the trail is easily trackable, as the “conversion” usually happens online, usually after clicking on the very ad you were served.* In the latter, the media employed is a multipronged strategy of Super Bowl ads, Internet advertising, postal mail, free keychains, and God knows what else. Also, the conversion happens way after the initial exposure to the media, and often offline and in a physical space, like at a car dealership. The tracking and attribution are much harder, due to both the manifold media used and the months or years gone by between the exposure and the sale. As such, brand advertising budgets, which are far larger than direct-response ones, are spent in embarrassingly large broadsides, barely targeted or tracked in any way. Now you know all there is to know about advertising. The rest is technical detail and self-promoting bullshit spun by agencies. You’re officially as informed as the media tycoons who run the handful of agencies that manage our media world.

Not an “Issue,” a Frame” “The link between challenging corruption and lowering emissions is just one example of how the climate emergency could—by virtue of its urgency and the fact that it impacts, well, everyone on earth—breathe new life into a political goal for which there is already a great deal of public support. The same holds true for many of the other issues discussed so far—from raising taxes on the rich to blocking harmful new trade deals to reinvesting in the public sphere. But before those kinds of alliances can be built, some very bad habits will need to be abandoned. Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One—why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women’s rights… when it’s blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement’s leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by comparison.” Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as “a gigantic snowjob” that was using “rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure. They were both wrong. The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.

In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads us to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families—starving one of the most important parts of our life of the resources it needs to flourish. It should be becoming clear that the answers to all three of our questions are deeply connected. Try as you might, it’s very hard to wall off different parts of your life. Your career priorities—the motivators that will make you happy at work—are simply one part of a broader set of priorities in your life, priorities that include your family, your friends, your faith, your health, and so on. Similarly, the way you balance your plans with unanticipated opportunities, and allocate your resources—your time and energy—does not stop when you walk out the door of your office. You’re making decisions about these every moment of your life. You will be constantly pressured, both at home and at work, to give people and projects your attention. How do you decide who gets what? Whoever makes the most noise? Whoever grabs you first? You have to make sure that you allocate your resources in a way that is consistent with your priorities. You have to make sure that your own measures of success are aligned with your most important concern. And you have to make sure that you’re thinking about all these in the right time frame—overcome the natural tendency to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term. It

The rabbit wine opener does complete integrity to its name in rapports of both, looks and performance. It looks like a bunny with 2 parallel handles serving as the trademark bunny ears and can open stubborn corks with utmost neatness. Manufacturers boast that the whole process of opening your precious bottle of wine will be over in 3 seconds to be precise. Because of the advanced in wine accessories, most people nowadays enjoy a rabbit wine opener set - especially the wine lovers as it offers the best time frame for the money. One of the most important features of the rabbit wine opener is that it can turn the bottle opening experience into a breeze for anyone. With it you don't require to use any type of force. In fact, if you do attempt to open a bottle by force with this accessory you might end up breaking it. Its two handles will softly remove the cork, relieving you of all the efforts. This way, there will be no more accidents when opening a bottle and the wine tasting process converts a lot more pleasant. Basic anatomy of this device consists of two handles which allow you to grip the opener tightly around the neck of the bottle, a worm or spiral which slices into the cork and removes it and a lever which pushes the worm in and out of the cork. With Rabbit Wine Openers you can handle traditional corks made of wood and also, synthetic corks. Though the synthetic ones can be trickier to remove, they are best dealt with rabbit wine opener. You can use this instrument on bottles of any size too. When using a new rabbit wine opener, or one that has not been abused, you will not experience situations in which the cork is broken into pieces inside the bottle, as when using other types of openers. This device makes the cork come out without damaging it in any way, even if the cork material is soft in nature or even if you are not accustomed to opening bottles.

They spent three more long days in the whitened mountain ash trees on the whitened bay. Tatiana baked pies in Nellie’s big kitchen. Alexander read all the papers and magazines from stem to stern and talked post-war politics to Tatiana and Jimmy, and even to indifferent Nellie. In Nellie’s potato fields, Alexander built snowmen for Anthony. After the pies were in the oven, Tatiana came out of the house and saw six snowmen arrayed like soldiers from big to little. She tutted, rolled her eyes and dragged Anthony away to fall down and make angels in the snow instead. They made thirty of them, all in a row, arrayed like soldiers. On the third night of winter, Anthony was in their bed restfully asleep, and they were wide awake. Alexander was rubbing her bare buttocks under her gown. The only window in their room was blizzarded over. She assumed the blue moon was shining beyond. His hands were becoming very insistent. Alexander moved one of the blankets onto the floor, silently; moved her onto the blanket, silently; laid her flat onto her stomach, silently, and made love to her in stealth like they were doughboys on the ground, crawling to the frontline, his belly to her back, keeping her in a straight line, completely covering her tiny frame with his body, clasping her wrists above her head with one hand. As he confined her, he was kissing her shoulders, and the back of her neck, and her jawline, and when she turned her face to him, he kissed her lips, his free hand roaming over her legs and ribs while he moved deep and slow! amazing enough by itself, but even more amazingly he turned her to him to finish, still restraining her arms above her head, and even made a brief noise not just a raw exhale at the feverish end...and then they lay still, under the blankets, and Tatiana started to cry underneath him, and he said shh, shh, come on, but didn’t instantly move off her, like usual. “I’m so afraid,” she whispered. “Of what?” “Of everything. Of you.” He said nothing. She said, “So you want to get the heck out of here?” “Oh, God. I thought you’d never ask.” “Where do you think you’re going?” Jimmy asked when he saw them packing up the next morning. “We’re leaving,” Alexander replied. “Well, you know what they say,” Jim said. “Man proposes and God disposes. The bridge over Deer Isle is iced over. Hasn’t been plowed in weeks and won’t be. Nowhere to go until the snow melts.” “And when do you think that might be?” “April,” Jimmy said, and both he and Nellie laughed. Jimmy hugged her with his one good arm and Nellie, gazing brightly at him, didn’t look as if she cared that he had just the one. Tatiana and Alexander glanced at each other. April! He said to Jim, “You know what, we’ll take our chances.” Tatiana started to speak up, started to say, “Maybe they’re right—” and Alexander fixed her with such a stare that she instantly shut up, ashamed of questioning him in front of other people, and hurried on with the packing. They said goodbye to a regretful Jimmy and Nellie, said goodbye to Stonington and took their Nomad Deluxe across Deer Isle onto the mainland. In this one instant, man disposed. The bridge had been kept clear by the snow crews on Deer Isle. Because if the bridge was iced over, no one could get any produce shipments to the people in Stonington. “What a country,” said Alexander, as he drove out onto the mainland and south.

At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken. She will lose what resolve she has because she will see an old bicycle speeding down a hill, bouncing on rocks and gravel, the metal pounding both their rears, clouds of dust kicked up with each sudden skid. She sits on the frame, and Masooma is the one on the saddle, she is the one who takes the hairpin turns at full speed, dropping the bike into a deep lean. But Parwana is not afraid. She knows that her sister will not send her flying over the handlebars, that she will not hurt her. The world melts into a whirligig blur of excitement, and the wind whooshes in their ears, and Parwana looks over her shoulder at her sister and her sister looks back, and they laugh together as stray dogs give chase.

But I’m still breathing. Not deeply; not enough to satisfy, but breathing. Peter pushes my eyelids over my eyes. Does he know I’m not dead? Does Jeanine? Can she see me breathing? “Take the body to the lab,” Jeanine says. “The autopsy is scheduled for this afternoon.” “All right,” Peter replies. Peter pushes the table forward. I hear mutters all around me as we pass the group of Erudite bystanders. My hand falls off the edge of the table as we turn a corner, and smacks in the wall. I feel a prickle of pain in my fingertips, but I can’t move my hand, as hard as I try. This time, when we go down the hallway of Dauntless traitors, it is silent. Peter walks slowly at first, then turns another corner and picks up the pace. He almost sprints down the next corridor, and stops abruptly. Where am I? I can’t be in the lab already. Why did he stop? Peter’s arms slide under my knees and shoulders, and he lifts me. My head falls against his shoulder. “For someone so small, you’re heavy, Stiff,” he mutters. He knows I’m awake. He knows. I hear a series of beeps, and a slide--a locked door, opening. “What do--” Tobias’s voice. Tobias! “Oh my God. Oh--” “Spare me your blubbering, okay?” Peter says. “She’s not dead; she’s just paralyzed. It’ll only last for about a minute. Now get ready to run.” I don’t understand. How does Peter know? “Let me carry her,” Tobias says. “No. You’re a better shot than I am. Take my gun. I’ll carry her.” I hear the gun slide out of its holster. Tobias brushes a hand over my forehead. They both start running. At first all I hear is the pounding of their feet, and my head snaps back painfully. I feel tingling in my hands and feet. Peter shouts, “Left!” at Tobias. Then a shout from down the hallway. “Hey, what--!” A bang. And nothing. More running. Peter shouts, “Right!” I hear another bang, and another. “Whoa,” he mumbles. “Wait, stop here!” Tingling down my spine. I open my eyes as Peter opens another door. He charges through it, and just before I smack my head against the door frame, I stick my arm out and stop us. “Careful!” I say, my voice strained. My throat still feels as tight as it did when he first injected me and I found it difficult to breathe. Peter turns sideways to bring me through the door, then nudges it shut with his heel and drops me on the floor. The room is almost empty, except for a row of empty trash cans along one wall and a square metal door large enough for one of the cans to fit through it along the other wall. “Tris,” Tobias says, crouching next to me. His face is pale, almost yellow. There is too much I want to say. The first thing that comes out is, “Beatrice.” He laughs weakly. “Beatrice,” he amends, and touches his lips to mine. I curl my fingers into his shirt. “Unless you want me to throw up all over you guys, you might want to save it for later.” “Where are we?” I ask. “This is the trash incinerator,” says Peter, slapping the square door. “I turned it off. I’ll take us to the alley. And then your aim had better be perfect, Four, if you want to get out of the Erudite sector alive.” “Don’t concern yourself with my aim,” Tobias retorts. He, like me, is barefoot. Peter opens the door to the incinerator. “Tris, you first.

Jonathan Green sat in one of the leather director’s chairs across from my desk and the two lesser attorneys went to the couch. Truly stayed on his feet. The videographer noticed the Pinocchio clock on the wall, then hustled around to the opposite side of my desk so that he could get both me and the clock in the frame. The Pinocchio clock has eyes that move side to side as it tocks. Photogenic. Like Green.

...I conducted a number of experiments to get in touch with my future self. Here are my favorite three: • Fire up AgingBooth. While hiring a programmer to create a 3-D virtual reality simulator is probably out of your price range, I personally love an app called AgingBooth, which transforms a picture of your face into what you will look like in several decades. There are also other apps like it, like Merrill Edge’s web app that shows you a live avatar of what you’ll look like at retirement (faceretirement.merilledge.com). AgingBooth is my favorite of them all, and it’s available for both Android and iOS, and it’s free. On the website for this book (productivityprojectbook.com), you can see what to expect out of the app—I’ve framed a picture of myself that hangs above my computer in my office, where I see it every day. Visitors are usually freaked out. • Send a letter to your future self. Like the letter I wrote at camp, writing and sending a letter to yourself in the future is a great way to bridge the gap between you and your future self. I frequently use FutureMe.org to send emails to myself in the future, particularly when I see myself being unfair to future me. • Create a future memory. I’m not a fan of hocus-pocus visualizations, so I hope this doesn’t sound like one. In her brilliant book The Wallpaper Instinct, Kelly McGonigal recommends creating a memory of yourself in the future—like one where you don’t put off a report you’re procrastinating on, or one where you read ten interesting books because you staved off the temptation of binge-watching three seasons of House of Cards on Netflix. Simply imagining a better, more productive version of yourself down the line has been shown to be enough to motivate you to act in ways that are helpful for your future self.

Svetlana looked at her father’s dacha with loathing. His rooms were ugly. In cheap frames on his walls he had huge photographs cut out from the magazine Ogonyok: a little girl with a calf, some children sitting on a bridge. Strangers’ children. Not a single photograph of his own grandchildren. The unchanging rooms—a couch, a table, chairs; a couch, a table, chairs—frightened her. The little party went off well, but Svetlana felt her father’s response to her daughter was indifference. He took one look at Katya and burst out laughing. Svetlana wondered if her father would have liked to be a family again. When she had fantasies of herself and her children living under the same roof with him, she realized that he was accustomed to the freedom of his solitude, which he claimed to have come to appreciate during his long Siberian exiles. “We could never have created a single household, the semblance of a family, a shared existence, even if we both wanted to. He really didn’t want to, I guess.”37

returned with my parents, who acted as my guides. In fact, my experience and Kotler’s are very different in that he was not only a boy in the former Soviet Union but grew to adulthood there, studied there, worked there, and ultimately was imprisoned there. So his frame of reference, not only for Crimea, but for the country as a whole, is substantially different from mine. My experience of returning to Latvia was one of actively trying to remember something, to tease out some memory of my life there. But what is common between my experience of Latvia and Kotler’s of Crimea is that both trips were taken in the summer and they were both to the seashore. When I returned, it was to the resort town of Jurmala on the Bay of Riga, where my family and I used to spend our summers. A few of those impressions filtered into the novel.

First, this faith does indeed become a virtue, in the Christian sense. The initial reaching out in grateful response, itself precipitated by the work of the Spirit and the preaching of the Word, is the start of a lifelong reaching out, a faithfulness that, like the initial faith, is the answer to God's faithfulness in Jesus Christ and in the word of the gospel. But this lifelong faithfulness, sharing as it does the nature and character of the initial faith by which one is justified, is not (again, as in some romantic or existentialist dreamings) a matter of giving expression to how one happens to be feeling at the time. (One of the evils of our age is first to say "I feel" when we mean "I think"; then to pass, subtly, to the point where actual feelings have taken the place of actual thought; then to pass beyond that again, to the point where "feeling" automatically trumps "thinking"; then to reach the point where thought has disappeared altogether, leaving us merely with Eliot's "undisciplined squads of emotion. "35 At that point, one of the nadirs of postmodernity, we have left behind both the classical and the Christian traditions, though tragically you can see exactly this sequence worked out in various would-be Christian contexts, not least Synods.) This lifelong faithfulness is a matter of practice. It means acquiring a habit: making a thousand small decisions to trust God now, in this matter, to believe in Jesus and his death and resurrection today, to be faithful and trustworthy to him here and now, in this situation ... and so coming, by slow steps and small degrees, to the point where faith, trust, belief, and faithfulness become, as we properly say in relation to virtue, "second nature" Not "first nature;' doing what comes naturally. No: second nature, doing from the heart that which the heart has learned by practice and hard work. Christian faith thus reaches out, by Spirit-inspired and eschatologically framed moral effort, toward the telos for which we were made, that we should be image-bearers of the faithful God. This means, in the terms I have posed in this paper, that faith is indeed one of the things we learn to do in the present time that truly anticipates the full life of the coming age. This is the sense, I think, in which lifelong Christian faith, though not different in kind or content from the faith by which one is justified (but only in temporal location, i.e., ongoing rather than initial), is indeed to be reckoned among the virtues.

The bobby directed us to the “Private Road” we’d already passed, but added, “You won’t be able to drive up there. It’s restricted.” Pat nudged me, so I said, “Oh, it’s all right, Officer. We have an appointment with the Princess of Wales.” The policeman shook his head in disbelief and said, “Right-o. Sure you do. Good day.” We drove right back to where we had started and proceeded through an open gateway framed by two square brick columns, both marked “Private Road.” Just before we reached the gravel courtyard next to the palace, we came to a small guardhouse. I told the two guards who we were and explained, “We’ve been invited to lunch with Her Royal Highness.” They laughed, “Which one?” I blushed at my mistake. “The Princess of Wales,” I specified. I had forgotten that Their Royal Highnesses, Princess Margaret and Princess Michael of Kent, as well as the Duchess of Gloucester, also had apartments at Kensington Palace.

Is there a problem, ma’am?” Mitch slanted a glance in her direction. She stood military straight, vehemently shaking her head. “Everything’s fine, Officer.” “Sheriff. You sure about that?” Charlie said, sounding like a complete hard-ass. “Looked to me like you were being accosted.” “N-no—” Mitch cut her off. “Would you get the hell out of here?” “Mitch,” Maddie said, with a low hiss. Evidently in a devious mood, Charlie stalked forward, placing a hand menacingly over his baton. “What did you say?” “Fuck. Off.” Mitch fired each word like a bullet. “Mitch, please,” Maddie said, tone pleading. “Do I have to take you in?” Charlie’s attention shifted in Maddie’s direction and his mouth twisted into a smile that Mitch had seen him use on hundreds of women during their fifteen-year friendship. “I’ll be happy to look after her for you, Mitch.” A stab of something suspiciously close to possessiveness jabbed at his rib cage. Mitch shot Charlie a droll glare. “Over my dead body.” One black brow rose over his sunglasses. “That can be arranged.” “Please, don’t take him to jail,” Maddie said, sounding alarmed. Both Charlie’s and Mitch’s attention snapped to her. “Now, why would you be thinking that?” Charlie asked, in an amused voice. Maddie’s gaze darted back and forth. “He threatened you.” Mitch laughed and Charlie scoffed. “Honey, he’s nothing but a pesky little fly I’d have to bat away.” Comprehension dawned and her worried expression cleared. “Oh, I see. You know, you should tell someone this is some macho-guy act before you get rolling.” “And what fun would that be?” Charlie rocked back on his heels. Even with his eyes hidden behind the mirrored frames, it was damn clear he was scoping Maddie out from head to toe. Under his scrutiny, she started to fidget. She pressed closer to Mitch, almost as if by instinct, pleasing him immensely. “Don’t mind him, Princess.” He slid his arm around her waist, pulling her tighter against him. “He likes to abuse his power over unsuspecting women.” “Um,” Maddie said, fitting under the crook his arm as though she were made for him, which was odd considering he towered over her by a foot. “I bet it’s quite effective.” Charlie laughed. “Maddie Donovan, you’re everything I’ve heard and then some.” Maddie stiffened, pulling out of Mitch’s embrace and cocking her head to the side. “How do you know my name?” “Honey,” Charlie drawled, the endearment scraping a dull blade over Mitch’s nerves. “This is a small town. People don’t have anything else to do but talk. Give me time and I’ll know your whole life story.” That strawberry-stained mouth pulled into a frown, and two little lines formed between auburn brows. She studied the cracked concrete at her feet. Suddenly, she looked up, her cheeks flushing when she realized they were watching her. She smiled brightly. “Oh well, I guess this is what I get for making an entrance.” Charlie

Are you going to put your feet in?” he asked. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It would be foolish. Besides that, I’m already breaking too many rules by sitting here alone with you. Though if anyone finds me, I shall claim that I was abducted by a pirate.” “And then you would be forced to wed me to save your reputation,” he suggested. “Which is not so very dreadful.” “I disagree,” she countered. “You, Lord Ashton, are a very wicked man with no sense of propriety.” But her eyes revealed her amusement. “If I worried about what others think, I would not be sitting with a beautiful woman on a sunny day, now, would I?” He leaned back with his arms crooked behind his head. He had the feeling that Lady Rose had a rebellious side to her, buried beneath her years of good manners. She shook her head and sighed. Then she lifted up one foot and began unbuttoning her shoe. “I must be mad.” A rebel indeed. He grinned and helped her with the other shoe, until she was clad in stockings. “No more than I. But it was an invigorating swim.” “You ought to put your shirt on,” she reminded him. “Someone will see you and think you are intent on seducing me.” “You did accuse me of being a pirate, a chara.” He kept his voice light, but leaned a little closer. “We aren’t known for being gentlemen.” In response, Rose dipped her hand into the water and splashed it at his chest. “Then I’ll be forced to defend myself from you.” The frigid water spilled down his bare chest, dampening his waistband. Iain rested his arms on either side of her, trapping her against the rock. “Now that wasn’t fair, Lady Rose.” Her smile faded instantly. “I was teasing, Lord Ashton.” “Were you?” He was feeling rather bold at the moment. He drank in the sight of her—those wide brown eyes, the delicate nose and sweet lips. Her hair was hidden beneath the bonnet, and he took it off, setting it aside. “You don’t need this.” “My face will be covered in freckles if I don’t wear it.” But she didn’t appear to mind his interference. And instead of shoving him aside, she was watching him with interest. Sunlight gleamed across her brown hair, revealing the hints of auburn. He leaned in, resting his forehead against hers. Her eyes widened, but she remained fixed upon his face. “Did Burkham ever kiss you?” “Of course.” Her voice held a hint of panic, but she didn’t pull away. He was caught up in the beauty of her. Her breath warmed his mouth, and for a moment, he remained near to her. She was forbidden to him, and he would not intrude where he wasn’t wanted. And yet, every part of him was entranced by her. “Tell me to leave you alone,” he said in a low voice. But she remained silent. Her hand moved up to touch the roughness of his face, and it only deepened the intimacy. She trailed her fingers upon his jaw, and the simple touch undid him. Iain bent and brushed his mouth against hers. It was the barest hint of a kiss, the promise of more if she wanted it. He pulled back immediately, searching her expression. He never wanted her to feel threatened by him. “Tell me if you’re wanting me to stop.” He leaned in again, nipping at her lips a second time. He waited for a long moment, giving her more than enough time to refuse. She could tell him no at any moment, and he would pull back. Instead, her eyes were wild, as if she didn’t know what to say or do. She tasted of summer, a softness and warmth like sunlight. Her eyes were caught up with his, her expression emboldened by a taste of the forbidden. Iain bent and claimed her mouth deeply, framing her face with both hands. He didn’t stop kissing her, learning the shape of her mouth and drawing her even closer.

Mother Mary wants to draft two more kids,” Astrid told Sam. “Okay. Approved.” “Dahra says we’re running low on kids’ Tylenol and kids’ Advil, she wants to make sure it’s okay to start giving them split adult pills.” Sam spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “What?” “We’re running low on kid pills, Dahra wants to split adult pills.” Sam rocked back in the leather chair designed for a grown man. “Okay. Whatever. Approved.” He took a sip of water from a bottle. The wrapper on the bottle said “Dasani” but it was tap water. The dishes from dinner—horrible homemade split-pea soup that smelled burned, and a quarter cabbage each—had been pushed aside onto the sideboard where in the old days the mayor of Perdido Beach had kept framed pictures of his family. It was one of the better meals Sam had had lately. The fresh cabbage tasted surprisingly good. There was little more than smears on the plates: the era of kids not eating everything was over. Astrid puffed out her cheeks and sighed. “Kids are asking why Lana isn’t around when they need her.” “I can only ask Lana to heal big things. I can’t demand she be around 24/7 to handle every boo-boo.” Astrid looked at the list she had compiled on her laptop. “Actually, I think this involved a stubbed toe that ‘hurted.’” “How much more is on the list?” Sam asked. “Three hundred and five items,” Astrid said. When Sam’s face went pale, she relented. “Okay, it’s actually just thirty-two. Now, don’t you feel relieved it’s not really three hundred?” “This is crazy,” Sam said. “Next up: the Judsons and the McHanrahans are fighting because they share a dog, so both families are feeding her—they still have a big bag of dry dog food—but the Judsons are calling her Sweetie and the McHanrahans are calling her BooBoo.” “You’re kidding.” “I’m not kidding,” Astrid said. “What is that noise?” Sam demanded. Astrid shrugged. “I guess someone has their stereo cranked up.” “This is not going to work, Astrid.” “The music?” “This. This thing where every day I have a hundred stupid questions I have to decide. Like I’m everyone’s parent now. I’m sitting here listening to how little kids are complaining because their older sisters make them take a bath, and stepping into fights over who owns which Build-A-Bear outfit, and now over dog names. Dog names?” “They’re all still just little kids,” Astrid said. “Some of these kids are developing powers that scare me,” Sam grumbled. “But they can’t decide who gets to have which special towel? Or whether to watch The Little Mermaid or Shrek Three?” “No,” Astrid said. “They can’t. They need a parent. That’s you.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m glad we got the chance to see it.” “It reminds me of the country. Of home.” He heard the wistful note in her voice. “Gwen misses it, too. She wishes you could all be home for Christmas at Easton Manner.” He turned toward her, leaning against the window frame. She’d never really noticed it before, but his shoulders were quite nicely broad. “Is that what you’d like for Christmas too, Amelia? To be home with your family?” She thought for a moment, then decided to tell the truth. “No, I would like not to have to marry Lord Broadmore.” The sudden intensity in Nigel’s gaze set her already pounding heart tripping over itself. “Then why should you?” he asked in a low voice. She returned her gaze to the snowy square, avoiding his eye. “I suspect you already know the answer—my unfortunate reputation. Besides, my parents approve of Broadmore and are eager to see us married. In their eyes, he will make the perfect husband.” His hand came to her arm and gently turned her to face him. “Amelia, no true friend would think less of you for ending your previous engagements. They were simply mistakes you learned from.” “I’ve been called a heartless jilt by more than one person, you know,” she said, trying to make a joke of a label that had wounded her deeply. “They were wrong,” he said, looking stern. “But tell me why your parents are so eager for you to marry Broadmore. We both know he’s an unrepentant ass.” His blunt speech surprised a laugh out of her. “True, but an ass with a title and several magnificent estates. Papa is determined that I marry as well as possible.” She grimaced. “He says a girl of my looks and fortune deserves the very best.” Nigel smiled. “Your father is correct, but not for those reasons. You do have a very pretty face and your fortune is enviable, but those are not the best part of you.” She had to force the words from her tight throat. “What is?” He took her hand, intertwining their fingers. The breath whooshed out of her lungs and she clutched his hand in a convulsive grip. “It’s your heart, Amelia. Your lovely, kind heart,” he said with a smile that melted her from the inside out. “And now that you’ve told me what you don’t want for Christmas, tell me what you do want.” When Amelia thought of all the obstacles facing them, her courage almost failed. But it was Christmas, the time for wishes and dreams to come true. “I want to marry a kind, loving man who will be a good husband and father. A man who will see me as I truly am, and not as a decorative knick-knack and a means for plumping up his bank account.” Nigel gently cupped her chin with his free hand. “My sweet girl that is only what you deserve.” She stared at him, mesmerized. “And what do you want for Christmas, Mr. Dash?” she finally whispered. His lips parted in a devastatingly tender smile. “A kiss, Amelia. One kiss for Christmas.” She felt her mouth curl up in a silly grin. “Only one?” He let out a husky laugh. “To start.” Then he bent and gently, carefully—as if he didn’t want to frighten her—brushed a kiss across her lips.

The butler or manservant or whatever led them into the library. Rounded walls of books climbed three stories high, topped by a glass cupola that let in the proper amount of fresh light. The room might have been a converted silo, or maybe it just looked that way. Hard to tell. The books were leather and in series and untouched. Cherry mahogany dominated the scene. Paintings of old sailing vessels were framed under portrait lamps. There was a huge antique globe in the center of the room, not unlike the one Win had in his own office. Rich people like old globes, Myron surmised. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they are both expensive and utterly useless. The

George Washington so liked Edward Savage’s painting of “The President and His Family, the full size of life,” that he ordered “four stipple engravings” in “handsome, but not costly, gilt frames, with glasses,” and hung one of his purchases over the fireplace mantel in the small dining room at Mount Vernon. As the Washington family—George and Martha, and two of Martha’s orphaned grandchildren, George Washington (“Washy”) and Eleanor (“Nelly”) Custis—took their daily repast, Edward Savage’s tableau of “The President and His Family” looked down upon them. It is likely that Washington favored the portrait above many others because of its intimacy and its affirmation of the future. The family gathers about a table at Mount Vernon, George seated at the left, opposite his wife, Martha. Washy, the younger of the two grandchildren, stands in the left foreground, while Nelly stands at the right in the middle ground. Washington rests his right hand upon the boy’s shoulder; Washy, in turn, holds a compass in his right hand, which he rests upon a globe, in a stance suggesting that succeeding generations of the family were destined to spread the ideals of liberty and democracy around the world. In the background, framed by large pillars and a swagged curtain, Savage presents a glimpse, as he said in a note, of “a view of thirty miles down the Potomac River.” On the table at the portrait’s center rests Andrew Ellicott’s map of the new federal seat of government. The family appears to be unrolling the document; Washington holds it flat with his left arm and sword, while Nelly and Martha steady it on the right. With her folded fan, Martha gestures to “the grand avenue,” as Savage called it, that connects the Capitol with the White House. In the right middle ground stands one of the chief contradictions of the new democracy, a nameless black male servant, part of the retinue of more than three hundred slaves the Washingtons depended upon for their comfort, security, and prosperity. Dressed in the colors of Mount Vernon livery, a gray coat over a salmon red waistcoat, he possesses an almost princely quality. His black, combed-back hair frames his dark face with its prominent nose. His unknowable eye impassively takes in the scene. He keeps his left hand enigmatically concealed in his waistcoat; his collar flamboyantly mirrors Washington’s across from him. The slave must remain a shadow, unobtrusive, unassuming, unremarkable, almost a part of the frame for the Potomac. Only the slave’s destiny seems apart from those gathered about the table examining the plans, yet from the beginning the fates of both slavery and the new city were inextricably intertwined. The nameless man’s story, along with the stories of tens of thousands of others, was very much a part of the plot unfolding on the Potomac in the 1790s. The consequences of involuntary servitude would affect and effect Washington’s development to the present day.

You’re the one being framed, Cai. I barely got that out before the guards found it.” He dropped it on the ground, then crushed it beneath his boot heel. “Someone plans to remove both you and your father from the line of succession.” No shit. The only question was who. And when.

Those of us who work with troubled children have to guard constantly against our preconceptions about a situation; one person’s “troubled teen” may be another person’s “victim of sexual abuse,” and the label given to the child often determines how he is treated. A child seen as “bad” will be treated differently from one viewed as “mad,” and both will have their behavior seen in a very different light depending on whether the clinician sees a “victim” or a “perpetrator.” Further, depending upon one’s point of view, the exact same behavior can be framed as “running away” or “seeking help” and the perspective will profoundly affect decisions about what to do for and to the child.

While there are certainly variants of the abstract capitalist model, one persistent and typical tendency is to assess the planet as either storehouse (of needed resource inputs, including energy resources) and/or sink (for waste products of all kinds, due in large measure to a continually sought novelty, and the concomitant obsolescence of the old). As a consequence of this orientation, nature, as both inherent worth and utilitarian guarantor of sustainable life, must be subjected to the ruthless calculus of costs and benefits. In such evaluations anything that fails to maximize profits or minimize losses must be discounted, ideally to a value of zero. In combination with an intensifying focus on shorter and shorter time frames for a maximum return on investment, a competition-driven imperative to externalize all costs that do not contribute to the bottom line has produced the by-now exhaustive litany of environmental woes, including the climate catastrophe that now threatens life on the planet as we have known it.

He kept digging, kept scratching — every finger, both hands, until he could feel the wood scraping on raw flesh. His wrists throbbed, the plastic cutting into them. He called out as one of his nails peeled back off the bed, screaming with a voice barely his own. But he couldn’t give up. And after who knows how long, he could get his fingers around the tip. Now he needed to get it out. He didn’t really wear man-jewellery, but he had a ring he wore around his index finger. A ring she’d given him — stolen for him. For them. Grace. He had to get back to her. Tell her he was okay. He got the flat side against the point and pushed, wedging himself under it.  Whether it took an hour or five, he didn’t know. He could feel blood in his palms as the steel stabbed at his skin with every slip.  But slowly he made progress, a millimetre at a time, forcing it upwards. And then it landed softly in the dirt next to the box. He managed to fold himself up under the new hole and shove his heel against it.  With what little strength he had left he pushed upwards, feeling the wood bow in the absence of the nail. He kicked at it, then kicked at it again. And again. And again. Until the pain in his foot was unbearable. And then he kept kicking, not feeling it moving, but knowing that staying inside meant death. People didn’t get nailed into boxes if they were going to survive.  The fuzz of whatever was in his system was still lingering. He didn’t seem to be able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time — but Grace was always there. Thin, brown hair, pretty in all the right ways. She was all he had now. He had to get back to her. The lid came loose, nails creaking in the wood, and in a blur he was out. Sweat-soaked, filthy, crying, he flopped out and into the dirt.  The room smelled like a swimming pool and polythene sheets hung from the ceiling. He didn’t wait to see what else there was. At the far side of the room, he could make out a door, outlined in the dim red glow of a tiny bulb above the frame. Next to it there was a crowbar, rusted and rough, silhouetted in the half-light. He limped over, his legs numb from the box and the drugs, and pulled it open, grabbing the bar. The light blinked off, the little plastic control unit next to it clicking, but he didn’t care. He had to get out.  The stairs beyond creaked under his weight as he dragged himself up on bloody fingers, the crowbar clanging against the mouldy stonework walls.

For since a kiss is a knitting together both of body and soul, it is to be feared lest the sensual lover will be more inclined to the part of the body than of the soul; but the reasonable lover wotteth well that although the mouth be a parcel of the body, yet is it an issue for the words that be the interpreters of the soul, and for the inward breath, which is also called soul; and therefore hath a delight to join his mouth with the woman’s beloved with a kiss – not to stir him to any unhonest desire, but because he feeleth that that bond is the opening of an entry to the souls, which drawn with a coveting the one of the other, pour themselves by turn the one into the other’s body, and be so mingled together that each of them hath two souls, and one alone so framed of them both ruleth, in a manner, two bodies. Whereupon a kiss may be said to be rather a coupling together of the soul than of the body, because it hath such force in her that it draweth her unto it, and, as it were, separateth her from the body. For this do all chaste lovers covet a kiss as a coupling of souls together.

He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that’s how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.

You screamed and cursed like a woman possessed. Now you think he’s the greatest thing under the sun.” “Point taken. I just know it’s not going to be easy obeying the rules of a new kid on the block. Que sera, sera. Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no use worrying about things beyond my control.” The chief proved how well he knew her and asked, “Are you and Tom having problems?” He reached across the desk and placed a hand over hers. Tears of frustration sprang to her eyes. Without looking up she replied, “Sorry, sir. Slip of the tongue. Ignore me. That package probably affected me more than I realised.” He gripped her hand tightly. “Look at me, Lorne.” She obeyed him. “If you want to talk any time, you know where I am.” Easing her hand from under his, she said, “I’ll remember that, the next time we have an argument and I’m contemplating my life’s journey at three o’clock in the morning.” “Ah, don’t think the wife would be too keen on that idea, do you?” They both smiled, and Lorne stood up to leave the room. “I meant what I said, Lorne. Don’t ever forget it.” She nodded and left his office. As she headed down the corridor towards the conference room, she took a few deep breaths to help push down her bubbling emotions. Chapter 26 “What have we got?” Lorne asked, walking into the incident room. “At 4:32 AM, a suspect delivered the package. Take a look.” Pete nodded at Tracy, and she started the video. A shudder ran up Lorne’s spine as she watched a man, dressed from head to toe in black, deposit the box on the top step of the station. He arrogantly stopped to wave at the camera, obviously knowing his every movement was being taped. His hooded sweatshirt obscured his face; it was impossible to make out his features as he mocked the camera. “Is there any way we can find out how tall he is? It would be a start.” “I’ll line a few of the guys up—varying heights, of course. See what we can come up with. I’ll get on it straightaway,” Pete said. Lorne and Tracy checked the video, frame by frame, for clues. Nothing—no rings, no glimpses of tattoos. Nothing. Mitch burst into the room and threw himself into one of the vacant chairs. He placed a list on the table and slid it across to Lorne. “Fifteen perverts in and around the Chelling Forest area.” “By ‘perverts’, I take it you mean registered sex offenders, Mitch?” she asked, studying the list. “Actually, what I meant to say was, there are fifteen names on the list—thirteen sex offenders and two registered paedophiles.

Frame control creates power and power attracts. BY JOSH (JETSET) KING MADRID WHAT DO KANYE WEST AND ELON MUSK HAVE IN COMMON? When you put the two together, there may be few similarities, but I believe one trait they share is the ability to control their frame, also known as frame control. Frame control is a little-known underlying phenomenon that may be one of the reasons they are so influential and successful despite the controversy. Nonetheless, they maintain their status as some of our culture's most powerful figures. The power of how we frame our personal realities is referred to as frame control. A frame is a tool that you can use to package your power, authority, strength, information, and status. Standing firm in your beliefs can persuade and influence. I first discovered frame control in 2016 after coming across the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. I was hooked instantly. I was a freshman in college at UC Irvine at the time and was earning a few thousand dollars a month in my online business. In just a few short months after applying the concept of frame control in my life and business, everything changed — I started dating the girl of my dreams, cleared my first $27,000 in one month and dropped out of college to go all in on my business. Since then, I've read every book, watched every video, and studied every expert-written blog I can find on the subject. This eventually led me to obtain NLP and neuro-marketing certifications, both of which explain the underlying psychology of how our brains frame social interactions and provide techniques for controlling these frames in oneself and others in order to become more likable, influential, and lead a better life overall. Frame control is about establishing your own authority, but it isn't just some self-help nonsense. It is about true and verified beliefs. The glass half-empty or half-full frame is a popular analogy. If you believe the glass is half-empty, that is exactly what it will be. But someone with a half-full frame can come in and convince you to change your belief, simply by backing it up with the logic of “an empty glass of water would always be empty, but having water in an empty glass makes it half-full.” Positioning your view as the one that counts does take some practice because you first have to believe in yourself. You won’t be able to convince anyone of your authority if you are not authentic or if you don’t actually believe in what you’re trying to sell. Whether they realize it or not, public figures are likely to engage in frame control. When you're in the spotlight, you have to stay focused on the type of person you want the rest of the world to see you as. Tom Cruise, for example, is an example of frame control because of his ability to maintain dominance in media situations. In a well-known BBC interview, Tom Cruise assertively puts the interviewer in his place when he steps out of line and begins probing into his personal life. Cruise doesn't do it disrespectfully, which is how he maintains his own dominance, but he does it in such a way that the interviewer is held accountable. How Frame Control Positions the User as Influential or Powerful Turning toward someone who is dominant or who seems to know what they are doing is a natural occurrence. Generally speaking, we are hard-wired to trust people who believe in themselves and when they are put on a world stage, the effects of it can be almost bewildering. We often view comedians as mere entertainers, but in fact, many of them are experts in frame control. They challenge your views by making you laugh. Whether you want to accept their frame or not, the moment you laugh, your own frame has been shaken and theirs have taken over.

For Plato, of course, there existed beyond the realm of ordinary sense-experience the world of Forms, for which outward, earthly appearances—including symbols such as language itself—were mere and meager representations. Words were simply incapable of accurately describing or illustrating this divine realm. The logic and reason of the Aristotelians occupied its true home only in the sphere of sense-experience—in what Pletho had nonchalantly dismissed as the world of oysters and embryos. The Aristotelian philosophy on which western Christianity depended therefore offered a misguided point of departure in any quest for inexpressible truths and eternal verities. The clumsy wordings of dogmas, liturgies, creeds: such things were mere shadow puppets on the wall of the Platonic cave; debates framed by Aristotelian philosophy could never hope to approach or capture their proper forms. On the other hand, Plato’s philosophy, with its belief in a unity embracing scattered differences, offered a more promising chance to find a concord between the Greeks and the Latins. Bessarion and Traversari duly worked out a compromise on the fraught question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit. They came up with the argument that since the saints in both the East and West had been inspired by the same Holy Spirit, it scarcely mattered whether this Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son or simply from the Father. It was, after all, merely a matter of semantics—of whether one believed that “from” (εκ) and “through” (διά) meant the same thing. As Bessarion put it in the context of another dispute, the two parties “agreed in substance and differed only in words.

The salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.

Karly- I stopped wearing my glasses after that day, when Jess Smith walked up and ripped them off my face and broke them in half, and poked me in the boob hard. I miss them, what wrong with glasses, they make you look sophisticated. Why was I so quiet and laid back, and a pushover? Marcel- She runs like everything for the bathroom, like always- not making it very far. She feels like some poor little girl, with a broken nose, and I remember when that happened. That is when I felt like she was in love with me she took the balls to the face for me. ‘I thought you liked balls in your face one boy said.’ You tripped and fell to the ground, hard, and I picked you up and carried you to safety, and we fell in love, even more, kissing under the bleachers. ‘You’re a weirdo,’ and the kiss was long and – fearing H-O-T! Like, kick your tongue out smoking hot! It’s still not as bad as the time my face was smashed to a brick wall, by some back boy- and I have to have something done about it, like getting my nose redone, yet I blamed it on my dad. Jenny- Sing the same girlie crap every year, you’ll blow chunks all over the place, which never happened, that’s why she stopped singing way back when. You can see here doing it on YouTube! Like- It happened! Jenny says every time someone brings it up. Until some unicycles guy flies into the frame where nothing freaking speedo- showing his tor·pe·do with the American flag up his ass! I don’t know if that is patriotic or what the hell that is… I am not sure what to look at. What can you say other than- ‘Ew-ah- gross…? Who does that…?’ Marcel- It kind of reunions the magic does it…? I spoke. Karly- Yep! I am glad I cannot see all that anyway! I am sure yours is better anyway. (She goes underneath his underwear down for it, getting a handful, and does what she feels is right in front of them all. It was more romantic than you would think pervs.) I did it for me and him, I did not give a crap; if they liked it or not… they can all look the other way. I have- a leaning popping lag kisses, and he rubbed his nose on mine saying it- I LOVE YOU! You’ll be fine… I’ll make sure of that. Karly- Back in time: We rain from the schoolyard to my house… stole my dad’s Nash and got married. My stepmother cased us down, with a bible in her hand saying we were sinners. Both- We’re sinner okay then- we all are- yet love is love even if age is in the way. Marcel- the very next day, it was all over. Say what you want to say… I know why- how- and who.

A restatement of the primary evidence may therefore be helpful in understanding what the experience of having the Roman Empire on the doorstep may have meant for the early Caledonians. Firstly, no matter how it is framed, this was no mere interlude in Scottish history. The Roman Iron Age in Scotland spanned over 300 years of many recorded episodes of interaction, mostly violent, with one of the world's most powerful and expansionist empires. A third of a millenium that saw the presence of one of the highest concentrations of Roman military personnel - it has been estimated that at the height of occupation, at least one in eight Roman soldiers was serving in North Britain. The building of two great walls, the larger of which was maintained for a 300-year period and both with offensive and defensive characteristics of a magnitude not shared by any other Roman fronteir of its size. Unlike other zones of interaction, there is little evidence of regular trade and no manifestation of any meaningful civic development.

Lord Hanuman once visited a lake for taking bath and heard something beautiful (A female voice) and he ejaculated his sperm on that river by masturbation without anyone noticed and prayed to lord rama and universal lord (No One), that river and sperm went to south and reached both hole, where sita and andal left their souls in time frame . That is where universal lord saw the truth about immorality and sent many souls to find out the truth, why and how hanuman masturbated who himself said that 100% pure and which girl and how that girl made him to do that. not only beauty but also voices are dangerous sometimes 17, 23, 18, 0, 9, 6, 5, 13, 11, 12 Hanuman stories

The man had already halved the distance to the lake. “He’s going to make it!” As much as Spike hated the criminals when he was a kid, he now saw them as the underdog. Besides, he knew what the diseased were and he couldn’t bring himself to root for them. Not like he might have done as a younger boy. Crack! A diseased exploded from nowhere and clattered into the man’s side. Spike winced at what sounded like bones breaking on impact. Despite their withered appearance, the creatures were both fast and strong. The diseased who’d taken the man down snarled as it bit into him. Another crunch, this time from where its teeth sank into flesh and bone. The bite turned the man limp. The diseased who were running after the man just seconds before stopped as if he no longer existed. The one who’d taken him down got to its feet. Feral and with blood coating its maw, its eyes glistened a deep crimson and were spread wide on its wrinkled face. It walked away from the downed man, leaving him in the long grass. Now it had bitten him, it had done its job. No matter how many times he’d watched it, Spike couldn’t ever look away from someone who’d been taken down. They always started with a pulsing twitch. Violent in how it threw their limbs away from them. The man’s right leg went first. Then an arm. Like many before him, the disease ripped through his frame, spasming and snapping his form. Seconds later, he jumped to his feet, blood coursing from his eyes like those of his diseased brethren. No more than fifty feet between him and the water’s edge, as much as Spike knew the man to be a criminal in some way, his heart hurt for him. “He got so close.

Have you ever walked into a room or a house, and it felt icy? It is because there was an inharmonious energy in that room. Have you ever stepped into a house or space and felt so calm and relaxed right away? This is because it space holds on to harmonious life, and the people who live there might have been intentionally cleaned and filled with love and light. I say inharmonious here, because although we as human beings may experience this energy as "negative," it is not necessarily negative inherently. It simply does not contribute to our energetic health or support it. Certain animals, especially cats, can feel energies that are totally different from humans. So that's all connected! Both spaces have the energy-storing power. And all spaces are doing basically. It can be in either a "good" mood or an "evil" mood almost like humans, and places can be. I'm sure you can relate to feeling like you've had a bad day when it all went wrong, and you've got a negative frame of mind that makes you walk around in a bad mood. By now, either you're using your Reiki practice or some other therapeutic or therapy method to keep yourself conscious of these emotional changes to help you break those destructive habits you're falling into, and instead bring positive, caring and safe ones. I'm sure you've even met people (or perhaps you're one of them) who aren't so easy to let go of their bad mood and change their focus. But you see, the point is that, in fact, moods are not things that happen to us. They are created by how we respond to the circumstances around us, coupled with the tendencies of personality that we carry within ourselves. Then we have a choice either to continue to allow and feel the mood or to let it go and bring positive energies. In essence, spaces are the same. There is no such thing as a bad room. It all comes down to the first, what happened in space, and the second, how the atmosphere treated and/or managed what happened in space by the people who are space caretakers. Just as people need to release their negative energy, places also need to release the same type of energy.

Young people need looking after,” she said. “Think of that beautiful boy Galois. People felt there was something secret in his character. They were right. The secret was mathematics. His father a suicide. His own death a horrible farce. Dawn in the fields. Caped and whiskered seconds. Sinister marksman poised to fire.” I need all my courage to die at twenty. “Then there was Abel, not much older, desperately poor, Abel in delirium, hemorrhaging. So often mathematical experience consists of time segments too massive to be contained in the usual frame. Lives overstated. Themes pursued to extreme points. Adventure, romance and tragedy.” I will fight for my life. “Look at Pascal, who rid himself of physical pain by dwelling on mathematics. He was just a bit older than you when he constructed his mystic hexagram. The loveliest aspect of the mystic hexagram is that it is mystic. That’s what’s so lovely about it. It’s able to become its own shadow.” Keep believing it. “The tricky thing about mathematical genius,” she said, “is that its sources are so often buried. Galois for one. Ramanujan for another. No indication anywhere in their backgrounds that these boys would one day display such natural powers. Figures jumping out of sequence. Or completely misplaced.” (...) “Numbers have supernatural harmonies, according to Hermite. They exist beyond human thought. Divine order through number. Number as absolute reality. Someone said of Hermite: ‘The most abstract entities are for him like living creatures.’ That’s what someone said.” “People invented numbers,” he said. “You don’t have numbers without people.” “Good, let’s argue.” “I don’t want to argue.” “Secret lives,” she said. “Dedekind listed as dead twelve years before the fact. Poncelet scratching calculations on the walls of his cell. Lobachevski mopping the floors of an old museum. Sophie Germain using a man’s name. Do I have the order right? Sometimes I get it mixed up or completely backwards. (...) “Tell me about your mathematical dreams.” “Never had one.” “Cardano did, born half dead, his inner life a neon web of treachery and magic. Gambler, astrologer, heretic, court physician. Schemed his way through the algebra wars.” “Can I see the baby?” “Ramanujan had algebraic dreams. Wrote down the results after getting out of bed. Vast intuitive powers but poor education. Taken to Cambridge like a jungle boy. Sonja Kowalewski wasn’t allowed to attend university lectures. We both know why. When her husband died she spent days and days without food, coming out of her room only after she’d restored herself by working on her mathematics. Tell me, was it Kronecker who thought mathematics similar to poetry? I know Hamilton and many others tried their hands at verse. Our superduper Sonja preferred the novel.

[P]assing expresses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing—as a limited durational performance—signals a “return” to a natural-cum-biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans-identificatory practices—both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic referent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness provided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “some- thing akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliberate calculation” of one’s fungible status. Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open—that is fungible—and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow.

Mr Locke...took a long, slender pick from the unrolled bag and, bending over slightly, inserted it into the lock. It was a steel-cased lock with a smooth, brass knob of around three inches wide and a brass plate around the singular keyhole. Mounted into the door frame was another steel fixture, forming the second half of the lock. Recognising the type of lock, Percy knew the key’s function was to throw the lock’s bolt into dead lock, thus securing the door. Such a design would also include an internal, smaller knob sliding back and forth, drawing back the bolt. A snib, jutting out from the case on the internal side of the door, could be compressed to keep the bolt in an open position, thus allowing one to open and close the door freely. “Do be so kind as to keep an eye out for the return of our friend the constable.” Locke pulled his pocket watch out with his other hand to glance upon it. “We have nine minutes.” “This is breaking and entering!” Mr Maxwell cried, hurrying up the steps. “Miss Trent said such was forbidden by the Society.” “Unless there is a sufficiently justifiable reason for doing so,” Mr Locke replied, inserting a second pick into the lower half of the lock. “The welfare of our client is a sufficiently justifiable reason; do you not think so, Mr Maxwell?” “His welfare?” Mr Maxwell enquired, confused. Miss Dexter, wholly fascinated by what the illusionist was doing, stepped closer still. She softly enquired, “Do you suspect some harm may have come to Mr Dorsey, Mr Locke?” “I do not know but Mr Colby was very keen we should not speak with him. Furthermore, Miss Trent’s note stated her telephone conversation with Mr Dorsey was abruptly ended, by him, when another—angry—voice spoke,” Mr Locke explained. There was a sharp click as the bolt sprang back into the lock’s casing. Mr Locke smiled broadly. “Our constable friend is back.” Mr Maxwell looked panic sticken. “It’s only been a minute.” “Ah, that will be the Bow Street police station,” Locke replied as he turned the door knob. “Also, they tend to keep a closer eye upon the more affluent residences; greater targets for thieves, you know,” Mr Locke stated as he pushed the door open and ushered both Mr Maxwell and Miss Dexter inside. He’d just closed the door, after slipping in himself, when the constable reached the bottom of the steps and peered up at the porch. Mr Locke stood to the side of the door and watched as the constable, seemingly satisfied all was well, walked away. A glance down at the internal part of the lock confirmed Mr Locke’s earlier assumptions about it. His slender hand slid the smaller brass knob along to lock the bolt in place once more.

Consider the experience of buying a stereo system, as conveyed by Shane Frederick, Nathan Novemsky, Jing Wang, Ravi Dhar, and Stephen Nowlis in an aptly named paper, “Opportunity Cost Neglect.” In their experiment, one group of participants was asked to decide between a $1,000 Pioneer and a $700 Sony. A second group was asked to pick between the $1,000 Pioneer and a package deal where for $1,000 they could get the Sony plus $300 to be spent only on CDs. In reality both groups were choosing between different ways of spending that $1,000. The first group chose between spending all of it on a Pioneer or spending $700 on a Sony and $300 on other things. The second group chose between spending all of it on a Pioneer or spending $700 on a Sony and $300 on music. The results showed that the Sony stereo was a much more popular choice when it was accompanied by $300 of CDs than when it was sold without them. Why is this odd? Well, strictly speaking, an unconstrained $300 is worth more than $300 that must be spent on CDs because we can buy anything with the unconstrained money—including CDs. But when the $300 was framed as being dedicated to CDs, the participants found it more appealing. That’s because $300 worth of CDs is much more concrete and defined than just $300 of “anything.” In the $300-for-CD case we know what we’re getting. It is tangible and easy to evaluate. When the $300 is abstract and general, we don’t conjure up the specific images of how we’re going to spend it, and the emotional, motivational forces on us are less powerful. This is just one more example of how when we represent money in a general way, we end up undervaluing it compared to when we have a specific representation of that money.1 Yes, CDs are the example here, which nowadays is like thinking about the gas efficiency of a stegosaurus, but the point remains: People are somewhat surprised when we simply remind them that there are alternative ways to spend money, whether it’s on a vacation or on a pile of CDs. That surprise suggests that people don’t tend to naturally consider alternatives, and without considering alternatives, we can’t possibly take opportunity costs into account. This tendency for neglecting opportunity costs shows us the basic flaw in our thinking.

A document that is widely misunderstood, Lincoln’s proclamation was a military strategy with multiple aims. It prevented European countries from supporting the Confederacy by framing the war in moral terms and making it explicitly about slavery, something Lincoln had previously backed away from. As a result, France and Britain, which had contemplated supporting the Confederacy, ultimately refused to do so because of both countries’ anti-slavery positions. The proclamation allowed the Union Army to recruit Black soldiers (nearly two hundred thousand would fight for the Union Army by the war’s end), and it also threatened to disrupt the South’s social order, which depended on the work and caste position of enslaved people. The Emancipation Proclamation was not the sweeping, all-encompassing document that it is often remembered as. It applied only to the eleven Confederate states and did not include the border states that had remained loyal to the US, where it was still legal to own enslaved people. Despite the order of the proclamation, Texas was one of the Confederate states that ignored what it demanded. And even though many enslaved

We need a revolution in mental health awareness to help us grasp the wonder and complexity of human behavior, health and functioning, and the nuances and intersections of brilliance and madness. This starts with dismantling myopic myths that prevent us from seeing the simultaneous wonder and complexity of our fullest selves. It involves providing access to the tools that mitigate being overtaken by the ravages of burnout and mental decompensation: the very risks of living in the modern world. Our sense-making approaches need to be comprehensive- grounded both scientifically and medically, steeped in love, and in ways that account for the multidimensionality of emotional and spiritual essence. Those that go beyond what the mind can first conceive of. This new mental health imperative relies upon universal precautions and a vehement resistance to linear checklists and binary labels that frame our gorgeous spirits solely as either complex and fraught or indomitable and wondrous. It also relies not on good will and best practices but the moral courage of policy makers to treat human beings like human beings. Dogs are often treated better than people. This is our new imperative: to radically change the way we care for ourselves and one another. We cannot extricate ourselves from the fact that the lines we walk are incredibly thin and blurry, and our only hope is to rewrite and navigate them together in solidarity, with every measure of creative reason and conscious community that can be mustered...

People struggle with creativity because they tend to connect the same set of dots and, therefore, end up getting the same run-of-the-mill ideas. A wow idea happens when you connect completely diverse dots the way no one has ever done. To be able to make such connections, you need lots of dots as well as different types of dots. To get both the above, you need to look for different frames. Your assumptions are the invisible barriers that stop you from seeing beyond your existing frames. Questions that you ask determine in which frame answers will fall. If you keep asking the same set of questions, you will keep struggling inside the same frame. Changing your questions is a powerful way to i. Break the invisible barrier of assumptions ii. Discover new frames.

Actually If there is someone so called god or avatar or whatever legendary creature he/she/it is, peoples first expectation is that god has to do magics, he has to do paranormal phenomenon. Yes it happens but keep on doing that will stop the peace of the world. When I left Nalanda and visited home, I felt like 23 degree tilt in my heart. What I felt can not be proven by scientific measurements. When i was nalanda I saw many people died, those who were close to my heart cried when i left Nalanda, and I saw that. But the thing is as I said, my subconscious mind controls the universal planetary patterns, no one can predict me but universe. I decide to be good or bad or neutral or crazy to protect nature. But now people has changed at least for today alone, they think that by providing beautiful women, money they can purchase me, haha. And sexual desire is common for men and women, both needs it but the problem is sustaining with so many trust issues and challenges to be faced. How many married people are happy? or how many sexual people are happy? Yes what i do is maturation frankly speaking, and you may think that it is bad. But I am true to myself alone. Sometimes the promises I have given to people can not be fulfilled, and it is not because i forgot you but because time frame shifted. I still remember sarnam singh face when I left nalanda, he cried before my eyes. He is 100% traditional guy, i disrespected him multiple times just because he doesnt like south people much, but the knowledge he has is more than anyone can imagine. In north india also people those who are in relationships are finding it hard and challenging but people that are single face no problems there. And when I visited Vrindhavan forest once from Rajgir, I realized something beautiful, that you should be ready to face the challenges and forget about small promises that can not be kept but think about big challenges that gives reason for your soul. (I talked with someone when I was in Vrindavan forest) - Do not worry she was human. Not mythic - My history before 3 years

truest to you: “Be all that you can be” or “This above all, to thine own self be true.” Our culture endorses both—relentless self-improvement as well as authenticity—but we often escape the contradiction by framing self-improvement as authenticity. Just as gaining an education means struggling for twelve to twenty years to develop one’s intellectual potential, character development ought to involve a lifelong struggle to develop one’s moral potential.

Elisa thumbs a stray curl from my face. "Sometimes we need a new memory to add to an old one." She gestures to the line of picture frames. "It does not mean the old one doesn't matter anymore or that it becomes less. It means the new one matters . . . too. También. And over time, they both change, nena. They change with us and inside us.

Now realize that this supremacist side, which refuses to participate in humanity—they are habitually framed as one of the two and only two sides that is meant when we say both sides. Really? The people who don’t want to participate in our shared humanity represent half of the entire ideological equation here? If they get their way, and pass all their laws designed to preserve their own blameless supremacy, and pave over the global swimming pool, is it really only one side that loses? Think how much more stagnant “both sides” framing makes us. It takes the gorgeous multifaceted gem of society and smashes it flat. Think of how much we’ll miss. Think of what we’ll fail to learn. Think of how simplistic supremacist arguments are, no matter how complex they make the rationale. Think of the improvement that won’t happen. Think how far behind we’ll fall. Think of the voices we’ll never hear, the accomplishments we’ll never see. Think who will be harmed. Think who will be killed. Think who already has been harmed and killed.

The room is full of color. Clothing strewn here and there, art, and posters. On the corner of a desk, a framed photograph. A girl my age leans into another girl, her hip cocked, arm slung over her friend’s shoulders. They are both smiling as though they’ve just shared a secret. One of the girls is clearly the one from the family portrait in the hall, but older here, with her friend. They wear ripped jeans. One of them has on a midriff-revealing tank top, the other what I think is a band or movie T-shirt, though I don’t recognize the name. Again, like the magazines, the sense that there is so much more color to these girls, to their lives, than my own. I turn my attention to the rest of the desk. Cluttered with rainbow pens, coins, to-do lists, jotted-down notes on scraps of paper, highlighters, stickers. A University of Wisconsin red hoodie draped over the chair. Photographs, drawings, ripped homework pages, clothes, and more variations of lip gloss than I would have thought existed. This is the bedroom of a teenage girl. Mine is that of a child. There are no crosses in this room. There’s no framed painting of Jesus, no stuffed animals or Bible.

Faery Grail and Holy Grail are thus kindred vessels: one operating under the older dispensations of nature and Faery, the other under the newer dispensation of Christianity. The effect of them both is the same in the everyday world of court and castle: the world is regreened and made fertile, the wars stop, and peace returns. The spiritual communion within people's hearts is framed differently, but it is ultimately consistent in respecting one's neighbor.

I’ve always said I didn’t want an ordinary life. Nothing average or mundane for me. But as I stared at the rather ample naked derriere wiggling two inches from my face today, I realized I should have been more specific with my goals. Definitely not ordinary, but not exactly what I had in mind. The Texas-flag tattoo emblazoned across the left cheek waved at me as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The flag was distorted and stretched, as was the large yellow rose on the right cheek, both tattoos dotted with dimples and pock marks. An uneven script scrawled out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” across the top of her rump. Her entire bridal party—her closest friends and relatives, mind you—had left her high and dry. They’d stormed off the elevator as I tried to enter it, a flurry of daffodil-yellow silk, spouting and sputtering about their dear loved one, Tonya the bride. “That’s it! We’re done!” They sounded off in a chorus of clucking hens. “We ain’t goin’ back in there. She can get ready on her own!” “Yeah, she can get ready on her own!” “Known her since third grade and she’s gonna talk to me like that?” “Third grade? She’s my first cousin. I’ve known her since the day she was born. She’s always been that way. I don’t know why y’all acting all surprised.” I felt more than a little uneasy about what all this meant for our schedule. The ceremony was supposed to start in fifteen minutes. The bride should have already been downstairs and loaded in the carriage to make her way to the hotel’s beach. My unease grew to panic when I knocked on Tonya’s door and she opened it clad only in a skimpy little satin robe. “Honey, you’re supposed to be dressed and downstairs already.” I tried to say it as sweetly as possible, but I’m sure my panic came through. My Southern accent kicked in thick, which usually only happens when I’m panicked or frustrated. Or pissed. Or drunk. “Do you think I don’t know that?” she asked, arching a perfectly drawn-on eyebrow. “Do you think somehow when I booked this wedding and had invitations printed and planned the entire damned event, I somehow didn’t realize what time the ceremony started? And just who the hell are you anyway?” Well, alrighty then. Obviously this was going to be a fun day. “Um, I’m Tyler Warren. I’m assisting Lillian with your wedding today.” “Fine. Those bitches left me with my nails wet.” She held up both hands to show me the glossy, fresh manicure. “How the hell am I supposed to get dressed with wet nails?” she asked, arching both eyebrows now and glaring at me like I was somehow responsible for this. “Oh.” My mind spun with the limited time frame I had available, the amount of clothing she still needed to put on, and the amount of time it would take to get her in the carriage and to the ceremony. “Give me just a second to let Lillian know we’ll be down shortly.” I smiled what I hoped was my sweetest smile and stepped backward into the hallway. She slammed the door as I frantically dialed Lillian’s cell. “You’d better be calling to tell me she is in the carriage and on her way,” Lillian said. “It is hotter than Hades out here. I have several people looking like they’re about to faint, and I may possibly dunk a cranky, tuxedoed five-year-old

Ethan slumped on the bench in the change room, ignoring the ribald behavior around him after yet another foregone win. A hard slap on the rear of his head roused him and he whirled, his lip curled back as he growled menacingly. “Don’t you dare show me your teeth,” Javier warned with a dark look. He ran his hand through hair, already tousled and sweaty from the match. “What the fuck happened out there? I passed you the perfect shot, and instead of grabbing it and scoring, you crashed into the g**damn arena glass. What are you, a rookie? Been watching too many Bugs Bunny cartoons?” Heat burned Ethan’s cheeks in remembrance of his mishap before dejection— along with a large dose of disbelief— quickly set back in. “I missed. It happens and besides, it’s not like we needed the point to win.” “Of course we didn’t,” Javier replied with a scoffing snort. “But it’s the point of it. What the hell distracted you so much? And, why do you look like your best friend died, which, I might add, is an impossibility given I’m standing right beside you.” Javier grinned. “I think I found my mate,” Ethan muttered. A true beauty with light skin, a perfect oval face framed by long, brown hair and the most perfect set of rosebud lips. Javier’s face expressed shock, then glee. “Congrats, dude.” Javier slapped him hard on the back, and while the blow might have killed a human or a smaller species, it didn’t even budge Ethan. “I know you’ve been pining to settle down with someone of the fairer sex. You must be ecstatic.” “Not really.” Although he should have been. Finding one’s mate was a one in a zillion chance given how shifters were scattered across the globe. Most never even came close to finding the one fate deemed their perfect match. His friend’s jovial grin subsided. “What’s wrong? Was she, like, butt ugly? Humongous? Old? Surely she can’t be that bad?” “No, she appears perfect. Or did.” Ethan groaned as banged his head off the locker door. “I am so screwed.” A frown creased Javier’s face. “I don’t get it. I thought you wanted to find the one, you sick bastard. Settle down and pop out cubs.” Ethan looked up in time to see Javier’s mock shudder. “Me, I prefer to share my love among as many women as possible.” Javier mimed slapping an ass then humping it with a leering grin. Ethan didn’t smile at Javier’s attempt at humor even if it happened to be the truth. Javier certainly enjoyed variety where the other sex was concerned. Heck, on many an occasion he’d shared with Ethan. Tag team sessions where they both scored. Best friends who did just about everything together. Blowing out a long sigh, Ethan answered him. “I do want to find my mate, actually, I’m pretty sure I already have, but I don’t think I made a great impression. She’s the one they took out on the stretcher after the ball I missed hit her in the face.” Javier winced. “Ouch. Sucks to be you, my friend. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure she’ll forgive you in, like, fifty years.” Ethan groaned and dropped his head back into his hands. Now that I’ve found her, how do I discover who she is so I can beg her forgiveness? And even worse, how the hell do I act the part of suitor? Raised in the Alaskan wilds by a father who wasn’t all there after the death of Ethan’s mother, his education in social niceties was sadly lacking. He tended to speak with his fists more often than not. Lucky for him, when it came to women, he didn’t usually have to do a thing. Females tended to approach him for sex so they could brag afterward that they’d ridden the Kodiak and survived. Not that Ethan would ever hurt a female, even if his idea of flirty conversation usually consisted of “Suck me harder” and “Bend over.” If I add “darling” on the end, will she count it as sweet talk?

Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

I fought hard for such a framing at the Conference of the Parties 6 in The Hague in 2000, but was opposed not by the usual suspects—industrial interests and OPEC—but rather by those who were more “green”—World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and European Green Party delegates. I was dumbfounded. Why didn’t they want to support a plan to both keep carbon in the forests and get a double bonus of biodiversity protection? The debates were heated. I thought the argument against it—no baseline for additionality—was legitimate, but not an insurmountable obstacle. Baselines are negotiable, and protecting primary forests should at least have been on the agenda. The passion of the opponents seemed totally misplaced. One evening during COP 6, I went to the environment NGOs’ tent for a reception. In this more informal setting,

I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do anything but go for a short walk. When I heard him, I felt the need to make certain he was all right. I didn’t know, Mikhail, that I was seeking human company.” “I do not blame you, little one, never that.” His voice was so gentle, it turned her heart over. “I can easily read your memories. I know of your intent. And I would never blame you for your compassionate nature.” “I guess we both have difficulties to contend with,” she said softly. “I can’t be what you want me to be, Mikhail. You use the word ‘human’ like a curse, something less than what you are. Did it ever occur to you that you’re prejudiced against my race? Carpathian blood may flow in my veins, but in my heart and my mind I’m human. I didn’t set out to betray you. I went for a walk. That’s all I did. I’m sorry, Mikhail, but all my life I’ve known freedom. Changing my blood is not going to change who I am.” He paced across the floor with quick, fluid energy, all power and coordination. “I am not prejudiced,” he denied. “Of course you are. You view my race with a measure of contempt. Would you have been happy if I had fed, using Romanov’s blood? Is that acceptable? To use him for food, but not for a few friendly words?” “I do not like this picture you paint of me, Raven.” Mikhail crossed the room to hold out his hand for the cape. The bedchamber was warm and smelled of nature--wood and meadow. Reluctantly Raven slipped the cape from her shoulders. Mikhail frowned when he saw that she was clad only in his crisp white shirt. Although the tails reached her knees and covered her bottom, a generous portion of her thighs was exposed, right up to her hips. The effect was incredibly sexy, with her long, wild mane of hair cascading in waves down to the bed, framing her slender form. “O köd belső--darkness take it,” Mikhail swore softly, a few choice words in his own language, thankful he hadn’t realized she was wearing nothing but his shirt beneath his cape.

To Helen’s mingled consternation and excitement, Winterborne accepted an invitation to dinner the very next evening. She wanted very much to see him, almost as much as she dreaded it. Winterborne arrived punctually and was shown to the main floor drawing room, where the Ravenels had gathered. His powerful form was dressed with elegant simplicity in a black coat, gray trousers, and a gray waistcoat. Although his broken leg was still healing, the cast had been removed and he walked with the use of a wooden cane. One could have easily singled him out in a crowd, not only from his distinctive height and size, but also from his raven hair and swarthy complexion. The coloring, thought to be the result of Spanish Basque influence in Wales, was not considered aristocratic…but Helen thought it very handsome and striking. His gaze came to Helen, dark heat framed with black lashes, and she felt a nervous flutter. Maintaining her composure, she gave him a neutral smile, wishing she had the confidence to say something charming or flirtatious. To her chagrin, Pandora and Cassandra--two years younger than she--were both far more comfortable with Winterborne. They amused him with nonsense such as asking whether there was a sword concealed in his cane (regrettably, no) and describing the mummified dogs in the Egyptian gallery.

When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the shoulder and slow down, and as the car approached, you would place both hands upon the windshield to keep it from shattering if a pebble thrown up by the passing car hit the glass. The car would thunder past, leaving you blinded in yellow fog. Now the road was paved and had a stripe painted down the center, and it carried a continual flow of vehicles. The overlanders were mixed up with pickup trucks and vans jammed with people, and the road reeked of diesel smoke. The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.

If she was mine, I would guard her so close, nothing would have a chance to harm her. Have you considered that she could carry the lifemate to one of us? Perhaps my lifemate? Do not take chances with her just to give her the illusion of freedom. None of us are truly free, he warned. Jacques sent them both a look of reprimand and extended his hand to Raven with Old World gallantry. She took it and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. Mikhail rose beside her, his arm sweeping her into the shelter of his body. She needed the contact, the closeness, the solid reality of his hard frame. Greogir, the instant bodyguard, scanned the air, the ground, moving fast as he did so. His body continually blocked the prince of their people and his lifemate from any possible threat. The three imposing figures surrounded the smaller one, moving as a unit, an honor guard, their paces slow and leisurely, their minds serene, with no hint of impatience or sign of their desire to get on to the night’s work. Hunger gnawed at Mikhail, but that too was kept at bay. When her mind touched his, Raven felt only love and concern, the desire to please her. Raven enjoyed the feel of the soft leaves under her feet as they moved through the forest. She lifted her face to embrace the wind, inhaled deeply to take in every secret the breeze could carry and would divulge. Every insect, every rustle in the underbrush, every separate sway of a branch, lightened the terrible dread in her heart, pushed the fearful memories a little farther away. “I can take them away completely,” Mikhail offered gently. Raven flashed him a small smile, meant to reassure. Her body moved briefly against his. She was well aware of what a temptation that had been for him, how the other two males thought him insane for not taking the choice from her. “You know I prefer to keep my memories. All of them.” Mikhail nodded, leaned over, and brushed a kiss over her temple. He felt the weight of Gregori’s pale gaze, his blatant disapproval. He knew he would be facing even more objections when they were alone. Carpathian males never allowed their mates to suffer needlessly. Only Gregori would dare to question or challenge the decisions of his prince. Mikhail usually welcomed the rare clashes. This time he had no way of defending his actions, at least not in a way Gregori would understand. Mikhail just knew Raven needed this semblance of normalcy and the time to come to grips with everything that had happened in her own way.

May we not think of the two friends together in a College chamber, Addison of slender frame, with features wanting neither in dignity nor in refinement, Steele of robust make, with the radiant 'short face' of the 'Spectator', by right of which he claimed for that worthy his admission to the Ugly Club. Addison reads Dryden, in praise of whom he wrote his earliest known verse; or reads endeavours of his own, which his friend Steele warmly applauds. They dream together of the future; Addison sage, but speculative, and Steele practical, if rash. Each is disposed to find God in the ways of life, and both avoid that outward show of irreligion, which, after the recent Civil Wars, remains yet common in the country, as reaction from an ostentatious piety which laid on burdens of restraint; a natural reaction which had been intensified by the base influence of a profligate King. Addison, bred among the preachers, has a little of the preacher's abstract tone, when talk between the friends draws them at times into direct expression of the sacred sense of life which made them one.

The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us. But—and this is again one of the messages of the early modernists—beings like us become at home in the world only by acknowledging our ‘fallen’ condition, as Eliot acknowledged it in The Waste Land. Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world, to a ‘kingdom of ends’ in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered. As Plato and Kant both saw, therefore, the feeling for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from a humble sense of living with imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental.

The only sounds at the late hour were the faint jingle of a phone ringing in the nurses’ station, the ping of an elevator, the faraway sound of the wheels of a cart, and the gentle beep of Brandon’s vital signs monitor. They wouldn’t allow any flowers or personal items in the ICU, but Sloan had snuck in an engagement photo. It sat on the table next to the bed. Her and Brandon on the beach, the surf crashing around their feet, her tattooed arm over his shoulder, them looking at each other. Both of them laughing. I looked back at him and sighed. “You’re going to have some gnarly scars, buddy.” They’d started the skin grafts for the road rash on his arm. “But you’ll get to do everything you planned to do with your life. One of us is going to get the girl. I’ll help you any way I can. Even if I have to wheel your ass to the altar.” I could picture his smile. With any luck I’d see it in a few hours. A knock on the door frame turned me around in my chair. “Hey, cutie.” Valerie came into the room for her vitals check. She turned the lights up, and I stood and stretched. As if sleeping in a chair wasn’t hard enough, the activity every two hours was the final kicker. I wouldn’t call anything I did on these overnight shifts sleeping. Maybe napping, but not sleeping. Every two hours Brandon was moved. They checked his airways, changed out bags, looked at his vitals. I don’t know how Sloan was handling doing this almost nightly for the last three weeks. Sloan was a good woman. I’d always liked her, but now she’d earned my respect, and I was grateful Brandon and Kristen had her. “Did you decide what day you want to bring the kids to the station?” I asked Valerie, yawning. She cycled the blood pressure cuff on Brandon’s arm and smiled. “I’m thinking Tuesday. You on shift Tuesday?” “Yup.” She wrote down some notes on Brandon’s chart and then gave me a raised eyebrow. “Any updates with your lady friend?” I laughed a little. “No.” The whole nursing staff knew about my depressing love life. I’d gotten hit on a few too many times by some of the younger nurses. I couldn’t claim to have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t married, so it was either “I’m gay” or “I’m in love with that girl over there.” I’d gone with the latter, and now I wished I’d said I was gay. They didn’t know why Kristen wouldn’t date me, just that she wouldn’t. It had turned into the favorite topic of the ICU. A real-life episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I rarely got through a Brandon visit without it coming up. The drama escalated when Kristen had been hit on by the nurses’ favorite single orthopedic surgeon. According to the nurses’ gossip circuit, Kristen told him to go fuck himself. And apparently she’d actually said, “Go fuck yourself.” After that everyone was sure she was holding out for me. Only I knew better.

He fired once, twice—the Smith & Wesson’s throaty cough drowned out in the hail of fully-automatic fire. The first round splintered the frame of the door near the sergeant’s head. The second buried itself in his shoulder. To his credit, he didn’t drop the rifle, but it gave Tex all the opening he needed. The semiautomatic came up, steady in both hands as he fired two more shots—almost as one, a single ragged hole opening where the bridge of the sergeant’s nose had once been

he might not really think anything of the risks you’d be taking. I thought it was worth reminding him. I still do.” “Not so many risks,” Sophia said, her voice falling as she looked into the fire. She’d made her choices long ago. Few men wanted a scholarly wife, and her studies had left little time for courtship. In the right frame of mind, she counted herself lucky that she’d had the choice to make, that with one daughter married and two sons, her family had been both able and inclined to allow for an unwed scholar.

Heaven and earth are but one and same world— both are home to the subjects and the Lord: “God has his home in heaven and on earth, as man is willed, too, for heaven in death.” Also, God and man are but one and same— only one spirit running in their frame: “Hurt man and you, too, hurt the One up there, in man lies the essence of our Maker.

Your knuckles hurt from knocking, so now you're slamming the side of your balled up fist on the wood door which rattles dangerously in its frame. You hope the neighbors can't hear as you beat on the door. It’s late, after midnight again, and recently, (you can't recall when) one of the neighbors complained about the noise. She stood outside the door as you lay on the living room floor and joined at the hip. She began yelling profanities through the thin wood. She was sick of listening to you two going at it all the time. You were a couple of “disgusting animals” in her estimation and she was going to call the police if you didn't keep it down from now on. You smile vaguely at the memory while your fist continues to pound the door. You recall how you both started coming simultaneously within only seconds of her banging on the door, how the startling intrusion made the pleasure even more thrilling, forbidden and intense.

... the type of leftist vanity that informs [Politically Correct English] is actually inimical to the Left's own causes. For in refusing to abandon the idea of themselves as Uniquely Generous and Compassionate (i.e., as morally superior), progressives lose the chance to frame their redistributive arguments in terms that are both realistic and realpolitikal. One such argument would involve a complex, sophisticated analysis of what we really mean by *self-interest*, particularly the distinctions between short-term financial self-interest and longer-term moral or social self-interest. As it is, though, liberals' vanity tends to grant conservatives a monopoly on appeals to self-interest, enabling the conservatives to depict progressives as pie-in-the-sky idealists and themselves as real-world back-pocked pragmatists. In short, leftists' big mistake here is not conceptual or ideological but spiritual and rhetorical--their narcissistic attachment to assumptions that maximize their own appearance of virtue tends to cost them both the theater and the war.

As Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, points out, “ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Häagen-Dazs.” Of course, it’s no surprise that correlation isn’t the same as causality. But although most organizations know that, I don’t think they act as if there is a difference. They’re comfortable with correlation. It allows managers to sleep at night. But correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation—the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution. Yet few innovators frame their primary challenge around the discovery of a cause. Instead, they focus on how they can make their products better, more profitable, or differentiated from the competition. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do? For me, this is a neat idea. When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem. Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little (“ pass the time while waiting in line”), some are big (“ find a more fulfilling career”). Some surface unpredictably (“ dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase”), some regularly (“ pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school”). Other times we know they’re coming. When we realize we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done. I might, for example, choose to buy the New York Times because I have a job to fill my time while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and I don’t want to read the boring magazines available in the lobby. Or perhaps because I’m a basketball fan and it’s March Madness time. It’s only when a job arises in my life that the Times can solve for me that I’ll choose to hire the paper to do it. Or perhaps I have it delivered to my door so that my neighbors think I’m informed—and nothing about their ZIP code or median household income will tell the Times that either.

Etienne hasn’t been by this afternoon.” She’d been startled when the words popped out--she hoped they hadn’t sounded--what? Judgmental? Disappointed? The truth was, she’d honestly expected him to show up at the house, at least for Aunt Teeta’s sake. Gage’s eyes were full of sympathy. “They were pretty tight, Etienne and your grandfather. I know Etienne’s heard the news, but I haven’t talked to him yet. He…” Again Gage paused, as though choosing just the right words. “I know he’ll be really upset. And he never lets anybody see him that way.” “Macho thing?” Miranda couldn’t help asking. A dimple flashed in Gage’s cheek. “Something like that, I guess.” They’d lapsed into a companionable silence. To Miranda, it felt so good just to sit there with him, not feeling the need to pretend or explain or keep up any sort of appearances. He’d seemed in no hurry to leave, and she’d been glad for him to stay. And when his attention focused on the comings and goings out in the hallway, she’d taken that chance really to study his face. Yes, there were definitely resemblances between Gage and Etienne--the same high cheekbones, lanky frames, and dark good looks. She guessed both their mothers were beautiful. But what was even more apparent up close was the stark contrast in the boys’ eyes. One, soulful and sensitive…the other, suspicious and blatantly defiant. “You’re staring,” Gage mumbled. As Miranda realized she’d been caught, the two of them laughed self-consciously. Gage lowered his eyes and slid back in his chair.

At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were wedged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating. Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent. The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole. There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze of Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time.