Camel Love Quotes

When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still. The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: 1. Everything is part of it. 2. It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads. Kizzy wanted.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

Love lets us ride on its back as if it were a camel. But you’ve got to water it, or it won’t grow into a healthy rose bush.

I thirst for love like a camel thirsts for water. I’m going through a desert right now, but I’m searching for the oasis of my life.

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?

I tucked the Camel coupon from his cigarette pack into my pocket. A souvenir of the moment where he said maybe. I would hold on to his maybe for as long as it would take, even forever.

The most important thing we've learned, So far as children are concerned, Is never, NEVER, NEVER let Them near your television set -- Or better still, just don't install The idiotic thing at all. In almost every house we've been, We've watched them gaping at the screen. They loll and slop and lounge about, And stare until their eyes pop out. (Last week in someone's place we saw A dozen eyeballs on the floor.) They sit and stare and stare and sit Until they're hypnotised by it, Until they're absolutely drunk With all that shocking ghastly junk. Oh yes, we know it keeps them still, They don't climb out the window sill, They never fight or kick or punch, They leave you free to cook the lunch And wash the dishes in the sink -- But did you ever stop to think, To wonder just exactly what This does to your beloved tot? IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND! HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE! HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES! 'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say, 'But if we take the set away, What shall we do to entertain Our darling children? Please explain!' We'll answer this by asking you, 'What used the darling ones to do? 'How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?' Have you forgotten? Don't you know? We'll say it very loud and slow: THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ, AND READ and READ, and then proceed To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks! One half their lives was reading books! The nursery shelves held books galore! Books cluttered up the nursery floor! And in the bedroom, by the bed, More books were waiting to be read! Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales And treasure isles, and distant shores Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, And pirates wearing purple pants, And sailing ships and elephants, And cannibals crouching 'round the pot, Stirring away at something hot. (It smells so good, what can it be? Good gracious, it's Penelope.) The younger ones had Beatrix Potter With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter, And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and- Just How The Camel Got His Hump, And How the Monkey Lost His Rump, And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul, There's Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole- Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books, Ignoring all the dirty looks, The screams and yells, the bites and kicks, And children hitting you with sticks- Fear not, because we promise you That, in about a week or two Of having nothing else to do, They'll now begin to feel the need Of having something to read. And once they start -- oh boy, oh boy! You watch the slowly growing joy That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen They'll wonder what they'd ever seen In that ridiculous machine, That nauseating, foul, unclean, Repulsive television screen! And later, each and every kid Will love you more for what you did.

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other’s embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel’s load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love’s burden.

I wasn’t very far away from figuring out the secret to love, no more than two miles or so, when my camel broke down and I got shot at by a pack of cigarettes.

I am the Love Camel of Llama Land. Come, hop on my hump and let me lead you to water.

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws -- riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public -- knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong. ROS: And talking to himself. GUIL: And talking to himself.

Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution. Any wine will get you high. Judge like a king, and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency about "what's needed." Drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it's been untied, and is just ambling about.

I’m happier than a camel on Wednesday.

For once Mohammad firmly clarified: “Trust God, but still make sure your camel’s tied!” God loves the one who earns, so I urge you: Trust God but don’t forget you must act too!

If you steal, steal a camel, she heard her mother whisper. And if you love, love the moon.

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else... Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses… Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in you bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing.

I have never been to Japan. I have never been to India, or to Morocco, or to Germany, or to most of the places Arthur Less has traveled to over the past few months. I have never climbed an ancient pyramid. I have never kissed a man on a Paris rooftop. I have never ridden a camel. I have taught a high school English class for the best part of a decade, and graded homework every night, and woken up early in the morning to plan my lessons, and read and reread Shakespeare, and sat through enough conferences and meetings for even those in Purgatory to envy me. I have never seen a glowworm. I do not, by any reckoning, have the best life of anyone I know. But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Because it is also mine. That is how it goes with love stories.

Are you thirsty?” she asked. “Like a camel,” Henry said. She led him to a chair by the window. Then she went to the kitchen, wishing she had something better than water to serve. She filled a glass. “Are you hungry?” Food, she had. “Like a camel that hasn’t eaten anything in days.” “Ham or casserole?” “No self-respecting camel eats casserole. It could contain a relative.

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense. Arraigned to my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night--of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told, in her quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rapidly devoured the ideal--I pronounced judgement to this effect-- That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life; that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar. "You," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You're gifted with the power of pleasing him? You're of importance to him in any way? Go!--your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world to dependent and novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe! Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene of last night? Cover your face and be ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy! Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness! It does no good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and if discovered and responded to, must lead into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. "Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: tomorrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own pictures, faithfully, without softening on defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.' "Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory--you have one prepared in your drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imageine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest lines, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram; remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye--What! you revert to Mr. Rochester as a model! Order! No snivel!--no sentiment!--no regret! I will endure only sense and resolution... "Whenever, in the future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them--say, "Mr. Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if he chose to strive for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this indignent and insignifican plebian?" "I'll do it," I resolved; and having framed this determination, I grew calm, and fell asleep.

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin sized world?

Try all you might to learn a woman's place. You have found it already. It is in the desert, with the stars shining on your skin. It is on the back of a camel, with a sword gripped tight in your fist. It is on the throne of Egypt-it is in the reach of your empire-it is in my arms, and in my heart. You made your place, and it is your by right, Zenobia, my love.

I'll be back," she said. "Very soon." He needed to reply. He needed to say Good, come back; better, Don't go; or better still, I'll join you. He wanted to say, Your neck is beautiful. He wanted to say, I never ever thought my life would hold this, and if your leaving is what I must give for what I was given, then it was worth it. But the children were all around and Mr Abasi was calling out and motioning for her to come, and anyway, he knew now, if he hadn't known before, that there were limitations to words - words in the air or on a page.

Long enshrined traditions around communion aside, there are always folks who fancy themselves bouncers to the heavenly banquet, charged with keeping the wrong people away from the table and out of the church. Evangelicalism in particular has seen a resurgence in border patrol Christianity in recent years, as alliances and coalitions formed around shared theological distinctives elevate secondary issues to primary ones and declare anyone who fails to conform to their strict set of beliefs and behaviors unfit for Christian fellowship. Committed to purifying the church of every errant thought, difference of opinion, or variation in practice, these self-appointed gatekeepers tie up heavy loads of legalistic rules and place them on weary people’s shoulders. They strain out the gnats in everyone else’s theology while swallowing their own camel-sized inconsistencies. They slam the door of the kingdom in people’s faces and tell them to come back when they are sober, back on their feet, Republican, Reformed, doubtless, submissive, straight.

I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and childern play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

A blanket could be used to wrap up all the love I have to offer you, so it’ll be easier for you to carry it across the desert. You’d better get walking, because me and my camel won’t be stopping until we have to pee.


Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn’t? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it, and not the camel? Come to think of it, what about the maple trees? What about the blue iris? What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight? What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves? What about the grass? —Mary Oliver, “Some Questions You Might Ask

Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her—long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America. . . .

Surely for as long as there have been nights as bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels andother beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number; yeah, something to help SPQR record-keeping...and Herod, or Hitler, fellas...what kind of a world is it...for a baby to come in tippin' those toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he ought have his head examined... "But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As it it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.

Jesus said: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth', 'Love not the world nor the things of the world', 'Woe unto you that are rich--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.' Yet all these self-styled'Followers' of Christ made the accumulation of money the principal business of their lives.

If a rich man's entry into heaven seems as difficult as the camel's attempt to go through the eye of a needle; if the love of money is the root of all evil; then we must at least assume the most powerful men on earth to be the most Satanic. This applies to financiers, industrialists, popes, poets, dictators, and all assorted opinion-makers and field marshals of the world's activities.

Sometimes you get frightened as a camel. Sometimes you get stuck in the mud like a hunted prey. O young fool, how long will you keep running away from yourself? In the end, the thing will happen anyway. Just go in the direction where there is no direction. Go, search there.

I, um…Yes.” I gazed around the room. “Is there a closet, or—?” Her laughter finally escaped. “A closet. That’s adorable. You can just wish yourself into clothes, Little Brother.” “I…ah…” I knew she was right, but I felt so flustered I even ignored her little brother comment. It had been too long since I’d relied on my divine power. I feared I might try and fail. I might accidentally turn myself into a camel. “Oh, fine,” Artemis said. “Allow me.” A wave of her hand, and suddenly I was wearing a knee-length silver dress—the kind my sister’s followers wore—complete with thigh-laced sandals. I suspected I was also wearing a tiara. “Um. Perhaps something less Huntery?” “I think you look lovely.” Her mouth twitched at the corner. “But very well.” A flash of silver light, and I was dressed in a man’s white chiton. Come to think of it, that piece of clothing was pretty much identical to a Hunter’s gown. The sandals were the same. I seemed to be wearing a crown of laurels instead of a tiara, but those weren’t very different, either. Conventions of gender were strange. But I decided that was a mystery for another time.

Behind every fortunate woman is someone who believes in her - someone sitting in the bleachers, quietly applauding every success, shouldering every disappointment, waiting in the twilight or the drizzle after everyone else is gone, loving her. If she is really lucky, that person is her husband.

I, like balloon animal hacks everywhere, can only make one animal so far. It is a LEGO version of the Island of Dr. Moreau, wherein I have brick-engineered a pig-camel, a dog-camel, and a camel with wheels. These monstrosities are quickly torn apart, and I wonder if I have some unresolved camel issues.

I lit a Camel, blew smoke through my nose and looked at a piece of black shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full, smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Marriott saw me staring at it. “An interesting bit,” he said negligently. “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.” “I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny,” I said. Mr. Lindsay Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort.

They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife - but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!

I must have been a very naughty boy in a previous life to end up with two left feet and the grace of a dead hippopotamus.

Camels came into town from the desert, with long sad steps, carrying sand in their yellow hair, looking far into the distance, with eyes that had seen eternity.

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular.

One of the obvious implications is that a person will have to face the fact that she cannot meet other people’s expectations. This signals the end of what might be called the “camel” phase of human development. I believe it was Nietschze who suggested that for the first part of life, we are camels, trudging through the desert, accepting on our backs everybody’s “shoulds” and “don’ts.” Camels only know how to spit; they don’t think for themselves or talk back. As the camel dies, a lion is born in its place. Lions discover both their roar and the art of preening. The lion may be a little shaky at first, so support and encouragement are vital. But once the camel begins to die (e.g., signaled by depression), there is no turning back. Symptoms occupy the space between the death of the camel and the birth of the lion. A therapist can be a good midwife during this liminal phase.

What does a camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sand that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaler. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. Not the flavorless grass she chews, then chews again, then again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age, taller than most and top heavy, tipping from side to side as she carries this human, this Arthur Less, pointlessly across the Sahara.

“Father Peregrine, won’t you ever be serious?” “Not until the good Lord is. Oh, don’t look so terribly shocked, please. The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn’t it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn’t that true? And certainly we are ridiculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to His humor.” "I never thought of God as humorous," said Father Stone. "The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man?" Oh, come now!" Father Peregrine laughed. Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

Holy tit fungus! Did you give Sasquatch an autopsy in here? God almighty, girl.” He waddled back into the hallway, this time holding his privates with both hands. “You balded the dick mitten. Nice. Let me see it.” He looked at her like she might drop trou simply because he suggested it. “I would rather lick a monkey’s armpit than show you my vagina.” Dove gave him the finger. “You know what I love best about a naked muff hole? It looks just like a camel’s dangly lips.” Duke extended his own lips to make them appear gummy and slack.

BOWLS OF FOOD Moon and evening star do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe. The purpose of every gathering is discovered: to recognize beauty and love what’s beautiful. “Once it was like that, now it’s like this,” the saying goes around town, and serious consequences too. Men and women turn their faces to the wall in grief. They lose appetite. Then they start eating the fire of pleasure, as camels chew pungent grass for the sake of their souls. Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground. Then green justice tenders a spear. Go outside to the orchard. These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac, learning Something new at each stop. And they’re here for such a short time, sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind. Bowls of food are brought out as answers, but still no one knows the answer. Food for the soul stays secret. Body food gets put out in the open like us. Those who work at a bakery don’t know the taste of bread like the hungry beggars do. Because the beloved wants to know, unseen things become manifest. Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation: bury your seed and wait. After you die, All the thoughts you had will throng around like children. The heart is the secret inside the secret. Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal. It’s unsure people who get the blessing. Climbing cypress, opening rose, Nightingale song, fruit, these are inside the chill November wind. They are its secret. We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner Being, and separate ways of talking and feeling. An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed. Pink rose deciding to open a competing store. A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out. Narcissus gossiping about iris. Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility. Red apple, what has the Friend taught you? To be sour. Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach. Look at the poplar, tall but without fruit or flower. Yes, if I had those, I’d be self-absorbed like you. I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones. Pomegranate questions quince, Why so pale? For the pearl you hid inside me. How did you discover my secret? Your laugh. The core of the seen and unseen universes smiles, but remember, smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. Dark earth receives that clear and grows a trunk. Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage. You have to be to be blessed! Pumpkin begins climbing a rope! Where did he learn that? Grass, thorns, a hundred thousand ants and snakes, everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise? Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns. We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell. The inside of an egg, the outside of a date. What about your inside and outside? The same way a branch draws water up many feet, God is pulling your soul along. Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground. Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring. They visit; they sing and tell what they think they know: so-and-so will travel to such-and-such. The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon. The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate. It’s time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house. Be your own watchman as birds are. Let the remembering beads encircle you. I make promises to myself and break them. Words are coins: the vein of ore and the mine shaft, what they speak of. Now consider the sun. It’s neither oriental nor occidental. Only the soul knows what love is. This moment in time and space is an eggshell with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk, under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind to become the song of an actual bird, and God.

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

I don’t quite know why, but I felt somehow that Linda had been once more deceived in her emotions, that this explorer in the sandy waste had seen only another mirage. The lake was there, the trees were there, the thirsty camels had gone down to have their evening drink; alas, a few steps forward would reveal nothing but dust and desert as before.

Africa is red dirt, camels hugging highway shoulders, blushing skies, waterfall drizzle, intricate glass tiles on the wall. But really, it’s people. It’s hosts serving postmeal popcorn, kids laughing in the grass, grown men laughing at terrible kid jokes, neighbors loving neighbors. Africa is shared community. It’s one billion people on the planet. It is the welcoming family of humanity. Cradle of civilization, indeed.

He squinted at her. He recalled the tears in her eyes that had not fallen into her teacup. No, it wasn’t a revelation. Not even to him. Yet, this was the same woman who had stolen a camel right out from under the Anti-Zionist army’s nose. She’d taken his hand, thrown herself down a sand dune on a dare, and then beaten him back up it. She’d glared at him and refused to part from his side. A coward? “Never,” he said again.

often tell me how lucky I am, to live in a country where cheap flights to dozens of exciting destinations are so readily available. They never understand why England doesn’t completely empty into Prague or Budapest every weekend. What they don’t appreciate is that to take advantage of these cheap flights, one must generally get to London; and that getting to London, from almost anywhere else in the country, is either dramatically more expensive, or considerably less pleasant, than the flights in question. Usually both.

the impression made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its creature. It clothes him with all its mysteries;

One glance. Once stare. Was all it took to take my lungs to long for air. The moment I saw you, is the moment I found myself. It was unreal; this love thrill, My soul it manifest. I was obsessed. Maybe that's where I went wrong, love possessed. Forced to cross the Rubicon, no protest. From your end ‘cause we shared the same sentiment Love we earned, time we burned, look at what we've done. Now we at the point of no return, no taking it back. Our world like centre CERN, particles go round and back. All we do is speak out of turn, Argue, push buttons;
I guess that's the straw hun, That broke the camel's back.

I’ve lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to talk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime-“ “Oded broke into a run,” Luce said without thinking. “I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you’d never seen him move like that.” “Yeah, well,” Daniel said. “He liked you.” They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce’s jaw dropped. “I did it!” she cried out. “It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. I came to me without thinking!” It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel’s arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel. No. She was finding her way to them. It was like a gate had been left open after Luce’s quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available. She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was-and she wasn’t just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia. She was every girl she’d ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love. She was Lucinda. “Quick,” she said to Daniel. “Can we do another?” “Okay, how about another desert life? You were living in the Sahara when I found you. Tall and gangly and the fastest runner in your village. I was passing through one day, on my way to visit Roland, and I stopped for the night at the closest spring. All the other men were very distrustful of me, but-“ “But my father paid you three zebra skins for the knife you had in your satchel!” Daniel grinned. “He drove a hard bargain.” “This is amazing,” she said, nearly breathless. How much more did she have in her that she didn’t know about? How far back could she go? She pivoted to face him, drawing her knees against her chest and leaning in so that their foreheads were almost touching. “Can you remember everything about our pasts?” Daniel’s eyes softened at the corners. “Sometimes the order of things gets mixed up in my head. I’ll admit, I don’t remember long stretches of time I’ve spent alone, but I can remember every first glimpse of your face, every kiss of your lips, every memory I’ve ever made with you.

I am Emir Dynamite!" he shouted, swaying on top of the tall camelback. "If within two days we don't get any decent food, I'll incite the tribes to revolt! I swear! I will appoint myself the Prophet's representative and declare holy war, jihad. On Denmark, for example. Why did the Danes torment their Prince Hamlet? Considering the current political situation, a casus beli like this would satisfy even the League of Nations. No, seriously, I'll buy a million worth of rifles from the British--they love to sell firearms to the tribes--and onward to Denmark. Germany will let us through--in lieu of war reparations. Imagine the tribes invading Copenhagen! I'll lead the charge on a white camel.

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leant over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

There's one thing you ought to know about old people," Alberto Terégo told me on our early morning walk on the beach. "Like what?" I asked my friend in reply. "Like old people don't mind if you kill them," Terégo said. "Just don't give them any more crap while you're doing it." "Are you talking about yourself?" I said. "You're telling me you'd rather have someone kill you than give you a hard time?” My head was starting to hurt. It usually did when I talked with Terégo, but never so soon into our daily conservation. He was grinning now, knowing he had me again. I just stared at him. He has this uncanny knack of making me feel he's laid a booby trap of punji sticks on which I'm about to impale myself. “That's ridiculous," I said finally, feeling like a kid for not being able to come up with a better response to his bizarre suggestion. “No, it's life,” Terégo said, his grin growing larger. “What's life?” I said. “Taking crap,” he said. "Taking crap is life?" I said. The grin hung ear to ear now. “It's what nice people do,” Terégo said. “There's an 18th century proverb that says we all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die. We do it from an early age, so old people have been doing it for a very long time, way beyond the proverbial amount that broke the camel's back.” “Eating dirt is life?” I said, feeling the pain grow under my arched eyebrows. "That's right," he said. "Eating dirt?" I repeated dully. "We do it to be team players, so we don’t rock the boat, to go with the flow," Terégo said. "We put up, shut up, get along--no matter what--with people even the Dalai Lama would slap silly. We defer to their foolishness, stupidity, biases, racism, ego, telling them what they want to hear, keeping quiet when we ought to be speaking up loud and clear. We put a sock in it even though it chokes us. We do it so we won’t offend, to fit in, be neighborly, sociable, kind. We do it so people will like us, love and reward and hire and promote us. We do it to be successful, secure, happy." "We eat dirt to be happy," I said, my eyes starting to glaze over like frost on window panes in deep winter. "You see the supreme irony in that," Terégo said, the triumph in his voice almost palpable, galling me no end.

A caravan from China comes; For miles it sweetens all the air With fragrant silks and dreaming gums, Attar and myrrh -- A caravan from China comes. O merchant, tell me what you bring, With music sweet of camel bells; How long have you been travelling With these sweet smells? O merchant, tell me what you bring. A lovely lady is my freight, A lock escaped of her long hair, -- That is this perfume delicate That fills the air -- A lovely lady is my freight. Her face is from another land, I think she is no mortal maid, -- Her beauty, like some ghostly hand, Makes me afraid; Her face is from another land. The little moon my cargo is, About her neck the Pleiades Clasp hands and sing; Hafiz, 't is this Perfumes the breeze -- The little moon my cargo is.

The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the Peace-makers, is how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly falseas they are t their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I think rather, they must be the babbling lairs of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous, these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. …the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poisen whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating hearts.

With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse & frog Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joys. Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens, and the meek camel Why he loves man; is it because of the eye, ear, mouth, or skin, Or breathing nostrils? No, for these the wolf and tyger have. Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav'nous snake Where she gets poison, & the wing'd eagle why he loves the sun, And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.

Snowbound up here with you. Without books or business to occupy my time, I wonder what I’ll do,” he added with a leer. She blushed gorgeously, but her voice was serious as she studied his face. “If things hadn’t gone so well for you-if you hadn’t accumulated so much wealth-you could have been happy up here, couldn’t you?” “With you?” “Of course.” His smile was as somber as hers. “Absolutely.” “Although,” he added, linking her hands behind her back and drawing her a little closer, “you may not want to remain up here when you learn your emeralds are back in their cases at Montmayne.” Her head snapped up, and her eyes shone with love and relief. “I’m so glad. When I realized Robert’s story had been fabrication, it hurt beyond belief to realize I’d sold them.” “It’s going to hurt more,” he teased outrageously, “when you realize your bank draft to cover their cost was a little bit short. It cost me $45,000 to buy back the pieces that had already been sold, and $5,000 to buy the rest back from the jeweler you sold them to.” “That-that unconscionable thief!” she burst out. “He only gave me $5,000 for all of them!” She shook her head in despair at Ian’s lack of bargaining prowess. “He took dreadful advantage of you.” “I wasn’t concerned, however,” Ian continued teasing, enjoying himself hugely, “because I knew I’d get it all back out of your allowance. With interest, of course. According to my figures,” he said, pausing to calculate in his mind what it would have taken Elizabeth several minutes to figure out on paper, “as of today, you now owe me roughly $151,126.” “One hundred and- what?” she cried, half laughing and half irate. “There’s the little matter of the cost of Havenhurst. I added that in to the figure.” Tears of joy clouded her magnificent eyes. “You bought it back from that horrid Mr. Demarcus?” “Yes. And he is ‘horrid.’ He and your uncle ought to be partners. They both possess the instincts of camel traders. I paid $100,000 for it.” Her mouth fell open, and admiration lit her face. “$100,000! Oh, Ian-“ “I love it when you say my name.” She smiled at that, but her mind was still on the splendid bargain he’d gotten. “I could not have done a bit better!” she generously admitted. “That’s exactly what he paid for it, and he told me after the papers were signed that he was certain he could get $150,000 if he waited a year or so.” “He probably could have.” “But not from you!” she announced proudly. “Not from me,” he agreed, grinning. “Did he try?” “He tried for $200,000 as soon as he realized how important it was to me to buy it back for you.” “You must have been very clever and skillful to make him agree to accept so much less.” Trying desperately not to laugh, Ian put his forehead against hers and nodded. “Very skillful,” he agreed in a suffocated voice. “Still, I wonder why he was so agreeable?” Swallowing a surge of laughter, Ian said, “I imagine it was because I showed him that I had something he needed more than he needed an exorbitant profit.” “Really?” she said, fascinated and impressed. “What did you have?” “His throat.

Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, What is God like? and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion....But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery—that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and god's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot? and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image. Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner—to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to.

The wine would be copious, the conversation scintillating, and the amenities deluxe. How could he say no? The answer, as always: money, money, money. Lewis relayed the cost, all inclusive, and, though the amount was staggering (Less checked twice to be sure it was not in Moroccan dirhams), he was, as always, already too much in love. Bedouin music was already playing in his ears; camels were already grunting in the darkness; he was already standing up from embroidered pillows and walking out into the desert night, champagne in hand, to let the floury Sahara warm his toes as, above him, the Milky Way glowed with his birthday candles. For it was somewhere in the Sahara that Arthur Less would turn fifty. He swore he would not be alone. Memories of his fortieth, wandering the broad avenues of Las Vegas, still came to him in worser moments. He would not be alone.

In the land of Uz, there lived a man, righteous and God-fearing, and he had great wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children feasted, and he loved them very much and prayed for them. 'It may be that my sons have sinned in their feasting.' Now the devil came before the Lord together with the sons of God, and said to the Lord that he had gone up and down the earth and under the earth. 'And hast thou considered my servant Job?' God asked of him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to his great and holy servant. And the devil laughed at God's words. 'Give him over to me and Thou wilt see that Thy servant will murmur against Thee and curse Thy name.' And God gave up the just man He loved so, to the devil. And the devil smote his children and his cattle and scattered his wealth, all of a sudden like a thunderbolt from heaven. And Job rent his mantel and fell down upon the ground and cried aloud, 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever.' Fathers and teachers, forgive my tears now, for all my childhood rises up again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then, with the breast of a little child of eight, and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and gladness. The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction, and His servant crying out: 'Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish me,' and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: 'Let my prayer rise up before Thee,' and again incense from the priest's censer and the kneeling and the prayer. Ever since then - only yesterday I took it up - I've never been able to read that sacred tale without tears. And how much that is great, mysterious and unfathomable there is in it! Afterwards I heard the words of mockery and blame, proud words, 'How could God give up the most loved of His saints for the diversion of the devil, take from him his children, smite him with sore boils so that he cleansed the corruption from his sores with a pot-sherd - and for no object except to board to the devil! 'See what My saint can suffer for My Sake.' ' But the greatness of it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery - that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished. The Creator, just as on the first days of creation He ended each day with praise: 'That is good that I have created,' looks upon Job and again praises His creation. And Job, praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was ordained. Good heavens, what a book it is, and what lessons there are in it! What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with it to man! It is like a mold cast of the world and man and human nature, everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what mysteries are solved and revealed! God raises Job again, gives him wealth again. Many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them. But how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with those new ones, however dear the new ones might be? But he could, he could. It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising such each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving!

Muhammad once was talking to a crowd of chieftains, princes with great influence, when a poor blind man interrupted him. Muhammad frowned and said to the man, "Let me attend to these visitors. This is a rare chance, whereas you are already my friend. We'll have ample time." Then somebody nearby said, "That blind man may be worth a hundred kings. Remember the proverb, Human beings are mines." World-power means nothing. Only the unsayable, jeweled inner life matters. Muhammad replied, "Do not think that I'm concerned with being acknowledged by these authorities. If a beetle moves toward rosewater, it proves that the solution is diluted. Beetles love dung, not rose essence. If a coin is eager to be tested by the touchstone, that coin itself may be a touchstone. A thief loves the night. I am day. I reveal essences. A calf thinks God is a cow. A donkey's theology changes when someone new pets it and gives it what it wants. I am not a cow, or thistles for camels to browse on. People who insult me are only polishing the mirror

For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams. My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

For the second day running you have burnt my toast!” Let me explain this ludicrous remark. You were this particular prefect’s fag. That meant you were his servant, and one of your many duties was to make toast for him every day at teatime. For this, you used a long three-pronged toasting fork, and you stuck the bread on the end of it and held it up before an open fire, first one side, then the other. But the only fire where toasting was allowed was in the library, and as teatime approached, there were never less than a dozen wretched fags all jostling for position in front of the tiny grate. I was no good at this. I usually held it too close and the toast got burnt. But as we were never allowed to ask for a second slice and start again, the only thing to do was to scrape the burnt bits off with a knife. You seldom got away with this. The prefects were expert at detecting scraped toast. You would see your own tormentor sitting up there at the top table, picking up his toast, turning it over, examining it closely as though it were a small and very valuable painting. Then he would frown, and you knew you were for it. So now it was night-time and you were down in the changing room in your dressing gown and pajamas, and the one whose toast you had burnt was telling you about your crime. “I don’t like burnt toast.” “I held it too close. I’m sorry.” “Which do you want? Four with the dressing gown on, or three with it off.” “Four with it on,” I said. It was traditional to ask this question. The victim was always given a choice. But my own dressing gown was made of thick brown camel’s hair, and there was never any question in my mind that this was the better choice. To be beaten in pajamas only was a very painful experience, and your skin nearly always got broken. But my lovely dressing gown stopped that from happening. The prefect knew, of course, all about this, and therefore whenever you chose to take an extra stroke and kept the dressing gown on, he beat you with every ounce of his strength. Sometimes he would take a little run, three or four neat steps on his toes, to gain momentum and thrust, but either way, it was a savage business.

The book of Job, based on an ancient folktale, may have been written during the exile. One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering evil but simply one of the “sons of God,” the legal “adversary” of the council.19 Satan pointed out that Job, Yahweh’s favorite human being, had never been truly tested but was good only because Yahweh had protected him and allowed him to prosper. If he lost all his possessions, he would soon curse Yahweh to his face. “Very well,” Yahweh replied, “all that he has is in your power.”20 Satan promptly destroyed Job’s oxen, sheep, camels, servants, and children, and Job was struck down by a series of foul diseases. He did indeed turn against God, and Satan won his bet. At this point, however, in a series of long poems and discourses, the author tried to square the suffering of humanity with the notion of a just, benevolent, and omnipotent god. Four of Job’s friends attempted to console him, using all the traditional arguments: Yahweh only ever punished the wicked; we could not fathom his plans; he was utterly righteous, and Job must therefore be guilty of some misdemeanor. These glib, facile platitudes simply enraged Job, who accused his comforters of behaving like God and persecuting him cruelly. As for Yahweh, it was impossible to have a sensible dialogue with a deity who was invisible, omnipotent, arbitrary, and unjust—at one and the same time prosecutor, judge, and executioner. When Yahweh finally deigned to respond to Job, he showed no compassion for the man he had treated so cruelly, but simply uttered a long speech about his own splendid accomplishments. Where had Job been while he laid the earth’s foundations, and pent up the sea behind closed doors? Could Job catch Leviathan with a fishhook, make a horse leap like a grasshopper, or guide the constellations on their course? The poetry was magnificent, but irrelevant. This long, boastful tirade did not even touch upon the real issue: Why did innocent people suffer at the hands of a supposedly loving God? And unlike Job, the reader knows that Job’s pain had nothing to do with the transcendent wisdom of Yahweh, but was simply the result of a frivolous bet. At the end of the poem, when Job—utterly defeated by Yahweh’s bombastic display of power—retracted all his complaints and repented in dust and ashes, God restored Job’s health and fortune. But he did not bring to life the children and servants who had been killed in the first chapter. There was no justice or recompense for them.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

We are told that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available. We are told to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. The world considers this undiscriminating; it would like to see clouds over evil people and is offended when they go unpunished. We are told that outcasts and harlots enter the kingdom of God before many who are perfunctorily righteous. Again unfair, the world thinks; respectable people should head the procession. We are told that the gate to salvation is narrow. The world would prefer it to be broad. We are told to be as carefree as birds and flowers. The world counsels prudence. We are told that it is more difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The world admires wealth. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the powerful, and the well-born who are happy. The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev said that a wind of freedom blows through these teachings that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect them by postponement—not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message.

The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the Peace-makers, is how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly false, as they are to their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I think rather, they must be the babbling lairs of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous, these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. …the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poison whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating hearts.

What used the darling ones to do? ‘How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?’ Have you forgotten? Don’t you know? We’ll say it very loud and slow: They . . . used . . . to . . . read! They’d read and read, And read and read, and then proceed To read some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks! One half their lives was reading books! The nursery shelves held books galore! Books cluttered up the nursery floor! And in the bedroom, by the bed, More books were waiting to be read! Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales And treasure isles, and distant shores Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, And pirates wearing purple pants, And sailing ships and elephants, And cannibals crouching ’round the pot, Stirring away at something hot. (It smells so good, what can it be! Good gracious, it’s Penelope.) The younger ones had Beatrix Potter With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter, And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and— Just How The Camel Got His Hump, And How The Monkey Lost His Rump, And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul, There’s Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole— Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books, Ignoring all the dirty looks, The screams and yells, the bites and kicks, And children hitting you with sticks— Fear not, because we promise you That, in about a week or two Of having nothing else to do, They’ll now begin to feel the need Of having something good to read. And once they start—oh boy, oh boy! You watch the slowly growing joy

I’m going to guide you across the desert,” the alchemist said. “I want to stay at the oasis,” the boy answered. “I’ve found Fatima, and, as far as I’m concerned, she’s worth more than treasure.” “Fatima is a woman of the desert,” said the alchemist. “She knows that men have to go away in order to return. And she already has her treasure: it’s you. Now she expects that you will find what it is you’re looking for.” “Well, what if I decide to stay?” “Let me tell you what will happen. You’ll be the counselor of the oasis. You have enough gold to buy many sheep and many camels. You’ll marry Fatima, and you’ll both be happy for a year. You’ll learn to love the desert, and you’ll get to know every one of the fifty thousand palms. You’ll watch them as they grow, demonstrating how the world is always changing. And you’ll get better and better at understanding omens, because the desert is the best teacher there is. “Sometime during the second year, you’ll remember about the treasure. The omens will begin insistently to speak of it, and you’ll try to ignore them. You’ll use your knowledge for the welfare of the oasis and its inhabitants. The tribal chieftains will appreciate what you do. And your camels will bring you wealth and power. “During the third year, the omens will continue to speak of your treasure and your Personal Legend. You’ll walk around, night after night, at the oasis, and Fatima will be unhappy because she’ll feel it was she who interrupted your quest. But you will love her, and she’ll return your love. You’ll remember that she never asked you to stay, because a woman of the desert knows that she must await her man. So you won’t blame her. But many times you’ll walk the sands of the desert, thinking that maybe you could have left … that you could have trusted more in your love for Fatima. Because what kept you at the oasis was your own fear that you might never come back. At that point, the omens will tell you that your treasure is buried forever. “Then, sometime during the fourth year, the omens will abandon you, because you’ve stopped listening to them. The tribal chieftains will see that, and you’ll be dismissed from your position as counselor. But, by then, you’ll be a rich merchant, with many camels and a great deal of merchandise. You’ll spend the rest of your days knowing that you didn’t pursue your Personal Legend, and that now it’s too late. “You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love … the love that speaks the Language of the World.

Water is like love, but love is not like water. No, because if it were, I’d be the camel of love.

Much as the Nazis created an "Aryan Jesus" because the real Semitic Jesus was not to their liking, the Lite Christians have created an American Jesus or a Muscular Jesus or a Consumerist Jesus because they don't like the real nonviolent/turn-the-other-cheek/love-your-enemy/meek-shall-inherit-the-earth/easier-for-a-camel-to-go-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-than-for-a-rich-man-to-enter-heaven/drive-the-moneychangers-from-the-temple Jesus. They simply re-create Jesus in their own image.

Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel." -Phil Lewis of LA Guns

Jesus (to the disciples): Let the children come to Me, and don’t ever stand in their way, for this is what the kingdom of God is all about. 15Truly anyone who doesn’t accept the kingdom of God as a little child does can never enter it. 16Jesus gathered the children in His arms, and He laid His hands on them to bless them. 17When He had traveled on, a young man came and knelt in the dust of the road in front of Jesus. Young Man: Good Teacher! What must I do to gain life in the world to come? Jesus: 18You are calling Me good? Don’t you know that God and God alone is good? 19Anyway, why ask Me that question? You know the Commandments of Moses: “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not slander, do not defraud, and honor your father and mother.”* Young Man: 20Yes, Teacher, I have done all these since I was a child. 21Then Jesus, looking at the young man, saw that he was sincere and responded out of His love for him. Jesus: Son, there is still one thing you have not done. Go now. Sell everything you have and give the proceeds to the poor so that you will have treasure in heaven. After that, come, follow Me. 22The young man went away sick at heart at these words because he was very wealthy, 23and Jesus looked around to see if His disciples were understanding His teaching. Jesus (to His disciples): Oh, it is hard for people with wealth to find their way into God’s kingdom! Disciples (amazed): 24What? Jesus: You heard Me. How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God [for those who trust in their wealth]!* 25I think you’ll see camels squeezing through the eye of a needle before you’ll see the rich celebrating and dancing as they enter into the joy of God’s kingdom! 26The disciples looked around at each other, whispering. Disciples (aloud to Jesus): Then who can be liberated? Jesus (smiling and shaking His head): 27For human beings it is impossible, but not for God: God makes everything possible. Peter: 28Master, we have left behind everything we had to follow You. Jesus: 29That is true. And those who have left their houses, their lands, their parents, or their families for My sake, and for the sake of this good news 30will receive all of this 100 times greater than they have in this time—houses and farms and brothers, sisters, mothers, and children, along with persecutions—and in the world to come, they will receive eternal life. 31But many of those who are first in this world shall be last in the world to come, and the last, first.

Despite the absence of speech, the green area on the upper part of the gyrus was glowing. “If it’s lighting up, it means she’s talking to me at this very moment.” “Eugenie?” Sharko grunted. Leclerc felt a chill. To see his chief inspector’s meninges react to speech like this, when you couldn’t even hear a fly buzzing, made him feel like there was a ghost in the room. “What’s she saying?” “She wants me to buy a pint of cocktail sauce and some candied chestnuts next time I go shopping. She loves those miserable chestnuts. Excuse me a second…” Sharko closed his eyes, lips pressed tight. Eugenie was someone he might see and hear at any moment. On the passenger seat of his old Renault. At night when he went to bed. Sitting cross-legged, watching the mini-gauge trains run around the tracks. Two years earlier, Eugenie had often shown up with a black man, Willy, a huge smoker of Camels and pot. A real mean son of a bitch, much worse than the little girl because he talked loud and tended to gesticulate wildly. Thanks to the treatment, the Rasta had disappeared for good, but the other one, the girl, came and went as she pleased, resistant as a virus.

the dude who worked for his would-be father-in-law for seven years to marry the woman he loved and the guy pulled a bait and switch and made him marry the older, ugly daughter first and then he had to work for the guy for seven more years before he got to marry the one he really wanted.” “That’s a twisted version of the chain of events, but you mean Jacob.” “Yeah. That’s the one.” She shook her index finger at him. “You’ve got the patience of Jacob. I mean besides all that waiting, once he finally snagged Rachel he had to put up with two wives. Can you imagine that honey-do list? ‘Hey, Jake, you brought camel dung in on your sandals, clean up your mess.’ Or, ‘We’re having date cake for dinner, shimmy up that date palm and get us a bushel,’ or ‘I don’t care if you visited her tent last night, it’s my turn for a little pinch and tickle.

You could walk from North Tai Ping Zhuang over to the North Entrance of He Ping Street, and you may as well have smoked your way through two packs of Camels. You smoked the taxi driver’s smoke as he spun sharply around a corner, you smoked the local party leader’s smoke as he tried to establish order at a meeting, you smoked your boyfriend’s smoke whether he loved you or not. Chinese-made cigarettes, foreign imports, dodgy rip-offs. The city was in a permanent fog.

A caravan of people were traveling from village to village through the deserts of Rajasthan. Since it was close to sunset, they decided to pitch their tent before the cold night set in. As the men got busy, tying their camels with a rope, they realized that they were short of just one peg and a rope. They were worried about losing their camel in the night and so decided to go to the village headman to seek a solution. The village sarpanch was a wise and intelligent man. The travelers approached him with their problem, “Sir, we are here to ask you for a solution to our problem.” The headman listened to their problem and said, “Go near the camel and pretend as if you are tying it down.” Although they had their doubts, the travelers did just as they were told. To their surprise, the next morning, the camel was right there. He had not moved an inch, forget about going anywhere. They untied the other camels and tents to move on with their journey. But this one wouldn’t move. Fearing something was wrong with him, they went back to the village head. “Did you untie the camel?” asked the village head. “Sir, we had not tied it in the first place.” The headman said, “My dear fellows, that’s what you know. The camel still believes that you had tied him. You pretended to tie him, now pretend to untie him!” The travelers went back to the camel and pretended to untie the rope and remove the peg. They were a picture of amazement seeing the camel get up and move on as if nothing had happened at all. In his own way, the village head had shown the travelers that the rope and peg were just an illusion which the camel thought to be real. In the same way, all of us are bound by our thoughts, which are actually not real but appear to be so. We are conditioned in that direction and are thus unable to experience complete freedom. If we assume that we are born in a middle class family and therefore will remain middle class all our lives, then the ‘middle class’ label will tie us up forever and will not allow us to explore further horizons. If you simply look inward, into your own life, you will see how much you have been conditioned. The realization of being conditioned is the first step towards breaking free from the artificial chains, which are but an illusion. Break free from all the limitations and conditioning that limit you.

You've the heart of a chanter who loves one song at sunup and another at sundown. Don't you see that both are part of the same day?

Do it. Even if you think you don’t want to. Whatever the adventure is that you’re afraid of, face the fear and do it anyway. Make a change in your life. Attempt something different. Let your spirit fly free! Go far, far away, and never look

A lot of science fiction is about the end game. What happens during a sudden alien invasion or what happens long after the world as we know it has changed. And I love that kind of writing. But what I found myself wondering about was what happens at the beginning of change, before the catastrophe. What happens if the change to our world is simply the straw that broke the camel's back.

In World War II, I was in Indochina—that’s what Vietnam was called then—and I didn’t just meet Ho Chi Minh, I knew him. We were fighting the Japanese, and so was he. We were allies. Plus he was our hero because his guerrilla fighters rescued American pilots shot down in the jungle by the Japanese. Ho spent so much time with Americans that sometimes his own men only recognized him by the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket. Also, he loved President Roosevelt for pissing off Churchill by saying that colonialism had to end after the war. Ho even knew our Declaration of Independence by heart—it was his model for sending the French colonists home. But after FDR died, everything changed. Truman sold Ho Chi Minh down the river by supporting the French—otherwise France wouldn’t join NATO. But didn’t we also fight a revolution to get rid of the British? Didn’t we fight a civil war to keep our country from being split into north and south? Well, that’s what Ho Chi Minh is doing now—and we’re on the wrong side.

…the darkness brought him some hope, and he wondered if Samir was looking at the same stars, guiding them to their own versions of freedom — the night, cloaking them at the same time, bringing them close together. Jacob got the chills thinking about it, as the headlights briefly captured majestic silhouettes of camel caravans in the distance, their humps like small mountains blending into the dunes.

Have you ever had that feeling that you're completely in this very moment, now, living, breathing, there with your whole being? I'm sitting on the hump of the Arabian camel. I feel the warm wind flowing around me like a never-ending stream. It's 48 degrees. I feel the heat on my skin, behold the endless, weightless, sandy open, and sense that I have fully arrived at this very moment. I'm here. I'm now. I'm alive. It is an incredible feeling, an incredibly full feeling of freedom and self-love, and love for the world, and I realize that everything is possible. I see the retrospective of my whole sensitivity, the odyssey of my life, my depression, my suffering, and loving until I have finally been able to arrive in this perfect marvellous moment, and I feel free. Simply free. Boundless and free. The first time I had that feeling that I'm totally present at this very moment had been at the age of fifteen when I read The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. A boy of fifteen years who travels the world with his father tells us the story of this feeling. He's lying in the loft bed. Above him, his father is snoring. It is night, and he cannot fall asleep because, in this very moment, he realizes that he's completely there, completely in this very moment, now, living, breathing, and marvelling at the miracle of his being. It's an overwhelming feeling. But at the age of fifteen, I hadn't been free. I knew that I existed, but I felt as if trapped in a cage with nowhere to hide. I was trapped in the cage of my own feelings. The cage of my depression. It had been an odyssey of many years into adulthood through trials and tribulations and self-inflicted and outward disappointments until I finally had been able to say that I can embrace the moment and feel alive. That I can be free. That I can be taken up at this very moment. That I love this life, I'm allowed to live. The moment I ultimately realized that I have made it through all of the trials and tribulations and obstacles of my life's journey to finally see my own true self was while riding on an Arabian camel in the Sahara desert. With the warm wind flowing around me. With myself within me. And that's also why I will never forget this journey and this country. And that's also why my love for this country is as vast and infinite as the Sahara desert. And that's why I will return there. Again and again and again. It is the place where I realized that I am free. That I made it. That everything, simply everything, is possible. So many people live their lives without ever experiencing something significant. Every day of their lives is the same. And then, at the end of their life's journey, they wonder why they cannot answer the question of whether they have lived at all. Because they never felt present as a whole. But without being wholly present and without the feeling of being existent in the present, within one's own true self, and now, one cannot know oneself, and one cannot recognize the precious gift of life. Because that's precisely what it is: a gift.

Capitalism is a satanic structure that’s built on the idea of building a meritocracy in the midst of democracy. In this system, we are told if we work hard and put one foot in front of the other, we too can be at the top of the food chain. Jesus said it’s easier for a camel to go through the head of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God. Our quest to be at the top of the food chain is the antithesis of the Jesus message. Capitalism is built on profits at the expense of the needs of others and often is the cause of the suffering of others. Generational wealth, historical inequities, and privilege all demand that if we are to tackle white supremacy, we have to also look at predatory economic policies.

The ancient Bedouins would say that just as camel droppings in the desert would tell them that camels passed by, and footsteps in the sand were proof that a creature had walked by, the Earth’s many valleys, mountains, oceans, and constellations point to the existence of a Creator.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual pandas, elephants, lions, eagles, birds, giraffes, camels, whales, frogs, sea turtles, hippopotami, bees, dogs, cats, ants, and loving humans, is entirely on purpose.

SOME QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT ASK Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn’t? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it, and not the camel?

One early morning while jogging through the outskirts of Bahesht along the river, I had the rare privilege to witness a spectacular anthropological wonder. A huge caravan of what seemed like a thousand kuchis (nomads), at least twice that many camels toting all their worldly goods, and several thousand sheep and goats came walking through town on a singular dirt road. They were obviously heading to a new home somewhere up in the mountains, stirring up the dust in the early morning light. Their caravan stretched for well over a mile. As I ran past countless camels—laden with collapsed, black tents topped by ancient-looking women and led by men who looked as if they had stepped out of the Old Testament—I couldn’t help but marvel that these are some of the very few true nomads left on the face of the earth. The kuchis looked back at me as though I was from another planet. Abraham must have looked like these men, I thought as I continued my jog. Now there was a true nomad who walked by faith and not by sight! His citizenship was in heaven! It dawned on me that if I am to be a real follower of Jesus, I am called to be something of a nomad on this earth. I thought of a verse that I had recently read about Abraham and other spiritual nomads, Hebrews 11:16: “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.” I smiled at the kuchi men that I jogged past. I know that I look different, but I am more like you than you may think ... I’m a nomad, too! Our guys in Bahesht were living as nomads on earth more than I was. I had a family and lived in the fair city of Iskandar in The Museum—basically a mud mansion—and here they were scraping by in one of the most remote and difficult places on the planet, trying to serve the poorest of the poor.

A Piece of Heaven Just For You by Maisie Aletha Smikle Just for you I will climb To the mountain peak Just for you I will dive in the ocean deep For you My love The valley is never too wide I will tread plateaus and plains And ride camels on their reins Just for you My beloved Just for you I will swim and thread rivers and seas Paddle through the frosty snow and icy breeze Just for you My darling I will do triathlons around the circumference of the globe Trek rocky grounds And slippery slopes Just for you My darling I will zipline from the north pole to the south pole I will swing from the treetops And parachute from the backdrop Just for you My darling Just for you I will sing And cook a pot of stew Just for you my love I will climb the stairs of heaven To reach the clouds And bring back a piece of heaven Just for you my beloved

First, the lie of the poverty spirit has convinced many people that being poor is more spiritual and godly than being wealthy. In much of the Church, a stigma exists that says that those who have a lot of money must be sinful. The truth is, it is not what one has that makes one evil; it is what one loves that makes one evil. The Bible does not say that having money is evil, but that loving money leads to evil: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). This is a crucial distinction. Much of the misunderstanding on this issue stems from the story of the rich young ruler in Mark 10. This man came to Jesus, telling him of all the things he had done to please God. He then asked, “What else should I do?” In response, Jesus told him to sell everything he had and give the money to the poor. After hearing this, the young man became sorrowful and realized that he loved money more than he loved God. The Bible says he walked away sad, leaving Jesus behind. Afterward, Jesus told His disciples that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus had identified the one thing in this young man’s life that he loved more than God—money. Because money was an idol in this man’s life, he needed to sell all in order to follow Jesus. But this is not true for all people everywhere. Many Christians have misinterpreted Jesus’ statement, thinking that it is impossible to be a Christian and be wealthy. Jesus did not say it was impossible for a rich person to be saved, only that it was more difficult. This is because when people have great riches and do not know Jesus, they have a tendency to become dependent on their financial standing and the lifestyle that their wealth provides. In order to accept Jesus, they have to make Him first in their lives.

natives who were laughing with that light, eternal laughter which is their way of enduring all things I don’t know where the English dug up all that damned self-assurance, but T imagine it’s just part of their sense of humor. the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us There's one merit nobody will ever be able to take away from the Communists: that of having looked man in the face. They didn't send him to Eton to learn protective coloration. Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich— being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its tnink inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid? that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind, He had spent five years in the Sahara himself, at the head of a Camel Corps unit, and those years had been the happiest of his life.It was true that in the desert a man felt less lonely than elsewhere, perhaps because he lived there in constant, almost physical contact with the sky, and so had all the company he needed. For what remained, a pipe was enough. He wanted to say all this to Haas, but his years in the desert hadn’t made him very talkative, and he also noticed that certain things which he felt deeply changed their meaning at the touch of words, so that he could no longer recognize them himself as he spoke. So that indeed he often wondered whether thinking were enough, whether thoughts were not a mere groping for something that was forever out of reach, whether days of real vision were not still ahead, and whether the mysterious cells which lay still unused in man’s brain would not, one day, lead toward light. he felt less and less need to exchange ideas with other men, because essentially they no longer came to him as questions, but as certainties. the man who changed species’ and of the last ‘fighter for dignity.’ Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it freedom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural splendor.” people who mistake their private neurosis for a philosophical outlook.” Men are dying to preserve a certain splendor of life. Call it free- dom, or dignity . . . They are dying to preserve a certain natural .splendor.

ON MY RETURN to our camping place, I make the camels kneel down and hobble their forelegs to prevent them from straying at night. Zayd has already lit a fire and is busy making coffee. Water boils in a tall brass coffeepot with a long, curved spout; a smaller pot of a similar shape stands ready at Zayd's elbow. In his left hand he holds a huge, flat iron spoon with a handle two feet long, on which he is roasting a handful of coffee beans over the slow fire, for in Arabia coffee is freshly roasted for every pot. As soon as the beans are lightly tanned, he places them in a brass mortar and pounds them. Thereupon he pours some of the boiling water from the larger pot into the smaller, empties the ground coffee into it and places the pot near the fire to let it slowly simmer. When the brew is almost ready, he adds a few cardamon seeds to make it more bitter, for, as the saying goes in Arabia, coffee, in order to be good, must be 'bitter like death and hot like love'.

In a road-mender’s hut near Vézelay they found a message scrawled on the wall: “La vie est un desert, la femme un chameau. Pour voir le desert il faut monter sur le chameau.” (“Life is a desert, woman is a camel. If you want to see the desert you have to ride the camel.”)

I don’t know how many years had passed that I hadn’t thought about her. It was a few months after the death of my mother that her name came to me again. I was cleaning out her closet and dresser to donate some of her clothes to the Church. They always had clothes drives to give to some of the poorer people in the area. Better for someone else to have them than just hanging in a closet or in a drawer. At the bottom of one of her drawers, my eyes saw an envelope with my name on. Immediately, I recognized the handwriting on the envelope and for the first time in a long time, I could feel the tears flowing out of my eyes. This wasn’t no single tear drop cry. This was the big, fat, messy tears that come from memories flashing through your mind. Tiffany did write something to me and it was kept from me. I almost unintentionally crumpled the letter in my hand as the combination of hurt and rage took over me for a few moments. I went back to my bedroom and sat down on the edge of my bed. The letter had her North Carolina address on it. That letter would have been a way for us to stay in touch. For almost eight years, I had believed that she didn’t want to stay in contact with me. In that moment, I realized that the hurt I felt for being disregarded was unfounded and she was the one who had the right to feel forgotten. She must have believed that she meant little to me, like I thought she did of me. It’s weird how quickly your perspective can change when given new information. I held that letter in my shaking hands for a few minutes. I didn’t know what to do. Opening it seemed pointless to me. All it would do was rekindle feelings that I once had and couldn’t do anything about. After all those years, I couldn’t try and reconnect to her life. We both moved past each other and it wouldn’t be fair to her to come back. It wouldn’t make her feel good about herself to know that my parents hid that letter from me, like she was some horrible person that I needed to avoid. She may not even live at that address anymore. She undoubtedly moved away for college. I wasn’t in love with her anymore and I don’t know if she ever loved me, but if she did, I’m sure she didn’t anymore. I did the only thing that I felt was right. I went outside and lit a cigarette in the backyard. I took a deep inhale from my Camel full flavored filtered cigarette. I hadn’t converted to menthols, yet. I re-lit my lighter and put a corner of the letter into the flame until I was certain that it had caught fire. I held it in my hand watching the white of the envelope turn black under the blue and yellow flame. Once the envelope was about three quarters burned, I let it fall out of my hand and watched it float for a few moments before it hit the bottom concrete step where it continued to burn. It had all turned black and the carbonized paper started to break away from each other as I stamped out the embers with my sneaker. The wind carried away the pieces of carbon and the memory of her floated away from me. Watching those small burned pieces of paper scatter across my backyard made me realize that my childhood was over. I had nothing to show for it. All I had was myself. I didn’t even know why I was still living in my parent’s house after my mother died. There was nothing there for me. Life would only begin for me once I found something that mattered to me. Unfortunately for me, the only thing that mattered to me was words.