Carving Memories Quotes

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

The terror takes you. The cage is locked and the curtain drawn. Fingers dance along as blades, carving memories into your flesh that will leave scars long past being healed.

If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

There are moments in one’s life that remain permanently distilled in memory. Some wither within minutes, and others are carved forever into our souls.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

Wait Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don't go too early. You're tired. But everyone's tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

But once you know, you can’t go back. Not really. You can carve out someone’s memories, but they won’t be who they were before. They’ll just be full of holes. Given the choice, I’d rather learn to live with what I know.

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

I carved out little spaces within my heart; little, lovely mausoleums where I could lock each and every one of them inside, keep the memories safe and close to me forever.

John's tattoo..Goddamn..He'd done it as a memorial to her-putting her name in his skin so she'd be with him always. After all, there was nothing more permanent than that-hell, that was why in the mating ceremony males got their backs carved up: Rings could get lost.

No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering.

It’s sad that sometimes we let ourselves believe that if it’s not bad, it must be good.” I carve out a corner of my memory for his words, because it’s a sentiment I don’t want to forget. It’s an idea that feels dangerous, because it makes me want more,

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

But there is room now in my heart for more memories, carved by a letting go that I could find only by coming home to a place I'd never been.

Mehmed’s face and the feeling of his hands on her body still haunted her, though. She wished she could carve out his memory with a knife. Trace the lines of him that would not leave her, then cut them free. She would bleed, but she would not die. Still, he lingered in places no knife could ever reach.

Of all the weapons we turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

Women can go mad with insomnia. The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home. Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one.

We do not know what our chances of survival are, so we fight as if they were zero. We do not know what we are facing, so we fight as if it was the dark gods themselves. No one will remember us now and we may never be buried beneath Titan, so we will build our own memorial here. The Chapter might lose us and the Imperium might never know we existed, but the Enemy — the Enemy will know. The Enemy will remember. We will hurt it so badly that it will never forget us until the stars burn out and the Emperor vanquishes it at the end of time. When Chaos is dying, its last thought will be of us. That is our memorial — carved into the heart of Chaos. We cannot lose, Grey Knights. We have already won." ~Justicar Alaric

I tell myself I should remain guarded against you, even as we are fastened together. And yet another side of me believes that you and I could make something of this arrangement. That you and I are complements, that we are made to clash and sharpen each other like iron. That you and I will stay bound together by that which is nameless and runs deeper than vows, until the very end, when the isle takes my bones into the ground and my name is nothing but memory carved into a headstone.

The curves of his chest carved into my memory the same way you won’t ever forget your best day. He is my best day.

A pointless, senseless death.’ ‘They’re all pointless and senseless, friend. Until the living carve meaning out of them. What are you going to carve, Gruntle, out of Harllo’s death? Take my advice, an empty cave offers no comfort.’ ‘I ain’t looking for comfort.’ ‘You’d better. No other goal is worthwhile, and I should know. Harllo was my friend as well. From the way those Grey Swords who found us described it, you were down, and he did what a friend’s supposed to do – he defended you. Stood over you and took the blows. And was killed. But he did what he wanted – he saved your hide. And is this his reward, Gruntle? You want to look his ghost in the eye and tell him it wasn’t worth it?’ ‘He should never have done it.’ ‘That’s not the point, is it?

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.

Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history - personal, political, civilizational - from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective - memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.

Every walk carves out a new city. And each of these tiny cities has its main square, a downtown area all its own, its own memorial statue, its own landmarks, laundromats, bus terminal—in short, its own focal point (from the Latin word focus, meaning fireplace, hearth, foyer, home), warm spot, sweet spot, soft spot, hot spot.

Secrets carve us like water carves stone. On the surface nothing will shift, but things we cannot tell anyone chafe and consume us, and slowly our life settles around them, moulds itself into their shape. Secrets gnaw at the bonds between people. Sometimes we believe they can also build them: if we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

There are moments in one's life that remain permanently distilled in memory. Some wither within minutes, and others are carved forever into our souls.

Memories happened in flashes, not as drawn-out as reality, and it seemed strange that something so important, so essential to a person, could disappear so quickly.

The heart breaks open,...'I know now that we never get over great losses: we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. Sometimes I think that the pain is what yields the solution. Grief and memory creative their own narrative:...

I wanted to absorb every moment of this night. I knew it was special. I wanted to keep it locked away inside me forever just the way it was. When I closed my eyes to sleep, I thought of how he'd glowed like a jewel in the light of the campfire. The way the flames carved him against the darkness. The very shape of his head. The smudges of chocolate and marshmallows on his fingers and lips. How the hair on his legs looked like filaments of gold. When I was certain my heart hat painted the canvas in my memory...I fell asleep.

The interplay between farmers and the elements was a poem without words, the echo which would always return to him. The air could hold the "breeze of the rain" or the "wind of warmth" to the discerning nose. The stone carved its memory deep into the hands that chiseled it. Fire was life in the hearth which was the center of home. Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells.

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.

it’s their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.

Rome wasn’t just a city—it was a living memory, carved in stone and whispered through fountains.

Scots have long memories, and they're not the most forgiving of people. There's a clan stone out there with the name of MacKenzie carved on it, and a good many of my relatives under it. I don't feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven't forgotten either. - Roger MacKenzie Wakefield

Of all the weapons we turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one’s own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

I walked the maintenance tunnels, my face pulsing. The memory of his lips against my cheek played over and over in my mind. I tried to stomp it down like a stray ember. I couldn’t kindle it and still do what needed to be done.

There are moments in one’s life that remain permanently distilled in memory. Some wither within minutes, and others are carved forever into our souls. This image, of the boy she loved begging her for mercy, would follow her for the rest of her life.

It’s a natural thing, little girl, to let a memory fade. Like chiseling stone. If the carving is shallow, then the picture just wears itself away. And even if it is chiseled in good and deep, the edges still smooth out, soften. Time has a kindness like that. That’s as it should be…

Come to me in the dark, bring me all of your scars. I want to know every crack in your heart, every ache, every memory that haunts you. I want to see the realness in your face, the way your eyes stay light even when you talk of pain, and the way your lips are uneven when you smile. The grooves carved into your soul have made you beautiful and I want to run my fingers across the etches. I know people cover wounds and disguise their damage, but this is what makes you, you, and I want to know you. I want to sink inside of you and feel your depth. Don’t protect me from your story. We all have a story and I’m tired of drowning alone.

Time, the sculptor of moments, carves our lives into the masterpiece of memories.

Living is more than just existing. When you are living you feel emotions that you may not be able to decipher. You commit mistakes and learn from them and you will be carved in people’s hearts and souls with love and happiness so when you are gone you may not be able to exist anymore but you will still be living inside people’s heart and souls and your memory will forever be cherished by them.

What I could tell the boy was, the moment we are born appears to be the very same moment we forget we are loved. Now isn't this awkward? Shouldn't the two things dovetail, love and memory? Shouldn't a feeling that powerful be carved on a tree so no one can ignore its message? To come so far to be in this world only to forget something all-important - what kind of a journey is that? I'll bet that 90 percent of the love that surrounds us is dismissed or discounted - the cup of tea a friend makes, the letter from a faraway auntie. The fact that no one feels loved enough merely proves my point.

What makes a person "the same" person across life's tectonic upheavals of circumstance and character? Amid the chaos and decay toward which the universe inclines, we grasp for stability and permanence by trying to carve out a solid sense of self in our blink of existence. But there is no solidity. Every quark of every atom of every cell in your body had been replaced since the time of your first conscious memory, your first word, your first kiss. In the act of living, you come to dream different dreams, value different values, love different loves. In a sense, you are reborn with each new experience.

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

Memories are the enemies that never die,” he says, turning away and shoving open his door, leaving me with the pain carved in those words that I am fairly certain he didn’t want me to hear. But I did, and they speak to me, diving deep in my soul with the blood of my own loss, and taking root. I say I want my memories back, but I’m not so sure I really do. It’s an idea I reject as I shove open my door and stand.

He’d learned early to carve and mold and cover the parts of himself that didn’t fit into the world. Keep the fractals of himself hidden, the way he came up at harsh angles to everyone else. He was a kaleidoscope, shifting and changing in the light. What was true was kept in the shadows, the same shadows that lived in his bones, that covered the memories of praying beside his father in the sunlight, murmuring the Quran.

In The Garret Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, All fashioned and filled, long ago, By children now in their prime. Four little keys hung side by side, With faded ribbons, brave and gay When fastened there, with childish pride, Long ago, on a rainy day. Four little names, one on each lid, Carved out by a boyish hand, And underneath there lieth hid Histories of the happy band Once playing here, and pausing oft To hear the sweet refrain, That came and went on the roof aloft, In the falling summer rain. 'Meg' on the first lid, smooth and fair. I look in with loving eyes, For folded here, with well-known care, A goodly gathering lies, The record of a peaceful life-- Gifts to gentle child and girl, A bridal gown, lines to a wife, A tiny shoe, a baby curl. No toys in this first chest remain, For all are carried away, In their old age, to join again In another small Meg's play. Ah, happy mother! Well I know You hear, like a sweet refrain, Lullabies ever soft and low In the falling summer rain. 'Jo' on the next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold, Diaries of a wilful child, Hints of a woman early old, A woman in a lonely home, Hearing, like a sad refrain-- 'Be worthy, love, and love will come,' In the falling summer rain. My Beth! the dust is always swept From the lid that bears your name, As if by loving eyes that wept, By careful hands that often came. Death canonized for us one saint, Ever less human than divine, And still we lay, with tender plaint, Relics in this household shrine-- The silver bell, so seldom rung, The little cap which last she wore, The fair, dead Catherine that hung By angels borne above her door. The songs she sang, without lament, In her prison-house of pain, Forever are they sweetly blent With the falling summer rain. Upon the last lid's polished field-- Legend now both fair and true A gallant knight bears on his shield, 'Amy' in letters gold and blue. Within lie snoods that bound her hair, Slippers that have danced their last, Faded flowers laid by with care, Fans whose airy toils are past, Gay valentines, all ardent flames, Trifles that have borne their part In girlish hopes and fears and shames, The record of a maiden heart Now learning fairer, truer spells, Hearing, like a blithe refrain, The silver sound of bridal bells In the falling summer rain. Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, Four women, taught by weal and woe To love and labor in their prime. Four sisters, parted for an hour, None lost, one only gone before, Made by love's immortal power, Nearest and dearest evermore. Oh, when these hidden stores of ours Lie open to the Father's sight, May they be rich in golden hours, Deeds that show fairer for the light, Lives whose brave music long shall ring, Like a spirit-stirring strain, Souls that shall gladly soar and sing In the long sunshine after rain

They spent years putting the tiniest of details on these works of art. It reminded me of what we try to do with ourselves. We spend years trying to paint our personalities to look a certain way or to carve memories into our souls.

It is okay to long for days past. It is natural to feel the imprint of what was, for all you lost is still a part of you. These memories carve their way into your heart, and you do not know how to recover its original form. And even when you try, you cannot shake the old feelings, her words, those photographs . . . but now, even here, after all of these years, you are free to remember, while also moving onward on this path, filled with Light, even if your earliest steps are small.

How beautiful it is to replace the world inside us with someone else’s reality. The way we allow someone to look into our deepest fears and desires, our treasured secrets, our worst nightmares and our most beautiful dreams, without any hesitations. The way we give away everything that could destroy us completely to our last bit, and tear us off into uncountable pieces. And yet we sit there, expecting them to carve the most beautiful memories of our life that we could carry to our graves.

I remember being on the edge of seventeen, that dangerous time between childhood and young adult when the cement is still wet in your mind. That part of your life where things get stuck and form who you are forever, liked or not. Offhand comments, distant laughter, anything a boy’s fragile ego could mistake for a slight on the kind of man he will one day become. There is never a time in your life when love is so sweet, or pain cuts so deep, or when memory is so undeniably carved in stone.

Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice… These are the indelible marks others make of us, like the watermarks of high tides, names carved into barks, or stamps branded onto belongings. For what else is history but the collected voices of others, who sing a chorus of what once was. It is not words but voices that are the inscriptions seared onto pages, into minds, of the fragments others glean, as we live our lives in passing. Flitting and fl eeting, we rub off as we move through, and in our wake is cast the dust of the stars that we become. And sometimes it is caught on the fingers of others, and they press that gold to their lips, where it glistens, an eternal testimony to the fact that they adored us: So we, those of us who remember, we grow more golden as we age, as if cast into statues that commemorate the splendor of those who loved us, and those we were privileged to love.

But the heavy stroke which most of all distresses me is my dear Mother. I cannot overcome my too selfish sorrow, all her tenderness towards me, her care and anxiety for my welfare at all times, her watchfulness over my infant years, her advice and instruction in maturer age; all, all indear her memory to me, and highten my sorrow for her loss. At the same time I know a patient submission is my Duty. I will strive to obtain it! But the lenient hand of time alone can blunt the keen Edg of Sorrow. He who deignd to weep over a departed Friend, will surely forgive a sorrow which at all times desires to be bounded and restrained, by a firm Belief that a Being of infinite wisdom and unbounded Goodness, will carve out my portion in tender mercy towards me! Yea tho he slay me I will trust in him said holy Job. What tho his corrective Hand hath been streached against me; I will not murmer. Tho earthly comforts are taken away I will not repine, he who gave them has surely a right to limit their Duration, and has continued them to me much longer than deserved. I might have been striped of my children as many others have been. I might o! forbid it Heaven, I might have been left a solitary widow. Still I have many blessing left, many comforts to be thankfull for, and rejoice in. I am not left to mourn as one without hope. My dear parent knew in whom she had Believed...The violence of her disease soon weakned her so that she was unable to converse, but whenever she could speak, she testified her willingness to leave the world and an intire resignation to the Divine Will. She retaind her Senses to the last moment of her Existance, and departed the world with an easy tranquility, trusting in the merrits of a Redeamer," (p. 81 & 82).

History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised. The Confessions are Augustine’s own first draft of history.

Talking about the present means I have to go deep into the past, to cross borders and scale mountains and go back to that lake so enormous they call it a sea. I have to let myself be guided by the flow of images and free associations, the natural fits and starts, the hollows and bumps carved into my memories by time. But the truth of memory is strange, isn’t it? Our memories select, eliminate, exaggerate, minimize, glorify, denigrate. They create their own versions of events and serve up their own reality. Disparate, but cohesive. Imperfect yet sincere.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against--you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew these caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others' recollections of your behavior--your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors--for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being to polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders--medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always take....And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me?

In contrast to ordinary memories both good and bad, which are mutable and dynamically changing over time, traumatic memories are fixed and static. They’re imprints, engrams from past overwhelming experiences. Deep impressions carved into the sufferer’s brain body and psyche. These harsh and frozen imprints do not yield to change, nor do they readily update with current information. The fixity of imprints prevents us from forming new strategies and extracting new meanings. There is no fresh ever-changing now, and no real flow in life. In this way, the past lives on in the present.

The world never slows down so that we can better grasp the story, so that we can form study groups and drill each other on the recent past until we have total retention. We have exactly one second to carve a memory of that second, to sort and file and prioritize in some attempt at preservation. But then the next second has arrived, the next breeze to distract us, the next plane slicing through the sky, the next funny skip from the next funny toddler, the next squirrel fracas, and the next falling leaf. Our imaginations are busy enough capturing now that it is easy to lose just then.

Renown does not allure you now. What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding? Moreover, happily there are too many of you for the weak memory of mankind to be able to retain your names.” “Of

Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a little and listen: music of hair, music of pain, music of looms weaving our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

When I Uncovered Your Body” I thought shadows fell deceptively, urging memories of perfect rhyme. I thought I could bestow beauty like a benediction and that your half-dark flesh would answer to the prayer. I thought I understood your face because I had seen it painted twice or a hundred times, or kissed it when it was carved in stone. With only a breath, a vague turning, you uncovered shadows more deftly than I had flesh, and the real and violent proportions of your body made obsolete old treaties of excellence, measures and poems, and clamoured with a single challenge of personal beauty, which cannot be interpreted or praised: it must be met.

It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they were gone. But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed for a moment; then, leaping from the window into the garden, called loudly for help.

I had told myself I’d forgotten what it was like to kiss Raihn. That was a lie. A body doesn’t forget a thing like this—it was carved into my muscle memory, a piece of myself that had awakened from some dormant state. He kissed me with not just his mouth, but his whole body—just like he fought, with every muscle rearranged to the task, centered around me alone.

Mahomet now proceeded to execute the great object of his religious aspirations, the purifying of the sacred edifice from the symbols of idolatry, with which it was crowded. All the idols in and about it, to the number of three hundred and sixty, were thrown down and de-stroyed. Among these, the most renowned was Hobal, an idol brought from Balka, in Syria, and fabled to have the power of granting rain. It was, of course, a great object of worship among the inhabitants of the thirsty desert. There were statues of Abraham and Ishmael also, represented with divining arrows in their hands ; "an outrage on their memories," said Mahomet, "being symbols of a diabolical art which they had never prac-ticed." In reverence of their memories, therefore, these statues were demolished. There were paintings, also, depicting angels in the guise of beautiful women. " The angels," said Mahomet, indignantly, " are no such beings. There are celestial houris provided in paradise for the solace of true believers ; but angels are ministering spirits of the Most High, and of too pure a nature to admit of sex." The paintings were accordingly obliterated. Even a dove, curiously carved of wood, he broke with his own hands, and cast upon the ground, as savoring of idolatry.

My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself, clutching the little wooden bird. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, to Jean and Marthe, in a stone house just beyond the old yew tree … She tells the story of her life to the little carving, as if afraid she’ll forget herself as easily as others do, unaware that her mind is now a flawless cage, her memory a perfect trap. She will never forget, though she’ll wish she could.

Hope is prayer’s second cousin, darkly dressed and hovering around the outside edge of the family photograph. If prayer is a plea to the Almighty for a precedented miracle—prayer’s memory is long—hope is a plea to nothing, to everything, to any possible refutation of the facts. It is tethered to the dreadful single-digit percentage, the medical equipment humming, the long sleepless night. Prayer can (or once could) deliver a miracle; hope can only give a body another week, maybe another month. Sometimes the dying can set goals and reach them: just let me see my son get married, my granddaughter turn ten, my family carve into the Thanksgiving turkey. Hope can outlast dress fittings, gift wrapping, and potato mashing, but it can’t deliver anything more. What hope does best is make plans. Sometimes those plans are to desperately avoid the worst.

The Great Stone at the center of the Somme memorial has this inscription: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The memorial contains 73,077 names, the names of young men who were robbed of life. Note that we often say that they gave their lives, but of course, this is not true; their lives were taken from them. It is not outrageous to consider the carving of their names and the false promise of “evermore” another act of violence.

There is a hidden materiality to texts—a word that originally meant “weaving,” a connection seen in “texture.” Forests haunt writing: The English word for “book” is related to “beech tree” by its Germanic root, and “library” comes from the Latin for “the inner bark of trees.” In most Indo-European languages, “writing” comes from carving and cutting. Language carries the memory of words etched into wood tablets, tree trunks, and bones.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

UNDERBELLY Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone until you hear the whole story: In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either so let’s say, in the story, I was human and made of human-things: fear and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me say it plain: I loved someone and I failed at it. Let me say it another way: I like to call myself wound but I will answer to knife. Sometimes I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do: plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held. Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually. Here is how one might start: Before. The truth? I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove. Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved it or what it was like before: my unscarred body visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove, I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars. I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story: I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream. Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing? I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard. My truth is: blade. My hands on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands because they are like mine. Holding a knife by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be. The truth is: I have made fire before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered before: flesh against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness.

None of these men will bring about your death any time sooner, but rather they will teach you how to die. None of them will shorten your lifespan, but each will add the wisdom of his years to yours. In other words, there is nothing dangerous about talking to these people and it won’t cost you a penny. Take from them as much as you wish. It’s up to you to squeeze the most you can from their wisdom. What bliss, what a glorious old age awaits the man who has offered himself as a mate to these intellects! He will have mentors and colleagues from whom he may seek advice on the smallest of matters, companions ever ready with counsel for his daily life, from whom he may hear truth without judgment, praise without flattery, and after whose likeness he may fashion himself. They say ‘you can’t choose your parents,’ that they have been given to us by chance; but the good news is we can choose to be the sons of whomever we desire. There are many respectable fathers scattered across the centuries to choose from. Select a genius and make yourself their adopted son. You could even inherit their name and make claim to be a true descendant and then go forth and share this wealth of knowledge with others. These men will show you the way to immortality, and raise you to heights from which no man can be cast down. This is the only way to extend mortality – truly, by transforming time into immortality. Honors, statues and all other mighty monuments to man’s ambition carved in stone will crumble but the wisdom of the past is indestructible. Age cannot wither nor destroy philosophy which serves all generations. Its vitality is strengthened by each new generation’s contribution to it. The Philosopher alone is unfettered by the confines of humanity. He lives forever, like a god. He embraces memory, utilizes the present and anticipates with relish what is to come. He makes his time on Earth longer by merging past, present and future into one.

I don’t want to be rude,” he said, “but I need to know about Cyra.” Ara folded her hands over her stomach. “What about Miss Noavek?” “Is she…?” He couldn’t quite say the word. “She is alive.” He closed his eyes, just for a tick letting himself think about her again. She was lively in his memories, fighting in the training room like war was a dance, searching windows into black space like they were paintings. She made ugly things beautiful, somehow, and he would never understand it. But she was alive.

A demon seduced an angel in the middle of the night and they gave the stars a glimpse. There was nothing casual about it, it was tender skin and battle scars breathless passion under storm clouds a rapid river stream mirroring the moon light. Until one day, he left her with nothing, just a bruised heart and carved memories iridescent wings chipped on the edges heat under her skin, like an ember burning low. I asked her, "What do you do after a love like that?" She laughed. And madness danced behind her eyes. But she flew so high the world was jealous.

Am I sealed in your memory now?” she said, sluggish. “As someone who hurt you?” The words caught in her throat like she was gagging on them. “The sounds you made, I can’t forget--” She was crying. Half-drunk, too, from the painkiller, but still, crying. He didn’t remember the sounds he’d made when she touched him--when Vas forced her to touch him, that was, torturing them both. But he knew she had felt everything he had felt. That was how her gift worked, sending pain both ways. “No, no,” Akos said. “What he did, he did to both of us.” Her hand came to rest against his sternum, like she was going to push him away, and then she didn’t. She brushed her fingers over his collarbone, and even through his shirt he felt how warm she was. “But now you know what I’ve done,” she said, staring at her hand, at his chest, anywhere but his face. “Before, you had only seen me do it to other people, but now you know the kind of pain I have caused people, so many people, just because I was too much of a coward to stand up to him.” She scowled, and lifted her hand. “Getting you out was the one good thing I’ve ever done, and now it’s not even worth anything, because here you are again, you…you idiot!

Then she decided she was ready to die. But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble, and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veins of the earth and placed where no man could see it, because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep with their eyes open, because the angels tremble from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain, and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivete--that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. It reflects itself in joy and grief, in my father's sudden knowledge that he would not live to protect me, and in his determination to leave behind a part of himself--his spirit, his humanity--to illuminate my path, give light to my darkened world. He carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again.

Afterward, I pretended to be patient as Akos taught me how to predict how strong a poison would be without tasting it. I tried to seal every moment in my memory. I needed to know how to brew these concoctions on my own, because soon he would be gone. If the renegades and I were caught in our attempt tonight, I would probably lose my life. If we succeeded, Akos would be home, and Shotet would be in chaos, without its leader. Either way, it was unlikely that I would see him again. “No, no,” Akos said. “Don’t hack at it--slice. Slice!” “I am slicing,” I said. “Maybe if your knives weren’t so dull--” “Dull? I could cut your fingertip off with this knife!” I spun the knife in my hand and caught it by the handle. “Oh? Could you?” He laughed, and put his arm across my shoulders. I felt my heartbeat in my throat. “Don’t pretend you’re not capable of delicacy; I’ve seen it myself.” I scowled, and tried to focus on “slicing.” My hands were trembling a little. “See me dancing in the training room and you think you know everything about me.” “I know enough. Look, slices! Told you so.” He lifted his arm, but kept his hand against my back, right under my shoulder blade. I carried the feeling with me for the rest of the night, as we finished the elixir and got ready for bed and he shut the door between us.

It is rumored by the wise-brained rats which burrow the citied earth and by the knowledgeable cats that stalk its shadows and by the sagacious bats that wing its night and by the sapient zats which soar through airless space, slanting their metal wings to winds of light, that those two swordsmen and blood-brothers, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, have adventured not only in the World of Nehwon with its great empire of Lankhmar, but also in many other worlds and times and dimensions, arriving at these through certain secret doors far inside the mazy caverns of Ningauble of the Seven Eyes—whose great cave, in this sense, exists simultaneously in many worlds and times. It is a Door, while Ningauble glibly speaks the languages of many worlds and universes, loving the gossip of all times and places. In each new world, the rumor goes, the Mouser and Fafhrd awaken with knowledge and speaking skills and personal memories suitable to it, and Nehwon then seems to them only a dream and they know not its languages, though it is ever their primal homeland. It is even whispered that on one occasion they lived a life in that strangest of worlds variously called Gaia, Midgard, Terra, and Earth, swashbuckling there along the eastern shore of an inner sea in kingdoms that were great fragments of a vasty empire carved out a century before by one called Alexander the Great. So much Srith of the Scrolls has to tell us. What we know from informants closer to the source is as follows:

My father became High King, and my mother his queen, yet this island on which you stand, this place … my mother claimed it for herself. The very island where she had once served as a slave became her domain, her sanctuary. The Daglan female who’d ruled it before her had chosen it for its natural defensive location, the mists that kept it veiled from the others. So, too, did my mother. But more than that, she told me many times that she and her heirs were the only ones worthy of tending this island. Nesta murmured to Azriel, “The Prison was once a royal territory?” Bryce didn’t care—and Azriel didn’t reply. Silene had glossed over how Theia and Fionn had used the Trove and Cauldron against the Asteri, and why the Hel had she come to this planet if not to learn about that? Yet once again, Silene’s memory plowed forward. And with the Daglan gone, as the centuries passed, as the Tithe was no longer demanded of us or the land, our powers strengthened. The land strengthened. It returned to what it had been before the Daglan’s arrival millennia before. We returned to what we’d been before that time, too, creatures whose very magic was tied to this land. Thus the land’s powers became my mother’s. Dusk, twilight—that’s what the island was in its long-buried heart, what her power bloomed into, the lands rising with it. It was, as she said, as if the island had a soul that now blossomed under her care, nurtured by the court she built here. Islands, like those they’d seen in the carvings, rose up from the sea, lush and fertile.

It is the memory of this relief that will haunt her in the months to come. It will start to unsettle her tonight when they eat the lasagna and carve up the chocolate cake. It will continue to disturb her when Robbie leaves for boot camp, and later, when he is assigned to duty nearly three thousand miles away at Camp Lejeune. It will scald her when she learns he has been deployed to Iraq. Each day she will think back to this day and remember how she nodded and wiped her eyes. She will remember how Robbie’s body seemed to loosen, open up, how he squared his shoulders and embraced her as if he’d been practicing all his life for this moment. Sometimes she thinks she will be haunted every day by the memory of the relief she felt when Robbie asked her to let him go. And she did.

Maybe the true surprise, I thought, was that it had not happened sooner. My uncles’ eyes used to crawl over me as I poured their wine. Their hands found their way to my flesh. A pinch, a stroke, a hand slipping under the sleeve of my dress. They all had wives, it was not marriage they thought of. One of them would have come for me in the end and paid my father well. Honor on all sides. The light had reached the loom, and its cedar scent was rising in the air. The memory of [Redacted]’s white-scarred hands, and the pleasure I had taken in them, was like a hot wire pushed through my brain. I dug my nails into my wrist. There are oracles scattered across our lands. Shrines where priestesses breathe sacred fumes and speak the truths they find in them. Know yourself is carved above their doors. But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.

Wait" Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

That pain of wanting, the burning desire to possess what you lack, is one of the greatest allies you have. It is a force you can harness to create whatever you want in your life. When you took an honest look at your life back in the previous chapter and rated yourself as being either on the up curve or the down curve in seven different areas, you were painting a picture of where you are now. This diagram shows that as point A. Where you could be tomorrow, your vision of what’s possible for you in your life, is point B. And to the extent that there is a “wanting” gap between points A and B, there is a natural tension between those two poles. It’s like holding a magnet near a piece of iron: you can feel the pull of that magnet tugging at the iron. Wanting is exactly like that; it’s magnetic. You can palpably feel your dreams (B) tugging at your present circumstances (A). Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon painted his vision of a more harmonious world in the song Imagine. Within the decade, he was shot to death. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates … our world can be harsh on people who talk about an improved reality. Visions and visionaries make people uncomfortable. These are especially dramatic examples, of course, but the same principle applies to the personal dreams and goals of people we’ve never heard of. The same principle applies to everyone, including you and me. Let’s say you have a brother, or sister, or old friend with whom you had a falling out years ago. You wish you had a better relationship, that you talked more often, that you shared more personal experiences and conversations together. Between where you are today and where you can imagine being, there is a gap. Can you feel it?

I follow Sevro to Cassius’s room. The door is open. I feel anger toward Sevro for violating Cassius’s sanctum, but then I see the cramped room into which Cassius fit his huge life. On one wall his childhood, filled with moving pictures of Eagle Rest, Julian, his father, his brothers, his sisters, even his mother—all curly-haired and smiling. There are a few swordsmanship badges and mementos whose meaning will never now be known. A purple stone with flecks of gold. A chunk of metal the size of an apple. A carved length of wood. A large knife with an eagle-shaped pommel. On another wall hangs a House Mars pendant, surrounded by printed news clippings of my pack. Not just me, but Sevro, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, Virginia, even Pax. They are all happy moments, and it makes me sad that he couldn’t be there to share them with us. On the third wall are images of Lysander, Pytha, and Cassius through the years. But it’s the holoprojector that makes me stare. A loch floats in the air filled with two shivering boys while a wolflike creature slinks around its edges.

Tanis answered. “You’ll slow us up if you don’t.” “The men in my tribe can travel for many days without sleep,” Riverwind said. His eyes were dull and glazed, and he seemed to stare at nothing. Tanis started to argue, then sighed and kept quiet. He knew that he could never truly understand the agony the Plainsman was suffering. To have friends and family—an entire life—utterly destroyed, must be so devastating that the mind shrank from even imagining it. Tanis left him and walked over to where Flint was sitting carving at a piece of wood. “You might as well get some sleep,” Tanis told the dwarf. “I’ll watch for a while.” Flint nodded. “I heard you yelling over there.” He sheathed his dagger and thrust the piece of wood into a pouch. “Defending Que-shu?” Tanis frowned at the memory. Shivering in the chill night, he wrapped his cloak around him, drew up his hood. “Any idea where we are?” he asked Flint. “The Plainsman says we’re on a road known as Sageway East,” the dwarf answered. He stretched out on the cold ground, dragging a blanket up around his shoulders.

Akos was still in the bathroom. He had plugged the bathtub drain and turned on the faucets. Now he was undoing the straps of his armor with quick, nimble fingers. “Don’t tell me you don’t need my help,” he said to me. “I won’t believe you.” I stepped out of sight of the living room and tried to lift my shirt over my head. I only made it up to my stomach before I had to stop for breath. Akos set his armor down and took the hem of my shirt from me. I laughed, softly, as he guided it over my head and down my arms and said, “This is awkward.” “Yes it is,” he said. He kept his eyes on my face. He was blushing. I had not allowed myself to imagine a situation like this, his fingers brushing my arms, the memory of his mouth on mine so close I could still feel it. “I think I can handle the pants on my own,” I said. I didn’t mind showing skin. I was far from frail, with thick thighs and a small chest, and it didn’t concern me. This body had carried me through a hard life. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to. Still, when his eyes dropped--just for a moment--I stifled a nervous giggle.

Akos’s memories of the interrogation were hazy, and the edges of them, creeping into his mind, were bad enough on their own, without any of the details to make them more real. Still, he let the memory of Cyra in. She had looked like a corpse, with the currentshadows making her face look pitted and rotted away. And she had been screaming so loud, every izit of her resisting; she didn’t want to hurt him. If he hadn’t told Ryzek what he knew about Isae and Ori, maybe she had, just to keep from killing Akos. Not like he would have blamed her. She woke up on the galley table with a twitch and a moan. Then reached for him, touching his jaw with her fingertips. “Am I sealed in your memory now?” she said, sluggish. “As someone who hurt you?” The words caught in her throat like she was gagging on them. “The sounds you made, I can’t forget--” She was crying. Half-drunk, too, from the painkiller, but still, crying. He didn’t remember the sounds he’d made when she touched him--when Vas forced her to touch him, that was, torturing them both. But he knew she had felt everything he had felt. That was how her gift worked, sending pain both ways. “No, no,” Akos said. “What he did, he did to both of us.

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.

Did It Ever Occur to You That Maybe You’re Falling in Love? BY AILISH HOPPER We buried the problem. We planted a tree over the problem. We regretted our actions toward the problem. We declined to comment on the problem. We carved a memorial to the problem, dedicated it. Forgot our handkerchief. We removed all “unnatural” ingredients, handcrafted a locally-grown tincture for the problem. But nobody bought it. We freshly-laundered, bleached, deodorized the problem. We built a wall around the problem, tagged it with pictures of children, birds in trees. We renamed the problem, and denounced those who used the old name. We wrote a law for the problem, but it died in committee. We drove the problem out with loud noises from homemade instruments. We marched, leafleted, sang hymns, linked arms with the problem, got dragged to jail, got spat on by the problem and let out. We elected an official who Finally Gets the problem. … We watched carefully for the problem, but our flashlight died. We had dreams of the problem. In which we could no longer recognize ourselves. We reformed. We transformed. Turned over a new leaf. Turned a corner, found ourselves near a scent that somehow reminded us of the problem, In ways we could never Put into words. That Little I-can’t-explain-it That makes it hard to think. That Rings like a siren inside.

In addiction, this means that because being addicted escalates wanting more than liking, the drug experience gets deeply carved into your memory. Anything you can associate with achieving a drug high, you will. As a result, when you try to quit, everything from a spoon (you could use it to prepare drugs) to a street (this is where the dealer lives!) to stress (when I feel like this, I need drugs) can come to drive craving. Desire fuels learning, whether it is normal learning or the pathological “overlearning” that occurs in addiction. You learn what interests you with ease because desire motivates. In contrast, it’s far more difficult to learn something you don’t want to understand or care to comprehend. Berridge and Robinson’s research also helps resolve another paradox: If dopamine signifies pleasure, then the brain should become less and less responsive to it as tolerance to a drug develops. But while tolerance clearly does occur, the opposite result is also seen in the brain. As I took cocaine, paranoia began to set in at lower and lower doses—not higher ones. The summer of 1988, it also took increasingly less drug to achieve the state of heart-pounding anxiety and mortal dread that I experienced so frequently. Neuroscientist Marc Lewis described his experience of this effect in his addiction memoir this way: “I kept pumping [cocaine] into my vein, this non-sterile solution, until my reeling consciousness, nausea, racing heart, and bloated capillaries told me that death was near. Later that night, I begged myself to stop.… But the urge would not relent.

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

Everywhere power has to be seen in order to give the impression that it sees. But this is not the case. It doesn't see anything. It is like a woman walled up in a 'peepshow'. It is separated from society by a two-way mirror. And it turns slowly, undresses slowly, adopting the lewdest poses, little suspecting that the other is watching and masturbating in secret. The metro. A man gets on - by his glances, gestures and movements, he carves out a space for himself and protects it. From that space, he sets his actions to those of the neighbouring, approximate molecules. He becomes the centre of a physical pressure, sniffs out hostile vibrations and emanations, or friendly ones, on the verge of panic. He joins up with others out of fear. He innervates his whole body with a calculated indifference, wraps himself in a superficial reverie, created only to keep others at a distance. He deciphers nothing, protects himself from the crossfire of everyone's gazes and sets his own as a backhand down the line, staring at a particular face at the back of the carriage until the very lightness of his stare stirs the other in his sleep. When the train accelerates or brakes, all the bodies are thrown in the same direction, like the shoals of fish which change direction simultaneously. The marvellous underwater lethargy of the metro, the self-defence of the capillary systems, the cruel play of vague thoughts - all while waiting for the stop at Faidherbe-Chaligny. The crucial thing is not to have sweeping views of the future, but to know where to plant your primal scene. The danger for us is that we'll keep running up against the wall of the Revolution. For this is the source of our misery: our phobias, our prohibitions, our phantasies, our utopias are imbedded in the nineteenth century, where their foundations were laid down. We have to put an end to this historical coagulation. Beyond it, all is permitted. It will perhaps be the adventure of the end of the century to dissolve the wall of the Revolution and to plunge on beyond it, towards the marvels of form and spirit.

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names; and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved, on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace, besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like; a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place; the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

The village square teemed with life, swirling with vibrant colors and boisterous chatter. The entire village had gathered, celebrating the return of their ancestral spirit. Laughter and music filled the air, carrying with it an energy that made Kitsune smile. Paper lanterns of all colors floated lazily above, their delicate glow reflecting on the smiling faces below. Cherry blossoms caught in the playful breeze, their sweet, earthy scent settling over the scene. At the center, villagers danced with unbridled joy, the rhythm of the taiko drums and the melody of flutes guiding their steps. To the side, a large table groaned under the weight of a feast. Sticky rice balls, steamed dumplings, seaweed soup, sushi, and more filled the air with a mouthwatering aroma. As she approached the table, she was greeted warmly by the villagers, who offered her food, their smiles genuine and welcoming. She filled a plate and sat at a table with Goro and Sota, overlooking the celebration. The event brought back a flood of memories of a similar celebration from her childhood—a time when everything was much simpler and she could easily answer the question who are you? The memory filled her heart with a sweet sadness, a reminder of what she lost and what had carved the road to where she was now. Her gaze fell on the dancing villagers, but she wasn’t watching them. Not really. Her attention was fully embedded in her heart ache, longing for the past, for the life that was so cruelly ripped away from her. “I think... I think I might know how to answer your question,” she finally said, her voice soft and steady, barely audible over the cacophony of festivity around them. “Oh?” Goro responded, his face alight with intrigue. “I would have to tell you my story.” Kitsune’s eyes reflected the somber clouds of her past. Goro swallowed his bite of food before nodding. “Let us retire to the dojo, and you can tell me.” They retreated from the bustling square, leaving behind the chaos of the celebration. The sounds of laughter and chatter and drums carried away by distance. The dojo, with its bamboo and sturdy jungle planks, was bathed in the soft luminescence of the moonlight, the surface of its wooden architecture glistening faintly under the glow. They stepped into the silent tranquility of the building, and Kitsune made her way to the center, the smooth, cool touch of the polished wooden floor beneath her providing a sense of peace. Assuming the lotus position, she calmed herself, ready to speak of memories she hadn’t confronted in a long time. Not in any meaningful way at least. Across from her, Goro settled, his gaze intense yet patient, encouraging her with a gentle smile like he somehow already understood her story was hard to verbalize.

Here before you lies the memorial to St. Cefnogwr, though he is not buried here, of course.” At her words, an uncanny knowing flushed through Katy and, crazy-of-crazy, transfixed her. “Why? Where is he?” Traci stepped forward, hand on her hip. A you’re-right-on-cue look crossed the guide’s face. She pointed to the ceiling. Traci scoffed. “I meant, where’s the body?” Her American southern accent lent a strange contrast to her skepticism. Again, the tour guide’s arthritic finger pointed upward, and a smile tugged at her lips, the smokers’ wrinkles on her upper lip smoothing out. “That’s the miracle that made him a saint, you see. Throughout the twelve hundreds, the Welsh struggled to maintain our independence from the English. During Madog’s Rebellion in 1294, St. Cefnogwr, a noble Norman-English knight, turned against his liege lord and sided with the Welsh—” “Norman-English?” Katy frowned, her voice raspy in her dry throat. “Why would a Norman have a Welsh name and side with the Welsh?” She might be an American, but her years living in England had taught her that was unusual. “The English nicknamed him. It means ‘sympathizer’ in Welsh. The knight was captured and, for his crime, sentenced to hang. As he swung, the rope creaking in the crowd’s silence, an angel of mercy swooped down and—” She clapped her hands in one decisive smack, and everyone jumped. “The rope dangled empty, free of its burden. Proof, we say, of his noble cause. He’s been venerated ever since as a Welsh hero.” Another chill danced over Katy’s skin. A chill that flashed warm as the story seeped into her. Familiar. Achingly familiar. Unease followed—this existential stuff was so not her. “His rescue by an angel was enough to make him a saint?” ever-practical Traci asked. “Unofficially. The Welsh named him one, and eventually it became a fait accompli. Now, please follow me.” The tour guide stepped toward a side door. Katy let the others pass and approached the knight covered in chainmail and other medieval-looking doodads. Only his face peeked out from a tight-fitting, chainmail hoodie-thing. One hand gripped a shield, the other, a sword. She touched his straight nose, the marble a cool kiss against her finger. So. This person had lived about seven hundred years ago. His angular features were starkly masculine. Probably had women admiring them in the flesh. Had he loved? An odd…void bloomed within, tugging at her, as if it were the absence of a feeling seeking wholeness. Evidence of past lives frozen in time always made her feel…disconnected. Disconnected and disturbed. Unable to grasp some larger meaning. Especially since Isabelle was in the past now too, instead of here as her maid of honor. She traced along the knight’s torso, the bumps from the carved chainmail teasing her fingers. “The tour group is getting on the bus. Hurry.” Traci’s voice came from the door. “Coming.” One last glance at her knight. Katy ran a finger down his strong nose again. “Bye,” she whispered.

When We Want God to Breathe New Life into Our Marriage Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. ISAIAH 43:18-19 WE ALL HAVE TIMES when we know we need new life in our marriage. We feel the strain, the tension, the sameness, or possibly even the subtle decay in it. When there is so much water under the bridge over what seems like a river of hurt, apathy, or preoccupation, we know we cannot survive the slowly and steadily rising flood without the Lord doing a new thing in both of us. The good news is that God says He will do that. He is the God of new beginnings, after all. But it won’t happen if we don’t make a choice to let go of the past. We have been made new if we have received Jesus. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). But in a marriage, it is way too easy to hang on to the old disappointments, misunderstandings, disagreements, and abuses. It becomes a wilderness of hurtful memories we cling to because we don’t want to be hurt, disappointed, misunderstood, disregarded, fought with, or abused again. Hanging on to old patterns of thought and negative memories keeps them fresh in your mind. And you don’t let your husband forget them, either. You remain mired in them because you don’t feel the situation has been resolved—and it still hurts. Only God can give you and your husband a new beginning from all that has gone on in the past. Only He can make a road in the wilderness of miscommunication and misread intentions, and make a cleansing and restoring river to flow in the dry areas of your relationship. Everyone needs new life in their marriage at certain times. And only the God of renewal can accomplish that. My Prayer to God LORD, I ask that You would do a fresh work of Your Spirit in our marriage. Make all things new in each of us individually and also together. Dissolve the pain of the past where it is still rising up in us to stifle our communication and ultimately our hope and joy. Wherever we have felt trapped in a wilderness of our own making, carve a way out of it for us and show us the path to follow. If there are rigid and dry areas between us that don’t allow for new growth, give us a fresh flow of Your Spirit to bring new vitality into our relationship. Help us to stop rehearsing old hurtful conversations that have no place in any life committed to the God of new beginnings. Sweep away all the old rubble of selfishness, stubbornness, blindness, and the inability to see beyond the moment or a particular situation. Only You can take away our painful memories so that we don’t keep reliving the same problems, hurts, or injustices. Only You can resurrect love, excitement, and hope where they have died. Help us to forgive fully and allow each other to completely forget. Help us to focus on Your greatness in us, instead of each other’s faults. Holy Spirit, breathe new life into each of us and into our marriage today.

But in all that carved and sculptured splendour of the history of England, its wars, its wealth, and its religion, its princes and prelates, and its imperial conquests, there were only two memorials that touched the heart. One was the chantry of William of Wykeham, saved from Cromwell's destroyers by the drawn sword of a Wykehamist captain, a Cromwellian, who stood upon the chantry steps and, against all comers, defended the tomb of the Founder. And the other was the little old lady of College Street, who commanded no armies and attacked no religions, who was burnt at no stake and married no prince, whose life added no faintest ripple to the waves and storms of England, and no fragment of a line to its recorded history; who is, alone among mortals, loved by all and hated by none, and who is, alone among the Great, imitated by none and parodied by none. English of the English, heart of English heart, bone of English bone, kindliest and gayest and gentlest, her memorial is not so wide as a church door nor so high as Albert's, but it is in Alfred's town, in Wykeham's cathedral, near Arthur's Table, and it will serve.

Sterling Memorial, the main library at Yale, had been built to resemble a Gothic cathedral, replete with stained glass, carved stonework, and a crenellated tower. Completed in 1930, the structure was "as near to modern Gothic as we dared" according to its architect, James Gamble Rogers. The use of the word "dare" always intrigued me. It suggested boundaries and infractions. There was, as I had come to expect at Yale, a scandalous story attached to the library's design. The benefactress, an old woman with failing eyesight, wanted a place of worship, and Yale wanted a library. Flouting its own motto, Lux et Veritas, Yale presented her with a structural trompe l'oeil. A cathedral in its outlines, but in its details a pantheon to books, where King Lear was a demigod and Huckleberry Finn a mischievous angel. The visual world had already become a greasy smudge to the benefactress, so the old biddy died never knowing the difference. Light and Truth, indeed.

carved to the side,

Beauty and stone In the huge town square, A statue carved from stone witnessed every passer by, And wondered how it could similar movements acquire, So that it too could walk if not fly, Its eyes constantly looked at the strange faces, Its posture was always the same, It stood at just one place and it could never visit other places, For it had sacrificed everything in the static beauty’s name, That is still, motionless, feelingless and always the same, It even perceives different things with single perception of mind, Cursed to play over and over again the same game, Because for the statue-like beauty everything is predefined, The posture, the view, the stance, and I guess even its every thought, At least that is how I feel when I look at the statue placed in the main town square, It seems to seek what it since eternity has sought, Because it may bear a fixed expression, but that has nothing to do with its desire, Because it expresses what its sculptor felt, And in this crowded town square it looks the same every night, everyday and every time, Of its own sweet will it has never with anything dealt, It has witnessed many lovers’ kisses, and it has been witness to many a crime, But it is its irony to be a statue and nothing else, Beautiful to look at and admire, But it has a missing pulse, That of real, warm, sensitive and sensate beauty in its prime, So, I sometimes look at it and just pretend it noticed me, As I leave the spot, I see it unmoved and feelingless, To it nothing matters, who you are or who you wish to be, Because it is just beauty carved from stone, completely lifeless, And then my love I think of you, and I miss you, So I leave the statue and its stone carved beauty behind, Because the statue is beautiful, but it cannot be you, Therefore, instead in my memories and in my heart beats you I discover and always manage to find!

In a quiet abode, where shadows weep, Lived the saddest grandmother, her sorrow ran deep. Once a home filled with laughter and cheer, Now echoes silence, a symphony of tears. Her eyes, like windows to a weathered soul, Glistened with memories that took their toll. A tale unfolded of love's sweet refrain, Now stained with loss, an enduring pain. Beside the hearth where warmth once thrived, Loneliness lingered, love deprived. A husband's absence, a void untold, Left her heart shattered, bitter and cold. Her family, once a vibrant bouquet, Now scattered petals, drifting away. The echoes of laughter, a distant sound, In the vast emptiness that sorrow found. Photographs whispered of days long past, A love that forever seemed to last. But time, a cruel and relentless stream, Carved lines of grief in a once joyous dream. Through tear-stained letters and faded attire, The saddest grandmother stoked love's dwindling fire. A matriarch cradled in solitude's embrace, Longing for the touch of her love's warm grace. Her children, grown and scattered like leaves, Each carried a piece of the pain she conceives. Yet, united by grief, a bittersweet thread, Bound by the love that time hadn't shed. In twilight's embrace, she wept in despair, A tapestry woven with threads of wear. The saddest grandmother, weathered and gray, Whispered to the wind the words she couldn't say. For in the echoes of her silent plea, Lingered the remnants of love's decree. A tale of loss, etched in the lines, Of the saddest grandmother, where sorrow resigns.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

That’s the power of memory, he supposes. Every one is unique, carved into neurons and strengthened through emotions and senses. It’s why so many adults never move past the music of their youth.

The first gift from parents to a child, after the gift of life itself, is a name. The given name is a gift for a lifetime – indeed, for more than a lifetime. When we are gone, our name carved in stone and the memories it evokes will be, for nearly all of us, all that remains. Here is a gift that is not only permanent but possibly life-shaping. Here is a gift that cannot be refused; here is a gift that cannot easily be put aside; here is a gift that must be worn and that straightaway not only marks but constitutes one’s identity.

Bryce stared at the hard-faced, beautiful female who could have rivaled the Hind for sheer badassery and beauty. Theia. Silene’s next words only confirmed how alike the ancient Fae Queen and the Hind were: But my mother, Theia, used the time she served the Daglan to learn all she could about their instruments of conquest. The Dread Trove, we called it in secret. The Mask, the Harp, the Crown, and the Horn. From the corner of her vision, Bryce spied Nesta glancing her way at the last word. The Horn had been sister to the Mask, and the Harp Nesta had mentioned. It had come from here, and worse, was part of some deadly arsenal of the Asteri— And Theia. The carving in the tunnel of the crowned, masked queen—Theia—flashed in Bryce’s memory. She’d been holding two instruments: a horn and a harp. The Daglan, Silene went on, always quarreled over who should control the Trove, so more often than not, the Trove went unused. It was their downfall.

My gift comes with its challenges, too,” she says to me after a few laps around the room. For a long time I thought her gift was simple, just seeing other people’s memories at a touch. But it’s more than that. She lives with the past always tugging at her, trying to carry her away on its tide. “Since Ori—” She stops, swallows, starts again. “I’ve been getting stuck in memories. Which is fine when they’re good ones, like with Ast, but they’re not always good, and they come into my dreams—

As leaves fall, I remember the times when love was happier and a lot easier. The countless letters I wrote and kept. The middle bench that may still contain our names carved. The compass that I lost afterwards. As leaves fall, I stand still smiling. Soon enough, a perpetual sadness fills here and there. Like dust that piles up thickly once left unnoticed. That happiness is a memory now. As leaves fall, I realise that not everything stays and sometimes, it's better that way. The words that kept ringing in your head had always said, "Autumn leaves must fall." As leaves fall, I decide to move a step further away. Knowing full well there's no going back anymore. It's time to bid the promised farewell. Until we meet again. A hope. As leaves fall, the revelation dawns on me. The leaves are falling. As it says. The leaves are not dancing with the wind. As it says. The leaves are falling. As distant as you, from me. Me, from you. As leaves fall, I am choosing myself. I may never unlove this person. But I'll soon crystallize everything that belonged to that time and leave. I'm choosing to do that. As leaves fall. - Athira Krishnakumar

Her hands groped around his neck, her fingers lacing through the thick shorn locks at the back of his head. The hard, clean contours of Keir's face rubbed against hers, a different feeling than the coarse tickle of his beard. But the mouth was the same, full and erotic, searingly hot. He consumed her slowly, searching with his tongue, licking deep into each kiss. Wild quivers of pleasure went through her, weakening her knees until she had to lean against him to stay upright. As her head tilted back, a forgotten tear slid from the outer corner of her eye to the edge of her hairline. His lips followed the salty track, absorbing the taste. Keir cradled her cheek in his hand, his shaken whisper falling hotly against her mouth. "Merry, love... my heart's gleam, drop of my dearest blood... you should have told me." Merritt heard her own weak reply as if from a distance. "I thought... in some part of your mind... you might have wanted to forget." "No." Keir crushed her close, nuzzling her hard against her hair and disheveling the pinned-up coils. "Never, love. The memory slipped out of reach for a moment, is all." His hand coasted slowly up and down her spine. "I'm so damned sorry for the way I've been trying to keep you at a distance. I dinna know you were already inside my heart." He paused before adding wryly, "Mind, I did have to jump from a three-story window, with little to break the fall but my own hard head." Taking one of her hands, he pressed her palm over his pounding heartbeat. "But you were still in here. Your name is carved so deep, a million years could no' erase it.

You own me, Christy. Not my brothers. Not Malik. Not my dark past. Not the ghosts that haunt me. Not the walls of this castle and the memories within them, nor the monster that still lingers inside my chest. You. Own. Me. My heart is yours. You can carve it out of my chest right here and now, and I wouldn’t stop you. Just know that it’s yours to do what you want with. It’s yours.

That you and I will stay bound together by that which is nameless and runs deeper than vows, until the very end, when the isle takes my bones into the ground and my name is nothing but memory carved into a headstone.

Why?” He knew what I meant. “Mor gets spooked. And what Az did today scared the shit out of her.” “The violence?” “The violence as a result of what he feels, lingering guilt over the deal with Eris—and what neither of them will face.” “Don’t you think it’s been long enough? And that taking Helion to bed is likely the worst possible thing to do?” But I had no doubt Helion needed a distraction as much as Mor did. From thinking too long about the people they loved—who they could not have. “Mor and Azriel have both taken lovers throughout the centuries,” he said, wings shifting slightly. “The only difference here is the close proximity.” “You sound remarkably fine with this.” Rhys glanced over a shoulder to where I lingered by the foot of the massive ivory bed, its carved headboard fashioned after overlapping waterlilies. “It’s their life—their relationship. They have both had plenty of opportunities to confess what they feel. Yet they have not. Mor especially. For private reasons of her own, I’m sure. My meddling isn’t going to make it any better.” “But—but he loves her. How can he sit idly by?” “He thinks she’s happier without him.” His eyes shone with the memory—of his own choice to sit back. “He thinks he’s unworthy of her.” “It seems like an Illyrian trait.

To you, in this very stone, Silene had said, I leave the inheritance and the burden that my own mother passed to me. This place, this Prison and the court it had once been, was Bryce’s inheritance. Hers to command, as Silene had commanded it. And that memory, of Silene lying next to the Harp in the center of this room, reaching for one of the carvings with a kernel of light forming at her finger … In this very stone … Silene had warped her former palace and home into this Prison. She must have imbued some magic in the rock to do it. Must have given over some part of her power to not only change the terrain, but to house the monsters in their cells.

But memories are etched into skin like carvings on a tree.

the kind of photographs that were popular during the war – mementos of a shared camaraderie; but more importantly in a time when death was indiscriminate and sudden, they were a record, in the event that the worst should happen, that you had actually lived – that you were more than just a name carved on a memorial to the fallen.

The wind stirred his loose hair and Sorasa assessed him for the first time since her memory failed. Since the deck of the Tyri ship caught fire, and someone seized her around the middle, plunging them both into the dark waves. She did not need to guess to know who. Dom’s clothing was torn but long dry. He still wore the leather jerkin with the undershirt, but his borrowed cloak had been left to feed the sea serpents. The rest of him looked intact. He had only a few fresh cuts across the backs of his hands, like a terrible rope burn. Scales, Sorasa knew. The sea serpent coiled in her head, bigger than the mast, its scales flashing a dark rainbow. Her breath caught when she realized he wore no sword belt, nor sheath. Nor sword. “Dom,” she bit out, reaching between them. Only her instincts caught her, her hand freezing inches above his hip. His brow furrowed again, carving a line of concern. “Your sword.” The line deepened, and Sorasa understood. She mourned her own dagger, earned so many decades ago, now lost to a burning palace. She could not imagine what Dom felt for a blade centuries old. “It is done,” he finally said, fishing into his shirt. The collar pulled, showing a line of white flesh, the planes of hard muscle rippling beneath. Sorasa dropped her eyes, letting him fuss. Only when something soft touched her temple did she look up again. Her heart thumped. Dom did not meet her gaze, focused on his work, cleaning her wound with a length of cloth. It was the fabric that made her breath catch. Little more than a scrap of gray green. Thin but finely made by master hands. Embroidered with silver antlers. It was a piece of Dom’s old cloak, the last remnant of Iona. It survived a kraken, an undead army, a dragon, and the dungeons of a mad queen. But it would not survive Sorasa Sarn. She let him work, her skin aflame beneath his fingers. Until the last bits of blood were gone, and the last piece of his home tossed away. “Thank you,” she finally said to no reply.

I have never returned to this lost paradise. Sometimes I am struck with the sudden desire to go to the Gare de lest, board the Orient Express, and retrace the route between Innsbruck and Plumeshof. As I so often saw other more or less close friends of the Welser family do, I fantasize about showing up without warning in the pretty meadow surrounded by fir trees and making the climb to the house while thinking only of Aunt Heidi, who has long since gone the to join her two older sons and their father in heaven. I would concentrate on her so strongly that I would eventually see her again on the doorstep, hastily drying her flour-covered hands in her apron; her opal eyes would brighten when she saw me. She would spread her arms while joyfully shouting: "Franziska!" and I would run to her calling back, "Aunt Heidi, Aunt Heidi!" Kurt's Kurt's contagious laughter would echo in the distance. Lilo, smiling, would be hanging out the laundry. A lifetime of love would still be stretching out before them. A delicious aroma of pancakes would be drifting in the air ... The large earthenware oven, the eiderdown quilts, the painted wooden chairs with a little heart carved in them like the shutters ... nothing would have changed.

Yonder loosestrife, gusts carry into sea. Totemic wing. Ghost wafts above water, unravels the seismic splay of muscle tissue in the flow. Waves lap into relentless roars. Ghost in a landscape of rain carves bone beyond aviary. Water curls form a heaviness in the body. North-coast. Clef wave with ghost made of fig leaves. A storm groans with compost hands to return cyan-blue to the sea. The listless downpour submerges ghost but ghost rises to the surface with gills. Water is a memory trail of floodlines.

Within seconds of being bound, everyone felt deathly; yet they could not die, death was not visible; eternal was their God, the one who cannot be heard. Their eyes were carved out, Their teeth were sawed off, Their legs were amputated, Their intestines were ripped out, and they were nailed to the beams by their wrist. After their formal lives in the world ended, the damned sang songs of tears; they were emptied of the memories of their loved ones, and they were tortured by demons in an indescribable sense of suffering. Since the divine creator is actually dead, he lures them into believing in something that does not exist by making them believe that he is real and loving. In fact, he is the Devil himself.

The High Priestess looked exactly as I remembered, both in those memories Rhys had shown me and in my own daydreamings of using the talons hidden beneath my nails to carve out her eyes, then her tongue, then open up her throat.

THE ROAD: The road is paved with heavy stone and carved along its tender edge are memories of healing and of rage so wild and free and cruel it took no remorse it threw itself into the flames and rose so high I never thought I’d see another sight so cold with truth. And memories of healing held themselves apart, they wouldn’t stand to see themselves by the light that gives no remorse to anybody other. The road goes on and on it leaves you with no clue of end it leaves as it stretches to the distance and at some point, some random stone I fall into my heavy bones and look upon the tender edges carved with memories of healing and of rage so wild and free and cruel it never turns away the truths that are accepted by no other.

One of the most beneficial things that brain research has done is it’s made it very hard for us to split cognition from emotion. For example, the areas of the brain most involved in memory—the quintessential cognitive function—are strongly tied to the emotion areas. Carol Dweck of Stanford University reiterates this point: neuroscience shows that we can’t carve people up—there isn’t the cognitive person, the emotional person, the motivational person, the social person. All of these co-occur in the brain.

My strength wanes, she said. I hope that my life has been spent wisely. Atoning for my mother’s crimes and foolishness and love—and trying to make it right. I carved these tunnels, the path here, so some record might exist of what we were, what we did. But first I had to erase all of it from recent memory. Her face faded away, and more images began. A faster montage. Silene, walking away from the Harp and through the empty, beautiful halls of a palace carved into the mountain—this mountain. Our home had been left empty since we’d vanished. As if the other Fae thought it cursed. So I made it truly cursed. Damned it all.

Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it, they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return…. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but we shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation’s head rests somewhere in the elements, and that is all; but if the indignant seas or the profaned turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to tell the history of a young and once promising life—USELESS! USELESS!

But there’s two different types of reminiscing. Those who recall the night with the lover they spent their lives with—a beginning to a life full of treasured memories they’ll carry with them until the end of their days. The other is the remembrance of regret—the lover who got away, who gifted them a night of raptured bliss, only to have it be the bar by which every moment forward would fall short. Maybe it ended in tragedy. Maybe it was a forbidden affair not meant to be realized beyond that one magical rendezvous. Or perhaps they simply didn’t fight hard enough.

I have never returned to this lost paradise. Sometimes I am struck with the sudden desire to go to the Gare de l'Est, board the Orient Express, and retrace the route between Innsbruck and Plumeshof. As I so often saw other more or less close friends of the Welser family do, I fantasize about showing up without warning in the pretty meadow surrounded by fir trees and making the climb to the house while thinking only of Aunt Heidi, who has long since gone the to join her two older sons and their father in heaven. I would concentrate on her so strongly that I would eventually see her again on the doorstep, hastily drying her flour-covered hands in her apron; her opal eyes would brighten when she saw me. She would spread her arms while joyfully shouting: "Franziska!" and I would run to her calling back, "Aunt Heidi, Aunt Heidi!" Kurt's contagious laughter would echo in the distance. Lilo, smiling, would be hanging out the laundry. A lifetime of love would still be stretching out before them. A delicious aroma of pancakes would be drifting in the air ... The large earthenware oven, the eiderdown quilts, the painted wooden chairs with a little heart carved in them like the shutters ... nothing would have changed.

Wait for Me, Daddy August 8, 2024 at 9:46 AM [Verse] Wait for me, Daddy, she yelled, don't leave me behind, Running down the gravel road, her little shoes untied, The sun sinking low, casting shadows on the pines, A memory carved deep, through the years it still shines. [Verse 2] Wait for me, Daddy, don’t let me go astray, Her small voice trembling in the last light of day, As he hoisted his bag, weariness in his eyes, The weight of the world carried with each goodbye. [Chorus] Wait for me, Daddy, I'm almost home, Through the fields of golden corn, and the wildflowers grown, With every step, with every mile's stone, Wait for me, Daddy, you’re never alone. [Verse 3] Years rolled by like rivers flowing, fast and wild, Her heart stayed true, her spirit reconciled, Letters sent from places he had never known, A father’s love, distant but never overthrown. [Bridge] Through winters harsh and summers that gleamed bright, She held his words close, they became her guiding light, Through the laughter, through the tears unshown, She’d whisper to the stars, “Daddy, call me home.” [Chorus] Wait for me, Daddy, I'm almost home, Through the fields of golden corn, and the wildflowers grown, With every step, with every mile's stone, Wait for me, Daddy, you’re never alone.

A Magic Hour’s Dreaming by Stewart Stafford Is there a sight more fair than wheaten fields, Awaiting the sun's ambush to potently ignite? Colour vibrates beyond the eye revealed, To live, dance and breathe in honeyed light. Nature’s palette, painted hues so bright, Invites the bees to sip and man to dream, Of engineered art, dazzling to the sight, Authored lightning in a celestial seam. The creator’s canvas, mint beyond decay, Invites the inner child to replenish at source, Where Nature’s staff casts shadows away, Friendships bond as a trickling stream's course. An eyeblink flash carved in history's tree, Treasured riches pooled of those by our side. For in sepia’s sunflower memory, We court the hand of an agreeable bride. Fading birdsong underscores this bottled time, In butterfly hearts, the hourglass stilled sublime. Autumn's leaves, ochre embers, curtsied fall, Farewell Summer, until roused in New Year's call. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

His mind blurred, a haze as each fallen Companion flashed before him, their endings irrevocably carved into his memory. No songs would be sung of them. No great stories told.

Doesn’t matter how much distance I put between me and Echo, she’s in my veins. Her ink’s carved like a memory into my bones. She’s my ghost of all good and bad things.

dank water. They felt low, despite the presence of Ted’s name carved on a tree as a token of memory. As rain began to fall, Ted made one token cast himself, which he described as ‘a ceremonial farewell’, and there ‘among the rubbish’ he hooked ‘a huge perch’, one of the biggest he had ever caught: ‘It was very weird, a complete dream.’32 Manor Farm is now a gastropub, the Crookhill estate a golf course, the pond of the pike shrunk by mud and reed. The magic landscape survives only in Hughes’s writings.

According to Oviedo’s history, a Portuguese ship bound for home port from San Domingo was driven onto the Bermudan reefs in 1542 or early 1543. Fortunately for the thirty seamen on the vessel, the ship—like the Sea Venture almost seven decades later—was held in the grip of the coral, kept afloat long enough for the crew to salvage provisions, tools, spars, sails, and shrouds. Over the next four months, they constructed a new vessel they used to sail to San Domingo. It may have been one of the sailors from this Portuguese vessel who climbed to a cliff seventy feet above the sea on Bermuda’s south shore where he carved a cross, the date—“1543”—and what appear to be the letters TF or RP. No one knows for sure just what this carving represents. If the letters are TF, they might be some marooned or shipwrecked mariner’s initials, carved as a memorial to himself as he stared out to sea, searching for the sight of a friendly sail. If RP, they may stand for Rex Portugaline, representing an early Portuguese claim to the islands.

Celia’s instructions would remain carved in her daughter’s memory. Ruth was to always be a lady. “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way,” RBG later explained. “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect, be a good teacher, but don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad’s muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one’s skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you’d struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don’t want to forget, but you don’t want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist.

Liam had seen warriors playing chess, and started to pepper me with questions about the rules. As the dishes were removed, nothing would satisfy him but that we play a game. "I know your memory is not like ours," he spoke eagerly as he pulled a wooden box out from under the platform. "So I bartered for this." He pulled out the first piece with a flourish and pressed it into my hand. I studied it as he set the rest out on the board. The carving was amazing. It was a fierce warrior of the Plains on a galloping horse, poised to fling a lance at his opponent. But it was plain wood, with no color distinction. Then I glanced at the board and realized that it wouldn't be a problem telling the pieces apart. One side was the Firelanders, clearly, lean and fierce warriors of both sexes, armed to the teeth. The others were all chubby city-dwellers, unarmored, with no weapons, cowering in fear of their attackers. Even the castles looked afraid somehow. I arched an eyebrow at Liam, and he had the grace to look embarrassed. "The set is well carved," he offered as if in apology. I chuckled. "Well, let's just see how you fare against me, Warlord.

So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in some-thing that felt like it was there…. And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone…. And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.

The Indian tribes living along the river valleys and on the offshore islands from northern Washington to Alaska are called the Northwest Coast tribes. They are noted for their wood-carving, particularly for their totem poles. These carved cedar poles were originally corner posts for the Indian houses. Later the custom of erecting one large pole in front of the house was adopted. There are several different types of totem poles. Some were erected to the memory of the dead. Others portrayed the owner’s family tree or illustrated some mythological adventure. The poles varied in height from about 40 to 70 feet. The larger ones were as much as 3 feet in diameter. The carver was an important person in his tribe. For his work he might be paid from one hundred to two hundred and fifty blankets, each worth about three dollars. The early poles were painted black, white, and red. Other colors were used when the traders brought in factory-made paints.

But the memorials themselves are worthy of attention as well, not only for what they tell us about the presidents but because they leave a record of what we value and believe as a country. In a country founded on the principle that we’re all created equal, we’ve built Mount Rushmore, where we’ve carved only four of our equals’ heads at twelve times normal size—because the president, the one person whom we can all elect, represents and exemplifies all of us. So fairly or unfairly, we make the presidents bigger than the rest of us.

We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of people we never knew have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way.

Hunter turned toward her and looped an arm around her waist. His eyes were dark splashes in the moonlight. “Blue Eyes, it will be good. Trust this Comanche.” “How can it be, Hunter?” “I will make it so.” He feathered a finger across her bottom lip. Trust. His voice, his gentle touch, delved deep, turning her warm and liquid, melting her resistance. She closed her eyes. In four more days, maybe less, she would be back in Hunter’s village. “Hunter, why did you tie me to stakes again tonight? How long do you plan to do that?” “Until my touch is carved in your heart.” “Oh, Hunter, it’s already carved in my heart. When I ran from you, it wasn’t out of fear.” “You said hi, hites with a rifle. You will have no fear again. Anger, maybe much hatred, but no fear.” He trailed a knuckle along her cheek. “You made pictures of your remembering. Now I make new rememberings, so they are very much good.” Puzzled, Loretta studied his dark face. Then she realized he was referring to her memories of her mother’s death--the Comanches, the stakes, her torturous last minutes. He was deliberately evoking those memories, only to expunge them by gently loving her. When she thought of his stakes now, she thought of shivers running down her spine, of sweet kisses in moonlight, of wonderfully strong arms enfolding her with warmth. Tears sprang to her eye. “Thank you for the new memories, Hunter. They are very much good.” His face drew close. “This Comanche wants to make more new remembering.” She took a ragged breath. “I can’t. Don’t you see? To say yes is surrendering all that I am.” He manacled her wrists with his iron grip. “That too is why I tie you.” His lips brushed hers, setting her senses afire. “You will make war tomorrow?” He whispered the question into her mouth, his breath warm and sweet. His tongue touched hers. Loretta’s heart caught at the careful way he drew her against him. Tomorrow. It seemed soon enough for fighting him. For tonight, she couldn’t stop herself from loving him--one last time.

Writers’ never-ending quest involves investigating genuineness while carving out narrative nonfiction. They must strive to reach great truths by recounting untold lies with acute enthusiasm. Culmination of a sprawling personal saga is an attempt to flesh out from the ichors of a person’s reptilian instincts and mammalian brain patterns the epicene embodiment of the originator’s dream works intermingled with their actual remembered sensory observations. One unleashes their cache of blood-tinged memories along with an X-ray beam of reminiscent enlightenment to forge a flowing stream of self-consciousness dedicated to the task of hunting out a new way of perceiving, thinking, and communicating.

When the boys were little, I used to take them to the gleaming white Jefferson Memorial at the edge of the Tidal Basin. Under the dome, we would read the inscriptions carved into the walls—the paragraph of self-evident truths from the Declaration of Independence, the four sentences from a religious freedom bill Jefferson drafted in 1777, the excerpt from a letter he wrote in 1816 (“Institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors”).

In the wake of World War I, however, the British and French took out their imperial pens and carved up what remained of the Ottoman dynastic empire, and created an assortment of nation-states in the Middle East modeled along their own. The borders of these new states consisted of neat polygons—with right angles that were always in sharp contrast to the chaotic reality on the ground. In the Middle East, modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and the various Persian Gulf oil states all traced their shapes and origins back to this process; even most of their names were imposed by outsiders. In other words, many of the states in the Middle East today—Egypt being the most notable exception—were not willed into existence by their own people or developed organically out of a common historical memory or

I love you for the million kindnesses in your heart, your infectious enthusiasm, your search for the perfect deep-fried cheese curds. I love that you take apart a recipe, look at the parts, then put it back together better than before. I love that my first memory of you is the smell of vanilla, coconut, and bacon. I love that you wear Crocs in the kitchen and heels when we go on dates. I want to fill a wall with magnets for all our special memories. I want to carve the Thanksgiving turkey using your hand-painted carving set every year for the next fifty. I want to cook with you, laugh with you, make love to you, and most of all, I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

If this was something I could cut out of myself with a knife,' he said, dropping her shoulders to bare his chest, as though exposing some treacherous organ, 'I would start cutting. I would carve it out if it killed me. But it’s not .' He shook his head, and finally his voice subsided. 'It’s been there all my life, since I was a tiny boy. This fear is part of every memory I have.

There once was a river, who came upon a brook, And with all his strength, His current was no match for the brook For the brook hid her strength in her gentle touch, Carving her memory slowly over time into his, Making her path so etched in that fate dared him to forget That the brook who once changed the river’s course... Will always hold his heart And that time would only strengthen What the river already knew— he would never be the same without her. And to think a little brook could overtake a river so...

The Parthenon was 228 feet long by 101 broad, and 64 feet high; the porticoes at each end had a double row of eight columns; the sculptures in the pediments were in full relief, representing in the eastern the Birth of Athene, and in the western the Struggle between that goddess and Poseidon, whilst those on the metopes, some of which are supposed to be from the hand of Alcamenes, the contemporary and rival of Phidias, rendered scenes from battles between the Gods and Giants, the Greeks and the Amazons, and the Centaurs and Lapithæ. Of somewhat later date than the Parthenon and resembling it in general style, though it is very considerably smaller, is the Theseum or Temple of Theseus on the plain on the north-west of the Acropolis, and at Bassæ in Arcadia is a Doric building, dedicated to Apollo Epicurius and designed by Ictinus, that has the peculiarity of facing north and south instead of, as was usual, east and west. Scarcely less beautiful than the Parthenon itself is the grand triple portico known as the Propylæa that gives access to it on the western side. It was designed about 430 by Mnesicles, and in it the Doric and Ionic styles are admirably combined, whilst in the Erectheum, sacred to the memory of Erechtheus, a hero of Attica, the Ionic order is seen at its best, so delicate is the carving of the capitals of its columns. It has moreover the rare and distinctive feature of what is known as a caryatid porch, that is to say, one in which the entablature is upheld by caryatides or statues representing female figures. Other good examples of the Ionic style are the small Temple of Niké Apteros, or the Wingless Victory, situated not far from the Propylæa and the Parthenon of Athens, the more important Temple of Apollo at Branchidæ near Miletus, originally of most imposing dimensions, and that of Artemis at Ephesus, of which however only a few fragments remain in situ. Of the sacred buildings of Greece in which the Corinthian order was employed there exist, with the exception of the Temple of Jupiter at Athens already referred to, but a few scattered remains, such as the columns from Epidaurus now in the Athens Museum, that formed part of a circlet of Corinthian pillars within a Doric colonnade. In the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, designed by Scopas in 394, however, the transition from the Ionic to the Corinthian style is very clearly illustrated, and in the circular Monument of Lysicrates, erected in 334 B.C. to commemorate the triumph of that hero's troop in the choric dances in honour of Dionysos, and the Tower of the Winds, both at Athens, the Corinthian style is seen at its best. In addition to the temples described above, some remains of tombs, notably that of the huge Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in memory of King Mausolus, who died in 353 B.C., and several theatres, including that of Dionysos at Athens, with a well-preserved one of larger size at Epidaurus, bear witness to the general prevalence of Doric features in funereal monuments and secular buildings, but of the palaces and humbler dwelling-houses in the three Greek styles, of which there must have been many fine examples, no trace remains. There is however no doubt that the Corinthian style was very constantly employed after the power of the great republics had been broken, and the Oriental taste for lavish decoration replaced the love for austere simplicity of the virile people of Greece and its dependencies. CHAPTER III

How can I be certain I’m not manufacturing a memory to match the evidence? You can’t rely on memory. You can’t rely on ancient artifacts, either, to tell you a story you can live with. You can rely only on the sculpture of your life you carve out of the available material, the one that stands by while you muddle your way into your future. Patrick

I thought about Gobi and her sister and the way it had all come unraveled. I thought about my dad. When you’re young, you think your father can do anything. Unless he was this severely abusive person and beat you or got drunk and smashed things, you probably worshiped him. At least most of the guys I knew were like that. They might not have used those exact words, but they all have some cherished memory of something they did with their father, even if it was just a shiny, far-off moment. I remembered being eight years old and making a Pinewood Derby car for Boy Scouts. Dad had brought out a gleaming red Craftsman toolbox that I had never seen before and helped me carve the car out of a block of wood, and we sat at the kitchen table painting it silver and blue with red flames up the side. I drank Pepsi and he sipped a beer. When we finished, the car didn’t weigh enough, so we put lead weights in the bottom and sprayed lubricant on the wheels until it rolled freely from one side of the table to the other. I won third place, and he said, “I’m proud of you.” I remembered going fishing with him up in Maine, taking a little motorboat out across the foggy lake until it was too dark to see our bobbers. I remembered him teaching me how to tie a necktie on the morning of my cousin’s wedding. I remembered seeing him in the stands at my first junior high swimming tournament, standing next to my mom and cheering. I remembered waking up very early in the morning and hearing him downstairs making coffee before slipping out to work. I remembered the first time I ever heard him swear.

My heart had started thumping with anticipation. So much had changed in Diana’s life. This would be our first meeting since she had become the Princess of Wales and a celebrity. Would she still be the same Diana underneath? Based on her letters, I thought so. Next Patrick and I were shown into the library, a warmer room with high ceilings and sunlight flooding in from tall windows. Carved wooden bookcases, glowing with a centuries-old patina, lined the walls and held leather-bound, gilt-edged volumes. I loved this room. I wished I could have leafed through a few of those beautiful old books. I was calmer now, prepared for a cozy mother-to-mother visit with Diana. Patrick and I stood expectantly in the center of the elegant room. I rested my right arm around his little shoulders. I needed the support more than he did. Then the door opened and Diana entered…with Prince Charles. I held my breath as she gave us a brilliant smile and briskly crossed the floor. The new Diana was truly breathtaking--beautiful, self-assured, polished, and stunning in her scarlet suit. She looked even more radiant in person than in her best pictures. She was absolute perfection, with her flawless complexion, starry blue eyes, and confident carriage. A remarkable and complete transformation from young nanny to global sensation--and she was only twenty-four!

We believed Harriet had been collected in 1835 by Charles Darwin himself. She was brought to Australia from England in 1841 by Captain Wickham aboard the HMS Beagle. Actually, three giant Galapagos tortoises had been donated to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, after Darwin realized they did not flourish in England, where he had originally taken them in 1835. How could we determine whether Harriet was one of the Darwin Three? Scott Thomson found a giant tortoise in the collection of the Queensland Museum that had been mislabeled an Aldabran tortoise. Carved on the carapace was the animal’s name. “Tom,” and “1929.” We now had potentially found two of the three Darwin tortoises. Harriet and Tom had been seen together in living memory. The third tortoise was never found and was presumed buried somewhere in the botanic gardens. Harriet lived on. Steve and I became very excited at this news. Our studies and research into Harriet’s history continued for years, and it was amazing to learn what a special resident we had at the zoo. Despite her impressive background, Harriet remained attractively modest. She had a sweet personality like a little dog. She loved hibiscus flowers, and certain veggies were her favorites. Steve carried on a practice that his parents had implemented: Whatever you feed animals should be good enough for you to eat. Thus Harriet got the most beautiful mustard greens, kale, eggplant, zucchinis, and even roses. In return, Harriet gave zoo visitors a rare chance to watch her keepers cuddle and scratch one of the grandest creatures on earth. She was the oldest living chelonian and the only living creature to have met Charles Darwin and traveled aboard the Beagle. And she gave us all something else, too--a lesson in how to live a long life. Don’t worry too much. Take it easy. Stop and munch the flowers. It was a lesson Steve noted and understood but could never quite take to heart. He was a meteor. Harriet was more of a mountain. In this world, we need both.

Weeping Willow Weeping willow, how your elongated leaves dangle in the mist of the air, you bring such true comfort into the needful eye. How your leaves sway from left to right, providing your own intricate dance so divine. Weeping willow, you provide the most comforting shade upon your layer of leaves making me feel encircled with love and safety. Weeping willow, as I lay under your silvery leaves, I look up for a helping hand, I see strength within your structure, can you help me? Weeping willow, as I climb upon you will you make sure I won't fall, will you catch me if I do? Weeping willow, as I sit upon you looking to the sky through your rustling leaves, will you hear my pain? Can I overcome such things? The weeping willows long leafed branches sway back and forth providing the gentlest of winds across one's face. The eyes close so slowly, a sigh escapes one's mouth. As one sits on the branch they feel if there is someone watching over them, comfort arises as the branches nestle one's sorrows. A tear slowly slides down their cheek as if all emotion was escaping them. The wind starts to slowly blow, once again the elongated leaved branches sway back and forth against the song of the wind, creating one's smile to appear slowly but surely. The long silvery leaves brush against ones cheek, as if it was the hand of comfort, wiping the sadness away. Weeping willow, I will climb down now, I have heard what you have had to say... The one steps down and walks around to the back of the willow tree as it faces such gleaming waters. They look at the carving at the back of the tree, something that has been carved there for years upon the dark bark. Their body slumps to the ground as their back presses against the bark, fingers reaching up to trace the well known loved one. The carved initials of a beloved memory. The one whispers, "Thank you for hearing me, Dad.

Do all memories of the poor huddle together in the villages? And do the rich keep their dreams in a box carved from minerals?

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivété - that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. It reflects itself in joy and grief, in my fathers sudden knowledge that he would not live to protect me, and in his determination to leave behind a part of himself - his spirit, his humanity - to illuminate my path, give light to my darkened world. He carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again.

Revelation has been within us since the origin of the World. Let us not, indeed, be mistaken: since the origin of the world, all possibilities and all future ideas have been in existence, as seeds of potential. It is, therefore, not to the future that it is necessary to look for revelation but the power of our memory. The poet of the enlightened land who conceived in very ancient times the symbol of the Earthly Paradise: God saying, after Adam had touched the Tree of Science, “He has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”—which is to say, the for and the against, the androgynous idea—“now we must make sure that he does not touch the Tree of Life and live forever”, thus condemning man to material labor; was several thousand years ahead, not only of his own time, but of ours. Humankind, as a whole, cannot follow the fulgurant course of an Idea; its progress is slower and “forward thinkers”—precursors—have to have the patience to wait until everyone else’s ideas have caught up with theirs: a patience often difficult for the thinker who, after being madly elevated, must return to his point of departure and, estranged by what he has seen, feels like a foreigner visiting his own world. The usefulness of precursors. Is it necessary to conclude that these forward thinkers, these bold recognitions, are useless? Quite the contrary, for it is in bringing superhuman heroes to life, imagining the reality of facts whose prototypes remain latent in the world of ideas, that poets and researchers construct the frame of the world. Their exceptional follies of today will become the banality of tomorrow, and the crowd will eventually hasten to take the presently-accessible steps which they are carving out in the clouds—and that crowd, in its blind course, will have been upraised without knowing it. Without changing position, the opposition of yesterday becomes the reaction of tomorrow, the exception becomes the law in its turn; only the Idea is immutable through its successive incarnations, its changes of material form: the relativities, in a word, that we call Life. It is for us to extract the substance from the shadow and seize the eternal element of things.

History is meant to be carved into stone, but the most magical of memories are those that exist only in your imagination. Time with erode away the etchings— but the heart never forgets.

What is Afterlife (The Sonnet) Read a few books, you live a little. Help a few beings, you live a lifetime. Heaven is not a place high above the sky, Heaven is the moment you're someone's lifeline. Even I enjoy a good dc and marvel story, But it mustn't turn you blind to reality. To live selfish is the animal's purgatory, To die while living for others is humanity. Memory is the fabric upon which time is carved. Where there is no memory, there is no time. Neurons are the building blocks of mind and memory. Where there is no neuron, there is no paradise. There's not one but two paradise, one real, another fiction. The real one is made of action, the other imagination.

Memory is the fabric upon which time is carved.

Our soul is a lot like the African elephant’s memory. Our soul intuitively remembers where it has buried the richest part of our life’s story even in the future chapters that haven’t been written yet by the light of our awareness. The soul knows. It remembers. It never forgets. The process of remembering becomes a lesson for us in the power of surrendering our limited perspective that only see what’s in front of us, and what we think may be waiting for us in some future moment. However, our soul sees deep into the distance of some future horizon of a time period that is waiting on the gift of time to mature to its fullness, to blossom on its own – outside of our own expectations and envisioned dreams because it is all part of our life’s predetermined story; a script carved in infinite time. That process of remembering becomes a lesson in the divine gift of believing, believing that the next moment is there waiting on us because our soul has already visited this path before, yet the lesson in it for us is that any future moment remains always just out of our reach, as we entrust our soul’s strength of memory to guide us on blind faith and firm footing to where our story needs to go to encourage our highest learning potential. We will thus forever be known by the tracks that we refollow when we follow the memory of our soul’s original path left on the dust of time. A lesson inspired by the mighty African elephant in what it means to surrender to life...

But what about my house in Heaven?" I asked, my tone soft and piteous. "Whatever would I do there? It's filled with my memories of Obadiah. We built it together with our own hands. We laid the marble and carved the statues. I sewed the curtains, the bedclothes and the tapestries. I even created the flowers and the landscaping which surrounded our grand mansion beside the sea…" I begin to sob, and Arik pulls me close. I rest my cheek against his chest and close my eyes. "Wh-When we first got to Heaven--me an' Obadiah--we were all each other had. Everyone else was still down on earth, mournin' us. Our physical bodies had been destroyed by Hana's guillotines. Timothy knew that his own death was comin', and he had specifically asked for the two of us to go and make a place for him in Heaven. When we arrived, Heaven was beautiful, but empty. I was suddenly able to see again, and the colors…my heart just danced, y'know? I began to create right away: houses, flowers, animals…it was glorious. I was never happier. It filled up my heart and pushed out the anguish an' guilt that I felt about leavin' all of you behind on earth to suffer. Obadiah and I were filled with so much joy then. I had never seen him so happy. An' the horses, Arik…the horses were his…beautiful, winged creatures, completely dedicated to him, but forever free...he would never have dreamed of restraining them. We would sit on the lanai and watch them...these beautiful creatures, who had nothing in their hearts but love…" I snuggle closer as he presses my head against his chest and weeps with me.

Galava dressed in spring green, plump and lush, the ground beneath her feet blooming flowers. Argas, mathematical formulae visible around him like a halo. Tya, her rainbow dress of veils shimmering as her fingers crackled with magic. Taja, dressed in silver, playing with a single coin. Ompher, looking less like a person than an animate statue carved from rock. Khored in red, raven-feathered, holding a glass sword. And last, Thaena, dressed in shroud white, crowned in burial roses.

Borges - his blind face like an Aztec woman's, that old shyster of metaphor, across whose open eyes pass flashes of magnesium without affecting him. The blind always seem to be holding their heads out of water. Yet they are gifted in unreality and cunning. I am sure he knows down to ten people how many are there to hear him, simply by listening, by sensing. The lecture is hopeless, but it is a sacrificial ceremony. The listeners are overwhelmed by the intelligence of this man whose cunning ploy is to make it seem as though he were speaking from beyond the grave, as if he were already dead. His muffled, syncopated, barely audible voice condemns the others to silence in the same way as he is condemned to the night. All the metaphors he uses are those of the night, including the thousand and first night, the finest since it is one added to eternity. He is without doubt also in his eighty-four-and-first year - i.e. he has one foot in eternity. There reigns all about him an ironic and cruel affectation. I don't know what animal he resembles. He has a soft spot for the tiger. Put a tiger in your liltrary and take away its sight: that's Borges. In this vegetation of Californian academics' soft encephalons, his silences carve lethal spirals. Since he can no longer see the world, he quotes it. His speech is one long quotation. ' Life itself is a quotation ', he says.

A thread of light leaked through the window, which was ajar, and he was able to make out the wide bed in which his father had died and his mother had slept every night since she was married. It was carved in black wood, with a canopy of angels in relief and a few scraps of red brocade that were frayed with age. His mother was propped up in a half-seated position. She was a block of solid flesh, a monstrous pyramid of fat and rags that came to a point in a tiny bald head with a pair of eyes that were sweet, blue, innocent, and surprisingly alive. Arthritis had transformed her into a monolithic being. She could no longer bend any of her joints or turn her head. Her fingers were clawed like the feet of a fossil, and in order to sit up in bed she had to be supported by a pillow at her back held in place by a wooden beam that, in turn, was propped against the wall. The passage of time could be read by the marks the beam had cut into the plaster: a path of suffering, a trail of pain. “Mama,” Esteban murmured, and his voice broke in his chest, exploding into a contained sobbing that erased in a single stroke his sad memories, the rancid smells, frozen mornings, and greasy soup of his impoverished childhood, his invalid mother and absent father, and the rage that had been gnawing at him ever since the day he first learned how to think, so that he forgot everything except those rare, luminous moments in which this unknown woman who now lay before him in her bed had rocked him in her arms, felt his forehead for fever, sung him lullabies, bent over to read the pages of a favorite book with him, had wept with grief to see him leave for work so early in the morning when he was still a boy, wept with joy when he returned at night, had wept. Mother, for me.

Scots have long memories,” he’d said, “and they’re not the most forgiving of people. There’s a clan stone out there with the name of MacKenzie carved on it, and a good many of my relatives under it.” He had smiled then, but not in jest. “I don’t feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven’t forgotten either.” No, not conquered. Not through a thousand years of strife and treachery, and not now. Defeated, scattered, but still surviving. Like Ian, maimed but upright. Like her father, exiled but still a Highlander.

Traditions are conditioned reflexes. Throughout Part 2 of this book, you will find suggestions for establishing family traditions that will trigger happy anticipation and leave lasting, cherished memories. Traditions around major holidays and minor holidays. Bedtime, bath-time, and mealtime traditions; sports and pastime traditions; birthday and anniversary traditions; charitable and educational traditions. If your family’s traditions coincide with others’ observances, such as celebrating Thanksgiving, you will still make those traditions unique to your family because of the personal nuances you add. Volunteering at the food bank on Thanksgiving morning, measuring and marking their heights on the door frame in the basement, Grandpa’s artistic carving of the turkey, and their uncle’s famous gravy are the traditions our kids salivated about when they were younger, and still do on their long plane rides home at the end of November each year. (By the way, our dog Lizzy has confirmed Pavlov’s observations; when the carving knife turns on, cue the saliva, tail wagging, and doggy squealing.) But don’t limit your family’s traditions to the big and obvious events like Thanksgiving. Weekly taco nights, family book club and movie nights, pajama walks, ice cream sundaes on Sundays, backyard football during halftime of TV games, pancakes in Mom and Dad’s bed on weekends, leaf fights in the fall, walks to the sledding hill on the season’s first snow, Chinese food on anniversaries, Indian food for big occasions, and balloons hanging from the ceiling around the breakfast table on birthday mornings. Be creative, even silly. Make a secret family noise together when you’re the only ones in the elevator. When you share a secret that “can’t leave this room,” everybody knows to reach up in the air and grab the imaginary tidbit before it can get away. Have a family comedy night or a talent show on each birthday. Make holiday cards from scratch. Celebrate major family events by writing personalized lyrics to an old song and karaoking your new composition together. There are two keys to establishing family traditions: repetition and anticipation. When you find something that brings out excitement and smiles in your kids, keep doing it. Not so often that it becomes mundane, but on a regular and predictable enough basis that it becomes an ingrained part of the family repertoire. And begin talking about the traditional event days ahead of time so by the time it finally happens, your kids are beside themselves with excitement. Anticipation can be as much fun as the tradition itself.

She plucked another figurine from the mantle: a rose carved from a dark sort of wood. She held it in her palm, its solid weight surprising, and traced a finger over one of the petals. 'He made this one for Elain. Since it was winter and she missed the flowers.' 'Did he ever make any for you?' 'He knew better than to do that.' She inhaled a shuddering breath, held it, released it. Let her mind calm. 'I think he would have, if I'd given him the smallest bit of encouragement, but... I never did. I was too angry.' 'You'd have your life overturned. You were allowed to be angry.' 'That's not what you told me the first time we met.' She pivoted to find him arching a brow. 'You told me I was a piece of shit for letting my younger sister go into the woods to hunt while I did nothing.' 'I didn't say it like that.' 'The message was the same.' She squared her shoulders, turning to the small broken cot in the shadows beside the fireplace. 'And you were right.

If I was to be limited to the memories of smell I would elaborate for you the brightness of Sagebrush in the rain Sun-soaked brows of laughing children Suburb lawns infused with lilac...

Sometimes grief turns you into a hardened sculpture...for in it is carved the faraway memories...sometimes grief kisses your every wound and awakens you to life again.........some other times grief turns you into a poet...or it makes you the poem itself.....or the song on the lips of a wounded heart......

You can’t rely on memory. You can’t rely on ancient artifacts, either, to tell you a story you can live with. You can rely only on the sculpture of your life you carve out of the available material, the one that stands by while you muddle your way into your future.

British stonemasons in Belgium were still at work carving the names of their nation’s missing onto memorials when the Germans invaded for the next war, more than 20 years later.

Our homes become like photo albums of the past. But these “photos” aren’t images that take up little space in a photo album or zero physical space on a computer. They’re items of furniture and wood carvings and cars and blankets and clothes. These memory objects can take up lots of room in your home. This is space you can’t fill with useful, functional items or new memory-associated items.

I would have preferred raised stones as markers," she said simply, and he understood that she was confiding a deeply private thing to him. "I imagined something upright, tall, with chiseled angels rising from it. I wanted a curved elaborate script to spell their names, a poem or a prayer carved into marble. I wanted a building built. A mausoleum.: She sighed. "I wanted something as magnificent as grief.

Don’t get sick, Victoria,” Kyle taunts as I retch, spilling my guts on the pavement, then forced to wallow in it as he holds me down for Lawrence to have his turn. “We’re just getting started.” “Don’t get sick, Kyle. We’re just getting started,” I say, slicing through another finger, taking one more digit that once held me in place. As he cries out, more memories assault me, and tears of pure hatred skid down my cheeks unexpectedly. “The daughter of a whore and a fucking pussy. You see, I know your dad never had the balls to kill those women. I just don’t care. Now take it, Victoria. Take it and shut the hell up.” “Take it!” I shout, slicing through another finger. “Take it and shut the hell up!” Jake holds him down harder as I work through all ten fingers, then tie up the damage, preventing him from bleeding too much. Kyle is a sobbing mess, but I wasn’t lying. We’re just getting started. “Your turn, Tyler. Saddle up. It’s bareback and fun tonight,” Kyle goads, grabbing my naked crotch and then slapping it. “It’s getting a little worn out.” “This is for me,” I hiss, slicing the blade down his torso, scooting back as he screams in agony. The slice is just shallow enough to burn like fire but not deep enough to bleed too much. Another memory surfaces, one that has my heart being suffocated and squeezed to death. “I’m sorry, Ms. Carlyle. But it seems like the damage done to your internal organs and the life saving measures they took at the hospital have prevented you from ever being able to have children. They were forced to perform an emergency hysterectomy.” More tears cascade down my cheeks as I slice him to the side, slowly flaying a piece of flesh from his body like the monstrous pro I’ve become. “This is for my father,” I tell him, carving another section.

I don’t want your gifts, Bjorn. I don’t want anything from you. If it were possible to erase you from my memories, I would do so.

In Eurasia, similar techniques were developed in the ancient ‘arts of memory’, where those trying to memorize stories, speeches, lists or similar material would each have a familiar ‘memory palace’. This consisted of a mental pathway or room in which a series of striking images could be arranged, each a cue to a particular episode, incident or name. One can only imagine what might happen if someone were to draw or carve one such set of visual cues, and a later archaeologist or art historian were to discover it, with no idea of the context, let alone what the story being memorized was actually about.

I don’t turn back. Because some lessons are worth the price of fine china, and some scars need to be visible—carved into mahogany and memory—to remind us why we can never go back.

they are called ‘rune sticks’–but also bone and stone. These are not the intricately decorated, professionally carved runic inscriptions that we find on memorial runestones, intended to be read and admired by all who passed by. These are ephemera: the scrappy Post-it notes, everyday text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time. And the biggest haul of these runic inscriptions–nearly 700 at current count–comes from Bryggen, the medieval harbourside at Bergen in Norway. They were found by archaeologists after some of the wooden buildings were destroyed by fire in 1955.

The forgetting carves the joy of return.

Stone rubbing is when ink, led or charcoal is used to rub against a blank sheet of paper that's placed on top of a carved or textured surface. The harder the attempt to rub and scratch the surface, the clearer the image on the other end is translated and transferred onto the sheet of paper. Having a pure and clear conscience allows The Creator to reveal what he wants us to see. Egos and selfish desires attempt to emulate by constructing a false narrative. Hard work is the friction and as we toil, only will our faith develop and recognize the process thats specially designed for our soul. The more we perform meritous acts the more the translation transfers the image from the creator to be seen and memorialize.

She began to see her own organism in the most clinical, mechanical terms. “I am now my own tool,” she mused. “I am also the craftsman wielding the tool. I am carving away at myself.

We are now reinforced by the fact that we no longer desire or crave food,” she wrote to a friend. She began to see her own organism in the most clinical, mechanical terms. “I am now my own tool,” she mused. “I am also the craftsman wielding the tool. I am carving away at myself.

I carved out little spaces within my heart; little, lovely mausoleums where I could lock each and every one of them away inside, keep the memories safe and close to me forever.

At the same time, it is important to remember that nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on fake memories. This is as true in the small scale of centuries as it is in the vast scale of life. Every genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. Your would-be ancestors in their many species, reaching back into the phylogenetic tree, were eaten, often by diseases, or sexually rejected before they could contribute genes to your legacy. The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of billions of years of extreme violence and poverty. Modernity is precisely the way individuals arose out of the ravages of evolutionary selection.

Not since Mr. Kaiser,” they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder’s crane wiped out their childhoods and their parents’ childhoods, blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-eight in case someone dropped by; as if Henry Kaiser had personally condemned them to live out their lives in California exile among only their token mementos, the calabashes and the carved palace chairs and the flat silver for forty-eight and the diamond that had been Queen Liliuokalani’s and the heavy linens embroidered on all the long golden afternoons that were no more.

God, even I don’t want to know. If I could scrub it from my mind, I would. If I could take a scalpel and carve the memories out, I would

Akos found the edge of the wall panel that would let him into the manor’s hidden passageways, and pulled it back. The familiar musty smell washed over him, sending him into memory. Terrified and desperately hopeful, with the toe of Eijeh’s shoe catching on his heel. And then, that little pool of heat in his gut as he followed a painted Cyra to the Sojourn Festival, the one that told him he liked her, no matter how hard he pretended otherwise. Liked her, then loved her. Then left her.

The last time I had walked into a crowd, it was to pretend to kill my own brother, and they had thirsted for my blood. And before that, he had carved my skin from my head to the tune of hundreds of cheers. I reached up to touch the silverskin that covered me from throat to jaw to skull. No, I did not have pleasant memories of crowds, and I was not likely to form them here, with only Ograns and Shotet exiles waiting for me.

So you are the daughter of an oracle, then.” I nod. “The sitting oracle of Thuvhe, yes.” “And the sister of an oracle, too, if Eijeh Kereseth still lives,” he says. “Yes, I’ve memorized all the oracle names, though I confess I had to use a few memory techniques. It’s quite a long mnemonic device. I would share it with you if it didn’t have a few vulgarities thrown in to keep it interesting.

What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding? Moreover, happily there are too many of you for the weak memory of mankind to be able to retain your names.

Legacy of Love In the future, when your children ask you, “What do these stones mean?” tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever. —JOSHUA 4:6-7     In your family’s history there are probably many examples of sacrifice—some you may know about, but many other sacrifices probably took place and were not recorded, mentioned, or elaborated on in family stories and journals. Consider how you have learned life lessons from those who did make sacrifices. What pleasures or luxuries or privileges do you enjoy today because of the toils and trials of past generations? How you honor such sacrifices becomes a part of your legacy to the next generation. If you are raising a family with God’s love and truth, that is honoring your life and the lives of those before you. If you are mentoring other women or girls, that is honoring the labor of many women of the past. When you have compassion on a stranger, that is honoring the acts of service that took place before you were born. We never want to let future generations forget what great sacrifices were made in order for us to be the persons, the families, and the nation we are. That’s why traditions are so important in life. They are attempts to pass on to future generations what of value has been passed on to us today. Joshua built a monument of stones so that the children of the future would ask about them and about their own heritage. What will your legacy be? What do you hope your children or your friends or your loved ones will carry with them after you are gone? Commit your ways to the ways of God, and your legacy will endure. It will become a heritage of faith and faithfulness that will help to encourage and inspire others. Your legacy won’t be in material possessions or in the details of a will. Your legacy will be discovered in the stones…the stepping stones…that created your path—each stone carved and polished by the Creator Himself. Prayer: Father God, remind me of the sacrifices made by those believers who persevered before

Change in fashion is simply the expression of an awakened intellect, groping in small things as in great for something better than it has known; and the use for a manual of fashion, such as we offer is, not to dictate to women any rule which they must blindly follow, but to afford such knowledge of varying costumes, and the manner of making them, that each may clothe herself appropriately, according to her appearance of age, or even mood. Why should not a woman's purity of mind, her quick eye for color, her aesthetic sense of fitness, be disclosed in her attire as well as in the pictures on her walls or her garden? Very few of us will ever carve a great statue, or paint a great picture but we all have clothes to wear; and it is a duty we owe to ourselves and those around us, to so drape the bodies that God has given us, as to make no discord in this beautiful, pleasant world. All of us have friends, or, it may be, children, with whom we would have a fair and tender memory. Carelessness and bad taste in dress, so far from being indicative of strength of mind, argues a certain vulgarity of feeling, just as vanity and foppery, on the other hand, prove a weak brain. Wise men or women make their dress so thoroughly in accordance with their person and character, that nobody notices it any more than the frame of a picture; but to be clothed shabbily, in the hopes that our inner perfections will overshadow our dress, is but the extreme of vanity. Peterson's Magazine, June 1873

She reaches in and pulls out the carved white marble box. My box of secrets. It has been years since she’s seen this box, though she could still sketch it from memory. It too looks smaller than she remembers. She wipes off a layer of dust and leaves her hand there for a moment, on the cool surface. She realizes she’s holding her breath, draws it in deeply, and opens the box. She unfolds the first letter inside, a small rectangular piece of faint pink stationery. Slowly, she reads the words written there in familiar childlike script: Dear Mom,         Today my teacher asked our class to write a letter to someone in another country. My father told me you are in India, but he doesn’t know your address. I am nine years old and in the fourth grade. I wanted to write you a letter to tell you I would like to meet you one day. Do you want to meet me? Your daughter, Asha The raw display of sentiment makes her cringe. She feels tears prick at the back of her eyes and the slow flood of emotions she has not experienced in a long time.

Even death can’t erase those memories. They were carved into every piece of me, including my soul.

When I was a boy I heard the story of an enthusiastic but entirely talentless boxer; when he died, they said, his family and neighbours had a gravestone carved showing this man standing in the ring, his hands bound up for fighting, his arms raised to strike; and underneath, the inscription ‘In memory of Polydamas, of whom it can truly be said, he never harmed his fellow men’. You know, I feel a bit like that Polydamas, only the other way round. He tried to hurt people but never managed it. I’ve tried to do good, on and off, my whole life, and I’ve left a trail of dead and mutilated bodies behind me wherever I’ve gone.

Like everything else in Balla, they were made of slate. The men worked them during slack times at the quarry. That’s what you did when you found a free half-hour: you worked your own headstone, cutting the cross or the crown at the top, and then carving your name and birthdate under ‘Sacred to the Memory of’ and a bas-relief opened book, leaving only the final date to be carved by another hand.

See the man under the stars, He drinks all day, he drinks all night He is trying to forget the love he has lost His heart is in servitude slavery and bondage To the greatest love, he has known And he knows it will not come back again Another sip of that bitter drink to sharpen his memories, another sip to forget himself To be left alone in a world where hope is absent, and his pain present each day, lost in the wilderness of life, lost in emotional gales of memories, shipwrecked upon the sand dunes of some uncharted territories, No rescue in sight, no one there to share his deepest thoughts his regrets and the joys his might He lived his life recklessly, and he has many regrets, but never the woman he fell in love with, her name is printed on his heart carved in his soul and swims in his mind The love garden is left unattended, there is no guard at the gates of love to protect and cherish, the flowers are blooming wild, and she is not there to take in the scent to walk among the roses so he can look at her one more time like she was in a dream and he was part of that reality That seems so far away in between the rivers of tears, love letters and poems, and the laughter that is carried forth from the other side, and her beautiful eyes smiling, lighting up his heart as the lonely moon starts its ascend on that same lonely journey he compares himself to the emptiness as he looks around him, she is not there He prays for the fool, he prays for the brave, he prays for the wise, he knows reality is all lies only pain is real, he takes another sip and salutes the passing ships in the night, he has no fight left in him, he has seen the light His soul runs free with the wild horses, and his heart flies with the eagles In the morning he knows he will waltz with her again through the morning mist, where he stops holding her face in his hands and kisses her lips, then looks into her eyes knowing this is his home Nothing more to say everything is perfect everything is beautiful, everything lived and everything died, no need for tears he knows she had the best years of his life, she had the best of everything he had to give, the fields are yellow and empty now, the summer is over, days come to pass, the weeks months and years following He takes another sip raises the bottle up towards the stars, as he sits there alone his shadow attached to him, under the stars under the moonlight The empty spaces bring sweet songs to take him back to his love, to that place where he felt alive, to that place where they both danced the waltz of life, but that has passed he wants to stay there as long as he can, but he reality calls him back to what’s left of life, under this sky, he smiles and says it’s just life, this too shall pass Kenan Hudaverdi 27/01/2025

The resulting garment was black, of course. But it was like no fabric I'd ever seen before, liquid and faintly glimmering. He had ordered each of his guardians to donate several of their feathers, and these he had woven into the material. They were not visible exactly, except as a suggestion of wings when the cloak caught the wind. It was a garment that needed no adornment, for it was like something snipped out of a dream, and he gave it none, apart from the row of buttons. I would have expected him to pick the finest of those I had gathered, but instead he chose a selection that would represent all the regions of his realm: silver from the Weeping Mines and the lower tributary of the Tromlu River; carved oak from the antlers of one of the hag-headed deer; colored marble from the Blue Hooks. The effect was more impressive than if he had adorned himself in jewels, for together the buttons possessed an enchantment that made strange images flit through my mind when I looked upon them, memories of places I'd never seen. A shadowy grove around a narrow standing stone; a flash of mist-shrouded water tumbling down a sheer cliff.

Memories of that stone room echoed around my mind. Of the jars of lightning and the metal tools that had carved into my flesh over and over. Darius had done that to me. It was all Darius. Every time I thought of him or woke calling for him in the night or screamed his name while begging for his help, that was what I'd gotten in return. He’d never come for me. He’d abandoned me to that fate.