Celebrate Endings Quotes

I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.

Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.

Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.

...when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.

[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Nazism:] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system? Again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won't hear said and you shouldn't believe.

Claire: Dear Claire, "What" and "If" are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if? I don't know how your story ended but if what you felt then was true love, then it's never too late. If it was true then, why wouldn't it be true now? You need only the courage to follow your heart. I don't know what a love like Juliet's feels like - love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for but I'd like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I will have the courage to seize it. And, Claire, if you didn't, I hope one day that you will. All my love, Juliet

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

I have drunk the night and swallowed the stars. I am dancing with abandon and singing with rapture. There is not a thing I do not love. There is not a person I have not forgiven. I feel a universe of love. I feel a universe of light. Tonight, I am with old friends and we are returning home. The moon is our witness.

Darius was dead, and very soon she and I would meet as equals. But i had the feeling it wouldn't be a day she ended up celebrating

Love finds you in the forgiveness at the tail end of a fight. Love finds you in the empathy you feel for someone else. Love finds you in the embrace that follows a tragedy. Love finds you in the celebration after the conquering of an illness. Love finds you in the devastation after the surrender to an illness.

Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.

So many people are so terrified to be alone that they settle for a loveless relationship or stay trapped in a miserable one for months and even years on end. But as it turns out, alone means unique, unequaled, and unexcelled. Or in other words: Unparalleled. Unrepeatable. Unable to be imitated or duplicated. Brave. FABULOUSLY ORIGINAL.

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

America has developed a pie tradition unequivocally and unapologetically at the sweet end of the scale, and at no time is this better demonstrated than at Thanksgiving.

When it comes to forming opinions on works of art, people look to others. Most people end up liking paintings, songs and movies just because the majority have a favourable opinion about them. Ultimately it’s all about the brand value of the artist.

I don't know where this pressure came from. I can't blame my parents because it has always felt internal. Like any other parent, my mother celebrated the A grades and the less-than-A grades she felt there was no need to tell anybody about. But not acknowledging the effort that ended in a less than perfect result impacted me as a child. If I didn't win, then we wouldn't tell anyone that I had even competed to save us the embarrassment of acknowledging that someone else was better. Keeping the secret made me think that losing was something to be ashamed of, and that unless I was sure I was going to be the champion there was no point in trying. And there was certainly no point to just having fun.

December. A desperate celebration of an end.

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn't Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: "I really wish you weren't crying right now"). Don't little children, awakened one morning and told, "Now you're five!" - don't they wail at the universe's descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death - shouldn't we all wail to the stars?

It is better to travel with hope in one's heart than to arrive in safety. . . . We should celebrate today's failure because it is a clear sign that our voyage of discovery is not yet over. The day the experiment succeeds is the day the experiment ends. And I inevitably find that the sadness of ending outweighs the celebration of success.

Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to. That bodes well for those apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him and to all that is good, beautiful, and true in his world. But not for those who give their attention to the 24-7 news cycle of outrage and anxiety and emotion-charged drama or the nonstop feed of celebrity gossip, titillation, and cultural drivel. (As if we “give” it in the first place; much of it is stolen by a clever algorithm out to monetize our precious attention.) But again: we become what we give our attention to, for better or worse.

There is something beautiful about autumn that makes things more beautiful. Out of all the seasons, it is the most honest about time. Summer and spring blind you to its passing with their colorful displays. Winter paints over everything in white. But autumn is not shy about things coming to an end. It welcomes it, waving leafy flags of red, yellow, and gold. It celebrates its sadness.” Hana Ishikawa

Many were the steps taken in doubt, that saw their shapeless ends in no time. Those who travail in faith today will truimph in joy tomorrow. Let faith lead the way.

The whole town rushed outside to celebrate this crowded minute when the time of suffering had ended and the time of forgetting had not yet begun.

You Can't Write Perfect Software. Did that hurt? It shouldn't. Accept it as an axiom of life. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Because perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It's unlikely that you'll be the first. And unless you accept this as a fact, you'll end up wasting time and energy chasing an impossible dream.

Gabriel Mackie had just celebrated his fourth birthday the first time he visited the whisper room, a windowless enclave with lavender walls brimming with daydreams, obscured from reality. All he knew for certain was that his older brother, Griff, nicknamed Boo, was gone. His bedroom at the end of the long hallway had been transformed into a guest room with ecru lace duvets instead of the blue and white pinstriped spreads covering the twin beds. Vanished were his toy box and New York Yankee American League pennants that had plastered the walls, replaced by paintings of water lilies and wheat fields. A stray tear trickled down Gabe’s cheek when he remembered Boo’s curly blonde hair and how he snorted when he laughed. Silence is deafening and the Mackie household screamed heartbreak.

There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookmarks astride our lives; one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.

Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory - or in the memory - of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried.

What writing teaches me, over and over, is that God is waiting to be found everywhere, in the darkest corners of our lives, the dead ends and bad neighborhoods we wake up in, and in the simplest, lightest, most singular and luminous moments. He's hiding, like a child, in quite obvious and visible places, because he wants to be found. The miracle is that he dwells in both.

On March 5th, I'm having my birthday celebration. The party starts at midnight, and ends at 12:01 AM. Don't be late!

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.

If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.

The miracle of life is given by One greater than ourselves, but once given, each life is ours to nurture and preserve, to foster, not only for today's world but for a better one to come. There is no purpose more noble than for us to sustain and celebrate life in a turbulent world, and that is what we must do now. We have no higher duty, no greater cause as humans. Life and the preservation of freedom to live it in dignity is what we are on this Earth to do. Everything we work to achieve must seek that end so that some day our prime ministers, our premiers, our presidents, and our general secretaries will talk not of war and peace, but only of peace.

This wasn’t ending, and he didn’t know if it would ever end, and Coop didn’t know if he wanted to celebrate, cry, or destroy the whole fucking world.

We should celebrate. We each married a sadistic killer.” His head tilted toward Isa as we drank our coffee. “I almost feel sorry for the poor bastard she ends up with.

Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.

To love, to forgive, to lose, to live - it was always a choice, and thus, the fact that he was a mortal was finally one worth celebrating. Because it would end! Maybe that was the entire secret, and therefore the whole thing was actually astonishingly simple. That over and over, he was presented with the same impossible decision - live and suffer, love and grieve - but still, every time, with all his being, his answer was and would always be yes. It would be difficult and painful, and however it ended, it would end - but still, he could choose it. To live, to love; it was always a choice, and inherently a brave one, to face down certain doo, with open arms.

Divorce is difficult. I knew it would be, but it’s so much harder than I anticipated. And navigating divorce with a child in the mix is a million times trickier. You’re stuck interacting with that person for the remainder of your life. You have to either figure out a way to plan birthday parties together or figure out a way to be okay with having separate celebrations. You have to plan on which holidays each of you get to spend with your child, which days of the week, down to which hours of the day sometimes. You can’t snap your fingers and be done with the person you married and divorced. You’re stuck with them. Forever.

When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices—or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of the Nonessentialist. The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.

People of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. But, I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe.

Funerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful examples of collective pain. They feature in a surprising finding from my research on trust. When I asked participants to identify three to five specific behaviors that their friends, family, and colleagues do that raise their level of trust with them, funerals always emerged in the top three responses. Funerals matter. Showing up to them matters. And funerals matter not just to the people grieving, but to everyone who is there. The collective pain (and sometimes joy) we experience when gathering in any way to celebrate the end of a life is perhaps one of the most powerful experiences of inextricable connection. Death, loss, and grief are the great equalizers.

Viewed in this way, you can never again see a tree as a single entity, despite its visual dominance. It towers. It’s impressive. But in the end, it’s a fragile endeavour that can only stand thanks to the contributions of many. We celebrate the tree that stretches to the sky, but it is the ground we should ultimately thank.

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.

I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same. It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else: The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

At the end of the day, it’s your life. If you turn out good, the world celebrates you and with you (not minding how you achieved it). If bad, they abandon you (even if they gave you the advice that led you to doom). Just be you and follow your heart.

When we surrender, we allow the universe to work its magic; we say yes to infinite possibilities; we trust that things will work out as they are meant to; and we give ourselves permission to let go of the outcome. This can be liberating, intimidating, blissful, scary, and a swirl of so many other emotions. But in the end, if we are true to our heart, life unfolds with magnificence…and we get to celebrate

Leisure cannot be achieved at all when it is sought as a means to an end, even though that end be “the salvation of Western civilization”. Celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake. That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure.

No matter where you are right now, no matter far along you are on your own path, don't wait to "have it all" to celebrate. You're never going to figure it all out. Make being happy your business, all along the way. Life can't be one long, tough haul, with a little party at the end. What good is that? Life should be punctuated with celebrations and you have to build them into your time because being happy isn't easy.

We are still on our journey, still suffering and still laughing together. But I feel like the tide has turned, and I think we will have our happy ending yet. Even if it doesn’t look like what we were expecting.

In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world are thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality. If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he sill suffer great pain. Blinded by the glare, he is unable to seeing anything and longs for the familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated. He confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality. The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they be blinded as well.

The deeper the difficulty in fulfilling a dream, the brighter the outcome of its fulfillment and the sweeter the celebration thereof. Persist to the end; don't give up!

Submission reaches the end of its tether when it becomes destructive.

I love balls and parties that have a high probability of ending dramatically. But I could cause an international incident - possibly a war - if I attend this celebration.

We were just about to head to the lake to do that thing where we celebrate America’s birthday by terrifying all of its dogs,

At the end of the day, there are very few people around you who truly want to see you peaceful, happy and content. Most of your friends only want to see you happy, peaceful and content, in ratio to their own happiness, peace and contentment. It's like, "Yeah, I want all your dreams to come true and I want to see you smile, but only for as much as I smile and only in proportion to how many of my own dreams come true." That's what people today call, "friendship" and "care". It's not really friendship and it's not really care. Then there's like one or two people who would celebrate your own happiness and success even if it's out of proportion to their own. And that's a real blessing right there, that's a real friendship.

What good is your gold if your friends will not lift you when you have fallen? How long lived our memory of you when you are gone? Because in the end, that is the only measure. In the end, when life’s last flickers fade, all that remains is memory. Richness, in the final measure, is not weighed in gold coins, but in the number of people you have touched, the tears of those who mourn your passing, and the fond remembrances of those who continue to celebrate your life.

There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck--the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won't work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together ... (?!) Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes--only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay--but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-months affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; and honest caring, however singled by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison.

I'll never have to give an account for not being more like my favorite celebrity, that shining star in my chosen field or anybody else. And at the end of my life, the question I never want to be asked is, "How come you weren't more like YOU? You had such great potential. You were a wholly unique person -- unrepeatable and irreplaceable. Why you weren't more like YOU?

But I want you to know that you're a beautiful girl, far more beautiful than I ever was at your age, and that starving yourself to compete with all of those skinny celebrities who spend half their lives checking in and out of rehab is not only a completely unreasonable and unattainable goal, but will only end up making you sick.

There is no feel-good reward at the end other than the knowledge that you are doing this because it’s the right thing to do. You will not be congratulated for it. You won’t get any ally cookies for it. You won’t be celebrated for it. You will have to learn to wean yourself off the addiction to instant gratification and instead develop a consciousness for doing what is right even if nobody ever thanks you for it.

Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.” —Joanne Harris, Chocolat

[Celebrations] are the punctuation marks that make sense of the passage of time; without them, there are no beginnings and endings. Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.

To use good things to our own ends is always a false religion

The healthiest response to death is to love, honor, and celebrate life.

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him--the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints--is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a high standard, to expect much of myself and do great things. I could have played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has been hard enough. That is how things have gone with me. For a while I was inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong headed. But that did not help me at all. And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and at my neighbors and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality that were wrong. It was as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money's sake, or to become some kind of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness and despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble with me was more material and moral and with you more spiritual--but it was the same road. Do you think I can't understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours--

Do not be discourage by people who reject your true purpose. Do not stop because of anxiety; stop because you are done with the mission! Don't ever be down by the susurrant call of the masses to stop, halt or abort your true purpose when you are convinced within your innermost man of how true your purpose is. A true purpose is mostly rejected, spat upon and seen as an unworthy cause by the masses until they come to a later realization of how true it is and then they accept, celebrate and enjoy it.

At the end of the day, you should try to remember that it's not about the number of followers you have or the numbers of likes, comments, and shares your posts are getting. It's the number of people who will be present in the hospital room when you fall terribly sick. It's the number of people who will remember your birthday like they remember their first name. It's the number of people who will invite you to celebrate Christmas or new year's eve. It's the number of people who will actually show up to look at your newborn child or to bless your newly bought house. It's the number of people who will actually cross an ocean to see your face. It's the number of people who will wipe your tears when one of your parents passes away. It's the number of people who will make a slightly larger than a thumb effort to be there for you.

It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila’s wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone. Why then wasn’t I with Alfonso, with whom I shared both origin and flight? Why, above all, hadn’t I stopped to say to Nino, Stay, come to the reception, tell me when the magazine with my article’s coming out, let’s talk, let’s dig ourselves a cave that can protect us from Pasquale’s driving, from his vulgarity, from the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and also—yes, also—of Antonio?

[Independence Day] will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.

The wind rose high and free, to soar in an open sky with no clouds. It passed over a broken landscape scattered with corpses not yet buried. A landscape covered, at the same time, with celebrations. It tickled the branches of trees that had finally begun to put forth buds. The wind blew southward, through knotted forests, over shimmering plains and toward lands unexplored. This wind, it was not the ending. There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending.

Never strive to be part of the norm. If people think you strange...CELEBRATE. Normal people try way to hard to please others and never end up pleasing themselves. Be ABnormal. It's more fun.

Everyone was on the same ticking clock. They might fool themselves into thinking that more time affords them opportunities to do more things, that the future is open-ended. But the world is simply too big. We weren’t meant to see everything, we weren’t built to do everything, we aren’t capable of knowing everything. At a certain point, peace has to be found with the choices we’ve made.

In Greek mythology, Pallas Athena was celebrated as the goddess of reason and justice.1 To end the cycle of violence that began with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, Athena created a court of justice to try Orestes, thereby installing the rule of law in lieu of the reign of vengeance.2 Recall also the biblical Deborah (from the Book of Judges).3 She was at the same time prophet, judge, and military leader. This triple-headed authority was exercised by only two other Israelites, both men: Moses and Samuel. People came from far and wide to seek Deborah’s judgment. According to the rabbis, Deborah was independently wealthy; thus she could afford to work pro bono.4 Even if its members knew nothing of Athena and Deborah, the U.S. legal establishment resisted admitting women into its ranks far too long.

The great Allied campaign to celebrate (or sell) Democracy, etc., was a venture so successful, and, it seemed, so noble, that it suddenly legitimized such propagandists, who, once the war had ended, went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of entities like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, John D. Rockefeller, General Electric.

I saw it in his eyes, first—the beginning of the end, the beginning of things to come. The blackest night, they cut into me, paralyzing my trembling body. Not even the gods could sense my fear now, for the celebration of the monsters who’d claimed me drowned out all perception of pain. It was all-powerful, all-knowing, the definition of infinite, an overwhelming possession that consumed every inch of my being.

Wren didn't think kissing anyone had ever felt like this. Like it was pulling. her together and breaking her apart all at the same time. As if this kiss could make her. A kiss to end times. Perhaps a kiss to start times.

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone.

She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. "Things are ending," he told her. "This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls." She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now.

what does being a dragonheart mean to you?   surviving / having flames in your veins / never-ending loyalty / powerful alone & with like-hearted people / loving fiercely / strong-spined / dangerous / celebrating yourself / celebrating others / magic even without spells / protective / gentle but armored / light-giver / reigning supremely / what fairy tales are made of / queen of your own life / no doubts about your own worth / forever valiant / tower-breaker / kingdom-shaker / standing up for others / resisting over & over / taking charge of your narrative / bravery beyond measure / not giving negativity a seat at your table / facing the fire head-on / prioritizing yourself / story-hungry / made of gold / dream-chaser / sea storm courage / voice-reclaimer / war-hearted / flower-hearted / RELENTLESS

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.

throw entire festivals in your name. invite no one but yourself. let there be choirs, let there be lanterns, let there be games, let there be cake, let there be laughter, let there be fireworks. some people make the mistake of spending their lives waiting for other people to celebrate their victories, so they never end up celebrating them at all. don’t wait for anyone to decide that you’re enough. you’ve endured every minute up until now—isn’t that just remarkable?- isn’t it?

The worst part of Christmas is that it ends. That practically the day after, everyone carries on as if nothing else ever happens. You’re expected to go back to your normal life, eat normal food, not receive presents or celebrate or be jolly and wear stupid clothing, just because the moment’s passed.

Afterward I just lay there watching everyone kiss while I died, thinking how cool it was to be on my bedroom floor bleeding while everyone in America celebrated the end of my life

The Pre-Historic Age Ended With A Bang. This Post-Historic Age Will End With A Cumshot Of An Auto Asphyxiated Minor Celebrity

Black is the color of celebration, the color of nights that never end...

Success lasts a lifetime but stops at the end of your life. Significance lasts many lifetimes and continues long after you’re gone.

In Pyra, death was celebrated as much as life. Only through endings could there be beginnings. That was the lesson of the phoenix, and it was the lesson of my life as well.

autumn is not shy about things coming to an end. It welcomes it, waving leafy flags of red, yellow, and gold. It celebrates its sadness.

At the end of that class Demian said to me thoughtfully: "There’s something I don’t like about this story, Sinclair. Why don’t you read it once more and give it the acid test? There’s something about it that doesn’t taste right. I mean the business with the two thieves. The three crosses standing next to each other on the hill are almost impressive, to be sure. But now comes this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again, it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up with sentimentality and given a high edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which one you’d rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t choose the sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion’, which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to it’s appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendant of Cain. Don’t you agree?" I was dismayed. Until now I had felt completely at home in the story of the Crucifixion. Now I saw for the first time with how little individuality, with how little power of imagination I had listened to it and read it. Still, Demian’s new concept seemed vaguely sinister and threatened to topple beliefs on whose continued existence I felt I simply had to insist. No, one could not make light of everything, especially not of the most Sacred matters. As usual he noticed my resistance even before I had said anything. "I know," he said in a resigned tone of voice, "it’s the same old story: don’t take these stories seriously! But I have to tell you something: this is one of the very places that reveals the poverty of this religion most distinctly. The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental—true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn’t close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.

I was discovering that I was not afraid of death; rather, I was in awe of it, and of its impact on our lives. What would happen if we ever ‘found a cure’ for death? Immortality seems in many ways an uninviting option. It is the fact that every day counts us down that makes each one such a gift. There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

As we come to the end of ourselves, we open the door to discovering the One who created us anew. The One who can whisper to us who we really are as we pilgrim toward our truest and deepest selves.

But life wasn’t a film. Problems didn’t disappear and “The End” wasn’t emblazoned across a lingering embrace the moment people succumbed to the inevitable and found the right moment to verbalise it. He

Dear Claire, "What" and "If" are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if? I don't know how your story ended but if what you felt then was true love, then it's never too late. If it was true then, why wouldn't it be true now? You need only the courage to follow your heart. I don't know what a love like Juliet's feels like: love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for, but I'd like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I'd have the courage to seize it. And Claire, if you didn't, I hope one day that you will. All my love, Juliet

The Song of the Winged Ones is a song of celebration, written as though the singer were standing on the Dragon Isle watching the dragons flying in the sun. The words are full of wonder at the beauty of the creatures; and there is a curious pause in the middle of one of the stanzas near the end, where the singer waits a full four measures in silence for those who listen to hear the music of distant dragon wings. It seldom fails to bring echoes of something beyond the silence, and is almost never performed because many bards fear it. I love it.

They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999—but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.

I told them what I had discovered about Nabokov's sentences: Because the word string and the thoughts behind the words are so original, the reader's brain can't jump ahead. There is no opportunity to make assumptions, no mental leapfrogging to the end of the sentence. So the reader is suspended in the perfect moment of now. You can only experience now. The sentences celebrate the absolute instant of creation. "It takes your breath away.

Where one might break, two can stand tall. Where one might fold, two can hold firm. From here until the end of your days on earth, you will have someone to support you during times of weakness, comfort you during times of grief, encourage you during times of fear, and celebrate with you during times of joy. That is a gift, one that should never be abused or taken for granted. Cherish each other as God cherishes you, and you will both know peace.

This person will not become a lifelong friend who attends your wedding, or your funeral. They will not celebrate your triumphs, or comfort you during your failures. They won't even move into tomorrow with you. What's the point?

Love finds you in the forgiveness at the tail end of a fight. Love finds you in the empathy you feel for someone else. Love finds you in the embrace that follows a tragedy. Love finds you in the celebration after the conquering of an illness. Love finds you in the devastation after the surrender to an illness.

One of the beautiful things about Buddhism is that it does not worship Buddha as a god or deity, but instead celebrates the Buddha as an example of a normal person like you and me who applied a good deal of discipline and gentleness to his meditation practice, and ended up opening his mind and heart in a very big way.

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it. Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism. Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely. Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected. The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor. The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it. It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots. That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump’s amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments. In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot. Beloved,

Poetry and song lyrics might want us to believe that finding love is like uncovering buried treasure, but now I know the truth. There’s no joy or celebration in love. There are no happy endings. There is simply me and her and a crushing pain. What’s left after that? An entire life of mute should-haves and second-bests.

Halloween, the one night when we embrace the darkness from which all of America is descended. October is the gateway to the wonderful, mystical finale of the American year. A place where life ends and the celebration of life briefly begins.

We Love the Illusion of Birthdays every year but ignore the Reality Death. If death ends the story absolutely it is unreasonable to celebrate the day of birth, if death is the real beginning of Eternal life, isn't it even more unreasonable to celebrate a day which leads us to death and fear the day which leads us to life?

For in the end, alcohol is merely us, a materialization of our own nature. To repress it is to repress something that we know about ourselves but cannot celebrate or even accept. It is like having a dance partner we cannot trust with our wallet.

Aroused Passion Oh God Let all lovers be content Give them happy endings Let their lives be celebrations Let their hearts dance in the fire of your love My sweetheart You have aroused my passion Your touch has filled me with desire I am no longer separate from you These are precious moments I beseech you Don’t let me wait Let me merge with you

God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united by faith in his Son as a manifestation of the expansive nature of his grace. This expansiveness is unfulfilled unless the differences are seen and celebrated, not as ends unto themselves, but as particular manifestations of the power of the Spirit to bring forth the same holiness among different peoples and cultures for the glory of God.

A group of adventurers is known as a "party," and not just because they like to celebrate their success together in the end. Your party should be as close to you as your family--assuming your family can cast spells, kill monsters, and bring you back from the edge of death.

Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

But God made us to life in community, to laugh and cry. To hurt and to celebrate with each other, no matter what were going through. And transformation is tough, and we dont always end up where we think we will. But we have to remember, that even when we struggle to believe in Him, He always believes in us. He fills our lives with purpose and passion, if we just let Him. And the best part of the journey, is that the God of the universe, sometimes allows us to play a part in changing the world.

For people who make up stories for a living, that is the ultimate success: knowing that, when the book closes, when the series ends, the adventure is not over. It goes on without the creator, in the minds of the people who love it. You can’t stop the signal. Once it’s broadcast, it continues on forever, pulsing past star clusters, lighting up new worlds, collecting new fans, till the end of time itself.

One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative...What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well, is that we don't know what to do with the tragedies that linger in our life...Can you imagine receiving an invitation "JOIN ME IN A CELEBRATION OF NO LONGER BELIEVING I'M STUPID"? We don't allow endings to be noted, let alone celebrated. Therefore we never allow denouement to be invigorate the upward movement of a new story.

Most of the world's ills, it seemed to him, were caused by men who believed themselves important: on a good day it always ended in tears, on a bad day in global destruction. Oliver was not a man to start a war or provoke pestilence: his icons were the makers of music, the tellers of tales, the clowns and the balladeers, and all who celebrated life's footnotes, appendices and afterthoughts. Little Brown, London, 1994.

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.

I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne, no friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner's box before the judges, and alone to decide in the face of oneself or in the face of others' judgement. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that's why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you're down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.

The rich flow of creativity, innovation, and almost musical complexity we are looking for in a fulfilled work life cannot be reached through trying or working harder. The medium for the soul, it seems, must be the message. The river down which we raft is made up of the same substance as the great sea of our destination. It is an ever-moving, firsthand creative engagement with life and with others that completes itself simply by being itself. This kind of approach must be seen as the "great art" of working in order to live, of remembering what is most important in the order of priorities and what place we occupy in a much greater story than the one our job description defines. Other "great arts," such as poetry, can remind and embolden us to this end. Whatever we choose to do, the stakes are very high. With a little more care, a little more courage, and, above all, a little more soul, our lives can be so easily discovered and celebrated in work, and not, as now, squandered and lost in its shadow.

Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us joyfully to affirm: "Death is no more!" Oh, death is still there, to be sure and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a "passover," a "Pascha"—into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory. "Trampling down death by death," He made us partakes of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: "Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave!

My intention in writing this book is not to hunt and name the killer. I wish instead to retrace the footsteps of five women, to consider their experiences within the context of their era, and to follow their paths through both the gloom and the light. They were worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for: they were children who cried for their mothers; they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth and the deaths of parents; they laughed and celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.

I celebrate ideals of individual excellence, self-reliance, and personal responsibility… But rugged individualism alone did not get us to the moon. It did not end slavery, win World War II, pass the Voting Rights Act, or bring down the Berlin Wall. It didn’t build our dams, bridges, and highways, or map the human genome. Our most lasting accomplishments require mutual effort and shared sacrifice; this is an idea that is woven into the very fabric of this country.

Of the Three Rings that the Elves had preserved unsullied no open word was ever spoken among the Wise, and few even of the Eldar knew where they were bestowed. Yet after the fall of Sauron their power was ever at work, and where they abode there mirth also dwelt and all things were unstained by the griefs of time. Therefore ere the Third Age was ended the Elves perceived that the Ring of Sapphire was with Elrond, in the fair valley of Rivendell, upon whose house the stars of heaven most brightly shone; whereas the Ring of Adamant was in the Land of Lórien where dwelt the Lady Galadriel. A queen she was of the woodland Elves, the wife of Celeborn of Doriath, yet she herself was of the Noldor and remembered the Day before days in Valinor, and she was the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth. But the Red Ring remained hidden until the end, and none save Elrond and Galadriel and Cirdan knew to whom it had been committed. Thus it was that in two domains the bliss and beauty of the Elves remained still undiminished while that Age endured: in Imladris; and in Lothlórien, the hidden land between Celebrant and Anduin, where the trees bore flowers of gold and no Orc or evil thing dared ever come. Yet many voices were heard among the Elves foreboding that, if Sauron should come again, then either he would find the Ruling Ring that was lost, or at the best his enemies would discover it and destroy it; but in either chance the powers of the Three must then fail and all things maintained by them must fade, and so the Elves should pass into the twilight and the Dominion of Men begin. And so indeed it has since befallen: the One and the Seven and the Nine are destroyed; and the Three have passed away, and with them the Third Age is ended, and the Tales of the Eldar in Middle-earth draw to then-close.

I’m drinking a glass of water in the empty hotel bar at the Principe di Savoia and staring at the mural behind the bar and in the mural there is a giant mountain, a vast field spread out below it where villagers are celebrating in a field of long grass that blankets the mountain dotted with tall white flowers, and in the sky above the mountain it’s morning and the sun is spreading itself across the mural’s frame, burning over the small cliffs and the low-hanging clouds that encircle the mountain’s peak, and a bridge strung across a path through the mountain will take you to any point beyond that you need to arrive at, because behind that mountain is a highway and along that highway are billboards with answers on them – who, what, where, when, why – and I’m falling forward but also moving up toward the mountain, my shadow looming against its jagged peaks, and I’m surging forward, ascending, sailing through dark clouds, rising up, a fiery wind propelling me, and soon it’s night and stars hang in the sky above the mountain revolving as they burn. The stars are real. The future is that mountain.

Fashion models and financial models are similar. They bear a similar relationship to everyday world. Like supermodels, financial models are idealized representations of the real world, they are not real, they don't quite work the way that the real world works. There is celebrity in both worlds. In the end, there is the same inevitable disappointment" - Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns & Money

Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences (61).

The day of resurrection is determined in this manner. The first Sunday after the full moon in Aries is celebrated as Easter. Aries begins on the 21st day of March and ends approximately on the 19th day of April. The sun’s entry into Aries marks the beginning of Spring The moon in its monthly transit around the earth will form sometime between March 21st and April 25th an opposition to the sun, which opposition is called a full moon, The first Sunday after this phenomenon of the heavens occurs Is celebrated as Easter; the Friday preceding this day is observed as Good Friday. This movable date should tell the observant one to look for some interpretation other than the one commonly accepted. These days do not mark the anniversaries of the death and resurrection of an individual who lived on earth.

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

How long lived our memory of you when you are gone? Because in the end, that is the only measure. In the end, when life’s last flickers fade, all that remains is memory. Richness, in the final measure, is not weighed in gold coins, but in the number of people you have touched, the tears of those who mourn your passing, and the fond remembrances of those who continue to celebrate your life. —Drizzt Do’Urden

Paradoxically, it is the so-called pleasure-chasers—the men who seemingly live for nothing but the sensation of the moment, who are concerned only with having "a good time"—who are psychologically incapable of enjoying pleasure as an end in itself. The neurotic pleasure-chaser imagines that, by going through the motions of celebration, he will be able to make himself feel that he has something to celebrate.

Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn’t always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it’s like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day. Because this life is full of promise, always. It’s full of beads and dolls and chipped plates; it’s full of twinklings and twinges. It is possible to admit that life is a struggle and also embrace the fact that small things—like sons who call you and beloved dogs in framed pictures and birds that tell you to drink your fucking tea—matter. They matter a lot. Stop trying to make sense of things. You can’t think your way through this. Open your heart and drink in this glorious day. You are young, and you will find little things that will make you grateful to be alive. Believe in what you love now, with all of your heart, and you will love more and more until everything around you is love. Love yourself now, exactly as sad and scared and flawed as you are, and you will grow up and live a rich life and show up for other people, and you’ll know exactly how big that is. Let’s celebrate this moment together. There are twinklings and twinges, right here, in this moment. It is enough. Let’s find the eastern towhee.

Every once in a while, I need a no-agenda day with nothing to do, but those aren’t the days we’re going to celebrate at the end of our lives. We won’t even remember those days. What we’ll remember are the days when we had everything to do, and with God’s help, we did it. We won’t remember the things that came easy; we’ll remember the things that came hard. We’ll remember the miracles on the far side of “long and boring.

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

I'd spent so many years imagining the event, placing myself in the crowd, that I wondered if maybe, in the end, it wouldn't matter if I actually felt the flames of the bonfire on my face. I often wondered the same thing about being kissed. Or falling in love. Did I need to experience them if I could imagine them? A part of me feared that Pinnacle Lane's solstice celebration couldn't possibility live up to la fête in my head.

Why we write. Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless. Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful terror. Because as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes) it passes the time. Because Death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs. Because epitaphs well struck give Death, our vorcious master, heartburn. Because fiction imitates life's beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks. Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world. Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it. Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child. Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks. Because God, created in the storyteller's image, can be destroyed only by its maker. Because in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious, and because in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life. Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood. Because in the beginning was the gesture and in the end the come, as well in between what we have are words. Because of all arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men. Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretentions. Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow upon (it must be said) no surface. Because the world is reinvented every day and this is how it is done. Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression. Because truth, that illusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there. Because writing, in all spaces unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all. And because, alas, what else?

Fairy tales have happy endings! The prince is supposed to save the princess. Kill the Erlking and the huntress, then they both ride on home to their awaiting family and are celebrated by all the land. Happily. Forever! What is this…this rubbish, what with the king stabbing his sister, the prince getting mauled by his hounds… I can’t remember all too many stories, but I’m certain that this is the absolute worst I’ve ever heard.

God has mercifully made the fantasies - the pursuit of power, of sensual satisfaction, of money, of learning, of celebrity, of happiness - so preposterously unrewarding that we are forced to turn to him for help and for mercy. We seek wealth and find we've accumulated worthless pieces of paper. We seek security and find we've acquired the means to blow ourselves and our little earth to smithereens. We seek carnal indulgence only to find ourselves involved in the prevailing erotomania. Looking for freedom, we infallibly fall into the servitude of self-gratification or, collectively, of a Gulag Archipelago.

But it’s always the friends in the end, isn’t it, who remain to pick up the pieces when the men have gone, leaving destruction in their wake? Still, only the romantic partner is taken seriously. Friends and family will not gather, ever, to celebrate my partnership with Naima—there will be no anniversaries or acknowledgments, no congratulatory cards, no celebratory ceremonies. And yet, it is this slow burning love of female friendship that actually keeps the world turning.

Fifteen years ago, the cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote of Jimi's performance of our national anthem as "his great NO to the war, to racism, to whatever you or he might think of and want gone. But then that discord shattered, and for more than four and a half long, complex minutes Hendrix pursued each invisible crack in a vessel that had once been whole, feeling out and exploring and testing himself and his music against anguish, rage, fear, hate, love offered, and love refused. When he finished, he had created an anthem that could never be summed up and that would never come to rest. In the end it was a great YES, both a threat and a beckoning, an invitation to America to match its danger, glamour, and freedom." … In late 1969, Jimi Hendrix wrote a poem celebrating Woodstock, saying with words what his music had in August: "500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God's tears of joy. And for once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery.

When I was your age, my father taught me how important it was to find something to celebrate each day. It didn't matter how small it was, or how long it lasted, but each simple pleasure needs to be marked. It can be...the first hawthorn blossom or the light on the path ahead through summer trees...the smile of a friend, or the silence at the end of a piece of music, as long as it is something precious and private to store up..they are moments of grace. My father called them "amulets of time".

They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.

Yes, yes, I felt that I wanted that, I wanted it to happen. An end of love and of that intolerable celebration, no embraces in a bed in Amalfi. Immediately shatter everything and every person in the neighborhood, tear them to pieces, Lila and I, go and live far away, lightheartedly descending together all the steps of humiliation, alone, in unknown cities. It seemed to me the just conclusion to that day. If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

In the end, it is about truly caring for every precious human being whose life we touch. It is about including everybody, not just the fortunate few or the exceptionally talented. It is about living with an abundance mind-set: an abundance of patience, love, hope, and opportunity. Everyone wants to contribute. Trust them. Leaders are everywhere. Find them. Some people are on a mission. Celebrate them. Others wish things were different. Listen to them. Everybody matters. Show them. We don’t just need a new guide to leading in times of change or adversity. We need a complete rethink, a revolution.

The sudden and total disappearance of Mawlana aroused resentment among his disciples and students, some of them becoming highly critical of Hazrat Shams, even threatening him. They believed Hazrat Shams had ruined their spiritual circle and prevented them from listening to Mawlana's sermons. In March of 1246 he left Konya and went to Syria without warning. After he left, Mawlana was grief stricken, secluding himself even more rather than engaging with his disciples and students. He was without a doubt furious with them. Realising the error of their ways, they repeatedly repented before Mawlana. Some months later, news arrived that Hazrat Shams had been seen in Damascus and a letter was sent to him with apologising for the behaviour of these disciples. Hazrat Sultan Walad and a search party were sent to Damascus to invite him back and in April 1247, he made his return. During the return journey, he invited Hazrat Sultan Walad to ride on horseback although he declined, choosing instead to walk alongside him, explaining that as a servant, he could not ride in the presence of such a king. Hazrat Shams was received back with joyous celebration with sama ceremonies being held for several days, and all those that had shown him resentment tearfully asked for his forgiveness. He reserved special praise for Hazrat Sultan Walad for his selflessness, which greatly pleased Mawlana. As he originally had no intention to return to Konya, he most likely would not have returned if Hazrat Sultan Walad had not himself gone to Damascus in search of him. After his return, he and Mawlana Rumi returned to their intense discussions. Referring to the disciples, Hazrat Shams narrates that their new found love for him was motivated only by desperation: “ They felt jealous because they supposed, "If he were not here, Mowlana would be happy with us." Now [that I am back] he belongs to all. They gave it a try and things got worse, and they got no consolation from Mowlana. They lost even what they had, so that even the enmity (hava, against Shams) that had swirled in their heads disappeared. And now they are happy and they show me honor and pray for me. (Maqalat 72) ” Referring to his absence, he explains that he left for the sake of Mawlana Rumi's development: “ I'd go away fifty times for your betterment. My going away is all for the sake of your development. Otherwise it makes no difference to me whether I'm in Anatolia or Syria, at the Kaaba or in Istanbul, except, of course, that separation matures and refines you. (Maqalat 164) ” After a while, by the end of 1247, he was married to Kimia, a young woman who’d grown up in Mawlana Rumi's household. Sadly, Kimia did not live long after the marriage and passed away upon falling ill after a stroll in the garden

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despair.

In the end, no matter what obstacles a company faces in the Thank You Economy, the solution will always be the same. Competitors are bigger? Outcare them. They’re cheaper? Outcare them. They’ve got celebrity status and you don’t? Outcare them. Social media gives you the tools to touch your consumer and create an emotion where before there might not have been one. It doesn’t matter if you’re not small or cool or sexy—people can get pumped up about the craziest stuff. I mean, really, who could have predicted the guy in a trench coat pulverizing iPhones in a blender? (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, check out willitblend.com. It’s fantastic!)

At the moment of death, the soul's impressions are similar to those of initiates in the ways of the Great Mysteries. First they rush along blindly, twisting and turning, on an endless, anxious journey through the shadows. Then, just before the end, their fear reaches its height. Bathed in cold sweat, they shiver and tremble, utterly terrified. This phase is almost immediately followed by a return to the light, a sudden illumination. They are surrounded by a marvelous glow and move through pure places and meadows ringing with voices and dancing. Sacred words inspire religious respect. The perfect initiate is free to celebrate the Mysteries.

Happiness is fleeting, fickle, often based on our circumstances....If you chase happiness, you will more often than not end up disappointed by the very nature of life. Life is hard, brutal at times, and often unfair. But following your bliss, that's entirely different. It means facing your present reality with honesty and courage and, in the midst of it all, continuing to pursue each spark of joy, even if it is a tiny pinpoint in the darkness of your life. Do not give up. Continue to look for the light in your life--it is always present somewhere, some small thing to be grateful for, something to celebrate, a way to give joy to others, a new way to grow. Move toward the light in life, seek it out no matter what. This is the essence of what it means to follow your bliss. You must be honest. Pay attention. Seek joy. [GERTRUDE LUND, to her great-niece Lolly Blanchard]

And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing. And so this music is a lament, and I am doomed to hear its bittersweet notes for a lifetime. Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering. Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers and is not threatened by them. Show me a god who understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death. Show— 'Stop,' Gesler said in a grating voice. Blinking, Fiddler lowered the instrument. 'What?' 'You cannot end with such anger, Fid. Please.' Anger? I am sorry. He would have spoken that aloud, but suddenly he could not. His gaze lowered, and he found himself studying the littered floor at his feet. Someone, in passing – perhaps Fiddler himself – had inadvertently stepped on a cockroach. Half-crushed, smeared into the warped wood, its legs kicked feebly. He stared at it in fascination. Dear creature, do you now curse an indifferent god? 'You're right,' he said. 'I can't end it there.' He raised the fiddle again. 'Here's a different song for you, one of the few I've actually learned. From Kartool. It's called "The Paralt's Dance".' He rested the bow on the strings, then began. Wild, frantic, amusing. Its final notes recounted the triumphant female eating her lover. And even without words, the details of that closing flourish could not be mistaken. The four men laughed. Then fell silent once more.

To love, to forgive, to lose, to live - it was always a choice, and thus, the fact that he was a mortal was finally one worth celebrating. Because it would end! Maybe that was the entire secret, and therefore the whole thing was actually astonishingly simple. That over and over, he was presented with the same impossible decision - live and suffer, love and grieve - but still, every time, with all his being, his answer was and would always be yes. It would be difficult and painful, and however it ended, it would end - but still, he could choose it. To live, to love; it was always a choice, and inherently a brave one, to face down certain doom, with open arms.

I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written. Such history will do full credit to the courage, endurance and soldierly ability of the American citizen, no matter what section of the country he hailed from, or in what ranks he fought. The justice of the cause which in the end prevailed, will, I doubt not, come to be acknowledged by every citizen of the land, in time. For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.

Information about toxicity in food is widely available, but people don’t want to hear it. Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control. Coming at us like this — in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. . . . In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterises the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.

But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven’t called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

Most of what's known about religious practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico has come to us through a Catholic parish priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, one of the few who ever became fluent in the Nahuatl language. He spent the 1620s writing his "Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs that Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain". He'd originally meant it to be something of a "field guide to the heathens" to help priests recognize and exterminate indigenous religious rites and their practitioners. In the process of his documentation, though, it's clear from his writings that Father Ruiz de Alarcón grew sympathetic. He was particularly fascinated with how Nahuatl people celebrated the sacred in ordinary objects, and encouraged living and spirit realities to meet up in the here and now. He noted that the concept of "death" as an ending did not exactly exist for them. When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn't something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People's sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could be addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, an ordinary communion between the dead and the living. Mexican tradition still holds that Xantolo is always present in certain places and activities, including marigold fields, the cultivation of corn, the preparation of tamales and pan de muerto. Interestingly, farmers' markets are said to be loaded with Xantolo.

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing. There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness. The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements. With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind. To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees. Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats.

Do not act so friendly, Savannah. You are a celebrity. We will have enough attention drawn to us. They are our neighbors. Try not to scare them to death, will you? Savannah took his arm, grinning up at him teasingly. "You look as fierce as a member of the Mafia. No wonder our neighbors are staring.People tend to be curious.Wouldn't you be if someone moved in next door to you?" "I don't abide next-door neighbors. When humans consider building in the vicinity of one of my homes, the neighborhood is suddenly inundated with wolves.It works every time." He sounded menacing. Savannah laughed at him. "You're such a baby,Gregori. Scared of a little company." "You scare me to death, woman. Because of you I find myself doing things I know are totally insane. Staying in a house built in a crowded city below sea level.Neighbors on top of us.Human butchers surrounding us." "Like I'm supposed to believe that would scare you," she said smugly,knowing his only worry was for her safety, not his.They turned a corner and headed toward the famous Bourbon Street. "Try to look less conspicuous," he instructed. A dog barked, rushed to the end of its lead,and bared its teeth. Gregori turned his head and hissed, exposing white fangs. The dog stopped its aggression instantly,yelped in alarm, and retreated whining. "What are you doing?" Savannah demanded, outraged. "Getting a feel for the place," he said absently, his mind clearly on other matters, his senses tuned to the world around him. "Everyone is crazy here, Savannah.You are going to fit right in." He ruffled her hair affectionately.

In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and every man, woman, and child in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused individual. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, each recalling the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy, is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and kindnesses are recited carefully and at length. This tribal ceremony often lasts for several days. At the end, the tribal circle is broken, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.

It just got ugly in the 1970s for New Journalism, hastened by the decline of general interest magazine. So what happened? Television, mostly, which siphoned away readers and ad dollars, turned celebrity culture into a growth industry, and assured the end of Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s – magazine that had published Mailer, Didion, Hersey, and many others. Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stones were no longer must-reads for an engaged readership that couldn’t wait for the next issue to arrive in their mailboxes, eager to find out what Wolfe, Talese, Thompson, and the rest had in store for them. As the seventies drew to a close, so, too, did the last golden era of American journalism. But there was also a sense of psychic exhaustion – that the great stories had all been told and there was nothing left to write about.

We form these elaborate fantasies of romantic partnerships, Romeos and Majnus who we’ll spend our days and nights with in a passion of rose petals and fireworks, while discounting our non-romantic relationships (if such distinctions can even be made), often more enduring and authentic. We discard them as soon as some man comes along, flashing his teeth and brandishing his penis. But it’s always the friends in the end, isn’t it, who remain to pick up the pieces when the men have gone, leaving destruction in their wake? Still, only the romantic partner is taken seriously. Friends and family will not gather, ever, to celebrate my partnership with Naima—there will be no anniversaries or acknowledgments, no congratulatory cards, no celebratory ceremonies. And yet, it is this slow burning love of female friendship that actually keeps the world turning.

He wouldn’t talk about it—at all. Not that Sophie had many chances to bring up the subject. Only a handful of people knew the truth. The rest believed the Black Swan’s carefully crafted lie, and thought Keefe was taking time away to mourn his mother’s disappearance. Even the Council had no inkling, and Sophie hoped it would stay that way. The less everyone knew, the easier it would be for Keefe to come home. If he came home. “You okay?” Fitz asked, making her realize she’d forgotten to say hello. “I hope you’re not worrying about your tests. There’s no way you didn’t pass.” “I don’t know . . .” Her photographic memory helped—but lately she’d struggled to concentrate during her school sessions. Honestly, though, she’d barely given her midterms a second thought. She wasn’t the same girl she’d been the year before, who thought failing out of Foxfire would be the end of the world. Now she’d been kidnapped, presumed dead, banished from the Lost Cities, and helped stop a plague from killing off the entire gnomish species. She’d even snuck into the ogres’ capital and helped destroy half the city—which happened to be why the Council was struggling to negotiate a new elvin-ogre treaty. “Relax,” Fitz said as her mind spun to nightmares of lumpy-faced ogres tearing through the elves’ glittering streets. “We’re supposed to be celebrating.” His cheer sounded forced. But she knew Fitz was trying. That’s what they did now. Try. Wait. Hope.

We are all mysteries, to those who love us and also to ourselves. When you find someone who embraces you, loves and desires you every moment, accepts your mysteries and flaws without judgement, you’ve struck gold. How delicious is the thought that this mysterious complex creature, chooses to share a life with you? Too many of us undervalue ourselves by digging too deep into the mistakes we have made or dwelling on when we failed at something like relationships, responsibilities, careers, whatever it might be. All those experiences make up the mystery and story of who we are. We are complex beings, all together in this fucked up but beautiful world. Whatever the mistakes or failures of someone’s murky past that leads them to your door should be experiences you are grateful for and that is cause for celebration. All of us have had experiences, good and bad, and those make up the intricate tapestry of who we are. I often feel insecure in so many ways, fragile and easily broken even when I know that is only a self-defeating perception that sometimes rears its ugly head. I am doing what I love, and deeply in love with someone with whom I want to share my future and write our own magical mystery story. I guess what I am trying to say is don’t dig so deep that you end up cutting your roots and the lifeblood that feeds and makes you. Match your energy and vibration with what you envision. Believe. You deserve love and success, so go for it.

An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side.

Osho was very generous with his genius. When I went to Poona in 1988, he answered a question of mine. “Rumi says, ‘I want burning, burning.’ What does this burning have to do with my own possible enlightenment?” “You have asked a very dangerous question, Coleman. Burning has nothing to do with your enlightenment. This work you have done with Rumi is beautiful. It has to be, because it is coming out of Rumi’s love. But for you these poems can become ecstatic self-hypnosis.” He pretty much nailed me to the floor with that one. Sufism is good, but end up with Zen. It was a fine hit he gave me. I am still drawn to the Sufi longing and love-madness, but clarity is coming up strong on the inside. I have not assimilated his wisdom yet, but I mean to. I am very grateful to him. But it is not wisdom for everyone. Osho crafted his words to suit the individual. Ecstatic self-hypnosis might be just the thing for someone else. He was showing me a daylight beyond any beloved darkness, an ecstatic sobriety beyond any drunkenness.

I imagine a man coming out of an alley and stabbing me a number of times until I die. Face-down, mouth-open in the snow. What would that change about me. Would I love it. Would I think that the stabbing was painful and that I didn’t like it. Does it actually hurt or is it great. I see my killer being given a wreath and a box of candy by the mayor of Chicago at some kind of ceremony (a ceremony for killing me, you see). And people are cheering for him. I see myself stab-holed and crawling out of an alley to join the periphery of the celebration. Then I hold one hand over the stab wounds and with the other hand I give the thumbs-up sign to my killer as he accepts the wreath from the mayor. I pass more people who are out walking. I’m on Ashland Avenue. A lot of times when I encounter someone else out walking or running past me, it feels like we should be more united than we end up acting. We’re both outside at the same time together. Why doesn’t that mean anything to anyone. Goddamn. No, I don’t think I actually care about that. I thought I cared about it just now.

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.

My friend tugged her husband’s arm with both hands. She used all her strength, and I who knew her thoroughly felt that if she could she would have wrenched it from his body, crossed the room holding it high above her head, blood dripping in her train, and she would have used it as a club or a donkey’s jawbone to crush Marcello’s face with a solid blow. Ah yes, she would have done it, and at the idea my heart pounded furiously, my throat became dry. Then she would have dug out the eyes of both men, she would have torn the flesh from the bones of their faces, she would have bitten them. Yes, yes, I felt that I wanted that, I wanted it to happen. An end of love and of that intolerable celebration, no embraces in a bed in Amalfi. Immediately shatter everything and every person in the neighborhood, tear them to pieces, Lila and I, go and live far away, lightheartedly descending together all the steps of humiliation, alone, in unknown cities. It seemed to me the just conclusion to that day. If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.

The Party's all-around intrusion into people's lives was the very point of the process known as 'thought reform." Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for 'thought examination' was held for those 'in the revolution." Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from 'bourgeois' backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self-criticism tapped into this.Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. My mother's cell grilled her week after week, month after month, forcing her to produce endless self-criticisms.She had to consent to this agonizing process. Life for a revolutionary was meaningless if they were rejected by the Party. It was like excommunication for a Catholic. Besides, it was standard procedure. My father had gone through it and had accepted it as part of 'joining the revolution." In fact, he was still going through it. The Party had never hidden the fact that it was a painful process. He told my mother her anguish was normal.At the end of all this, my mother's two comrades voted against full Party membership for her. She fell into a deep depression. She had been devoted to the revolution, and could not accept the idea that it did not want her; it was particularly galling to think she might not get in for completely petty and irrelevant reasons, decided by two people whose way of thinking seemed light years away from what she had conceived the Party's ideology to be. She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong. At the back of her mind was another, more practical point which she did not even spell out to herself: it was vital to get into the Party, because if she failed she would be stigmatized and ostracized.

Like a great waterwheel, the liturgical year goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime. So goes the liturgical year through all the days of our lives. /it concentrates us on the two great poles of the faith - the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But as Christmas and Easter trace the life of Jesus for us from beginning to end, the liturgical year does even more: it also challenges our own life and vision and sense of meaning. Both a guide to greater spiritual maturity and a path to a deepened spiritual life, the liturgical year leads us through all the great questions of faith as it goes. It rehearses the dimensions of life over and over for us all the years of our days. It leads us back again and again to reflect on the great moments of the life of Jesus and so to apply them to our own ... As the liturgical year goes on every day of our lives, every season of every year, tracing the steps of Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, so does our own life move back and forth between our own beginnings and endings, between our own struggles and triumphs, between the rush of acclamation and the crush of abandonment. It is the link between Jesus and me, between this life and the next, between me and the world around me, that is the gift of the liturgical year. The meaning and message of the liturgical year is the bedrock on which we strike our own life's direction. Rooted in the Resurrection promise of the liturgical year, whatever the weight of our own pressures, we maintain the course. We trust in the future we cannot see and do only know because we have celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus year after year. In His life we rest our own. ― Joan D. Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series

But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain. Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront. The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.” Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.

Margo Brinker always thought summer would never end. It always felt like an annual celebration that thankfully stayed alive long day after long day, and warm night after warm night. And DC was the best place for it. Every year, spring would vanish with an explosion of cherry blossoms that let forth the confetti of silky little pink petals, giving way to the joys of summer. Farmer's markets popped up on every roadside. Vendors sold fresh, shining fruits, vegetables and herbs, wine from family vineyards, and handed over warm loaves of bread. Anyone with enough money and enough to do on a Sunday morning would peruse the tents, trying slices of crisp peaches and bites of juicy smoked sausage, and fill their fisherman net bags with weekly wares. Of all the summer months, Margo liked June the best. The sun-drunk beginning, when the days were long, long, long with the promise that summer would last forever. Sleeping late, waking only to catch the best tanning hours. It was the time when the last school year felt like a lifetime ago, and there were ages to go until the next one. Weekend cookouts smelled like the backyard- basil, tomatoes on the vine, and freshly cut grass. That familiar backyard scent was then smoked by the rich addition of burgers, hot dogs, and buttered buns sizzling over charcoal.

Pathways toward a New Shabbat Do 1. Stay at home. Spend quality time with family and real friends. 2. Celebrate with others: at the table, in the synagogue, with friends or community. 3. Study or read something that will edify, challenge, or make you grow. 4. Be alone. Take some time for yourself. Check in with yourself. Review your week. Ask yourself where you are in your life. 5. Mark the beginning and end of this sacred time by lighting candles and making kiddush on Friday night and saying havdalah on Saturday night. Don’t 6. Don’t do anything you have to do for your work life. This includes obligatory reading, homework for kids (even without writing!), unwanted social obligations, and preparing for work as well as doing your job itself. 7. Don’t spend money. Separate completely from the commercial culture that surrounds us so much. This includes doing business of all sorts. No calls to the broker, no following up on ads, no paying of bills. It can all wait. 8. Don’t use the computer. Turn off the iPhone or smartphone or whatever device has replaced it by the time you read this. Live and breathe for a day without checking messages. Declare your freedom from this new master of our minds and our time. Find the time for face-to-face conversations with people around you, without Facebook. 9. Don’t travel. Avoid especially commercial travel and places like airports, hotel check-ins, and similar depersonalizing encounters. Stay free of situations in which people are likely to tell you to “have a nice day” (Shabbat already is a nice day, thank you). 10. Don’t rely on commercial or canned video entertainment, including the TV as well as the computer screen. Discover what there is to do in life when you are not being entertained.

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCÉE ABOUT HIGHWAYS ...and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that's when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn't keep clocks in the house. Ain't no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin' to horizon, lookin' like the sun was always out. back when I was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain't have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin' us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that'll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn't have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say 'river' because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said "the bottom of a good glass." And then he stopped answering. And then he stopped coming home altogether. Something about the first day of a season, honey. Something always gotta sacrifice its blood. Everything that has its time must be lifted from the earth. My boys don't bother with seasons anymore. My sons went to sleep in the spring once and woke up to a motherless summer. All they know now is that it always be colder than it should be. I wish I could fix this for you. I'm sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn't remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties. I'm sorry that you may come home one day to the smell of rotting meat, every calendar you own, torn off the walls, burning in a trashcan. And it will be the end of spring. And you will know.

The one Asian nation with which we have, alas, made no headway whatsoever is China. … The Chinese government, in fact, is totally committed to the Arab war against Israel, and Mr. Arafat and his comrades are constantly given arms, money, and moral support by Peking, though I, for one, have never understood why, and for years, lived under the illusion that if we could only talk to the Chinese, we might get through to them. Two pictures come to my mind when I mention China. The first is the horror with which I picked up a mine manufactured in China – so far away and remote from us – which had put an end to the life of a six-year-old girl in a border settlement in Israel. I stood there near that small coffin, surrounded by weeping, enraged relatives. ‘What on earth can the Chinese have against us?’ I kept thinking. ‘They don’t even know us.’ Then I remember, at the celebration of Kenya’s independence, sitting at a table near that of the Chinese delegation. It was a very relaxed, festive occasion, and I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps if I go over and sit down with them, we can talk a bit.’ So I asked Ehud to introduce himself to the Chinese. He walked over, held out his hand to the head of the delegation and said, ‘My foreign minister is here and would like to meet you.’ The Chinese just averted their gaze. They didn’t even bother to say, ‘No, thank you, we don’t want to meet her.

In my practice, I’ve helped to creatively engineer all kinds of physical separations—bringing a cult member home for a holiday, family celebration, or even a funeral. It might seem manipulative, but it is a critical first step to helping a person free themselves from the clutches of a cult—one that has become increasingly difficult with 24/7 access to the internet through smartphones. In the case of Trump, there are also the continual tweets and right-wing and Christian right programming through radio and television. The relentless programming streaming from both ends of the political spectrum is pushing supporters ever deeper into Trump country. This brings me to an important point and a key aspect of my approach. By attacking or belittling Trump’s followers, political opponents and traditional media may be helping Trump to maintain his influence over his base. In my experience, telling a person that they are brainwashed, that they are in a cult, or that they are following a false god, is doomed to fail. It puts them immediately on the defensive, confirms you are a threat, possibly an enemy, and reinforces their indoctrination. It closes their mind to other perspectives. I’ve seen this happen over and over again. It happened to me when I was in the Moon group. It immediately triggers a person’s mind control programming—including thought stopping and us-versus-them thinking, with you being the “them.

April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead... ...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin. It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus... ...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

The channel does not pay lip service to fairness. It does not employ any neutral commentators. On the contrary, it celebrates its own ability to manipulate reality. At one point in 2018, the station showed a clip from a press conference; the then leader of the opposition party, Grzegorz Schetyna, was asked what his party achieved during its eight years in government, from 2007 to 2015. The clip shows Schetyna pausing and frowning; the video slows down and then ends. It’s as if he had nothing to say. In reality, Schetyna spoke for several minutes about the mass construction of roads, investments in the countryside, and advances in foreign policy. But this manipulated clip—one example of many—was deemed such a success that for several days, it remained pinned to the top of Telewizja Polska’s Twitter feed. Under Law and Justice, state television doesn’t just produce regime propaganda; it draws attention to the fact that it is doing so. It doesn’t just twist and contort information, it glories in deceit.

Without slavery, as a matter of fact, there is no definitive solution. I very soon realized that. Once upon a time, I was always talking of freedom: At breakfast I used to spread it on my toast, I used to chew it all day long, and in company my breath was delightfully redolent of freedom. With that key word I would bludgeon whoever contradicted me; I made it serve my desires and my power. I used to whisper it in bed in the ear of my sleeping mates and it helped me to drop them. I would slip it… Tchk! Tchk! I am getting excited and losing all sense of proportion. After all, I did on occasion make a more disinterested use of freedom and even – just imagine my naiveté -- defended it two or three times without of course going so far as to die for it, but nevertheless taking a few risks. I must be forgiven such rash acts; I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a choice, on the contrary and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne, no friends raising their glasses as they look at your affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner's box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face others' judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that's why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you're down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.

Obedience is freedom. Better to follow the Master’s plan than to do what you weren’t wired to do—master yourself. It is true that the thing that you and I most need to be rescued from is us! The greatest danger that we face is the danger that we are to ourselves. Who we think we are is a delusion and what we all tend to want is a disaster. Put together, they lead to only one place—death. If you’re a parent, you see it in your children. It didn’t take long for you to realize that you are parenting a little self-sovereign, who thinks at the deepest level that he needs no authority in his life but himself. Even if he cannot yet walk or speak, he rejects your wisdom and rebels against your authority. He has no idea what is good or bad to eat, but he fights your every effort to put into his mouth something that he has decided he doesn’t want. As he grows, he has little ability to comprehend the danger of the electric wall outlet, but he tries to stick his fingers in it precisely because you have instructed him not to. He wants to exercise complete control over his sleep, diet, and activities. He believes it is his right to rule his life, so he fights your attempts to bring him under submission to your loving authority. Not only does your little one resist your attempts to bring him under your authority, he tries to exercise authority over you. He is quick to tell you what to do and does not fail to let you know when you have done something that he does not like. He celebrates you when you submit to his desires and finds ways to punish you when you fail to submit to his demands. Now, here’s what you have to understand: when you’re at the end of a very long parenting day, when your children seemed to conspire together to be particularly rebellious, and you’re sitting on your bed exhausted and frustrated, you need to remember that you are more like your children than unlike them. We all want to rule our worlds. Each of us has times when we see authority as something that ends freedom rather than gives it. Each of us wants God to sign the bottom of our personal wish list, and if he does, we celebrate his goodness. But if he doesn’t, we begin to wonder if it’s worth following him at all. Like our children, each of us is on a quest to be and to do what we were not designed by our Creator to be or to do. So grace comes to decimate our delusions of self-sufficiency. Grace works to destroy our dangerous hope for autonomy. Grace helps to make us reach out for what we really need and submit to the wisdom of the Giver. Yes, it’s true, grace rescues us from us.

When older people ask me, “How have you been so successful after age 65?” I tell them, “Anyone who’s reached 65 years of age has had a world of experience behind him. He’s had his ups and downs and all the trials and tribulations of life. He certainly ought to be able to gather something out of that, something he can put together at the end of his 65 years so he can get a new start.” The way I see it, a man’s life is written by the way he lives it. It’s using any talent God has given him, even if his talent is cooking food or running a good motel. You can reach higher, think bigger, grow stronger and live deeper in this country of ours than anywhere else on Earth. The rules here give everybody a chance to win. If my story is different, it’s because my life really began at age 65 when most folks have already called it a day. I’d been modestly successful before I hit 65. After that I made millions. When they’re about 60 or 65, a lot of people feel that life is all over for them. Too many of them just sit and wait until they die or they become a burden to other people. The truth is they can make a brand new life for themselves if they just don’t give up and hunker down. I want to tell people, “You’re only as old as you feel or as you think, and no matter what your age there’s plenty of work to be done.” I don’t want to sound like I’m clearing my throat and giving advice about how a man can be successful. I’m not all puffed up. My main trade secret is I’m not afraid of hard, back-cracking work. After all, I was raised on a farm where hard work is the way of life.

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION 1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. 2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’. 3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths. 4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. 5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world. 6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels. 7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails. 8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

Let me start with this: I am an apostate. I have lied. I have cheated. I have done things in my life that I am not proud of, including but not limited to: • falling in love with a married man nineteen years ago • being selfish and self-centered • fighting with virtually everyone I have ever known (via hateful emails, texts, and spoken words) • physically threatening people (from parking ticket meter maids to parents who hit their kids in public) • not showing up at funerals of people I loved (because I don’t deal well with death) • being, on occasion, a horrible daughter, mother, sister, aunt, stepmother, wife (this list goes on and on). The same goes for every single person in my family: • My husband, also a serial cheater, sold drugs when he was young. • My mother was a self-admitted slut in her younger days (we’re talking the 1960s, before she got married). • My dad sold cocaine (and committed various other crimes), and then served time at Rikers Island. Why am I revealing all this? Because after the Church of Scientology gets hold of this book, it may well spend an obscene amount of money running ads, creating websites, and trotting out celebrities to make public statements that their religious beliefs are being attacked—all in an attempt to discredit me by disparaging my reputation and that of anyone close to me. So let me save them some money. There is no shortage of people who would be willing to say “Leah can be an asshole”—my own mother can attest to that. And if I am all these things the church may claim, then isn’t it also accurate to say that in the end, thirty-plus years of dedication, millions of dollars spent, and countless hours of study and

I had tracked down a little cafe in the next village, with a television set that was going to show the World Cup Final on the Saturday. I arrived there mid-morning when it was still deserted, had a couple of beers, ordered a sensational conejo au Franco, and then sat, drinking coffee, and watching the room fill up. With Germans. I was expecting plenty of locals and a sprinkling of tourists, even in an obscure little outpost like this, but not half the population of Dortmund. In fact, I came to the slow realisation as they poured in and sat around me . . . that I was the only Englishman there. They were very friendly, but there were many of them, and all my exits were cut off. What strategy could I employ? It was too late to pretend that I was German. I’d greeted the early arrivals with ‘Guten Tag! Ich liebe Deutschland’, but within a few seconds found myself conversing in English, in which they were all fluent. Perhaps, I hoped, they would think that I was an English-speaker but not actually English. A Rhodesian, possibly, or a Canadian, there just out of curiosity, to try to pick up the rules of this so-called ‘Beautiful Game’. But I knew that I lacked the self-control to fake an attitude of benevolent detachment while watching what was arguably the most important event since the Crucifixion, so I plumped for the role of the ultra-sporting, frightfully decent Upper-Class Twit, and consequently found myself shouting ‘Oh, well played, Germany!’ when Helmut Haller opened the scoring in the twelfth minute, and managing to restrain myself, when Geoff Hurst equalised, to ‘Good show! Bit lucky though!’ My fixed grin and easy manner did not betray the writhing contortions of my hands and legs beneath the table, however, and when Martin Peters put us ahead twelve minutes from the end, I clapped a little too violently; I tried to compensate with ‘Come on Germany! Give us a game!’ but that seemed to strike the wrong note. The most testing moment, though, came in the last minute of normal time when Uwe Seeler fouled Jackie Charlton, and the pig-dog dolt of a Swiss referee, finally revealing his Nazi credentials, had the gall to penalise England, and then ignored Schnellinger’s blatant handball, allowing a Prussian swine named Weber to draw the game. I sat there applauding warmly, as a horde of fat, arrogant, sausage-eating Krauts capered around me, spilling beer and celebrating their racial superiority.

Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash! 　　While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual! 　　Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence

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

I want a love like me thinking of you thinking of me thinking of you type love or me telling my friends more than I've ever admitted to myself about how I feel about you type love or hating how jealous you are but loving how much you want me all to yourself type love or seeing how your first name just sounds so good next to my last name. and shit- I wanted to see how far I could get without calling you and I barely made it out of my garage. See, I want a love that makes me wait until she falls asleep then wonder if she's dreaming about us being in love type love or who loves the other more or what she's doing at this exact moment or slow dancing in the middle of our apartment to the music of our hearts. Closing my eyes and imagining how a love so good could just hurt so much when she's not there and shit I love not knowing where this love is headed type love. And check this- I wanna place those little post-it notes all around the house so she never forgets how much I love her type love then not have enough ink in my pen to write all the love type love and hope I make her feel as good as she makes me feel and I wanna deal with my friends making fun of me the way I made fun of them when they went through the same kind of love type love. The only difference is this is one of those real type loves and just like in high school I wanna spend hours on the phone not saying shit and then fall asleep and then wake up with her right next to me and smell her all up in my covers type love and I wanna try counting the ways I love her then lose count in the middle just so I could start all over again and I wanna celebrate one of those one-month anniversaries even though they ain't really anniversaries but doing it just 'cause it makes her happy type love and check this- I wanna fall in love with the melody the phone plays when our numbers dial in type love and talk to you until I lose my breath, she leaves me breathless, but with the expanding of my lungs I inhale all of her back into me. I want a love that makes me need to change my cell phone calling plan to something that allows me to talk to her longer 'cause in all honesty, I want to avoid one of them high cell phone bill type loves and I don't want a love that makes me regret how small my hands are I mean the lines on my palms don't give me enough time to love you as long as I'd like to type love and I want a love that makes me st-st-st-stutter just thinking about how strong this love is type love and I want a love that makes me want to cut off all my hair. Well maybe not all of the hair, maybe like I'd cut the split ends and trim the mustache but it would still be a symbol of how strong my love is for her. I kind of feel comfortable now so I even be fantasize about walking out on a green light just dying to get hit by a car just so I could lose my memory, get transported to some third world country just to get treated and somehow meet up again with you so I could fall in love with you in a different language and see if it still feels the same type love. I want a love that's as unexplainable as she is, but I'm married so she is gonna be the one I share this love with.

[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . . Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . . Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . . The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . . These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . . “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . . In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . . An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . . For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . . Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.

The story is told about three men who were sentenced to death by guillotine. One was a doctor, another a lawyer, and the third an engineer. The day of execution arrived, and the three prisoners were lined up on the gallows. “Do you wish to face the blade, or look away?” the henchman asked the doctor. “I’ll face the blade!” the physician courageously replied. The doctor placed his neck onto the guillotine, and the executioner pulled the rope to release the blade. Then an amazing thing happened – the blade fell to a point just inches above the doctor’s neck, and stopped! The crowd of gathered townspeople was astonished, and tittered with speculation. After a bevy of excited discussions, the executioner told the doctor, “This is obviously a sign from God that you do not deserve to die. Go forth – you are pardoned.” Joyfully the doctor arose and went on his way. The second man to confront death was the lawyer, who also chose to face the blade. The cord was pulled, down fell the blade, and once again it stopped but a few inches from the man’s naked throat! Again the crowd buzzed – two miracles in one day! Just as he did minutes earlier, the executioner informed the prisoner that divine intervention had obviously been issued, and he, too, was free. Happily he departed. The final prisoner was the engineer who, like his predecessors, chose to face the blade. He fitted his neck into the crook of the guillotine and looked up at the apparatus above him. The executioner was about to pull the cord when the engineer pointed to the pulley system and called out, “Wait a minute! – I think I can see the problem!” Within each of us there resides an overworking engineer who is more concerned with analyzing the problem than accepting the solution. Many of us have become so resigned to receiving the short end of the stick in life, that if we were offered the long end, we would doubt its authenticity and refuse it. We must be willing to drop the heavy load of guilt, unworthiness, and self-denial we have carried for so long, perhaps lifetimes. We must openly affirm that we are ready to receive all the good that life has to offer us, without argument or wariness. Then we must accept our good – not just in word, but in action. In so doing we claim our right to live in a new world – one which attests that we are deserving not of punishment, but of release, freedom, and celebration.

Mandana Misra was a great scholar and authority on the Vedas and Mimasa. He led a householder’s life (grihastha), with his scholar-philosopher wife, Ubhaya Bharati, in the town of Mahishi, in what is present-day northern Bihar. Husband and wife would have great debates on the veracity of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and other philosophical works. Scholars from all over Bharatavarsha came to debate and understand the Shastras with them. It is said that even the parrots in Mandana’s home debated the divinity, or its lack, in the Vedas and Upanishads. Mandana was a staunch believer in rituals. One day, while he was performing Pitru Karma (rituals for deceased ancestors), Adi Shankaracharya arrived at his home and demanded a debate on Advaita. Mandana was angry at the rude intrusion and asked the Acharya whether he was not aware, as a Brahmin, that it was inauspicious to come to another Brahmin’s home uninvited when Pitru Karma was being done? In reply, Adi Shankara asked Mandana whether he was sure of the value of such rituals. This enraged Mandana and the other Brahmins present. Thus began one of the most celebrated debates in Hindu thought. It raged for weeks between the two great scholars. As the only other person of equal intellect to Shankara and Mandana was Mandana’s wife, Ubhaya Bharati, she was appointed the adjudicator. Among other things, Shankara convinced Mandana that the rituals for the dead had little value to the dead. Mandana became Adi Shankara’s disciple (and later the first Shankaracharya of the Sringeri Math in Karnataka). When the priest related this story to me, I was shocked. He was not giving me the answer I had expected. Annoyed, I asked him what he meant by the story if Adi Shankara himself said such rituals were of no use to the dead. The priest replied, “Son, the story has not ended.” And he continued... A few years later, Adi Shankara was compiling the rituals for the dead, to standardize them for people across Bharatavarsha. Mandana, upset with his Guru’s action, asked Adi Shankara why he was involved with such a useless thing. After all, the Guru had convinced him of the uselessness of such rituals (Lord Krishna also mentions the inferiority of Vedic sacrifice to other paths, in the Gita. Pitru karma has no vedic base either). Why then was the Jagad Guru taking such a retrograde step? Adi Shankaracharya smiled at his disciple and answered, “The rituals are not for the dead but for the loved ones left behind.

To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, ‘for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains’, but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined – their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

It was as she remembered, a haven of comfort and serenity. With a glad sigh, she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the side of the bed.Smiling, she patted the mattress beside her. Her husband scowled. It seemed to have become his habit. "We aren't here to relax." "Wolscroft may not even be in the area. It could take days for this to be settled." "He's here," Dragon said with certainty. "He will know what happened at Winchester, and he will be looking for a way to stop us before we can threaten him further." Privately, Rycca believed the same but she saw no reason to stress it. Nothing would happen until dark. Of that she was confident. Which meant... "We have hours to fill.Any ideas?" When he realized her meaning,he looked startled. With a laugh,she scrambled off the bed and went to him. "Oh,Dragon,for heaven's sake, do you really want to mope around here all day? I certainly don't. I still haven't gotten over being afraid Magnus was going to kill you,and I simply don't want to think about death anymore. I want to celebrate life." "There are three hundred men out there-" "Which is why we're in here." She raised herself on tiptoe, bit the lobe of his ear, and whispered, "I promise not to yell too loudly." A shudder ran through him. Even as his big hands stroked her back,he said, "Warriors don't mope." "No,of course they don't.It was a poor choice of words.But you'll be pacing back and forth, looking out the windows, or you'll go get that whetstone I noticed in the stable and sharpen your sword endlessly, or you'll be staring off into space with that dangerous look you get when you're contemplating mayhem. You'll be totally oblivious to me and-" He laughed despite himself and drew her closer. "Enough! Heaven forbid I behave so churlishly." "Speaking of heaven..." With the covers kicked back,the bed was smooth and cool.They undressed each other slowly, relishing the wonder of discovery that still came to them fresh and pure as their very first time. "Remember?" Rycca murmured as she trailed her lips along his broad, powerfully muscled shoulder and down the solid wall of his chest. "I was so nervous..." "Really?" Fooled me....Ah..." "I'd never seen anything so beautiful as you." "Not...beautiful...you are..." "I can't believe how strong you are. Why am I never afraid with you?" "Know I'd die 'fore hurting you? Sweetheart..." "Ohhh! Dragon...please..." His hands and lips moved over her, sweetly tormenting. She clutched his shoulders, her hips rising, and welcomed him deep within her. Still he tantalized her, making her writhe and laughing when she squeezed him hard with her powerful inner muscles. But the laughter turned quickly to a moan of delight. She looked up into his perfectly formed face,more handsome than any man had a right to be, and into his tawny eyes that were the windows of a soul more beautiful than any physical form. A piercing sense of blessedness filled her that she should be so fortunate as to love and be loved by such a man. Her cresting cry was caught by him, hismouth hard against hers, the spur to his own completion that went on and on,seemingly without end.

The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”). Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.” Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.

told me more about what happened the other night?” she asked, deciding to air her worst fears. “Am I under suspicion or something?” “Everyone is.” “Especially ex-wives who are publicly humiliated on the day of the murder, right?” Something in Montoya’s expression changed. Hardened. “I’ll be back,” he promised, “and I’ll bring another detective with me, then we’ll interview you and you can ask all the questions you like.” “And you’ll answer them?” He offered a hint of a smile. “That I can’t promise. Just that I won’t lie to you.” “I wouldn’t expect you to, Detective.” He gave a quick nod. “In the meantime if you suddenly remember, or think of anything, give me a call.” “I will,” she promised, irritated, watching as he hurried down the two steps of the porch to his car. He was younger than she was by a couple of years, she guessed, though she couldn’t be certain, and there was something about him that exuded a natural brooding sexuality, as if he knew he was attractive to women, almost expected it to be so. Great. Just what she needed, a sexy-as-hell cop who probably had her pinned to the top of his murder suspect list. She whistled for the dog and Hershey bounded inside, dragging some mud and leaves with her. “Sit!” Abby commanded and the Lab dropped her rear end onto the floor just inside the door. Abby opened the door to the closet and found a towel hanging on a peg she kept for just such occasions, then, while Hershey whined in protest, she cleaned all four of her damp paws. “You’re gonna be a problem, aren’t you?” she teased, then dropped the towel over the dog’s head. Hershey shook herself, tossed off the towel, then bit at it, snagging one end in her mouth and pulling backward in a quick game of tug of war. Abby laughed as she played with the dog, the first real joy she’d felt since hearing the news about her ex-husband. The phone rang and she left the dog growling and shaking the tattered piece of terry cloth. “Hello?” she said, still chuckling at Hershey’s antics as she lifted the phone to her ear. “Abby Chastain?” “Yes.” “Beth Ann Wright with the New Orleans Sentinel.” Abby’s heart plummeted. The press. Just what she needed. “You were Luke Gierman’s wife, right?” “What’s this about?” Abby asked warily as Hershey padded into the kitchen and looked expectantly at the back door leading to her studio. “In a second,” she mouthed to the Lab. Hershey slowly wagged her tail. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Beth Ann said, sounding sincerely rueful. “I should have explained. The paper’s running a series of articles on Luke, as he was a local celebrity, and I’d like to interview you for the piece. I was thinking we could meet tomorrow morning?” “Luke and I were divorced.” “Yes, I know, but I would like to give some insight to the man behind the mike, you know. He had a certain public persona, but I’m sure my readers would like to know more about him, his history, his hopes, his dreams, you know, the human-interest angle.” “It’s kind of late for that,” Abby said, not bothering to keep the ice out of her voice. “But you knew him intimately. I thought you could come up with some anecdotes, let people see the real Luke Gierman.” “I don’t think so.” “I realize you and he had some unresolved issues.” “Pardon me?” “I caught his program the other day.” Abby tensed, her fingers holding the phone in a death grip. “So this is probably harder for you than most, but I still would like to ask you some questions.” “Maybe another time,” she hedged and Beth Ann didn’t miss a beat. “Anytime you’d like. You’re a native Louisianan, aren’t you?” Abby’s neck muscles tightened. “Born and raised, but you met Luke in Seattle when he was working for a radio station . . . what’s the call sign, I know I’ve got it somewhere.” “KCTY.” It was a matter of public record. “Oh, that’s right. Country in the City. But you grew up here and went to local schools, right? Your