Confined By Walls Quotes

You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.

The Holy Spirit showed me that when I put up walls to keep others out I also wall myself into solitary place of confinement.

What chilled my blood was a felt marker outline of a woman on the wall. Hands above the head, where there was a hook, then below the shape of the head, a neck strap. Then a waist strap, and two ankle clamps. The silhouette gave me no doubt that Gina had been confined here. But where was she now?

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers. Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso. Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement..

In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had peeped into one of my strange windows out of curiosity and had caught a glimpse of my doomed loneliness, or her fancy had been intrigued by the mute language, the clue of my painting. And then, while I advanced always along my corridor, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of those people who live outside, that strange, absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety and frivolity. And it happened at times that when I walked by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and longing (why was she waiting for me? why silent and longing?); but other times she did not get there on time, or she forgot about this poor creature hemmed in, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, could see her in the distance, smiling or dancing carefree, or, what was worse, I could not see her at all and I imagined her in inaccessible or vile places. And then I felt my destiny a far lonelier one than I had imagined.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide on man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass: for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who prologue-like your humble patience pray, Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

It is love. I will have to run or hide. The walls of its prison rise up, as in a twisted dream. The beautiful mask has changed, but as always it is the one. Of what use are my talismans: the literary exercises, the vague erudition, the knowledge of words used by the harsh North to sing its seas and swords, the temperate friendship, the galleries of the Library, the common things, the habits, the young love of my mother, the militant shadow of my dead, the timeless night, the taste of dreams? Being with you or being without you is the measure of my time. Now the pitcher breaks about the spring, now the man arises to the sound of birds, now those that watch at the windows have gone dark, but the darkness has brought no peace. It, I know, is love: the anxiety and the relief at hearing your voice, the expectation and the memory, the horror of living in succession. It is love with its mythologies, with its tiny useless magics. There exists a corner that I dare not cross. Now the armies confine me, the hordes. (This room is unreal; she has not seen it.) The name of a woman gives me away. A woman hurts me in all of my body.

Let no one reduce to tears or reproach This statement of the mastery of God, Who, with magnificent irony, gave Me at once both books and night Of this city of books He pronounced rulers These lightless eyes, who can only Peruse in libraries of dreams The insensible paragraphs that yield With every new dawn. Vainly does the day Lavish on them its infinite books, Arduous as the arduous manuscripts Which at Alexandria did perish. Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us) Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens; I aimlessly weary at the confines Of this tall and deep blind library. Encyclopedias, atlases, the East And the West, centuries, dynasties Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies Do walls proffer, but pointlessly. Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade Explore with my indecisive cane; To think I had imagined Paradise In the form of such a library. Something, certainly not termed Fate, rules on such things; Another had received in blurry Afternoons both books and shadow. Wandering through these slow corridors I often feel with a vague and sacred dread That I am another, the dead one, who must Have trodden the same steps at the same time. Which of the two is now writing this poem Of a plural I and of a single shadow? How important is the word that names me If the anathema is one and indivisible? Groussac or Borges, I see this darling World deform and extinguish To a pale, uncertain ash Resembling sleep and oblivion

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.

A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind is surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,” a voice shouts in my head: I AM FREE!

The bud of a rose grows in darkness. It knows nothing of the sun, yet it pushes at the darkness that confines it until at last the walls give way and the rose bursts forth, spreading its petals into the light. I love him.

That the life of man is but a dream, many a man has surmised heretofore; and I, too, am everywhere pursued by this feeling. When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation, whilst we amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes, — when I consider all this, Wilhelm, I am silent. I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.

It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.

I can read and see the words that you have confined behind the wall of your lips in the expression on your face and in the gaze of your eyes.

did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Without compunction, pity or shame, they've built towering walls around me. Desperate, I sit and think one thing: alone here this fate confounds me. For there were many things I'd hoped to do out there. With all the construction, how was I not aware? Yet the crack and clang of hammers I never once heard. Imperceptibly they've confined me from the outside world. ("Walls")

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.

What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank of either race in that world.

His gaze, blunted by the unnumbered procession of iron bars, uncounted as his softly padded steps. Smooth motion of blood and sinew turning in its own, small circle prescribed by bars and walls ...and skin, confined. Suddenly, without warning, a flash of light and image pierces the caged brain, and passing through its beating heart to stillness finds its way.

A driving, pounding, uncontrollable need courses through me with every beat of my pulse, demanding an outlet, demanding I rip through the confines of her leather and trade her sweet taste for the incomparable perfection of sinking into her when she comes. I need to fuck her, to flip her over the arm of this throne and drive into her, but I can't. I need her nail marks in the wood, need her cries filling this whole fucking house, need her knowing what I can be for her—anything and everything she needs. She's heaven in my mouth. Flawless. Mine. And she's almost there. Gods, yes, her legs are shaking, her walls are fluttering around my tongue. I love her so fucking much.

When looking across the horizon the world had a way of expanding, broadening beyond the tight narrow confines of the little boxes of pain humans tended to wall themselves into.

the confines of prison walls cannot impose boundaries on the flights of one’s fantasy

You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where space-time has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity.

realized I was living in a misery of my own making. I was living in shackles I had put on myself. I was confined by walls I had built—walls I was continuing to build, choice by choice.

People who want to put up walls and turn refugees away today are not acting all that differently from the Nazi collaborators who, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, embodied the “banality of evil.” Anyone willing to countenance thousands of children dying at sea or living in subhuman conditions within the confines of refugee camps is just as cruel as they were.

Though I couldn't define what I was, I knew what I wasn't. I was shown the limits, and being confined within a set of walls tormented me and drained me of life, for the real me spanned multitudes, stretching far beyond the bounds of normality encircling ninety percent of the human race.

An airplane crossed the sky, and she imagined its interior-people packed in rows like eggs in a carton, the chemical smell of the toilets, pretzels in foil pouches, cans hiss-popping open, black oval of night sky embedded in the rattling walls. How strange that something so drab, so confined, so stifling with sour exhalations and the fumes of indifferent machinery might be mistaken for a star.

She wanted to leave the house and dance the world away until she fell down dead. For her, every passing minute meant more lost time. Inside the house, she was condemned to live a cloistered life, whereas outside those confining walls, the entire world was enjoying itself. It was like an eternal party...

Our emotional suffering is caused by our desire for things to be other than they are. The more we resist the fact of what is happening right now, the more we suffer. Pain is like a gaseous substance. If you allow it to just be there, freely, it will eventually dissipate on its own. If you fight and resist the pain, however, walling it into a confined space, the pressure will grow and grow until there is an explosion.

Shoulder to shoulder, a coordinated movement of the people, their blood no longer confined in the limited circulation of the body but rolling sweetly and yet still returning through the infinite extent of China.

One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. —Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother, July 1880

Those of us who have been violated or around violence or cruelty—and really those of us who have simply grown up in a racist, sexist, homophobic world—knew how far we could go, how loud we could get, how big we could become, how much space or attention we could occupy. We learned the price we had to pay for our bigness, our desire, and our ambition. We were practiced at the dance. We cherished the walls of our confines because they gave definition to our lives, boundaries. We wrongly believed this was safety, protection. We made sure someone was assigned to bring us down a notch, remind us who we really are, hold the truth of our badness.

Well basically,’ said Nell, ‘I want to question the value of confinement. An enclosed community is toxic. It festers. It stagnates. The wrong people thrive there. The sort of people who actually like being walled in.

So it began, the living escape. The writer’s life. Limits left at the door, with muddy boots, grace and undiscovered fantastical, far away lands. Intrigue exists, beyond the confines of four, suffocating walls. The flawed, vulnerable, messy, selfish heroine makes human mistakes, yet we forgive her. We recognize the broken pieces in ourselves, her honesty forces a hard look in the mirror. Characters become real, we picture them with our own eyes, hear their voices, empathize with their story. We root them on. When the writer does their job well, we love them, never wanting to say good-bye.

If we measured our affection toward others by how many nicknames we bestow upon them, our pets would be the most loved. Here's the etymological journey for the nicknames I have for Tobey: Tobito, Toblerone. T-Bone. T-bonics. Ta-T. Ta-Tobes. Tubby, for when he's gotten into the trash and gorged himself. Nicknames with origins based on appearance: Bearded Yum Yum, Handsome McHandsome, Fuzzy Face. Then this strange progression: Pooch. Poochers. Poocharoo. Poochacho. Pachune. Then, somehow, Pooch turned into Mooch, and so there had to be Moocharo. Muchacho. Manu, and most recently Man-nu-nu. All these monikers I say in voices more commonly echoed from the confines of straightjackets and padded walls. Anyone we truly love should come with their own dictionary.

There can be no question that parrots have more intellect than any other kind of bird, and it is this that makes them such favourite pets and brings upon them so many sorrows. ...Men will buy them ... and carry them off to all quarters of the native town, intending, I doubt not, to treat them kindly; but "the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel", and confinement in a solitary cell, the discipline with which we reform hardened criminals, is misery enough to a bird with an active mind, without the superadded horrors of ... life in a tin case, hung from a nail in the wall of a dark shop... Why does the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals never look into the woes of parrots? ... However happy you make her captivity, imagination will carry her at times to the green field and blue sky, and she fancies herself somewhere near the sun, heading a long file of exultant companions in swift career through the whistling air. Then she opens her mouth and rings out a wild salute to all parrots in the far world below her.

The thought of the Gita is not pure Monism although it sees in one unchanging, pure, eternal Self the foundation of all cosmic existence, nor Mayavada although it speaks of the Maya of the three modes of Prakriti omnipresent in the created world; nor is it qualified Monism although it places in the One his eternal supreme Prakriti manifested in the form of the Jiva and lays most stress on dwelling in God rather than dissolution as the supreme state of spiritual consciousness; nor is it Sankhya although it explains the created world by the double principle of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theism although it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatara of Vishnu according to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows no essential difference nor any actual superiority of the status of the indefinable relationless Brahman over that of this Lord of beings who is the Master of the universe and the Friend of all creatures. Like the earlier spiritual synthesis of the Upanishads this later synthesis at once spiritual and intellectual avoids naturally every such rigid determination as would injure its universal comprehensiveness. Its aim is precisely the opposite to that of the polemist commentators who found this Scripture established as one of the three highest Vedantic authorities and attempted to turn it into a weapon of offence and defence against other schools and systems. The Gita is not a weapon for dialectical warfare; it is a gate opening on the whole world of spiritual truth and experience and the view it gives us embraces all the provinces of that supreme region. It maps out, but it does not cut up or build walls or hedges to confine our vision.

In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels

As I passed a low pavilion, where a crowd of helpless lunatics were confined, I read a motto on the wall, “While I live I hope”. The absurdity of it struck me forcibly. I would have liked to put above the gates that open to the asylum, “He who enters here leaveth hope behind”.

Just as the roads at Moscow's heart flow out in concentric ripples from the Kremlin, so this tension too seems to radiate from those secret and formidable walls, lapping outward to the suburbs and to the farthest confines of the Soviet Union itself, in ever-weakening but pervasive rings.

Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow.

Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.

Reading was my salvation. Libraries and universities and schools from all over Louisiana donated books to Angola and for once, the willful ignorance of the prison administration paid off for us, because there were a lot of radical books in the prison library: Books we wouldn’t have been allowed to get through the mail. Books we never could have afforded to buy. Books we had never heard of. Herman, King, and I first gravitated to books and authors that dealt with politics and race—George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, J. A. Rogers’s From “Superman” to Man. We read anything we could find on slavery, communism, socialism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, the African independence movements, and independence movements from around the world. I would check off these books on the library order form and never expect to get them until they came. Leaning against my wall in the cell, sitting on the floor, on my bed, or at my table, I read.

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe’s narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace) we come to accept life’s brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! That is another matter.

Asking us to push away the very walls that are constantly crushing us into small, confined boxes is toxic.

faith perishes if it is walled in, or confined. If it is anywhere, it must be everywhere, like God himself: if God is in your life, he is in all things, for he is God.

He went back to his solitary wanderings. Believing any set of four walls to be a tomb or a trap, he preferred to float over the most barren of open spaces.

As I walked out of the ghetto with its tombstone-crowned walls and along the streets of Krakow, I was dumbfounded to see that life seemed just as it had been before I entered the ghetto. It was as if I were in a time warp...or as if the ghetto were on another planet. I stared at the clean, well-dressed people, busily moving from place to place. They seemed so normal, so happy. Had they not known what we had been suffering just a few blocks away? How could they not have known? How could they not have done something to help us? A streetcar stopped, and passengers boarded, oblivious to our presence. They showed absolutely no interest in who we were, where we were going, or why. That our misery, confinement, and pain were irrelevant to their lives was simply incomprehensible.

As Master Nathaniel jogged leisurely along his thoughts turned to the Farmer Gibberty, who many a time must have jogged along this path, in just such a way, and seen and heard the very same things that he was seeing and hearing now. Yes, the Farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people's memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered.

I live here, yet I am not seen. The world pulses with bloodshed, that sends shivers down my spine. Try, I do, to find places to hide within the confines of these walls, away from the rage of metal.

man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise of the thinking faculty!

Would this be the rest of her life, too? Confined to the four walls of this house, to the whispers of other people’s fears, scrubbing away, while another world was happening out there, happening without her?

It was a good place to sit, and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions — small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.

A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity? Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

I picture myself confined within my clinical cell, time slowly dripping down the four walls, forming puddles of dirty sludge that will slowly come up to drown me. Until then, I am existing in an infinite space where delusion is married to reality.

It's stiff, the fabric hugging my hips, making it impossible to move freely. "Go on." It's Kai's taunting voice I hear behind me. "Ask for my help, Gray." I roll my eyes at the wall in front of me. "Stubborn, remember?" I hear Kitt's chuckle before I feel hands brushing my legs. Startled, I look down, eyes landing on a bent head of messy black waves. Kai is gripping the bottom seam of my dress, his eyes flicking up to mine. "May I?" His voice is soft, tone amused. I swallow, roll my eyes once again, and nod against my better judgment. And then he's ripping my dress. He tears the fabric easily, creating a slit up the side of my thigh, freeing me from the tight confines of the fabric. His rough fingers briefly brush my skin as he says, "I am more than willing to rip your dresses for you, Gray. To help, of course." Kitt snorts while Kai smirks. "You only need to ask." "Why ask when you're so eager to offer?" Kai's laughter follows me as I finally pull myself up, arms burning with the strain.

We now dwelt in a very large prison, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico and two oceans. There were the jailers, the turnkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal walls or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anywho, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it a good idea…Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved.

There is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental dis-ease. It acts like an unquenchable fire that renders the vast majority of us incapable in this life of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies in the marrow of our bones and the deep regions of our souls. All great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion tries to name and analyze this longing. We are seldom in direct touch with it, and indeed the modern world seems set on preventing us from getting in touch with it by covering it with an unending phantasmagoria of entertainments, obsessions, addictions, and distractions of every sort. But the longing is there, built into us like a jack-in-the-box that presses for release. Two great paintings suggest this longing in their titles—Gauguin’s Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going? and de Chirico’s Nostalgia for the Infinite—but I must work with words. Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality.

It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power -- we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.

In 1947, the U.N. offered the Palestinians 45 percent of historic Palestine. After the 1948 war, Palestinians were confined to 22 percent of the territory. Since the 1967 war, Israeli settlements, along with the separation wall and settler-only roads, have shrunk the Palestinian remnant to an even smaller fraction.

Misner walked away from the pulpit, to the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the podium and held it before him for all to see - if only they would. . . . Without this sign, the believer's life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit; the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid. . . . But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well, life was a whole other matter.

The three characters used for the word “autism” in Japanese signify “self,” “shut” and “illness.” My imagination converts these characters into a prisoner locked up and forgotten inside a solitary confinement cell waiting for someone, anyone, to realize he or she is in there. The Reason I Jump knocks out a brick in the wall.

And then I was in the prison, arm outstretched, fingers on Akos’s cheek, Vas’s hand strong around my wrist, holding me fast. Akos’s teeth were gritted. And the shadows that were usually confined beneath my skin were all around us, like smoke. So dark I couldn’t see Ryzek or Eijeh or the prison with its glass walls. Akos’s eyes--full of tears, full of pain--found mine. Pushing the shadow toward him would have been easy. I had done it many times before, each time a mark on my left arm. All I had to do was let the connection form, let the pain pass between us like a breath, like a kiss. Let all of it flow out of me, bringing relief for us both, in death. But he did not deserve it. This time, I broke the connection, like slamming a door between us. I pulled the pain back, into myself, willing my body to grow darker and darker, like a bottle of ink. I shuddered with the force of that power, that agony. I didn’t scream. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I was strong enough to survive it all.

But now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a few straggling snowflakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to their coverts and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour. There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men.

They saw how the wall around Eden stretched away on either hand, with only the one opening, as though to guard those within from hungry hordes who might wish to come inside. And next to the cherubim they saw the flaming sword. … The flaming sword turned this way, to prevent any intruder entering from the east, and that way, to prevent any intruder entering from the west. But it did not ever turn in the direction of the garden. The mouse and the beetle stood together watching it for a long time. Beyond it the country stretched away, with winding rivers and low hills and stands of trees and no moving thing in sight. The beetle said, ‘These are formidable defences. No one can enter Eden. But I do not see that there is anything to prevent us leaving.

There is a popular view that something has to lead to a specific distant goal in order to have value. So we build goals like walls that confine us and condemn every other result or destination in life to be a failure. But by freeing yourself from the burden of reaching a predetermined point/status, you are no longer a prisoner to yourself. And you start enjoying things for what they are, not for what they could be or lead to. You relish the company of your family, your friends or your books; you do things without aiming at something else beyond. You love the Present, for these present moments are yours and no one can take them from you, regardless of what the future shall bring. You just walk where the soul is really longing for, and then you say that this was your destination. Because this w-a-s your destination.

It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions—small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.

The kinds of things I half-heartedly fantasized about—sustaining a family, a career, a relationship—were just fantasies; I’d wasted too much time conflicted and confused. My choices, over years, had stacked up on top of each other until they felt like external forces, walls that obstructed my view and confined me; even this morning, I considered, I’d made terrible choices unceasingly . . . I couldn’t simply become another person.

o here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I'm in, what I'm in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now, fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against my belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged. I've no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against the bloody walls. I listen, make mental notes, and I'm troubled. I'm hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I'm terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in.

Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sound of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude. In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.

That the development of the human being is but the passing from one state of consciousness to another. It is a succession of expansions, a growth of that faculty of awareness that constitutes the predominant characteristic of the indwelling Thinker. It is the progressing from consciousness polarised in the personality, lower self, or body, to that polarised in the higher self, ego, or soul, thence to a polarisation in the Monad, or Spirit, till the consciousness eventually is Divine. As the human being develops, the faculty of awareness extends first of all beyond the circumscribing walls that confine it within the lower kingdoms of nature (the mineral, vegetable and animal) to the three worlds of the evolving personality, to the planet whereon he plays his part, to the system wherein that planet revolves, until it finally escapes from the solar system itself and becomes universal.

I tell you Charlie, I was there waiting in that field. waiting for Ede and Tom to find me. You don't think two people come together for nothing, do you? They were together because I was waiting to be found..." Then she looked straight into my face and said to me: "You know it, too, Charlie. All that time you waited for me to find you. What if I hadn't? What if I'd said: I won't?" She turned, and clinging to my arm, she surveyed the fields of snow the stretched away to the confining wall.

When I consider how narrowly the active and enquiring powers of a human being are confined; when I see that all effective effort has as its end the satisfaction of needs which themselves have no purpose except to lenghten the duration of our poor existence, and that any contentment on one point or another of our enquiries consists only in a sort of dreaming resignation as we paint the walls within which we sit out our imprisonment with bright figures and vistas of light—All that, Wilhelm, renders me speechless.

With a wail of fury, the prince raised his sword and began to charge the villain, but in that same moment, the Erlking fired an arrow tipped in pure gold. The prince screamed. He dropped the sword and fell to his knees, cradling his arm. The arrow had not gone completely through but remained lodged in his wrist. With a snarl, he looked up and staggered back to his feet. “You should have aimed to kill,” he told the Erlking. But the villain merely smiled. “I do not want you dead. I want you to suffer. As I will continue to suffer for the rest of time.” The prince claimed the sword with his other hand. But when he went again to charge for the Erlking—something tugged on his arm, holding him in place. He looked down at the bloodied arrow shaft trapped in his limb. The Erlking rose from the throne. Black magic sparked in the air between them. “That arrow now tethers you to this castle,” he said. “Your spirit no longer belongs to the confines of your mortal body, but will be forever trapped within these walls. From this day into eternity, your soul belongs to me.” The Erlking lifted his hands and darkness cloaked the castle, spreading through the throne room and out to every corner of the forsaken place. “I lay claim to all of this. To you family’s history, your beloved name—and I curse it all. The world will forget you. Your name will be burned from the pages of history. Not even you will remember the love you might have known. Dear prince, you will be forever alone, tormented until the end of time—just as you’ve left me. And you will never understand why. Let this be your fate, until your name, forgotten by all, should be spoken once more.

As early as 1953 there was talk of television. Perhaps Macdonnell saw the writing on the wall when he told the press that “our show is perfect for radio,” that Gunsmoke confined by a picture couldn’t possibly be as authentic or attentive to detail. Behind the scenes, he was intrigued. If the cast could be left intact (a major problem, for the once-slender Bill Conrad had ballooned in recent years, giving him an appearance far different from what a listener saw in the mind) and if the spirit and integrity of the radio show could be maintained … well, it might be interesting.

What makes you come alive? What keeps you going ? Is there hope in your heart still or has the weariness of the world attached itself to you like a limpet leaving you afraid and passionless? Do you wake up with a smile and stars in your eyes after restless, feverish soul-searching in the night? Do you dream, dream beyond what is possible and beyond the narrow confines of your jaded existence? How old do you feel? How much in love can you fall? How much step is there in your dance, o how many notes left in your song ? Have you decided to sit by and watch others dance or weep at the dying notes of your own swan song? Shake your lethargy. Come alive to innocence once more. Believe past your own jaded cynicism. Pretend you are young once more. Jump up with a spring in your feet, fall breathlessly in love again. Let the colors of the world wash over your walls, brushing the greys away. Let the sunlight of hope flood through your doubting self, o let the music play. Dance till you ache and drop, laugh till you cry. Sing till your lungs burst, and journey till the very road ends and dream by the moonless starless nights. Sleep with a secret smile on your lips, your body flush with the imprints of lips. Come alive, my dearest ...reclaim yourself from the living dead. Life beckons

So as long as you have not attained to desirelessness, as long as you have not renounced desires completely, you will go on taking births and wandering in different bodies. And howsoever different the forms of the body may be, their basic condition is always the same. The ills of the body are the same, regardless whether it’s a bird’s body or man’s. There is no difference in their miseries, because the fundamental misery is only one: the soul becoming confined in the body, the entering of the soul into the prison of body. A prison after all is a prison; it makes no difference whether its walls are circular or angular no matter what you think.

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in the water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not his then his son's or unborn grandson's) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal domination, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.

Landsman is a tough guy, in his way, given to the taking of wild chances. He has been called hard-boiled and foolhardy, a momzer, a crazy son of a bitch. He has faced down shtarkers and psychopaths, he has been shot at, beaten, frozen, burned. He has pursued suspects between the flashing walls of urban firefights and deep into bear country. Heights, crowds, snakes, burning houses, dogs schooled to hate the smell of a policeman, he has shrugged them all off or functioned in spite of them. But when he finds himself in lightless or confined spaces, something in the animal core of Meyer Landsman convulses. No one but his ex-wife knows it, but Detective Meyer Landsman is afraid of the dark.

Dr Bone was over sixty when she was arrested in Hungary in 1949. A notable linguist, she had been invited to Hungary to translate English scientific books into Hungarian. She herself had joined the Communist Party in 1919. She was accused of being a British agent, but refused to make a false confession or in any way to collaborate with her interrogators. This elderly lady spent seven years in prison before she was finally released in November 1956. For three of those years she was denied access to books or writing materials. The cell in which she was first confined was bitterly cold and had no window. Worse was to come. For five months she was kept in a cellar in total darkness. The walls ran with water or were covered with fungus; the floor was deep in excrement. There was no ventilation. Dr Bone invented various techniques for keeping herself sane. She recited and translated poetry, and herself composed verses. She completed a mental inventory of her vocabulary in the six languages in which she was fluent, and went for imaginary walks through the streets of the many cities which she knew well. Throughout these and other ordeals, Dr Bone treated her captors with contempt, and never ceased to protest her innocence. She is not only a shining example of courage which few could match, but also illustrates the point that a well-stocked, disciplined mind can prevent its own disruption.

CONDENSATION COVERS THE walls, dimpling into tiny individual drops that follow an almost fractal pattern, like someone has been writing out the secrets of the universe in the most transitory medium they can find. The smell of damp steel assaults my nose as I walk the hall, uncomfortable boots clumping heavily with every step I force myself to take. The space is tight, confined, unyielding; it is like living inside a coral reef, trapped by the limits of our own necessary shells. We are constantly envious of those who escape its limitations, and we fear for them at the same time, wishing them safe return to the reef, where they can be kept away from all the darkness and predations of the open sea.

I opened my eyes today to a world that felt alien. For though things resembled the familiar, nothing was the same. Walls I once considered confining, crumbled at the slightest shove. Mountains that for ages had barred my view now faded, transparent. Meandering roads stretched out as straight as an arrow, void of stop signs. Obstacles no longer stood stationary. Pinnacles loomed within reach. Beasts were tame, bullies timid, wagging tongues all tied into knots, and in the palm of my hand glistened the end of a glorious rainbow. It took but a moment to realize that in my newfound sight, everything I had ever longed for was accessible. Incredibly, the only thing that had really changed was the way I saw the world.

clothes off, cept for the big chef’s hat I was wearin at the time. An it blowed stew all over us, so’s we looked like—well, I don’t know what we looked like—but man, it was strange. Incredibly, it didn’t do nothin to all them guys settin out there in the mess hall neither. Jus lef em settin at they tables, covered with stew, actin kinda shell-shocked or somethin—but it sure did shut their asses up about when they food is gonna be ready. Suddenly the company commander come runnin into the buildin. “What was that!” he shouted. “What happen?” He look at the two of us, an then holler, “Sergeant Kranz, is that you?” “Gump—Boiler—Stew!” the sergeant say, an then he kind of git holt of hissef an grapped a meat cleaver off the wall. “Gump—Boiler—Stew!” he scream, an come after me with the cleaver. I done run out the door, an he be chasin me all over the parade grounds, an even thru the Officer’s Club an the Motorpool. I outrunned him tho, cause that is my specialty, but let me say this: they ain’t no question in my mind that I am up the creek for sure. One night, the next fall, the phone rung in the barracks an it was Bubba. He say they done dropped his atheletic scholarship cause his foot broke worst than they thought, an so he’s leavin school too. But he axed if I can git off to come up to Birmingham to watch the University play them geeks from Mississippi. But I am confined to quarters that Saturday, as I have been ever weekend since the stew

The night spent in the detention barracks will always be one of Schweik's fondest memories. Next door to Number 16 was a cell for solitary confinement, a murky den from which issued, during that night, the wailing of a soldier who was locked up in it and whose ribs were being systematically broken for some disciplinary offence. When the wailing stopped, there could be heard in Number 16 the crunching noise made by the fleas as they were caught between the fingers of the prisoners. Above the door in an aperture in the wall an oil lamp, provided with wire netting to protect it, gave a faint light and much smoke. The smell of the oil blended with the natural effluvia of unwashed bodies and with the stench from the bucket.

Once three men were confined in a pitch-dark prison. Two of the men were intelligent, but one of them was a simpleton who knew nothing at all: he couldn’t put his clothes on, he didn’t know how to eat; nothing. One of the intelligent men worked hard to teach the simpleton to dress himself, to eat, to hold a spoon, and so on. The other intelligent man did nothing at all. One day the hardworking man asked the indifferent one, “Why don’t you make some effort to help teach the simpleton?” The other replied, “In this darkness you’ll teach him nothing, no matter how many years you spend. I use my time thinking of ways to break a hole in the wall to let in the light. When that happens, he’ll learn on his own what he needs to know.

We yearn for solace, a gentle hand to hold, But fear's icy grip leaves us feeling cold. A prisoner of silence, a voice confined, Bound by the chains of a troubled mind. Afraid to ask for support, we hide the pain, Lost in the labyrinth of our own disdain. Burdened by the weight of unspoken fears, A journey alone through a sea of tears. The world spins on, oblivious to the plight, As we grapple with darkness, devoid of light. A shattered heart, concealed behind a smile, Suffocated on words, trapped in denial. The walls built high, a fortress of brittle pride, Concealing vulnerabilities that the heart longs to confide. The mask worn so effortlessly, a facade of strength and grace, But behind the painted smile, a soul yearning for embrace.

A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them. Stones can make people docile and knowable. The old simple schema of confinement and enclosure — thick walls, a heavy gate that prevents entering or leaving — began to be replaced by the calculation of openings, of filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies.

The trance-state of prophecy is like no other visionary experience. It is not a retreat from the raw exposure of the senses (as are many trance-states) but an immersion in a multitude of new movements. Things move. It is an ultimate pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you come at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it changes, that its rules change, that nothing remains permanent or absolute throughout all such movement, that mechanical explanation for anything can work within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements. The things you see in this trance are sobering, often shattering. They demand your utmost effort to remain whole and, even so, you emerge from that state profoundly changed.

Jeepie said that was why I was always a little bugs the first few days after they let me out of solitary confinement. He said solitary itself was nothing but a room and a cot and you; and the room was a blank to begin with and a blank was comfortable as being asleep or dead. But that if you began filling the room with crazy thoughts you came out of it crazy. Jeepie said perhaps my biggest trouble was I could never forget I'd been to school: “They've taught you that to think is to be smart but my friend there's times when it's smart to be stupid.” But no one's immune to thinking. Try drawing a blank for any length of time, emptying your head of everything and still you land on a color, a shape, a personality, a grievance. I can sit here on this cot in my cell and stare at the plaster wall, go absolutely limp in my head, and the story, the story of Virginia and me is there in the plaster.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax.

Justification was required to inspire thousands of Germans to take the actions that enabled the Holocaust, The unproven geometazine notion that typhus was a Jewish disease, one that moreover did no real harm to Jews. Since they were the racial and geographical carriers of it offered the typical German Public Health officer in occupied Poland, a psychological out, It seemed to justify a policy of keeping Jews locked behind ghetto walls, where typhus could be confined without threatening the vulnerable Aryan population, especially the German occupants as the historian, Christopher Browning, writes the persistent, medieval, anti-semitic stereotype of the Jew as the plague carrier, thus called forth as a modern medical response. The Revival of a medieval invention, the sealed ghetto, The medical establishment of the newly occupied territories, was a Motley collection of opportunistic hacks, misled Patriots and True Believers.

It was precisely here that the Church was born, in the margins of the Cross where so many of the crucified are found….This is why they followed Jesus. He gave them dignity….To do this Jesus had to reject the mindset of the religious elites of his day, who had taken ownership of law and tradition. Possession of the goods of religion became a means of putting themselves above others, others not like them, whom they inspected and judged. By mixing with tax collectors and ‘women of ill repute,’ Jesus wrested religion from its imprisonment in the confines of the elites, of specialized knowledge and privileged families, in order to make every person and situation capable of God. By walking with the poor, the outcasts, and the marginalized. He smashed the wall that prevented the Lord from coming close to His people, among His flock. In showing God’s closeness to the poor and sinners, Jesus indicted the mindset that trusts in self-justification, ignoring what happens around them.

Then I realised that our Tiger too had cut out, and I tried to restart our motor frantically with the hand switch. I could hear that groaning voice from our turret still, and muttered dialogue between Wilf and Helmann, something about the gun. Then I saw our 88mm barrel swing around and depress in elevation, coming down over my head and pointing straight into the Stalin’s upper deck. I could actually see into the JS driver’s position through his vision slit – his lights were still on inside, and men were moving around in there, maybe struggling to restart their engine. In the next moment, we fired. I clearly saw our armour-piercing round burst through their upper armour, and enter inside the compartment. Through the Russian’s vision slit, I saw our warhead ricochet again and again inside there, flying chaotically around the confined space and bouncing off the steel walls, glowing bright red. Finally, the explosive charge in the rear of the shell detonated, in a plume of sparks.

Since the stomach gives no obvious external sign of its workings, investigators of gastric movements have hitherto been obliged to confine their studies to pathological subjects or to animals subjected to serious operative interference. Observations made under these necessarily abnormal conditions have yielded a literature which is full of conflicting statements and uncertain results. The only sure conclusion to be drawn from this material is that when the stomach receives food, obscure peristaltic contractions are set going, which in some way churn the food to a liquid chyme and force it into the intestines. How imperfectly this describes the real workings of the stomach will appear from the following account of the actions of the organ studied by a new method. The mixing of a small quantity of subnitrate of bismuth with the food allows not only the contractions of the gastric wall, but also the movements of the gastric contents to be seen with the Röntgen rays in the uninjured animal during normal digestion.

Spinoza" Las traslúcidas manos del judío Labran en la penumbra los cristales Y la tarde que muere es miedo y frío. (Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.) Las manos y el espacio de jacinto Que palidece en el confín del Ghetto Casi no existen para el hombre quieto Que está soñando un claro laberinto. No lo turba la fama, ese reflejo De sueños en el sueño de otro espejo, Ni el temeroso amor de las doncellas. Libre de la metáfora y del mito Labra un arduo cristal: el infinito Mapa de Aquél que es todas Sus estrellas. Here in the twilight the translucent hands Of the Jew polishing the crystal glass. The dying afternoon is cold with bands Of fear. Each day the afternoons all pass The same. The hands and space of hyacinth Paling in the confines of the ghetto walls Barely exists for the quiet man who stalls There, dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth. Fame doesn’t trouble him (that reflection of Dreams in the dream of another mirror), nor love, The timid love women. Gone the bars, He’s free, from metaphor and myth, to sit Polishing a stubborn lens: the infinite Map of the One who now is all His stars.

Without us these isles rose from the sea; without us they acquired a couple of hundred lakes replete with fish; without our help they were settled by capercaillies, hares, and deer, while foxes, wolves, and other beasts of prey never appeared there ... [T]he monks crossed the mother-of-pearl sea in a tiny boat and came to look on this island without a beast of prey as sacred. The Solovetsky Monastery began with them ... Prison thought: How glorious - good stone walls standing on a separate island! What a good place to confine important criminals ... The eighty-year-old and even hundred-year-old monks begged on their knees to be allowed to die on the 'holy soil,' but they were all thrown out with proletarian ruthlessness except for the most necessary among them ... And that is how one of the favorite sayings constantly repeated by the prisoners came true: A holy place is never empty. The chimes of bells fell silent, the icon lamps and candle stands fell dark, the liturgies and the vespers resounded no longer; psalms were no longer chanted around the clock ... And so ... the Archipelago ... began its malignant advance through the nation ...

how he would get to Tronjheim’s base—where the Urgals were breaking in. There was no time to climb down. He looked at the narrow trough to the right of the stairs, then grabbed one of the leather pads and threw himself down on it. The stone slide was smooth as lacquered wood. With the leather underneath him, he accelerated almost instantly to a frightening speed, the walls blurring and the curve of the slide pressing him high against the wall. Eragon lay completely flat so he would go faster. The air rushed past his helm, making it vibrate like a weather vane in a gale. The trough was too confined for him, and he was perilously close to flying out, but as long as he kept his arms and legs still, he was safe. It was a swift descent, but it still took him nearly ten minutes to reach the bottom. The slide leveled out at the end and sent him skidding halfway across the huge carnelian floor. When he finally came to a stop, he was too dizzy to walk. His first attempt to stand made him nauseated, so he curled up, head in his hands, and waited for things to stop spinning. When he felt better, he stood and warily looked around. The great chamber was completely deserted, the silence unsettling. Rosy light filtered down from Isidar Mithrim. He faltered—Where was he supposed to go?—and cast out his mind for the Twins. Nothing. He froze as loud knocking echoed through Tronjheim. An explosion split the air. A long slab of the chamber floor buckled and blew thirty feet up. Needles of rocks flew outward as it crashed down. Eragon stumbled back, stunned, groping for Zar’roc. The twisted shapes of Urgals clambered out of the hole in the floor. Eragon hesitated. Should he flee? Or should he stay and try to close the tunnel? Even if he managed to seal it before the Urgals attacked him, what if Tronjheim was already breached elsewhere? He could not find all the places in time to prevent the city-mountain from being captured. But if I run to one of Tronjheim’s gates and blast it open, the Varden could retake Tronjheim without having to siege it. Before he could decide, a tall man garbed entirely in black armor emerged from the tunnel and looked directly at him. It was Durza. The Shade carried his pale blade marked with the scratch from Ajihad. A black roundshield with a crimson ensign rested on his arm. His dark helmet was richly decorated, like a general’s, and a long snakeskin cloak billowed around him. Madness burned in his maroon eyes, the madness of one who enjoys power and finds himself in the position to use it.

His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green remained—the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Irabestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea. There was a tear in the paper that looked exactly like a railway and another that signified a range of hills. Some tiny drops of ink formed a chain of lakes. A darker decorative strip of Grecian pediments and interlacing ivy at the ceiling’s edge kept the tribes of Gog and Magog from invasion. Once he had passed through it to the ceiling but it made him dizzy and afraid. Shadows moved quixotically over the whole wall, usually from left to right in tall thin bands, and sank behind the bureau or below the bed or disappeared suddenly in a corner.

With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls,11 it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park.12 In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober. What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things. So

Violent Storm" Those who have chosen to pass the night Entertaining friends And intimate ideas in the bright, Commodious rooms of dreams Will not feel the slightest tremor Or be wakened by what seems Only a quirk in the dry run Of conventional weather. For them, The long night sweeping over these trees And houses will have been no more than one In a series whose end Only the nervous or morbid consider. But for us, the wide-awake, who tend To believe the worst is always waiting Around the next corner or hiding in the dry, Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating Whether or not to fell the passerby, It has a sinister air. How we wish we were sunning ourselves In a world of familiar views And fixed conditions, confined By what we know, and able to refuse Entry to the unaccounted for. For now, Deeper and darker than ever, the night unveils Its dubious plans, and the rain Beats down in gales Against the roof. We sit behind Closed windows, bolted doors, Unsure and ill at ease While the loose, untidy wind, Making an almost human sound, pours Through the open chambers of the trees. We cannot take ourselves or what belongs To us for granted. No longer the exclusive, Last resorts in which we could unwind, Lounging in easy chairs, Recalling the various wrongs We had been done or spared, our rooms Seem suddenly mixed up in our affairs. We do not feel protected By the walls, nor can we hide Before the duplicating presence Of their mirrors, pretending we are the ones who stare From the other side, collected In the glassy air. A cold we never knew invades our bones. We shake as though the storm were going to hurl us down Against the flat stones Of our lives. All other nights Seem pale compared to this, and the brilliant rise Of morning after morning seems unthinkable. Already now the lights That shared our wakefulness are dimming And the dark brushes against our eyes.

When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?” The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her. “They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful. “When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.” Her blood chilled. “How did you trap such a thing?” Cassian tapped a spot on his neck where a scar slashed beneath his ear. “I quickly learned I could never beat him in combat or magic. Still have the scar here to prove it.” Cassian smiled faintly. “So I used his arrogance against him. Flattered and taunted him into trapping himself in a mirror bound with ash wood. I bet him the mirror would contain him—and Lanthys bet wrong. He got out of the mirror, of course, but by that time, I’d dumped his miserable self into the Prison.

That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one, and I too am never free of the feeling. When I consider the restrictions that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man; when I see that all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence, and then see that all our reassurance concerning the particular questions we probe is no more than dreamy resignation, since all we are doing is to paint our prison walls with colourful figures and bright views – all of this, Wilhelm, leaves me silent. I withdraw into myself, and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of actuality and vital strength. And everything swims before my senses, and I go my way in the world wearing the smile of the dreamer. All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me. I gladly confess, since I know the reply you would want to make, that they are the happiest who, like children, live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress and undress them, and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has locked away the cake, and, when at last they get their hands on what they want, devour it with their cheeks crammed full and cry, ‘More!’ – They are happy creatures. And those others, who give pompous titles to their beggarly pursuits and even to their passions, and chalk them up as vast enterprises for the good and well-being of mankind, they too are happy. – It is all very well for those who can be like that! But he who humbly perceives where it is all leading, who sees how prettily the happy man makes an Eden of his garden, and how even the unhappy man goes willingly on his weary way, panting beneath his burden, and that all are equally interested in seeing the light of the sun for one minute more – he indeed will be silent, and will create a world from within for himself, and be happy because he is a man. And then, confined as he may be, he none the less still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.

It’s with the next drive, self-preservation, that AI really jumps the safety wall separating machines from tooth and claw. We’ve already seen how Omohundro’s chess-playing robot feels about turning itself off. It may decide to use substantial resources, in fact all the resources currently in use by mankind, to investigate whether now is the right time to turn itself off, or whether it’s been fooled about the nature of reality. If the prospect of turning itself off agitates a chess-playing robot, being destroyed makes it downright angry. A self-aware system would take action to avoid its own demise, not because it intrinsically values its existence, but because it can’t fulfill its goals if it is “dead.” Omohundro posits that this drive could make an AI go to great lengths to ensure its survival—making multiple copies of itself, for example. These extreme measures are expensive—they use up resources. But the AI will expend them if it perceives the threat is worth the cost, and resources are available. In the Busy Child scenario, the AI determines that the problem of escaping the AI box in which it is confined is worth mounting a team approach, since at any moment it could be turned off. It makes duplicate copies of itself and swarms the problem. But that’s a fine thing to propose when there’s plenty of storage space on the supercomputer; if there’s little room it is a desperate and perhaps impossible measure. Once the Busy Child ASI escapes, it plays strenuous self-defense: hiding copies of itself in clouds, creating botnets to ward off attackers, and more. Resources used for self-preservation should be commensurate with the threat. However, a purely rational AI may have a different notion of commensurate than we partially rational humans. If it has surplus resources, its idea of self-preservation may expand to include proactive attacks on future threats. To sufficiently advanced AI, anything that has the potential to develop into a future threat may constitute a threat it should eliminate. And remember, machines won’t think about time the way we do. Barring accidents, sufficiently advanced self-improving machines are immortal. The longer you exist, the more threats you’ll encounter, and the longer your lead time will be to deal with them. So, an ASI may want to terminate threats that won’t turn up for a thousand years. Wait a minute, doesn’t that include humans? Without explicit instructions otherwise, wouldn’t it always be the case that we humans would pose a current or future risk to smart machines that we create? While we’re busy avoiding risks of unintended consequences from AI, AI will be scrutinizing humans for dangerous consequences of sharing the world with us.

What can he tell them? He, who knows nothing. Ibn al Mohammed has not planned atrocities nor committed them. He has never been in the presence of terrorists. Yet Satan’s agents suspect him. He is dark-complected. His hair and beard are black. His name is Muslim. Body tall and slender, hands large, their fingers long and tapered. Dark eyes sunken in a narrow face. Irises like obsidian. He prays on hands and knees, forehead touching the floor. Thoughtlessly aligned, his cage obliges him to face a white plastic wall to bow toward Mecca. No matter; Ibn al Mohammed requires no sight of ocean or sky to know his place in the universe. He knows himself as one chosen, beloved of God. A man whose devotion will allow him to be saved. Standing at the bars, he stares at the plastic wall. Modesty panel, they call it. The detainee wills nothing, attempts nothing, merely stares at blankness as his mind opens toward such signs as might appear. Something, nothing. However little, however great, whatever God vouchsafes is sufficient. The least sign is enough. A crease in the plastic. A shadow cast against its insensate skin, then fleeing, gone. A raindrop: trickling through the roof, one small drop might touch the wall, leave a transparent streak, a tear without sorrow to confirm his understanding of what is and must be. Recognition. Acceptance. By such a sign he will know he is not forsaken. That God notices and prepares a place. He will not serve in the harvest. He will eat the food, drink the water, ride the bus. He will not pick the berries so prized by his captors. Droids will cajole and threaten; perhaps they will beat him. If so, they incriminate themselves. He relishes their degradation together with God’s tasking, this new test of will and faith. To suffer in silence, as meek as a lamb. Ibn al Mohammed will remove himself from himself. Self fading into background, his presence will diminish. His body will persist; corporeally, he must endure. But his self will become absent. Mind and its thought, heart and all emotion will disperse smoke-like into nothingness and in its vanishing forestall injury, indignity, all pain. Does God approve? Does God see? A mere token will assure Ibn al Mohammed for a lifetime. Standing at the bars, he watches. Minutes pass. How long must he wait? God speaks at His leisure to those with patience to attend. What does it mean, to have enough patience to attend to God? It is a discipline to expect nothing because you deserve nothing and merit only death. Ibn al Mohammed has waited all his life. What has he seen? His father taken away. His mother and sisters scrounging in a desert. He himself is confined in-cage. Squats on a stool, shits in a pail. Rain rattles across sheet tin, pock-pock-pock-pock. Food is delivered on a tray. A damp bed beneath his body, a white wall before his eyes. What does Ibn al Mohammed see? He sees nothing. [pp. 203-204]

The dissident theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the millions who suffered and perished behind the electrified walls of a Nazi concentration camp, tortured and kept in solitary confinement. Could the townspeople hear the prayers of the innocents? “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” Bonhoeffer once said of bystanders. “God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” The

As I passed a low pavilion, where a crowd of helpless lunatics were confined, I read a motto on the wall, “While I live I hope.” The absurdity of it struck me forcibly. I would have liked to put above the gates that open to the asylum, “He who enters here leaveth hope behind.

Most earlier egyptologists, however, had assumed that such celebrated sites as Aswan, Edfu and Hierakonpolis, Memphis, Buto and Bubastis had once been ancient cities. Yet Memphis of the ‘White Walls’ – the Memphis of the Greek and Roman travellers and of nineteenth-century imagination – was sustained by markets and a monetary economy, and the Old Kingdom had been very far removed from such classical or modern concepts of urban life. The fundamental nature of that most ancient state was agricultural. The gulf between Memphis and its provinces was not nearly as great as one might at first imagine. Even the royal residence was set beside canals and at the edge of farmland. And, certainly, the life style of the court as it is depicted in its courtiers’ myriad tomb chapels is always shown as country life and never as taking place within the confines of some kind of city.

All at once, my house seems both too big and too small. It’s claustrophobic, sitting here, these four walls confining me inside, trapping me with this recycled, stale air. But it’s also impossibly lonely; too large to be filled with only the silent thoughts of a single soul. I have the sudden urge to move.

In a world that thrives on diversity, the LGBTQ+ community stands as a testament to the beauty of authenticity and the strength of the human spirit. We are a tapestry of vibrant colors, interwoven with the threads of love, courage, and resilience. Our existence is not defined by societal norms but by the unwavering belief that love knows no boundaries. In embracing our true selves, we challenge the confines of convention and rewrite the narrative of what it means to be human. We are the bold pioneers who refuse to be silenced, forging paths of acceptance and equality for future generations. Through every step we take, we paint a brighter tomorrow, where love is celebrated in all its forms. Our community is a symphony of voices, harmonizing in a chorus of authenticity. From every corner of the globe, we rise above prejudice and discrimination, demanding recognition, respect, and the right to love freely. We are the embodiment of resilience, turning adversity into opportunity, and transforming hate into understanding. In our journey, we find solace in unity. We stand shoulder to shoulder, a collective force that cannot be ignored. We are family, friends, and allies, bound by compassion and a shared commitment to creating a world where everyone is embraced for who they are. Our pride radiates like a beacon, illuminating the path towards a society that celebrates diversity and champions equality. We are the architects of change, dismantling the walls of ignorance and prejudice. With every act of love and every act of defiance, we redefine the boundaries of possibility. So let the world bear witness to the kaleidoscope of love that we embody. Let our colors shine unapologetically, guiding others towards a future where acceptance is the norm. Together, we will continue to paint the world with the brushstrokes of compassion, understanding, and love, leaving a legacy of inclusivity that will endure for generations to come. In a world that can sometimes be gray, let us be the vibrant hues that light up the sky, reminding all that love has no limits, and the LGBTQ+ community is a testament to the infinite power of the human heart.

Vlady did not like such arguments. The blind worship of accomplished facts always led to passivity. Why should one come to terms with the present? Such an attitude would never have brought down the Wall. He refused to accept what existed simply because happenings elsewhere were much worse. History became an alibi. It was a cursed history whose womb was producing tiny new republics. Monstrous creations. How could they be otherwise, deformed as they were by decades of unnatural confinement? Men, women and children were living and dying for these new states. In the past they had done the same for the big empires, but with this difference: in the old days they had fought reluctantly and cynically. It could have been any old job. Today they went to war with a sullen obstinacy, their heads and bodies distorted by an intolerant zeal. It would end badly. Of this Vlady was sure.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls —Robert Walser. A German-speaking Swiss writer, Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Confined to a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland, he used to write ‘micrograms’, (undecipherable short texts handwritten in a nano text-size) and take long walks. On the 25th of December 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow.

We are soaring shadows, adapting on the wing. We are everywhere on this big beautiful blue and that is the privilege of being a crow, Blackwing. We are not caged, never confined to bars and walls. We build tools and communities and use our mind maps to navigate the world, so much easier now without the electro-smog blurring our flight paths. And we are survivors. We thrived in the hollowing time of trash and plastic, and we will thrive in the New World, as Nature settles her debts.

In a dark room that is lined with concrete, if a small hole is made, the darkness will no longer be all-consuming. In a similar way, if we keep chipping away and breaking down the walls of old conditioning that confine us, more light will get in and we will be able to see the outside world with a wider and clearer perspective.

Today, I left those suffocating walls, but the lights didn’t flick back on, nor the colour automatically restore. I wasn’t going to unravel from an inmate to free person quite so fast. Some things I instantly missed – like the confinement. So much so that I spent whole days sitting fully clothed in a bathtub just to feel normal. After a decade, I was out and free – sort of.

I want to live. I want to walk for a spell without having some great fucking wall stopping me taking another step. I just want to be free. I want to see the stars without seeing bars. I want to be caught in a busy shopping crowd. I want to see children playing nonsense games. I want to see a dog pissing against a lamp post. I want to take my girlfriend for a walk. I want to sleep a whole night beside her. I want to see all of you suffer less. I want away from institutions.

Transformative teaching isn't confined by walls; it's a philosophy that transcends boundaries, inspiring students to challenge conventions and carve their own path.

The irony is you build those walls to protect yourself. You think they will make you hard and less vulnerable, but they isolate you in solitary confinement with your darkest thoughts and ugliest memories. You convince yourself that somehow you deserve to be there due to the bad life decisions you made. You believe that you are not worthy of more, or something better, and that the damage can’t be undone. You are filled with endless shame. When you look in the mirror, you don’t see yourself for who you are. And what keeps you locked up in your prison is that false narrative that you continually feed yourself and the false reflection you can’t escape because it is part of you.

Our story isn’t something I can ever erase, and I was foolish to think I was stronger than us. That we would ever be anything less than meaningful. I was stupid to believe that I could forget about her. There are moments in life that define us and reshape us in irreversible ways. Carving patterns into our souls while changing the course of our futures. Some of these moments appear inconspicuous, like rain tapping against glass on a cloudy day. While others overcome the confines of time itself. In those rare instances, it feels like someone pressed pause, allowing us to simply exist and enjoy a glimpse of total happiness. Other moments are harrowing, leaving a crack so deep that nothing can ever mend the initial impact. Those ones shatter through you, breaking down every barrier and wall you have worked to put up.

Buddha’s enlightenment: Gautama felt as though a prison which had confined him for thousands of lifetimes had broken open. Ignorance had been the jailkeeper. Because of ignorance, his mind had been obscured, just like the moon and stars hidden by the storm clouds. Clouded by endless waves of deluded thoughts, the mind had falsely divided reality into subject and object, self and others, existence and nonexistence, birth and death, and from these discriminations arose wrong views—the prisons of feelings, craving, grasping, and becoming. The suffering of birth, old age, sickness, and death only made the prison walls thicker. The only thing to do was to seize the jailkeeper and see his true face. The jailkeeper was ignorance. . . . Once the jailkeeper was gone, the jail would disappear and never be rebuilt again.1

We were the only unit in the American military that had eye-to-eye contact with the enemy every day. I mean, we were so close to them, we could hit them with a rock. In appearance, these Russians looked poor, with only one uniform, poor equipment, their food and supplies weren’t great, and they were mainly confined to their barracks

You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where space-time has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity. Merely what it deserves, no more nor less.

The veil was a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one man, a portable architecture of confinement.

Henry Greene’s hobby was his constant exercise. He did quarter squats—he couldn’t squat down any farther in the confined space—and he jogged in place and he did what he called resistance training, pressing his palms against the opposite sides of our tube and tensing every muscle in his torso. His exercise had a frenetic quality, as if he were trying to distract himself from the fundamental truths. For all his sarcasm and his disparagement and his cruel smile and his burly posturing, he was fragile. I could sense it as if my nerves had grown directly into his skin. Sometimes he would fly into insanity. He’d shriek with a strangled, pear-gargling sound. He’d thump his head against the wall—and if anyone had the physical strength to knock out his brains it was our Henry. The cracking sound of skull on cement was sickening. We’d grab him and Rose would wrap her thin strong tentacle arms around his head. He’d fight us, screaming and staggering, and we all three would get our share of bruises. He was much stronger than me. After a while he’d stop surging under us and calm down. Or give up. Well, he’d say after a long pause, in resignation and also in apology, it is what it is.

Walls are more than stone and mortar. They are silent sentinels, their eyes following every movement, their mouths sealed yet harboring countless reminiscences. They're silent storytellers. They witness hushed secrets and grand pronouncements, absorbing the laughter and tears that reverberate within their confines. Their textures saying under its breath, of the lives lived within. The worn wallpaper narrating chronicles. The chipped paint flecks capture fleeting moments, and the floor creak with impressions unseen. The silence of walls holds the weight of history. A chronicle of lives lived within their embrace.

We are too often told that anger is an unhealthy emotion, but when someone or something has stolen your soul and destroyed your life, anger is a natural response. I am not talking about irrational rage, which can be disastrous and lead you down an even darker hole. I am talking about controlled anger, which is a natural source of energy that can wake you the fuck up and help you realize that what you went through wasn’t right. I have cracked open anger several times. It has warmed me when I was freezing, it has turned my fear into bravery, and it has given me fight when I had none. And it can do the same for you. Anger will snap you out of the spell you’re in until you are no longer willing to remain confined in your mental prison. You’ll be scratching and clawing at the walls, looking for cracks where the light leaks in. Your fingernails will be broken, the tips of your fingers bloody and raw, and you will continue to fight to expand those cracks because your anger will be purifying and the human mind loves progress. Keep at it, and eventually, those walls will tumble until you are free, standing in a debris field one more time, with your eyes wide open. That’ll work. Because destruction always breeds creation.

Here is the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful description of the Buddha’s enlightenment: Gautama felt as though a prison which had confined him for thousands of lifetimes had broken open. Ignorance had been the jailkeeper. Because of ignorance, his mind had been obscured, just like the moon and stars hidden by the storm clouds. Clouded by endless waves of deluded thoughts, the mind had falsely divided reality into subject and object, self and others, existence and nonexistence, birth and death, and from these discriminations arose wrong views—the prisons of feelings, craving, grasping, and becoming. The suffering of birth, old age, sickness, and death only made the prison walls thicker. The only thing to do was to seize the jailkeeper and see his true face. The jailkeeper was ignorance. . . . Once the jailkeeper was gone, the jail would disappear and never be rebuilt again.

In the labyrinth of life, the walls that once seemed to confine us often hold within them the paths to our deepest truths. With patience and tenderness, we may find that each turn leads us closer to our own inner sanctuary.

Within hospital walls, more prayers echo than in the confines of church sanctuaries. In today's world, I've witnessed numerous places of worship in underprivileged regions, where hope seems to be exchanged for fleeting illusions. Kind hearts wear tattoos, while misguided souls drape themselves in rosaries. Beggars, seeking generosity, choose the warmth of bars over the solemnity of church pews. It's a testament to the essence of humanity, where authenticity holds more value than mere appearances

What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation,

The king keeps his new adopted daughter carefully sequestered from the rest of his bloody world. He gives her everything she could possibly wish for within the confines of four walls. The girl is eleven years old before her wishes venture beyond those walls. The king tried to be everything to her, but for all his affection and protection, he was still several hundred years older than her, and an entirely different species aside. The girl remembered the life she had before she came here—even if those images were fleeting, eaten away by time. Years are long to a child so young, and memories so short. Still, she remembered that she had a life before this. A life with people who were like her. One night, when the king came to visit her, she asked him about her family. It was not the first time. She recognized the look on his face as he prepared to give her the same answer he always had, for the thousandth time.

Following the Soviet invasion, the Communists, to their credit, passed decrees making girls’ education compulsory and abolishing certain oppressive tribal customs—such as the bride-price, a payment to the bride’s family in return for her hand in marriage. However, by massacring thousands of tribal elders, they paved the way for the “commanders” to step in as the new elite. Aided by American and Saudi patronage, extremism flourished. What had once been a social practice confined to areas deep in the hinterlands now became a political practice, which, according to ideologues, applied to the entire country. The modest gains of urban women were erased. “The first time a woman enters her husband’s house," Heela “told me about life in the countryside, “she wears white”—her wedding dress—“and the first time she leaves, she wears white”—the color of the Muslim funeral shroud. The rules of this arrangement were intricate and precise, and, it seemed to Heela, unchanged from time immemorial. In Uruzgan, a woman did not step outside her compound. In an emergency, she required the company of a male blood relative to leave, and then only with her father’s or husband’s permission. Even the sound of her voice carried a hint of subversion, so she was kept out of hearing range of unrelated males. When the man of the house was not present, boys were dispatched to greet visitors. Unrelated males also did not inquire directly about a female member of the house. Asking “How is your wife?” qualified as somewhere between uncomfortably impolite and downright boorish. The markers of a woman’s life—births, anniversaries, funerals, prayers, feasts—existed entirely within the four walls of her home. Gossip, hopscotching from living room to living room, was carried by husbands or sons.

Why are you lying in the gloom of the temple? Raise your eyes. Look! God is not confined to four walls. He has gone where the farmers are tilling and toiling all year round". (Rabindranath Tagore)

People hurt each other all the time, both wittingly and unwittingly. And some made the choice to keep moving on, through the pain and uncertainty, and others barricaded the walls of their worlds and stayed safely inside those narrow confines.

SWIGERT provided a list of 12 SERE techniques for possible use by the CIA: (1) the attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap, (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) waterboard, (10) use of diapers, (11) use of insects, and (12) mock burial.136

Alex turned from the far wall, where the shadows were deepest, and closed his eyes tightly, willing sleep to come as the tingle of something sinister continued to creep through his veins, chilling him to the very core, as if a nightmare had found its way from the safe confines of sleep and crept into the waking world.

The first step in the mental training is to become the master of external things. He who is addicted to worldly pleasures, however learned or ignorant he may be, however high or low his social position may be, is a servant to mere things. He cannot adapt the external world to his own end, but he adapts himself to it. He is constantly employed, ordered, driven by sensual objects. Instead of taking possession of wealth, he is possessed by wealth. Instead of drinking liquors, he is swallowed up by his liquors. Balls and music bid him to run mad. Games and shows order him not to stay at home. Houses, furniture, pictures, watches, chains, hats, bonnets, rings, bracelets, shoes—in short, everything has a word to command him. How can such a person be the master of things? To Ju (Na-kae) says: "There is a great jail, not a jail for criminals, that contains the world in it. Fame, gain, pride, and bigotry form its four walls. Those who are confined in it fall a prey to sorrow and sigh for ever." To

When attempting at understanding and grasping the truth concerning horrors of tyranny and oppression...To experience these first hand is the only viable and substantiated acquired form of education....Thus exceeding any knowledge or insight attained within the confined four walls of a classroom

You are confined only by the walls you build yourself...

What were you looking for over here?” Jim asked again. “I wonder if you can exorcise hands…hmm? Oh, where on the wall was that place I sent you through before. Do you remember?” Jim shook its head. “Why are you looking for that particular spot? It have fond memories for you or something?” “Hardly. You told me that it was easier to tear the fabric of existence in a spot where it had previously been rent. And I know I sent you through it from this room, but I don’t remember where, exactly.” I glanced at the clock on the mantel, leaping to my feet when I saw the time. “Oh my god. Oh my god! Tell me that clock isn’t right!” “That clock isn’t right.” Relief made me sag a bit as I dug through my purse looking for my cell phone. “Thank god. I was worried there for a minute that I’d missed the wedding.” “You have,” Jim said complacently, snuffling around behind the fainting couch. “What? You just told me the clock was wrong!” “Yuh-uh. And who ordered me to tell her that?” “Gah!” I screamed, punching a speed-dial number into the phone. “Talk about your day from hell…Jim, look around and find the weak spot. I’m not going to let something like a deranged Guardian ruin my day.” “Sooo many things I could say to that,” Jim said, shaking its head. “I’ll confine myself to pointing out that even if I found the spot, it wouldn’t do you any good.” “It wouldn’t? Why not?” Inside my head, a dark, sinuous voice whistled a peppy little tune. I ground my teeth. “Don’t tell me—I’d have to use the dark power in order to push us through.” “Yup.” Smirk. “Bloody he—Drake!” “Aisling?” I held the phone away from my ear at the sound of Drake’s roar. “Hi, sweetie. Um. I guess we’re even on the whole jilting-at-the-altar thing, huh?” “Where are you? Where have you been? Why have you not answered my calls?” Drake growled. “Rene and your uncle said you just disappeared on the street. Have you been harmed?” “I’m fine. Jim’s here with me. I’m in…er…oh, hell.” “Abaddon,” Jim corrected.

I take it you have some sort of plan going? Something that calls for you to be arrested?" "There, now, you see? I told Drake you'd grasp the gist of things right away, but he had his doubts." "Drake?" I straightened up. "Is Gabriel with him? Did he get my message?" "Of course he got your message. That's why I'm here. Is there no chair?" she asked, frowning around the empty room. "No. I hate to let down the team and all, but what exactly are you doing here? Is Gabriel going to be able to get me out of being sent to the Akasha? Is he going to appeal the conviction?" "Better than that," she said with smile, glancing around quickly before leaning in closely, her voice dropped to almost a whisper. "We're going to bust you out of here." "Bust me..." I closed my eyes for a moment. "You've been watching too many old westerns. No one conducts jailbreaks these days. Especially not when the jailers are the L'au-dela committee." "That's why this plan is so incredibly cunning," she said, giving my arm a little squeeze. "They're all expecting you to try to escape-they'll never expect us to break you out of here." "Oy," I said, sliding down the wall to the floor. "This has 'doomed from the start' written all over it. You didn't think up this plan yourself, did you?" I asked suspiciously. She looked offended. "No, I didn't, and you can stop being such a negative Nelly. Gabriel thought up the plan, and Drake and I are helping. I'm the decoy, you see." "Of course you are. What, exactly, is this grandiose escape plan?" Her mouth set in a prim manner. "I can't tell you." "Why not?" "There could be bugs. We don't want them to know our plans." "If they were listening in, you just told them there's a plan, so they'll be expecting something to happen," I pointed out. "Yes, but they won't know what," she said, pulling off her jacket. Her shirt followed almost immediately, as did her jeans, shoes, and the sparkly pink socks that she was so prone to wearing despite the fact they would look more at home on a twelve-year-old. I watched her striptease with confusion for a moment before a thought struck me. "You don't mean-" "Shhh," she said, waving a vague hand around as she pulled off the scarf she wore to confine her bangs. "Bugs, remember?" I bit back an obvious reply, thought for a moment, then decided that although the plan Gabriel had come up with was too I Love Lucy for words, I didn't have any alternative. I stripped.

THE VATICAN The very name Vatican comes from a surprising source. It is neither Latin nor Greek, nor is it of biblical origin. In fact, the word we associate with the Church has a pagan origin. More than twenty-eight centuries ago, even before the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, there was a people called the Etruscans. Much of what we think of as Roman culture and civilization actually comes from the Etruscans. Even though we are still trying to master their very difficult language, we already know a great deal about them. We know that, like the Hebrews and the Romans, the Etruscans did not bury their dead inside the walls of their cities. For that reason, on a hillside slope outside the confines of their ancient city in the area that was destined to become Rome, the Etruscans established a very large cemetery. The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this necropolis, or city of the dead, was Vatika.

Jeepie said that was why I was always a little bugs the first few days after they let me out of solitary confinement. He said solitary itself was nothing but a room and a cot and you; and the room was a blank to begin with and a blank was comfortable as being asleep or dead. But that if you began filling the room with crazy thoughts you came out of it crazy. Jeepie said perhaps my biggest trouble was I could never forget I'd been to school: “They've taught you that to think is to be smart but my friend there's times when it's smart to be stupid.” But no one's immune to thinking. Try drawing a blank for any length of time, emptying your head of everything and still you land on a color, a shape, a personality, a grievance. I can sit here on this cot in my cell and stare at the plaster wall, go absolutely limp in my head, and the story, the story of Virginia and me is there in the plaster.

We must be careful in all our talk about liturgical prayer not to rule out the spontaneous moves of the Spirit. Just as liturgical traditions have much to offer us by way of roots, the charismatic and Pentecostals have much to offer us in zeal and passion. Tradition and innovation go together in God’s kingdom. Jesus was Jewish. He went to synagogue “as was his tradition”and celebrated holy days such as Passover. But Jesus also healed on the Sabbath. Jesus points us to a God who is able to work within institutions and order, a God who is too big to be confined. God is constantly coloring outside the lines. Jesus challenges the structures that oppress and exclude, and busts through any traditions that put limitations on love. Love cannot be harnessed. Liturgy is public poetry and art. You can make beautiful art by splashing paint on a wall, and you can also make art with the careful diligence of a sculptor. Both can be lovely, and both can be ugly. Both can be marketed and robbed of their original touch, and both have the potential to inspire and move people to do something beautiful for God. So it is with worship. More important than whether something is old or new, winsome or classic is whether it is real. The Scriptures tell us to “test the spirits,”and the true test of the spirit of a thing is whether it moves us closer to God and to our suffering neighbor. Does it have fruit outside of our own good feelings? Beauty must hearken to something beyond us. It should cause us to do something beautiful for God in the world.

He proceeded on the theory that confinement within the walls of the prison was punishment. That the law never intended to confine prisoners within the prison. From a moral point of view, it was putting the prisoner in double jeopardy. Actually it was a double punishment.

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

Prison. Confinement. Incarceration. Up to three years of nothing but four walls for a victimless crime that maybe he didn't commit. That was the prospect facing - contradicting - Jim Morrison, main lyricist and lead singer of the Doors. Who could imagine that the man who lived so free could be reduced to a number in Florida's penal system?

His smile vanished. “I told you earlier. You are confined to this keep. You will not stray from its walls without an escort.  I have warned you of my wrath should you disobey.  I will not warn you again.” She was wise enough not to argue with him.  He was beginning to intimidate her again but she fought it.  She averted her gaze, looking to her hands.

(He) killed her and dialed 7411 and carefully placed the gun. If (He) can Kill (His) blood, won’t (He) return the observers to God? Won’t (He) lay to rest the diaconate whose body and soul is confined within the high brick walls just as (he) did Efe and the four observers?

They live their day to day existence in their confined environment by passing the time either sitting around the dayroom, reading, drawing, painting, watching television, listening to music, doing puzzles, or sleeping in the dormitory. Quite often patients sit near the windows and stare outside to a world that seems both foreign and out of reach to them. Some just sit on the floor, while leaning against the wall, due to a limited amount of proper seating.

Looking around the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving--beating very lightly--a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.

What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability.

Greed is not, of course, an invention of modernity, but the onset of modernity allows for a change in its ethical status. Only within the modern world would it be possible to proclaim, with Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, that “greed is good”; to ancient societies, greed is always sinful (that is to say, always dangerous to the stability of the social order). In other words, the very thing that threatens to destroy ancient societies becomes the very lifeblood of the modern one. Because it involves such a complete upheaval, no other change in Western history, for the Marxist, approaches this one in importance. This type of valuation of the historical shift to capitalism, however, is not confined to doctrinaire Marxists. Even avowedly non-Marxist historians, though they might not emphasize the changing status of money, nonetheless tend to see the onset of modernity—the nascent moments of capitalism—as a time of epochal change, as a shift from a static society to a progressive one. This is what leads Fredric Jameson to claim that “the emergence of the modern world or capitalism, the miraculous birth of modernity or of a secular market system, the end of ‘traditional’ society in all its forms [. . .] remains for us (in the collective unconscious) the only true Event of history.” In whatever language we discuss the changes in society occasioned by modernity, few would dispute Jameson’s claim that it marks the historical shift in the West, leaving, as it does, a gulf between the structure of traditional society (a closed world) and modern capitalist society (an open universe).

I’m glad you have a brand. It says you’re dangerous, and we have narrow confines up here on the wall. We can’t simply press every eligible man; I need real soldiers, men who know what they’re doing.” “So that’s why I’m here?” Kaladin asked. “To see that?” “I want you to think,” Azure said. “I tell the men—this Wall Guard, this is redemption. If you fight here, nobody will care what you did before. Because they know if we fall, this city and this nation will be no more.

Your fear won’t come knocking at your door without reason. It will come with a purpose. It will want you to know that there's something out there worth exploring. It will want you to get out of your comfort zone and into a territory that is unfamiliar and risky, but worth it. When fear comes knocking at your door, welcome it. Invite it in to get to know it. Speak to it. Understand it. When you face your fear, remember to stay strong. Remember to push through even when your palms get sweaty, your voice trembles, and your heart thumps. Your fear will come knocking at your door to set you free, never to cage and confine you again. When you can look fear in the eyes and get comfortable with it, remember to thank it for showing up. Remember to appreciate it for all the lessons it taught you. Remember to give it gratitude for carving a path that led you to your dreams. Remember to thank it for how it has allowed you to recognize your potential outside of the four walls you once sought comfort in. Remember to be prepared for it to come knocking again. Remember to face it fiercely.

Artemis stood in the entryway, her open palm pressed to her heart. The look she gave Persephone dripped with dramatic suffering. “I shall waste away to a mere waif if made to pass another hour in the confines of my dungeon.” “Your bedchamber is hardly a dungeon,” Persephone said. “And you have not been confined to that room. You have the entire house and the back grounds at your disposal, and you have made any number of excursions out into London.” “A free spirit must go about in the world without restrictions, Persephone.” At this, Artemis’s eyes turned heavenward, creating the perfect picture of longing and heartbreaking agony. “Walls and gates stifle and suffocate a heart meant to fly beyond the bounds of—” “I am sorry for your suffocating heart, my dear, but you cannot venture out into Town unaccompanied by your family, no matter its appeal.” “I wish only to go out into the park. I can see it from my window, calling out to me, just out of reach.” She clutched her hands together before her as though a condemned prisoner at once pleading for mercy and praying for the welfare of her soul. “And I solemnly vow to give any criminals—though you realize meeting an actual criminal would be wonderfully exciting—a very wide berth.

In the insanity of the cube we feel safe within its confines, yet the insanity is believing that confines equate to safety.

His point was that we can distinguish between the normal pain of life—difficult emotions, physical discomfort, and so on—and actual suffering, which is the mental anguish caused by fighting against the fact that life is sometimes painful. Let’s say you get caught in a nasty traffic jam. This situation may be mildly stressful and annoying. You’ll probably be a few minutes late for work and somewhat bored while sitting there. No big deal. If, however, you resist the fact that you are caught in a traffic jam, mentally screaming “THIS SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING!!!!” you are likely to suffer a great deal. You’ll become much more upset, agitated, and angry than you would be otherwise. Road rage incidents are due to precisely this type of overreaction. There are about three hundred serious injuries or deaths caused by road rage in the United States alone each year. Our emotional suffering is caused by our desire for things to be other than they are. The more we resist the fact of what is happening right now, the more we suffer. Pain is like a gaseous substance. If you allow it to just be there, freely, it will eventually dissipate on its own. If you fight and resist the pain, however, walling it into a confined space, the pressure will grow and grow until there is an explosion.

Who even dreams up that kind of shit? What the bloody hell was the Unseelie king thinking when he created his royal caste? Did Death really have to be the death of anyone he fucked? Did the half-mad king sit around and cackle about that particular bit of nastiness? Did he even care? I suppose the original Death must have instinctively known how to mute his killing Sidhba-jai, or learned in time to control it, or simply hadn’t cared that he killed while slaking his needs. Then again, confined to the Unseelie prison, perhaps he never got to slake his needs, which would go a long way toward explaining how rabid the Unseelie princes were when the walls finally came tumbling down. I know I’d be mad as a hatter after three quarters of a million years of celibacy, whether hobbled by a Fae sex drive or an average dose of male testosterone. I wasted the rest of the day after Mac left, tamping down my raging desire to find the nearest willing woman and passing it, instead, with Kat and Sean, trying to teach the black Irish nephew of Dublin’s most notorious, deceased crime mobster, Rocky O’Bannion, what I’d learned about how to control our power. Sean and I walked the final paltry acres of grass in my kingdom, over and over, and bloody well over again, as I endeavored to instruct him on how to sense the earth beneath his boots and draw power from it without scorching the ground to charred ruin.

They build a Prison of Black Iron, the World of Forms, and weave beautiful and appealing illusions within its walls. The illusions stupefy Adam and Eve, who lose sight of their gnosis and perpetuate the race of humanity within the confines of the Black Iron Prison.

None of the three even saw the bright amber eyes peer over the top. The cat was able to leap out of the basket, land behind the table, and squeeze under the tarp that formed the back wall. Free of the confines of the basket, though the contents had provided good eating, he waddled along the aisle of booths, looking for something more to nibble on.

His deeply melodic voice rumbled in the confines of the thick stone walls.

I have cracked open anger several times. It has warmed me when I was freezing, it has turned my fear into bravery, and it has given me fight when I had none. And it can do the same for you. Anger will snap you out of the spell you’re in until you are no longer willing to remain confined in your mental prison. You’ll be scratching and clawing at the walls, looking for cracks where the light leaks in. Your fingernails will be broken, the tips of your fingers bloody and raw, and you will continue to fight to expand those cracks because your anger will be purifying and the human mind loves progress.

Learning is not confined to the walls of a classroom; it flourishes in the embrace of diverse experiences and perspectives.

I have often seen two of the Grey nuns, and know that their rules, as well as those of the Congregational Nunnery, do not confine them always within their walls, like those of the Black Nunnery.

Along with astronomy and alchemy, collecting was what made Rudolf happy. He mistrusted people. He could hear them now. Whispering voices. Murmuring in the walls. Rustling through leaves. He heard them everywhere he went. Everywhere, that is, except within the confines of his private chambers. Here the voices fell silent. He felt comfortable surrounded by his curiosities, for objects can't answer back. Objects can't betray.

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe’s narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace), we come to accept life’s brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! that is another matter. In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time’s shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe’s narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe’s real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny.

It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.

You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighbourhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where space-time has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity. Merely what it deserves, neither more nor less.

Once you trap yourself within walls, the outside world will never feel the same — just like a bird confined to a cage.

the depths of despair, I found myself trapped within the suffocating confines of an abusive marriage. For years, I endured the relentless storm of emotional and physical torment that battered my spirit. Anxiety and depression became unwelcome companions, weaving their tendrils through every facet of my being as the weight of the abuse grew heavier with each passing day. Like a fragile bird with broken wings, I was stripped of my confidence and left adrift in a sea of despair. The walls of my own mind held me captive, echoing with the venomous words and cruel actions inflicted upon me. I longed for freedom, but fear and doubt shackled me, chaining me to a life I believed I could never escape.

Subscribing to other people's limitations builds prisons of the mind but a courageous spirit not only welcomes inspiration from the most unexpected places, it dares to break through the absurdly confining walls we unknowingly built in response to projections never truly meant for us.

Subscribing to other people's limitations builds prisons in the mind, but a courageous spirit not only welcomes inspiration from the most unexpected places, it dares to break through the absurdly confining walls we unknowingly built in response to projections never truly meant for us.

Well, well, if it isn’t the little spitfire herself.” Lily glanced up with a start and found Jimmy Neil standing two steps above her. A slow grin spread across his face, and the black gaps where he was missing parts of his top teeth seemed to stare at her. He’d leered at her several times that past week during the meals he’d taken in the dining room. But she’d made a point of ignoring him. And that’s exactly what she planned to do this time too. He moved one step closer, and the stench of the alcohol on his breath filled the space between them. He’d likely already been out at the taverns long enough to drink too much but would continue with the drinking as long as he was conscious. So why was he back at the hotel? “Ran out of money,” he said too softly, as if he’d seen the direction of her thoughts. “The night’s still young, and I aim to get my fill of women.” His eyes glistened with brittle lust. A man like Jimmy Neil didn’t deserve a response, not even the briefest acknowledgment that she’d heard his lurid words. She turned her head and pushed past him in the narrow stairwell. But before she could get by, his arm shot out and blocked her path. “Where you goin’ so fast?” “Get out of my way.” She shoved his arm, but it didn’t budge. She tried to duck under it, but he stuck out his knee. He leaned into her. The sickly heat and sourness of his breath fanned her neck. “Maybe I don’t need to go back out, not when I can have a little spitfire right here, right now.” She stifled a shudder and the shiver of fear that accompanied it. She might have broken free of him last time, but he was drunk now, and there was no telling what he was capable of doing. Better for her to play it safe. She spun and tried to retreat the way she’d come, but his other hand slapped against the wall, trapping her into an awkward prison within the confines of his arms. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere except up to my room with me.” He pushed himself against her in such a carnal way that she couldn’t keep from crying out in alarm. His hand cut off her cry, covering her mouth and smothering any chance she had at calling for help. A rush of fear turned her blood to ice. For an instant Daisy’s sweet face flitted into her mind. Was this the way men treated her sister? How could she possibly withstand such abuse day after day? As if seeing the fright in Lily’s eyes, his gap-toothed smile widened. “It’s always more fun when there’s some scratchin’ and clawin’.” His hand against her mouth and nose was beginning to suffocate her. She swung her head, struggling to break free and jerked up her knee, trying to connect it with his tender spot. But he was pressed too close, and he only strengthened his grip. She tried to scream and then bite him. But she was quickly losing strength in the dizzying wave that rushed over her. Suddenly his smile froze and fear flitted across his face. “Let go of her. Now. Or I’ll shove this knife in all the way.” Connell’s voice was low and menacing. Slowly Jimmy’s grip loosened. She caught a glimpse of Connell, one step down, his face a mask of calm fury.

We oft have battled for an empty name And sought by dogma, edict, creed, To send each other to the flame. Is Christ then divided? Was Cephas or Paul Nailed to the Cross to die ? If not: Then why these divisions at all? Christ's love doth enfold you and I. His pure sweet love is not confined By creeds which segregate and raise a wall. His love enfolds, embraces Humankind ;

I would wonder if our weakness and irritatingly resilient immaturity rests in our perceived inability to be challenged, for having locked ourselves down in the tiny confines of our frightened worlds we have presumed the world to be bigger than our ability to engage it. And because that is the case, we can only hear that which fits within the suffocating walls of these tiny confines within which we have barricaded ourselves. And the tragedy of it all is not that we 'while-away' the length of our days gradually perishing within such horrid confines. The tragedy is that we are blessed with the inherent ability to transform all of the things outside of those confines that caused us to retreat within them in the first place. But, as I ponder all of this a bit further, I realize that possibly the greatest tragedy of all is our staunch unwillingness to recognize this truth and therefore leave both ourselves and our world's tragically unchanged when in fact they could have been brilliantly transformed.

Measure your progress by your experience of the love of God and its exercise before men... In contrast, servile, base, and mercenary is the notion of Christian practice among the bulk of nominal Christians. They give no more than they dare not withhold. They abstain from nothing but what they dare not practice. When you state to them the doubtful quality of any action, and the consequent obligation to refrain from it, they reply to you in the very spirit of Shylock, " they cannot find it in the bond." In short, they know Christianity only as a system of restraints. It is robbed of every liberal and generous principle. It is rendered almost unfit for the social relationships of life, and only suited to the gloomy walls of a cloister, in which they would confine it. But true Christians would consider themselves as not satisfying some rigorous creditor, but as discharging a debt of gratitude. Accordingly, theirs is not the stinted return of a constrained obedience, but the large and liberal measure of voluntary service."-William Wilberforce, Real Christianity

We came to value transparency and to knock down walls—not only online but also in person. We failed to realize that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office. Instead of distinguishing between online and in-person interaction, we used the lessons of one to inform our thinking about the other.

Stay Hydrated Check this box if your urine never appeared darker than a pale yellow all day. Note that if you’re eating riboflavin-fortified foods (such as nutritional yeast), then base this instead on getting nine cups of unsweetened beverages a day for women (which would be taken care of by the green tea and water preloading recommendations) or thirteen cups a day for men. If you have heart or kidney issues, don’t increase fluid intake at all without first talking with your physician. Remember, diet soda may be calorie-free, but it’s not consequence-free, as we learned in the Low in Added Sugar section. Deflour Your Diet Check this box every day your whole grain servings are in the form of intact grains. The powdering of even 100 percent whole grains robs our microbiomes of the starch that would otherwise be ferried down to our colons encapsulated in unbroken cell walls. Front-Load Your Calories There are metabolic benefits to distributing more calories to earlier in the day, so make breakfast (ideally) or lunch your largest meal of the day in true king/prince/pauper style. Time-Restrict Your Eating Confine eating to a daily window of time of your choosing under twelve hours in length that you can stick to consistently, seven days a week. Given the circadian benefits of reducing evening food intake, the window should end before 7:00 p.m. Optimize Exercise Timing The Daily Dozen’s recommendation for optimum exercise duration for longevity is ninety minutes of moderately intense activity a day, which is also the optimum exercise duration for weight loss. Anytime is good, and the more the better, but there may be an advantage to exercising in a fasted state, at least six hours after your last meal. Typically, this would mean before breakfast, but if you timed it right, you could exercise midday before a late lunch or, if lunch is eaten early enough, before dinner. This is the timing for nondiabetics. Diabetics and prediabetics should instead start exercising thirty minutes after the start of a meal and ideally go for at least an hour to completely straddle the blood sugar peak. If you had to choose a single meal to exercise after, it would be dinner, due to the circadian rhythm of blood sugar control that wanes throughout the day. Ideally, though, breakfast would be the largest meal of the day, and you’d exercise after that—or, even better, after every meal. Weigh Yourself Twice a Day Regular self-weighing is considered crucial for long-term weight control, but there is insufficient evidence to support a specific frequency of weighing. My recommendation is based on the one study that found that twice daily—upon waking and right before bed—appeared superior to once a day (about six versus two pounds of weight loss over twelve weeks).

My aunt's life was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while they, aired the other. They were rooms of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot, making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room, was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.

Yet if Diana’s later recollections were an authentic gauge of her mood in 1980 and early 1981, she felt intense resentment, anger, fear, depression, and jealousy behind her expressions of affection. Diana needed to be consoled and cared for, and had she felt secure, her disquieting undercurrents might have subsided. But life with the royal family behind palace walls only offered the illusion of protection. Diana was an emotionally bruised adolescent without a clear identity, and royal life, with its rigid protocol and fishbowl confines, would become a source of anxiety rather than a safe haven.

Watching the defendants shuffle to the front of the room to stand before the bench, I realized that I had never before seen so many men and women in shackles, that I had never laid eyes on a group of people so diminished. I had apprehended and processed countless men and women for deportation, many of whom I sent without thinking to pass through this very room—but there was something dreadfully altered in their presence here between towering and cavernous walls, lorded over by foreign men in colored suits and black robes, men with little notion of the dark desert nights or the hard glare of the sun, with little sense for the sweeping expanses of stone and shale, the foot-packed earthen trails, the bodies laid bare before the elements, the bones trembling from heat, from cold, from want of water. It dawned on me that in my countless encounters with migrants at the hard end of their road through the desert, there was always the closeness of the failed journey, the fading but still-hot spark from the last flame of the crossing. But here, in the stale and swirling air of the courthouse, it was clear that something vital had gone missing in the days since apprehension, some final essence of the spirit had been stamped out or lost in the slow crush of confinement.

The sequestering of the family in the big house feels to those within the walls like a strange curtailment of their liberty. To those in the village it is no great novelty. For them, even before the wall’s building was complete, to stray about the park, without express permission, was to risk having a leg bitten off by a mantrap. Prisoners lament their confinement. Sometimes to be at large is an equal deprivation

“Human beings, having originated in the Garden, require contact with nature. Even a palace grows unwholesome to one who is too long confined within its walls.” -THE BOOK OF THE ETERNAL ROSE

When it comes to web design, listening solely to the hotel’s requests can put the whole website project in jeopardy, as hoteliers, who spend most of their day in the confined space of the four walls of their hotels, tend to develop a “partial blindness”: they often take the stronger features of their hotel for granted and they give an unjustifiably high value to some trivial characteristic.

Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired….He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years…. And though he lives to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter night there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.

What’s next?” I want to tell her it’s not a game; my fears aren’t thrilling rides she gets to go on. But she probably doesn’t mean it that way. “It’s--” The wall comes from nowhere, slamming into her back, my back, both our sides. Forcing us together, closer than we’ve ever been before. “Confinement,” I say, and it’s worse than usual with her in here, taking up half the air. I groan a little, hunching over her. I hate it in here. I hate it in here. “Hey,” she says. “It’s okay. Here--” She pulls my arm around her. I’ve always thought of her as spare, not an ounce of extra anything on her. But her waist is soft. “This is the first time I’m happy I’m so small,” she says. “Mmhmm.” She’s talking about how to get out. Fear-landscape strategy. I am trying to focus on breathing. Then she pulls us both down, to make the box smaller, and turns so her back is against my chest, so I’m completely wrapped around her. “This is worse,” I say, because with my nervousness about the box and my nervousness about touching her combined, I can’t even think straight. “This is definitely…” “Shh. Arms around me.” I wrap my arms around her waist, and bury my face in her shoulder. She smells like Dauntless soap, and sweet, like apple. I’m forgetting where I am.

What’s next?” I want to tell her it’s not a game; my fears aren’t thrilling rides she gets to go on. But she probably doesn’t mean it that way. “It’s--” The wall comes from nowhere, slamming into her back, my back, both our sides. Forcing us together, closer than we’ve ever been before. “Confinement,” I say, and it’s worse than usual with her in here, taking up half the air.

When my wife was pregnant with my son, we had many talks about possible futures--things we would do, ways that things would go. All of this dreaming came to an absolute halt on the day of the birth when our son appeared. I don't mean to give the impression that we were unhappy, because we weren't, we weren't unhappy at all. It was just that a sheer wall had appeared confining us and our lives in certain ways that we could never have guessed at before. My wife said to me about it--I think that my whole life before was training for this.

Aloneness seems to be the greatest byproduct of this invisible enemy for whether or not a person has been infected the condition is one of separation, a self-imposed isolation. Be it out of fear or guilt you are expected to stop your life in its tracks and confine yourself willingly and against all natural instincts to the walls that house you.

Until recently, when the walls that had kept her confined, safe, suddenly seemed a little oppressive and she was finally plucking up the courage to peer over them.

Devastation was a private thing, to be confined within the walls of my mind and soul.

He gives her everything she could possibly wish for within the confines of four walls.

Our arrogance has convinced us of our ability to create the keys that will unlock the doors that imprison us. But we’ve yet to realize that only God can get us over the wall.

During the years of solitary confinement we had communicated with other POWs using a tap code -- tapping on the walls. During the time I was tortured I mainly tapped on the wall with Howie Dunn, a marine F-4 pilot. I poured out my heart to him. We talked about what the Vietnamese were doing to us, we talked about food, we talked about women, we talked about our past lives and what we wanted to do in the future. We tapped for hours. At one point I said, "Howie, what do you look like?" He tapped back and said, "Actually, I look a lot like John Wayne." We were moved away from each other, and I didn't talk to him for about five years. Right before we were coming home the Vietnamese allowed us to all get out together in a big compound and "greet one another" as they said. So I'm standing there talking to some people and this guy walks up to me -- he's short and bald and nondescript, a complete and absolute stranger. I had never laid eyes on him before. He sticks out his hand and says, "Hi, I'm Howie Dunn." In a flash, there he was, my best friend. [Porter Halyburton, US Navy pilot POW in North Vietnam, 1965 - 1973]

I’m responsible for the whole, flattened film that has become my life. I think of camera angles. I think of how I should preserve the intricacies of the set. I must manage to capture what it means for a once-nomad to be confined to the four walls of a house. I must figure out a way to show on screen how even a small space of confinement begins to grow in the mind of the woman who inhabits it with her sorrows, how the walk from the bedroom to the door of the house becomes a Herculean task, or how the thought of checking on the slow-cooking chicken Chettinad curry when she is busy reading a book becomes an impossible chore. I also have to find out the technique to show its exact opposite, how the rooms begin to close in on this woman when she is being violated, how the walls chase her into corners, how the house appears to shrink the minute her husband is home, how there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to evade his presence.

- If anyone makes you doubt how fucking gorgeous you are, I'll make them regret it for the rest of their lives. - I thought my cage was the prison walls, Zahara. But getting beyond them didn`t break the shackles that have kept me confined. You, you are my salvation. And this, this has finally set me free.

The Berlin in which Leamas had his being was a paradigm of human folly and historical paradox. In the early sixties I had observed it mostly from the confines of the British Embassy in Bonn, and only occasionally in the raw. But I watched the Wall’s progress from barbed wire to breeze block; I watched the ramparts of the Cold War going up on the still-warm ashes of the hot one. And I had absolutely no sense of transition from the one war to the other, because in the secret world there barely was one. To the hard-liners of East and West the Second World War was a distraction. Now that it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917

The illuminated castle rose from the sleeping city like a mound of ice and steam. There was something greenish about it, and it seemed to pulse. By this time tomorrow, she’d be confined within those walls. But tonight—tonight it was so quiet, like the calm before a storm.

An eye-opening experience can come in many ways. Sometimes, it comes as dawn pushing through the night to reveal the light. At other times, on the edge of loss, we realize what we need to, or when summer sadly ends and we smell autumn in the breeze, and the quiet goodbye. Sometimes, we can come by an ocean and carry its soul into ours. Expansion occurs in the sacred space. Transformation happens in so many subtle ways. Not every mentoring occurs in a classroom confined by four walls. Some go beyond them and unfold in unconfined spaces. That's when the seed of transformation explodes, and we begin growing.