Console Wars Quotes

Sometimes, she reflected, she dressed for courage, sometimes for success, and sometimes for the consolation of knowing that whatever else went wrong, at least she liked her clothes.

There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien's innumerable heirs. Call it 'epic', or 'high', or 'genre' fantasy, this is what fantasy has come to mean. Which is misleading as well as unfortunate. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés—elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps—via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabiński and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on—the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine—that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it—Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies? Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge. The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave. I don't know if he's right, but I'm excited. This is a radical literature. It's the literature we most deserve.

He must be blessed, by someone or something. My only consolation is knowing I'm right about him, and always will be.

Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 21, 1864. Dear Madam,-- I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours, very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln

I understand your position, Dave.  It’s a big story, and you worked hard to get it.  But if you don’t drop me at the Europa, I’ll blow your head off.  Imagine how big that story would be. There’s no need for these histrionics.  We’ll go to the Holiday Inn.  You can rest, shower, debrief.  You’ll be among friends. Last chance, Dave.  You can be the hero or the headline.  Your call. Let’s talk it out. No.  You talk too much. He started a new line of argument, but before the words passed his lips his brains passed them on the way out. A dirty reddish slime painted the windshield; it covered the dashboard and console. It poured and dripped from the ceiling to the seat.  The driver was covered on one side of his head and body.  The mess made the crowded taxi undrivable. -Also, someone crapped their pants.

Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.

Not only can what others are suffering be a consolation while we are suffering, but even knowing what others suffered long ago can be consoling.

For here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in a time of war. And here at the heart of the city, right under the sweep of the searchlights, was Rick’s Café Américain, where the beleaguered could assemble for the moment to gamble and drink and listen to music; to conspire, console, and most importantly, hope. And at the center of this oasis was Rick. As the Count’s friend had observed, the saloonkeeper’s cool response to Ugarte’s arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition; neither so terrible, nor so humiliating.

the Super NES, which would hit stores on August 23, 1991. All systems would come with the groundbreaking new Super Mario World game, while four others would immediately be available for purchase: F-Zero, Pilotwings, Gradius III, and SimCity.

Recall that in April 2008 candidate Obama—unaware that a blogger was recording his remarks at a private fundraiser for moneyed Bay Area radicals—dismissed religion as a consolation for the “bitter” in Middle America. Contained within this one remark was the seed of secularist bigotry toward the religious that would come to full and odorous flower in his first term.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.

Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.

By 1990, Nintendo of America had sold nearly thirty million consoles, resulting in an NES in one out of every three homes.

Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room. Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls? Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us. One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was ‘distraction’ (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin.

There was no such thing as a magic touch, and it wouldn’t have mattered if there were, because the only thing it takes to sell toys, vitamins, or magazines is the power of story. That was the secret. That was the whole trick: to recognize that the world is nothing but chaos, and the only thing holding it (and us) together are stories. And Kalinske realized this in a way that only people who have been there and done that possibly can: that when you tell memorable, universal, intricate, and heartbreaking stories, anything is possible.

The women who went to the field, you say... A few names were writ, and by chance live to-day; But's a perishing record fast fading away, Of those we recall, there are scarcely a score... And what would they do if war came again?... They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then, The nurses, consolers, and saviors of men.

Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness.

. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.

Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.

Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.

I’m supposed to be a man. A man’s man, the ones who can do anything. I’m a goddamn Navy SEAL. I’ve been to war and seen some awful shit. I’ve battled through things most men can only imagine. Yet here I stand like a little bitch hesitating to open that door.

Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer Happy those who can rely on God to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end. But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man and now see man’s image debas’d lower than the wolf or the hog— Where can we turn for consolation? Owen

So after the family moved to New Jersey, she formally became NOA’s first employee and helped select a location for the new company’s office. Arakawa and his wife settled on a small space on the seventeenth floor of a Manhattan high-rise located in the center of the toy district at 25th Street and Broadway.

She consoled herself with the thought that the pictures were graphic enough to shake people up, stop them being complacent about what was happening, and if that meant the war would end sooner, those two deaths weren't in vain. As she hoped, with less and less confidence each day, that Michael's had not been in vain. Too much waste to bear.

I had been with them a little more than a year; I had been ordained a little more than two years. How inexperienced and immature I felt at this sudden crisis of such proportions. Supported by the routines of a parish priest, I had ministered to these people in their daily problems, helped them, consoled them, said Mass and brought Communion to the sick, anointed the dying. I had made many friends among them, and they trusted me, young as I was—the young American in their midst. But the war changed everything.

It was awkward for her to admit even secretly to herself that she had fallen in love with a man who would possibly never love her in return, but she consoled herself with the thought that no one would ever know, and she would bear no blame for this love, as long as it remained unspoken, even if it was her first and last love, and it went on for a lifetime.

There’s a way of looking at this where I’m the hero who chops through the bullshit and oppression in order to come out the other end with a spoonful of freedom.

I’ll just be the guy who was there for the fall. No one will remember anything before that.

Though to this day no panegyrist of life has succeeded in escaping death, the conviction that life is worth living is the ultimate content and consolation of all art.

Arakawa and his wife settled on a small space on the seventeenth floor of a Manhattan high-rise located in the center of the toy district at 25th Street and Broadway.

This task was given to Shigeru Miyamoto, a floppy-haired first-time game designer who idealistically believed that videogames should be treated with the same respect given to books, movies, and television shows.

Stop it now! D’you think I can work miracles? What must be will be. Let everything take its inexorable course! There’s some kind of consolation even in this: that whatever is happening follows its own inevitability and its own law.

According to historian Ellen Hammer, he (Pres. Kennedy) was, 'shaken and depressed.' to realize that, 'the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese chief of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.' At one point an aide tried to console him by reminding him that Diem and Nhu had been tyrants. 'No," he replied. "They were in a difficult position.' They did the best they could for their country.

Although Sony would go on to sell ten million PlayStation systems by the end of 1996 (with more than half of those sales occurring in the United States), most of SCEA’s key executives would be fired or let go within a year of the launch.

In a flash I had a change of heart. Even one precious life was worth saving. Japan was defeated; but the wounded were still alive. The war was over; but the work of our relief team remained. Our country was destroyed; but medical science still existed. Wasn't our work only beginning? Irrespective of the rise and fall of our country, wasn't our main duty to attend to the life and death of each single person? the very basis of the Red Cross was to attend to the wounded, be they friend or foe. Precisely because we Japanese had treated human life so simply and so carelessly--precisely for this reason we were reduced to our present miserable plight. Respect for the life of every person--this must be the foundation stone on which we would built a new society. Our people had been told that they must suffer these terrible wounds to win the war; but in fact they had suffered in order to lose. Now they were thrown into the most pitiable and desperate situation. And there was no one to console them, no one to help them except us. We must stand and come to their aid. I stood there unsteadily on my tottering legs. And then the whole group stood up beside me. Our courage came back. The determination to continue our work gave us strength and joy.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons—Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire—that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond’s Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me—a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined “Houston, we’ve had a problem” or “Watch this” in the pantheon of understated taglines for calamity: “I wouldn’t lean on that.

No follower of Christ knew the shape of the earth. For many centuries this great Peasant of Palestine has been worshiped as God. Millions and millions have given their lives to his service. The wealth of the world was lavished on his shrines. His name carried consolation to the diseased and dying. His name dispelled the darkness of death, and filled the dungeon with light. His name gave courage to the martyr, and in the midst of fire, with shriveling lips the sufferer uttered it again and again. The outcasts, the deserted, the fallen, felt that Christ was their friend, felt that he knew their sorrows and pitied their sufferings. All this is true, and if it were all, how beautiful, how touching, how glorious it would be. But it is not all. There is another side. In his name millions and millions of men and women have been imprisoned, tortured and killed. In his name millions and millions have been enslaved. In his name the thinkers, the investigators, have been branded as criminals, and his followers have shed the blood of the wisest and best. In his name the progress of many nations was stayed for a thousand years. In his gospel was found the dogma of eternal pain, and his words added an infinite horror to death. His gospel filled the world with hatred and revenge; made intellectual honesty a crime; made happiness here the road to hell, denounced love as base and bestial, canonized credulity, crowned bigotry and destroyed the liberty of man. It would have been far better had the New Testament never been written – far better had the theological Christ never lived. Had the writers of the Testament been regarded as uninspired, had Christ been thought of only as a man, had the good been accepted and the absurd, the impossible, and the revengeful thrown away, mankind would have escaped the wars, the tortures, the scaffolds, the dungeons, the agony and tears, the crimes and sorrows of a thousand years.

You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.

From the kitchen was now issuing the smell of freshly brewed coffee and I heard Frida rumbling about. It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one—it was always the unimportant, the little things.

The Lament of the Demobilised “Four Years,” some say consolingly. “Oh well, What’s that? You’re young. And then it must have been A very fine experience for you!” And they forget How others stayed behind and just got on – Got on the better since we were away. And we came home and found They had achieved, and men revered their names But never mentioned ours; And no one talked heroics now, and we Must just go back and start again once more. “You threw four years into the melting-pot – Did you indeed!” these others cry. “Oh well, The more fool you!” And we’re beginning to agree with them.

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

The only thing that consoled him, for a few seconds at least, was when the woman who had embraced him, and now cried with him, told him that at least he would have the chance to bury them. He would always know where they were laid to rest, she said. She seemed to know a little more about war than the rest of us.

When Heshie was killed in the war, the only thing people could think to say to my Aunt Clara and my Uncle Hymie, to somehow mitigate the horror, to somehow console them in their grief, was, “At least he didn’t leave you with a shikse wife. At least he didn’t leave you with goyische children.” End of Heshie and his story.

Heinz Heck wrote after the war that he and his brother had begun the back-breeding project out of curiosity, but also from "the thought that if man cannot be halted in his mad destruction of himself and other creatures, it is at least a consolation if some of those kinds of animals he has already exterminated can be brought back to life again.

The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune.

Even in death, some souls leave an intangible mark on the world. It is impossible not to feel them there, feel their presence just beyond the veil that separates the living from those already risen into the arms of the Lifegiver. Though I pray the loved ones I’ve lost have long since returned to the world in Laor’s infinite circle of rebirth, I cannot help but feel that some part of each of them remains yet with me, suspended between this old life I was a part of and the new one they must now enjoy. It is painful to feel that presence and the constant reminder it bears to mind, and yet it is simultaneously wondrously consoling to know that they are—even in some small way—still there to watch over and guide me…” —

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God." From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good. In the Old Testament, they said. God is the judge -- but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison -- no everlasting fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead. In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal. The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." These are the words of "eternal love." No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror. All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ. This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism. America massacred civilians in No Gun Ri and My Lai, it poisoned fields of crops and buried mines, it left behind machine guns in the wrong hands and let houses turn to rubble. San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.

The center console rattled when it hinged open, and after futilely pawing around for a bottle of aspirin, Steele settled on the FN Five-seven instead. Most of the time Steele carried a modified Colt 1911. The .45 was an old gun, and the only thing his father left at the house before he disappeared. It was Steele’s most cherished possession, but not the right weapon for what he had planned

These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope--these lofty city spires or simple chapels in the hills--they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know, but as long as men suffer, those steeples will remain

Truth [10w] Tell the truth and its enemies will scatter like roaches. Inventory of a Lost Childhood 1. Lion King’s Simba missing an eye 2. Conan the Barbarian missing a sword 3. Transformer missing an arm/wing/machine gun 4. Scooby-Doo missing a head 5. Star Wars’ R2-D2 missing a gripping tool 6. Etch-a-Sketch missing a knob 7. Powell Peralta skateboard missing a wheel 8. Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle missing a nunchuk 9. Atari console missing a joystick 10. G.I. Joe missing in action

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy—this discovery is not a matter for triumph... And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds. But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not... Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves. All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense.

I am completely against ecumenism as it is envisaged today--with its ineffective "dialogues" and gratuitous and sentimental gestures amounting to nothing. Certainly an understanding between religions is possible and even necessary, though not on the dogmatic plane, but solely on the basis of common ideas and common interests. The common ideas are a transcendent, perfect, all-powerful, merciful Absolute, then a hereafter that is either good or bad depending on our merits or demerits; all the religions, including Buddhism--Buddhist "atheism" is simply a misunderstanding--are in agreement on these points. The common interests are a defense against materialism, atheism, perversion, subversion, and modernism in all its guises. I believe Pius XII once said that the wars between Christians and Muslims were but domestic quarrels compared to the present opposition between the world of the religions and that of militant materialism-atheism; he also said it was a consolation to know that there are millions of men who prostrate themselves five times a day before God.

The Oedipal vortex had him caught like a dead leaf in its compulsory spin, wanting one consolation after another. Some languages kept the ideas of desire and privation apart, but English forced them into the naked intimacy of a single syllable: want. Wanting love to ease the want of love. The war on want which made one want more. Whiskey was no better at looking after him than his mother had been, or his wife had become, or the pink cardigan would be if he lurched across the room, fell to his knees and begged her for mercy. Why did he want to do that?

If something terrible happened – such as war, plague or drought – people consoled themselves that ‘We all play a role in some great cosmic drama devised by the gods, or by the laws of nature. We are not privy to the script, but we can rest assured that everything happens for a purpose. Even this terrible war, plague and drought have their place in the greater scheme of things. Furthermore, we can count on the playwright that the story surely has a good and meaningful ending. So even the war, plague and drought will work out for the best – if not here and now, then in the afterlife.

All those beings who revealed truths to me and who were no longer there, seemed to me to have lived a life from which I alone profited and as though they had died for me. It was sad for me to think that in my book, my love which was once everything to me, would be so detached from a being that various readers would apply it textually to the love they experienced for other women. But why should I be horrified by this posthumous infidelity, that this man or that should offer unknown women as the object of my sentiment, when that infidelity, that division of love between several beings began with my life and long before I began writing? I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted. I had anticipated the profanation of my memories by unknown readers. I was not far from being horrified with myself as, perhaps, some nationalist party might be in whose name hostilities had been provoked and who alone had benefited from a war in which many noble victims had suffered and died without even knowing the issue of the struggle which, for my grandmother, would have been such a complete reward. And the single consolation she never knew, that at last I had set to work, was, such being the fate of the dead, that though she could not rejoice in my progress she had at least been spared consciousness of my long inactivity, of the frustrated life which had been such a pain to her. And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced.

The sun had set in its usual abrupt tropical manner soon after they had made themselves comfortable: night had swept over the sky, showing the eastern stars after the few minutes of twilight, and now on the larboard beam a glowing planet heaved up on the horizon, lying there for a moment like the stern-lantern of some important ship. Martin was a man of peace; Maturin, with certain qualifications, was in principle opposed to violence; yet both had absorbed so much of the man-of-war's and even more the letter of marque's predatory values that they fell silent, staring like tigers at the planet until it rose clear of the sea and betrayed its merely celestial character.

For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins – duplicity, for example – in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

Lobsang sighed. ‘But I think I need you too, Joshua. I often think back to our days together on the Mark Twain.’ ‘Watched any old movies recently?’ ‘That’s another thing about Agnes. She won’t let me show any movies that don’t have nuns in.’ ‘Wow. That’s brutal.’ ‘Something else that’s good for me, she says. Of course there aren’t that many movies that qualify, and we watch them over and over.’ He shuddered. ‘Don’t talk to me about Two Mules for Sister Sara. But the musicals are the worst. Although Agnes says that the freezer-raiding scene in Sister Act is an authentic detail from convent life.’ ‘Well, that’s a consolation. Musicals with nuns in, huh . . .’ A voice rang out across the park, a voice Joshua remembered only too well from his own past. ‘Lobsang? Time to come in now. Your little friend will keep until tomorrow . . .’ ‘She has loudhailers everywhere.’ Lobsang shouldered his rake and sighed as they trudged across the grass. ‘You see what I’m reduced to? To think I hired forty-nine hundred monks to chant for forty-nine days on forty-nine mountain tops in stepwise Tibets, for this.’ Joshua clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It’s tough, Lobsang. She’s treating you like you’re a kid. Like you’re sixteen, going on seventeen.’ Lobsang looked at him sharply. ‘You can pack that in for a start,’ he snapped. ‘But I’ve got confidence you can overcome these difficulties, Lobsang. Just face up to every obstacle. Climb every mountain—’ Lobsang stalked off sulkily. Joshua waved cheerfully. ‘So long! Farewell!

psychological protection against disasters. If something terrible happened – such as war, plague or drought – people consoled themselves that ‘We all play a role in some great cosmic drama devised by the gods or by the laws of nature. We are not privy to the script, but we can rest assured that everything happens for a purpose. Even this terrible war, plague and drought have their place in the greater scheme of things. Furthermore, we can count on the playwright that the story surely has a good and meaningful ending. So even the war, plague and drought will work out for the best – if not here and now, then in the afterlife.’ Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But Ko-san with the flag jumped resolutely down into the ditch and still has not climbed back.

The troops also edged toward that timeless state common to veteran armies in which the men trusted no one less wretched than themselves. Still they did not hate. But each time they had to bundle up unopened mail for the dead and return it to the rear, their blood rose. An officer noticed that American artillery barrages now elicited raucous cheers. “Lay it on them!” the men yelled. “Give it to the bastards!” And the poignancy of young men dying young intruded every hour of every day. This farewell note was found in a dead pilot’s sunglasses case: Mother, please do not grieve but rather console yourself in the fact that I am happy. Try to enjoy the remainder of your life as best you can and have no regrets, for you have been a wonderful mother and I love you. Jim. It was enough to incite a man to murder.

My own theological views are those of an agnostic—one who doesn’t know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. As an agnostic, what impresses me first of all is the woeful limits of our human knowledge. I respect the power of reason, but I also respect those aspects of religious faith that are compassionate and consoling. Many people could not live their lives without the consolation of faith. The virtues of religion should not be dismissed lightly. The Christian testament has a beautiful phrase for our limited human understanding: “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”13 Believers trust the biblical promise that all our questions will be answered when we meet God face-to-face in eternity. That promise is the heart of religious faith. For an agnostic, that promise is a reminder that our knowledge in this life is incomplete. We are well into the twenty-first century, and we marvel at the spectacular achievements of science. But science still does not know how the universe was created or how life began. The Book of Proverbs contains a warning that speaks to us in our uncertain state: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”14 Those who believe they are changing the world, or saving the planet, or transforming the human race, are intoxicated with self-aggrandizing pride. As secular “redeemers,” a haughty spirit is their second nature. Consequently, they are deaf to this biblical wisdom. The secularists are confident that the nonexistence of God is a self-evident fact. It infuriates them that religionists (or “irrationalists,” as Bill Maher calls them) resist what they think is obviously, indisputably true. Believing they know a truth that cannot be known, and that others resist, they are prepared to use any means necessary to silence their opponents and achieve their goals.

an idle threat, for Nuri Said with the guns had gone back to Guweira. There were only one hundred and eighty Turks in the village, but they had supporters in the Muhaisin, a clan of the peasantry; not for love so much as because Dhiab, the vulgar head-man of another faction, had declared for Feisal. So they shot up at Nasir a stream of ill-directed bullets. The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune. At dark Mastur rode in. His Motalga looked blackly at their blood enemies the Abu Tayi, lolling in the best houses. The two Sherifs divided up the place, to keep their unruly followers apart. They had little authority to mediate

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forgot all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of relenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private consolation.

Nowadays, enormous importance is given to individual deaths, people make such a drama out of each person who dies, especially if they die a violent death or are murdered; although the subsequent grief or curse doesn't last very long: no one wears mourning any more and there's a reason for that, we're quick to weep but quicker still to forget. I'm talking about our countries, of course, it's not like that in other parts of the world, but what else can they do in a place where death is an everyday occurrence. Here, though, it's a big deal, at least at the moment it happens. So-and-so has died, how dreadful; such-and-such a number of people have been killed in a crash or blown to pieces, how terrible, how vile. The politicians have to rush around attending funerals and burials, taking care not to miss any-intense grief, or is it pride, requires them as ornaments, because they give no consolation nor can they, it's all to do with show, fuss, vanity and rank. The rank of the self-important, super-sensitive living. And yet, when you think about it, what right do we have, what is the point of complaining and making a tragedy out of something that happens to every living creature in order for it to become a dead creature? What is so terrible about something so supremely natural and ordinary? It happens in the best families, as you know, and has for centuries, and in the worst too, of course, at far more frequent intervals. What's more, it happens all the time and we know that perfectly well, even though we pretend to be surprised and frightened: count the dead who are mentioned on any TV news report, read the birth and death announcements in any newspaper, in a single city, Madrid, London, each list is a long one every day of the year; look at the obituaries, and although you'll find far fewer of them, because an infinitesimal minority are deemed to merit one, they're nevertheless there every morning. How many people die every weekend on the roads and how many have died in the innumerable battles that have been waged? The losses haven't always been published throughout history, in fact, almost never. People were more familiar with and more accepting of death, they accepted chance and luck, be it good or bad, they knew they were vulnerable to it at every moment; people came into the world and sometimes disappeared at once, that was normal, the infant mortality rate was extraordinarily high until eighty or even seventy years ago, as was death in childbirth, a woman might bid farewell to her child as soon as she saw its face, always assuming she had the will or the time to do so. Plagues were common and almost any illness could kill, illnesses we know nothing about now and whose names are unfamiliar; there were famines, endless wars, real wars that involved daily fighting, not sporadic engagements like now, and the generals didn't care about the losses, soldiers fell and that was that, they were only individuals to themselves, not even to their families, no family was spared the premature death of at least some of its members, that was the norm; those in power would look grim-faced, then carry out another levy, recruit more troops and send them to the front to continue dying in battle, and almost no one complained. People expected death, Jack, there wasn't so much panic about it, it was neither an insuperable calamity nor a terrible injustice; it was something that could happen and often did. We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last forever. We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword. And we're bound to be cowed when confronted by those who still see death, their own or other people's, as part and parcel of their job, as all in a day's work. When confronted by terrorists, for example, or by drug barons or multinational mafia men.

You will see that the most powerful and highly placed men let drop remarks in which they long for leisure, acclaim it, and prefer it to all their blessings. They desire at times, if it could be with safety, to descend from their high pinnacle; for, though nothing from without should assail or shatter, Fortune of its very self comes crashing down.8 The deified Augustus, to whom the gods vouchsafed more than to any other man, did not cease to pray for rest and to seek release from public affairs; all his conversation ever reverted to this subject—his hope of leisure. This was the sweet, even if vain, consolation with which he would gladden his labours—that he would one day live for himself. In a letter addressed to the senate, in which he had promised that his rest would not be devoid of dignity nor inconsistent with his former glory, I find these words: "But these matters can be shown better by deeds than by promises. Nevertheless, since the joyful reality is still far distant, my desire for that time most earnestly prayed for has led me to forestall some of its delight by the pleasure of words." So desirable a thing did leisure seem that he anticipated it in thought because he could not attain it in reality. He who saw everything depending upon himself alone, who determined the fortune of individuals and of nations, thought most happily of that future day on which he should lay aside his greatness. He had discovered how much sweat those blessings that shone throughout all lands drew forth, how many secret worries they concealed. Forced to pit arms first against his countrymen, then against his colleagues, and lastly against his relatives, he shed blood on land and sea. Through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and almost all countries he followed the path of battle, and when his troops were weary of shedding Roman blood, he turned them to foreign wars. While he was pacifying the Alpine regions, and subduing the enemies planted in the midst of a peaceful empire, while he was extending its bounds even beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates and the Danube, in Rome itself the swords of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being whetted to slay him. Not yet had he escaped their plots, when his daughter9 and all the noble youths who were bound to her by adultery as by a sacred oath, oft alarmed his failing years—and there was Paulus, and a second time the need to fear a woman in league with an Antony.10 When be had cut away these ulcers11 together with the limbs themselves, others would grow in their place; just as in a body that was overburdened with blood, there was always a rupture somewhere. And so he longed for leisure, in the hope and thought of which he found relief for his labours. This was the prayer of one who was able to answer the prayers of mankind.

Atheism is an emancipating system of thought that frees the mind from myths, fables, and childish fancies. There can be no inquisition, no witchcraft delusion, no religious wars, no persecutions of one sect by another, no impediment to science and progress, no stultification of the mind, as a result of its teachings. The philosophy of atheism teaches man to stand on his own feet, instills confidence in his reasoning powers, and forces him to conquer his environment. It teaches him not to subject himself and debase himself before mythical superhuman powers, for his reason is his power. The march from faith to reason is the march on which dwells the future hope of a really civilized mankind. Atheism teaches man to endeavor constantly to better his own condition and that of all of his fellowmen, to make his children wiser and happier; it supplies the powerful urge to add something new to the knowledge of mankind. And all this, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells. This is no cold and cheerless philosophy; it is an elevating and ennobling ideal which may console him in his afflictions and teach him how to live and how to die. It is a self-reliant philosophy that makes a man intellectually free, and this mental emancipation allows him to face the world without fear of ghosts and gods.

There were thousands of young men, as padres at the front would testify, in whom belief in God was an unshakeable conviction, and who in danger, in bodily agony and in death found peace and consolation in their undimmed faith. There were thousands upon thousands again for whom religion had always been a matter of indifference, and to whom it remained so. But there were also those, not negligible in point of numbers, and far from negligible in point of intelligence, who quietly thought about it all, and found that the faith in which they had been brought up was not reconcilable with the horrors that were their daily bread. About the reality of them there was no doubt: to see your friend turned to tripe or a dish of brains before your eyes was actual, and they threw over the other not with indifference, but with the savage contempt of those who have been fooled. It was childish to talk of loving your enemies when you were going through hell yourself for the sake of maiming or killing them as profusely as possible. And what price Divine Protection for non-combatants? There was that padre (bloody fool) who ran out across a shell-swept area to administer the sacrament to a man who lay mortally wounded in front of a trench, and who was like to die before they could bring him in. A shell hit him directly as he ran: he vanished like a property in a conjuring trick, and one couldn't help laughing and was sick afterwards.

Anyone thus forced to react continually to precepts that are not the expressions of his impulses lives, psychologically speaking, above his means, and may be objectively described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly conscious of this difference or not. It is undeniable that our contemporary civilization favors this sort of hypocrisy to an extraordinary extent. One might even venture to assert that it is built upon such a hypocrisy and would have to undergo extensive changes if man were to undertake to live according to the psychological truth. There are therefore more civilized hypocrites than truly cultured persons, and one can even discuss the question whether a certain amount of civilized hypocrisy is not indispensable to maintain civilization because the already organized cultural adaptability of the man of today would perhaps not suffice for the task of living according to the truth. On the other hand the maintenance of civilization even on such questionable grounds offers the prospect that with every new generation a more extensive transformation of impulses will pave the way for a better civilization. These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behavior of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed. In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never really rose as high as we had believed.

What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war. But for Hoa and countless other loved comrades, nameless ordinary soldiers, those who sacrificed for others and for their Vietnam, raising the name of Vietnam high and proud, creating a spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict, the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise. Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling. After 1975, all that had quieted. The wind of war had stopped. The branches of conflict had stopped rustling. As we had won, Kien thought, then that meant justice had won; that had been some consolation. Or had it? Think carefully; look at your own existence. Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and sad. And look at who won the war. To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But for those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death, and inhuman violence have also won. Just look and think: it is the truth. Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired, and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.

Velizy. All those shepherds in the Pyrenees who are being fitted out with fibre optics, radio relay stations and cable TV. Obviously the stakes are pretty high! And not just in social terms. Did these people think they were already living in society, with their neighbours, their animals, their stories? What a scandalously underdeveloped condition they were in, what a monstrous deprivation of all the blessings of information, what barbaric solitude they were kept in, with no possibility of expressing themselves, or anything. We used to leave them in peace. If they were called on, it was to get them to come and die in the towns, in the factories or in a war. Why have we suddenly developed a need for them, when they have no need of anything? What do we want them to serve as witnesses of? Because we'll force them to if we have to: the new terror has arrived, not the terror of 1984, but that of the twenty-first century. The new negritude has arrived, the new servitude. There is already a roll-call of the martyrs of information. The Bretons whose TV pictures are restored as soon as possible after the relay stations have been blown up . . . Velizy . . . in the Pyrenees. The new guinea pigs. The new hostages. Crucified on the altar of information, pilloried at their consoles. Buried alive under information. All this to make them admit the inexpressible service that is being done to them, to extort from them a confession of their sociality, of their 'normal' condition as associated anthropoids. Socialism is destroying the position of the intellectual. Unlearn what they say. Either they don't believe in it themselves or the violent effort they make to believe in it is disagreeable.

We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life — he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them. As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces. In this intermediate stage he wavers — neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will. He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other — a creature of incalculable variability. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will and instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect understanding has given the former the power to replace the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and unwavering to the distant pole of truth. In Carrie — as in how many of our worldlings do they not? — instinct and reason, desire and understanding, were at war for the mastery. She followed whither her craving led. She was as yet more drawn than she drew.

We could call Christianity, in particular, a huge treasure house of the most elegant forms of consolation — there are so many pleasant, soothing, narcotizing things piled up in it, and for this purpose it takes so many of the most dangerous and most audacious chances. It shows such sophistication, such southern refinement, especially when it guesses what kind of emotional stimulant can overcome, at least for a while, the deep depression, leaden exhaustion, and black sorrow of the physiologically impaired. For, generally speaking, with all great religions, the main issue concerns the fight against a certain endemic exhaustion and heaviness. We can from the outset assume as probable that from time to time, in particular places on the earth, a feeling of physiological inhibition must necessarily become master over wide masses of people, but, because of a lack of knowledge about physiology, it does not enter people’s consciousness as something physiological, so they look for and attempt to find its “cause” and remedy only in psychology and morality (—this, in fact, is my most general formula for whatever is commonly called a “religion”). Such a feeling of inhibition can have a varied ancestry; for instance, it can be the result of cross-breeding between different races (or between classes — for classes also always express differences in origin and race: European “Weltschmerz” [pain at the state of the world] and nineteenth-century “pessimism” are essentially the consequence of an irrational, sudden mixing of the classes), or it can be caused by incorrect emigration — a race caught in a climate for which its powers of adaptation are not sufficient (the case of the Indians in India); or by the influence of the age and exhaustion of the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or by an incorrect diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the inanity of vegetarians, who, of course, have on their side the authority of Squire Christopher in Shakespeare); or by degeneration in the blood, malaria, syphilis and things like that (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War, which spread bad diseases in an epidemic through half of Germany and thus prepared the ground for German servility, German timidity).

Eat, woman,” he bellowed, leaning over her, prepared to force the remainder of her meal into her opened mouth. “I would,” she said in a strained voice, “But there is a giant attached to my chin. Perhaps if he would be so gracious as to remove the cured pork from my pack, I would share it with him.” Rautu’s eyes blazed in senseless joy. He released his companion and hastened toward her effects, rummaging through them with great anticipation. He found a small brown parchment parcel and assumed that this was the source of his happiness. He sniffed the outside of the paper and hummed in delight for the exquisite scent. He tore open the barrier between him and his prize and he was compelled to smile when remarking the numerous slices of meat in his hands. He began eating them immediately, leaving no time between one slice and the next to savour that which he had longed to again taste. The superior fare of Frewyn had been the chief of his consolation during the war, and if he was to remain on the islands with all its splendor, all its comforting familiarity, all its temperate climate, and all its horrendous food, he would relish this last ember of bliss before being made to suffer a diet of steamed grains again. “I did say share,” the commander called out. “I am responsible for securing your life,” he replied with a full mouth and without turning around. “And I thanked you accordingly.” The commander’s remonstrations were unanswered, and she scoffed in aversion as she watched the voracious beast consume nearly all the provisions she had been saving for the return journey. “I know you shall not be satisfied until you have all the tribute in the world, but that pork does belong to me, Rau.” “You are not permitted to have meat while taking our medicines,” he said, dismissively. She peered at him in circumspection. “I don’t recall you mentioning that stipulation before. I find it convenient that you should care to do so now.” The giant paused, his cheeks filled with pork. “And?” he said, shoving another slice into his mouth. “And,” she laughed, “You’re going to allow me to starve on your inedible bread while you skulk off with something that was meant for both of us?” “Perhaps.” “Savior, indeed,” the commander fleered. “You have saved me from one means of death only to plunge me into another.

The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows. Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.” These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope. The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days. We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion. So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.

Videogames weren’t just for kids; they were for anyone who wanted to feel like a kid.

Videogames were for everyone; they just didn’t realize it yet.

Kalinske said. “I’ve just been trying to take some time to myself and figure things out a little.” “Ah, yes,” Nakayama said. “But don’t you know that this is why I called?” Then, right there in the middle of Kalinske’s family vacation,

Use letters. Four-hundred-ish. It takes up way more space.

Kalinske then described what made the videogame industry unique, what made it superbly unpredictable, and what tomorrow might or might not bring. But along this wild roller-coaster ride, there was one thing that would not change. “Suspension of disbelief. It’s always been the fundamental component of diversion, whether that diversion is books, movies, or the theater. Advances in gaming mean we will come to supply that component more effectively than any other medium. The interactive entertainment business is going to allow the Walter Mitty in all of us to finally realize our dreams. We are going to become great football players, race car drivers, or aviators. We are going to move into and occupy new worlds that were formerly only available to us in dreams.

the console was just the movie theater, but it was the movies that kept people coming back for more.

Unsurprisingly, he soon fired every manager that had been appointed by his grandfather and replaced them with young go-getters who he believed could usher Nintendo beyond its conservative past.

It was as if after a decade of conservative politics under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Sonic’s combination of speed, attitude, and energy seemed to embody the promise of the 1990s.

It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that war began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race. The organisation of mankind into great States and Empires, and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness, enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined. All the noblest virtues of individuals were gathered to strengthen the destructive capacity of the mass. Good finances, the resources of world-wide credit and trade, the accumulation of large capital reserves, made it possible to divert for considerable periods the energies of whole peoples to the task of devastation. Democratic institutions gave expression to the will-power of millions. Education not only brought the course of the conflict within the comprehension of everyone, but rendered each person serviceable in a high degree for the purpose in hand. The Press afforded a means of unification and of mutual stimulation. Religion, having discreetly avoided conflict on the fundamental issues, offered its encouragements and consolations, through all its forms, impartially to all the combatants. Lastly, Science unfolded her treasures and her secrets to the desperate demands of men, and placed in their hands agencies and apparatus almost decisive in their character.

The world is full of misconceptions, but perhaps none more fatally fantastical than those involving the lemming. As legend has it, these feisty creatures are prone to combating periods of overpopulation by blindly marching one by one off tall cliffs and unceremoniously plummeting to their deaths. It’s unclear where this global rumor began, but evidence suggests that its popularity spread from Disney’s 1958 Academy Award–winning documentary White Wilderness, which highlighted this unusual and unnatural behavior. Although it was later discovered that the filmmakers had flown in the featured lemmings from Canada and had actually tossed them off the cliffs by hand, it was too late to reverse this morbid misconception.

In February 2010, Ad Age reported that Wal-Mart had consolidated its stocked range of food bags from three brands, Ziploc, Glad and Hefty, down to the market leader, Ziploc, and their own Great Value private label offering.3 Pactiv, the makers of Hefty, gained the consolation prize of the contract to manufacture the Great Value products, whereas the owners of Glad lost their entire food bag business in Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart could do this easily as, unlike many other retailers, they consolidate all manufacturer payments into the buying price and pass on most of the benefit to the shopper in lower prices. Retailers who take manufacturer payments to their bottom line are sometimes unwilling to give up the short-term benefit of such payments for the longer-term return of better margins from their private label. The secondary brands that are targeted by private label are usually big payers of trade spend to make up for their lower level of consumer appeal versus the top brands.

This is no consolation,’ Roberta murmured, hiding her face. ‘Just mindless animal warmth.’ ‘I know,’ Jacques said. ‘But it’s all we have. Try to sleep now.

by electing to hold Verdun, de Castelnau was doing exactly what von Falkenhayn wanted. He was opting to hold a position that could only be defended at a great cost in lives. The fact that it was to cost Germany as many men as France would prove a poor consolation; Germany had more men to lose.

And if [the writer’s] conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:—My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

After the news came that their troops had surrendered, an Urdu newspaper in Lahore wrote that ‘today the entire nation weeps tears of blood . . . Today the Indian Army has entered Dacca. Today for the first time in 1,000 years Hindus have won a victory over Muslims . . . Today we are prostrate with dejection.’ Within days, however, the Urdu press was seeking consolation from the lessons of history. While the defeat was certainly ‘a breach in the fortress of Islam’, even the great Muhammad of Ghori had lost his first war in the subcontinent. But as another Lahore newspaper reminded its readers, Ghori had come back ‘with renewed determination to unfurl the banner of Islam over the Kafir land of India’.54

Videogames were for everyone; they just didn't realize it yet.

(like Blanka, a green-skinned beast-like Brazilian man who had been raised in the jungle),

deeply shaken composer himself. “Songs connect, collect and bring together,” the critic John Berger has written, providing “a shelter from the flow of linear time: a shelter in which future, present and past can console, provoke, ironize and inspire one another.