Decorating Ideas Quotes

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

My friend wants to get moving and so do I,' Eddie said. 'We've got miles to go yet.' I know that. It's on your face, son. Like a scar.' Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed.

Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another.

Occasionally, events in one's life become clearer through the prism of experience, a phrase which simply means that things tend to be clearer as time goes on. For instance, when a person is just born, they usually have no idea what curtains are and spend a great deal of their first months wondering why on earth Mommy and Daddy have hung large pieces of cloth over each window in the nursery. But as the person grows older, the idea of curtains becomes clearer through the prism of experience. The person will learn the word "curtains" and notice that they are actually quite handy for keeping a room dark when it is time to sleep, and for decorating an otherwise boring window area. Eventually, they will entirely accept the idea of curtains of their own, or venetian blinds, and it is all due to the prism of experience.

The one law of Art is its own spontaneity, its pleasure and freedom. How mystic, pure and simple is its wish; it has no idea of potential divinity! Decoration is its creed and vital allegory is its belief. Being the ‘Free Morality,’ it has no sin – then most assuredly Art is all we dare express without excuse.

Your species," M-Bot said in my ear, "has a diet roughly similar to a human one - though with more nuts and less meat. Also, no milk" "Seriously?" I whispered, moving with Morriumur toward the vegetable line. I waved at my chest. "Alanik has breasts. What are they for? Decoration?" "No milk from other creatures, I should say," M-Bot said. Your species finds it extremely gross. As do I by the way. Do you even stop to think how many strange liquids you organics squirt from your orifices?" "No stranger than the ideas that squirt from your orifice sometimes, M-Bot".

Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside,

The ballroom was empty of people but filled with round tables and chairs. It was set for a wedding party. White tablecloths with huge pink bows and pink and white artificial flower centerpieces, a two-foot riser with a long decorated table for the bridal party, a smaller round table next to the riser. The smaller table supported a massive wedding cake that was being cooled by a standing fan. “This is so romantic,” I said to Ranger. “Does it give you ideas?” He wrapped an arm around me, dragged me close against him, and kissed me on the forehead. “Yes, it gives me ideas, but not about marriage. Mostly about setting fire to this atrocity.

You don’t think she ever loved your dad?” Shelley shook her head. “I think, for her, it was more like taking a job than falling in love. If you’ve been bred to marry a rich man and have his babies and basically be decoration, and you have no skills and no idea how to support yourself, how many options do you really have?

The all-powerful Zahir seemed to be born with every human being and to gain full strength in childhood, imposing rules that would thereafter always be respected: People who are different are dangerous; they belong to another tribe; they want our lands and our women. We must marry, have children, reproduce the species. Love is only a small thing, enough for one person, and any suggestion that the heart might be larger than this may seem perverse. When we are married we are authorised to take possession of the other person, body and soul. We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organised society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill. We must buy jewelry; it identifies us with our tribe. We must be amusing at all times and sneer at those who express their real feelings; it's dangerous for a tribe to allow its members to show their feelings. We must at all costs avoid saying no because people prefer those who always say yes, and this allows us to survive in hostile territory. What other people think is more important than what we feel. Never make a fuss--it might attract the attention of an enemy tribe. If you behave differently you will be expelled from the tribe because you could infect others and destroy something that was extremely difficult to organise in the first place. We must always consider the look of our new cave, and if we don't have a clear idea of our own, then we must call a decorator who will do his best to show others what good taste we have. We must eat three meals a day, even if we're not hungry, and when we fail to fit the current ideal of beauty we must fast, even if we're starving. We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of our country, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hair-style, criticise anyone who is different, go to a religious service on Sunday, Saturday or Friday, depending on our religion, and there beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise he other tribe, who worship false gods. Our children must follow in our footsteps; after all we are older and know more about the world. We must have a university degree even if we never get a job in the area of knowledge we were forced to study. We must never make our parents sad, even if this means giving up everything that makes us happy. We must play music quietly, talk quietly, weep in private, because I am the all-powerful Zahir, who lays down the rules and determines the meaning of success, the best way to love, the importance of rewards.

Believe me, a highly strung brain such as yours demands occasional relaxation from the strain of domestic surroundings. Forget for a little while that children want music lessons, and boots, and bicycles, with tincture of rhubarb three times a day; forget there are such things in life as cooks, and house decorators, and next-door dogs, and butchers’ bills. Go away to some green corner of the earth, where all is new and strange to you, where your over-wrought mind will gather peace and fresh ideas. Go away for a space and give me time to miss you, and to reflect upon your goodness and virtue, which, continually present with me, I may, human-like, be apt to forget, as one, through use, grows indifferent to the blessing of the sun and the beauty of the moon. Go away, and come back refreshed in mind and body, a brighter, better man—if that be possible—than when you went away.

When he removed his robes, you could see the hundreds of scars and bruises that shamelessly decorated his body. Huge black bruises, long scars that came from sword lacerations and whips and new wounds that bled fresh red blood. The Dragonboy's father had no idea his son suffered. That's because the boy never told. From The Binding, a story from the upcoming tenth update of Dragons and Cicadas

A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,' my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor.

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colors. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur -- the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the Eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain, they are all curtains -- a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous.

Contemporary Residential decorating Ideas for home Different ideas to decorate your bedroom The bedroom is the most cherished place in our home. It is the dream of every common man to live in a well decorated and well designed room.

Conversation is how values get ordered, how passion is made contagious. If a parent talks about it, it's important. If a child is allowed to join the conversation, then that child becomes more than a table decoration, he has a part to play in the drama that is growing up. If his ideas count, then he counts. Children gain essential access to adulthood by being given a safe place to speak, and by rehearsing their thoughts out loud before the most patient and supportive audience they will ever know.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load. She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?

The central ideas of Christianity — an angry God and vicarious atonement — are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions. Christians well know that the much-decorated statue of the Church, as it now stands, is not of pure chiseled marble, but of clay, cemented together by blood and tears and hardened in the fires of hatred and persecution. And still we hear the cry, 'The whole world for Christ'.

I am one of the small group of people who go to Halloween stores not for temporary plastic decorations but for actual interior design ideas.

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation of the Word.

On Easter we wrap up pretty, little decorated eggs symbolizing life and renewal. We do this because of the intangibility of a promised gift, which is the eventual resurrection of the body, restored to its finest forever state. Easter celebrates life and the idea of its eternal value, most notably the life of the gift-giver who demands nothing in return. He is your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Freedom is not an idea; a philosophy written about freedom is not freedom. Either one is free or one is not. One is in a prison, however decorative that prison is; a prisoner is free only when he is no longer in prison. Freedom is not a state of the mind that is caught in thought. Thought can never be free. Thought is the response of memory, knowledge and experience; it is always the product of the past and it cannot possibly bring about freedom because freedom is something that is in the living active present, in daily life. Freedom is not freedom from something - freedom from something is merely a reaction.

She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.

What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of a piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom . . . He will endeavor to develop public acceptance of the idea of a music room in the home. This he may do, for example, by organizing an exhibition of period music rooms designed by well-known decorators who themselves exert an influence on the buying groups . . . Then, in order to create dramatic interest in the exhibit, he stages an event or ceremony. To this ceremony key people, persons known to influence the buying habits of the public, such as a famous violinist, a popular artist, and a society leader, are invited. These key persons affect other groups, lifting the idea of the music room to a place in the public consciousness which it did not have before. The juxtaposition of these leaders, and the idea which they are dramatizing, are then projected to the wider public through various publicity channels . . . The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It will come to him as his own idea.

Some car had hit it after all, because it hadn’t had the courage to honor its own correct instinct. And I began to cry because I had this thought about people, that they do this all the time, deny the wise voice inside them telling them the right thing to do because it is different. I remembered once seeing a tea party some little girls had set up outside, mismatched china, decorations of a plucked pansy blossom and a seashell and a shiny penny and a small circle of red berries and a fern, pressed wetly into the wooden table, the damp outline around it a beautiful bonus. They didn’t consult the Martha Stewart guide for entertainment and gulp a martini before their guests arrived. They pulled ideas from their hearts and minds about the things that gave them pleasure, and they laid out an offering with loving intent. It was a small Garden of Eden, the occupants making something out of what they saw was theirs. Out of what they truly saw.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

Speaking of chocolate, what kind of cake are we having for the shower?” “I don’t know.” Sincerely shocked, Peabody jerked around in her seat. “You didn’t get cake?” “I don’t know. Probably.” Because the idea of the shower, what she had to do, hadn’t done, should do, made her stomach jitter, Eve squirmed. “Look, I called the caterer, okay? I did it myself. I didn’t dump it on Roarke, I didn’t ask—God forbid—Summerset to handle it.” “Well, what did you ask for? What’s the theme?” The jitters escalated into a roiling. “What do you mean, theme?” “You don’t have a theme? How can you have a baby shower without a theme?” “Jesus Christ, I need a theme? I don’t even know what that means. I called the caterer. I did my job. I told her it was a baby shower. I told her how many people, more or less. I told her when and where. She started asking me all kinds of questions, which gives me a fucking headache, and I told her not to ask me all kinds of questions or she was fired. Just to do whatever needed doing. Why isn’t that enough?” Peabody’s sigh was long and heartfelt. “Give me the caterer’s info, and I’ll check in with her. Does she do the decorations, too?” “Oh, my God. I need decorations?” “I’m going to help you, Dallas. I’m going to run interference with the caterer. I’m going to come over early on the day and help get it set up.” Eve narrowed her eyes and tried to ignore the joy and relief bubbling in her breast. “And what’s this going to cost me?” “Nothing. I like baby showers.” “You’re a sick, sick woman.

All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

The battle is now so completely won that even many married Christians couples think of birth control almost as a sacrament, and many treat the idea of babies as an optional add-on to their relationship. We live in a society which despises fruitfulness, tolerating it only when it is a sort of self-conscious decision—a baby added on as a little garnish on top of a successful career like the small flourish of kale on the side of your dinner plate. Not really necessary, just decorative, and definitely not the point of the meal. Eve

There was her way with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they always had stiff little vases all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias — all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together — cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls

You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy - she's out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that loopy world out there, with whats going on out there - what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, NJ, of course she didn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the world. She can't get enough of it - she's still acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You're still in your olf man's dream-world, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life - ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is?" Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964. "You wanted Ms. America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance - she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the sit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone - and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of hte hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts; if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The message is simple: You will take me as I come - there is no choice. He cannot endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose. And these are two brothers, the same parents' sons, one for whom the aggression's been bred out, the other for whom the aggression's been bred in. "If you were a father who loved your daughter," Jerry shouts at the Swede, "you would never have left her in that room! You would have never let her out of your sight!

The mantle of intellectual meaninglessness shrouds every aspect of our common life. Events, things, and “information” flood over us, overwhelming us, disorienting us with threats and possibilities we for the most part have no idea what to do about. Commercials, catch words, political slogans, and high-flying intellectual rumors clutter our mental and spiritual space. Our minds and bodies pick them up like a dark suit picks up lint. They decorate us. We willingly emblazon messages on our shirts, caps—even the seat of our pants. Sometime back we had a national campaign against highway billboards. But the billboards were nothing compared to what we now post all over our bodies. We are immersed in birth-to-death and wall-to-wall “noise”—silent and not so silent.

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. “Mister Jem,” he said, “we’re mighty glad to have you all here. Don’t pay no ’tention to Lula, she’s contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She’s a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an’ haughty ways—we’re mighty glad to have you all.” With that, Calpurnia led us to the church door where we were greeted by Reverend Sykes, who led us to the front pew. First Purchase was unceiled and unpainted within. Along its walls unlighted kerosense lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit a faded pink silk banner proclaimed God Is Love, the church’s only decoration except a roto-gravure print of Hunt’s The Light of the World.

Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.

I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday, Anteojito, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.

It is the one who accepts commitment who is strong. The true commitment is the artistic one. This is why artists are so often attacked. They are attacked for their morals, for their ideas – even for their work. Yet their essence – their commitment – is the secret which is unassailable. The true artist knows that creativity is its own reward. Ordinary people fear commitment, you see. Ordinary people fear creativity. They know that if they allow that seething cauldron of yellow liquid to boil over within themselves, then their whole lives will be changed. People fear change. People do not wish to be creative and artistic in any real sense. They wish to decorate, perhaps, and to make things around themselves pleasant – but this has little to do with creativity. … All spiritual paths should be creative. Creativity is involved with sacrifice. That stew of yellow liquid which boils in everyone is a sacrificial broth …

Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

At present, when people become aware of this [common metaphorical] imagery, they tend to think of it as merely a surface dressing of isolated metaphors - as a kind of optional decorative paint that is sometimes added to ideas after they are formed, so as to make them clear to outsiders. But really such symbolism is an integral part of our thought-structure. It does crucial work on all topics, not just in a few supposedly marginal areas such as religion and emotion, where symbols are known to be at home, but throughout our thinking.

He got carried away as he developed his idea: 'The aesthetic quality of towns is essential. If, as has been said, every landscape is a frame of mind, then it is even more true of a townscape. The way the inhabitants think and feel corresponds to the town they live in. An analogous phenomenon can be observed in certain women who, during their pregnancy, surround themselves with harmonious objects, calm statues, bright gardens, delicate curios, so that their child-to-be, under their influence, will be beautiful. In the same way one cannot imagine a genius coming from other than a magnificent town. Goethe was born in Frankfurt, a noble city where the Main flows between venerable palaces, between walls where the ancient heart of Germany lives on. Hoffmann explains Nuremberg - his soul performs acrobatics on the gables like a gnome on the decorated face of an old German clock. In France there is Rouen, with its rich accumulation of architectural monuments, its. cathedral like an oasis of stone, which produced Corneille and then Flaubert, two pure geniuses shaking hands across the centuries. There is no doubt about it, beautiful towns make beautiful souls.

Little girls liked charm boxes. He had seen them at the markets on Saturdays, lining up at the craft stalls, looking for little cases in which to keep their treasures. He would make one for her, Lauren's daughter, and he would decorate it with all of the items that meant the most to him; the stone, too, for it had found a new child to protect. It wasn't much, but it was all that he could think to do. And maybe, just maybe, if he did it right, when he gave the gift to her, he would be able to imbue it with the same powerful idea, the same light and love, that the stone had held when it was given to him.

He said that death marks places like a dog marking its territory. Some people can sense it right away, while others simply start to feel uncomfortable after a time. Every stay in any place betrays the quiet ubiquitousness of the dead. As he said: ‘At first you always see what’s alive and vibrant. You’re delighted by nature, by the local church painted in different colours, by the smells and all that. But the longer you’re in a place, the more the charm of those things fades. You wonder who lived here before you came to this home and this room, whose things these are, who scratched the wall above the bed and what tree the sills were cut from. Whose hands built the elaborately decorated fireplace, paved the courtyard? And where are they now? In what form? Whose idea led to these paths around the pond and who had the idea of planting a willow out the window? All the houses, avenues, parks, gardens and streets are permeated with the deaths of others. Once you start feeling this, something starts to pull you elsewhere, you start to think it’s time to move on.’ He added that when we are in motion, there’s no time for such idle meditations. Which is why to people on trips everything seems new and clean, virginal, and, in some sense, immortal.

Elane scan the room and takeing in the white antiseptec decor of Buzzfeed office in Soho. Her eyes land on a wall decoratien, a glareing yellow butten about the size of a parasol. It read simply: LOL. It seem to mock her. Honestly? Elane just dosent fit in here. No one here is under 30 and to Elane it is almost like nobody speaking Englesh. Everything is "HTML 5" this and "Keven Ware sports injery" that and "Game Of Throans recap" this and "Downten Abby parady tumblr" that. She have no idea what any of that mean. She open her face book and feal deep pit of emptynes as she click thru the profiles of her 17 face book frends.

This is just one version of how the world of successful people actually works. But social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I didn’t know when I got to Yale Law School: That you needed to wear a suit to a job interview. That wearing a suit large enough to fit a silverback gorilla was inappropriate. That a butter knife wasn’t just decorative (after all, anything that requires a butter knife can be done better with a spoon or an index finger). That pleather and leather were different substances. That your shoes and belt should match. That certain cities and states had better job prospects. That going to a nicer college brought benefits outside of bragging rights. That finance was an industry that people worked in. Mamaw always resented the hillbilly stereotype—the idea that our people were a bunch of slobbering morons. But the fact is that I was remarkably ignorant of how to get ahead. Not knowing things that many others do often has serious economic consequences. It cost me a job in college (apparently Marine Corps combat boots and khaki pants aren’t proper interview attire) and could have cost me a lot more in law school if I hadn’t had a few people helping me every step of the way.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

Moving on, while he wondered, the dark through which Mr. Lecky's light cut grew more beautiful with scents. Particles of solid matter so minute, gases so subtle, that they filtered through stopping and sealing, hung on the unstirred air. Drawn in with Mr. Lecky's breath came impalpable dews cooked out of disintegrating coal. Distilled, chemically split and reformed, they ended in flawless simulation of the aromas of gums, the scent of woods and the world's flowers. The chemists who made them could do more than that. Loose on the gloom were perfumes of flowers which might possibly have bloomed but never had, and the strong-smelling saps of trees either lost or not yet evolved. Mixed in the mucus of the pituitary membrane, these volatile essences meant more than synthetic chemistry to Mr. Lecky. Their microscopic slime coated the bushed-out ends of the olfactory nerve; their presence was signaled to the anterior of the brain's temporal lobe. At once, thought waited on them, tossing down from the great storehouse of old images, neglected ideas - sandalwood and roses, musk and lavender. Mr. Lecky stood still, wrung by pangs as insistent and unanswerable as hunger. He was prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired. More than anything he could see, or words, or sounds, these odors made him stupidly aware of the past. Unable to remember it, whence he was, or where he had previously been, all that was sweet, impermanent and gone came back not spoiled by too much truth or exact memory. Volatile as the perfumes, the past stirred him with longing for what was not - the only beloved beauty which you will have to see but which you may not keep. Mr. Lecky's beam of light went through glass top and side of a counter, displayed bottles of colored liquid - straw, amber, topaz - threw shadows behind their diverse shapes. He had no use for perfume. All the distraction, all the sense of loss and implausible sweetness which he felt was in memory of women. Behind the counter, Mr. Lecky, curious, took out bottles, sniffed them, examined their elaborately varied forms - transparent squares, triangles, cones, flattened ovals. Some were opaque, jet or blue, rough with embedded metals in intricate design. This great and needless decoration of the flasks which contained it was one strange way to express the inexpressible. Another way was tried in the names put on the bottles. Here words ran the suggestive or symbolic gamut of idealized passion, or festive night, of desired caresses, or of abstractions of the painful allure yet farther fetched. Not even in the hopeful, miracle-raving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help. Women, young, but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfume. But they were not. Mr. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while, aware of the tenth woman.

Shirley doesn’t play fair, you see. What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs—but she’ll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull. She knows that. She reads novels. So, half believing what she says, she’ll tell you the hell with that domestic dullness, never for her. She’s going to paint, that’s what—or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress, always an actress if she’s got any real looks—but the idea is she’s going to be somebody. Not just a wife. Perish the thought! She’s Lady Brett Ashley, with witty devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place.

get out on the rocks or the fields or the water and spout them." Captain Jim had come up that afternoon to bring Anne a load of shells for her garden, and a little bunch of sweet-grass which he had found in a ramble over the sand dunes. "It's getting real scarce along this shore now," he said. "When I was a boy there was a-plenty of it. But now it's only once in a while you'll find a plot—and never when you're looking for it. You jest have to stumble on it—you're walking along on the sand hills, never thinking of sweet-grass—and all at once the air is full of sweetness—and there's the grass under your feet. I favor the smell of sweet-grass. It always makes me think of my mother." "She was fond of it?" asked Anne. "Not that I knows on. Dunno's she ever saw any sweet-grass. No, it's because it has a kind of motherly perfume—not too young, you understand—something kind of seasoned and wholesome and dependable—jest like a mother. The schoolmaster's bride always kept it among her handkerchiefs. You might put that little bunch among yours, Mistress Blythe. I don't like these boughten scents—but a whiff of sweet-grass belongs anywhere a lady does." Anne had not been especially enthusiastic over the idea of surrounding her flower beds with quahog shells; as a decoration they did not appeal to her on first thought. But she would not have hurt Captain Jim's feelings for anything; so she assumed a virtue she did not at first feel, and thanked him heartily. And when Captain Jim had proudly encircled every bed with a rim of the big, milk-white shells, Anne found to her surprise that she liked the effect.

Walt Disney's orchestration of his animation studio was often likened to that of a Renaissance artist's workshop: 'Of all the things I've done,' he stated, 'the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them at a certain goal.' Disney understood the amorphous nature of his role as repeatedly relayed in what may be an apocryphal anecdote: 'You know,' Disney said, 'I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, 'Do you draw Mickey Mouse?' I had to admit I do not draw any more. 'Then you think up all the jokes and ideas?' 'No,' I said, 'I don't do that.' Finally, he looked at me and said, 'Mr. Disney, just what do you do?' 'Well,' I said, 'Sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody.' I guess that's the job I do.

Neliss, why is this rug wet?” Legna peeked around the corner to glance at the rug in question, looking as if she had never seen it before. “We have a rug there?” “Did you or did you not promise me you were not going to practice extending how long you can hold your invisible bowls of water in the house? And what on earth is that noise?” “Okay, I confess to the water thing, which was an honest mistake, I swear it. But as for a noise, I have no idea what you are talking about.” “You cannot hear that? It has been driving me crazy for days now. It just repeats over and over again, a sort of clicking sound.” “Well, it took a millennium, but you have finally gone completely senile. Listen, this is a house built by Lycanthropes. It is more a cave than a house, to be honest. I have yet to decorate to my satisfaction. There is probably some gizmo of some kind lying around, and I will come across it eventually or it will quit working the longer it is exposed to our influence. Even though I do not hear anything, I will start looking for it. Is this satisfactory?” “I swear, Magdelegna, I am never letting you visit that Druid ever again.” “Oh, stop it. You do not intimidate me, as much as you would love to think you do. Now, I will come over there if you promise not to yell at me anymore. You have been quite moody lately.” “I would be a hell of a lot less moody if I could figure out what that damn noise is.” Legna came around the corner, moving into his embrace with her hands behind her back. He immediately tried to see what she had in them. “What is that?” “Remember when you asked me why I cut my hair?” “Ah yes, the surprise. Took you long enough to get to it.” “If you do not stop, I am not going to give it to you.” “Okay. I am stopping. What is it?” She held out the box tied with a ribbon to him and he accepted it with a lopsided smile. “I do not think I even remember the last time I received a gift,” he said, leaning to kiss her cheek warmly. He changed his mind, though, and opted to go for her mouth next. She smiled beneath the cling of their lips and pushed away. “Open it.” He reached for the ribbon and soon was pulling the top off the box. “What is this?” “Gideon, what does it look like?” He picked up the woven circlet with a finger and inspected it closely. It was an intricately and meticulously fashioned necklace, clearly made strand by strand from the coffee-colored locks of his mate’s hair. In the center of the choker was a silver oval with the smallest writing he had ever seen filling it from top to bottom. “What does it say?” “It is the medics’ code of ethics,” she said softly, taking it from him and slipping behind him to link the piece around his neck beneath his hair. “And it fits perfectly.” She came around to look at it, smiling. “I knew it would look handsome on you.” “I do not usually wear jewelry or ornamentation, but . . . it feels nice. How on earth did they make this?” “Well, it took forever, if you want to know why it took so long for me to make good on the surprise. But I wanted you to have something that was a little bit of me and a little bit of you.” “I already have something like that. It is you. And . . . and me, I guess,” he laughed. “We are a little bit of each other for the rest of our lives.” “See, that makes this a perfect symbol of our love,” she said smartly, reaching up on her toes to kiss him. “Well, thank you, sweet. It is a great present and an excellent surprise. Now, if you really want to surprise me, help me find out what that noise is.

It is the one who accepts commitment who is strong. The true commitment is the artistic one. This is why artists are so often attacked. They are attacked for their morals, for their ideas – even for their work. Yet their essence – their commitment – is the secret which is unassailable. The true artist knows that creativity is its own reward. Ordinary people fear commitment, you see. Ordinary people fear creativity. They know that if they allow that seething cauldron of yellow liquid to boil over within themselves, then their whole lives will be changed. People fear change. People do not wish to be creative and artistic in any real sense. They wish to decorate, perhaps, and to make things around themselves pleasant – but this has little to do with creativity. … All spiritual paths should be creative. Creativity is involved with sacrifice. That stew of yellow liquid which boils in everyone is a sacrificial broth …

Happy birthday, Kya,” he said. “You’re fifteen.” A two-tiered bakery cake, tall as a hatbox and decorated with shells of pink icing, rose from the basket. Her name scripted on top. Presents, wrapped in colorful paper and tied with bows, surrounded the cake. She stared, flabbergasted, her mouth open. No one had wished her happy birthday since Ma left. No one had ever given her a store-bought cake with her name on it. She’d never had presents in real wrapping paper with ribbons. “How’d you know my birthday?” Having no calendar, she had no idea it was today. “I read it in your Bible.” While she pleaded for him not to cut through her name, he sliced enormous pieces of cake and plopped them on paper plates. Staring into each other’s eyes, they broke off bites and stuffed them in their mouths. Smacking loudly. Licking fingers. Laughing through icing-smeared grins. Eating cake the way it should be eaten, the way everybody wants to eat it.

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

tuff. Almost all of us have it in abundance. What can we do with it? One of my favorite hideaways is an old faithful: the cardboard box. Cover it with festive Contact paper and stuff away. Or hang a shelf about a foot from the ceiling, and use it to store items you don't want sitting around. It's also great in a child's room for toys that aren't played with often. Get old school lockers or trunks, paint them, and use them for storage. Clutter around your house can cause clutter in your emotional and spiritual life too, so clean up and spend your best time enjoying life. re you reluctant to share your home with others? Maybe it's not your dream house or you don't have the money right now to decorate the way you'd like to. But you know what? It's not about having a perfect home. It's about your spirit of hospitality, your willingness to share your home and your life with others. Don't wait until everything is perfect because that will never happen. Focus on making your home cozy and comfortable. Your place will always be at its most beautiful when you use it to warm hearts. aking time for your husband doesn't have to be difficult or a hassle. With a little imagination and the desire to make him happy, you can make him feel loved. Are you thinking, Oh great, now Emilie 's telling me what I'm doing wrong with my husband. Not at all! I just want to give you a few ideas to help you let your

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

Like Italian or Portuguese or Catalan, Spanish is a wordy language, bountiful and flamboyant, with a formidable emotional range. But for these same reasons, it is conceptually inexact. The work of our greatest prose writers, beginning with Cervantes, is like a splendid display of fireworks in which every idea marches past, preceded and surrounded by a sumptuous court of servants, suitors, and pages, whose function is purely decorative. In our prose, color, temperature, and music are as important as ideas and, in some cases-Lezama Lima or Valle Inclan, for example-more so. There is nothing objectionable about these typically Spanish rhetorical excesses. They express the profound nature of a people, a way of being in which the emotional and the concrete prevail over the intellectual and the abstract. This is why Valle Inclan, Alfonso Reyes, Alejo Carpentier, and Camilo Jose Cela, to cite four magnificent prose writers, are so verbose in their writing. This does not make their prose either less skillful or more superficial than that of Valery or T.S. Eliot. They are simply quite different, just as Latin Americans are different from the English and the French. To us, ideas are formulated and captured more effectively when fleshed out with emotion and sensation or in some way incorporated into concrete reality, into life-far more than they are in logical discourse. That perhaps is why we have such a rich literature and such a dearth of philosophers.

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It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.

My darling son: depression at your age is more common than you might think. I remember it very strongly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I was about twenty-six and felt like killing myself. I think the winter, the cold, the lack of sunshine, for us tropical creatures, is a trigger. And to tell you the truth, the idea that you might soon unpack your bags here, having chucked in all your European plans, makes your mother and me as happy as could be. You have more than earned the equivalent of any university 'degree' and you have used your time so well to educate yourself culturally and personally that if university bores you, it is only natural. Whatever you do from here on in, whether you write or don't write, whether you get a degree or not, whether you work for your mother, or at El Mundo, or at La Ines, or teaching at a high school, or giving lectures like Estanislao Zuleta, or as a psychoanalyst to your parents, sisters and relatives, or simply being Hector Abad Faciolince, will be fine. What matters is that you don't stop being what you have been up till now, a person, who simply by virtue of being the way you are, not for what you write or don't write, or for being brilliant or prominent, but just for being the way you are, has earned the affection, the respect, the acceptance, the trust, the love, of the vast majority of those who know you. So we want to keep seeing you in this way, not as a future great author, or journalist or communicator or professor or poet, but as the son, brother, relative, friend, humanist, who understands others and does not aspire to be understood. It does not matter what people think of you, and gaudy decoration doesn't matter, for those of us who know you are. For goodness' sake, dear Quinquin, how can you think 'we support you (...) because 'that boy could go far'? You have already gone very far, further than all our dreams, better than everything we imagined for any of our children. You should know very well that your mother's and my ambitions are not for glory, or for money, or even for happiness, that word that sounds so pretty but is attained so infrequently and for such short intervals (and maybe for that very reason is so valued), for all our children, but that they might at least achieve well-being, that more solid, more durable, more possible, more attainable word. We have often talked of the anguish of Carlos Castro Saavedra, Manuel Meija Vallejo, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, and so many quasi-geniuses we know. Or Sabato or Rulfo, or even Garcia Marquez. That does not matter. Remember Goethe: 'All theory (I would add, and all art), dear friend, is grey, but only the golden tree of life springs ever green.' What we want for you is to 'live'. And living means many better things than being famous, gaining qualifications or winning prizes. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. Only now, when all that has passed, have I felt really happy. And part of that happiness is Cecilia, you, and all my children and grandchildren. Only the memory of Marta Cecilia tarnishes it. I believe things are that simple, after having gone round and round in circles, complicating them so much. We should do away with this love for things as ethereal as fame, glory, success... Well, my Quinquin, now you know what I think of you and your future. There's no need for you to worry. You are doing just fine and you'll do better, and when you get to my age or your grandfather's age and you can enjoy the scenery around La Ines that I intend to leave to all of you, with the sunshine, heat and lush greenery, and you'll see I was right. Don't stay there longer than you feel you can. If you want to come back I'll welcome you with open arms. And if you regret it and want to go back again, we can buy you another return flight. A kiss from your father.

Party Loot Bags Perfect for party favours, lolly & loot bags, especially lolly buffets, cake or homemade goodies - yum! A contemporary bomboniere trend that is here to stay.

Uses of Customized Blinds Custom blinds will also be used to manage the temperature in any room. As an illustration, if the room in a home is cold through the day time, the owner of the home and their family members can easily open up the blinds so that they'll let the daylight in. The daylight helps to heat up the room with out altering the temperature on the wall. Additionally, when it gets too scorching, the family can shut the blinds in order that they can cool the room down as properly. Regardless of the scenario, these blinds can be utilized for all kinds of different purposes. Window blinds right now can be found in quite a few colours, materials and magnificence. Getting a perfect window blind will rely in your style. Aside from decoration, the window shades serve many functions in properties. They prevent excess light from coming through windows, they provide us with privateness and they're also appropriate to manage temperature. In cold seasons they forestall heat from getting out of the home. Buying the perfect varieties of window blinds can change your complete looks of your own home and make it attractive. Vertical blinds are among the most unique sorts of window blinds you can get. They're good insulators and can be utilized to utterly Blinds Sutherland Shire block daylight penetration. The vertical shades are also strong sufficient to prevent any damage from strong winds. They're low-cost however trendy. Some are constructed with the ability to adjust themselves according to the time of day. Customs blinds can be used for both informal and office settings. This innovative idea means that you can use images as blind. In the case of makes use of of customized blinds, there are different options. Using your personal creativeness, customized blinds will be embellished with completely different colours, designs and patterns. If your window is of an additional strange size, there are traditional window blinds which might be customized to slot in. These are the roller blinds. Resulting from technology, they have been superior to be extra dependable and sturdy than before. They're now less more likely to breakdown. You can select from all kinds of colours and patterns. Earlier than coming to a conclusion on one of the best kinds of window blinds, it is important to do some in depth analysis. Custom blinds act as a fantastic reward in your loved ones. It's a present that can be cherished and remembered for a number of years. It is unique from normal gifts, the recipient will be glad about the trouble and thought you will have invested into it. When you parents have passion for grandchildren, think about having your children printed onto a blind and giving it to them. They may merely adore the photograph of their grandchildren, as well as having a new blind to boost the look of their residence.

[General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary.

It had been the idea of the board members to have the party, and they were the ones who had purchased all of the food and arrived early to decorate the common room and set up. Apparently, there was some residual guilt over the problems caused by a former board member earlier in the fall. The

me into quite the chatterbox. There are a thousand things I wish to tell you. But where should I begin? Where should I stop? And yet I confess I find that a written letter is a poor substitute for being able to look into your eyes and listen while you talk in that lively and inimitable way you have. Please permit me to say that since we met, I have not stopped thinking of you. The evening we spent together, and then the walk we took through that incomparable landscape enchanted me. You, Ruth, enchanted me! I am a man of numbers, a sober-headed chief clerk, and yet I find myself asking Fate what it could mean that we met. I hardly dare hope that you might consider our meeting anything more than a commercial transaction. Though this, too, has its charm—it seldom happens that I find myself negotiating with such a charming partner. Mr. Woolworth, by the way, says that he found the way you did business very “American.” You may be assured that he means that as a compliment. As I sit in my office and look out the window, I see steamers setting out for the New World every day. In only a few weeks I, too, will set foot aboard one of these oceangoing giants to accompany your Christmas baubles—and the many other glasswares from your home village—to America. But before that time comes, I wish you to know that I am considering a visit to Sonneberg on the 29th of September. Given the quantity of goods that are to be transported to Hamburg on the 30th, it might be a good idea for me to supervise the loading and packing of these wares myself. Most respected Ruth, if you chose to come from Lauscha to Sonneberg, we could be certain that the wares are treated with the due respect. After all, glass is very fragile, is it not? I would be very pleased indeed to receive a few lines with your reply. I have already given you my address in Hamburg. You will also find it on the back of the envelope to this letter. With hopes of a positive reply, I remain, Yours sincerely, Steven Miles Lauscha, 9 September 1892   Dear Steven, Thank you for being so kind as to write. Your letter was delightful! (If one may say this sort of thing of a letter.) I would be very pleased if we could meet in Sonneberg on the 29th of September. Of course I plan to accompany our Christmas decorations—after all, I must make sure that they don’t end up in a ditch by the side of the road somewhere between Lauscha and Sonneberg!

se "in-between times" to get things done. For example, it takes 15 minutes or less to change the sheets on a bed. So when you're waiting for dinner to finish cooking, to go somewhere, or for something to finish up, make a bed. Planning saves you time. Know what you have to do-and set your priorities. ere's a fun idea! Why not lighten a gathering together load a little by hosting a tea "potluck." It's a great way to widen your circle of friends and expand your recipe files. You provide the beautiful setting-and, of course, the tea. Invite each guest to bring a wonderful tea-time treat to share, along with the recipe. Have fun sampling all the goodies. You can also invite someone to play the piano, the guitar, or even do a dramatic reading of some sort. After the gathering, create a package of recipes and send them to each participant, along with a "thank you for coming" note. Friends are the continuous threads that help hold our lives together. f you have a fireplace, make it the focus of the room. Add plants, a teddy bear collection, or whatever you like to catch the eye. Add homey touches with a favorite stuffed toy, a framed picture of yourself with your grandmother. Photos and vacation souvenirs are great to liven up a room. Slipcovers help you make incredible changes in your decor simply. In winter months, toss an afghan over a sofa or chair. When you're not using afghans or blankets, stack them neatly under a shelf or a table to add texture to a room. Instead of a lamp table, stack wooden trunks or packing boxes together. These make great tables and provide storage.

You can make the jar as an immersive pot of chicken corn soap for the winter vacations. You can make the gift immersive by decorating it with some funky colored flowers and by tighten ribbons.

We've had problems with non-mutants coming here in the past, taking pictures of everything and stealing all our rocks for souvenirs. We need those rocks, too, you know. We are a very decorative people. We take our landscaping seriously. But thanks to you non-atomic jerks, the nearest retaining wall is a good fifty miles from here. Do you have any idea how hard it is to landscape without rocks? Or retaining walls? If cutting a few faces off is what it's going to take to get you to leave us alone, then so be it.

Man as an individualised soul is essentially causal-bodied,” my guru explained. “That body is a matrix of the thirty-five ideas required by God as the basic or causal thought forces from which He later formed the subtle astral body of nineteen elements and the gross physical body of sixteen elements. “The nineteen elements of the astral body are mental, emotional, and lifetronic. The nineteen components are intelligence; ego; feeling; mind (sense-consciousness); five instruments of knowledge, the subtle counterparts of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch; five instruments of action, the mental correspondence for the executive abilities to procreate, excrete, talk, walk, and exercise manual skill; and five instruments of life force, those empowered to perform the crystallising, assimilating, eliminating, metabolising, and circulating functions of the body. This subtle astral encasement of nineteen elements survives the death of the physical body, which is made of sixteen gross chemical elements. “God thought out different ideas within Himself and projected them into dreams. Lady Cosmic Dream thus sprang out decorated in all her colossal endless ornaments of relativity. “In thirty-five thought categories of the causal body, God elaborated all the complexities of man’s nineteen astral and sixteen physical counterparts. By condensation of vibratory forces, first subtle, then gross, He produced man’s astral body and finally his physical form. According to the law of relativity, by which the Prime Simplicity has become the bewildering manifold, the causal cosmos and causal body are different from the astral cosmos and astral body; the physical cosmos and physical body are likewise characteristically at variance with the other forms of creation. “The fleshly body is made of the fixed, objectified dreams of the Creator. The dualities are ever present on earth: disease and health, pain and pleasure, loss and gain.

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I’ve decided to make you my mistress.” A small thread of temper mixed in with the fear traveling through her veins. “Have you now?” “I bought this building just for you, and had the top floor decorated in a manner I was quite certain, given your dramatic attitude, you’d appreciate.” Lucetta drew in a breath—refusing to allow Silas the satisfaction of even glancing at some of the more gaudy pieces in the room he was pointing out—and waited until he’d run out of words before she lifted her chin another notch. “I’d like to know, if you please, how you came to the conclusion I’d be receptive to the idea of becoming your mistress.” Silas settled back in the chair, folding his hands across a stomach that strained against the buttons of the jacket he was wearing. “Come now, dear. There’s no need to continue playing coy. You’ve led me on a merry chase these past few years, never affording me an audience after your performances, and neglecting to answer the notes I sent asking you to join me for a late-night dinner here or there.” He wiggled a finger in her direction. “You and I know full well that you did so in order to increase your value.” “I wouldn’t be so certain about that.” He continued speaking as if she hadn’t voiced a reply. “I’m willing to allow you to live here, amongst this lavish setting, and will provide you with your very own personal maid, a carriage with matching bays, a driver for that carriage, and . . . give you the pleasure of my company until I tire of you.” She dug her fingernails into the tender skin of her palm so that she wouldn’t be tempted to rake them across the man’s face. “I have my own carriage, thank you very much, as well as a lovely place to stay, and while I’m flattered you want to spend time in my company, I do have a profession I need to get back to. That means I am—regretfully, of course—going to have to refuse your simply charming offer to become your mistress.” Her head snapped back from his slap before she’d even realized he’d gotten up from his chair. Blinking to hold back tears that longed to fall, she lifted her chin and ignored the pain in her cheek as Silas retook his seat and immediately took to staring at her. His eyes were filled with something hot, something she was certain verged on the edge of true insanity, and that insanity chilled her straight through her bones. “It wasn’t an offer, my dear,” he finally said quite pleasantly.

There’s also an oak wood log in the corner with a torch and chests on either side. Step 17: Hedges & Lighting Below the house we’ve got a hedge of jungle leaves between the pillars along the red lines and we’ve also got redstone lamps (X) with redstone torches under them. You can also plant tall grass and flowers with bone meal in this area to add some definition. Step 18: Walkway The walkway along the blue line leading up the ladders is made of gravel and the arch represented by the red line is made of oak wood and jungle leaves. Step 19: Walkway Decorations To spice up the walkway a little bit I planted some flowers (X), alternate between yellow and red. There’s also a fence that surrounds the walkway along the red lines. That completes The Tree House, I hope you enjoyed it!

Step 12: Front Decorations This is a nice way to add even more definition. Put stone pressure plates on top of the front wall of the bunker (X), hold SHIFT to place them on the dispensers. You can also place iron bars in the spaces between the stone wall and the cobblestone wall (X). Step 13: Furnishing The last step is adding some furniture and decorations to the room. You can get creative here but I’ll give you some suggestions. We’ve got a symmetric design with two double chests against the wall, then a chiseled stone brick with a fern flower pot on top and an item frame on the side. The item frames has a bow on the right side and a steak on the left side and they represent what’s in each chest. Weapons and food, all you need for defending the valley below! We also got a bed on each side if you need to take a nap.

There I was, standing on a cold marble floor in a long room and staring at white walls lined with the names of the donors who had contributed to building the library. I was starting to get nervous. What’s going on? Did they forget about me? Suddenly, a huge line of serious-looking Secret Service men with radios in their ears and an attitude that showed they were all-business came into the room. A moment later, I realized why, as they were followed by all five living Presidents and their wives. Barack Obama. Bill Clinton. George Bush. Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush. I froze against the wall like a mannequin. I tried to will myself to be invisible and not get in anyone’s way. George W. Bush, in a black suit and blue-checkered tie, spotted me and caught my eye. I saw him glance down at my prosthetic leg decorated with the American flag as he waved at me and interrupted the conversations going on around him. “Let me introduce you to my friend, Melissa,” he said. All of the Presidents and their wives came over and circled around me. The Secret Service formed a half-circle ring behind them. I was introduced to everybody, one by one. President Bush told everyone about me and my story, and how we had met during the ride at his ranch. I was almost speechless as I managed to say, “Nice to meet you, Mister President,” over and over. I felt like I was in a dream. As the circle dispersed to get back to preparing for the event, President Obama paused to ask me how my life in Chicago was going and about the progress of Dare2Tri. I had no idea how he knew about these things, but we spoke, just the two of us, for a few minutes. “I’m proud of you,” he finally said, getting one of his presidential coins out of his pocket as a gift. President Bush was standing close by, and he put his arm around me as he cracked a joke to put everyone at ease. I noticed Condoleezza Rice had come in and was standing on the opposite end of the room practicing pronouncing the names of all the foreign dignitaries in attendance. It had to be the most surreal moment of my life. I felt like I was exuding pure patriotism, just being in that room with those people. On that day, political views didn’t matter—what was important was that several of our country’s leaders had come together to honor one of their peers, and, by extension, America itself. I had never been prouder to be American.

The grid derives from the golden ratio and the simpler rule of thirds: it divides your photograph into three segments both horizontally and vertically. The idea of the grid is that you should position your main motif (for example, the person you are photographing) on one of the points where the lines intersect rather than in the middle of the grid, which will improve the composition of the photograph.

Ideas, doctrines - mere façades, decorative fantasies, accidents. If you have not resolved to kill yourself, there is no difference between you and the others, you belong to the faction of the living, all - no matter what their convictions - great believers. Do you deign to breathe? You are approaching sainthood, you deserve canonization.

Incompatible with one another (and often at odds with themselves), the three were widely seen as plotting the course of modernity toward a future without reli- gion and indeed without normative ethics. Today these threats, if not vanished, are diminished, almost to mockeries of their former magnitude and hubris. The Soviet embodiment of the Marxist idea has collapsed, as untenable politically and economically as apartheid proved to be. Logical positivism is now a historical cu- riosity. Philosophers who want to dig up the roots of our current philosophical plantings often find it necessary to explain just what positivism was and tell the story of the rival ideas that motivated otherwise intelligent thinkers to suppose that verificationism circumscribed the possibilities of meaning. And, of course, the doctrinaire behaviorism of Watson and Skinner that once proposed to do psy- chology without any idea of minds or thoughts, intentions or even dispositions, and dismissed as outmoded the ideals of human freedom and dignity, is itself a thing of the past, quaint as the brass microscopes that might decorate an antique shop window, no longer proposed for serious scientific use.

Oh, she says gravely, when a bell chimes or a phone rings, we simply take the opportunity to switch off and abandon all our plans and emotions - all our thoughts about other people and ourselves. Abandon all our human perceptions? I ask indignantly. In that case, what’s left for us? No, she says with a shake of the head, I only mean our conception of the world. I like the way she pronounces the word ‘conception’ in her Dutch accent, as if it were hot and she might burn her lips on it. I wish I could speak a foreign language as fluently as you do, I tell her. Please say ‘conception’ again. Explain it to me. What’s the difference between my perceptions and my conceptions? Resolutely, she makes for a cafe beneath some plane trees whose leaves are casting decorative shadows on the white tablecloths. She sits down and regards me sceptically, as if gauging whether I’m bright enough to merit an answer. Most of the time, she says, we form an opinion about things without really perceiving them. She points to an elderly woman waddling across the square laden down with plastic bags. For instance, she goes on, I look at that woman and I think, How bow-legged she is, and that skirt! A ghastly colour and far too short for her. No one should wear short skirts at that age. Are my own legs still good enough for short skirts? I used to have a blue skirt myself. Where is it, I wonder? I wish I was wearing that blue skirt myself. Where is it, I wonder? I wish I was wearing that blue skirt right now. But if I looked like that woman there... She props her head on her hands and regard me with a twinkle in her eye. I laugh. I haven’t really ‘perceived’ the woman, she says, I’ve merely pondered on skirts and legs and the ageing process. I’m a prisoner of my own ideas - my conceptions, in other words. See what I mean? I say yes, but I’d say yes to a whole host of things when she looks at me that way. A waitress of Franka’s age takes our order. She’s wearing a white crocheted sweater over her enormous breasts and a white apron tightly knotted around her prominent little tummy. Her platform-soled sandals, which are reminiscent of hoofs, give her a clumsy, foal-like appearance. Now it’s your turn, says Antje. French teenager, I say. Probably bullied into passing up an apprenticeship and working in her parents’ cafe. Dreams of being a beautician. No, Antje protests, that won’t do. You must say what’s really going through your head. I hesitate. Come on, do. I sigh. Please, she says. OK, but I take no responsibility for my thoughts. Deal! Sexy little mam’selle, I say. Great boobs, probably an easy lay, wouldn’t refuse a few francs for a new sweater. She’d be bound to feel good and holler Maintenant, viens! That song of Jane Birkin’s, haven’t heard it for years. I wonder what Jane Birkin’s doing these days. She used to be the woman of my dreams. Still, I’m sure that girl doesn’t like German men, and besides, I could easily be her father, I’ve got a daughter her age. I wonder what my daughter’s doing at this moment... I dry up. Phew, I say. Sorry, that was my head, not me. Antje nods contentedly. She leans back so her plaits dangle over the back of the chair. Nothing torments us worse than our heads, she says, closing her eyes. You’ve got to hand it to the Buddhists, they’ve got the knack of switching off. It’s simply wonderful.

How to Create a Spring Garden Mantelpiece [Fireplaces and mantels are stunning focal points in the winter when they’re filled with a roaring fire, but what about spring and summer? Today, Anna Potter of Swallows & Damsons joins us for a clever centerpiece idea to make the most of your fireplace or decorative mantel in warmer weather.]

It contradicts modern methods and ideas of innovation and progress on many levels, as we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything).

One classic example involved a hospital33 group that hired IDEO to help answer the question What is our patient experience like? The hospital executives were surprised when IDEO, instead of doing a snazzy PowerPoint presentation, showed them a long, deadly dull video of a hospital ceiling. The point of the film: “When you lie in a hospital bed all day, all you do is look at the ceiling, and it’s a really shitty experience,” IDEO’s Paul Bennett explained. The firm understood this because someone from IDEO actually checked into the hospital, was wheeled around on a gurney, and then lay in a hospital bed for hours. This kind of “immersive” approach enables the firm to consider a question or problem from the inside out, instead of from the outside looking in. (Soon after seeing the video, the hospital’s nurses took it upon themselves to decorate the ceiling tiles in each room.)

The principle is the same when planning a kitchen island or breakfast bar with seating, even though the work surface in this case will be farther from the floor than a standard tabletop. Having more than one pendant light is a good idea if the size

storage expert Lu Wei calls the “2:8 principle,” the idea being that the “visual noise” of a home can be minimized by allowing only 20 percent of your things to be visible and putting away 80 percent. That

The fog pictures grow charming. There is an idea in them now. People are detached little decorations etched upon a mist. The cat has eaten up the monstrous clock and people have rid themselves of their routine, which was to tumble and scurry among its cogs and levers. They are done with life, with buying and selling and with the perpetual errand. And they have become a swarm of little ornaments. Men and women denuded of the city. Their outlines posture quaintly in the mist. Their little faces say, "The clock is gone. There is nothing any more to make us alive. So we have become our unconnected selves.

What a coincidence it was for me to see the SS African Moon in Dar-es-Salaam! After leaving Farrell Lines I thought that I would never get back to Kenya but here I was. It was just like home coming when I came aboard and saw Eddie the first mate. Everything was just as I left it three years before so as we celebrated our reunion over a cup of coffee. Although I hadn’t planned it, I suddenly got an idea. This would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring something worthwhile back to The United States. So, I asked Eddie if he could bring something big back to New York for me. “What might that be” he asked suspecting that I was up to no good. “No, it’s not narcotics, it’s a dug out native canoe.” I replied. “Well, I won’t have room in any of the holds but we can lash it down on deck. “Good I’ll have it to you within an hour!” I left and found someone who was willing to sell his dug-out to me and deliver it to the Meteor for under fifty dollars, which at the time was a lot of money but the price included the delivery charge. My, newly acquired well used dug out canoe, was the last thing that crossed the fish plates of the African Moon. Talking to Eddie we watched as the crew professionally lashed it down just forward of the #1 hatch. Shortly thereafter the African Moon backed down and headed out into the Indian Ocean. As for the rest of the story… When the Moon returned, I picked up the dug-out dockside in Brooklyn. With a little help I got it into my pick-up and brought it to my father’s house in Jersey City.  Later without my knowing, it he drilled holes into its hull and decided that it would make a good planter. It didn’t take long for the dirt in it to cause the rot to set in. Within months my canoe was destroyed, however I still have the paddles which sadly but reminiscently serve as a decoration in my Florida home.

Fashion blogger Anna Estrin in her online magazine talks about women's happiness, the atmosphere of home comfort, traditions, holidays, decor and culinary recipes. Since all of her projects in one way or another are united by the theme of fashion, beauty, womanhood, family and home comfort, she shares the current trends, the secrets of combining different styles and putting together the perfect image not just of a woman but also around her. A surrounding of a woman plays a big role in building her happiness, Anna believes. She is convinced that any day can be turned into a real holiday with the help of creative ideas. Anna is an expert in making her home a cozy space that is festive for her family because she loves esthetics. For most people, their home is the most important place that their lives revolve around since that is where they and their loved ones live. We all want our homes to be not just comfortable but also beautiful. Adding small touches here and there can add a lot of beauty to a home and help the homeowner realize his or her home’s full potential. Making her family happy is the main key to Anna’s happiness and she is delighted to share her ideas with the readers.

That was when she realized she was wearing one of his tunics, with the right sleeve chopped off to accommodate her bandage. The blue fabric was decorated with eurypterids, but Sophie was far less disturbed by the idea of wearing sea scorpions than she was by the thought that someone had to have changed her into it, and she decided she didn’t want to know the who or when or where or how.

But with the Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively, but as positively, mean and commonplace. A man of any station was represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person--a person born, as it were, in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it being--as, of course, it is--ridiculous for him to deliberately wear ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic words, whereas, of course, it is emotional speech which is natural, and ordinary civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty and ugliness, of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down. Beauty became an extravagance, as if top-hats and umbrellas were not the real extravagance--a landscape from the land of the goblins. Dignity became a form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying crests and coats-of-arms instead of laughing at their own boots and neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man who carries men's souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the cavern of a merciful witchcraft. There

Caroline has laid out a beautiful spread, which is a combination of some of my favorite things that she has cooked, and traditional Sikh wedding dishes provided by Jag's friends. There is a whole roasted beef tenderloin, sliced up with beautiful brioche rolls for those who want to make sandwiches, crispy brussels sprouts, potato gratin, and tomato pudding from Gemma's journal. The savory pudding was one of the dishes from Martha's wedding, which gave me the idea for this insanity to begin with, so it seemed appropriate. I actually think Gemma would strongly approve of this whole thing. And she certainly would have appreciated the exoticism of the wonderful Indian vegetarian dishes, lentils, fried pakoras, and a spicy chickpea stew. From what I can tell, Gemma was thrilled anytime she could get introduced in a completely new cuisine, whether it was the Polish stonemason introducing her to pierogi and borsht, or the Chinese laundress bringing her tender dumplings, or the German butcher sharing his recipe for sauerbraten. She loved to experiment in the kitchen, and the Rabins encouraged her, gifting her cookbooks and letting her surprise them with new delicacies. Her favorite was 'With a Saucepan Over the Sea: Quaint and Delicious Recipes from the Kitchens of Foreign Countries,' a book of recipes from around the world that Gemma seemed to refer to frequently, enjoying most when she could alter one of the recipes to better fit the palate of the Rabins. Mrs. Rabin taught her all of the traditional Jewish dishes they needed for holiday celebrations, and was, by Gemma's account, a superlative cook in her own right. Off to the side of the buffet is a lovely dessert table, swagged with white linen and topped with a small wedding cake, surrounded by dishes of fried dough balls soaked in rosewater syrup and decorated with pistachios and rose petals, and other Indian sweets.

You really think stopping here is a good idea?” Lex asked her uncle, eyeing the buffalo. A strange decoration for a small-town deli, to be sure, but then again Lex wasn’t really up to date on the interior design trends of small-town upstate New York. “Of course,” Uncle Mort said, counting out a stack of bills and placing them on the counter. “Don’t you think a cross-country run-for-our-lives road trip just screams ‘time for a picnic’?” “I would not have thought that, no.” “Well, that’s because you’re a total noob.” The girl reappeared behind the counter with two bagfuls of wrapped sandwiches. “That’ll be sixty-seven dollars and two cents,” she said, smiling sweetly at Uncle Mort. “Thanks,” he said, giving her a wink as he handed her the bills. “Keep the change, hon.” She giggled. Lex rolled her eyes. “Smooth move, Clooney,” Lex said as they exited the deli. “Do we need to pencil in some time for a sexy rendezvous? I think there’s a motel down the street that rents rooms by the hour.” “Pop quiz, hotshot: Let’s say someone shows up in this town and starts asking questions about a hooligan band of teenagers accompanied by two ghosts, an ancient woman, and a devastatingly attractive chaperone. Which one do you think that girl will be more likely to remember?” Lex grumbled. “The chaperone.” “You seem to have forgotten a couple of key adjectives there.” “Oh, I didn’t forget.” “Believe me, that girl won’t dream of ratting us out. Especially now that I’ve bestowed upon her the Wink of Trust.” Lex snorted. “The Wink of Trust?” “Has gotten me out of more trouble than you can imagine. I suggest you try it some time. Add it to your already overflowing arsenal of charm.

Our philosophy is that home decor shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because we want our homes to reflect who we are, no one else. We want things to be fun and interesting, but we want things we can really live with and around. We want a place where you can use Play-Doh or prop up crusty old cowboy boots on the coffee table. We’re not afraid of candle drippings or drink rings. We believe all these things help our homes tell a tale of love and family. A tale of history and future. A tale of the American experience. Our homes spin the story we want to live in every day. We firmly believe your home should be your sanctuary, where you surround yourself with every sensible and nonsensible thing you love, a place that speaks of where you’ve been and where you’re going. Make no mistake: Our homes are far from perfect! Just beyond the frame of every camera angle is a pile of dirty clothes, three half-unpacked suitcases, and a room still waiting to be decorated. Because that, my friends, is real. C’mon in anyway and stay awhile. Our hope is that you’ll find an idea—a project, a picture, a spark of divine fire—that will inspire you. Because just like the wild woods or the glorious road, like fingerprints or feathers, your home is unique—and it should be uniquely you.

Sundays when they could come, my mother would bring a piece of cake and some cookies from the bakery. Of course, the cookies and the cake were past their prime, but that was just the way I liked them. I really don’t know how happy my parents were to see me since most of the time they were there; they would talk to my teachers in conference, and then tell me all the things I had supposedly done wrong. Sadly, I would always wind up with a lecture on how bad I had been and what was expected of me. It was something I had grown to expect, but more importantly, I was grateful for the cake and pastries. I have no idea why, but they also brought me cans of condensed milk. I can only guess that they believed that the thick syrupy milk, super saturated with sweet, sweet, sugar, would give me the energy I needed to think better. After one such visit, I made the mistake of leaving my cake unattended. It didn’t take long before it grew legs and ran off. I couldn’t believe that one of my schoolmates would steal my cake, not at a Naval Honor School! Nevertheless, not being able to determine who the villains were, I hatched a plan to catch the culprits the next time around. Some months later when my parents returned to check on my progress, my mother brought me a beautiful double-layer chocolate cake. This time I was ready, having bought all the Ex-Lax the pharmacy in Toms River had on hand. Using a hot plate, I heated the Ex-Lax until it liquefied, and then poured the sticky brown substance all over the cake in a most decorative way. With that, I placed the cake on my desk and invitingly left the door open to my dorm room. I wasn’t away long before this cake also grew legs, and, lo and behold, it also disappeared. The expected happened, and somewhat later I found the culprits in the boys’ bathroom, having a miserable time of it. Laughingly, I identified them as the culprits, but didn’t turn them in. It was enough that I caught them with their pants down!

Oh, your birthday! What a day that would be. I would make you a cake and decorate the house with banners, before creeping into your room with a fistful of balloons and confetti and a cupcake with a single candle in it. This would become one of our traditions, so no matter how old you got, you’d always wake to a cupcake, with pink frosting of course, and a single candle. If for any reason I couldn’t be with you on that day, you’d make one for yourself or someone you loved would buy you one, and holding that cupcake would make you feel close to me wherever you were in the world. Your birthday would be a day for great, great celebration, the day my life changed. The day I got you, the day I gave my heart away . . .

What are you doing out here anyway?” “Lydia,” Plath said after a cold pause, “that is one question you should never have to ask a bookseller. Bright Ideas is not Victoria’s Secret. It takes style to work here. We can’t just run errands during breaks like we’re all accountants. We must smoke on corners and read. We are decor.

The fact that there were more adults than children at her party didn't seem to faze Dixie. "That child is like a dandelion," Lettie said. "She could grow through concrete." Dixie's birthday party had a combination Mardi Gras/funeral wake feel to it. Mr. Bennett and Digger looped and twirled pink crepe paper streamers all around the white graveside tent until it looked like a candy-cane castle. Leo Stinson scrubbed one of his ponies and gave pony rides. Red McHenry, the florist's son, made a unicorn's horn out of flower foam wrapped with gold foil, and strapped it to the horse's head. "Had no idea that horse was white," Leo said, as they stood back and admired their work. Angela, wearing an old, satin, off-the-shoulder hoop gown she'd found in the attic, greeted each guest with strings of beads, while Dixie, wearing peach-colored fairy wings, passed out velvet jester hats. Charlotte, who never quite grasped the concept of eating while sitting on the ground, had her driver bring a rocking chair from the front porch. Mr. Nalls set the chair beside Eli's statue where Charlotte barked orders like a general. "Don't put the food table under the oak tree!" she commanded, waving her arm. "We'll have acorns in the potato salad!" Lettie kept the glasses full and between KyAnn Merriweather and Dot Wyatt there was enough food to have fed Eli's entire regiment. Potato salad, coleslaw, deviled eggs, bread and butter pickles, green beans, fried corn, spiced pears, apple dumplings, and one of every animal species, pork barbecue, fried chicken, beef ribs, and cold country ham as far as the eye could see.

Think Iconic. Even if you’re not in the marketing biz, it will serve you well to crystallize your thinking by leveraging an image that can symbolize your idea, or the spirit of it. And if you are in the marketing business, you’re simply required by law to think this way. Whatever presentations you make, whatever products you sell, whomever you’re trying to convince—never forget the power of an image to galvanize your audience. Note that there’s a big difference between finding a great image and decorating a PowerPoint presentation. There’s too much decorating in the world already, and for the most part it’s meaningless. Find a conceptual image that actually captures the essence of your idea. Be simple and be strong. The same principle applies whether you’re talking to colleagues or to the public. Over time, a conceptual image gives people an easy way to identify your company, your idea or your product. Memorable images often communicate more effectively than words—which is why those who value Simplicity tend to rely on them.