Descendants Famous Quotes

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.

About Sun Tzu himself this is all that Ssu-ma Ch`ien has to tell us in this chapter. But he proceeds to give a biography of his descendant, Sun Pin, born about a hundred years after his famous ancestor's death, and also the outstanding military genius of his time.

You have a famous relative. Family tradition has it we descend from St. Nicholas.” “Santa Claus? I thought he was make-believe.” “He is, but the person Santa Claus is based on is real. St. Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop—and a fine human being. He served in Turkey.

Black Pearl was the most famous courtesan of all. “She’s descended from the dragons, that one,” the woman had told Cat. “The first Black Pearl was a pirate queen.

My descendants will manage without my portrait' she smiled. Anyway they'll have plenty of photographs of me. To this our famous conductor replied that a photograph only gives the outward appearance of the person,whereas a painting reveals the inner world.

These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” —Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

WOODEN CAGES I may be clapping my hands, but I don't belong to a crowd of clappers. Neither this nor that, I'm not part of a group that loves flute music or one that loves gambling or drinking wine. Those who live in time, descended from Adam, made of earth and water, I'm not part of that. Don't listen to what I say, as though these words came from an inside and went to an outside. Your faces are very beautiful, but they are wooden cages. You had better run from me. My words are fire. I have nothing to do with being famous, or making grand judgments, or feeling full of shame. I borrow nothing. I don't want anything from anybody. I flow through human beings. Love is my only companion. When union happens, my speech goes inside toward Shams. At that meeting all the secrets of language will no longer be secret.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical.

Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

When a wolf descends upon your flocks, all you gain by killing him is a short respite, for other wolves will come,” King Garth IX said famously. “If instead you feed the wolf and tame him and turn his pups into your guard dogs, they will protect the flocks when the pack comes ravening.” King

There is no man,’ he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grand sons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming that one is a painter—extracted something that goes beyond them.

The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don't realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn't overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

As we stated, after their initial conquest, the Milesians began assimilating the gnosis of their predecessors. Of course they were no lovers of the Druids. After all, the British Druids were collaborators with their dire enemies, the Amenists. Nevertheless, returning to the ancient homeland was a most important step for the displaced and despised Atonists. Owning and controlling the wellspring of knowledge proved to be exceptionally politically fortunate for them. It was a key move on the grand geopolitical chessboard, so to speak. From their new seats in the garden paradise of Britain they could set about conquering the rest of the world. Their designs for a “New World Order,” to replace one lost, commenced from the Western Isles that had unfortunately fallen into their undeserving hands. But why all this exertion, one might rightly ask? Well, a close study of the Culdees and the Cistercians provides the answer. Indeed, a close study of history reveals that, despite appearances to the contrary, religion is less of a concern to despotic men or regimes than politics and economics. Religion is often instrumental to those secretly attempting to attain material power. This is especially true in the case of the Milesian-Atonists. The chieftains of the Sun Cult did not conceive of Christianity for its own sake or because they were intent on saving the world. They wanted to conquer the world not save it. In short, Atonist Christianity was devised so the Milesian nobility could have unrestricted access to the many rich mines of minerals and ore existing throughout the British Isles. It is no accident the great seats of early British Christianity - the many famous churches, chapels, cathedrals and monasteries, as well as forts, castles and private estates - happen to be situated in close proximity to rich underground mines. Of course the Milesian nobility were not going to have access to these precious territories as a matter of course. After all, these sites were often located beside groves and earthworks considered sacred by natives not as irreverent or apathetic as their unfortunate descendants. The Atonists realized that their materialist objectives could be achieved if they manufactured a religion that appeared to be a satisfactory carry on of Druidism. If they could devise a theology which assimilated enough Druidic elements, then perhaps the people would permit the erection of new religious sites over those which stood in ruins. And so the Order of the Culdees was born. So, Christianity was born. In the early days the religion was actually known as Culdeanism or Jessaeanism. Early Christians were known as Culdeans, Therapeuts or suggestively as Galileans. Although they would later spread throughout Europe and the Middle East, their birthplace was Britain.

For, as on the coloured canvas Subtle pencils softly blend Dark and light in such proportions That the dim perspectives end- Now perhaps like famous cities, Now like caves or misty capes, For remoteness ever formeth Monstrous or unreal shapes... So it was, while I alone, Saw their bulk and vast proportions But their form remained unknown. First they seemed to us uplifting High in heaven their pointed towers, Clouds that to the sea descended, To conceive in sapphire showers What they would bring forth in crystal. And this fancy seemed more true, As from their untold abundance They, methought, could drink the blue Drop by drop. Again sea monsters Seemed to us the wandering droves, Which, to from the train of Neptune, Issued from their green alcoves. For the sails, when lightly shaken, Fanned by zephyrs as by slaves, Seemed to us like outspread pinions Fluttering o'er the darkened waves; Then the mass, approaching nearer, Seemed a mighty Babylon, With its hanging gardens pictures By the streamers fluttering down. But at last our certain vision Undeceived, becoming true, Showed it was a great armada For I saw the prows cut through Foam....

Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine). Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.' 'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.' 'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing. 'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.' 'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.' 'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.' 'Is it in the dictionary?' 'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?' And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. 'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously. 'Thanks, thanks.' 'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?' 'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.' Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail.

And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world

People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel–engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast–iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four–roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612. Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

In the early 1990s, before Japan’s bubble economy burst, a leading newspaper in the U.S. published a large photo taken on a winter’s morning of rush-hour commuters in Shinjuku Station (or possibly Tokyo Station—the same applies to both) heading down the stairs. As if by agreement, all the commuters were gazing downward, their expressions strained and unhappy, looking more like lifeless fish packed in a can than people. The article said, “Japan may be affluent, but most Japanese look like this, heads downcast and unhappy-looking.” The photo became famous. Tsukuru had no idea if most Japanese were, as the article claimed, unhappy. But the real reason that most passengers descending the stairs at Shinjuku Station during their packed morning commute were looking down was less that they were unhappy than that they were concerned about their footing. Don’t slip on the stairs, don’t lose a shoe—these are the major issues on the minds of the commuters in the mammoth station during rush hour. There was no explanation of this, no context for the photograph. Certainly it was hard to view this mass of people, clad in dark overcoats, their heads down, as happy. And of course it’s logical to see a country where people can’t commute in the morning without fear of losing their shoes as an unhappy society.

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism." "I'm sorry. I don't know what that is." "I don't either," Bunny would say brokenly. "Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see." He would resume pacing. "Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it." "Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word." "Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe." "Is it in the dictionary?" "Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean" — he made a picture frame with his hands — "the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?" And so it would go on, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. "This is a nice paper, Bun — ," Charles said cautiously. "Thanks, thanks." "But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?" "Oh, Donne," Bunny had said scoffingly. "I don't want to drag him into this." Henry had refused to read it. "I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really," he said, glancing over the first page. "Say, what's wrong with this type?" "Tripled spaced it," said Bunny proudly. "These lines are about an inch apart." "Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?" Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. "Looks kind of like a menu," he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence "And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man — so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise — unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups — assuming that one is a painter — extracted something that goes beyond them.

Because of our current representatives’ corruption, many Americans no longer trust the federal government. Some refuse to analyze the reasons for this distrust and prefer to think about other things, like sports, entertainment, and lifestyles of the rich and famous. We have the choice of continuing to be distracted by trivialities or of faithfully watching for and responding to abuse of the Constitution. If we choose the former option, our descendants will be faced with much less pleasant options.

Another, much more famous, instance of morphologization has occurred in the Romance languages (the modern descendants of Latin). Latin had a noun mens ‘mind’, whose stem was ment- and whose ablative case-form was mente (the Latin ablative was a case-form with miscellaneous uses, most of which we would associate largely with prepositional use in English). Quite early, it became usual in Latin to use the ablative mente with an accompanying adjective to express the state of mind in which an action was performed; as was usual in Latin, the adjective had to agree with its noun mente as feminine singular ablative. We thus find phrases like devota mente ‘with a devout mind’ (i.e., ‘devoutly’) and clara mente ‘with a clear mind’ (i.e., ‘clear-headedly’). At this stage, however, the construction was possible only with adjectives denoting possible states of mind; other adjectives, like those meaning ‘new’ or ‘equal’ or ‘obvious’, could not appear with mente, because the result would have made no sense: something like ‘with an equal mind’ could hardly mean anything. But then speakers began to reinterpret the mente construction as describing not the state of mind of somebody doing something, but the manner in which it was done. Consequently, the construction was extended to a much larger range of adjectives, and new instances appeared, like lenta mente (lenta ‘slow’) and dulce mente (dulce ‘soft’), with the adjectives still in the appropriate grammatical form for agreement with the noun. As a result, the form mente was no longer regarded as a form of mens ‘mind’; it was taken instead as a purely grammatical marker expressing an adverbial function, and it was therefore reduced from a separate word to a suffix. Today this new suffix is the ordinary way of obtaining adverbs of manner in the Romance languages, entirely parallel to English -ly in slowly or carefully, and it can be added to almost any suitable adjective. Thus Spanish, for example, has igualmente ‘equally’ (igual ‘equal’) and absolutamente ‘absolutely’ (absoluta ‘absolute’). Spanish still retains a trace of the ancient pattern: when two such adverbs are conjoined, only the last takes the suffix, and hence Spaniards say lenta y seguramente ‘slowly and surely’, and not *lentamente y seguramente. In French, this is not possible, and a French-speaker must say lentement et sûrement.

there is the prophetic promise that the divine Spirit will be rather fully active in the scion of the restored Davidic royal line (Isa 11:1-3), in the "servant" in whom God delights (Isa 42:1), and even among the descendents of Israel more broadly (Isa 44:3). This idea of a wider sharing of the experience of the Spirit is also famously projected in Joel 2:28-29 (MT and LXX 3:1-5, a text explicitly cited in Acts 2:16-21 as fulfilled in the phenomena of the Pentecost episode). In a lengthy oracle, there is the following divine promise:

The Tiger King’s Gift Long ago, in the days of the ancient Pandya kings of South India, a father and his two sons lived in a village near Madura. The father was an astrologer, but he had never become famous, and so was very poor. The elder son was called Chellan; the younger Gangan. When the time came for the father to put off his earthly body, he gave his few fields to Chellan, and a palm leaf with some words scratched on it to Gangan. These were the words that Gangan read: ‘From birth, poverty; For ten years, captivity; On the seashore, death. For a little while happiness shall follow.’ ‘This must be my fortune,’ said Gangan to himself, ‘and it doesn’t seem to be much of a fortune. I must have done something terrible in a former birth. But I will go as a pilgrim to Papanasam and do penance. If I can expiate my sin, I may have better luck.’ His only possession was a water jar of hammered copper, which had belonged to his grandfather. He coiled a rope round the jar, in case he needed to draw water from a well. Then he put a little rice into a bundle, said farewell to his brother, and set out. As he journeyed, he had to pass through a great forest. Soon he had eaten all his food and drunk all the water in his jar. In the heat of the day he became very thirsty. At last he came to an old, disused well. As he looked down into it, he could see that a winding stairway had once gone round it down to the water’s edge, and that there had been four landing places at different heights down this stairway, so that those who wanted to fetch water might descend the stairway to the level of the water and fill their water pots with ease, regardless of whether the well was full, or three-quarters full, or half full or only one-quarter full. Now the well was nearly empty. The stairway had fallen away. Gangan could not go down to fill his water jar so he uncoiled his rope, tied his jar to it and slowly let it down. To his amazement, as it was going down past the first landing place, a huge striped paw shot out and caught it, and a growling voice called out: ‘Oh Lord of Charity, have mercy! The stair is fallen. I die unless you save me! Fear me not.

Once upon a time, the dragons used to mock her because these spikes prevented her from bearing a saddle. Now, with her being bonded to the famous descendant of the great Asian leopard cat, they apparently all respected her.

Theo van Gogh was well known in the Netherlands, both as a descendant of the famous painter who shared his surname and as a critic of Islam even more provocative than Fortuyn.

Then he came to a work by an anonymous artist of the late nineteenth century—it was a Last Judgment. He could not understand why he had not heard of the painting before, for it was clearly a masterpiece. The image was not so complex or populated with grotesque characters as Bosch’s famous painting of the same title. No, its power was magnified through simplicity. The artist had portrayed the second coming of Christ as the return of the Lord to a world devoured by evil. In the upper half a luminous divine order descended into a field of demonic energy and universal abomination. People staggered about the desolate landscape, unable to look up to the light. They could no longer see; they could no longer believe. They thought that ruin was the sum total of reality. He could see it in their faces, their despair, their fear, their terrible loneliness. The loneliness of the apocalypse. And in those faces he saw his own face. Pawel burst into tears and wept openly in front of the painting. It seemed to him that the artist had captured his experience perfectly. How had he done that? Had he, too, felt what Pawel had felt, had he once been where Pawel now was?

That's his perception of reality," Nenad responded. "He has adopted it as his interpretation and cannot break free from it, and probably doesn't even consider doing so. In fact, we too are unable to escape his worldview as it partly is our own. However, when faced with the choice between the cat and the belt, I choose the cat. It's not doomed, it's not poisoned, and it can be easily removed by hand from the engine, even if it comes at a financial cost. I have enough space in my cage for its rescue. I can imagine that within its mind, this engine has become a prison for his hopes of salvation. Overcoming our phobias of losing money in the pursuit of something else, even in small amounts, is healthy. A ground strap costs nothing, and though it may require a bit of time in a repair shop, in this day and age, we are used to wasting our time for far less. The reality of our daily lives is filled with every online distraction, like a sheet riddled with holes from moths that we wrap ourselves in out of habit without even noticing. It’s so comforting. At first, you embrace what everyone else does, what you are told to think. But eventually, you come to the realization that you have the power to dictate your thought patterns and become the architect of your ideology. You can construct a personal propaganda machine that aligns with your values and desires, creating a unique model of the world that is entirely your own. Your mind is still going to be a box in one of the billions of drawers, but it’s going to be YOUR box. Your true home. Manipulate yourself. We should manipulate ourselves towards common sense, compassion, and hope that we’ll get a good batch of people at some point so we can live among more like-minded peers. Now it’s up to our online feed. Now the education in our phone holds the reins, encapsulated in the three-second video of someone's take on history, the five-second clip of fitness models or investment strategies. And if we're fortunate, some famous person would quote Epictetus' Discourses, perhaps echoing the wisdom of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Marcus Aurelius, Sartre, etc. This is our chance for us to avoid descending into mere survival instincts without the tempering influence of morality and an understanding of the absurdity that we have created around us. To get addicted to the freedom in our minds. OR to choose the ground strap, choose to sacrifice someone else’s life so we can preserve our resources, because that’s what greed is, on a deep ancient level it’s you hoarding resources the same way a squirrel does with its winter supplies. Choose to be a squirrel rather than a human and live off your acorns. Choose to kill the cat. Choose not to ruin your precious machine. Choose the current model of society and disappear in it like a pelican getting caught in an airplane engine. Perhaps responsibility is the first and maybe even the only synonym for human purpose. Of course, there is value in the small moments we experience, but they lack foundation if they don’t fit into the break from working on something meaningful.

Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism." "I'm sorry. I don't know what that is." "I don't either," Bunny would say brokenly. "Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see." He would resume pacing. "Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it." "Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word." "Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe." "Is it in the dictionary?" "Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean" — he made a picture frame with his hands — "the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?" And so it would go on, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. "This is a nice paper, Bun — ," Charles said cautiously. "Thanks, thanks." "But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?" "Oh, Donne," Bunny had said scoffingly. "I don't want to drag him into this." Henry had refused to read it. "I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really," he said, glancing over the first page. "Say, what's wrong with this type?" "Tripled spaced it," said Bunny proudly. "These lines are about an inch apart." "Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?" Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. "Looks kind of like a menu," he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence "And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

The Medes, Parthians, Persians, and some others who spoke the same language like in Bactria, combined were deemed the Aryan people. And the language of Darius the Mede was called "Aryan."39 This is likely the name of the language of the Medes (or possibly the old Persian language) that dominated much of the area. Map of Asshur and his descendants What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more "evolved" than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent.

From the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century an influx of dilletantes, academics, artists, writers, travellers and eccentrics descended unto the barren plains of Greece to pick over the marble bones of the past in the hope of finding some meaningful connection with Homer and Thucydides. The Levantine Lunatics, as Lord Byron termed them, many of them British, but also Germans, French and other Westerners, went on to paint, record and loot the past. Marbles, such as those made famous by Lord Elgin, pilfered or otherwise from classical sites, made their way into the country houses and museums of Europe. Byron, although critical of his contemporaries, was in many ways one of them, the difference being that he made a point of appreciating the here and now, the reality of the Oriental present as opposed to the classical past, and embracing the people who lived there even if they were regarded as debased specimens by his fellow travellers.

That peculiar light just before sunset, before gloaming: it is then that Essa sees for the first time the famous dunes at Avanue, which roll like fat people in their sleep, and shift restlessly forever. “They cast long shadows, these sleeping giants, and Essa shivers. She has walked too far—after the trip north she was so grateful to be out of hospital—her hands and feet are cold, and she is dizzy with exhaustion. She sits down on the ragged grass at the edge of the bluff which overlooks the dunes, and tries not to hate them. “Her mother’s words, remembered in a dream, sound like water flowing in her thoughts. There is no water here. The grasses under her are dry and stiff, and they grow in sand so fine it grits through her clothing against the skin of her ass. The sea is too far away to see or smell. But at least she is alone. “Though she is shivering, it is still a hot day, and the sun has warmed the sand. The ground radiates heat into her body. She lies down flat on her belly, her head to one side so that she can still see the dunes, and puts her hands beneath her; gradually they warm. “Gradually her body comes back into balance and she starts to see an eerie beauty before her. The sun is fully down when she sits up, brushes the sand away as well as she can, and hugs her knees to her chest. She puts her chin on her knees and watches darkness descend over the low rolling landscape. “This is unlike any cliff on which she has rested yet. It is low and gives no perspective. The dunes come up almost to her feet. Yet the demarcation is quite abrupt: there is no grass growing anywhere after this brief crumbling drop-off, and she can see as the land-breeze begins to quicken that ahead of her the sand is moving. In fact, she realizes, she can hear it, a low sweeping sound which has mounted from inaudibility until it inexorably backs every other sound: sounds of grasses moving, insects scraping, birds calling from the invisible sea far beyond her viewpoint are all subsumed in one great sand-song. “It is a sound so relentlessly sad that Essa can hardly bear to listen, but so persistent that she cannot ignore it now that she has become aware of its susurration. She pulls her sweater—the one her mother made by her knitting—around her and waits. “When it is fully dark and the wind has died again, she rises and begins the long walk back to town in the dim light of stars and crescent moon.

And do you mean to say he had peace and quiet with you there?’ said the driver teasingly. ‘Well, well!’ ‘It’s not so quiet there really,’ said Tinker. ‘The waves make such a noise, and so does the wind. But my father didn’t really notice those. He only notices things like bells ringing, or people talking, or somebody knocking at the door. Things like that drive him mad. He loved the lighthouse.’ ‘Well – I hope you enjoy yourselves there,’ said the driver. ‘It’s not my cup of tea – hearing nothing but waves and gulls crying. Better you than me!’ They descended the other side of the hill and the lighthouse was no longer to be seen. ‘Soon be there now,’ said Tinker. ‘Mischief, will you like to be at the lighthouse again? How quickly you could go up the spiral staircase and down – do you remember?’ The car swept down almost to the edge of the sea. The lighthouse was now plainly to be seen, a good way out from the shore. A small boat bobbed at a stone jetty, and Tinker pointed it out with a scream of joy. ‘That’s the boat we had – the one that took us to and from the lighthouse when the tide was in! It’s called Bob-About, and it does bob about too.’ ‘Is it yours?’ asked George, rather jealously.

I bet you are being fawned over at school for the rare “achievement” of being admitted to an Ivy League college. That mi familia is so proud, so bowled over by the famous white names and faces that have gone there before you. So pleased that a place built on the back of slaves, funded by the sheep-like descendants of slave owners, run via nepotism towards advancing more of those descendants, took in someone like you. As if, somehow, you breaking into that system, your intelligence being affirmed by this institution, means that they, too, have accomplished something

Some say the sons of God were the descendants of Seth and the daughters of men were the posterity of Cain and that the progeny of Seth procreated with the daughters of Cain to produce these famous heroes of old. From the mainstream Christian point of view, this makes perfect sense—end of story.

There is no man,’ he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grand sons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

The portrait had been discovered in 1860 when Mr. William Oakes Hunt, the town clerk of Stratford, employed a visiting art expert named Simon Collins to examine a group of portraits long lodged inside the Hunt attic. These paintings were believed to have descended from the aristocratic Clopton family. Mr. Hunt recalled as a child using the portraits for archery practice, but by 1860 he’d become curious as to their value. When hired to appraise these attic portraits, Simon Collins had just finished the prestigious job of restoring Stratford’s world-famous funerary bust of Shakespeare that hovered like a putty-nosed wraith over the poet’s tomb in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Posed with pen and paper while sporting the pickdevant-styled pointy beard and up-brushed mustache popular from 1570 to 1600, the bust has long been championed as one of the most authentic likenesses of the poet; nevertheless, back in 1793 a curator named Edmond Malone had decided to whitewash the entire bust, which until then had been unique in portraying Shakespeare wearing a blood-red jerkin beneath a black sleeveless jacket.

It was like watching a sexy, masculine Mary Poppins and this was his version of her famous carpet bag. His resourcefulness never ceased to amaze me.

We are just in time for the famous Peabody Duck March. Led by their trainer, the ducks descend by elevator and parade down their own red carpet in the lobby to the fountain.

When they’d filled the peppers and they were laid out in nice, neat, bacon-wrapped lines, she slid them into the oven. Then they went into the sitting room. David sat down next to Leah on the settee. “Now, we can’t fall asleep, waiting for them to finish cooking,” he said. Famous. Last. Words. They chatted for a moment about how melted cheese was probably the best invention on the planet, but it descended into quiet as their lids dropped and she wondered why she couldn’t think of anything more insightful to say. It had felt like only seconds that she rested her eyes, but Leah and David jumped to a start, the fire alarm beeping in the kitchen. The both looked at each other, their eyes big with surprise. “Oh no!” he laughed. They ran into the kitchen, David throwing on one of Nan’s oven mitts and yanking the smoking, sizzling peppers out of the oven. Leah opened the windows and the back door, but it seemed to let more cold air in than smoke out. She fanned the air, while David took the peppers outside and set them on the brick walkway. As they both stood in the freezing kitchen, the smoke billowing around the ceiling, they broke into laughter. “Maybe we should’ve just had the marshmallows,” he said. Leah rolled under the duvet to view the time, the gray morning barely giving her enough light to focus. It was still early—six o’clock. She closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow, the feel of the linens so familiar and comfortable that, at first, she’d almost forgotten about her troubles. This was the bed she’d slept in when she needed the security of family, and a retreat to ease her mind.

On the one hand, these filmmakers are the descendants of the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the century. One of the important ideological components of the May Fourth movement was its radical antitraditional stance, exemplified by its famous slogan: "Smash the Confucian Temple" (zalan kongjiadian).

The famous French biologist Jacques Monod once wrote that “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the Universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance”. It’s a melancholy thought. I can think of only one thing sadder: if the only species possessing consciousness, the only species that can light up the universe with acts of love and humor and compassion, were to extinguish itself through acts of stupidity or ignorance. The various “Solutions” discussed in chapter 4 don’t, I believe, solve the Fermi paradox; but they do describe a range of possible futures for our descendants. We can choose which future we want. If we survive, we have a Galaxy to explore and make our own. If we destroy ourselves, if we ruin Earth before we’re ready to leave our home planet . . . well, it could be a long, long time before a creature from another species looks up at its planet’s night sky and asks: “Where is everybody?

The celebrated Conn of the Hundred Battles was a son of Feidlimid, the son of Tuathal — though he did not immediately succeed Feidlimid. Between them reigned Cathair Mor, who was the father of thirty sons, among whom and their posterity he attempted to divide Ireland, and from whom are descended the chief Leinster families. And we may pause to note that Cathair Mor is immortalised in Irish history by reason of a famous ancient will ascribed to him — a will that is of value because of the light it sheds upon many things of prime historical interest in early days.

Once released from her trading responsibilities, she descended to Cannes’s famous seafront esplanade. Occasionally she dallied for a while, enjoying the sunshine while strolling the length of the Boulevard de la Croisette, or she might pause for un caffè espresso and a swift perusal of the announcements in the local daily newspaper, Nice Matin. More often than not, though, her habit was to walk purposefully in the direction of the new port close to the Pointe Croisette, where waiting patiently on the corner of Place Franklin Roosevelt was Maurice, her chauffeur, with her morning mail, seated in her second-hand 1996 Bentley Azure, its gleaming bodywork black as a beetle’s carapace.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, God-down, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,” “reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.” It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large. The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman.

The Coptic Achievement In vivid contrast, the Egyptian churches certainly did reach the hearts of their natives, and from early times. Even the name Copt is a corruption of Aigyptos—that is, native Egyptians, whose language descends from the tongue of the pyramid builders. (The word Aigyptos derives from the name of ancient Memphis, the city of Ptah.) When nineteenth-century scholars translated the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, they did so by using the language they found spoken in the liturgies of the Coptic church. Though Alexandrians wrote and thought in Greek, Coptic was from the earliest years a sophisticated language of Christian literature and theology, making it easy to spread the faith among ordinary Egyptians. The famous Nag Hammadi collection of alternative scriptures, probably written in the fourth century, is in Coptic.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. . . . Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.

During the era of the Warring States in ancient China, the state of Qi found itself threatened by the powerful armies of the state of Wei. The Qi general consulted the famous strategist Sun Pin (a descendant of Suntzu himself), who told him that the Wei general looked down on the armies of Qi, believing that their soldiers were cowards. That, said Sun Pin, was the key to victory. He proposed a plan: Enter Wei territory with a large army and make thousands of campfires. The next day make half that number of campfires, and the day after that, half that number again. Putting his trust in Sun Pin, the Qi general did as he was told. The Wei general, of course, was carefully monitoring the invasion, and he noted the dwindling campfires. Given his predisposition to see the Qi soldiers as cowards, what could this mean but that they were defecting? He would advance with his cavalry and crush this weak army; his infantry would follow, and they would march into Qi itself. Sun Pin, hearing of the approaching Wei cavalry and calculating how fast they were moving, retreated and stationed the Qi army in a narrow pass in the mountains. He had a large tree cut down and stripped of its bark, then wrote on the bare log, “The general of Wei will die at this tree.” He set the log in the path of the pursuing Wei army, then hid archers on both sides of the pass. In the middle of the night, the Wei general, at the head of his cavalry, reached the place where the log blocked the road. Something was written on it; he ordered a torch lit to read it. The torchlight was the signal and the lure: the Qi archers rained arrows on the trapped Wei horsemen. The Wei general, realizing he had been tricked, killed himself. Sun Pin based his baiting of the Wei general on his knowledge of the man’s personality, which was arrogant and violent. By turning these qualities to his advantage, encouraging his enemy’s greed and aggression, Sun Pin could control the man’s mind. You, too, should look for the emotion that your enemies are least able to manage, then bring it to the surface. With a little work on your part, they will lay themselves open to your counterattack.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw Protestant evangelicalism enter India. And while Christian missions did much good – in education, uplifting the marginalized and exposing failures even of the Company – as far as Indian elites were concerned, they were a thorn in the side. In Travancore, for example, converts from low castes, empowered by their new identity, now aspired to equality with their ex-superiors. As a Dewan argued, by ‘violating the existing social distinctions’, the new Christians were bound to ‘annoy the high castes’, who demanded retribution. For generations, battles would be fought on dress, access to roads, temples, and even government buildings, and much of the reform Travancore grew famous for owed to this tension with missionaries, and the confidence they gave disempowered segments. Missionaries, however, also tended to magnify the evils they saw, to gain financial sympathy at home, for example. In 1848, thus, it was alleged that Travancore had a ‘professed torturer’, an expert in ‘twenty-three modes’ of abuse, on its payroll. In 1855 the state was described as ‘a perfect pandemonium of torture and misgovernment’. But the core problem was a clash of moralities, causing even the maharajah ‘great uneasiness’.77 As a Hindu king his duty lay in preserving the way things were; or as he said: ‘As my kingdom was in my predecessors’ time, so let it remain, and so let it descend to my heir.’78 His critics, however, wished to smash that caste-based order with a new conception of justice. Which side prevailed at any given moment depended also on higher-ups – Resident Cullen was sympathetic to the maharajah, while the infamous governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, showed personally an evangelical bent.

Since gorillas split off from our evolutionary branch slightly before chimps and bonobos, it’s been argued that whichever ape is more like the gorilla deserves to be called the original type. But who says that gorillas themselves resemble our last common ancestor? They have had plenty of time to change, too, over seven million years, in fact. What we are looking for instead is the ape that has changed the least over time. Takayoshi Kano, the premier expert on wild bonobos, has argued that since bonobos never left the humid jungle - whereas chimpanzees did so partially and our own ancestors completely - bonobos probably have encountered fewer pressures to change and may therefore look most like the forest ape from which we all descend. American anatomist Harold Coolidge famously speculated that the bonobo “may approach more closely to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and man than does any living chimpanzee.

By the time of Mary’s second French betrothal, Henry was already beginning to doubt the validity and the usefulness of his marriage to Catherine and considering the possibility of annulment. At least in Henry’s eyes, Catherine had failed him by having no sons, and Henry had lost interest in her. Instead, he was interested in a certain France-returned coquettish aristocratic courtier descended from the powerful Howards of Norfolk (the incumbent Duke’s niece), Anne Boleyn. Try as he might, Henry could not get Anne to become his mistress, but she did agree to become his Queen consort, famously telling him, “I beseech your highness most earnestly to desist, and to this my answer in good part. I would rather lose my life than my honesty”.

Liu was taken at bayonet point from his Shandong village in 1944 and sent to work in the Showa coal mine in Hokkaido. Unlike those at Hanaoka who rose up in rebellion, he fled into the mountains. He escaped in July 1945, just about one month before the end of the war, but he was so terrified that he remained in hiding, living off grasses and nuts, and occasionally descending to the remote coastline to collect seaweed, less afraid of bears than of human beings, and with no knowledge that the war was over, until he was by chance discovered by a rabbit trapper in 1958. When he emerged, not only was the war over, but Kishi Nobosuke, the Tojo Cabinet's Minister for Commerce and Labor, who had been responsible for the forced-labor program, had become prime minister. When Kishi's government ordered an investigation of Liu on suspicion of illegal entry into the country, Liu published a famous statement of protest and then returned to China. As of the early 1990s, he was still pursuing his case for justice against the Japanese government, and still waiting for a response from it.

Max Weber, who we met in the previous chapter, provided the most famous and widely accepted definition of the state, identifying it with the “monopoly of legitimate violence” in society. Without such a monopoly and the degree of centralization that it entails, the state cannot play its role as enforcer of law and order, let alone provide public services and encourage and regulate economic activity. When the state fails to achieve almost any political centralization, society sooner or later descends into chaos, as did Somalia. We

It looks like we’re stuck here for a while,” Cass said, trying not to let her eyes wander down to Falco’s chest. His damp chemise was clinging to his body. The drizzle became a deluge, rain pounding the stone street so hard, it drowned out Falco’s response. Cass leaned in close. “What?” “I said I know someplace nearby we can go. Until the rain stops.” Falco’s lips were so close to her ear that she felt a puff of warm air with each p he spoke. Cass trembled slightly. She told herself it was from the weather, but she turned to face Falco even though it meant putting the right side of her dress out into the storm. His expression was neutral, but his eyes smiled at her. “What sort of place?” “Tommaso’s studio. It’s just a couple of streets over.” Cass watched the rain come down in sheets. “Tommaso?” “Vecellio. He’s my master.” Cass sucked in a deep breath. Tommaso Vecellio was descended from the same bloodlines as Titian, one of the most famous Venetian artists of all time. Titian had died before Cass was born, but his influence lingered in churches and private homes all across Venice. “You apprentice with Vecellio? How come you never told me?” Falco slicked his wet hair back from his face. “You never asked.

of we are to believe Helen Cody Wetmore, one of William Cody's sisters, her family was descended from Spanish and Irish royalty, and were accordingly entitled to a crest. In her book Buffalo Bill, Last of the Great Scouts: The Life Story of Colonel William F. Cody, published in 1899, she wrote that her brother was "a lineal descendant of Milesius, king of Spain, that famous monarch whose three sons, Heber, Heremon, and Ir, founded the first dynasty in Ireland about the beginning of the

One rainy day in 1979 or 1980 I was eating lunch at the legendary sandwich shop of Sal Meijer on the Niewmarkt in Amsterdam. In what was once one of the most famous Jewish neighborhoods in Europe, the owner, a Holocaust survivor, stood at the door gazing sadly at the downpour that was keeping his customers away. Speaking to no one in particular, he said, 'Forty days and forty nights. All the wicked people were killed and only the righteous survived. And that is us.' No more than Sal Meijer was Jheronimus Bosch impressed by the descendants of Noah.

Charmers lie to sell their words, Your Majesty, and I have no need to lie. They say you descend from the goddesses,” he said, grinning widely—his famous smile.