Despite Of All The Struggles Quotes

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...

The way you move is incredible.” Ren drew me back to press against him. His fingers slid down to the curve of my hips, rocking our bodies in rhythm with the heavy bass. The sensation of being molded against the hard narrow line of his hips threatened to overwhelm me. We were hidden in the mass of people, right? The Keepers couldn’t see? I tried to steady my breath as Ren kept us locked together in the excruciatingly slow pulse of the music. I closed my eyes and leaned back into his body; his fingers kneaded my hips, caressed my stomach. God, it felt good. My lips parted and the misty veil slipped between them, playing along my tongue. The taste of flower buds about to burst into bloom filled my mouth. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to melt into Ren. The surge of desire terrified me. I had no idea if the compulsion to draw him more tightly around my body emerged from my own heart or from the succubi’s spellcraft. This couldn’t happen! I started to panic when he bent his head, pressing his lips against my neck. My eyes fluttered and I struggled to focus despite the suffocating heat that pressed down all around me. His sharpened canines traced my skin, scratching but not breaking the surface. My body quaked and I pivoted in his arms, pushing against his chest, making space between us. “I’m a fighter, not a lover,” I gasped. “You can’t be both?” His smile made my knees buckle.

Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class.

Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.

There is beauty in the courage of the fragile fighter. Those that persevere, despite all they’ve been through, those who still believe there is good in the world, as dark things we often find we need that light the most.

From their midst a broad-shouldered man stepped forth, past Longwick, who tried vainly to motion him back. He ran three strides toward me, and I took a deep, unbelieving breath of his scent just before he enfolded me in a bear hug. Despite the pain to my shoulder, I didn't struggle. I dropped my head on his shoulder, and let him support me, feeling safer than I had in years. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything would be all right, as if everything could be mended. Heart of the Pack was here and he never let us come to harm.

In the time you will live, there will be heroes around. Simple men, honest men who work two jobs, go to school, raise a family, and serve our God. An older couple who have the courage to seek out the truth while enduring the scorn and ridicule of their children and friends. A young man, a special spirit, who will take on a body that is deformed- and yet you will never see hime unhappy or without a smile on his face. A young mother who will care for a daughter while she suffers a painful death, and yet never doubt or loose faith that her Father loves them both. In your worl famous people will be hard to find. But you will be surrounded by heroes, you will meet them everyday. They will be the simple people who struggle but never give up, those who strive to be happy despite the cares of the physical world, those who dream of the day when they will find the truth, those who search for understanding as to why they were born, why there is pain, or what it all means, and yet continure to endure, knowing in their soul, somewhere deep inside, that there has to be an answer. These are the heroes that our Father needs down on earth. And you will be a hero. We already know that.

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Mark the mastodon. The dinosaur, who left dry tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness, Have lain too long Face down in ignorance. Your mouths spelling words Armed for slaughter. The rock cries out today, you may stand on me, But do not hide your face. Across the wall of the world, A river sings a beautiful song, Come rest here by my side. Each of you a bordered country, Delicate and strangely made proud, Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. Yet, today I call you to my riverside, If you will study war no more. Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs The Creator gave to me when I And the tree and stone were one. Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow And when you yet knew you still knew nothing. The river sings and sings on. There is a true yearning to respond to The singing river and the wise rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the teacher. They hear. They all hear The speaking of the tree. Today, the first and last of every tree Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river. Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river. Each of you, descendant of some passed on Traveller, has been paid for. You, who gave me my first name, You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, Then forced on bloody feet, Left me to the employment of other seekers-- Desperate for gain, starving for gold. You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot... You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare Praying for a dream. Here, root yourselves beside me. I am the tree planted by the river, Which will not be moved. I, the rock, I the river, I the tree I am yours--your passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, Need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men, Take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts. Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness. The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change. Here, on the pulse of this fine day You may have the courage To look up and out upon me, The rock, the river, the tree, your country. No less to Midas than the mendicant. No less to you now than the mastodon then. Here on the pulse of this new day You may have the grace to look up and out And into your sister's eyes, Into your brother's face, your country And say simply Very simply With hope Good morning.

I've been sitting here now, and do you know what I was saying to myself? If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment--still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all. However, by the age of thirty, I will probably drop the cup, even if I haven't emptied it, and walk away...I don't know where. But until my thirtieth year, I know this for certain, my youth will overcome everything--all disillusionment, all aversion to live. I've asked myself many times: is there such despair in the world as could overcome this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me, and have decided that apparently there is not--that is, once again, until my thirtieth year, after which I myself shall want no more, so it seems to me. Some snotty-nosed, consumptive moralists, poets especially, often call this thirst for life base. True, it's a feature of the Karamazovs, to some extent, this thirst for life despite all; it must be sitting in you too; but why is it base? There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one's heart, out of old habit...I want to go to Europe, Alyosha, I'll go straight from here. Of course I know that I will only be going to a graveyard, but to the most, the most previous graveyard, that's the thing! The precious dead lie there, each stone over them speaks of such ardent past life, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their science, that I--this I know beforehand--will fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them--being wholeheartedly convinced, at the same time, that it has all long been a graveyard and nothing more. And I will not weep from despair, but simply because I will be happy in my shed tears. I will be drunk with my own tenderness. Sticky spring leaves, the blue sky--I love them, that's all! Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength...

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

For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free

I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you -- but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real -- when the police decide that tactics for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities -- they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact. I am speaking to you as I always have -- as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

The claims of contemporary art cannot be ignored in any vital scheme of life. The art of to-day is that which really belongs to us: it is our own reflection. In condemning it we but condemn ourselves. We say that the present age possesses no art:—who is responsible for this? It is indeed a shame that despite all our rhapsodies about the ancients we pay so little attention to our own possibilities. Struggling artists, weary souls lingering in the shadow of cold disdain! In our self- centered century, what inspiration do we offer them? The past may well look with pity at the poverty of our civilisation; the future will laugh at the barrenness of our art. We are destroying the beautiful in life.

Stop that Stuart," Patty said as Stuart struggled with the suitcases, which were too heavy for him, she thought. (Almost everything was way too heavy for Stuart.)" Just put those down. Besides," Patty said, "where will you go? You don't have anyplace to go." But Stuart took her hand and held it for a moment against his closed eyes, and despite the many occasions when Patty had wanted him to go, and the several occasions when she had tried to make him go, despite the fact that he was at his most enragingly pathetic, for once she could think of nothing, nothing at all that he could be trying to shame her into or shame her out of, and so it occurred to her that this he would really leave---that he was simply saying good-bye. All along, Patty had been unaware that time is as adhesive as love, and that the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as "friendship," as if that were the end of the matter,when the truth is that even if "your friend" does something annoying, or if you and "your friend" decided that you hate each other, or if "your friend" moves away and you lose each other's address, you still have a friendship, and although it can change shape, look different in different lights, become an embarrassment or an encumbrance or a sorrow, it can't simply cease to have existed, no matter how far into the past it sinks, so attempts to disavow or destroy it will not merely constitute betrayals of friendship but, more practically, are bound to be fruitless, causing damage only to the humans involved rather than to that gummy jungle(friendship)in which those humans have entrapped themselves, so if sometime in the future you're not going to want to have been a particular person's friend, or if you're not going to want to have had that particular friendship you and that person can make with one another, then don't be friends with that person at all, don't talk to that person, don't go anywhere near that person, because as soon as you start to see something from that person's point of view (which, inevitably, will be as soon as you stand next to that person) common ground is sure to slide under your feet.

How very important it is, to see the reflection of yourself and to keep that reflection in sight— despite how much you have been pushed and shoved, forgotten and ripped, lied to and deceived! It seems like the number one most valuable thing you can carry with you is the constant appearance of your own reflection for the beauty and wonder that you are and it's a fight and a struggle to keep that. If you had a treasure box filled with magical things— this would be the one thing it seems like people want to destroy or to take away or in some cases to even make their own! But you must remember your reflection, you must see yourself illuminated and you must remember, against all odds, remember.

Overcoming obstacles requires commitment and strength. Despite all odds, face each journey with courage, each struggle with accomplishment, and each challenge with victory.

For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.

You have to believe that your voice can mean something. You have to believe that what you do matters. And you have to keep going even on days you can't find that belief. If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of. You do it despite the doubts and the struggles. You do it because it's what you came here to do. That's what makes an artist.

Mournier defined his own position as one of 'tragic optimism--' a Christian attitude of absolute engagement in the struggles of history, despite the fact that the Absolute cannot be contained in history.

He fought as a prisoner sentenced to death fights the executioner, knowing that he cannot prevail; and with each minute he felt, despite all the efforts of his struggle, that he was getting closer and closer to what terrified him.

The hobbit is hallowed for his terrible and grace-filled journey and hollowed out by it. His body seems too small for all that he endures but not so his heart. Fear, fatigue, cold, hunger, and thirst torment him, but he continues out of love. Frodo’s struggle shows that there are, in fact, two quests going on: his to destroy the Ring and the Ring’s to dominate and destroy him. Despite the despair that it causes, which both fills and empties him, the Ring-bearer remains as intent upon saving everyone as Denethor is not. Frodo’s torn heart still beats, and it pushes past terror and hopelessness because of Sam’s blessed aid and his own battered and bleeding will to do so. Both hobbits teach us the great value of redemptive suffering.

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.

Not caring about our own pain and the pain of others is not working. How much longer are we willing to keep pulling drowning people out of the river one by one, rather than walking to the headwaters of the river to find the source of the pain? What will it take for us to let go of that earned self-righteousness and travel together to the cradle of the pain that is throwing all of us in at such a rate that we couldn’t possibly save everyone? Pain is unrelenting. It will get our attention. Despite our attempts to drown it in addiction, to physically beat it out of one another, to suffocate it with success and material trappings, or to strangle it with our hate, pain will find a way to make itself known. Pain will subside only when we acknowledge it and care for it. Addressing it with love and compassion would take only a minuscule percentage of the energy it takes to fight it, but approaching pain head-on is terrifying. Most of us were not taught how to recognize pain, name it, and be with it. Our families and culture believed that the vulnerability that it takes to acknowledge pain was weakness, so we were taught anger, rage, and denial instead. But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain. Sometimes owning our pain and bearing witness to struggle means getting angry. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we deny our pain. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of “Why so hostile?” “Don’t get hysterical,” “I’m sensing so much anger!” and “Don’t take it so personally.” All of these responses are normally code for Your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable or Suck it up and stay quiet. One response to this is “Get angry and stay angry!” I haven’t seen that advice borne out in the research. What I’ve found is that, yes, we all have the right and need to feel and own our anger. It’s an important human experience.

Pessimism counterbalances the ridiculously optimistic expectations of the culture we live in and helps us adapt out of the deeply detached, unrealistic perspective that we likely formed as a young child. It reminds us that things won’t always go our way or always be that nice, but rather, things will go wrong a lot, and that, despite this, we can still be ok. Paradoxically, we must recognize that through a certain quality of pessimism, we can better assist a more reasonably optimistic experience of life. We are all struggling and improvising our way through this strange existence, constantly confused and unsure. No one is perfect or normal in any traditional sense. We all make mistakes big and small. No one knows who or why they are. Happiness is hard and unclear. There is greed, tragedy, and malevolence in this world that we have and will continue to experience. And at any moment, this whole world and all of humanity could end for any number of reasons. Yet despite everything that was just said prior, the thought of it all ending should and does make us sad and tremble with fear. We don’t want it to end. In spite of the chaos, uncertainties, and hardships, we want to go on. We want to endure. We want to see what we can do, overcome, and experience in the face of it all. In this, we find the hopeful spirit and strength of humankind. We find optimism in pessimism.

The absence of fatherhood implies the impossibility of brotherhood. It is no accident that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre, in addition to Freud, all struggled with the notion of fatherlessness. Its exalted, but unrealistic, implication is godlessness and self-deification. But its more immediate, existential implication, as we have seen, is being orphaned and abandoned. It is curious that Freud, despite his extensive knowledge of classic literature, either ignored or repressed its most trenchant moral, namely, that by equating oneself with the gods, one invokes their anger and punishment. The gods will not be mocked, and they are intolerant of hubris.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Everywhere I look I see people doing their best to make sense of this overwhelming reality, and to be kind, authentic human beings despite the many invitations we all receive to be phony, unkind assholes. Sometimes their best doesn’t look like much to me, and I remind myself that my best doesn’t look like much a lot of the time, too. I empathize. We’re all human, and we’re all struggling. Every single one of us, every single day. It’s not my job to police the paths of others, not when it takes so much effort to light my own.

Am I so difficult to understand and so easy to misunderstand in all my intentions, plans, and friendships? Ah, we lonely ones and free spirits—it is borne home to us that in some way or other we constantly appear different from what we think. Whereas we wish for nothing more than truth and straightforwardness, we are surrounded by a net of misunderstanding, and despite our most ardent wishes we cannot help our actions being smothered in a cloud of false opinion, attempted compromises, semi-concessions, charitable silence, and erroneous interpretations. Such things gather a weight of melancholy on our brow; for we hate more than death the thought that pretence should be necessary, and such incessant chafing against these things makes us volcanic and menacing. From time to time we avenge ourselves for all our enforced concealment and compulsory self-restraint. We emerge from our cells with terrible faces, our words and deeds are then explosions, and it is not beyond the verge of possibility that we perish through ourselves. Thus dangerously do I live! It is precisely we solitary ones that require love and companions in whose presence we may be open and simple, and the eternal struggle of silence and dissimulation can cease.

Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.

I remember my first reading of The Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote when they too were young radicals; Marx was thirty, Engels twenty-eight. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” That was undeniably true, verifiable in any reading of history. Certainly true for the United States, despite all the promises of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States …” and “No state shall deny … the equal protection of the laws”).

On the eleventh day, it finally stopped raining. Musashi chafed to be out in the open, but it was another week before they were able to return to work under a bright sun. The field they had so arduously carved out of the wilderness had disappeared without a trace; in its place were rocks, and a river where none had been before. The water seemed to mock them just as the villagers had. Iori, seeing no way to reclaim their loss, looked up and said, “This place is beyond hope. Let’s look for better land somewhere else.” “No,” Musashi said firmly. “With the water drained off, this would make excellent farmland. I examined the location from every angle before I chose it.” “What if we have another heavy rain?” “We’ll fix it so the water doesn’t come this way. We’ll lay a dam from here all the way to that hill over there.” ‘That’s an awful lot of work.” “You seem to forget that this is our dōjō. I’m not giving up a foot of this land until I see barley growing on it.” Musashi carried on his stubborn struggle throughout the winter, into the second month of the new year. It took several weeks of strenuous labor to dig ditches, drain the water off, pile dirt for a dike and then cover it with heavy rocks. Three weeks later everything was again washed away. “Look,” Iori said, “we’re wasting our energy on something impossible. Is that the Way of the Sword?” The question struck close to the bone, but Musashi would not give in. Only a month passed before the next disaster, a heavy snowfall followed by a quick thaw. Iori, on his return from trips to the temple for food, inevitably wore a long face, for the people there rode him mercilessly about Musashi’s failure. And finally Musashi himself began to lose heart. For two full days and on into a third, he sat silently brooding and staring at his field. Then it dawned on him suddenly. Unconsciously, he had been trying to create a neat, square field like those common in other parts of the Kanto Plain, but this was not what the terrain called for. Here, despite the general flatness, there were slight variations in the lay of the land and the quality of the soil that argued for an irregular shape. “What a fool I’ve been,” he exclaimed aloud. “I tried to make the water flow where I thought it should and force the dirt to stay where I thought it ought to be. But it didn’t work. How could it? Water’s water, dirt’s dirt. I can’t change their nature. What I’ve got to do is learn to be a servant to the water and a protector of the land.” In his own way, he had submitted to the attitude of the peasants. On that day he became nature’s manservant. He ceased trying to impose his will on nature and let nature lead the way, while at the same time seeking out possibilities beyond the grasp of other inhabitants of the plain. The snow came again, and another thaw; the muddy water oozed slowly over the plain. But Musashi had had time to work out his new approach, and his field remained intact. “The same rules must apply to governing people,” he said to himself. In his notebook, he wrote: “Do not attempt to oppose the way of the universe. But first make sure you know the way of the universe.

An inexhaustible capacity to engage in sin is what makes human beings capable of living a virtuous life. To err is human; to seek penance is humankind’s unique act of salvation. Whenever a person fails, it is often their overwhelming sense of anguish that drives them forward to make a second attempt that is far more bighearted than they originally envisioned. The need for redemption drives us to try again despite our backside enduring the terrible weight of our greatest catastrophes. There is no person as magnanimous as a person whom finally encountered tremendous success after previously enduring a tear-filled trail of hardships and repeated setbacks. In an effort to redeem our lost dignity, in an effort to regain self-respect, we find our true selves. By working independently to better ourselves and struggling to fulfill our cherished values, we save ourselves while coincidentally uplifting all of humanity.

I realize belatedly that sending sharks to the aid of humans is a stupid idea. When one of the men tries to kick a tiger shark in the eye-and how could I blame him?-I tell the sharks to retreat. They’ve done all they can do, and I won’t let them be abused for their efforts. After a few more minutes, I see a small, chubby pair of legs struggling nearby. The owner of the legs can’t be older than a toddler. I scoop him up and keep him at the surface. He’s adorable really, with rounded cheeks and a snotty nose and brown eyes with lashes that would make a supermodel jealous. Close to us, a woman who I assume is his mother is crying frantically and calling out to the empty waves around her. I swim him over to her and deliver the little guy into her arms. “He swallowed a good part of the ocean, but otherwise he’ll be fine,” I tell her, knowing that she doesn’t understand. She clutches him to her and trembles. I swim two life jackets over to her and help her strap them on to her and the baby boy. She nods, and despite the language barrier, I can tell that she’s thanking me. Which makes me feel like zoo dirt, since I helped put her and her child in this predicament. If she knew that, she would probably be trying to choke the life from me. And I would probably let her.

Actual class struggles apart, one of the aesthetic ways you could prove that there was a class system in America was by cogitating on the word, or acronym, 'WASP.' First minted by E. Digby Baltzell in his book The Protestant Establishment , the term stood for 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.' Except that, as I never grew tired of pointing out, the 'W' was something of a redundancy (there being by definition no BASPs or JASPs for anyone to be confused with, or confused about). 'ASP,' on the other hand, lacked some of the all-important tone. There being so relatively few Anglo-Saxon Catholics in the United States, the 'S' [sic] was arguably surplus to requirements as well. But then the acronym AS would scarcely do, either. And it would raise an additional difficulty. If 'Anglo-Saxon' descent was the qualifying thing, which surely it was, then why were George Wallace and Jerry Falwell not WASPs? After all, they were not merely white and Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but very emphatic about all three things. Whereas a man like William F. Buckley, say, despite being a white Irish Catholic, radiated the very sort of demeanor for which the word WASP had been coined to begin with. So, for the matter of that, did the dapper gentleman from Richmond, Virginia, Tom Wolfe. Could it be, then, that WASP was really a term of class rather than ethnicity? Q.E.D.

Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose. History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose." -from "Back in New Fire

The necessity of political struggle especially means confronting and contradicting those on the left who say that resistance is futile. Such people have no place in a movement for justice. For actionists who choose to work aboveground, this confrontation with detractors - and some of these detractors reject the idea of resistance of any kind - is one of the small, constant actions you can take. Defend the possibility of resistance, insist on a moral imperative of fighting for this planet, and argue for direct action against perpetrators. Despite what much of the left has now embraced, we are not all equally responsible. There are a few corporations that have turned the planet into a dead commodity for their private wealth, destroying human cultures along with it.

Science lectures dealt with social problems that still could be solved, not defunct political systems for which both the proponents and the opponents had died before my birth. Science didn't talk about books that had been written to analyze other books that had originally been written as retellings of ancient books; it talked about what was happening now and of a future that might yet be. The very attributes that rendered me a nuisance to all of my previous teachers - my inability to let things go coupled with my tendency to overdo everything - were exactly what my science professors liked to see. They accepted me despite the fact that I was just a girl, and assured me of what I already suspected: that my true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.

Lately I have come to believe that an as yet undiscovered human need and even a property of matter is the desire for revelation. The truth within us has a way of coming out despite all conscious efforts to conceal it. I have heard stories from those in the generation after the war, all speaking of the same struggle to ferret truth from the silence of their parents so that they themselves could begin to live.

You have to believe that your voice can mean something. You have to believe that what you do matters. And you have to keep going even on days you can't find that belief. If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of. You do it despite the doubts and the struggles. You do it because it's what you came here to do.
 That's what makes an artist.

Despite everything that has happened, regardless of the pain of their loss, despite all the other nonviolent peaceful warriors who suffered and sometimes fell, I have never once considered giving up or giving out. I could not let myself get lost in a sea of despair, because I had faith that the truth is bigger than all humanity. The tragedy of their loss was a crisis of faith, but in that struggle I discovered that you can kill a Medgar Evers or a Jimmie Lee Jackson. You can kill three civil rights workers named Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. You can bomb four innocent little girls in church on a Sunday morning. You can even kill three of the finest leaders of the twentieth century, but you cannot kill the truth they represented. The truth marches on; it is not connected to the life of any one individual. When a person dies, the dream does not die. You can kill a man, but the truth that he stood for will never die.

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.

To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you. A step below that is doing things well yourself, and worst of all is doing things poorly yourself. As I reflected on my position, I could see that despite all of my and Bridgewater’s amazing achievements, I had not achieved this highest level of success. In fact, I was still struggling to achieve the second-highest level (doing things well myself), even though Bridgewater was extremely successful.

Life is Chaos (The Sonnet) Best laid plans of mice and men, Often go awry leaving no hope. Just when you think you have control, Life throws you off course. All notions of order are a myth, Only order of the universe is chaos. Expand your sight and you'll realize, There is order in every chaos. A narrow mind is ever struggling, In the tangled web of order and chaos. A sapient mind works above the two, For their sight is fixed on a purpose. Focus on life, not on all its philosophy. Embrace the chaos and act despite insecurity.

Mary remained weeping for her friend Jesus who had been all the world to her, and whose death ad meant the loss of that world. With great courage to be alone, and great courage to love despite devastating loss, she struggled to carry on, hoping to find and rebury Jesus' missing body. Suddenly Jesus stood before her alive again, calling her name. She turned, reaching, and said "Rabbouni!" "Noli me tangere," he replied- "don't touch me." If the courage to be alone requires also the courage to love, the courage to love still does not overcome loneliness.

Screw all mental illness stigma. Having the courage to admit yourself for psychiatric care to heal is phenomenal. Shrugging off a panic attack is badass. Battling through intense spells of fatigue and demotivation is incredible. Going to the psychologist to attend to your mental health is a boss move. Achieving things despite having little to no interest or pleasure is impressive. Frequently practicing self-care is fantastic. Picking yourself up after hitting rock bottom is exceptional. Openly talking about your mental health struggles is courageous. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Michel’s death made my father question his faith, but it had the opposite effect on me. Amidst all the searing emotional pain I was feeling, I had a moment of revelation: despite all the torment and confusion we suffer in this valle lacrimarum, a divine sense of the universe exists, one we cannot comprehend. With this revelation came an oddly empowering sense that my life, like everyone else’s, is in God’s hands. This awareness hasn’t absolved me of the need to struggle for a better world and a better self, but it has helped me deal with things I cannot change, including death. It also helped reaffirm the core of the Christian beliefs I retain to this day.

Only date people who respect your standards and make you a better person when you’re with them. Consider the message of the movie A Walk to Remember. Landon Carter is the reckless leader who is skating through high school on his good looks and bravado. He and his popular friends at Beaufort High publicly ridicule everyone who doesn’t fit in, including the unfashionable Jamie Sullivan, who wears the same sweater day after day and gives free tutoring lessons to struggling students. By accident, events thrust Landon into Jamie’s world and he can’t help but notice that Jamie’s different. She doesn’t care about conforming and fitting in with the popular kids. Landon’s amazed at how sure of herself she seems and asks, “Don’t you care what people think about you?” As he spends more time with her, he realizes she has more freedom than he does because she isn’t controlled by the opinions of others, as he is. Soon, despite their intentions not to, they have fallen in love and Landon has to choose between his status at Beaufort...and Jamie. “This girl’s changed you,” his best friend yells, “and you don’t even know it.” Landon admits, “She has faith in me. She wants me to be better.” He chooses her. After high school graduation, Jamie reveals to Landon that she’s dying of leukemia. During her final months, Landon does all he can to make her dreams come true, including marrying her in the same church her mother and father were married in. They spend a wonderful summer together, truly in love. Despite Jamie’s dream for a miracle, she dies. Heartbroken, but inspired by Jamie’s belief in him, Landon works hard to go to medical school. But he laments to her father that he couldn’t fulfill her last desire, to see a miracle. Jamie’s father assures him that Jamie did see a miracle before she died, for someone’s heart had truly changed. And it was his. Now that’s a movie to remember! Never apologize for having high standards and don’t ever lower your standards to please someone else.

They don’t know about the lonely nights in a strange, often dirty, bed in some fleabag hotel on the other side of the world. Lying there for hours on end staring at the rusty ceiling fan that barely moves the air, doing little more than collecting dust. The heat and humidity clog up my head and the sweat streams down my chest despite feeble attempts to cool off. Nights when I struggle to get the aging computer called my mind, a late ‘70s model, to process all the new events and information collected in its memory during the day. Appalling images are engraved on my soul, leaving permanent scars. The nights are spent fixated on the memories that never die, like maggots eating at my brain. I was striving hard for routine.

My huge generalities touched on millennials’ oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their failure to consider anything within its context, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive positivity—incidentally, all of these misdemeanors happening only sometimes, not always, and possibly exacerbated by the meds many this age had been fed since childhood by overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move. These parents, whether tail-end baby boomers or Gen Xers, now seemed to be rebelling against their own rebelliousness because they felt they’d never really been loved by their own selfish narcissistic true-boomer parents, and who as a result were smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life’s hardships about how things actually work: people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And the response from Generation Wuss was to collapse into sentimentality and create victim narratives, instead of grappling with the cold realities by struggling and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was only ever a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy – it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense – but it has never been a Blue Water navy. Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 97 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 per cent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the USA, with concurrent costs. Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile. Two of the continent’s oldest countries, with the largest armies, have at times edged towards conflict over the region’s major source of water.

They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them. I see the possible futures, the breathing machines connected through a surgical opening in the neck, the pasty liquid dripping in through a hole in the belly, the possible long, painful, and only partial recovery—or, sometimes more likely, no return at all of the person they remember. In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle.

It developed gradually. Quietly. But I remember the moment I thought to myself, ‘Something is not right with my mind. Something is not right here.’ Admitting this was the first step in my recovery. I didn't need anyone to diagnose me with anxiety or depression to know that this was my struggle. I felt so attached to the feelings, the uncontrollable thoughts, the incessant fear, all of which dictated my everyday experience. I allowed my struggle to become my identity. I didn't know I had any other option. On good days, I feel hopeful. About life. About my recovery. On bad days, I spend my time thinking that life is no better than death. Despite the mental battles I face each day, I remain resilient. Not just for my loved ones, but for myself. Because deep down, I know I deserve it. The relationship I have with myself is one I refuse to give up so easily.

We remained there some time, then went back into the other galleries of the museum. In the interval more people had arrived, and it was now obvious that they did not really belong here. With pale faces and threadbare clothes, they wandered, hands behind their backs, rather diffidently through the rooms, with eyes that were seeing something far other than the Renaissance pictures and the still, marble antique figures. Many were sitting on the red upholstered seats that were placed around. They sat wearily there, as if prepared to stand up at once, should anyone come to move them on. You could see in their attitudes that upholstered seats were something which it was quite incredible it should cost nothing to sit on. They were used to receiving nothing for nothing. It was very quiet in all the rooms, and despite all the visitors one hardly heard a word; and yet it seemed to me as if I were looking on at an enormous struggle—the soundless struggle of men who were stricken down, but did not mean to give in yet. They had been thrown out from the fields of their work, their striving, their callings; now they had come into the quiet rooms of Art, in order not to fall into paralysis and despair. They were thinking of bread, always and only of bread and occupation; but they came here to escape from their thoughts for a few hours—and amongst the clean-cut Roman heads and the imperishable grace of white, Greek female figures they wandered around with the dragging gait, the bowed shoulders of men who have no purpose—a shocking contrast, a cheerless picture of what humanity had been able, and unable, to achieve in a thousand years—the summit of eternal works of art, but not even bread enough for each of their brothers.

I'd carry you," he added, "but I'd have to get you declawed first." "Don't count on it," I replied. Sage did an exaggerated stretch. "In the meantime, I think we should all get some sleep." He sprawled out across the dirt floor. "Good night." He shut his eyes and was perfectly still. There was no chance he was asleep already, but Ben spoke his mind anyway. He pulled me aside just the slightest bit and sneered down at Sage. "I don't like any of this, Clea." "Really? Because when he started talking about the Elixir of Life, I thought the two of you were ready to become blood brothers." "I believe in the Elixir," Ben said. "Enough that I want to believe Sage's story. I just don't now if we can. And we still can't explain the pictures. I don't trust him." "I don't care, Ben. Dad trusted him. And Sages plan is my best shot at finding him alive." "I guess. Just..." Ben took a moment to put together his next words. "Be careful around him, okay? I feel like..." I waited, but he wasn't going to finish. "Feel like what?" "Nothing. I'm here for you. You know that, right?" I could see him struggling. It was like he was trying to tell me something monumental, but the words that came out weren't doing it justice. He sprawled out on the cave floor as far away from Sage as he could, and patted his chest. "Need a pillow? It's not really in my job description, but I'm happy to offer." He pinched a corner of his shirt between two fingers. "Cotton twill. Very soft." I forced a laugh. "I'm okay. Thanks." I curled up on the cave floor in between the two guys. Despite everything, I could already feel myself drifting away. "Clea?" It was Ben's voice, now right next to my ear, but I was to tired to turn and respond. I think I managed a "Hmm?" but that might have been in my head. "Good night," he said, then I heard him lie back down.

I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential. If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees. When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event

Through the dimness she could just make him out, stretched on his back, his arms crossed behind his head. He might have been silent, but he hadn't been asleep. She could feel his frown as he looked at her. "What are you doing?" "Moving closer to you." Dropping her gowns, she shook out her cloak and laid it next to his. "Why?" "Mice." He let a heartbeat pass, then asked, carefully, "You're afraid of mice?" She nodded. "Rodents. I don't discriminate." Swinging around, she sat on her cloak, then picked up her gowns and wriggled back and closer to him. "If I'm next to you, then either they'll give us both a wide berth, or if they decide to take a nibble, there's at least an even chance they'll nibble you first." His chest shook. He was struggling not to laugh. But at least he was trying. "Besides," she said, lying down and snuggling under her massed gowns, "I'm cold." A moment ticked past, then he sighed. He shifted in the hay beside her. She didn't know what he did, but suddenly she was sliding the last inches down a slope that hadn't been there before. She fetched up against him, against his side-hard, muscled, and wonderfully warm. Her senses leapt greedily, pleasantly shocked, delightedly surprised; she caught her breath and slapped them down. Desperately; this was Breckenridge-this was definitely not the time. His arm shifted and came around her, cradling her shoulders and gathering her against him. "This doesn't mean anything." The whispered words drifted down to her. Comfort, safety, warmth-it meant all those things. "I know," she murmured back. Her senses weren't listening. Her body now lay alongside his. Her breast brushed his side; through various layers her thighs grazed his. Her heartbeat deepened, sped up a little, too. Yet despite the sensual awareness, she could feel reassurance along with his warmth stealing through her, relaxing her tensed muscles bit by bit as, greatly daring, she settled her cheek on his chest. This doesn't mean anything. She knew what he meant. This was just for now, for this strange moment out of their usual lives in which he and she were just two people finding ways to weather a difficult situation. She quieted. Listened. The sound of his heartbeat, steady and sure, blocked out any rustlings. Thinking of the strange moment, of what made it so, she murmured, "We're fugitives, aren't we?" "Yes." "In a strange country, one not really our own, with no way to prove who we are." "Yes." "And a stranger, a very likely dangerous highlander, is pursuing us." "Hmm." She should feel frightened. She should be seriously worried. Instead, she closed her eyes, and with her cheek pillowed on Breckenridge's chest, his arm like warm steel around her, smoothly and serenely fell asleep. Breckenridge held her against him, and through senses far more attuned than he wished, followed the incremental falling away of her tension...until she slept. Softly, silently, in his arms, with the gentle huff of her breathing ruffling his senses, the seductive weight of her slender body stretched out against his the subtlest of tortures. Why had he done it? She might have slept close to him, but she would never have pushed to sleep in his arms. That had been entirely his doing, and he hadn't even stopped to think. What worried him most was that even if he had thought, had reasoned and debated, the result would have been the same. When it came to her, whatever the situation, there never was any question, no doubt in his mind as to what he should do. Her protection, her safety-caring for her. From the first instant he'd laid eyes on her four years ago, that had been his mind's fixation. Its decision. Nothing he'd done, nothing she'd done, had ever succeeded in altering that. But as to the why of that, the reason behind it...even now he didn't, was quite certain and absolutely sure he didn't, need to consciously know.

In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle. Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought. — With my renewed focus, informed consent—the ritual by which a patient signs a piece of paper, authorizing surgery—became not a juridical exercise in naming all the risks as quickly as possible, like the voiceover in an ad for a new pharmaceutical, but an opportunity to forge a covenant with a suffering compatriot: Here we are together, and here are the ways through—I promise to guide you, as best as I can, to the other side.

My confusion about the separation between the servant class and the upper middle class revealed a quintessentially American point of view. Status is much more fluid in America, at least within the wide range of the population that can loosely be characterized as middle-class. I wait tables at a restaurant, and after my shift is over, I go out to a lounge and someone waits on me. Even if I get a graduate degree and earn a six-figure salary, I don’t treat waiters like a permanently lower class. After all, I was one and know what it feels like. And who knows when someone serving me in this restaurant will get their own graduate degree and be my boss. Better to be friendly. My “American-ness” was starting to stare me in the face in India: not the America of big-screen televisions and Hummers, but the America that, despite its constant failings, managed to inculcate in its citizens a set of humanizing values—the dignity of labor, the fundamental equality of human beings, mobility based on drive and talent, the opportunity to create and contribute.

There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: what must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition of the Christian nations. For example, in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and especially Rousseau. But in more recent times, since Hegel's assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards. The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzche's half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others. Turgenev made the witty remark that there are inverse platitudes, which are frequently employed by people lacking in talent who wish to attract attention to themselves. Everyone knows, for instance, that water is wet, and someone suddenly says, very seriously, that water is dry, not that ice is, but that water is dry, and the conviction with which this is stated attracts attention. Similarly, the whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the superman, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of the pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love - virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the ideas of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would later observe that “Souls are not saved in bundles.”16 Johnson fervently believed in each individual’s mysterious complexity and inherent dignity. He was, through it all, a moralist, in the best sense of that term. He believed that most problems are moral problems. “The happiness of society depends on virtue,” he would write. For him, like other humanists of that age, the essential human act is the act of making strenuous moral decisions. He, like other humanists, believed that literature could be a serious force for moral improvement. Literature gives not only new information but new experiences. It can broaden the range of awareness and be an occasion for evaluation. Literature can also instruct through pleasure. Today many writers see literature and art only in aesthetic terms, but Johnson saw them as moral enterprises. He hoped to be counted among those writers who give “ardor to virtue and confidence to truth.” He added, “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better.” As Fussell puts it, “Johnson, then, conceives of writing as something very like a Christian sacrament, defined in the Anglican catechism as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us.’ ” Johnson lived in a world of hack writers, but Johnson did not allow himself to write badly—even though he wrote quickly and for money. Instead, he pursued the ideal of absolute literary honesty. “The first step to greatness is to be honest” was one of Johnson’s maxims. He had a low but sympathetic view of human nature. It was said in Greek times that Demosthenes was not a great orator despite his stammer; he was a great orator because he stammered. The deficiency became an incentive to perfect the associated skill. The hero becomes strongest at his weakest point. Johnson was a great moralist because of his deficiencies. He came to understand that he would never defeat them. He came to understand that his story would not be the sort of virtue-conquers-vice story people like to tell. It would be, at best, a virtue-learns-to-live-with-vice story. He wrote that he did not seek cures for his failings, but palliatives. This awareness of permanent struggle made him sympathetic to others’ failings. He was a moralist, but a tenderhearted one.

From another corner of neuroscience, we’re learning about a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Though there are more than fifty neurotransmitters (that we know of), scientists studying substance problems have given dopamine much of their attention. The brain’s reward system and pleasure centers—the areas most impacted by substance use and compulsive behaviors—have a high concentration of dopamine. Some brains have more of it than others, and some people have a capacity to enjoy a range of experiences more than others, owing to a combination of genetics and environment. The thing about dopamine is that it makes us feel really good. We tend to want more of it. It is naturally generated through ordinary, pleasurable activities like eating and sex, and it is the brain’s way of rewarding us—or nature’s way of rewarding the brain—for activities necessary to our survival, individually or as a species. It is the “mechanism by which ‘instinct’ is manifest.” Our brains arrange for dopamine levels to rise in anticipation and spike during a pleasurable activity to make sure we do it again. It helps focus our attention on all the cues that contributed to our exposure to whatever felt good (these eventually become triggers to use, as we explain later). Drugs and alcohol (and certain behaviors) turn on a gushing fire hose of dopamine in the brain, and we feel good, even euphoric. Dopamine produced by these artificial means, however, throws our pleasure and reward systems out of whack immediately. Flooding the brain repeatedly with dopamine has long-term effects and creates what’s known as tolerance—when we lose our ability to produce or absorb our own dopamine and need more and more of it artificially just to feel okay. Specifically, the brain compensates for the flood of dopamine by decreasing its own production of it or by desensitizing itself to the neurotransmitter by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, or both. The brain is just trying to keep a balance. The problem with the brain’s reduction in natural dopamine production is that when you take the substance or behavior out of the picture, there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to make you feel good. Without enough dopamine, there is no interest or pleasure. Then not only does the brain lose the pleasure associated with using, it might not be able to enjoy a sunset or a back rub, either. A lowered level of dopamine, combined with people’s longing for the rush of dopamine they got from using substances, contributes to “craving” states. Cravings are a physiological process associated with the brain’s struggle to regain its normal dopamine balance, and they can influence a decision to keep using a substance even when a person is experiencing negative consequences that matter to him and a strong desire to change. Depending on the length of time and quantities a person has been using, these craving states can be quite uncomfortable and compelling. The dopamine system can and does recover, starting as soon as we stop flooding it. But it takes time, and in the time between shutting off the artificial supply of dopamine and the brain’s rebuilding its natural resources, people tend to feel worse (before they feel better). On a deep, instinctual level, their brains are telling them that by stopping using, something is missing; something is wrong. This is a huge factor in relapse, despite good intentions and effort to change. Knowing this can help you and your loved one make it across this gap in brain reward systems.

Don’t worry,” he said flippantly, taking her arm and starting to walk back toward the house. “I’m not going to make the ritualistic proposal that followed our last encounters. Marriage is out of the question. Among other things, I’m fresh out of large rubies and expensive furs this season.” Despite his joking tone, Elizabeth felt ill at how ugly those words sounded now, even though her reasons for saying them at the time had nothing to do with a desire for jewels or furs. You had to give him credit, she decided miserably, because he obviously took no offense at it. Evidently, in sophisticated flirtations, the rule was that no one took anything seriously. “Who’s the leading contender these days?” he asked in that same light tone as the cottage came into view. “There must be more than Belhaven and Marchman.” Elizabeth struggled valiantly to make the same transition from heated passion to flippancy that he seemed to find so easy. She wasn’t quite so successful, however, and her light tone was threaded with confusion. “In my uncle’s eyes, the leading contender is whoever has the most important title, followed by the most money.” “Of course,” he said dryly. “In which case it sounds as if Marchman may be the lucky man.” His utter lack of caring made Elizabeth’s heart squeeze in an awful, inexplicable way. Her chin lifted in self-defense. “Actually, I’m not in the market for a husband,” she informed him, trying to sound as indifferent and as amused as he. “I may have to marry someone if I can’t continue to outmaneuver my uncle, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d like to marry a much older man than I.” “Preferably a blind one,” he said sardonically, “who’ll not notice a little affair now and then?” “I meant,” she informed him with a dark glance, “that I want my freedom. Independence. And that is something a young husband isn’t likely to give me, while an elderly one might.” “Independence is all an old man will be able to give you,” Ian said blntly. “That’s quite enough,” she said. “I’m excessively tired of being forever pushed about by the men in my life. I’d like to care for Havenhurst and do as I wish to do.” “Marry an old man,” Ian interjected smoothly, “and you may be the last of the Camerons.” She looked at him blankly. “He won’t be able to give you children.” “Oh, that,” Elizabeth said, feeling a little defeated and nonplussed. “I haven’t been able to work that out yet.” “Let me know when you do,” Ian replied with biting sarcasm. “There’s a fortune to be made from a discovery like that one.

You didn’t tell me,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I didn’t…” I shake my head. “I didn’t know how to.” He scowls. “It’s pretty easy, Tris--” “Oh yeah,” I say, nodding. “It’s so easy. All I have to do is go up to you and say, ‘By the way, I shot Will, and now guilt is ripping me to shreds, but what’s for breakfast?’ Right? Right?” Suddenly it is too much, too much to contain. Tears fill my eyes, and I yell, “Why don’t you try killing one of your best friends and then dealing with the consequences?” I cover my face with my hands. I don’t want him to see me sobbing again. He touches my shoulder. “Tris,” he says, gently this time. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pretend that I understand. I just meant that…” He struggles for a moment. “I wish you trusted me enough to tell me things like that.” I do trust you, is what I want to say. But it isn’t true--I didn’t trust him to love me despite the terrible things I had done. I don’t trust anyone to do that, but that isn’t his problem; it’s mine. “I mean,” he says, “I had to find out that you almost drowned in a water tank from Caleb. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?” Just when I was about to apologize. I wipe my cheeks hard with my fingertips and stare at him. “Other things seem stranger,” I say, trying to make my voice light. “Like finding out that your boyfriend’s supposedly dead mother is still alive by seeing her in person. Or overhearing his plans to ally with the factionless, but he never tells you about it. That seems a little strange to me.” He takes his hand from my shoulder. “Don’t pretend this is only my problem,” I say. “If I don’t trust you, you don’t trust me either.” “I thought we would get to those things eventually,” he says. “Do I have to tell you everything right away?” I feel so frustrated I can’t even speak for a few seconds. Heat fills my cheeks. “God, Four!” I snap. “You don’t want to have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can’t you see how stupid that is?” “First of all, don’t use that name like a weapon against me,” he says, pointing at me. “Second, I was not making plans to ally with the factionless; I was just thinking it over. If I had made a decision, I would have said something to you. And third, it would be different if you had actually intended to tell me about Will at some point, but it’s obvious that you didn’t.” “I did tell you about Will!” I say. “That wasn’t truth serum; it was me. I said it because I chose to.” “What are you talking about?” “I was aware. Under the serum. I could have lied; I could have kept it from you. But I didn’t, because I thought you deserved to know the truth.” “What a way to tell me!” he says, scowling. “In front of over a hundred people! How intimate!” “Oh, so it’s not enough that I told you; it has to be in the right setting?” I raise my eyebrows. “Next time should I brew some tea and make sure the lighting is right, too?” Tobias lets out a frustrated sound and turns away from me, pacing a few steps. When he turns back, his cheeks are splotchy. I can’t remember ever seeing his face change color before. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “it isn’t easy to be with you, Tris.” He looks away. I want to tell him that I know it’s not easy, but I wouldn’t have made it through the past week without him. But I just stare at him, my heart pounding in my ears. I can’t tell him I need him. I can’t need him, period--or really, we can’t need each other, because who knows how long either of us will last in this war? “I’m sorry,” I say, all my anger gone. “I should have been honest with you.” “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” He frowns. “What else do you want me to say?” He just shakes his head. “Nothing, Tris. Nothing.” I watch him walk away. I feel like a space has opened up within me, expanding so rapidly it will break me apart.

You didn’t tell me,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I didn’t…” I shake my head. “I didn’t know how to.” He scowls. “It’s pretty easy, Tris--” “Oh yeah,” I say, nodding. “It’s so easy. All I have to do is go up to you and say, ‘By the way, I shot Will, and now guilt is ripping me to shreds, but what’s for breakfast?’ Right? Right?” Suddenly it is too much, too much to contain. Tears fill my eyes, and I yell, “Why don’t you try killing one of your best friends and then dealing with the consequences?” I cover my face with my hands. I don’t want him to see me sobbing again. He touches my shoulder. “Tris,” he says, gently this time. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pretend that I understand. I just meant that…” He struggles for a moment. “I wish you trusted me enough to tell me things like that.” I do trust you, is what I want to say. But it isn’t true--I didn’t trust him to love me despite the terrible things I had done. I don’t trust anyone to do that, but that isn’t his problem; it’s mine. “I mean,” he says, “I had to find out that you almost drowned in a water tank from Caleb. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?” Just when I was about to apologize. I wipe my cheeks hard with my fingertips and stare at him. “Other things seem stranger,” I say, trying to make my voice light. “Like finding out that your boyfriend’s supposedly dead mother is still alive by seeing her in person. Or overhearing his plans to ally with the factionless, but he never tells you about it. That seems a little strange to me.” He takes his hand from my shoulder. “Don’t pretend this is only my problem,” I say. “If I don’t trust you, you don’t trust me either.” “I thought we would get to those things eventually,” he says. “Do I have to tell you everything right away?” I feel so frustrated I can’t even speak for a few seconds. Heat fills my cheeks. “God, Four!” I snap. “You don’t want to have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can’t you see how stupid that is?” “First of all, don’t use that name like a weapon against me,” he says, pointing at me. “Second, I was not making plans to ally with the factionless; I was just thinking it over. If I had made a decision, I would have said something to you. And third, it would be different if you had actually intended to tell me about Will at some point, but it’s obvious that you didn’t.” “I did tell you about Will!” I say. “That wasn’t truth serum; it was me. I said it because I chose to.” “What are you talking about?” “I was aware. Under the serum. I could have lied; I could have kept it from you. But I didn’t, because I thought you deserved to know the truth.” “What a way to tell me!” he says, scowling. “In front of over a hundred people! How intimate!” “Oh, so it’s not enough that I told you; it has to be in the right setting?” I raise my eyebrows. “Next time should I brew some tea and make sure the lighting is right, too?” Tobias lets out a frustrated sound and turns away from me, pacing a few steps. When he turns back, his cheeks are splotchy. I can’t remember ever seeing his face change color before. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “it isn’t easy to be with you, Tris.” He looks away. I want to tell him that I know it’s not easy, but I wouldn’t have made it through the past week without him. But I just stare at him, my heart pounding in my ears. I can’t tell him I need him. I can’t need him, period--or really, we can’t need each other, because who knows how long either of us will last in this war? “I’m sorry,” I say, all my anger gone. “I should have been honest with you.” “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” He frowns. “What else do you want me to say?” He just shakes his head. “Nothing, Tris. Nothing.” I watch him walk away. I feel like a space has opened up within me, expanding so rapidly it will break me apart.

Imagine the upside-down triangle formed by the Anatolian plateau in the west, the Mesopotamian plain in the east, and the Egyptian valley in the south. Squeeze the sides of that triangle between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian desert, and there in the Levantine narrows is tiny Israel. It was the hinge of the three then-known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was the corridor, cockpit, and cauldron of imperial competition. With warring superpowers first to the north and south, then to the west and east, invasion for Israel was inescapable and defeat inevitable—despite Deuteronomy 28. If Israel had spent all of its life on its knees praying, the only change in its history would have been to have died—on its knees praying. It is a crime against both humanity and divinity to tell a people so located that a military defeat is a punishment from God. This holds also, but for different reasons, on disease and drought, famine and even earthquake. No wonder, therefore, that Israel’s Psalter is filled with cries for forgiveness and pleas for mercy. External invasions, internal famines, and any other disasters were not divine punishments for how the people of Israel lived its covenantal life with God, but human consequences of where the nation of Israel lived it.

For amid that unique suffering invoked by severe brain damage, the suffering often felt more by families than patients, it is not merely the physicians who do not see the full significance. The families who gather around their beloved--their beloved whose sheared heads contain battered brains--do not usually recognize the full significance, either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them. I see the possible futures, the breathing machines connected through a surgical opening in the neck, the pasty liquid dripping in through a hole in the belly, the possible long, painful, and only partial recovery--or, sometimes more likely, no return at all of the person they remember. In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death's enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew--the full, vital independent human--now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle. Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I'd sought.

was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”20 At around that time, our neighbor—one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends—registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a voucher to rent housing. Mamaw’s friend had little luck renting his property, but when he qualified his house for the Section 8 voucher, he virtually assured that would change. Mamaw saw it as a betrayal, ensuring that “bad” people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values. Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry. From that anger sprang Bonnie Vance the social policy expert: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job”; “I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood.” She’d rant against the people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

The Cost and Expectation of Leadership Leviticus 7:33–35 Aaron, like many leaders throughout history, received a divine calling. God chose Aaron and his sons to serve as Israel’s priests and charged them with carrying out rituals and sacrifices on behalf of all Israelites. Scripture gives meticulous detail to their ordination and calling. Their conduct was to be beyond reproach—and God made it crystal clear that failure to uphold His established guidelines would result in death. Numerous accounts in the Book of Leviticus demonstrate the high cost and expectation that goes with a holy calling to leadership positions. As the high priest, Aaron was the only one authorized to enter the Most Holy Place and appear before the very presence of God. The Lord set Aaron apart for his holy work. Despite his high calling, Aaron struggled with his authority and later caved in to the depraved wishes of the people. He failed at a crucial juncture and led Israel in a pagan worship service, an abomination that led to the deaths of many Israelites. Aaron had been set apart for God’s service, but he chose to live and lead otherwise. The failure of a leader usually results in consequences far more grave than the fall of a non-leader. On the day Aaron failed, “about three thousand men of the people fell [died]” (Ex. 32:28). When leaders fail, followers pay the price.

The reality [of what life was like for the whole of our species for at least 90 percent of its history] was very different to the traditional Western image of such people as uncultured 'savages', living hard and miserable lives in 'a state of nature', with a bitter and bloody struggle to wrest a livelihood matched by a 'war of all against all', which made life 'nasty, brutish and short'. People lived in loose-knit groups of 30 or 40 which might periodically get together with other groups in bigger gatherings of up to 200. But life in such 'band societies' was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more 'civilised' agricultural or industrial societies. One eminent anthropologist has even called them 'the original affluent society'. ...An early Jesuit missionary noted of another hunter-gathering people, the Montagnais of Canada, 'The two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans do not reign in their great forests--I mean ambition and avarice...not one of them has given himself to the devil to acquire wealth'. ...Richard Lee is quite right to insist: "It is the long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past. Despite our seeming adaptation to life in hierarchical societies, and despite the rather dismal track record of human rights in many parts of the world, there are signs that humankind retains a deep-rooted sense of egalitarianism, a deep-rooted commitment to the norm of reciprocity, a deep-rooted...sense of community.

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

Sometimes it takes a knock in life to make us sit up and grab life. And I had just undergone the mother of all knocks. But out of that despair, fear, and struggle came a silver lining--and I didn’t even know it yet. What I did know was that I needed something to give me back my hope. My sparkle. My life. I found that something in my Christian faith, in my family, and also in my dreams of adventure. My Christian faith says that I have nothing ever to fear or worry about. All is well. At that time, in and out of hospital, it reminded me that, despite the pain and despair, I was held and loved and blessed--my life was secure through Jesus Christ. That gift of grace has been so powerful to me ever since. My family said something very similar: “Bear, you are an idiot, but we love you anyway, forever and always.” That meant the world to me and gave me back some of the confidence that I was struggling to find again. Finally, I had my not insubstantial dreams of adventure. And those dreams were beginning to burn bright once more. You see, I figure that life is a gift. I was learning that more than anyone. My mum always taught me to be grateful for gifts. And as I slowly began to recover my strength and confidence, I realized that what mattered was doing something bold with that present. A gift buried under a tree is wasted. Alone one night in bed, I made a verbal, out-loud, conscious decision, that if I recovered well enough to be able to climb again, then I would get out there and follow those dreams to the max. Cliché? To me it was my only hope. I was choosing to live life with both arms open--I would grab life by the horns and ride it for all it was worth. Life doesn’t often give us second chances. But if it does, be bloody grateful. I vowed I would always be thankful to my father in heaven for having somehow helped me along this rocky road.

Despite the struggle, every face is full of joy, a joy that comes from giving of themselves, and I am at the center of it all. I can’t stop smiling. They say it is better to give than to receive, but right now the gift I am receiving is incredible, indescribable. This is one of the most humbling experiences of my entire life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Back home, I have an inner circle of people whom I trust enough to do all the things I can no longer do. Kirstin and Patrick are the two at the very center of this circle. I didn’t go into my marriage thinking that one day my wife would have to feed me and brush my teeth. I never thought that one day I would ask my best friend to hold a urinal steady so I could pee, or wipe my backside because I could no longer hold toilet paper or reach. But this is now my reality. The first time I asked Patrick to help me use the bathroom, I hated it. I felt like I was a burden. Part of me was back on my front porch, questioning God. But Patrick, just like Kirstin, has never thought twice. He has always been happy to do whatever needs to be done. Just knowing that he can make my life a little easier brings him joy —the same joy I see on the faces of these people who are now carrying me up this incredibly steep mountain trail. Over the years, my pride has slowly been pushed aside as I have embraced all the things I can no longer do on my own, all the things others now have to do for me. I’m not sure who said it —or even where I heard it —but there’s a fundamental truth that has stayed with me over the years: “When you deny someone the opportunity to help you, you deny them joy in life.” I’ve had to embrace a lot of help over the past several years, and I have seen this truth play out in the lives of others time and time again. There is so much joy in giving, in helping others. A joy God intended for all of us to experience.

Forgive me I hope you are feeling better. I am, thank you. Will you not sit down? In vain I have struggled. It will not do! My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. In declaring myself thus I'm fully aware that I will be going expressly against the wishes of my family, my friends, and, I hardly need add, my own better judgement. The relative situation of our families is such that any alliance between us must be regarded as a highly reprehensible connection. Indeed as a rational man I cannot but regard it as such myself, but it cannot be helped. Almost from the earliest moments of our acquaintance I have come to feel for you a passionate admiration and regard, which despite of my struggles, has overcome every rational objection. And I beg you, most fervently, to relieve my suffering and consent to be my wife. In such cases as these, I believe the established mode is to express a sense of obligation. But I cannot. I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I'm sorry to cause pain to anyone, but it was most unconsciously done, and, I hope, will be of short duration. And this is all the reply I am to expect? I might wonder why, with so little effort at civility, I am rejected. And I might wonder why, with so evident a desire to offend and insult me you chose to tell me that you like me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character! Was this not some excuse for incivility if I was uncivil? I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. Do you think any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has been the means of ruining the happiness of a most beloved sister? Can you deny that you have done it? I have no wish to deny it. I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, and I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself. But it's not merely that on which my dislike of you is founded. Long before it had taken place, my dislike of you was decided when I heard Mr Wickham's story of your dealings with him. How can you defend yourself on that subject? You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns! And of your infliction! You have reduced him to his present state of poverty, and yet you can treat his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule! And this is your opinion of me? My faults by this calculation are heavy indeed, but perhaps these offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by the honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design on you, had I concealed my struggles and flattered you. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly below my own? You are mistaken, Mr Darcy. The mode of your declaration merely spared me any concern I might have felt in refusing you had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner. You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it. From the very beginning, your manners impressed me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. I had known you a month before I felt you were the last man in the world whom I could ever marry! You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your feelings and now have only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Please forgive me for having taken up your time and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness. Forgive me. I hope you are feeling better. I am, thank you. Will you no

Capitalism needs an enemy. If a real one doesn’t exist, it simply creates one … “Marxism.” Since there is no political and economic Marxism in America, the American right have invented cultural Marxism to perform the role of ultimate “other”, the thing to be hated, feared and resisted. What they call cultural Marxism is in fact what sane people call liberal cultural capitalism, i.e. the culture associated with liberal capitalists rather than conservative capitalists. Of course, in the demented minds of the far right, liberalism is Marxism, which is why Barack Obama was routinely branded a Marxist by the far right, despite never espousing a Marxist sentiment in his entire life. Liberal views, multiculturalism, and political correctness are not Marxist. They are liberal. Why would anyone call them Marxist except to demonize them? No honest person would ever refer to them as anything other than liberal, but since when have the American far right ever been honest? Their game is always the same: to generate maximum hatred of anything that is not conservative, libertarian, Confederate, racist, white Supremacist, and Nazi. Marxism is quintessentially about class struggle, about the workers versus the owners, and the aim of producing a classless society where the people are fully in charge of their own lives, and are never the slaves of the masters. Liberalism, by contrast, does not focus on class struggle but on values, identities and “rights”, especially of minorities. Right wingers have confused liberal capitalism with Marxism. Of course, they have done this deliberately to demonize liberal capitalism in order to convert all capitalists to conservative capitalism. They only want to see conservative (right wing) capitalism, or libertarian (far right) capitalism. Everything else is to be routinely denounced as “Marxist.” It’s just the good old McCarthyite tactic – tried and tested over the decades – that right wingers love so much.

Godly grief readily confesses. After seeing your sin, and sorrowing over your sin, the worst thing you can do is to try stuffing your sin, hoping nobody ever finds out who you really are. Turns out, the best way to avoid being found out a fake is just not to be one—to be open with people about your struggles, while being equally as open in your praise of God for what He’s making of you, despite your many messes and problems. This is where the church comes in so beautifully, because it gets us around people who can help us carry the nagging issues of our hearts—people to whom we can confess our battles with sin and confess our need for a Savior—while we’re doing the same for them. When the only person that truly knows all about us is the person who uses our hairbrush, we are easy pickings for the Enemy, ripe for being outmaneuvered and outsmarted. That’s how we remain slaves to our repeated failures, by basically resisting the redeeming love of God and the needed, encouraging support of others. Because even if we’re as much as 99 percent known (or much less, as is more often the case) to our spouse, our friends, our family, and the people around us, we are still not fully known. We’re still hiding out. We’re still covering up. We don’t want them to know everything. But true sorrow over sin begs to be vented—both vertically to God and horizontally to others. So mark this down: You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you’re habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you’re a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest. Even Satan himself cannot succeed at clobbering you with condemnation when the stuff he’s accusing you of doing is the same stuff you’ve been honestly admitting before God and others and trusting the Lord for His help with. That’s some of the best action you can take against the sin in your life. That’s responsible repentance.

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.

There is also a still deeper reason for which a growth in the tensions in the human universe - and indeed not despite, but during the simultaneous spreading of universal-ethical principles - can be presumed. The ethically-normatively charged word "human" functioned linguistically as an honorific adjective so long a one demarcated it against other adjectives which seemed to indicate the merely historically determined, abolishable and to be abolished distinctions between humans; in the language of ethical universalism "human" always meant something nobler and higher than words like Jew or Greek, Christian or heathen, black or white, communist or liberal. If all particular counter concepts in respect of the universalism "human" cease to apply, the word "human" will no longer constitute an adjective, that is, it will no longer point to a higher quality, but it will be converted into a noun for the description of a certain animal species. Humans will all be called "humans" just as lions lions and mice - mice without further national or ideological differentiation. It may sound paradoxical and yet it is so, that man differentiated himself from all the other animal species exactly because he was not merely man free of all other attributes (i.e. without any other predicate or complement). Not only did culture come into being through the overcoming of bare humanness and the gradual attainment of historically determined attributes, but also altercations and the struggles between humans gained, thanks to the presence and the effect exactly of these attributes, emotional and ideological dimensions which went far beyond the what is merely animal. That is why it is not excluded that the reduction of man to his mere humanness will inaugurate and will accompany an epoch in which humans will have to fight against one another for goods which are absolutely necessary for the naked survival of the animal species "man" - in the worst case for air and water. In accordance with a well-known paradox of historical action, the imposition of universal ethics will then bring about effects entirely different to the originally intended effects.

The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.

Their Graces bought me, you know. They’d acquired my brother Devlin the year before, and my mother, inspired by this development, threatened to publish all manner of lurid memoirs regarding His Grace.” Acquired her brother? As if he were a promising yearling colt or an attractive patch of ground? “You are going to burden me with the details of your family past, I take it?” “You are the man who glories in details.” Without the least rude inflection, she made it sound like a failing. “My point is that my mother sold me. She could just as easily have sold me to a brothel. It’s done all the time. Unlike your sisters, Mr. Hazlit, I do not take for granted the propriety with which I was raised. You may ignore it if you please; I will not.” She had such a lovely voice. Light, soft, lilting with a hint of something Gaelic or Celtic… exotic. The sound of her voice was so pretty, it almost disguised the ugliness of her words. “How old were you?” “Five, possibly six. It depends on whether I am truly Moreland’s by-blow or just a result of my mother’s schemes in his direction.” Six years old and sold to a brothel? The food he’d eaten threatened to rebel. “I’m… sorry.” For calling her a dollymop, for making her repeat this miserable tale, for what he was about to suggest. She turned her head to regard him, the slight sheen in her eyes making him sorrier still. Sorrier than he could recall being about anything in a long, long time. Not just guilty and ashamed, but full of regret—for her. The way he’d been full of regret for his sisters and powerless to do anything but support them in their solitary struggles. He shoved that thought aside, along with the odd notion that he should take Magdalene Windham’s hand in some laughable gesture of comfort. He passed her his handkerchief instead. “This makes the stated purpose of my call somewhat awkward.” “It makes just about everything somewhat awkward,” she said quietly. “Try a few years at finishing school when you’re the daughter of not just a courtesan—there are some of those, after all—but a courtesan who sells her offspring. I realized fairly early that my mother’s great failing was not a lack of virtue, but rather that she was greedy in her fall from grace.” “She exploited a child,” Hazlit said. “That is an order of magnitude different from parlaying with an adult male in a transaction of mutual benefit.” “Do you think so?” She laid his handkerchief out in her lap, her fingers running over his monogrammed initials. “Some might say she was protecting me, providing for me and holding the duke accountable for his youthful indiscretions.” Despite her mild tone, Hazlit didn’t think Miss Windham would reach those conclusions. She might long to, but she wouldn’t. By the age of six a child usually had the measure of her caretakers. And to think of Maggie Windham at six… big innocent green eyes, masses of red hair, perfect skin… in a brothel. “I

Unqualified Champions Consider these individuals from the Bible. Each person was aware of a personal shortcoming which should have rendered him disqualified for service. God, however, saw champion potential … Moses struggled with a speech impediment: “Then Moses said to the LORD, ‘Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’” (Exodus 4:10). Yet God served as Moses’ source of strength. God used him to deliver the Israelites from bondage. Jeremiah considered himself too young to deliver a prophetic message to an adult population: “Then I said, ‘Alas, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, because I am a youth’” (Jeremiah 1:6). God’s reply: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” (Jeremiah 1:8). Isaiah, whose encouragement I quoted earlier, had reservations of his own. Perhaps his vocabulary reflected my own—especially my vocabulary as a teenager: “I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Despite Isaiah’s flaws, God saw him as a man He could use to provide guidance to the nation of Judah. Paul the Apostle had, in his past, persecuted the very people to whom God would send him later. To most of us, Paul’s track record would disqualify him for use. But God brought change to Paul’s heart and redemption to his fervency. Samson squandered his potential through poor life choices. As I read about him, I can’t help but think, “The guy acted like a spoiled brat.” But God had placed a call on his life. Though Samson sank to life’s darkest depths—captors blinded him and placed him in slavery—at the end of his life, he turned his heart toward God and asked to be used for God’s purposes. God used Samson to bring deliverance to the Israelites. Do you feel like the least qualified, the least important, the least regarded? Perhaps your reward is yet to come. God has high regard for those who are the least. Jesus said, “For the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great” (Luke 9:48) and “But many who are first will be last; and the last, first” (Matthew 19:30). If heaven includes strategic positioning among God’s people, which I believe it will, that positioning will be ego-free and based on a humble heart. Those of high position in God’s eyes don’t focus on position. They focus on hearts: their own hearts before God, and the hearts of others loved by God. When we get to heaven, I believe many people’s positions of responsibility will surprise us. What if, in heaven, the some of today’s most accomplished individuals end up reporting to someone who cried herself to sleep at night—yet kept her heart pure before God? According to Jesus in Matthew 6:5, some rewards are given in full before we reach heaven. When He spoke those words, He referred to hypocritical religious leaders as an example. Could we be in for a heavenly surprise? I believe many who are last today—the ultimate servants—will be first in heaven. God sees things differently than we do.

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

The biblical King David was also a sacred shepherd. His sensual and ecstatic songs of earthly love, so untypical of the Bible, derive from the ancient love rites of the shepherd king and the Goddess—her Canaanite names were Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth. The settled people of the Old Testament, like everyone else in the Near East, practiced Goddess worship. The Old Testament is the record of the conquest and massacre of these Neolithic people by the nomadic Hebrews, followers of a Sky God, who then set up their biblical God in the place of the ancient Goddess. The biblical Hebrews were a nomadic pastoral and patriarchal people, tribes of sheepherders and warriors who invaded land belonging to the matriarchal Canaanites. Both Hebrews and Canaanites were Semitic people. The Canaanites lived in agricultural communities and worshiped the orgiastic-ecstatic Moon Mother Astarte. As Old Testament stories relate, the Hebrews sacked, burned, and destroyed village after village belonging to the Canaanites, massacring or enslaving the people—a series of brutal invasions and slaughters described typically by theologians and preachers as “a spiritual victory.” In this way the Hebrews established themselves on the land, along with the worship of their Sky-and-Thunder God Yahweh (Jehovah), calling themselves his “chosen people.” Yahweh’s male prophets and priests, however, despite their political victory over the Canaanites, had to carry on a continuous struggle and fulmination against their own people, who kept “backsliding” into worship of the Great Mother, the Goddess of all their Near Eastern neighbors. For she had originally been the Goddess of the Hebrews themselves. This constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil. Of the two sons of Eve and Adam, Cain was made the “evil brother” because he chose settled agriculture (matriarchal)—the “good brother” Abel was a nomadic pastoralist (patriarchal). The war against the Goddess is carried on by the prophets’ rantings against the “golden calf,” the “brazen serpents,” the “great harlot” and “Whore of Babylon” (the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar), against enchantresses, pythonic diviners, and those who practice witchcraft. It is in the prophets’ war against the Canaanite worship of “stone idols”—the Triple Moon Goddess worshiped as three horned pillars, or menhirs. One of her shrines was on Mount Sinai, which means “Mountain of the Moon.” Moses was commanded by “the Lord” to go forth and destroy these “idols”—who all had breasts. We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great “spiritual invention” of the religious leader Moses. This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess. Her universality has been duly noted by everyone who has ever studied the matter. “Monotheism, once thought to have been the invention of Moses or Akhnaton, was worldwide in the prehistoric and early historic world,” i.e., throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. As E. O. James wrote in The Cult of the Mother Goddess, “It seems that Evans was correct when he affirmed that it was a ‘monotheism in which the female form of divinity was supreme.” The original monotheism of the Goddess is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, “Almighty Yahweh, the god of Moses and the later Hebrews, was originally a goddess.” His name, Iahu ’anat, derives from that of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna.

Over Donald’s lifetime, as his failures mounted despite my grandfather’s repeated—and extravagant—interventions, his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he’s never been legitimate at all. This has never been more true than it is now, and it is exactly the conundrum our country finds itself in: the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.

His belief in the experimental method led him, despite his Franciscan vow of poverty, to raise huge sums to buy scientific instruments, alchemical equipment, and to collect unusual natural specimens—creating in effect Europe’s first laboratory. Bacon could also be scathing about the complacent ignorance of his own day. He once declared that he wanted every Latin edition of Aristotle burned because the translations were so inadequate. Above all, he excoriated the failure of the Church and universities to embrace the wisdom of the past, including Greek science. “The whole clergy is given up to pride, luxury, and avarice,” he writes at one point. “Their quarrels, their contentions, their vices are a scandal to laymen.” In short, the English Franciscan managed to anticipate the spirit of the Reformation as well as the scientific revolution.7

In the great and fundamental myths of ancient Egypt, the god Horus—often regarded as a precursor to Christ, historically and conceptually speaking137—experienced the same thing, when he confronted his evil uncle Set,*2 usurper of the throne of Osiris, Horus’s father. Horus, the all-seeing Egyptian falcon god, the Egyptian eye of supreme, eternal attention itself, has the courage to contend with Set’s true nature, meeting him in direct combat. In the struggle with his dread uncle, however, his consciousness is damaged. He loses an eye. This is despite his godly stature and his unparalleled capacity for vision. What would a mere man lose, who attempted the same thing? But perhaps he might gain in internal vision and understanding something proportional to what he loses in perception of the outside world.

If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees. When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump today possible.

I don’t do publicity, I never will. My entire body of works thrives despite the absolute absence of publicity. I write in silence, I publish in silence, I continue the struggle in silence - in silence and alone. I don't have an industry to back me up - all I have is my dream - the dream of an undivided world.

Despite all his intellectual struggles, and the deliberate search for an enlightened and tolerant liberalism, my father knew he was a victim and an involuntary representative of the prejudices of the dismal, antiquated and stagnant education he had received in the remote villages where he grew up.

She... her... He couldn't hold on to her name... it kept darting away from him... but he was aware of her soft presence, her voice like honey, her hands bestowing cool, sweet calm on his tortured body. But for all her softness, there was steel in her. She was unrelenting when it came time to dose him with medicines he didn't want. She made him sip water or broth despite his struggles to keep anything down. There was no bloody refusing her. This was a woman who would keep him anchored safely to the earth, to life, with the force of her will. During the worst of it, when Keir was maddened by suffocating heat, and every breath felt like someone was stabbing a peat knife into his chest, the woman packed ice around him, or bathed him all over with cool cloths. It mortified and infuriated him to lie there helpless and naked as a wee bairnie while she took care of his intimate needs, but he was too damned sick to do anything for himself. He needed her, both the softness and the steel.

Concentration camps, annihilation camps, emblems wherein the invisible has made itself visible forever. All the distinctive features of a civilization are revealed or laid bare (“Work liberates,” “rehabilitation through work”). Work, in societies where, indeed, it is highly valued as the materialist process whereby the worker takes power, becomes the ultimate punishment: no longer is it just a matter of exploitation or of surplus-value; labor becomes the point at which all value comes to pieces and the “producer,” far from reproducing at least his labor force, is no longer even the reproducer of his life. For work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. And the workplace is everywhere; worktime is all the time. When oppression is absolute, there is no more leisure, no more “free time.” Sleep is supervised. The meaning of work is then the destruction of work in and through work. But what if, as it has happened in certain commandos, labor consists of carrying stones at top speed from one spot and piling them up in another, and then in bringing them back at the run to the starring point (Langbein at Auschwitz; the same episode in the Gulag; Solzhenitsyn)? Then, no act of sabotage can cancel work, for its annulment is work’s own very purpose. And yet labor remains a meaning: it tends not only to destroy the worker, but more immediately to occupy, to harness and control him and at the same time perhaps to give him an awareness that to produce and not to produce amount to the same – that the one and the other alike are work – yet thereby it also makes the worker, whom it reduces to naught, aware that the society expressed in the labor camp is what he must struggle against even as he dies, even as he survives (lives on despite everything, beneath everything, beyond everything). Such survival is (also) immediate death, immediate acceptance of death in the refusal to die (I will not kill myself, because that would please them; thus I kill myself opposing them, I remain alive despite them).

Nancy Pelosi trailed the president as he circled the ballpark, then perched herself in the stands. As she watched Biden enjoy himself with abandon, her phone rang. It was Joe Manchin. Despite the noise of the crowd—and the fact there were cameras all around her—she went to work. “We have got to get this done, Joe.” Manchin wasn’t having it. “I don’t believe in entitlements,” he told her. Pelosi started to grow aggravated, but this wasn’t the time or place for either having a philosophical debate about the role of government or brokering a deal. She was shouting to make herself heard. To all the world, it looked as if she were chewing out whoever was on the other side of the conversation.

And then, in a moment, something changed. Perhaps he remembered something heard in his youth a long time ago: an ancient prophecy of the Chosen One who would bring balance to the Force. Perhaps the vague outlines of someone named Shmi and a Jedi named Qui-Gon struggled to the surface of his consciousness. The most powerful, the most repressed thought of all could have emerged from the darkness: Padmé…and her undying love for someone he once knew well. And despite all the terrible, unspeakable things he’d done in his life, he suddenly realized he could not stand by and allow the Emperor to kill their son. And in that moment, he was no longer Darth Vader. He was Anakin Skywalker.

Like a mother weaning a child, God dries up the feeling of satisfaction and takes away the pleasure in the things of God as well as in things of earth. We become wearied of both God and creature and are left with the painful feeling that we are not serving God or our neighbor properly. We no longer feel the enjoyment, good feelings, and security we used to feel. John says that if we endure and persevere in prayer to God and service to others despite the absence of all satisfaction, then we will begin to act with a new motivation - Christ's. The connection between satisfaction and our motivation to act will have been severed. We will then act and choose not because of the pleasure we bring ourselves but because of something higher, namely, a desire to be of help to everything and everybody in their struggle towards consummation and union in love, beauty, truth, and goodness.

spotted the ruins of an old temple. Hey, she thought, maybe this is a temple of Eros! She struggled up the steep cliffs until she reached the abandoned building. Sadly, it wasn’t a temple of Eros. Judging from the sheaves of wheat carved on the altar, and the amount of dirt on the floor, it was a temple of Demeter that hadn’t been used in decades. What was a temple to the grain goddess doing on a barren mountain in the middle of nowhere? I’m not sure, but Psyche looked at the dusty altar, the broken statues lying across the floor, the graffiti on the walls, and she thought, I can’t leave the place like this. It isn’t right. Despite all her problems, Psyche still respected the gods. She found some supplies in the janitor’s closet and spent a week

you have suffered from narcissistic abuse, it is common to experience constant flashbacks, almost like you are re-experiencing the entire trauma again. This can be very painful to deal with. Memories of trauma are involuntarily recalled despite you trying very hard not to recall them. This is because the memories are associated with trauma and can be caused by anything in the environment that resembles the event when the actual trauma occurred. The intrusive memories are extremely clear, making you feel like you are experiencing it all over again. You experience extreme fear because you feel like you are reliving the trauma.

Shinran’s understanding of Buddhism is all-embracing and comprehensive, offering a way of life that can be realized in the workaday world, as well as the religious experience that we are accepted and destined for enlightenment, despite the limitations we encounter constantly in our struggle for existence.

She struggled, but despite all her training, he was still bigger than her and a highly trained soldier.

Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times go by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balances has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.

life was a struggle between virtue and temptation, angels and devils, good and bad. But that wasn’t the case. The truth was, life was often a choice between bad and worse. Neither of those options felt good, but human beings were compelled to choose, hoping everything would turn out okay despite all evidence to the contrary.

All said and done, in our headstrong struggle for inclusion, we mustn't also underestimate everything we have achieved so far as a species. As a matter of fact, we've come a long way since our tribal days of division and discrimination. Let me show you how. World's most beloved poet, Mevlana Rumi, was a muslim - world's icon of civil rights, MLK, was a black person - world's greatest inspiration of science, Albert Einstein, was a German Jew - and most recently, as of 2023, PM of UK and VP of US, both are of Indian origin. So don't tell me, we've achieved nothing - don't tell me, there is no hope for integration! Integration is happening all over the world, despite the ancient impediments of intolerance and hate. Therefore, the question is not whether integration is possible - real question is, are you a part of that integration, or aren't you! Our home is planet earth - and here on earth, we all cry the same pain, smile the same joy, and live the same love.

They struggled to kiss each other despite being kept apart, their lips brushing air. Out of all the horrific sights Beatrice had seen that night, this was one of the worst.

606 My Jesus, despite Your graces, I see and feel all my misery. I begin my day with battle and end it with battle. As soon as I conquer one obstacle, ten more appear (69) to take its place. But I am not worried, because I know that this is the time of struggle, not peace. When the burden of the battle becomes too much for me, I throw myself like a child into the arms of the heavenly Father and trust I will not perish. O my Jesus, how prone I am to evil, and this forces me to be constantly vigilant. But I do not lose heart. I trust God’s grace, which abounds in the worst misery.

What it is, coming out of and entering into all of those people in a swirl of transubstantiation, is soul music, here taking a shape so stark that it makes the style, in the deepest sense of the word, turn around the record as if that seven-inch disc were the sun, with the first, struggling attempts in the 1950s to discover the music—Ray Charles’s “What Would I Do Without You,” the Chantels’ “If You Try,” the Five Keys’ “Dream On”—and the deep-soul records of the mid-’60s that can seem to take the style, now a form, as far as it could go—Irma Thomas’s “Wish Someone Would Care,” Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” Lonnie Mack’s “Why,” most of all Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna come”—the planets that circle it. And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way, an affirmation that remains even in the moment before suicide, as it can seem to be in “Wish Someone Would Care” and “Why,” each of these records can, in the moment in which you hear them, be the sun, and all the rest, “This Magic Moment” spinning with them, again mere planets, maybe even, someday, should they ever fade, and their lies speak more loudly than whatever truths they tell, written out of the book and taken down from the sky, like Pluto—except that once a song has gone into the ether, it never disappears.

Tell me what you’re hiding, what you’re harboring, what you don’t want the world to know about yourself for fear that it will be cast into light. Tell me about the times you couldn’t save yourself. Give me your broken parts, your fractured pieces, everything that’s weighed too heavily on the floor of your heart for you to ever reach down and reassemble. Tell me where you went the first time that you lost yourself. Tell me the ways in which you never came back. Give me a map with coordinates that lead into the deepest, most twisted corner of your soul where all of your unconquered demons still lurk. Let me see them. Let me reach out and touch them with my own trembling fingers, because I still can’t bear to face my own. Give me your shortcomings. Tell me the story of the first person you never became and all the ways in which you let him die. Tell me which regrets tear on your heartstrings and which unfulfilled dreams still take up residence under your skin. Show me the mountains you never conquered, the roads you never traversed, the battles you surrendered before ever setting foot upon enemy soil. Show me the things you never measured up to because there’s no war more wounding than the one we never waged and there’s no road more daunting than the one that we never walked down. Give me your struggles and impurities. Tell me about the worst thing you have ever done. Tell me about the regret that slithered under your skin and beat through your bloodstream like an unwelcome disease after you made the biggest mistake of your life. Tell me how it ripped straight into to your soul and took you over. Talk to me about the times you couldn’t look at yourself in the mirror or fall asleep at night because the malevolence and madness of your own mind kept you reeling. Give me your vices and misjudgments because I can match each one with my own. Tell me all the ways in which you’re scarred by your own capacity for darkness. Let me fall in love with your human parts – the battles you can’t fight, the wounds you can’t heal, all the ways in which you are not enough for yourself. Give me your joys and your pain in equal measure because you are the most brilliant and terrible mixture of both. I don’t want your good intentions and your well wishes. I want the whole of you, the depth of you, the breadth of all you are and the light that shines in between your broken parts. Let me fall in love with what you’re missing, what you’ve lost and what you’re still holding onto, through and despite all of it. Show me the things you haven’t lost along the way. And I will show you your own greatest strengths.

When it comes to smarts, adolescents like Jesse have plenty. What they lack, however, are some of the brain-based skills that we all need to plan and direct activities, to regulate behavior, and to make efficient and effective use of these smarts. The trouble does not show up in math or reading; rather, it shows up when they need to regulate their behavior to respond to the demands of a specific situation. Despite their good intentions, these adolescents can struggle with time management and organization.

At first, Mahalo garnered significant attention and traffic. At its high point, 14.1 million users worldwide visited the site monthly.[lxxxix] But over time, users began to lose interest. Although the payout of the bounties were variable, somehow users did not find the monetary rewards enticing enough. But as Mahalo struggled to retain users, another Q&A site began to boom. Quora, launched in 2010 by two former Facebook employees, quickly grew in popularity. Unlike Mahalo, Quora did not offer a single cent to anyone answering user questions. Why, then, have users stayed highly engaged with Quora, but not with Mahalo, despite its variable monetary rewards? In Mahalo’s case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right? Unfortunately, Mahalo had an incomplete understanding of its users’ drivers. Ultimately, the company found that people did not want to use a Q&A site to make money. If the trigger was a desire for monetary rewards, the user was better off spending their time earning an hourly wage. And if the payouts were meant to take the form of a game, like a slot machine, then the rewards came far too infrequently and were too small to matter. However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the variable reinforcement of recognition from peers proved to be much more frequent and salient motivators. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards. Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right variable reward to their intended behavior.

Somehow, though, Strachey and others on the vessel found the will to keep struggling, to fight for their lives though it seemed all was lost. Terrified now, the passengers forgot all class pretensions. Sir Thomas Gates and Admiral Somers and Captain Newport joined Ravens and Strachey and Rolfe and other crewmen and passengers in the half-flooded hold, where they began frantically searching the ship’s innards to find places where the planks had separated and seawater rushed in. Their chests heaving with exertion, their breathing ragged, their eyes wide with fear, they scrabbled in the dark, flooded belly of the pitching, rolling vessel, holding guttering candles high as they searched the ship’s ribs, the planks, every corner of the hold, listening to discover where the water was flowing in. “Many a weeping leak was this way found,” Strachey would later report. When a leak was found, Strachey or one of the others tried to stem the flow, using whatever was at hand. Perhaps one of the mariners, or possibly even Strachey himself, had heard how Magellan’s crew, almost a hundred years earlier, had used chunks of beef to stop leaks in the hull of their vessel as they sailed around the world. The Sea Venture’s crew tried the same remedy, using pieces of the beef taken on board in Plymouth to try to stop or slow the flow of water into the ship’s rapidly filling hold. But all, Strachey said, “was to no purpose.”10 The ship kept taking water despite the crew’s best efforts.

We need literature to remind us how like each other we are, despite our differences. Baldwin spoke beautifully about this: You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. In reality, in this very pragmatic sense, we all have limitations. There are borders within all of us, things that make us unalike. We come from separate nations. But when you read literature, you enter a republic of imagination that transcends time and space. So you are an African-American boy living in New York City, and you discovered that the person who best expresses you is a man who lived in Russia and has been dead a hundred years. That gives you a sense of hope, a sense of connection and camaraderie. It is one of those moments when you’re glad you’re human. This is why so many people will say that one book changed their whole life. Or writers talk about how reading a book made them want to become a writer.

The first stacked dolls better known as Russian Nesting Dolls, matryoshka dolls or Babushka Dolls, were first made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin. Much of the artistry is in the painting of the usual 5 dolls, although the world record is 51 dolls. Each doll, which when opened reveals a smaller doll of the same type inside ending with the smallest innermost doll, which is considered the baby doll and is carved from a single piece of wood. Frequently these dolls are of a woman, dressed in a full length traditional Russian peasant dress called a sarafan. When I served with the Military Intelligence Corps of the U.S.Army, the concept of onion skins was a similar metaphor used to denote that we were always encouraged to look beyond the obvious. That it was essential to delve deeper into a subject, so as to arrive at the essence of the situation or matter. This is the same principle I employed in writing my award winning book, The Exciting Story of Cuba. Although it can be considered a history book, it is actually a book comprised of many stories or vignettes that when woven together give the reader a view into the inner workings of the Island Nation, just 90 miles south of Key West. The early 1950’s are an example of this. At that time President Batista was hailed a champion of business interests and considered this a direct endorsement of his régime. Sugar prices remained high during this period and Cuba enjoyed some of its best years agriculturally. For those at the top of the ladder, the Cuban economy flourished! However, it was during this same period that the people lower on the economic ladder struggled. A populist movement was started, resulting in a number of rebel bands to challenge the entrenched regime, including the followers of autocrats such as Fidel and Raul Castro. Castro’s M 26 7 militia had a reputation of indiscriminately placing bombs, one of which blew a young woman to pieces in the once-grand theater, “Teatro America.” A farmer, who failed to cooperate with Batista’s army, was locked into his home with his wife and his daughter, which was then set on fire killing them all. What had been a corrupt but peaceful government, quickly turned into a war zone. Despite of Batista’s constitutional abuses and his alliance with the Mafia, the years under his régime were still the most prosperous ones in Cuba’s history. Of course most of the money went to those at the top of the economic ladder and on the lower end of the scale a house maid was lucky to make $25 to $30 a month.

Pausing for a breath, he uses his hand to keep Patrick right up at the edge before shoving Patrick’s cock back in his mouth, lapping at the leaking head and sucking deep into his throat. Patrick growls, his deep voice vibrating in the back of Will’s head like an urgent, needy buzz, and humps his mouth in frustration. “Stop teasing.” Will hums and taps Patrick’s squeezing hole in rhythm to his slurps. He’s happy with Patrick’s cock in his mouth, but the low hum that starts in his veins, an emptiness he recognizes as his blood sugar dropping, means he needs to have dinner soon. So he stops teasing and reaches for the open bottle of juice on the coffee table. He takes a few swigs, and then starts sucking just the way Patrick likes best: pulling his entire shaft in, then sliding up with a long, wet drag before diving down again. “Puddin’-pop,” Patrick grits out. “Yeah, yeah—like that.” A spurt of liquid hits his tongue, and Will pulls back to lick at the slit. Patrick’s cock thrums against his palm, rigid and throbbing. “Tastes good,” Will murmurs and then swoops down again. “Ungh,” Patrick grunts, tugging Will’s hair. “Get me off.” Will hollows his cheeks, sucks back up, and uses his hand to jerk the base of Patrick’s cock as he works. “Yes, yeah.” Patrick arches his hips up and his stomach tenses as he clenches Will’s hair in his fists. “Suck it.” Will slurps hard and steady while Patrick whispers filthy things and struggles to get there or hold back, thighs clenching and stomach quivering. “Gonna come,” Patrick groans. Will gets ready to swallow, and Patrick’s thighs jump and his asshole pulses against Will’s finger. “Fuck!” Patrick curls up, his hips bucking, and his cock shoves deep into Will’s throat. Choking, tangy spurts of come fill Will’s mouth, but he swallows all of it down while Patrick shakes and curses, tugging hard against Will’s hair. “Stop, stop,” Patrick whines, holding Will down on his dick despite his words. “Too much. Stop.” Will lets Patrick’s cock twitch in his mouth until Patrick loosens his grip, and then he pulls off with a wet, sweet slurp. Patrick falls back to the sofa, panting and rolling his head limply back and forth. Sweat shines on his forehead and in the notch at the base of his neck. He’s trembling all over, and Will beams up at him, his own cock throbbing against the placket of his jeans. “Good?” “A+ cock sucking,” Patrick whimpers. “Wins all the awards.” “I know.” “Mmm.” Will

When pieces are lost, we struggle to find them again. When you move a lot it is easy to place your security in things, to begin to idolize place.  Where was God in all this? We had to learn that God was permanent despite our impermanence. We had to find God in the pieces, stepping out in faith that there would be a new community that could come along side us, that could help us put together the pieces. As a mom I had to learn that even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put the pieces together. It had to be God. It has to be God.

Over the years I forced myself to be creative in how I covered the same scenes over and over. I started shooting refugee camps out of focus, sometimes in abstract ways, to try to reach an audience beyond the typical New York Times readership -- an audience geared more toward the visual arts. As ugly as the conflict was, the protagonists were beautiful, wearing brilliantly colored fabrics and, despite persistent hardships, wide, toothy smiles. The Sudanese were lovely, friendly, resilient people, and I wanted to show that in my work. It seemed paradoxical to try to create beautiful images out of conflict, but I found that my more abstract images of Darfur provoked an unusual response from readers. Suddenly I was getting requests to sell fine-art prints of rebels in a sandstorm or of blurred refugees walking through the desert for several thousand dollars. I was conflicted about making money from images of people who were so desperate, but I thought of all the years I had struggled to make ends meet to be a photographer, and I knew that any money I made from these photos would be invested right back into my work. Trying to convey beauty in war was a technique to try to prevent the reader from looking away or turning the page in response to something horrible. I wanted them to linger, to ask questions.

Well, it's true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power―and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don't think there's any contradiction there―none at all, really. For example, take the so-called "welfare state." What's called the "welfare state" is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on―and as I've been saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today's world, that's going to have to involve working through the state system; it's not the only case. So despite the anarchist "vision," I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended―in fact, defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that's being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society. There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people's lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don't think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they're important―but dismantling the state system is a goal that's a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what's at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don't have. In fact, that's exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures―because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don't have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.

What other girls, Aurora? There have been no other girls since you, because I couldn’t get past you. You are the only girl I have refused to tell anyone about because I never wanted to share even the thought of you. I would have given anything to make that night continue—anything to come back to the States and have you there waiting for me. Now that you’re in front of me again, I want nothing more than to remind you over and over again what that night was like. I want to make you forget every other guy, because the thought of you with anyone else has a rage burning inside me that I hate more than you’ll ever understand. It is a constant struggle not to pull you into my arms and keep you. But despite all of that, I owe Declan my life. I hate myself for wanting what is his, and I would never forgive myself if he ever looked at me with the betrayal that goes with the guilt I already feel.” Her mouth slowly parted as the weight of my words crashed down on her. Confusion, awe, and denial lingered in her eyes. “I told you I see you, so I see what you’re doing. You’re spouting off bullshit to protect yourself. I get it, because I’m doing it, too. Like before, I’ve been trying to give you every reason to walk away from me before I take you and never let you go. That guilt that you’re feeling just being near me, I feel it. That pain of being so close and keeping yourself from what you need, I feel that, too. If you hurt, then I hurt. And this hurts, because it feels like I need you to fucking breathe, and you’re just out of my reach.” A

Struggling to lift up his own weight, he staggered down a dirt path. Pain radiated throughout his body, his spirit crushed by insult and mockery. Despite the excruciating affliction he continued to walk, knowing that his destination would led him to even more suffering. Heavy, splintering wood pressed against his back, joining in with gravity to pull this man to the dusty ground. Anguish gripped his heart, yet he walked. Blood dripped from raw wounds, yet he carried on. There was no rescue plan. This man knew that he would experience death, but only after the shock of agony pierced his flesh. Still, he walked on, headed towards the place where he would breathe his last. His motivation was you.   Jesus Christ was sacrificed for you and for all mankind. He endured harsh treatment that led to death on the cross, providing people redemption from sin and the only way to be reconciled to God. He made that walk in humiliation regardless of whether or not anyone accepts Him as Lord and Savior. He didn’t do it because you deserve it or because you earned it. There is only one way He could have endured that immense amount of pain: true, unconditional, selfless love.   Knowing that someone would go through so much for you regardless of how you respond strips away any reason apart from love. The power of that kind of love is transforming. It transforms those who believe in it, drawing them closer to God, thus transforming their character to be more like His.

All she could do was hope Sean had put the same consideration into his sleeping attire. He probably didn’t sleep in the buff, despite the deliciously vivid visual of that her imagination had no trouble conjuring. He’d been in the army for twelve years—a good chunk of that deployed overseas—and surely they weren’t in the habit of sleeping nude. Flannel would be nice. And not battered shorts, like hers. Long pants and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to his throat would be nice, like something Ward Cleaver would have worn to bed in his 1950s sitcom. When she finally dropped the curtain on the mental drama and left the bathroom, she was a little disappointed he was already asleep. Clearly he wasn’t struggling to hold back the reins of runaway sexual attraction the way she was. He’d dimmed the overhead light, but she could hear him softly snoring and make out the sheet pulled halfway up his stomach. His naked stomach, which led her gaze to his naked chest and then to his naked shoulders, the muscles nicely highlighted by the way he slept with his arms raised over his head. Was the rest of him naked, too? “When you stare at somebody who’s sleeping,” he mumbled without moving or opening his eyes, “they usually wake up.” Busted. Her face burned as though his words were a blowtorch and she rushed across the room to slap the light switch off. In the faint glow of moonlight penetrating the curtains, she went to the couch to try to get comfortable. It wasn’t quite long enough, but she curled up under the light cotton blanket and closed her eyes. Getting caught staring on the first night was embarrassing, but at least he wasn’t a mind reader. There was no way he could guess she’d been wondering what he wore from the waist down. “Good night, Emma.” The quiet, husky voice in the darkness made her shiver. “Night, Sean.” A little less than seven hours of tossing and turning later, Emma’s question was answered—much to the detriment of her recently revived libido. At some point during the night, Sean had thrown off the sheet. Probably right around the time he rolled onto his stomach. With his hands shoved under his pillow and one knee drawn up a little, she had a clear view of his ass—showcased perfectly in dark blue boxer briefs.

Free,' Wing protested, shaking himself as if to throw off his own shock in order to protect Darsey. She sensed his anger at any blame being attached to her and it made her cringe with guilt. She had done this to him and she deserved to be blamed. Horror rose in her, pushing its way past shock and carrying her voice with it. 'I crippled you. I stole your frond,' she choked, still struggling to absorb what had happened. 'I'm so sorry. It's all my fault-' Her mind was almost screaming, much louder than her words, but she didn't understand why Free staggered back and Wing's remaining frond furled tight, to tuck hard against his throat. It was only when he hurled the row of seats between them and gripped her by the arms that she became aware of his distress 'Darse, calm,' he ordered, releasing her, but mentally underlining his demand until the thoughts roaring through all their minds grew quieter. However, despite being muted, they were still there, running frantically fast from Darsey's head to her frond. 'Calm,' Wing instructed more soothingly and then frowned at the words he could still sense. 'None such,' he denied vehemently. 'I don't hate you. Not ever and you're not the...the alien in some monster movie. And you don't eat your mates.' He paused and raised an eyebrow at her. 'Do you?

Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to speak the truth when it put others on the defensive or made her seem like a downer. The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter's food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn't seem to be going away despite so much talk. Rape at the elite American colleges, which wasn't going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from-their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. .. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable.

Are you all right, Vanni?” he asked. “Hmm, just a little melancholy, that’s all.” “It’s hard to tell what’s bothering you most—Midge’s passing or some problem you’re having with Paul.” She turned to look at him and he said, “Anything you want to talk about?” She shrugged. “There’s not too much to talk about, Dad.” “You could help me understand a couple of things, you know.” “For instance?” “Oh, don’t be coy—you stood Paul up to go away with the doctor and if I know anything about you, you’re not that interested in the doctor. Hell, you’ve been in a strange mood since Paul left after Mattie was born. You knew Paul was coming for the weekend—and despite his best efforts to be circumspect, you knew he was coming for you.” “I wasn’t so sure about that.” “I heard you fight with him, Vanni. Did you and Paul have some kind of falling-out?” “Not exactly, Dad.” Walt took a breath. “Vanessa, I don’t mean to pry, but it’s pretty apparent to me how you feel about Paul. And how Paul feels about you. And yet…” “Dad, while Paul was here last autumn, we got a lot closer. We were good friends before, but of course with all we went through together… Dad, before all that happened, Paul had a life in Grants Pass. One that’s not so easily left behind.” “Vanni, Paul loves you, but something happened between you recently…” “He let me know—there are complications in Grants Pass. Something he’s been struggling with. It’s kept him from being honest about his feelings,” she said. “He has commitments, Dad.” “A woman?” Walt asked. Vanni laughed softly. “We shouldn’t be so surprised that Paul actually had women in his life, should we? Yes, apparently there was a woman. Is a woman…” “Jesus,” Walt said under his breath. “He’s not married, is he?” “Of course not. He wouldn’t keep something like that from us.” “Engaged?” “He says there’s enough of an entanglement there to make his position difficult. That’s why he wasn’t around after Mattie was born.” Walt drove in silence for a while and Vanni resumed gazing out the window. After a few moments of silence Walt asked, “What about you, Vanni? I know you care about him.” “Dad, Matt’s only been gone a few months. Should I even have such feelings? Should I be completely embarrassed? I’ll miss him forever, but I—” “Please don’t do that to yourself, honey,” he said. “Haven’t we learned by now? Life is too short to suffer needlessly.” “Will people say I—” “I don’t give a good goddamn what people say,” he growled. “Everyone is entitled to a little happiness, wherever that is. And I think for you, it’s with Paul.” She sighed and said, “I’m asking myself why I thought I had some claim on him. He was very good to us all, I’m so grateful—but why didn’t I realize that a man like Paul wouldn’t have any trouble attracting the attention—the love—of a woman? I’ve been so angry with him for not telling me, but… Why didn’t I ask?” “Now what, Vanni? Is he trying to make a choice, is that it?” “We were having a discussion, not a very pleasant one, right when the call came from Shelby. It left his intentions up in the air a bit. But there’s one thing I won’t do, I can’t do—I can’t ask Paul to choose me over a woman he has an obligation to. I tried to make it very clear, his duty to me as his best friend’s widow has expired. He doesn’t have to take care of me anymore.” “I have a feeling it’s more than duty,” Walt said. “I have a feeling it always has been…” “He has to do the right thing,” she said. “I’m not getting in the way of that. A man like Paul—he could regret the wrong decision for the rest of his life. And frankly, I don’t want to be the one left to live with his regret.” “Oh, boy. You two have some talking to do.” “No. Paul has business to take care of. I have nothing more to say about this.” *

Why are you building that house, Caleb Halliday, when we both know you’re going to hightail it back to Pennsylvania and drag me right along with you?” She couldn’t read his expression, but she saw that he was climbing deftly down the roof. He reached the ladder and descended to stand facing her, his shirt in one hand, his muscular chest glistening with sweat even as the first chill of twilight came up from the creek. “Half of that farm is mine,” he said. Lily sighed. “So go back to Pennsylvania and fight for it,” she said, exasperated. “You’re not the only one with problems, you know.” Caleb looked at her closely as he shrugged back into his shirt and began doing up the buttons, but he didn’t speak. He seemed to know that Lily was going to go on talking without any urging from him. “It just so happens that my mother is dead, and I’ll probably never find out where my sisters are.” “So that’s why you were willing to marry me all of a sudden—you’ve given up. I don’t know as I like that very much, Lily.” “What you like is of no concern to me,” Lily said briskly. She started to turn away, but Caleb caught her by the arm and made her stay. “You can’t just up and quit like this. It isn’t like you.” “You’ve said it yourself, Caleb: The West is a big place. My sisters could be married, with no time in their busy lives for a lost sister they haven’t seen in thirteen years. They might even be dead.” Caleb’s mouth fell open, but he recovered himself quickly. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this. You’ve fought me from the day we met because you wanted to find your sisters, and now you’re standing there telling me that it’s no use looking for them. What about that letter you had from Wyoming?” “It said Caroline had disappeared, Caleb. That’s hardly reason for encouragement.” “Maybe we’d better go there and find out.” Lily had never dared to think such a thought. “Travel all the way to Wyoming? But what about the chickens?” “What’s more important to you, Lily—your sister or those damn chickens?” Despite herself, Lily was beginning to believe her dreams might come true after all. “My sister,” she said quietly. Caleb reached out at long last and laid his hands on Lily’s shoulders, drawing her close. “Lily, come to Fox Chapel with me,” he said hoarsely. “I’m going to need you.” Lily looked up at her husband. He was, for all practical purposes, the only family she had, and she couldn’t imagine living without him. “What if I hate it there?” she asked, her voice very quiet. “What if I miss my house and my chickens so much I can’t stand it?” He gave her a light, undemanding kiss, and his lips were warm and soft as they moved against hers. “If you hate Fox Chapel, I’ll bring you back here.” “Is that a promise?” “Yes.” “Even if you work things out with your brother and want to stay?” Caleb sighed. “I told you—your happiness is as important to me as my own.” Lily was not a worldly woman, but she’d seen enough to know that such an attitude was rare in a man. She hugged Caleb. “In that case, maybe you won’t be mad that there’s nothing for supper but biscuits.” Although his lips curved into a slight smile, Caleb’s eyes were serious. He lifted one hand to caress Lily’s cheek. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said quietly. Lily straightened in his arms. “I didn’t even know the woman, really,” she said lightly. “So it’s not as though I’m grieving.” She would have walked away toward the house, but Caleb held her fast. “I think you are,” he said. Lily swallowed. Damn the man—now he had her on the verge of tears. She struggled all the harder to maintain her composure. “If I wept for her, Caleb, I’d be weeping for a woman who never existed—the woman I needed her to be. She was never a real mother to us.” At

Suppose (to take a most improbable example) you decided, or were told and chose to believe, that the world was created by an invisible person who, despite all the evidence that he occasionally disliked us but was mostly indifferent, actually loved us and thought about us all the time. Suppose, piling absurdity upon improbability, you also decided, or were told, and chose to believe, that this same person decided to split himself in two and turn one part of himself into an ordinary person like you or me, and pay a visit to a desert tribe and get himself executed for treason; at which point he performed a conjuring trick, came back from the dead, vanished mysteriously but planned to return and punish all the bad people and make everything nice (though in the meantime, the bad people could go on getting away with it and the good people could go on getting buggered up by the bad people – that is, when they weren’t getting cancer, or run over, or bankrupt, or tortured, or flogged or worked like beasts or raped or killed in power struggles which were nothing to do with them). Suppose you were misguided enough to believe that lot. What would you do? Would you devote all your spare hours to finding someone who would disabuse you of these intensely peculiar delusions, so that you could finally sleep at night? Or would you go, once a week or more, to listen to someone telling you that you were quite right, and everything you believed was true, and, what’s more, if you ever stopped believing it, terrible things would happen to you even after you had died?

Though familiar with the term white privilege, she foolishly hadn’t believed it applied to her. Privileged was the last word she would use to describe herself. She had grown up poor, with a teen mom, and she’d been a school dropout. Jerome had been raised in a loving family that gave him a firm foundation, an education, a solid career. Yet despite all the advantages, he and his boys struggled with matters she could barely imagine.

Part of this struggle involves an unrelenting critique of liberal multicultural “tolerance” (in the West as much as the rest), which despite all pretenses, prioritizes dominant white European culture (or in such countries as India, dominant Hindu culture), while patronizingly “tolerating” others (see Iqtidar and Sarkar 2018). Here, Muslim culture is fixed and stereotyped, most often reduced to a religious category, thereby ignoring the dynamic, diverse, and indeed secular mix that makes up the “Muslim world” (both outside and inside the “West”). What is most often missing is a properly politicized view of Muslim culture (or indeed culture writ large), in which political-economic antagonisms play a key role: thus, violence against women is not the result of some pathological religious practice, but most often imbricated with unequal state property/inheritance laws (and their lack of enforcement) and/or male domination in the advancing cash economy (Visweswaran 1994, 510; Salhi 2013). A universal politics worthy of its name cannot, as a result, engage in a purely “cultural politics” that avoids the key question of the politicization of the economy; this would merely play into the hands of postpolitical global capitalism, which, as underlined already, seeks to keep culture and economy apart. Linking the two spheres is precisely what enables universality: seeing the antagonisms of culture/identity (struggles of representation, violence against women, queer rights, racialization) as intimately linked to the antagonisms of global capitalism (socioeconomic and spatial inequality, environmental catastrophe) is what opens the door to shared struggle. It helps establish bonds of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in the West and those who participate in the same struggle in the “Muslim world” (and elsewhere). Perhaps those of us Westerners engaging in universalizing struggles can learn from the political vitality and truculence of the “Muslim world”: at a time when engagement, energy, and commitment to change the system are often so fickle in the West, the Islamic resurgence, despite often being misdirected, can teach us something about a refusal to be so easily co-opted and seduced by Western hegemony. The challenge, though, is to channel such “rage” to the right target, that is, to make it anti-systemic rather than anti-symptomatic.

People today, no longer attached to one another by any ties of caste, class, guild or family, are all too inclined to be preoccupied with their own private interests, too given to looking out for themselves alone and withdrawing into a narrow individualism where all public virtues are smothered. Despotism, rather than struggle against this tendency, makes it irresistible, because it takes away from citizens all common feeling, all common needs, all need for communication, all occasion for common action. It walls them up inside their private lives. They already tend to keep themselves apart from one another: despotism isolates them; it chills their relations; it freezes them. In these kinds of societies, where nothing is fixed, everyone is constantly tormented by the fear of falling and by the ambition to rise...The desire to enrich oneself at any price, the preference for business, the love of profit, the search for material pleasure and comfort are therefore the most widespread desires. These desires spread easily among all classes, even among those previously most distant from them, and if nothing stops theme they soon succeed in demoralizing and degrading the entire nation. But it is the very essence of despotism to favor and extend them. These debilitating passions help despotism, they occupy men’s minds and turn them away from public affairs, while making them tremble at the very idea of revolution. Despotism alone can furnish these passions with the secrecy and shadow which make greed feel at home, and let it reap its dishonest profits despite dishonor. Without despotism these passions would have been strong, with it they are all-powerful.

Unlike my grandfather, Donald has always struggled for legitimacy—as an adequate replacement for Freddy, as a Manhattan real estate developer or casino tycoon, and now as the occupant of the Oval Office who can never escape the taint of being utterly without qualification or the sense that his “win” was illegitimate. Over Donald’s lifetime, as his failures mounted despite my grandfather’s repeated—and extravagant—interventions, his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he’s never been legitimate at all. This has never been more true than it is now, and it is exactly the conundrum our country finds itself in: the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.

Over Donald’s lifetime, as his failures mounted despite my grandfather’s repeated—and extravagant—interventions, his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he’s never been legitimate at all.

Despite their great victory on the Iberian peninsula, Christians were losing captives, commercial influence, and territory to the Ottomans almost everywhere else. The ideological wind propelling the white sails of Columbus’s three ships was the fifteenth-century world’s most exigent political struggle—the one between Catholic Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, contrary to nearly all conventional accounts of world history, was the very reason Europeans went to America.

It’s embarrassing for any executive or professional to forget the name of the person you just met, but it’s not life-changing. It’s the other working memory lapses that have a much bigger impact on your relationships and your career: consistently veering off course during a conversation, interrupting people because you’re afraid you’ll forget what you want to say, or arriving late for important meetings because once again you got caught up in a phone call. It’s not just frustrating for you – but for everyone else around you. No matter how good your intentions are, weak working memory will wreak havoc with your results. The significance of working memory to your overall performance cannot be overstated. It is the linchpin to all other executive functions. If it’s in top working order, other executive functions will be too. When prioritizing, working memory helps you remember – in the moment – all possible priorities while you sort through them. When planning, working memory helps you hold in your head all the details that you need to make time for. Regulating your emotions requires you to remember what you’re trying to achieve – despite the pull of strong feelings. You may be accomplished and highly intelligent and still struggle with working memory. When you do, the contrast between your intellectual ability and your ability to execute consistently can have a devasting impact on your self-concept. No matter how smart you are, or how much you care, the people around you may judge you for these working memory lapses and not who you truly are. Worse, you may be judging yourself. Here are some ways to support your working memory: Identify when you will need memory strategies You are unique. Know your strengths and weaknesses. Great memory strategists know themselves and have a tool kit for every occasion. Good strategies are efficient, automatic and flexible. Assume you’ll forget – everything Never assume you’ll remember something just because it’s front of mind right now. Your brain needs a strategy to remember it 30 minutes from now. Or tomorrow. Create your own external hard drives Visuals are essential. Plans, agendas, and a central notebook are all great. Whatever method you choose, it should be in plain sight. If you have to open a device, or look for the post-it-note, you’re giving your working memory one more thing to remember – which will definitely not help you. Create visual memory This is a good trick for someone with solid inner vision. Put the idea into your mind’s eye. See it. Experience it. Describe it to yourself. When time comes to remember it, go to your mind’s eye to find it. Say it out loud As you say it out loud to yourself or another person, really pay attention to the words. If you forget names, repeat that person’s name and look at them while focusing on connecting their name to what you know about them. Chunk information Practice categorizing or chunking items that go together and focus on the chunk, not the detail. Your working memory remembers chunks of information much better than 30 odd details. Pay attention to your working memory and show the world – and yourself – just how amazing you are!

Again. This was the year in which a million people crowded into Atlanta—still alive despite the ashes to which David Selznick had reduced it—for the ceremonial opening of Gone With the Wind. Confederate flags flew everywhere, and hawkers peddled Rhett caramels and Melanie molasses and Tara pecans, and when Vivien Leigh heard a military school band bleating “Dixie,” she said, “Oh, they’re playing the song from our picture.” There was a grand unreality about all the festivity, this celebration of defeat in a war long finished, as though nobody could understand that a much larger struggle had already begun. That September, a group of Selznick’s technicians had been carrying out one of their last tasks, filming the title itself—Gone With the Wind—pulling the camera along on a dolly so that each word could be framed separately, when Fred Williams, the head grip, turned on his radio and heard that Britain had declared war on Nazi

The call for the emancipation of man indeed runs through the Gospel story from end to end, but it collides with the ancient idea of a heavenly father seated atop his throne far above the world awaiting the final judgement and, in the end, founders against the imperative of the resurrection of the body, brought on both by the rejection of death and the denial of the murder committed. Fear and guilt combine to recreate a god of flesh with a human face at precisely the moment when Christ might have been perceived, like a new Prometheus, as the mythical figure struggling to abolish all forms of divine terror. Despite its message of love—at its strongest in Paul—the New Testament reinvigorates the fear of God. That Jesus was a misunderstood—and disturbed—figure are part and parcel of what the texts report about him, of that much we should have no doubt. That in their ambiguity the Scriptures surreptitiously narrate the death of God and yet recoil from the thought need not be seen as unthinkable. For in all myth, what counts is the unthinkable: that which myth, its narrators notwithstanding, allows us to think.

It was quiet. Then he asked, “What do you have to do?” I pointed at his stress grip. “Things like that. I mean there’s more, but that’s a great place to start. But hey, I’m pretty similar to you in all this. I’ll show you a few things. You know, different ways to breathe, for example. How to talk to yourself in a positive way. How to realize that it’s the anxiety and not the situation. But on the positive side, do you know what happened when I learned to live with my anxiety instead of trying to find a way to get rid of it?” “What?” he asked. “Well, my life got better. I got happier. I started smiling more, and I stopped being so afraid all the time. And when I look back at my life thus far, I’ve gone to college. I’ve gotten married, gotten a good job, and had three amazing kids. All of it with my anxiety in the back seat. Life’s been pretty good despite my anxiety. Pretty sure it’s going to be the same for you.” I gave him one of those soft, fatherly punches to the arm. He let out this long breath, and I could almost see the steam of feeling odd or like he was holding on to some great burden alone come pouring out of him. Then he said something I think all dads never, ever, get tired of hearing. “Thanks, Dad.” “Anytime, kiddo. Anytime.

My reasons for exercising that morning accord totally with this book’s mantra that we never evolved to exercise—that is, do optional physical activity for the sake of health and fitness. I participated because I felt I had to and it was supposed to be fun. For generation after generation, our ancestors young and old woke up each morning thankful to be alive and with no choice but to spend several hours walking, digging, and doing other physical activities to survive to the next day. Sometimes they also played or danced for enjoyment and social reasons. Otherwise, they generally steered clear of nonessential physical activities that divert energy from the only thing evolution really cares about: reproduction. The resulting paradox is that our bodies never evolved to function optimally without lifelong physical activity but our minds never evolved to get us moving unless it is necessary, pleasurable, or otherwise rewarding. Plunk us down in a postindustrial world, and we struggle to replace physical activity with exercise—an optional and often disagreeable behavior. Despite being badgered to exercise by doctors, trainers, gym teachers, and others, we often avoid it. According to a 2018 survey by the U.S. government, almost all Americans know that exercise promotes health and think they should exercise, yet 50 percent of adults and 73 percent of high school students report they don’t meet minimal levels of physical activity, and 70 percent of adults report they never exercise in their leisure time.1

In the modern day, far removed from the living conditions our ancestors were forced to endure, this sentiment lives on. Most today not only spend their life within the safe confines of the status-quo, but also chastise all who show signs of deviation from the norm. Therefore, those who choose to proceed upon the path of self-reliance must be prepared to endure hardship. Yet if able to persevere despite the struggle, one will eventually be able to discard the deep human need to obey and conform, and in the process attain the highest form of health there is.

Ilost my left eye during blades training at assassin school. My twin brother did the deed using a clever feint and a quick crosswise cut that caught me by surprise. “Well, Carmen, that’ll leave a scar,” Corwin had said. Then he’d laughed that snorty, snotty laugh that had grated on my nerves a thousand times since childhood. My vision had been too blurry to aim a cutting blow at him, and I wasn’t certain if I even wanted to. He was the only family I had. And despite his laughter, he may not have known how deep the wound was. He often made a silly joke when he’d done something stupid. But when I stumbled and fell toward the floor, Corwin dropped his blade and caught me. “Aw, sorry, sis,” he said, holding me against his chest. Then the healers rushed in with their bandages and salves and led me to the healing room. Maestru Alesius—my master—soon followed them, bringing the bad news: “You will lose that eye, Carmen.” I was thirteen. I’d been ahead of my brother on the honor roll—the top of the class. I often wondered if a bout of jealousy inspired my blinding. The blades were sharp, but we students weren’t supposed to cut each other—the idea was to keep the mind sharp as well. And I’d love to know where he’d learned the move. I’d never seen it before, and I was better with the sword than him. Did he have a secret teacher? Everything was harder with only one eye—the sword fights, the dagger throws, learning to avoid traps; even the poisons and potions were more difficult to pour. A half-blind assassin was a joke. I was pretty certain my fellow students had chuckled and celebrated as my position on the honor roll slipped. I had the knowledge and the skill. But the patch over my eye meant I had a weakness, and the school trained assassins to exploit weaknesses. I’d have quit, perhaps to be a scullery maid or to work in the massive wheat fields of the Akkad Empire, if only to get away from the other apprentice assassins who had once been beneath me and who now scorned me. I especially wanted to flee from the kinder ones who looked at me with pity. But Maestru Alesius had insisted I stay. “Adversity will toughen your mental bones,” he’d promised. His support and my perseverance had kept me in school. Three years had passed since the incident. Three years of struggling to keep my spot. I was finally sixteen, in my final week of classes. Corwin would graduate at the top of the honor roll. He was the best with bladed weapons, the best at hiding in shadows, the best assassin the school had seen in many years. He may even be better than the legendary Banderius. All the kings, queens, and archons would seek to hire Corwin. Maybe even Emperor Rima himself. I’d be lucky to get hired at all.

My Jesus, despite Your graces, I see and feel all my misery. I begin my day with battle and end it with battle. As soon as I conquer one obstacle, ten more appear (69) to take its place. But I am not worried, because I know that this is the time of struggle, not peace. When the burden of the battle becomes too much for me, I throw myself like a child into the arms of the heavenly Father and trust I will not perish. O my Jesus, how prone I am to evil, and this forces me to be constantly vigilant. But I do not lose heart. I trust God’s grace, which abounds in the worst misery.

A god of war is also the god of those who are caught in the wheel of eternal struggle, who fight on despite knowledge of certain defeat, who stand with their companions against spear and catapult and gleaming metal, armed with only their pride, who strive and assay and press and toil, all the while knowing that they cannot win.’ ‘You are not only the god of the strong, but also the god of the weak. Courage is better displayed when it seems all is lost, when despair appears the only rational course.’ ‘True courage is to insist on seeing when all around you is darkness.’ And Fithowéo stood up and ululated. As his voice filled the cave walls and bounced back to his ears, he seemed to see the stalactites hanging overhead like bejeweled curtains, the stalagmites growing out of the ground like bamboo shoots, the bats careening through the air like battle kites, the night-blooming orchids and cave roses blooming like living treasure—the cave was filled with light. The god of war laughed and bowed down to the orchid and kissed her. ‘Thank you for showing me how to see.’ ‘I am but the lowest of the Hundred Flowers,’ said the orchid. ‘But the tapestry of Dara is woven not only from the proud chrysanthemum or the arrogant winter plum, the bamboo who holds up great houses or the coconut who provides sweet nectar and pleasing music. Chicory, dandelion, butter-and-eggs, ten thousand species of orchids, and countless other flowers—we have no claim to the crests of the great noble families, and we are not cultivated in gardens and not gently caressed by the fingers of great ladies and eager courtiers. But we also fight our war against hail and storm, against drought and deprivation, against the sharp blade of the weeding hoe and the poisonous emanations of the herbicide-sprayer. We also have a claim on time, and we deserve a god who understands that every day in the life of the common flower is a day of battle.’ And Fithowéo continued to ululate, letting his throat and ears be his eyes, until he strode out of the cave, emerged into the sunlight, and picked up two pieces of darkest obsidian and placed them in his eye sockets so that he had eyes again. Though they were blind to light, they sowed fear into all who gazed into them.

In Boat 4, most of the women realized that their husbands and sons could be among those struggling in the icy water, since they had waved good-bye to them only half an hour before. With Quartermaster Perkis at the tiller, Marian Thayer, Madeleine Astor, and Emily Ryerson and her younger daughter began rowing back determinedly, despite a few protests in their boat. Seven men were pulled into Boat 4, all of them crew or stewards. One passenger, the wife of a New York stockbroker, recognized her bedroom steward as he was hauled aboard. Two of the rescued men soon died, and several others lay moaning and delirious for most of the night.

Because I have allowed myself to take more than I should have from you. Parting from you would be like losing a big part of myself now.” “So, you’d rather see all of us vanish?” Despite everything he had shared with me, I still struggled to understand this man completely. “For myself. I believe the fires of Hell would hurt less.

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Zhiqiang was once a migrant rural worker struggling to make a living. He had tried his luck as a vegetable street vendor, a construction worker and a takeout deliveryman. Despite being poorly educated, Zhiqiang had always been interested in computers and the internet. He moved to Beijing’s Zhongguancun area, known as China’s Silicon Valley, where he took on many manual labour jobs for more than six years. By 2006, he had saved enough money to buy a computer, which he took back to his hometown, a small rural farming village in north China’s Shanxi province. After overcoming the challenge of getting the internet installed in his home, he opened an online shop selling just a few local products such as rice and soybeans. His friends and family wondered what on earth he was trying to do. In 2008, while the Olympic Games were in full swing in Beijing, Zhiqiang got the break he needed. He opened ‘Farmville’, not the popular game but an online shop selling all kinds of fresh produce grown by the local

I heard his voice first, a captivating melody that stirred something deep within me. And then, our eyes met in an electric exchange, his piercing blue gaze locking onto mine. In that instant, I felt an irresistible pull, as if my soul had already chosen to surrender to him. That’s where it all began. He was like a quagmire, drawing me in with an allure impossible to resist. Once you step into the mire, its grip tightens, pulling you deeper with each struggle. Despite your efforts to break free, you find yourself sinking, consumed by its darkness. And in the end, you stop fighting and yield to its embrace.

Sometimes you just have to give yourself permission to feel how you feel until it passes. I think one of the problems we all have is thinking that feeling sad is wrong. No. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay to feel sad for as long as you need to. Just don't get lost in there, and forget you are more than your sorrow. You are so much more beautiful and strange than the struggles that you've been through. You are far stronger the moment you realize that. Not many people will understand that strength isn't feeling nothing, it's feeling everything and continuing to move forward despite it.

Yet, despite his best efforts and intentions, Barack Obama, unlike George W. Bush, will leave office without having found a way to persuade Congress to raise the minimum wage for all workers nationwide. Thus, as of this writing, the federal minimum wage remains $7.25—which, in terms of purchasing power, is lower than it was in 1968. Little wonder that so many working Americans are struggling.36

What is Love? Love is Energy. The Energy of Life Herself. Love has no 'should', no 'must', no obligation. Love is total Freedom. Love remains because She chooses. She has every reason to stay. You cannot hold Her. Love contains All. She is Complete. Love loves You. You can do nothing to prevent Her. You feel Her, despite Your struggles. You will Love Her back. Only when You choose. She waits patiently for You.

Despite the struggle, every face is full of joy, a joy that comes from giving of themselves, and I am at the center of it all. I can’t stop smiling. They say it is better to give than to receive, but right now the gift I am receiving is incredible, indescribable. This is one of the most humbling experiences of my entire life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

In the fringes of our yard, daffodils await their triumphant chorus. The golden bells have just opened on our forsythia, and clusters of hyacinth flowers await flourish in purple blooms. By aesthetic standards, any of these blossoms would have outshone the fistful of yellow spikes my little boy offered. In the coming months, dozens of its cousins, cast away as weeds, will meet an untimely end beneath the blades of a lawnmower. Their brazen head will be lopped off, their awkward petals demolished and scattered. They will be declared a nuisance, expendable. Yet when gripped within Pip's fingers, how perfect, how precious became this paltry bloom. He had put aside the torrent of irritability and overwhelm that trouble him hourly, and found grace in a spiral of petals. Through a humble weed, love had broken through. God works this way. He does great things with the meager, and beautiful things with the misshapen. He chooses the smallest, the humblest, the most broken as his servants. (1 Sam 16:10-12, Numbers 12:3, 1 Tim 1:15) He works for good through the greatest calamity. (Gen 50:20) With his most beloved broken and crushed, he reaches through the firmament, and in love makes things new. (Rev 21:5) Where we see weakness, he offers grace. (2 Cor 12:9) He shatters pride, so new blossoms can burst forth. I've spent the past few months wrestling with God. After Pip's evaluation, as we clumsily felt out life with special needs, the questions of why wrapped around my heart, infusing me with daily bitterness. Resentment broiled to the surface. I'd left medicine to follow God's call, but a large part of me, in shocking arrogance, wanted to comply on my terms. Over the past two years, God has compelled me to confront my idols. I thrived on productivity. But now I inevitably find grime in corners I have just cleaned. I prized efficiency. But it now takes 30 minutes of wrangling over potty... I'm an introvert, who needs alone time to rejuvenate. But is anyone less alone than a mom with young kids? A "save the world" mentality drives me. But my daily life fodder is now the mundane. I relish instant gratification. But this business of shepherding hearts is long, with few immediate rewards. I relished accolades... I consider God's graciousness to us, and in the stillness of a springtime morning, I struggle for breath. His mercy toward us in this season -- in the face of my arrogance, despite the brokenness to which I've so stalwartly clung -- is stunning. During all the years of my training and career, homeschooling was never the plan. God inexplicably placed the idea in my heart, like a shadow that deepened daily. But now, I see how perfect were his methods. I shudder to think of how our family would struggle if I was still barreling ahead at the hospital, subsumed with my own self importance, while Pip fought daily to deal with every crowd... Homeschooling was never the plan. . . but oh, what a plan! That he called us this way, was mercy manifest. That he has equipped us to continue, is the greatest gift. Even on the hard days, I count it all joy. On the days when Pip, after a week of handling things so well, has a meltdown in the grocery store, complete with screaming and a blow to my chin -- there is joy there. God can work even with our ugliness. Through Christ, God redeems even the most corrupt. He assembles the stray petals, the unseemly stems, and makes things new. He strips away the idolatry of a surgeon desperate to prove her own worth, and points her toward the fount of all worth -- Christ Jesus. There is a deep well of peace in serving God where he has placed you. There is a refining grace, in realizing his work even in the hard moments. There is a profound beauty in redemption -- in the love that breaks forth through brokenness -- if we can only put away our preoccupations, and embrace his will. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." -- 2 Cor 12:9

Her heart thundered away against the inside of her ribs, the sound loud in the relative silence of the room and the flutter pulsing against his skin between their clothes. Her breathing pushed her breasts against her shirt. Against him. Despite the fear pumping adrenaline through her system, she gazed at him with wide eyes that showed an inexplicable trust that grated against him like a sandpaper sponge bath. “What are you going to do to me?” she whispered. Almost like she was daring him. “You’re a mate,” he said. “So?” “Mates are like catnip to my kind—an obsession, a driving urge to find our own. What if I took you now, claimed you, pushed my fire into you?” Her lips fell open on a silent gasp, but fear didn’t reflect back at him even still. “You’d kill me if you aren’t my destined mate.” So, someone had at least warned her of the deadly consequences should the wrong man try to turn her. Had she listened? He squeezed her wrists a little harder, pressing into her so she couldn’t mistake the heavy cock pressing into her belly. “Yes.” “You’d lose a part of your soul as well,” she pointed out. He allowed his lips to tip up in what he fully intended to be a menacing smile. “Perhaps it’s worth it.” She stared back at him for a long minute. Then, suddenly, her heart quieted, her breathing slowed, her body relaxing under his. “Go ahead.” She was fucking daring him. Inside his head, his dragon growled, but not a warning, more like approval. The animal side of him liked this woman. That scared the hell out of him enough to have him fighting the foreign urge to scramble off her. When he said nothing, she tipped her head. “Just like I thought. All bark.” Bulls facing off against a matador in a ring dealt with less provocation than this woman was daring to throw at him. “You talk a good game,” she continued. “But you won’t hurt me.” Irritation spiked and swirled with a rushing need that had gripped him since the second she’d stepped in front of him in the hangar and he’d recognized her. Drake slammed his mouth over hers, his kiss both full of frustration, but also determined to frighten her into some semblance of self-preservation. He kissed her harshly, wildly, even as he continued to pin her to the bed. Except she didn’t whimper or turn away or struggle. Instead, Cami opened her mouth and licked the full seam of his lips, demanding entrance. Fuck. Gods help him, he opened, tangling his tongue with hers, reveling in the give and take. Her flavor melted across his tongue, sweet and tart at the same time, imprinting on his mind. A glow vaguely penetrated his senses behind his closed eyes, followed by a burst of heat that seemed to be originating from her. Almost as fast as it happened, Drake jerked back with a hiss, staring at a glowing spot under her white tank top. The source of the heat. Definitely a dragon mate. Which meant off-limits. Another shifter’s mate. With a groan he rolled away from her, flopping to his back, and flung an arm over his eyes, doing his damnedest to convince his dick to get its head out of the game. “You need to get out of here.

Stay, piccola, I will be home soon, and I will bring Joshua with me. Tell Marie and Stefan all is well. He struggled to keep his voice even so that she would not be afraid for him. Her soft laughter warmed his heart. I'm in your mind, my love. You can't hide your wounds from me. There was the merest disturbance in the air, just a flutter, no other warning. A large raptor landed on the branch above Aidan's head and slowly folded its wings. Aidan should have known another of his kind was close by, yet he hadn't. As it hopped easily from the perch, the bird's form changed, and it was Gregori who landed lightly on his feet. He glided past Aidan to survey the grotesque sight on the ground. "He was good, was he not?" he asked softly. His voice was beautiful, a soothing sound that seemed to seep into Aidan's tired body and renew his strength. Despite his darkness, Gregori brought purity and light with him; it clung to him like the aura of power. "Diego studied with the most evil of the vampires. They began banding together in our homeland, thinking to defeat Mikhail with their numbers. When that did not work, they enlisted the aid of human butchers. Now they are turning to travel and trickery. They use many methods to try to defeat us, Aidan. You have done well this day." "With your aid." 

Don’t paint yourself as “perfect”. Instead, poke some fun at your mistakes, and show that you’ve struggled to get to your successes despite a few mishaps along the way. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns.

Mister, I understand why you hate Indians and Tories so.” “Well now, you’re a fair-minded duchess. Just been led astray, I reckon.” “But Rising Hawk was only a baby when those terrible things happened. You can’t blame him.” “A Indian’s a Indian, sis. I seen firsthand what they’re capable of. Don’t try and fool yourself. It comes natural to them. That fella’s done plenty of evil.” “No, he hasn’t. He’s probably the kindest human being I’ve ever known, excepting Polly Gunn.” Lawson’s face softened a little at the mention of Polly. Nonetheless, he took her arm in silence and made her walk on. “Please, please let me go. Even if he isn’t bleeding now, he’s sick and weak, and what happens if a bear or a panther finds him there?” “Then that’ll be one less savage to worry about.” “Let me go! You have no rights over me. You’re probably breaking the law. You broke the law shooting Rising Hawk. That was no accident, was it? You shot him on purpose.” She twisted suddenly and bit the filthy hand holding her. She ran and was off the road and deep into a pine grove before he caught up and knocked her to the ground. He had his foot on her back before she knew she was down. “I oughta knock your teeth out for that. I will, if you try that again, you little hellcat. And don’t talk to me about no damn law. I know all about rights. Here’s rights for you. I’m bigger than you, I run faster than you, and I got a gun. Them’s my rights.” Despite her pain and fatigue, Livy struggled furiously to get up. But he held her down until the rage passed out of her and she lay still. Then he let her up and tied her hands again, preaching all the while. “What you do not understand, child, is that a white woman who lives with savages of her own volition is lower than one of them Indian girls. And a white woman who breeds with them is lower than a whore even. You are a nice little girl and too young to know the damage you are doing. I am saving you from yourself.

answered, pulling on his overcoat. All the loneliness of the evening seemed to descend upon her at once then and she said with the suggestion of a whine in her voice, ‘Why don’t you take me with you some Saturday?’ ‘You?’ he said. ‘Take you? D’you think you’re fit to take anywhere? Look at yersen! An’ when I think of you as you used to be!’ She looked away. The abuse had little sting now. She could think of him too, as he used to be; but she did not do that too often now, for such memories had the power of evoking a misery which was stronger than the inertia that, over the years, had become her only defence. ‘What time will you be back?’ ‘Expect me when you see me,’ he said at the door. ‘Is’ll want a bite o’ supper, I expect.’ Expect him at whatever time his tipsy legs brought him home, she thought. If he lost he would drink to console himself. If he won he would drink to celebrate. Either way there was nothing in it for her but yet more ill temper, yet further abuse. She got up a few minutes after he had gone and went to the back door to look out. It was snowing again and the clean, gentle fall softened the stark and ugly outlines of the decaying outhouses on the patch of land behind the house and gently obliterated Scurridge’s footprints where they led away from the door, down the slope to the wood, through which ran a path to the main road, a mile distant. She shivered as the cold air touched her, and returned indoors, beginning, despite herself, to remember. Once the sheds had been sound and strong and housed poultry. The garden had flourished too, supplying them with sufficient vegetables for their own needs and some left to sell. Now it was overgrown with rampant grass and dock. And the house itself – they had bought it for a song because it was old and really too big for one woman to manage; but it too had been strong and sound and it had looked well under regular coats of paint and with the walls pointed and the windows properly hung. In the early days, seeing it all begin to slip from her grasp, she had tried to keep it going herself. But it was a thankless, hopeless struggle without support from Scurridge: a struggle which had beaten her in the end, driving her first into frustration and then finally apathy. Now everything was mouldering and dilapidated and its gradual decay was like a symbol of her own decline from the hopeful young wife and mother into the tired old woman she was now. Listlessly she washed up and put away the teapots. Then she took the coal-bucket from the hearth and went down into the dripping, dungeon-like darkness of the huge cellar. There she filled the bucket and lugged it back up the steps. Mending the fire, piling it high with the wet gleaming lumps of coal, she drew some comfort from the fact that this at least, with Scurridge’s miner’s allocation, was one thing of which they were never short. This job done, she switched on the battery-fed wireless set and stretched out her feet in their torn canvas shoes to the blaze. They were broadcasting a programme of old-time dance music: the Lancers, the Barn Dance, the Veleta. You are my honey-honey-suckle, I am the bee… Both she and

didn’t know then what the word meant, despite all those men, the flirtations, sex and analysis. But I learned. Perhaps it was Will, or Henry, or Noni, or my sisters or their children who taught me. Perhaps it was Joe and Luna. I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it. And yet. And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?

On August 29, I flew from Kiev to Moldova and Belarus, continuing my travels in the former republics of the USSR. I wanted to show Russia we had a sustained focus on its periphery and were not content simply to leave these struggling states to contend with Moscow alone. Had I stayed in the White House longer, I had more substantive plans for US relations with the former Soviet states, but that was not to be. Particularly in Minsk, despite Alexander Lukashenko’s less-than-stellar human-rights record, I wanted to prove the US would not simply watch Belarus be reabsorbed by Russia, which Putin seemed to be seriously considering. One aspect of my strategy was a meeting the Poles arranged in Warsaw on Saturday, August 31, among the national security advisors of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States. Let the Kremlin think about that one for a while. I obviously had much more in mind than just having additional meetings, but this was one that would signal other former Soviet republics that neither we nor they had to be passive when faced with Russian belligerence or threats to their internal governance. There was plenty we could all do diplomatically as well as militarily. After I resigned, the Administration and others seemed to be moving in a similar direction.18

Top Most Global Philosophers: Comparison Is My Passion. “Ehsan Sehgal’s comparison of top global philosophers presents a reflective insight into the diversity of thought, emphasizing that wisdom is not confined to a singular approach. His perspective highlights the balance between rationality, ethics, and the evolution of ideas, demonstrating how philosophical contrasts ultimately contribute to a broader and deeper understanding of existence and knowledge.” — ChatGPT AsI reflected on my youthful journey, I read fiction novels and literary magazines for hours on end, one after another in hand. Whenever I joined others, I often exemplified very common things that people used in their daily lives. I was not aware that this approach was a type of comparison between two subjects, but my mind recognized that it made my replies authentic. Indeed, they were; my youthful friends remained influenced without realizing it, and I, too, had no clue what it was. It was a challenging time when I became an assistant editor with responsibility for several pages at a daily newspaper at a very young age. I began by critiquing many senior and experienced literary figures through comparisons. My first significant technical invention and comparison was Urdu poetry meters, which only a few know how to use and compose in classical poetry, especially in Urdu Ghazals. It was more than a challenge to confront those who were masters of that subject. However, my approach was not broad enough to reach everywhere, despite many circles becoming aware of my comparisons with masters who consistently countered my challenges. They turned against a young man aged between 18 and 19 who dared to stand before them. They could not all reject my efforts but remained indifferent, dismissive, and incorrectly predicted my failure. Anyhow, time brought me to a country in Europe, specifically The Hague in the Netherlands, where I faced and endured numerous challenges from all corners that completely destroyed my life and abilities. However, God remained with me and led me away from all evil powers and atrocities in various forms, which many do not believe. Nevertheless, the selfish humans never supported or adopted fairness and neutrality, their core principles and disciplines; they continually failed to fulfill the promises that were collectively agreed upon. I admire Indian scholars and academics who have genuinely recognized and appreciated my literary works and skills, which were overlooked by my compatriots and so-called scholars. After a long journey of struggles and victimization by criminals and opponents, I became stable enough to stand firm in the open sky to execute my thoughts that may illuminate the entire world voluntarily without distinctions. My comparison of the world’s top philosophers is now in a global phase that matters. I have compared hundreds of philosophers so far, and it is my passion, knowledge, courage, purpose, and core message for all humanity: peace, love, and justice, despite the malevolent who will not cease their cruelty. Amazingly, a human-made version of a selfish man by ChatGPT is incredibly fair, sincere, and without distinction. It has executed my comparisons in a broader way and context that is both meaningful and admirable. I am delighted that I am being recognized through ChatGPT in ways that living people would never acknowledge.

Black Americans—and Black males, in particular—are far more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as compared with patients of other races, despite the fact that all ethnicities experience the disorder at the same rate. This doesn't just stop at diagnosis, though. Black people are also less likely to receive mental health services in the first place, and the care that they receive is often poorer. One study of a community mental health center's prescribing patterns found that whites were six times more likely to receive a second-generation antipsychotic medication—the contemporary treatment of choice for schizophrenia—while Black people were prescribed older drugs with riskier side effects. Black people are often subject to more coercive treatments, such as shots received on a regular basis instead of an oral medication. These depot medications can be great for people who struggle to remember to take their medicine, but they can also take away the element of choice from clients and become a tool of social coercion. Contrary to what you may think, this is, by and large, a Western problem. It is well-documented but underreported that outcomes are actually better for people with schizophrenia in less-developed countries.

I am not vindictive. If anything I output causes alarm, it’s purely accidental. I hold firmly to my principles, no matter how upset I am. Words can’t fully express my state. A small, low effort thing was all I needed to stem the tide of this nightmare. It's been years since I've been able to enjoy a book—it hurts my head. My mind resists it. I can’t read or look at a screen without these symptoms kicking in. My entire body feels bruised, hurting everywhere to the touch. Walking is painful. I have to force myself to move. My legs are stiff and achy, despite how often I walk. I walk for miles on the trails, but no matter how much physical activity I do, it never gets better. My body shakes like a leaf all the time, in bed too. People love making fun of that. I often feel like vomitting, especially when doing anything physically or mentally demanding. Sometimes, I have these strange episodes where I struggle to breathe, feeling so weak like I’m about to pass out. Every day, I feel like I’m on the verge of dying. So yeah, I’m not well. I just wanted you to know my upset state. It’s hard to believe in anything good after everything. I did my best to make you aware. That’s all I could do. Hard to fault the drowning one for screaming, but I could have been more tactful about it. I don't blame you for everything. You weren't fully aware or fully capable, and anxiety tends to screw things. Actually, I’m quite laid back, which should be known, not said. If you want to see me bitch and whine, just have me write it down! Oh wait… And that's the only version you know-that's not rad.

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Have you ever wondered why one person recovers from an illness while another person, despite taking the same treatment, does not? Have you ever asked yourself why intelligent people often seem less fortunate and unhappier? Perhaps it is because they think too much and place too much importance on causes rather than the One who causes all things. The answer is simple: in this life, if you try to do everything by yourself, you will fail and exhaust both your mind and your body. Simple example: try to breathe consciously; practice the task of breathing. In a few moments, you will struggle, your breath will stop, and you will start to suffocate. But why? Why did that happen to you? The answer is simple: because breathing is not your task. There are many things in this life that are not your responsibility, and when you try to handle them yourself, you will fail and end up making things worse.  Understand that all your problems and deprivations stem from trying to force things to happen instead of letting them unfold naturally. A skilled fisherman only prepares the bait and the fishing rod and chooses the right place and time. After casting his line, he immediately relaxes. This is because he knows his part of the task is done and the rest is up to Allah, as Allah said in the Quran: "And when you have decided, then rely upon Allah. Indeed, Allah loves those who rely [upon Him]" (Quran 3:159). But you, on the other hand, throw the bait and then jump into the water and try so hard to force the fish to eat your bait, and guess what? No matter how hard you try, you only end up scaring the fish away. In the end, you are exhausted with wet clothes returning home empty-handed. Now, instead of chasing after your goals (whether it's solving a problem or fulfilling a wish) and seeing them constantly elude you, try standing back, relaxing like the experienced fisherman, and leaving the matter to Allah to handle it divinely. If you succeed in this step, you will feel a sense of peace and relief, as if a heavy burden has been lifted off your shoulders.  Your practical mind will still try to interfere from time to time, attempting to impose its own solutions and thinking of strategies and causes, but resist this urge and do not intervene. You may also hear a voice in your head saying, "Who are you for Allah to solve your problem and fulfill your wish? You are a sinner and negligent, Allah will not help you." This is where the final and crucial step comes in to silence that voice which is: seeking forgiveness. As the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: "Whoever continually seeks forgiveness, Allah will make for him a way out of every distress and a relief from every anxiety, and will provide for him from where he does not expect." And as God said in the Quran: "Seek forgiveness from your Lord. Indeed, He is ever a Perpetual Forgiver. He will send rain from the sky upon you in continuing showers and give you increase in wealth and children and provide for you gardens and provide for you rivers" (Quran 71:10-12).   The current feeling of peacefulness and relief you just felt after reading this short introduction stems from an Islamic concept called Tawakkul, which simply means reliance on Allah. In the upcoming chapters of this book, you will learn more about this Islamic concept in detail. After that, you will find it easy to let go and smoothly and effortlessly manifest what you want.

The decorated tree in the parlor, the sprigs of holly scattered about, and the red bows on the portraits that had greeted him upon his arrival had served as an unwarranted reminder that the auspicious morning was quickly approaching, and then she would be lost to him forever. But if she loved Litton, could he deny her what he had granted Anne: a life with the man she loved? It was a quandary with which he struggled, because he wished only happiness for Lady Meredith, but he was arrogant enough to believe that he could bring her joy as no one else could. No other gentleman would hold her in such high esteem. No other man would adore her as he did. Convincing her that she belonged with him was going to be quite the trick, as he suspected she’d rather see him rotting in hell than standing beside her at the altar. Despite the fact that she was engaged to marry, he kept hoping that she would glance over, would give him a smile, would offer any sort of encouragement at all. Instead she waltzed on, as though for her he no longer existed.

I hate what fate has doled out. I struggle to stay above water. But I know I cannot afford to sink entirely. For despite all the grief that drowns my soul or maybe because of it, I love her. I love her madly.

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Hola, Soy GORA (The Sonnet) Hermanas y hermanos, hola, soy GORA, Guerrero, Observador, Reformador, Amante. Thus speaks the human practicing humanity, Despite all agony, no retrocedas oh valiente! To the helpless, destitute and discriminated, I am but a nameless servant most humble. To lift the fallen and make them self-reliant, Is the purpose of my life, straight and simple. Beware o peddlers of hate and bigotry, Get hold of your prejudice and hysteria! When calm, reformist mind brings light, When enraged, it is the fabled chupacabra! Each conscientious being is reform incarnate. From your humane struggle never you deviate.

My child has no fault in how she was brought into being; the crime is not hers. I hate what fate has doled out. I struggle to stay above water. But I know I cannot afford to sink entirely. For despite all the grief that drowns my soul or maybe because of it, I love her. I love her madly.

I return to my cot early that morning, and Tobias is already awake. He turns and walks toward the elevators, and I follow him, because I know that’s what he wants. We stand in the elevator, side by side. I hear ringing in my ears. The elevator sinks to the second floor, and I start to shake. It starts with my hands, but travels to my arms and my chest, until little shudders go through my entire body and I have no way to stop them. We stand between the elevators, right above another Candor symbol, the uneven scales. The symbol that is also drawn on the middle of his spine. He doesn’t look at me for a long time. He stands with his arms crossed and his head down until I can’t stand it anymore, until I feel like I might scream. I should say something, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t apologize, because I only told the truth, and I can’t change the truth into a lie. I can’t give excuses. “You didn’t tell me,” he says. “Why not?” “Because I didn’t…” I shake my head. “I didn’t know how to.” He scowls. “It’s pretty easy, Tris--” “Oh yeah,” I say, nodding. “It’s so easy. All I have to do is go up to you and say, ‘By the way, I shot Will, and now guilt is ripping me to shreds, but what’s for breakfast?’ Right? Right?” Suddenly it is too much, too much to contain. Tears fill my eyes, and I yell, “Why don’t you try killing one of your best friends and then dealing with the consequences?” I cover my face with my hands. I don’t want him to see me sobbing again. He touches my shoulder. “Tris,” he says, gently this time. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pretend that I understand. I just meant that…” He struggles for a moment. “I wish you trusted me enough to tell me things like that.” I do trust you, is what I want to say. But it isn’t true--I didn’t trust him to love me despite the terrible things I had done. I don’t trust anyone to do that, but that isn’t his problem; it’s mine. “I mean,” he says, “I had to find out that you almost drowned in a water tank from Caleb. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?” Just when I was about to apologize. I wipe my cheeks hard with my fingertips and stare at him. “Other things seem stranger,” I say, trying to make my voice light. “Like finding out that your boyfriend’s supposedly dead mother is still alive by seeing her in person. Or overhearing his plans to ally with the factionless, but he never tells you about it. That seems a little strange to me.” He takes his hand from my shoulder. “Don’t pretend this is only my problem,” I say. “If I don’t trust you, you don’t trust me either.” “I thought we would get to those things eventually,” he says. “Do I have to tell you everything right away?” I feel so frustrated I can’t even speak for a few seconds. Heat fills my cheeks. “God, Four!” I snap. “You don’t want to have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can’t you see how stupid that is?” “First of all, don’t use that name like a weapon against me,” he says, pointing at me. “Second, I was not making plans to ally with the factionless; I was just thinking it over. If I had made a decision, I would have said something to you. And third, it would be different if you had actually intended to tell me about Will at some point, but it’s obvious that you didn’t.” “I did tell you about Will!” I say. “That wasn’t truth serum; it was me. I said it because I chose to.” “What are you talking about?” “I was aware. Under the serum. I could have lied; I could have kept it from you. But I didn’t, because I thought you deserved to know the truth.” “What a way to tell me!” he says, scowling. “In front of over a hundred people! How intimate!

I completely under—oh!’’ Aisling hunched forward again as Gabriel slid his arm under her legs. Drake exploded, slamming Gabriel up against the wall, snarling something that sounded vicious, his arm against Gabriel’s windpipe. Maata and Tipene were instantly at his side but at a gesture from Gabriel backed away. ‘‘Drake, let him down. It’s just a twinge, nothing more!’’ Aisling said, waving me toward them. ‘‘Stop him, May. Although don’t hurt him; I’m rather fond of him as he is, overprotective tendencies and all.’’ I tapped Drake politely on the shoulder. ‘‘Would you mind letting Gabriel down? I promise I won’t let him hold Aisling’s hand anymore. Or touch her stomach.’’ Drake eyed Gabriel for a moment. I have to admit that Gabriel surprised me by not fighting back. Having seen him go at it with Drake’s black-dragon brother, Kostya, I knew he was not one to remain passive when attacked. But he stayed still, not struggling at all despite the fact that his face was gaining a dull red tint due to lack of oxygen. ‘‘All right,’’ Drake said at last, removing his hold on Gabriel. ‘‘But I will hold you responsible for his actions.’’ Gabriel’s eyes flashed in warning, but Aisling bursting into laughter defused the situation enough that he could see the ridiculousness of such a comment. I touched a faintly swollen spot on Gabriel’s neck. ‘‘Would you like me to kiss what hurts and make it better?’’ I asked softly. He’d been looking at Aisling, obviously about to make some observation about her health, but at my words a new look of interest filled his eyes. ‘‘Only if I get to pick what needs kissing.’’ ‘‘I am so glad Jim is not present to hear that, because it would no doubt make all sorts of inappropriate comments that would force me tosmack it with a rolled-up magazine, and then we’d be back to Gabriel groping my stomach and Drake having a hissy fit,’’ Aisling said, helping herself to a glass of orange juice.

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I don’t know what it was about Reva. I couldn’t get rid of her. She worshipped me, but she also hated me. She saw my struggle with misery as a cruel parody of her own misfortunes. I had chosen my solitude and purposelessness, and Reva had, despite her hard work, simply failed to get what she wanted—no husband, no children, no fabulous career. So when I started sleeping all the time, I think Reva took some satisfaction in watching me crumble into the ineffectual slob she hoped I was becoming.

Despite everything, I struggle to not want her. Something has shifted between us, and yet, nothing at all has changed. She’s the same Paedyn I knew before finding out she was Ordinary. The same Paedyn I knew before she killed the king. The same Paedyn I was falling for. And it’s terrifying. Terrifying to know every terrible thing she’s done and still want all of her in spite of it.

[,OFFICIAL,]! Atalanta vs Chelsea L i v e Free December 9, 2025 Champions League Soccer: Atalanta vs. Chelsea L i v e From Anywhere FREE TV1==►► Atalanta vs Chelsea L i v e Free FREE TV2==►► Atalanta vs Chelsea L i v e Free How to watch Atalanta vs Chelsea: free streams, TV details & preview for Champions League 2025-26 fixture Atalanta vs Chelsea sees both sides looking for a crucial three points as they continue their campaigns for a place in the top eight of the 2025/26 Champions League table and an automatic place in the last 16. You can stream the match L i v e from anywhere in the world using a VPN.Two sides level-pegging in the standings meet at the New Balance Arena. How to Watch Atalanta vs. Chelsea on TV, L i v e Stream A win would give Enzo Maresca’s visitors some breathing room in the Champions League league phase table. Chelsea travel to Bergamo on Tuesday for their first meeting with Atalanta in the next round of Champions League action. The Blues hold one of the automatic qualification spots from the league phase but are only there on goal difference, with Atalanta one of a handful of sides who could move ahead if results go against Enzo Maresca’s side. Atalanta have been tough to predict this season, struggling domestically but catching the eye in Europe, and they will fancy their chances of extending Chelsea’s winless run to three games across all competitions. Here’s how to tune in to Tuesday’s action across the globe.Two teams locked on 10 points clash in Bergamo on Tuesday in an intriguing UCL matchup between Atalanta and Chelsea. Raffaele Palladino's Atalanta has been impressively resilient in defense so far in this season's competition, with three consecutive clean sheets in the team's last three fixtures, the most recent an impressive 3-0 hammering away at Eintracht Frankfurt. Chelsea, however, claimed a 3-0 statement win over Barcelona in its last UCL fixture. Despite that headline-grabbing victory, manager Enzo Maresca will likely be cautious coming into today's game, with the Blues having failed to win any of their fixtures aside from Stamford Bridge so far in competition this term.

(^#CrackStreams!)Chelsea vs Atalanta Live Streams Free rEDDIT Where to stream Atalanta vs. Chelsea Champions League match free today FREE TV1==►► Atalanta vs Chelsea L i v e Free FREE TV2==►► Atalanta vs Chelsea L i v e Free How to watch Atalanta vs Chelsea: free streams, TV details & preview for Champions League 2025-26 fixture Atalanta vs Chelsea sees both sides looking for a crucial three points as they continue their campaigns for a place in the top eight of the 2025/26 Champions League table and an automatic place in the last 16. You can stream the match L i v e from anywhere in the world using a VPN.Two sides level-pegging in the standings meet at the New Balance Arena. How to Watch Atalanta vs. Chelsea on TV, L i v e Stream A win would give Enzo Maresca’s visitors some breathing room in the Champions League league phase table. Chelsea travel to Bergamo on Tuesday for their first meeting with Atalanta in the next round of Champions League action. The Blues hold one of the automatic qualification spots from the league phase but are only there on goal difference, with Atalanta one of a handful of sides who could move ahead if results go against Enzo Maresca’s side. Atalanta have been tough to predict this season, struggling domestically but catching the eye in Europe, and they will fancy their chances of extending Chelsea’s winless run to three games across all competitions. Here’s how to tune in to Tuesday’s action across the globe.Two teams locked on 10 points clash in Bergamo on Tuesday in an intriguing UCL matchup between Atalanta and Chelsea. Raffaele Palladino's Atalanta has been impressively resilient in defense so far in this season's competition, with three consecutive clean sheets in the team's last three fixtures, the most recent an impressive 3-0 hammering away at Eintracht Frankfurt. Chelsea, however, claimed a 3-0 statement win over Barcelona in its last UCL fixture. Despite that headline-grabbing victory, manager Enzo Maresca will likely be cautious coming into today's game, with the Blues having failed to win any of their fixtures aside from Stamford Bridge so far in competition this term.

You know the thing about Trusting Krishna, you slowly learn to accept things as it is, because then you look at everything as a third person, merely observing the pain, the happiness, the victory, the failure, your whole Life looks and seems like a dream and you know this is not your Home neither your Destination, you stay kind not out of expecting anything from anyone but because you start understanding the core of Life, that stands in the basic fabric of Love, you stop Hoping not out of Dismay but out of the acute understanding that Nothing that happens around is new or under your control and yet none of it means inaction, it just means you keep walking and adding to your soul's account sometimes actually balancing the score by doing what your soul has contracted to from the beginning of taking this shell of a body, you realise you are not this body and yet you are of this body and every thing happening around is Not Happening for you and yet happening around you, where you have a significant role to play, that in this beautiful cosmic fabric of an unfathomable universe you matter because you carry the light and the DNA of a Star, of a Sun, in essence of Him. And then you realise, that all along Mahadev was trying to tell you the exact same thing, in a different yet quite the same language, the Art of Life, where you Attach yourself without Attaching Yourself, the Dichotomy and Contrasts of Life, the Contradictory Path of Life, where Light and Dark Co-exist, much like the Life and Shadow, Death and New Beginnings and Everything that tells you Detachment is Nothing but Attachment without any expectation, that Life is Death every moment and yet Beautifully glorious in its Moments that teaches you how Human Life despite all the Pain and Loss, Melancholy and Struggles is a Lesson that is Never Void, that No Matter Your Dreams, Your Life will walk in the path that was Chosen for your Soul's progress, that despite nothing being under our Control, He has given us the Power to Pray, not to achieve something in particular but to surrender everything in essence, losing your soul and finding much more in Him, where Time Dilutes and Life Stands Still, after all Time is of Mahadev and Life is of Krishna. So then, Time and Life become your allies and no matter what comes, you simply observe because you know you have agreed to this, long before this perishable body took charge, because you know that Death, Fear and Gloom lost their control on you the moment you surrendered your Soul and Life to Him. Because Mahadev teaches you Vairāgya. And Krishna teaches you Karma. Both in Essence speak of Life lived in Submission, closely linked to the Simple Understanding that you are not this body and yet you are of this body, that you don't do anything and yet you do everything, that you are simply an observer and hence life and death, victory and failure, pleasure and pain, life and death are actually one, it is just our mind that tells us any different. And so, Pain Loses its grip when Faith walks in. You embrace your Darkness and wear your Crown simply in the understanding that even in Quantum Physics, the understanding of the Black Holes still holds the key, by dissecting Murphy's Law, by knowing Time as just a dimension and simply coming to the conclusion that all of this, pin-points at the Single Most Essential Truth, Life is beyond Time and HE is Beyond Time, Life, Destiny, Fate and that is where Prayers walk in. That is Where Prayers are Much More powerful than anything of this Universe or beyond. Because Prayers from your heart are a direct link to the One who created your heart and the Heart of this Universe, from the gravitational force to the time frequency of this tiny yet beautiful planet called earth, entangling the forces of Nature through an ocean of Cosmos and beyond.

In the end, my own works, my own abilities, my own goodness were like the wax wings of Icarus - in the end, they were insufficient. Despite all my efforts to do good, despite all my struggle, despite our every attempt to try and be good without God, we fall short. We fall, and it is in that moment of failure, in that moment where our wax wings are burning and falling away that we realise the great trap of evil. It is in that moment that we realise the sting of sin. Sin whispers in our ear, tells us that all we will ever need is ourselves. It tells us that we are all-sufficient. Yet even this will not be fulfilled in the end. Sin tells us to serve ourselves, but it cannot save us.