Distant Lovers Quotes

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.

I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.

Things I Want Decided Which shouldn't exist in this world, the one who forgets or the one who is forgotten? Which is better, to love one who has died or not to see each other when you're alive? Which is better, the distant lover you long for or the one you see daily without desire? Which is the least unreliable among fickle things — the swift rapids, a flowing river, or this human world?

Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely. During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go round with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me." "If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

I can't really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she'd order the gig and we'd drive out into the country to see the nighta s it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune- those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.

Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now. “ It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life.

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements? Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both. Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows -- then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky -- then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion." And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

I dreamed of death the way previously I'd dreamed of the pain leaving me, and the way before that I'd dreamed of gardens and children and weekends away. Death was my elusive lover, treasured and longed for and jealously guarded, and always distant. Always out of reach.

I knew a man once,” Al Sorna continued, “who loved a woman very much. But he had a duty to perform, a duty he knew would cost him his life, and hers too if she stayed with him. And so he tricked her and had her taken far away. Sometimes that man tries to cast his thoughts across the ocean, to see if the love they shared has turned to hate, but he finds only distant echoes of her fierce compassion, a life saved here, a kindness done there, like smoke trailing after a blazing torch. And so he wonders, does she hate me? For she has much to forgive, and between lovers,” his gaze switched from her to me, “betrayal is always the worst sin.

But in the end, there will still be a morning like this one, full of new light, and a distant voice will be heard, like a memory of before we became people. And the tones of a song will well up, the gentle lull of the first mother. This song, yes indeed, will be ours, the memory of a deep root that they were unable to wrench out of us. This voice will give us the strength for a new beginning, and upon hearing it, the corpses will find peace in their graves and the survivors will embrace life with the simple joy of young lovers. All this will happen if we are able to rid ourselves of this time that has made animals out of us. Let us strive to die like the people we no longer are.

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.

And there’s you, with your purity and beauty. You unyoke me. We lie on the bed, closer than a hand in a glove, yet I still experience this distant ache. I miss you even in your presence. How did love find me when I hid from it so masterfully? How did love know when to strike? I look into your infinite eyes and can say nothing. Because there, in front of me, lies everything. And you unyoke me.

It so happens that this is particular love was precisely the sort best suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of remote worship, a mute contemplation, a deification by an unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adolescence by adolescence, her dreams becoming romance ad remain in dream, the wished-for phantom realized at last and made flash, but still without name or wrong or fault, or need, or defect; in a word, a lover distant and ideal, a chimera having form. Any closer and more palpable encounter at this first stage would have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying mirage of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors of nuns mingled. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been steeped for five years, was still evaporating from her whole person, and made everything tremulous around her. In this condition, it was not a lover she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to adore Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.

He couldn’t look back at the children. He couldn’t think of it. All he could do was watch the eyes of his wife. He pulled her to him, her body soft, her skin warm. She was life, she was his. He took her lips and tasted his freedom once more. The subtle tenderness. The hope hidden in joined breath. He took it into himself. Soaking in the peace that came with it. And even as the rustling began he felt still, he felt calm. Scratching and scrapping within the stones, and the rustle of wings. But all Eli knew was the nature of love.

When he heard light, rushing footfalls, he turned his head. Someone was racing along the second-floor balcony. Then laughter drifted down from above. Glorious feminine laughter. He leaned out the archway and glanced at the grand staircase. Bella appeared on the landing above, breathless, smiling, a black satin robe gathered in her hands. As she slowed at the head of the stairs, she looked over her shoulder, her thick dark hair swinging like a mane. The pounding that came next was heavy and distant, growing louder until it was like boulders hitting the ground. Obviously, it was what she was waiting for. She let out a laugh, yanked her robe up even higher, and started down the stairs, bare feet skirting the steps as if she were floating. At the bottom, she hit the mosaic floor of the foyer and wheeled around just as Zsadist appeared in second-story hallway. The Brother spotted her and went straight for the balcony, pegging his hands into the rail, swinging his legs up and pushing himself straight off into thin air. He flew outward, body in a perfect swan dive--except he wasn't over water, he was two floors up over hard stone. John's cry for help came out as a mute, sustained rush of air-- Which was cut off as Zsadist dematerialized at the height of the dive. He took form twenty feet in front of Bella, who watched the show with glowing happiness. Meanwhile, John's heart pounded from shock...then pumped fast for a different reason. Bella smiled up at her mate, her breath still hard, her hands still gripping the robe, her eyes heavy with invitation. And Zsadist came forward to answer her call, seeming to get even bigger as he stalked over to her. The Brother's bonding scent filled the foyer, just as his low, lionlike growl did. The male was all animal at the moment....a very sexual animal. "You like to be chased, nalla, " Z said in a voice so deep it distorted. Bella's smile got even wider as she backed up into a corner. "Maybe." "So run some more, why don't you." The words were dark and even John caught the erotic threat in them. Bella took off, darting around her mate, going for the billiards room. Z tracked her like prey, pivoting around, his eyes leveled on the female's streaming hair and graceful body. As his lips peeled off his fangs, the white canines elongated, protruding from his mouth. And they weren't the only response he had to his shellan. At his hips, pressing into the front of his leathers, was an erection the size of a tree trunk. Z shot John a quick glance and then went back to his hunt, disappearing into the room, the pumping growl getting louder. From out of the open doors, there was a delighted squeal, a scramble, a female's gasp, and then....nothing. He'd caught her. ......When Zsadist came out a moment later, he had Bella in his arms, her dark hair trailing down his shoulder as she lounged in the strength that held her. Her eyes locked on Z's face while he looked where he was going, her hand stroking his chest, her lips curved in a private smile. There was a bite mark on her neck, one that had very definitely not been there before, and Bella's satisfaction as she stared at the hunger in her hellren's face was utterly compelling. John knew instinctively that Zsadist was going to finish two things upstairs: the mating and the feeding. The Brother was going to be at her throat and in between her legs. Probably at the same time. God, John wanted that kind of connection.

The lightness returned. That airless sensation of his body evaporating. Darline and Paris were fading, too. They were becoming distant longings, silhouettes, shadows fading on the ground. There are loves that outlive lovers.

You write poems with your fingertips And I keep listening to the songs written on my skin By some distant dream, similar words But the verses never meet...

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.

On the Necessity of Sadness" Let me tell you about longing. Let me presume that I have something new to say about it, that this room, naked, its walls pining for clocks, has something new to say about absence. Somewhere the crunch of an apple, fading sunflowers on a quilt, a window looking out to a landscape with a single tree. And you sitting under it. Let go, said you to me in a dream, but by the time the wind carried your voice to me, I was already walking through the yawning door, towards the small, necessary sadnesses of waking. I wish I could hold you now, but that is a line that has no place in a poem, like the swollen sheen of the moon tonight, or the word absence, or you, or longing. Let me tell you about longing. In a distant country two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons, unafraid, are perching beside them. She places a hand on his knee and says, say to me the truest thing you can. I am closing my eyes now. You are far away.

People who live in the night are acquainted with all kinds of quiet. There’s quiet enough to hear the distant traffic. Quiet enough to hear your breathing. Quiet enough to hear a lover’s heartbeat. There’s please-god-don’t-let-me-die quiet, and can’t-remember-her-name quiet. Is-he-lying quiet and can’t-make-rent quiet. There’s the quiet that inspires poets, and quiet that torments the lonely.

He is emotionally distant as long as he is in the Warrior. This does not mean that the man accessing the Warrior in his fullness is cruel, just that he does not make his decisions and implement them out of emotional relatedness to anyone or anything except his ideal.

James had been acting a little weird. After waking up yesterday, he'd been a little bit distant. It might just be the stress of the trip. It was probably hard on James to be in charge of the little group. He was responsible for the welfare of his lover, a nun, and a talking horse. That couldn't be easy.

Ce ne stiamo in silenzio sotto quel cielo che ci guarda e chissà che pensa di noi. Ci sono sere in cui si vede a malapena una stella ma, se t'innamori, ne vedi tantissime, è come quando sei ubriaco e vedi doppio... stasera se ne vedono a g rappoli. "Carlo, ma le stelle quante sono?" Mi prende il dito e lo punta verso il cielo. "Una, due, tre, quattro"... Quando trovi l'amore puoi fare tutto, puoi anche contare le stelle. E quel cielo non è poi tanto distante e tanto nemico... Sono 351.

The breeze carried the music into the distant country plains, past the bullet trains, across the majestic cornfields and the Christmas tree farms. The music swept past the Georgia orange trees, the droning honeybees, and the shining seas of the Atlantic. It wafted past the London Pier. Young Britney wanted all of Nod to hear.

You describe her as an Eden. This rare, unknowable place. Distant. And you tell me to wear her skin but I refuse. I shift in my seat. Distant. What is it about the men that go looking for old lovers in new women. And why is it that they always want you to touch them like she touched them. Wear her head like a show piece. Use her words as lipstick.

I keep coming back to this singular, inescapable fact: I am alive. Given the odds, those three words are more miraculous than you might imagine; to me, they have an odd, shiny quality, like rocks brought back from a distant planet. No one can quite believe it. It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.

Let me tell you what is love, What is it to be enamored in caring! Reputation, remuneration, turn distant memory, That is the first sign of love's awakening.

It is said that in that distant place, almost at the end of the Ganges, where she sleeps in a darkened room with her lover, she is subject to moods of profound melancholy.

As I stand there, coffee in one hand and nothing in the other, and watch the distant waves in the ocean, I realize that I am feeling a wave of my own, inside me. Gratitude.

He turned out to be a tender and considerate lover, despite his unfortunate, sharply angled pubic bone, which first time hurt like hell. He apologised for it, as one might for a mad but distant relative. By which I mean he was not particularly embarrassed. We settled the matter by making love with a folded towel between us, a remedy I sensed he had often used before.

Her voice was soft, ethereal, the sound of a lullaby half-remembered. The songs she sang, one by one, held Celaena in place. Songs of distant lands, of forgotten legends, of lovers forever waiting to be reunited.

When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant.

but had always felt she was a visitor. She felt disconnected and different everywhere else too, but far from being a problem this gave her a sense of pride, as it added to her view of herself as a distant, mysterious artist vaguely superior to the rest of mortals.

Lollipops and raindrops Sunflowers and sun-kissed daisies Rolling surf and raging sea Sailing ships and submarines Old Glory and “purple mountain’s majesty” Screaming guitar and lilting rhyme Flight of fancy and high-steppin’ dances Set free my mind to wander… Imagine the ant’s marching journeys. Fly, in my mind’s eye, on butterfly wings. Roam the distant depths of space. Unfurl tall sails and cross the ocean. Pictures made just to enthrall Creating images from my truth Painting hopes and dreams on my canvas Capturing, through my lens, the ephemeral Let me ruminate ‘pon sensual darkness… Tremble o’er Hollywood’s fluttering Gothics… Ride the edge of my seat with the hero… Weep with the heroine’s desperation. Yet… more than all these things… Give me words spun out masterfully… Terms set out in meter and rhyme… Phrases bent to rattle the soul… Prose that always miraculously inspires me! The trill runs up my spine, as I recall… A touch… a caress…a whispered kiss… Ebony eyes embracing my soul… Two souls united in beat of hearts. A butterfly flutter in my womb My lover’s wonder o’er my swelling The testament of our love given life Newly laid in my lover’s arms Luminous, sweet ebony eyes Just so much like his father’s A gaze of wonder and contentment From my babe at mother’s breast Words of the Divine set down for me Faith, Hope, Love, and Charity Grace, Mercy, and undeserved Salvation “My Shepherd will supply my need” These are the things that inspire me.

Wedding Superstitions The Bridal Gown White - You have chosen right. Grey - You'll go far away. Black - You'll wish yourself back. Red - You'll wish yourself dead. Green - Ashamed to be seen. Blue - You'll always be true. Pearl - You'll live in a whirl. Peach - A love out of reach. Yellow - Ashamed of your fellow. Pink - Your Spirits will sink. The Wedding Day Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday best of all, Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, Saturday for no luck at all. The Wedding Month Marry in May, and you'll rue the day, Marry in Lent, you'll live to repent. Married when the year is new, He'll be loving, kind and true. When February birds do mate, You wed nor dread your fate. If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you'll know. Marry in April when you can, Joy for maiden and the man. Marry in the month of May, And you'll surely rue the day. Marry when the June roses grow, Over land and sea you'll go. Those who in July do wed, Must labour for their daily bread. Whoever wed in August be, Many a change is sure to see. Marry in September's shine, Your living will be rich and fine. If in October you do marry, Love will come, but riches tarry. If you wed in bleak November, Only joys will come, remember, When December's snows fall fast, Marry and true love will last. Married in January's roar and rime, Widowed you'll be before your prime. Married in February's sleepy weather, Life you'll tread in time together. Married when March winds shrill and roar, Your home will lie on a distant shore. Married 'neath April's changeful skies, A checkered path before you lies. Married when bees o'er May blossoms flit, Strangers around your board will sit. Married in month of roses June, Life will be one long honeymoon. Married in July with flowers ablaze, Bitter-sweet memories in after days. Married in August's heat and drowse, Lover and friend in your chosen spouse. Married in September's golden glow, Smooth and serene your life will go. Married when leaves in October thin, Toil and hardships for you begin. Married in veils of November mist, Fortune your wedding ring has kissed. Married in days of December's cheer, Love's star shines brighter from year to year

Melancholy, amorous and barbaric,” these tales exalted adulterous love as the only true kind, while in the real life of the same society adultery was a crime, not to mention a sin. If found out, it dishonored the lady and shamed the husband, a fellow knight. It was understood that he had the right to kill both unfaithful wife and lover. Nothing fits in this canon. The gay, the elevating, the ennobling pursuit is founded upon sin and invites the dishonor it is supposed to avert. Courtly love was a greater tangle of irreconcilables even than usury. It remained artificial, a literary convention, a fantasy (like modern pornography) more for purposes of discussion than for everyday practice.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl, boldness. This is surprising, yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming, each the other’s qualities. That day, Cosette’s glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius’ glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and Cosette uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other. The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It melts in love, which is its sun. Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered in its terrestrial sense. She did not know what name to give to what she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one does not know the name of one’s malady? She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved. She would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: ‘You do not sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not be! You blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at the end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!’ She would not have understood, and she would have replied: ‘What fault is there of mine in a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?’ It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to the state of her soul. It was admiration at a distance, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a chimaera with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the convent, with which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he was not even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible. As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him with all frankness. Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy, and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought when she said to Jean Valjean:— ‘What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!’ Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other. It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed, beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of beauty and in ignorance of love.

That moment of standing in the graveyard and hearing nothing except the wind and the rustle of moving grass and the sounds of distant birds and insects, and knowing, knowing deep in your heart, that no other noise would come. That the silence was eternal now that our loved ones had finally passed away, and that our pain was the price of their newfound peace. And

The brain accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s volume, yet consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy. A pearly gray, gelatinous, three-pound universe, this exceptional organ can map parsecs and plot the whereabouts of distant galaxies measured in quintillions of light-years. The brain accomplishes this magic trick without ever having to leave its ensorcelled ovoid cranial shell. From minuscule-wattage electrical currents crisscrossing and ricocheting within its walls, the brain can reconstruct a detailed diorama of how it imagines the Earth appeared four billion years ago. It can generate poetry so achingly beautiful that readers weep, hatred so intense that otherwise rational people revel in the torture of others, and love so oceanic that entwined lovers lose the boundaries of their physical beings.

Dagger of Love: Long and Distant Memories) c. 2016 The dagger of love sticks deep in me, Of loves lost; waves of memory I dimly see, (Of loving a man so much that she is a goddess to thee). Grasp for the dagger from my fevered mind, And pluck the memories like roses to find. Shadows fleet and so does she, I embrace nothing; a handful of memory I barely see, We both come to a room where we could both meet, And tell each other ‘I love you’ as our grips do fleet. Memories are two-edged so I must go, Recollections in a corner forgotten; where silence does grow. They must go and so do I, The corners forgotten in my mind. Their we wait for silence to grow, and she says goodbye and it is so. For I must rhyme to tell the day, First of autumn cold, windy and gray. Farewell my love on another forgotten day, (May eternity reunite us that we may love on our way).

I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and up-country. Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially up-country. They don’t do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months’ leaves every three years, when at last they’ll be able to talk about what it’s like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvellous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts. They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added together one by one like time, like the long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves.

Summer, and hot. Full Earth had come to the land like a vampire lover that year, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city of Gilead white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them paled to insignificance before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted lustlessly, unmindful of sows and sex and knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always did; but there was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The thread that held the last jewel at the breast of the world was unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.

Please don’t look at me like that. He lowers his gaze, picks up a strand of my hair and twirls it around his finger. “I miss you,” he says to it. It’s barely audible over the sound of the storm raging outside, but in here, it’s like a roaring crescendo. Why do his words have the power to turn my world upside down? Why do will and shame and guilt and sense fall by the wayside when I’m with him? Because you love him, comes the answer. You love him. You love him. It echoes like the clap of distant thunder.

She was too compelling to look at directly. Bright like the sun, bright and terrible. Only one other being could look upon her, and that was Death. And so…they became lovers.” He said the word like a caress, like velvet again, and my face began to heat. “Together they forged great and hellish things,” Jesse murmured. “Lightning and waterfalls that churned into clouds off the tip of the world. Chasms so winding deep that daylight never traced their endings. They dreamed through golden days and silvered nights. All the other creatures envied or adored them, because Death and the Elemental were destruction and creation joined as One. In the natural order of things, they should not have been stronger joined. And yet they were.” He shifted, coming closer to me. A hand settled lightly atop my chest, directly over my heart. At our feet the seawater splashed a little, as if disturbed by something rolling over in the dark, distant deep. “Centuries passed, and mankind began to devour the earth, even the wildest places. They had tools to invent and wars to fight and grubby, short lives. Nothing about them dwelled in the magic of the ancient spirits. So although Death, the Great Hunter, prospered as he sieved through their villages, the Elemental, strong as she once was, thinned into a web of gossamer. Human lives simply tore her apart.” His hand was so warm. Warmer than I, warmer than the air, and still just barely touching me. The light behind my lids never lifted, so I knew he wasn’t glowing, but it felt as if he held a tame coal to my skin. It felt like something painless and ablaze, drawing my heart upward into it. “The time had come for them to divide. Like all the rest of her kind, the goddess would cease to exist; she had no other course. So Death and the Elemental severed their joined hearts. For a few generations more, she drifted alone through the last of the sacred places, deserts, and fjords, lands so savage no human had yet desecrated them.” Jesse’s voice dropped to a whisper. Without moving his hand, he bent down, his breath in my ear. “And Death, who had tasted her brightness, who would never cease to crave it-who knew her better than all the collected souls of all mankind’s weeping dead-became her Hunter.” I was hot and strange. I was light and lighter, and curiously my breath came so slow. “Until at last, one starry night beneath the desert moon, she surrendered to him. She allowed him to come to her, to make love to her. To unravel her…” It was happening. He sat next to her and bore witness to her change, her pulse slowing, her skin blanching, the fans of her lashes stark against the contours of her face. He kept his palm there against her chest, up and down with her respiration, and watched the smoke begin to curl around his fingers. “And by his hand, in the bliss of her unraveling, she touched the stars…” Lora’s breath hitched. Her heart skipped-then stopped. If I could take this from you, Jesse thought fiercely. If I could take this one moment away from you and keep the agony for myself- Her eyes opened, went instantly to his. Panic lit her gaze. Then she was gone. His fingers sank to the floor through her empty blouse, and the blue dragon smoke that was all of Eleanore Jones rose into strands above him.

And I stared at the room with the same, nervous, calculating extension of the intelligence and of all one’s forces which occurs when gauging a mortal and unavoidable danger: at the silent walls of the room with its distant, archaic lovers trapped in an interminable rose garden, and the staring windows, staring like two great eyes of ice and fire, and the ceiling which lowered like those clouds out of which fiends have sometimes spoken and which obscured but failed to soften its malevolence behind the yellow light which hung like a diseased and undefinable sex in its center.

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal—which is why we bear to take in so much of it.

We have always called ourselves a tax-exempt 501c3 antiprofit organization. We wrestle to free ourselves from macrocharity and distant acts of charity that serve to legitimize apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community. We visit rich people and have them visit us. We preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her violent slumber. Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it. We fight terrorism—the terrorism within each of us, the terrorism of corporate greed, of American consumerism, of war. We are not pacifist hippies but passionate lovers who abhor passivity and violence. We spend our lives actively resisting everything that destroys life, whether that be terrorism or the war on terrorism. We try to make the world safe, knowing that the world will never be safe as long as millions live in poverty so the few can live as they wish. We believe in another way of life—the kingdom of God—which stands in opposition to the principalities, powers, and rulers of this dark world (Eph. 6:12).3

I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, in all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy …? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were. His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave.

After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully. Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a mastery of her own artistry of living, becomes even more than beauty something about which though we are even now no more capable of addressing than before, our admiration as original Earth-loving human beings should nonetheless never remain silent. And for that beauty we should never sing about, but only sing directly to it. Straightforward, cold, and inornate description in the presence of such living evidence of the flowering speech of the Holy in the Seed would be death of both the beauty and the speaker. Even if we always fail when we speak, we must be willing to fail magnificently, for even an eloquent failure, if in the service of life, feeds the Divine. Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path? If we can find the hearts, tongues, and brightness of our original souls, broken or not, then no matter from what mess we might have sprung today, we would be like those old-time speakers of life; every one of us would have it in our nature to feel obligated by such true living beauty as to know we have to say something in its presence if only for our utter feeling of awe. For, finally learning to approach something respectfully with love, slowly with the courtesy of an ornate indirectness, not describing what we see but praising the magnificence of her half-smiles of grief and persistent radiance rolling up from the weight-bearing thumping of her fine, well-oiled dusty old feet shuffling toward the dawn reeds at the edge of her part of the lake to fetch a head-balanced little clay jar of water to cook the family breakfast, we would know why the powerful Father Sun himself hurries to get his daily glimpse of her, only rising early because she does.

For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends.

How was I ever going to explain to him, or to myself, why I couldn’t go to his home and meet his family, though every part of me was dying to? Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. What had I expected? A hug, a handshake, a perfunctory hail-fellow-well-met, and then the unavoidable Later! ? The very possibility of meeting his family suddenly alarmed me—too real, too sudden, too in-my-face, not rehearsed enough. Over the years I’d lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I’d dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn’t just how distant were the paths we’d taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss I didn’t mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we’ve stopped thinking of things we’ve lost and may never have cared for. Or was it that I was jealous of his family, of the life he’d made for himself, of the things I never shared and couldn’t possibly have known about? Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn’t there to witness and wouldn’t know the first thing about. I wasn’t there when he’d acquired them, wasn’t there when he’d given them up. Or was it much, much simpler? I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive. The trouble was I didn’t want anything to be alive either.

It is the quiet of the night that I adore the most. It makes me wander in paths and times that seem so distinct, so distant in the light of a bright chirpy day. Oh, I love to talk and I love to hear, form connections, live the passion of Life throbbing with the fervour of colours and stories. But the dark, the stillness of the night makes me see the rivulets of light that walk in my soul. As if they talk to me, like an unsung melody, a poem scattered in bits and pieces, holding my breath to a dawn. They walk through my soul and ask me to keep my senses open as I inhale the peace of night where only the murmur of the stars dance in a serenade of a lover's dream, as if to paint a shadow of colours woven in the misty echo of an infinite lullaby. I love the night air so cold yet so crisp clutching us in a passionate embrace where we give way to all that a heart desires, some make poems some heal wounds and some sleep in the arms of love, while every soul wears its real and most vulnerable yet most whole self. And there as I watch my soul bathed in the halo of stillness, I see how the silence of the night gives in to the chirping of the birds, while the stars walk into their cocoon to let the Sun smile through the breathing dawn. Only a moment, when the night holds us in a mirror for a second or for a fraction of a second and when the morn seeps in to let Life jump in with a thousand voices. Only a moment. And yet that moment is so pure so beautiful to let us soak and even hold on to that stillness of night as much as we can through our heart, and every bit of our soul. I sit in awe, not only to behold the glory of the Morn but also to absorb the depth of the Night, for it is the quiet of the night that I adore the most.

¡Qué exuberante y alborotado es el universo, Alma! Gira y gira. La única constante es que todo cambia. Es un misterio que sólo podamos apreciarlo desde la quietud. Estoy viviendo una etapa muy interesante. Mi espíritu contempla con fascinación los cambios en mi cuerpo, pero esa contemplación no es desde un punto distante, sino desde dentro. Mi espíritu y mi cuerpo están juntos en este proceso. Ayer me decías que echas de menos la ilusión de inmortalidad de la juventud. Yo no. Estoy disfrutando mi realidad de hombre maduro, por no decir viejo. Si me fuera a morir dentro de tres días, ¿qué pondría en esos días? ¡Nada! Me vaciaría de todo menos del amor. Hemos dicho muchas veces que amarnos es nuestro destino, nos amamos en vidas anteriores y seguiremos encontrándonos en vidas futuras. O tal vez no hay pasado ni futuro y todo sucede simultáneamente en las infinitas dimensiones del universo. En ese caso estamos juntos constantemente, para siempre. Es fantástico estar vivo. Todavía tenemos diecisiete años, Alma mía.

When I look at this age with the eye of a distant future, I find nothing so remarkable in the man of the present day as his peculiar virtue and sickness called "the historical sense." It is a tendency to something quite new and foreign in history: if this embryo were given several centuries and more, there might finally evolve out of it a marvellous plant, with a smell equally marvellous, on account of which our old earth might be more pleasant to live in than it has been hitherto. We moderns are just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful, future sentiment, link by link, we hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us as if it were not the question of a new sentiment, but of the decline of all old sentiments: the historical sense is still something so poor and cold, and many are attacked by it as by a frost, and are made poorer and colder by it. To others it appears as the indication of stealthily approaching age, and our planet is regarded by them as a melancholy invalid, who, in order to forget his present condition, writes the history of his youth. In fact, this is one aspect of the new sentiment He who knows how to regard the history of man in its entirety as his own history, feels in the immense generalisation all the grief of the invalid who thinks of health, of the old man who thinks of the dream of his youth, of the lover who is robbed of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is destroyed, of the hero on the evening of the indecisive battle which has brought him wounds and the loss of a friend. But to bear this immense sum of grief of all kinds, to be able to bear it, and yet still be the hero who at the commencement of a second day of battle greets the dawn and his happiness, as one who has an horizon of centuries before and behind him, as the heir of all nobility, of all past intellect, and the obligatory heir (as the noblest) of all the old nobles; while at the same time the first of a new nobility, the equal of which has never been seen nor even dreamt of: to take all this upon his soul, the oldest, the newest, the losses, hopes, conquests, and victories of mankind: to have all this at last in one soul, and to comprise it in one feeling: this would necessarily furnish a happiness which man has not hitherto known, a God's happiness, full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness which, like the sun in the evening, continually gives of its inexhaustible riches and empties into the sea, and like the sun, too, feels itself richest when even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars! This divine feeling might then be called humanity!

Having become—with the passage of time—the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage those obsessive souls who bring back crockery, artifacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of others and our own. Nevertheless, I would caution against paying too much attention to the objects and relics of “first love,” for these might distract the viewer from the depth of compassion and gratitude that now arose between us. So it is precisely to illustrate the solicitude in the caresses that my eighteen-year-old lover bestowed upon my thirty-year-old skin as we lay quietly in this room in each other’s arms, that I have chosen to exhibit this floral batiste handkerchief, which she had folded so carefully and put in her bag that day but never removed. Let this crystal inkwell and pen set belonging to my mother that Füsun toyed with that afternoon, noticing it on the table while she was smoking a cigarette, be a relic of the refinement and the fragile tenderness we felt for each other. Let this belt whose oversize buckles that I had seized and fastened with a masculine arrogance that I felt so guilty for afterwards bear witness to our melancholy as we covered our nakedness and cast our eyes about the filth of the world once again.

And thus when by poetyr or wehn by music the most entrancing of the poetic moods we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then not as the abbate gravina supposes through excess of pleasure but through a certain petulatn impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp no wholly here on earth at once and forever these divein and rapturous joys of which through the poem or through the music we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. The struggle to apprehend the supernal loveliness this struggle on the part of souls fittingly constituted has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as peotic whose distant footsteps echo down the corridors of time The impression left is one of pleasurable sadness. This certain taint of sadness is insperably connected with al the higher manifestations of true beauty . It is nevertheless. Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. The next desideratum was a pretext for the continous use of the one word nevermore.in observing the difficutly which i at once found in inventing a suffiecienly plausible reason for its continuous repetition i did not fail to preceive thta this difficutly arose solely form the pre assumption that the world was to be so continuously or monotonously spoke by a human being i did not fail to perceive in shor t that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word here then immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech and very naturally a parrot in the first instance suggested itself but was superseded forthwith by a raven as equally capable of speech and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.“I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word "Nevermore" at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object _supremeness_ or perfection at all points, I asked myself--"Of all melancholy topics what, according to the _universal_ understanding of mankind, is the _most_ melancholy?" Death, was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?" From what I have already explained at some length, the answer here also is obvious--"When it most closely allies itself to _Beauty_; the death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

13. If the goal is to build up one's sexual energy, what's the harm of sleeping with a lot of different women (or men) to increase your ching chi? Chia: The goal is not to build up one's sexual energy—it is to transform raw sexual energy into a refined subtle energy. Sex is only one means of doing that. Promiscuity can easily lower your energy if you choose partners with moral or physical weakness. If you lie with degenerates, it may hurt you, in that you can temporarily acquire your partner's vileness. By exchanging subtle energy, you actually absorb the other's substance. You become the other person and assume new karmic burdens. This is why old couples resemble each other so closely: they have exchanged so much energy that they are made of the same life-stuff. This practice accelerates this union, but elevates it to a higher level of spiritual experience. So the best advice I can give is to never compromise your integrity of body, mind and spirit. In choosing a lover you are choosing your destiny, so make sure you love the woman with whom you have sex. Then you will be in harmony with what flows from the exchange and your actions will be proper. If you think you can love two women at once, be ready to spend double the chi to transform and balance their energy. I doubt if many men can really do that and feel deep serenity. For the sake of simplicity, limit yourself to one woman at a time. It takes a lot of time and energy to cultivate the subtle energies to a deep level. It is impossible to define love precisely. You have to consult your inner voice. But cultivating your chi energy sensitizes you to your conscience. What was a distant whisper before may become a very loud voice. For your own sake, do not abandon your integrity for the sake of physical pleasure or the pretense that you are doing deep spiritual exercises. If you sleep with one whom you don't love, your subtle energies will not be in balance and psychic warfare can begin. This will take its toll no matter how far apart you are physically until you sever or heal the psychic connection. It's better to be honest in the beginning. For the same reason make love only when you feel true tenderness within yourself. Your power to love will thus grow stronger. Selfish or manipulative use of sex even with someone with whom you are in love can cause great disharmony. If you feel unable to use your sexual power lovingly, then do not use it at all! Sex is a gleaming, sharp, two-edged sword, a healing tool that can quickly become a weapon. If used for base purposes, it cuts you mercilessly. If you haven't found a partner with whom you can be truly gentle, then simply touch no one. Go back to building your internal energy and when it gets high you will either attract a quality lover or learn a deeper level within yourself.

With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke! and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose, who are now apprehensive for the safety of their "possession"); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as "good." Our love of our neighbor, is it not a striving after new property? And similarly our love of knowledge, of truth; and in general all the striving after novelties? We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves, that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves. (One can also suffer from excess, even the desire to cast away, to share out, may assume the honorable name of "love.") When we see any one suffering, we willingly utilize the opportunity then afforded to take possession of him; the beneficent and sympathetic man, for example, does this; he also calls the desire for new possession awakened in him, by the name of "love," and has enjoyment in it, as in a new acquisition suggesting itself to him. The love of the sexes, however, betrays itself most plainly as the striving after possession: the lover wants the unconditioned, sole possession of the person longed for by him; he wants just as absolute power over her soul as over the body; he wants to be loved solely, and to dwell and rule in the other soul as what is highest and most to be desired. When one considers that this means precisely to exclude all the world from a precious possession, a happiness, and an enjoyment; when one considers that the lover has in view the impoverishment and privation of all other rivals, and would like to become the dragon of his golden hoard, as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors "and exploiters; when one considers finally that to the lover himself, the whole world besides appears indifferent, colorless, and worthless, and that he is ready to make every sacrifice, disturb every arrangement, and put every other interest behind his own, one is verily surprised that this ferocious lust of property and injustice of sexual love should have been glorified and deified to such an extent at all times; yea, that out of this love the conception of love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism. Here, evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of language, there were, of course, always too many of them. Those who have been favored with much possession and satiety, have, to be sure, dropped a word now and then about the "raging demon," as, for instance, the most lovable and most beloved of all the Athenians Sophocles; but Eros always laughed at such revilers, they were always his greatest favorites. There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name — friendship.

My distant past, that is. The last time we were together he said he’d leave me to figure things out in my own time, and a lot of that sort of time has passed.

Perhaps it was the darkness and secrecy that lent an extra layer of excitement to their meeting? Certainly, all of her other senses felt heightened to an almost unbearable extent. She couldn’t see, but she could hear the distant strains of dance music as the steady beat thrummed through her body; and she could feel so much with just one touch.

A name after all is a label as personal as “sweetheart” that a lover may use or as distant as a “hey you” that a stranger in a crowd may call out. But a name is more than a label. It is an inheritance that is uniquely your own. It is the primary way in which you respond to the world and the lens through which the world sees you. It defines you, shapes you, and grounds you. It is the one right you take for granted from the time you start interacting with society.

It is not unusual to be drawn into a love relationship with a person we hurt in the distant past in an attempt to heal. The problem is that instead of healing an ancient wound, most often we end up reinjuring each other. That person who once burned you at the stake for your beliefs in a Christian or pagan god, and whom you confuse for your beloved, ends up lighting the kindling under you once again. And you’re left wondering why you are choking from the smoke of the relationship. When you are sure that you have met your dream lover, your soul mate, and every cell in your body is quivering with excitement, run away as fast as you can. Unless, of course, you are ready to sign up for another lesson in the school of emotional storms. We never got the best parents, only the right parents for us. We never got the best spouse, only the right spouse. The sooner we recognize this the faster we will be able to move on to more interesting engagements with the world. Learning to love the people you do not necessarily approve of or agree with is a challenge, but they are often our greatest teachers. They hold the mirror up to us so we can see hidden and neglected parts of ourselves in them. As for your soul mate, accept that you will never find that person perfectly designed to your romantic specifications. They do not exist. But know that you can become the right partner. This will only happen once you stop looking for him or her.

When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant

John’s life had been like so many of ours. He grew up in a middle-class family with a loving, nurturing mother and a kind but distant father. He knew his father loved him, but they hadn’t been close since John’s teenage years. When John came out to his parents, they were upset but seemed to get through it fairly well, although they didn’t ask about the details of John’s life. He introduced his parents to his first live-in lover, but after that relationship fell apart, he avoided telling them much about whom he was seeing. It just made him feel like a double failure: first, he turned out to be gay; and second, he couldn’t keep a long-term relationship.

The lealest lover time can show, Doomed for a lady-love to languish, Among these solitudes doth go, A prey to every kind of anguish. Why Love should like a spiteful foe Thus use him, he hath no idea, But hogsheads full — this doth he know — Don Quixote’s tears are on the flow, And all for distant Dulcinea Del Toboso.

When will you arrive? Why is your radiance distant from my eyes? You drop through the branches when I sleep at the roots. You pour yourself out like the light of an afternoon and yet somewhere you linger, outside the day.

Love and aspirations! Let me take you behind the rainbow, And show you the colours of love, Let me make you wet with my feelings of love, As every droplet of my colourful feelings kisses you behind that rainbow. Let me borrow some colourful mist from the butterfly, And sprinkle it on your soul, Let me love you whole including your soul, As you become the envy of every butterfly. Let me take you to the garden of roses, lavenders and other beautiful flowers, And love you like careless lovers, Let us be those carefree and self indulgent lovers, As I secretly endow you with the beauty of all these flowers. Let us stand at the banks of the noisy rivulet, And flow with its hastiness in one direction, Let you be the sea and I will be the river flowing in this direction, As you and I become the part of the happily and always rushing rivulet. Let me take you to a place where it is always morning, And let the dew fall on your soul and quench you, Let you be the pasture of million grass blades as the dew drops kiss you, As you witness the wave of pleasure engulfing you , then only for you let me be this morning. Let me take you to the distant valley where the shepherdess sings a beautiful song, And you try to be her melody, Let me then be the every note of this melody, As you get drawn towards the mesmerising song. Let me make you sit before my mirror long enough, And fill myself just with your visual imaginations, Let there be no memory left in me except your imaginations, As I love you today Irma may it be till eternity, and yet not enough! Let me feel your bright body and deep eyes, under the sun, And I shall love you in presence of this universe, Let me kiss you , to feel you and to remember you just like this universe, As sometimes under the moonlight I feel you are my warmth and my only sun! Let me love you forever, Although loving is brief but forgetting is an infinite loop of time, So, let me love you Irma till the end of time, Because we were born for each other and to be together forever. Let me now take you to the pinnacle of hopes, dreams and beautiful aspirations, And you decide if you wish to push me into the abyss of nothingness, Let me tell you though, I shall find you even in that nothingness, Because as we both stood in front of the mirror, I hope you remember, my reflection was a representation of your beauty and aspirations!

Most screams heard on television and in the movies are created by doubles and voice actors. One stock scream is so well used it has a name, the Wilhelm. Originally created for the 1951 film Distant Drums, the scream was used in 1977 by Star Wars film sound designer Ben Burtt, who named it after character Private Wilhelm from the 1953 movie The Charge at Feather River. To date, the Wilhelm has been heard in more than four hundred films and shows, including the book-related movies The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Planet of the Apes (2001), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 2 (2012), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019).

The terranaut and the Priest of Hands were aspects of himself, his inner younger self. He yearned to embrace them, not for any carnal gratification, but simply to become one with the parts of his character which he felt had become lost or estranged. Ays and Finnigin walked bravely into the unknown; he himself cowered behind city walls, afraid of the land beyond. He was fond of his creations, and felt jealous of them. He knew it would be difficult to equip them with lovers, and realised it was no accident that the two women he had invented were based on a dour, distant spinster, and a wild animal.

They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer's star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings. At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, "Everything," so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts.

When you leave, your delicate footsteps walk through my sanity damaging me with the sweet calamities of your untouchable vanities.

Bring me the stars She wanted me to bring her those stars, I looked at the sky and wondered how far they could be, They had witnessed moments of triumph, romance and many wars, And from where I was they appeared too distant to me, But then a feeling greeted me suddenly, “To know how far , far can be; you must go, Bring her the stars she loves so passionately, And how much she loves you, you shall know!” I could dare the dark even the unknown, But being unable to see her would be like witnessing the sky without stars, And in my thoughts in these distant skies I have often flown, Knowing that she is beside me, kissing me, touching me, unlike these far away stars, Yet her wish, her desire, is like this night sky to me, Where the stars indeed exist, But somehow this sky of mine where she is everything, she fails to see, Perhaps this is why from seeking these new and unknown stars I resist, But tonight she kissed me with her eyes and she spread over my soul, And said, “I want those stars and the sky too.” I wondered how I could steal the empire of Gods whole, But for her love, her smile, her warm and wet kisses, I can anything do, So I held her in my embrace and felt her everywhere, Then I let her drown into my eyes, And from there, when she returned she had retrieved the sky, the stars from somewhere, Then her smile and the passion in her eyes, Poured over me like the million kisses of love, And from this night onwards, whenever she loves me in the darkness of the night, I hold her warm body in my arms and kiss her with the feeling of love, And then she dives into my eyes of passion to retrieve her objects of delight, It has been so, since that night, that starry night, When I realised how far, far can be, And with the feeling of love one can even steal the starlight, At least this is how I feel Irma, whenever you confess you love me!

Cosmic lovers The moon in the sky, bright and fully lit, By the generous Sun that on it has never quit, They have been part of this everlasting affair, Where one brightens the other’s life in ways beautiful and fair, The moon in the darkness of the night reflects the love beams of her admirer, Who for millions of years has been her seeker, So distant, so far, with never ending spaces to separate them both, But what can separate from light the passions of a vigorous moth, So they discovered a way to clad each other in their feelings, That we witness as moon light are but sun’s and moon’s true feelings, Cast by the sun from the distance and received by the moon, As it burns in her memories everyday, every afternoon, Then during the night the moon performs her burning act, And that is where lies love’s true and the most inexplicable fact, For what burns the sun, only brightens the moon, And this is the wonder of their love affair that will not end ever, and not at all anytime soon!

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements? Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both. Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion." And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

Fado, Ramage thought to himself; the Portuguese were a far from sad people, but those sad songs ... always about the broken-hearted woman left at home while her loved one departed, whether for some distant shore or the gates of Heaven. If one judged the country by the song, the nation comprised only women who'd been spurned, jilted, widowed or whose lover had disappeared over the horizon, and every dam' one of them wailing about it to the accompaniment of musical instruments obviously invented by gloomy men for the use at funerals.

Like former lovers […] [friends] are the ones whom, from time to time, I seek out on the internet, in the phone directories of distant cities, in the faces I pass on the street. For it’s almost as if they still hold some Proustian key to the mystery of lost time, the answer to the question of who we were when we were friends, and of what has become of us since.

Morning's Serenade by Stewart Stafford Stirred by a magpie's auction bids, I opened up our curtained eyelids, To pale dawn's reverential blinking, Beyond my lady's distant inkling. Anointed by the infant sun's rays, I stand in regal morning’s praise; Surveying virgin domain’s expanse, Before the hatchling public dance. The early-risen owl hoots carried far, The songbirds played off fading stars, Cockcrow drew in a loping red fox, Scattering fawns and sheep flocks. My lady spent, sports a drowsy crown, Her chest rises, then slowly down, Cityscape visions to last night's desire, Golden tresses tossed in oriole fire. To the kitchen, a connoisseur's start, A lover's labour, a chef's work of art, Crack avian treasures, new life's motif. Ground coffee, perfumed weekend relief. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant. Just what Bowlby and Ainsworth had found with mothers and children.

Worse than that is the faint, uncanny off feeling when we’re actually together. Like she’s only halfway here. Like those metronomes have fallen into different rhythms, and even when we’re right next to each other, they never manage to match up. At first I’d chalked it up to stress about the new baby, but as time has worn on, my sister’s seemed more distant rather than closer. We’re fundamentally out of sync in a way I can’t seem to name,

Duncan had no other guide than a distant glimmering light, which served, however, the office of a polar star to the lover. By its aid he was enabled to enter the haven of his hopes, which was merely another apartment of the cavern, that had been solely appropriated to the safe-keeping of so important a prisoner as a daughter of the commandant of William Henry. It was profusely strewed with the plunder of that unlucky fortress. In the midst of this confusion he found her he sought, pale, anxious, and terrified, but lovely. David had prepared her for such a visit. “Duncan!” she exclaimed, in a voice that seemed to tremble at the sounds created by itself. “Alice” he answered, leaping carelessly among trunks, boxes, arms, and furniture, until he stood at her side. “I knew that you would never desert me,” she said, looking up with a momentary glow on her otherwise dejected countenance.

In a realm of soft hues and blooming blossoms, a young girl lay amidst a field of flowers, a celestial veil gracing her features with a gentle, translucent touch. Her arms extended gracefully above her, eyes closed, she seemed to dance on the edge of dreams. The flowers painted the canvas in shades of blue, purple, and pink, their petals swaying in a tender breeze. Dew-kissed blades of grass formed a sea of diamonds, reflecting the soft glow of an unseen moon. As the girl stirred in her slumber, a distant echo of horse steps reached her ears, a melody that danced through the flowered meadow. Slowly, she rose from her flowery bed, the veil slipping away like morning mist to unveil her enchanting presence. Her gown, a masterpiece of celestial elegance, cascaded around her. A floor-length creation in light blue, it cradled her form with a sweetheart neckline, the bodice adorned in gold, floral designs. Layers of tulle formed the flowing skirt, adorned with accents of blueish flowers, and a train that trailed behind her like a comet's tail. Around her neck hung a pendant, a crescent moon cradling a star, both crafted from silver and adorned with blue gemstones, a twin to the one she wore in the enchanted garden. Her golden locks, a cascade of loose curls, framed her face with ethereal grace, flowing like strands of sunlight. Awakening from the meadow's embrace, her deep blue eyes sought the source of the approaching steps. With a sense of dreamlike purpose, she floated towards the sound, the forest mist enveloping her like a lover's caress. In the heart of the foggy woodland, a clearing revealed itself, trees standing sentinel in the distance. From the shroud of mist emerged a figure on horseback, a man in the regalia of a medieval warrior. The horse, a noble steed of white, carried him forward with determined grace. His attire, a tapestry of dark fabric and gilded accents, spoke of a history steeped in honor and battle. High collars and embroidered shoulder pads, buttons, and chains of gold, all adorned his form. His cape billowed behind him, a canvas of golden threads dancing in the breeze. Their eyes met innocence and determination woven together in the tapestry of fate. As he approached, still astride his noble mount, he extended a hand, a silent invitation. With an innocence that matched the morning dew, she lifted her hand to meet his, and at that moment, the world seemed to swirl and dance around them.

In a realm of soft hues and blooming blossoms, a young girl lay amidst a field of flowers, a celestial veil gracing her features with a gentle, translucent touch. Her arms extended gracefully above her, eyes closed, she seemed to dance on the edge of dreams. The flowers painted the canvas in shades of blue, purple, and pink, their petals swaying in a tender breeze. Dew-kissed blades of grass formed a sea of diamonds, reflecting the soft glow of an unseen moon. As the girl stirred in her slumber, a distant echo of horse steps reached her ears, a melody that danced through the flowered meadow. Slowly, she rose from her flowery bed, the veil slipping away like morning mist to unveil her enchanting presence. Her gown, a masterpiece of celestial elegance, cascaded around her. A floor-length creation in light blue, it cradled her form with a sweetheart neckline, the bodice adorned in gold, floral designs. Layers of tulle formed the flowing skirt, adorned with accents of blueish flowers, and a train that trailed behind her like a comet's tail. Around her neck hung a pendant, a crescent moon cradling a star, both crafted from silver and adorned with blue gemstones, a twin to the one she wore in the enchanted garden. Her golden locks, a cascade of loose curls, framed her face with ethereal grace, flowing like strands of sunlight. Awakening from the meadow's embrace, her deep blue eyes sought the source of the approaching steps. With a sense of dreamlike purpose, she floated towards the sound, the forest mist enveloping her like a lover's caress. In the heart of the foggy woodland, a clearing revealed itself, trees standing sentinel in the distance. From the shroud of mist emerged a figure on horseback, a man in the regalia of a medieval warrior. The horse, a noble steed of white, carried him forward with determined grace. His attire, a tapestry of dark fabric and gilded accents, spoke of a history steeped in honor and battle. High collars and embroidered shoulder pads, buttons, and chains of gold, all adorned his form. His cape billowed behind him, a canvas of golden threads dancing in the breeze. Their eyes met innocence and determination woven together in the tapestry of fate. As he approached, still astride his noble mount, he extended a hand, a silent invitation. With an innocence that matched the morning dew, she lifted her hand to meet his, and at that moment, the world seemed to swirl and dance around them. Yet, just as the dance was about to begin, Princess Mehjabeen's eyes fluttered open, the enchanting dream slipping away like mist beneath the twilight.

Everything is only you! Sometimes my heart wants to escape with my head, But my heart beats in all directions tend to tread, And my mind that only thinks of you, Eventually lets my heart beats become an echo of you, Where your memories lie everywhere, and stare at me, From every corner, every side, every direction, it is just you that I see, And then my love Irma, I love you, Quietly in my heart beats and my mind creates visual glimpses of you, Which appear and fade like bubbles in the sea of time, And whenever a bubble of excitement is about to reach its prime, It bursts and the bubble sprays infinite droplets of memories bearing an image of you, And then how I miss you! Maybe you will never know it, That shall be the tragedy of time and feelings of love which are forfeit, Still I shall think of you and love to create this bubble with you, And feel the droplets of your kisses, which are but distant memories of you, Time travels at its pace but human memories somehow master the art of lying in a timeless space, Where the moments from the past through the lanes of mind towards every heartbeat pace, It is so with me, yet I love to love you, Whenever I travel in the train of time I wish to journey only unto you, So let the memories be there Irma and let the feelings stay true, Let the present know, that it is past that rules and leaves a clue, For the lovers to pick, just like I in every present seek you, This clue from the past, makes me find you in the present, that Universe creates only for me and you, In every bubble of memory that bursts and creates endless droplets of memories, Which cover my body and soul with these time’s pleasantries, Where you grow over me like a skin of feelings and I feel you, Like a touch growing all over me, where everything is now you and only you!

In the naked reality! In the nakedness of the reality, She reflects in my mind’s imagination, Sometimes she becomes a dream of endless beauty, Where she is everything, even reality’s beautiful personification, In the smile that slowly grows over my face, She neutralizes every feeling of anxiety, And how happily my heart beats pace, In a feeling of love’s sobriety, Then as I hold her hand, In the midst of Summer flowers, She assumes the form of beauty that grows in my land, Land of reality, land of Irma’s dreams, Irma’s kisses, Irma’s beauty, the land of lovers, We tread and walk for sometime, In this naked moment of the reality, Invaded by a feeling of joy sublime, Because I walk with the most authentic form of beauty, At night when the sky is shimmering with distant glowing dots, We sit under a chestnut tree, To experience our love and a feeling that never departs, Wherever we might be, Finally in this naked moment of reality, I grow over her skin like a shadow that grows over something, I kiss her and then her beauty, Until we both become part of everything, The thing itself and the shadow that covers the thing, The feeling of love that covers us inside out, Then when our hearts no longer beat, but they only sing, I hold her hand and experience love with nothing to fear and with no doubt, And this romance continues to grow, Like two shadows fused into one, And as my endless feelings of love over her skin flow, We lie in this state of naked reality without letting anyone know!

I think of her as much as anyone thinks of their former lovers, I suppose,” I heard him say, distantly. “Men especially never forget the erotic encounters they have enjoyed.

The air was pure and still, and early sunshine sparkled on the heavy dew. In the valley sat cotton candy mist, and the distant hills stood softly, their edges blurred and colors muted by the moist air. Swallows and house martins swooped and dipped, hungry for their breakfasts, catching the first rise of insects of the day. The honeysuckle and roses had not yet warmed to release their scent, so the strongest smell was of wet grass and bracken. Laura smiled, breathing deeply, and walked lightly through the gate into the meadows. She hadn't the courage to head off onto the mountain on her own just yet but could not wait to explore the woods at the end of the fields. By the time she reached the first towering oaks, her feet were washed clean by the dew. She felt wonderfully refreshed and awake. As she wandered among the trees she had the sense of a place where time had stood still. Where man had left only a light footprint. Here were trees older than memory. Trees that had sheltered farmers and walkers for generations. Trees that had been meeting points for lovers and horse dealers. Trees that had provided fuel and food for families and for creatures of the forest with equal grace. As she walked deeper into the woods she noticed the quality of sound around her change. Gone were the open vistas and echoes of the meadows and their mountain backdrop. Here even the tiniest noises were close up, bouncing back off the trunks and branches, kept in by the dense foliage. The colors altered subtly, too. With the trees in full leaf the sunlight was filtered through bright green, giving a curious tinge to the woodland below. White wood anemones were not white at all, but the palest shade of Naples yellow. The silver lichens which grew in abundance bore a hint of olive. Even the miniature violets reflected a suggestion of viridian.

And the priestess spoke again and said: “Speak to us of Reason and Passion“ And he answered saying: Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements? Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or our rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both. Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows – then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.” And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky – then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.” And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

I’ve heard the most interesting rumors regarding you and the oh-so-dishy Mr. Haverstein,” Millie said. “I don’t believe dishy is a real word” was all Lucetta could think to respond. Millie waved that away with a flick of her dainty wrist. “I can’t be expected to know all the right words, Lucetta, and you’re stalling.” Lucetta blew out a breath, stirring the bubbles. “What have you heard?” “That you and Mr. Haverstein were caught in a most interesting situation in a storage room of all places, that he tried to save you from drowning twice in his, uh, moat from what I’ve been told, and . . . that he did save you once from a mad goat by the name of Geoffrey. I’ve also heard that you seem to enjoy his company, so much so that there’s been talk of marriage—but you rejected the marriage idea because of mysterious happenings occurring at Ravenwood.” “Bram didn’t save me from drowning twice. He almost caused me to drown both of those times.” “Again . . . stalling.” Tracing a finger through the bubbles, Lucetta took a second to gather her thoughts. “He’s explained away practically all the mysteries surrounding him, which has allowed me to come to the conclusion he’s not insane.” Millie’s eyes turned the size of saucers. “You had reason to doubt his sanity?” “He maintains a dungeon and has a castle where suits of armor go strolling about in the middle of the night—what else was I to conclude?” “A . . . dungeon?” “Yes, but I can’t explain that in any further detail, since the dungeon is part of a rather large secret that Bram has yet to divulge to anyone except his staff—and now me, of course.” Millie settled back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Fair enough, but . . . tell me this, how do you feel about the man, especially since his sanity is no longer in question?” “That’s a little tricky to answer.” Millie sent her a look that had exasperation stamped all over it. “It is not. And since you’re the one who insisted Harriet and I dwell on exactly what our feelings were for Oliver and Everett just a few months back, I’m going to extend you the same courtesy. So . . . feelings—yours for Mr. Haverstein—what are they?” “He, uh . . . did mention that he’d like to court me.” “Court you?” “Yes, you know, call on me, take me for drives, bring me flowers, and . . . well . . . court me.” “That’s incredibly romantic.” “Well, yes, it is, but . . .” “You don’t want to be courted because you see that as a weakness of being female.” “What?” Millie rolled her eyes. “Lucetta, you and I have been friends for a very long time, and while you never talk about yourself much—as in ever—it’s always been clear to me and Harriet that you’ve got this attitude, if you will, about being a female. It’s one of the reasons I believe you’ve held yourself so distant from any gentleman who has ever shown an interest in you. And, it’s why you’re incredibly wary of men like Bram Haverstein, who clearly—and this is without me even knowing that much about him—is an old-fashioned man, one who enjoys swooping in and saving the damsel in distress.” “There’s that romance novel lover I’ve been missing.” Millie sat forward. “You know I’m right.” “So

I lived inscrutable hours, a succession of disconnected moments, in my night-time walk to the lonely shore of the sea. All the thoughts that have made men live and all their emotions that have died passed through my mind, like a dark summary of history, in my meditation that went to the seashore. I suffered in me, with me, the aspirations of all eras, and every disquietude of every age walked with me to the murmuring shore of the sea. What men wanted and didn’t achieve, what they killed in order to achieve, and all that souls have secretly been – all of this filled the feeling soul with which I walked to the seashore. What lovers found strange in those they love, what the wife never revealed to her husband, what the mother imagines about the son she didn’t have, what only had form in a smile or opportunity, in a time that wasn’t the right time or in an emotion that was missing – all of this went to the seashore with me and with me returned, and the waves grandly churned their music that made me live it all in a sleep. We are who we’re not, and life is quick and sad. The sound of the waves at night is a sound of the night, and how many have heard it in their own soul, like the perpetual hope that dissolves in the darkness with a faint plash of distant foam! What tears were shed by those who achieved, what tears lost by those who succeeded! And all of this, in my walk to the seashore, was a secret told me by the night and the abyss. How many we are! How many of us fool ourselves! What seas crash in us, in the night when we exist, along the beaches that we feel ourselves to be, inundated by emotion! All that was lost, all that should have been sought, all that was obtained and fulfilled by mistake, all that we loved and lost and then, after losing it and loving it for having lost it, realized we never loved; all that we believed we were thinking when we were feeling; all the memories we took for emotions; and the entire ocean, noisy and cool, rolling in from the depths of the vast night to ripple over the beach, during my nocturnal walk to the seashore …

Distant voices reached him; inwardly, he sighed, and reluctantly brought the kiss to an end. He raised his head. Patience's eyes slowly opened, then she blinked, and stared straight at him. For one instant, the look on her face, in her eyes, had him puzzled- then he recognized it. Curious- she wasn't shocked, stunned, or thrown into a maidenly fluster. She was curious. Vane couldn't stop his rakish grin. Nor could he resist the temptation to brush his lips over hers one last time. "What are you doing?" Patience whispered as his head bent to hers. Even at close quarters, she could still see his smile. "It's called 'kiss and make up.'" The curve of his lips deepened. "It's what lovers do when they fall out." A vise locked Patience's heart; panic- it had to be that- streaked through her. "We aren't lovers." "Yet." His lips touched hers and she shivered. "We never will be." She might be giddy, but she was quite sure of that. He stilled, but his confident smile didn't waver. "Don't wager your fortune on it." Again, his lips brushed hers.

No great stars above her. Only a blackness that hurt to look at. Had the distant suns abandoned their birthplace? Earth was dying and the stars were gone like adulterous celestial lovers seeking a new terrestrial mate. She did not blame them. We were never worth shining for, she thought.

Even though we have all had experiences of feeling distant from God, the Dark Night of the Senses is a particular experience with identifiable symptoms, described by John of the Cross. Although not every person necessarily experiences all these symptoms, we can get a good feel for this painful time by looking at the characteristics he describes:4 • The Dark Night of the Senses usually comes after a season of consistent and satisfying meditative prayer, and we have been experiencing some detachment from old dependencies on worldly things. • In the darkness, we no longer derive real satisfaction or consolation from spiritual practices or from other people. • The darkness does not have any apparent causes; it is not the result of depression or newly committed sins or imperfections.5 • We feel as though we are not serving God well, but backsliding in our faith, and we become concerned about failing God. • We experience a powerlessness to meditate on God’s Word and to make use of our imagination to relate to the truths of Scripture. God doesn’t seem to speak to us through our analysis and synthesis of the ideas in the text. Prayer may well feel like a waste of time. • In the midst of our spiritual dryness and the absence of God’s consolations, a “dark light” shines that brings us even greater pain. As this dark light shines on us, we gain a greater awareness of our own sinful nature and the extent to which every thought and action is tainted with self. • We find ourselves deeply grieved over our sinful nature and the sins of others. • In the light of our greater self-knowledge, we find ourselves humbler and more patient with the struggles of others. • The Dark Night season often feels even emptier by the absence of qualified spiritual direction to help interpret what is happening, or worse, by bad advice from others. • Whether the Dark Night time is relatively short or extends for years, it is terribly painful, like that endured by a lover separated from her beloved.

We see the mortal form of the immortal healer climbing along the jutting cornice of some cliff, in search for the simples of life; and as the zephyrs waft his long ashen locks around his furrowed brow, his trembling hand clutches some rugged crag, more perhaps from joy than fear. And so, as we now open the works of Aleister Crowley, we are filled with an exhilarating chain of pangs; mortal-like we are never sated, and as our lips taste the nectar of true poetry we tremblingly clutch the crags of Parnassus in search for the Asphodel of Love, Wisdom, and Beauty. Here, as we turn some beetling height, the dying rays of the Swinburnian sun sink, those rays that ruffled the vestal purity of the clouds to the rosy blush of a lover’s kiss, and in the departing light we again find the mystic Trinity midst the hellebore and thistles of existence, enthroned, eternal. The sun sinks, and the last notes of the nightingale die into the stillness of falling night. The emerald sky like the robe of some car-borne Astarté, slashed with an infinite orange and red, fades into the sombre garment of night; and above silently breaks a primal sea gemmed with all the colours of the opal, deepening into a limitless amethyst, darkens, and the sun goes out. The spangled pall of Night is drawn, and the lull of death is o’er us; but no, hark! the distant boom of a beetle is carried across the still glowing welkin, it is the signal drum announcing the marriage of Night and Day. The crescent moon rises, diaphanous and fair, and the world wakes to a chant.

even if the British royal family sold him jams, they would not contain the hidden sweetness of tea leaves that had been fermented and dried in distant villages. He recalled being told by tea lovers that the singing of the tea pickers served as the fertilizer of choice.

Here’s a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and disciple them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle. You don’t have to be a fertility maximalist to recognize that children are always lauded as a blessing in the Bible… [I]n the not-too-distant future, the only couples replacing themselves in America will be religious couples. Although there are many good reasons to have a baby, at the end of the day, as Jonathan Last maintains, “there’s only one good reason to go through the trouble a second time: Because you believe, in some sense, that God wants you to.” The basic reason countries stop having children is because they’ve come to see offspring as a liability rather than a source of hope. As Christians, we know better. Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15)? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children. And once we have those children, there is almost nothing more important than catechizing them in the faith, developing their moral framework, and preparing them to be deeply compassionate lovers of God and lovers of people and relentlessly biblical lovers of truth... I understand that many couples will be unable to have all the children they want to have. We have to allow for God to work in mysterious ways that we would not have planned. And yet, in so far as we are able, let us welcome new life... Presidents and Supreme Court justices will come and go. A child’s soul will last forever. The future belongs to the fecund. It’s time for happy warriors who seek to “renew the city” and “win the culture war” by investing in their local church, focusing on the family, and bringing the kingdom to bear on the world, one baby at a time.

Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film Aging, at all. I want that. And to fall perhaps most honestly in love beside the ocean, in a home I’ve paid for by doing as I like: drinking good wine, dusting sugar over a croissant, or the stage play I’m writing myself into. Aging Black woman in neutral summer turtleneck. Known. And jogging. Lonesome enough. Eating homemade lavender ice cream, the moon blooming through the kitchen window. The distant sound of waves. Learning French as a second language. Votre pâte merveilleux, I smile back. And then, just like that! Falling, cautiously, for my busy, middle-aged lover, who needs me, but has never truly seen me until now. Our Black friends, celebrating with hors d’oeuvres. Our Black children growing older.

The only one I ever liked was Jesus, the baby, the boy. I was always impatient with the crucifixion bit, and I was always mad at his so-called father. God, [...] You know, my grandmother mainly prayed to the Virgin, and, in fact, she told me the Virgin appeared to her in dreams, and once, she said, in a vision. I think she secretly didn't like that God guy either. In fact, if anything, it was as though she emotionally lumped God and the Devil together. Distant, threatening - one threatened if you did, one threatened if you didn't. Both masculine, isolated entities. [...] That God guy has us in a bind. Too isolated, not enough joy. He needs a lover, that's what I think. [...] Yeah, I think God needs some pussy.