Drift Racing Quotes

The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.

You belong to the biblical race of Nephilim. Your real father was an angel who fell from heaven. You're half mortal." The boy's dark eyes lifted, meeting Chauncey's. "Half fallen angel." Chauncey's tutor's voice drifted up from the recesses of his mind, reading passages from the Bible, telling of a deviant race created when angels cast from heaven mated with mortal women. A fearsome and powerful race. A chill that wasn't entirely revulsion crept through Chauncey. "Who are you?

The low, rough sound he emitted at that was infuriating, fascinating. Wait. Was he still growling? Or was he purring? His eyes drifted half closed. He gave her a heavy-lidded, sleepy, sensual, entirely disingenuous look.

By their peculiar “reasoning,” too, theologians have sanctioned most of the ills of the ages. They justified the Inquisition, serfdom, and slavery. Theologians of our time defend segregation and the annihilation of one race by the other. They have drifted away from righteousness into an effort to make wrong seem to be right.

Immediately after the race, even as he sat gasping for air in the Husky Clipper while it drifted down the Langer See beyond the finish line, an expansive sense of calm had enveloped him. In the last desperate few hundred meters of the race, in the searing pain and bewildering noise of that final furious sprint, there had come a singular moment when Joe realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win the race, beyond what he was already doing. Except for one thing. He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it. He had known in that instant that there could be no hesitation, no shred of indecision. He had had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself off of a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him

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.

I long to drift through turquoise skies; race the wind in rampant flight. Ruddy chains have framed my eyes, they seize my heart and stain the light.

Black smoke wafted around her, covering her from the waist downward. She drifted fingers through the top of it. It curled and eddied just like real smoke. Khalil was making his presence known to the Vampyres in no uncertain terms. She stirred the smoke with a forefinger. It looked really neat, actually, like she was standing in the mouth of a volcano. Or maybe in the mouth of hell. "Meet my companion," she said. "He's not very friendly." Khalil Somebody Important. Which probably meant he was the Bane of More Than One Person's Existence. He might possibly be the Bane of Quite a Few Peoples' Existences. For the first time since meeting him, Grace felt almost cheerful.

She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.

Avery?" My eyes drifted shut. "What?" "You've never been kissed before, right?" My pulse exploded."No." "Just so we're clear," he said."This isn't a kiss." I opened my mouth, and then his lips were on mine. A sweet sweeping of his lips across mine, breathtakingly tender and soft, and way too quick. "You kissed me," I gasped, my fingers digging into his sweater. "That wasn't a kiss." His lips brushed mine as he spoke. Shivers raced up and down my spine.

I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.

There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes. The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor.

In every one of these "chrysalis" worlds thousands of millions of persons were flashing into existence, one after the other, to drift gropingly about for a few instants of cosmical time before they were extinguished. Most were capable, at least in some humble degree, of the intimate kind of community which is personal affection; but for nearly all of them a stranger was ever a thing to fear and hate. And even their intimate loving was inconstant and lacking in insight. Nearly always they were intent merely on seeking for themselves respite from fatigue or boredom, fear or hunger. Like my own race, they never fully awoke from the primeval sleep of the subman. Only a few here and there, now and then, were solaced, goaded, or tortured by moments of true wakefulness. Still fewer attained a clear and constant vision, even of some partial aspect of truth; and their half-truths they nearly always took to be absolute. Propagating their little partial truths, they bewildered and misdirected their fellow mortals as much as they helped them.

The tin pan notes of a piano drift faintly into the night. A man curses and a window slams. Far distant an ash can clatters on stone and the almost human screech of a cat pierces the night.

Above it all drifted a silvery scythe blade of moon. Wayne looked up at it, and away, and then looked again. The moon had a hooked nose, a thoughtfully frowning mouth, and a single eye closed in sleep. When it exhaled, a wind rippled across the plains and silvery beds of cloud raced through the night. Wayne almost clapped his hands in delight to look upon it.

Frankly, I had forgotten Mithra-Grandchamp. The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.

The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers dug up the petrified culture from the rubble and ashes. Today, the entire picture of the former paradise stands before our eyes as a spent dream which had once produced life, beauty and strength as long as a superior race ruled. It will live again and it will dream again. But as soon as races of a dreamless kind took over and attempted to realize the dream, reality vanished with the dream.

the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes. Perhaps the sexually impotent are subject to the same impulse. (The

The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known---cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honored of them all--- And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end. To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains; but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, my own Telemachus, To whom I leave the scepter and the isle--- Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and through soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me--- That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A nation without a myth drifts aimlessly throughout history. Myth gives purpose and meaning to the civilisation. Myth makes a people a nation, a nation a race, and a race a contributor to the world. Myth shapes the race so that the race may fulfil the potential of its individual. The myth makes us conscious that we are a race, and not merely an arbitrary, purposeless, ill-defined conglomerate of men and women.

Did they stop to think, in the midst of their gaiety and laughter, that they were passing burial places and battlegrounds of vanished peoples? Did they think that the winding river was the highway of extinct races, whose skimming light canoes did cleave the same waters in centuries long ago? Did these maidens in wide bonnets, these lads in straw skimmers and bowties, dream of aught but innocent love and beauty and desire as they drifted on languid oars down waters of youth and summertime! Ah! let us behold them this brief while, floating on the classic river of Raintree County, with all their gushing joys in their bloom...

[The goal is] "liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed form eternity and when at least it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea, and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, till at least it reaches the boundless seas from which it rose." "But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality." Larry grinned. "You want to taste sugar, you don't want to become sugar. What is individuality but the expression of our egoism? Until the soul has shed the last trace of that it cannot become one with the Absolute." "You talk very familiarly of the Absolute, Larry, and it's an imposing word. What does it actually signify to you?" "Reality. You can't say what it is ; you can only say what it isn't. It's inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It's not a person, it's not a thing, it's not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change; whole and part, finite and infinite. It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom." "Golly," I said to myself, but to Larry: "But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in their distress for comfort and encouragement." "It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that's so, whom or what am I to worship—myself? Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination of India has evolved the manifestations of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva and by a hundred other names. The Absolute is in Isvara, the creator and ruler of the world, and it is in the humble fetish before which the peasant in his sun-baked field places the offering of a flower. The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self.

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you. It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die – migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid-afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen’s pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

Everything is grey—except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a “brool” over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom. Dark figures are on the beach here and there, sometimes half shrouded in the mist, and seem “men like trees walking.” The fishing-boats are racing for home, and rise and dip in the ground swell as they sweep into the harbour, bending to the scuppers.

The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things. Nothing compares, even oblivion is a sweet dream. You understand why, of course. Why this peculiar threat. These brooding psyches, all the busy minds everywhere. I hear them buzzing like flies in the blackness. I see them as glow worms flitting in the blackness. They are struggling, straining every second to keep the sky above them, to keep the sun in the sky, to keep the dead in the earth-to keep all things, so to speak, where they belong. What an undertaking! What a crushing task! Is it any wonder that they are all tempted by a universal vice, that in some dark street of the mind a single voice whispers to one and all, softly hissing, and says: 'Lay down your burden.' Then thoughts begin to drift, a mystical magnetism pulls them this way and that, faces start to change, shadows speak... sooner or later the sky comes down, melting like wax. But as you know, everything has not yet been lost: absolute terror has proved its security against this fate. Is it any wonder that these beings carry on the struggle at whatever cost?

eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and tubes feeding what remains. But I don’t want to be kept alive. Because I know what’s next. I’ve seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog

As clouds race towards their own release from form, they are replenshied by the mutable process which created them. They drift, not into continuity, but into other, temporary states of being, all of which eventually decompose to melt into the surrounding air. They rise and fall like vaporous civilizations....

The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says - migrate or die.

Rhys lunged against his hold, but Amren stepped to their side and hissed, 'Listen.' Nesta whispered, 'I give it all back.' Her shoulders heaved as she wept. Rhys began shaking his head, his power a palpable, rising wave that would destroy them all, destroy the world if it meant Feyre was no longer in it, even if he only had seconds to live beyond her, but Amren grabbed the nape of his neck. Her red nails dug into his golden skin. 'Look at the light.' Iridescent light began flowing from Nesta's body. Into Feyre. Nesta kept holding her sister. 'I give it back. I give it back. I give it back.' Even Rhys stopped fighting. No one moved. The lights glimmered down Feyre's arm. Her legs. It suffused her ashen face. Began to fill the room. Cassian's Siphons guttered, as if sensing a power far beyond his own, beyond any of theirs. Tendrils of light drifted between the sisters. And one, delicate and loving, flowed towards Mor. To the bundle in her arms, setting the silent babe within glowing bright as the sun. And Nesta kept whispering, 'I give it back. I give it all back.' The iridescence filled her, filled Feyre, filled the bundle in Mor's arms, lighting his friend's face so the shock on it was etched in stark relief. 'I give it back,' Nesta said, one more time, and Mask and Crown tumbled from her head. The light exploded, blinding and warm, a wind sweeping past them, as if gathering every shard of itself out of the room. Ans as it faded, dark ink splashed upon Nesta's back, visible through her half-shredded shirt, as if it were a wave crashing upon the shore. A bargain. With the Cauldron itself. Yet Cassian could have sworn a luminescent, gentle hand prevented the light from leaving her body altogether. Cassian didn't fight Rhys this time as he raced to the bed. To where Feyre lay, flush with colour. No more blood spilling between her legs. Feyre opened her eyes. She blinked at Rhys, and then turned to Nesta. 'I love you, too,' Feyre whispered to her sister, and smiled. Nesta didn't stop her sob as she launched herself onto Feyre and embraced her.

Diversity” in the academy purported to be about bridge-building and broadening people’s experiences. It has had the opposite effect: dividing society, reducing learning, and creating an oppositional mind-set that prevents individuals from seizing the opportunities available to them. It is humanistic learning, by contrast, that involves an actual encounter with diversity and difference, as students enter worlds radically different from their own. Humanistic study involves imaginative empathy and curiosity, which are being squelched in today’s university in favor of self-engrossed complaint. Teaching the classics is the duty we owe these great works for giving us an experience of the sublime. Once we stop lovingly transmitting them to the next generation, they die. For decades, universities have drifted further and further away from their true purpose. Now they are taking the rest of the world with them.

Jacks-' Evangeline tried not to sound as if her heart was racing. 'Don't you want to hurt me anymore, Little Fox?' His finger reached out and lightly traced her exposed collarbone, setting every inch of her skin on fire. 'You can pick up the dagger any time now.' But Evangeline couldn't pick up the dagger. She could barely manage to keep breathing. His hand was now at the hollow of her throat, careful and caressing. Jacks had touched her before- last night he'd held her while she'd slept, but he'd acted if that had been torture. His touch hadn't been warm, or curious. Or maybe she was the one who was curious. She knew she shouldn't be. But hadn't she wondered what it would be like to be wanted with the intensity that Jacks seemed to want things? His mouth curved wider as his hands moved from her throat to her shoulders and slowly slid the cape away, leaving more of her skin exposed. 'You should go back on the other side of the gate.' Her voice was hoarse. 'You're the one who said I needed a distraction.' HIs fingers drifted lower, trailing down her chest to the sensitive stretch of skin right above the lacy line of her corset. 'Isn't this better than talking?' One finger dipped all the way in to the corset. Her breathing hitched. 'I don't think this is a good idea.' 'That's what makes it interesting.' His other hand found her jaw, while the finger in her corset gently stroked just above her heart, coaxing it to beat even faster. 'You can always pick up the blade,' he taunted. 'You wouldn't like me as a vampire, Little Fox.

Thinking about such a situation, one becomes aware of the human lack of detachment; our inexperience and immaturity in the complex problems of the human condition. But it should not be so. We have the ‘breathing spaces’ when we can take a detached point of view. If it was of life-or-death importance that we learned by these moments of insight, men would quickly become something closer to being godlike. But most of us can drift through life without making any great moral decisions. And so the human race has shown no advance in wisdom in three thousand years.

If trust is the core value that allows us to meet the world in a cheerful stance, then tolerance is the equally important quality that allows us to deal with the realities of differences and conflict. Let's be honest: If people were all more or less the same — if there were no differences in race, religion, sexual orientation, political leanings — life would in some ways be easier. But, boy, would it be dull! Diversity is the spice of life. Our ability to embrace diversity makes our own lives richer. Conversely, whenever we fall victim to prejudice or unadmitted bias, we make our own lives smaller and poorer. You don't believe that women are the equal of men in the workplace? Well, your world has just shrunk by half. You have a problem with gay people? Well, you just deprived yourself of 10 percent of the population. You're not comfortable with black people? Latinos? You get my drift. Keep giving in to intolerance, and eventually your world contains no one but you and a few people who look like you and think like you; it gets to resemble a small, snooty, and deathly dull country club! Is that a world worth living in?

Imagine you're in a rowing boat on a lake. It's summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn't quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. The rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can. A low clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It's a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There's the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else. You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake's movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap. Now, right on that tap - stop. Stop imagining. Here's the real game. Here's what's obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn't matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still - think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside - the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.

In Memory of My Feelings" My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette. At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I'm too blue. An elephant takes up his trumpet, money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired." One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes, and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust, definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs of earth. So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.

At the time, about to graduate from college, I was operating mainly on impulse, like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception. In class and seminars I would dress up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I'd discovered in books., thinking - falsely - that the slogans meant something, that they somehow made what I felt more amenable to proof. But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I'd never known. ... Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me (although even this much understanding may have come later, is also a construct, containing its own falsehoods) that I wasn't alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men... Through organising, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned... I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my life. That was my idea of organising. It was a promise of redemption.

This reminds me of old times,” he said, and his lashes lifted. As his gaze drifted over me, it was focused but all too brief, because he looked away, a muscle working along his jaw. “Kind of.” A flush raced across my cheeks as I switched out the ball for a new one. He was right—this was like all the other times I’d cleaned him up. Well, when I was younger, I tried to clean him up, but had no idea what I was doing, but as we grew older, and he got into fights defending me or for some other reason, this was our routine. Except I was pretty sure that when his gaze roamed over me just now, he’d checked out my breasts, and that was definitely something that hadn’t happened before.

It shouldn't make a difference to me, I suppose,but it does. I've grown to trust you, and I'd hate to think that I've been wrong about you." "Well,it's real nice to hear you like me, Freckles," he teased. "I kind of like you,too." He wiggled his eyebrows as he had earlier. Willow laughed and leaned over to swat at him but missed. "You know, I really don't have freckles. Why don't you call me Williw like everyone else does?" "Maybe, because everyone else does." He shrugged. "Freckles is mine. My special name for you, that is. And you do have freckles, cute little ginger-colored freckles, all-l-l aross the bridge of your nose." "I don't!" Her mouth twisted in annoyance. "Tell you what, we'll race on it. You win-you don't have freckles. I win-you do have freckles." Knowing her only chance to beat his big stallion was to get a head start, Willow didn't waste time agreeing to ny terms. She dug her heels into Sugar's sides and tore off across the desert. "Hey!" Rider called, laughing and spurring Sultan into a run. "You're supposed to wait till I say go." Her laugh drifted back on the wind. "Come on,Sultan. Let's show Miss Freckle Britches who she's dealing with." The spirited stallion's legs stretched out ith effortless grace, his body lowering in a ground-eating pace, and Willow's little mare was no match for the big stallion. "See you back at the ranch, Freckles," Rider laughingly taunted as he rode past.

Paris-Plage: the operation would be perfect if an oil slick drifted in to pollute this pretty little beach. Then the illusion would be total: the beach attendants would be transformed into ecological clean-up agents; they would have stopped sunbathing stupid. WTC: no trace of the bodies of the 3,000 victims. It's as though they had been dropped into quicklime. All the images without the sound, silent, vitrified, pellicularized. The scrap metal and the rubble are auctioned off. The event has more or less vanished into thin air. The pope has reached the state of 'martyr', that is to say, of witness: witness to the possibility that the human race can live beyond death. Living experience of brain-death, of spirituality on a life-support system, of automatic piloting of the vital functions in their death throes. A great model for future generations

Code Blue! We’re losing him!” The EMTs hustled the gurney containing Erik Dawson’s broken body into the operating room where the surgical team waited. The nursing staff literally ripped his clothes off as they worked to stabilize him. “What do we have here?” the lead surgeon asked. His assistant didn’t bother to look up as she answered, “Auto accident. An eighteen- wheeler smashed his car into a guardrail.” The lead surgeon whistled through his teeth. “It’s a miracle he’s still breathing. Let’s keep him that way.” As the surgical team moved into action with skill born of practice, Erik drifted on the fringes of consciousness. Erik’s thoughts raced. What? Where? Anesthesia put him under, but as the doctors began their work and his parents prayed fervently in the waiting room, Erik spasmed and stopped breathing. Family Matters, from Home Again

At noontime in midsummer, when the sun is at its highest and everything is in a state of embroiled repose, flashes may be seen in the southern sky. Into the radiance of daylight come bursts of light even more radiant. Exactly half a year later, when the fjord is frozen over and the land buried in snow, the very same spirit taunts creation. At night cracks in the ice race from one end of the fjord to the other, resounding like gunshots or like the roaring of a mad demon. The peasants dig tunnels from their door through the drifts over to the cow shed. Where are the trolls and the elves now, and where are the sounds of nature? Even the Beast may well be dead and forgotten. Life itself hangs in suspension - existence has shrunk to nothingness. Now it is only a question of survival. The fox thrashes around in a blizzard in the oak thicket and fights his way out, mortally terrified. It is a time of stillness. Hoarfrost lies in a timeless shroud over the fjord. All day long a strange, sighing sound is heard from out on the ice. It is a fisherman, standing alone at his hole and spearing eel. One night it snows again. The air is sheer snow and the wind a frigid blast. No living creature is stirring. Then a rider comes to the crossing at Hvalpsund. There is no difficulty in getting over­ - he does not even slacken his speed, but rides at a brisk trot from the shore out onto the ice. The hoofbeats thunder beneath him and the ice roars for miles around. He reaches the other side and rides up onto the land. The horse — a mighty steed not afraid to shake its shanks - cleaves the storm with neck outstretched. The blizzard blows the rider's ashen cape back and he sits naked, with his bare bones sticking out and the snow whistling about his ribs. It is Death that is out riding. His crown sits on three hairs and his scythe points triumphantly backward. Death has his whims. He takes it into his head to dis­mount when he sees a light in the winter night. He gives his horse a slap on the haunch and it leaps into the air and is gone. For the rest of the way Death walks like a carefree man, sauntering absentmindedly along. In the snow-streaked night a crow is sitting on a wayside branch. Its head is much too large for its body. Its beady eyes sparkle when it sees the wanderer's familiar face, and its cawing turns into silent laughter as it throws its beak wide open, with its spear-like tongue sticking far out. It seems almost ready to fall off the branch with its laughter, but it keeps on looking at Death with consuming merriment. Death moves on. Suddenly he finds himself beside a man. He raps the man on the back with his fingers and leaves him lying there. There is a light. Death keeps his eye on the light and walks toward it. He moves into the shaft of light and labors his way over a frozen field. But when he comes close enough to make out the house a strange fervor grips him. He has finally come home - yes, this has been his true home from the beginning. Thank goodness he has now found it again after so much difficulty. He goes in, and a solitary old couple make him welcome. They cannot know that he is anything more than a traveling tradesman, spent and sick. He lies down quickly on the bed without a word. They can see that he is really far gone. He lies on his back while they move about the room with the candle and chat. He forgets them. For a long time he lies there, quiet but awake. Finally there are a few low moans, faltering and tentative. He begins to cry, and then quickly stops. But now the moans continue, becoming louder, and then going over to tearless sobs. His body arches up, resting only on head and heels. He stares in anguish at the ceiling and screams, screams like a woman in labor. Finally he collapses, and his cries begin to subside. Little by little he falls silent and lies quiet.

Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person.  We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.  All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.  And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me :  the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.

In the United States, both of the dominant parties have shifted toward free-market capitalism. Even though analysis of roll call votes show that since the 1970s, Republicans have drifted farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left, the latter were instrumental in implementing financial deregulation in the 1990s and focused increasingly on cultural issues such as gender, race, and sexual identity rather than traditional social welfare policies. Political polarization in Congress, which had bottomed out in the 1940s, has been rapidly growing since the 1980s. Between 1913 and 2008, the development of top income shares closely tracked the degree of polarization but with a lag of about a decade: changes in the latter preceded changes in the former but generally moved in the same direction—first down, then up. The same has been true of wages and education levels in the financial sector relative to all other sectors of the American economy, an index that likewise tracks partisan polarization with a time lag. Thus elite incomes in general and those in the finance sector in particular have been highly sensitive to the degree of legislative cohesion and have benefited from worsening gridlock.

Mathilde watched as down the street came a little girl in a red snowsuit with purple racing stripes. Mittens, a cap too big for her head. Disoriented, the girl turned around and around and around. She began to climb the snow mountain that blocked her from the street. But she was so weak. Halfway up, she’d slip back down. She’d try again, digging her feet deeper into the drift. Mathilde held her breath each time, let it out when the girl fell. She thought of a cockroach in a wineglass, trying to climb up the smooth sides. When Mathilde looked across the street at a long brick apartment complex taking up the whole block, ornate in its 1920s style, she saw, in scattered windows, three women watching the little girl’s struggles. Mathilde watched the women as they watched the girl. One was laughing over her bare shoulder at someone in the room, flushed with sex. One was elderly, drinking her tea. The third, sallow and pinched, had crossed her skinny arms and was pursing her lips. At last, the girl, exhausted, slid down and rested, her face against the snow. Mathilde was sure she was crying. When Mathilde looked up again, the woman with crossed arms was staring angrily through all the glass and cold and snow directly at her. Mathilde startled, sure she’d been invisible. The woman disappeared. She reappeared on the sidewalk in inside clothes, tweedy and thin. She chucked her body into the snowdrift in front of the apartment building, crossed the street, grabbed the girl by the mittens and swung her over the mountain. Carried her across the street and did it again. Both mother and daughter were powdered with white when they went inside. Long after they were gone, Mathilde thought of the woman. What she was imagining when she saw her little girl fall and fall and fall. She wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone. It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. A

A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.

Which brings me to my very last leading lesson for you: Live now. Truthfully, it’s something I struggle with every day. Being a choreographer, I need to constantly envision the future--what a routine might look like before it’s ever danced. You see a blank dance floor; I see bodies moving across it in an intricately woven series of moves. I suppose this is a good thing for a guy who competes on Dancing with the Stars, but it’s not such a good thing for my well-being. That “forward thinking” began to bleed into my everyday life as well, and for a long time, I would find myself in a constant state of worry about the future. I was anxious and relatively unhappy considering all my successes, and I didn’t know why. The day would fly by and I wouldn’t even remember what I did, because I was just going through the motions. Then it dawned on me: I wasn’t in the moment. It’s good to have goals for the future and it’s good to learn from the past, but life is happening now. You cannot let it rush by you unseized or unacknowledged. You have to make a real, conscious effort to be in the present and not let your thoughts drift to other places and times. Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for specific tasks, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. This is a tough thing for me. I’m an overthinker. Many of us are. My mind gets racing a thousand miles a minute and I get anxious about my work, my career, or where I need to be in thirty minutes. Every day I need to shut down this machine and simply be still.

SILVER CITY IS NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS I left Colorado Springs the next morning and got back in the fucking car for another day of driving for the Tour of the Gila. I’d never driven in snow before, but I made it to Santa Fe and then Albuquerque in the afternoon, careful to dodge all the tumbleweeds on the highway in New Mexico. I hadn’t known that those existed outside of cartoons. Already exhausted when I got off the interstate, I was surprised when my GPS said “48 miles remaining, 1.5 hours’ drive time”—I was sure that couldn’t be right. Then I saw the steep climbs, bumpy cattle guards, and dangerous descents on the road into Silver City. I drove as fast as I could, sliding my poor car around hairpins in the dark. I made it to the host house, fell asleep, and found two flat tires when I went outside to unpack the car in the morning. They probably weren’t meant for drifting. My luck didn’t improve when the race started. I got a flat tire when I went off the road to dodge a crash, and I chased for over an hour to get back to the field. Between the dry air and altitude, I got a major nosebleed. My car was parked at the base of the finishing climb, and I got there several minutes behind the field, my new white Cannondale and all my clothes covered in blood. The course turned right to go up the climb, and I turned left, climbed into my car, and got the hell out of there. I might have made the time cut, but for the second time in two weeks, I opted to climb in the car instead. I got out of that town like I was about to turn into a pumpkin, and made it back to San Diego nine hours later. If there wasn’t a Pacific Ocean to stop me, I’d have driven another day, just to get farther from Gila.

The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 to maintain the control of the family’s oil empire. Today this foundation is the most important shareholder of Exxon with 4.3 million shares. Additionally, the foundation has two million shares in Standard Oil of California and 300.000 shares in Mobil Oil. Other smaller foundations belonging to the Rockefellers have three million shares in Exxon, and 400.000 shares in Standard Oil of Ohio. The total asset of this group of Rockefeller companies, amount to more than fifty billion dollars.[20] For a researcher who concentrates on the Rockefeller family, it won’t be difficult to prove that this immensely rich family has played an important role in the American politics of the twentieth century. The drift and decisions of American politics lead directly back to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers immigrated to America from Spain. The best-known member of this family was the influential industrialist, banker John Davidson Rockefeller. He asserted himself as the richest man of his time. Before going into oil transport, he was a wholesaler of narcotic drugs.[21] With an unbridled energy, he set up the Standard Oil Trust, which now possesses ninety percent of the oil refineries in the United States.[22] John Davidson Rockefeller also bought the Pocantico Hills territory in New York, which is the domicile of over a 100 families with the name Rockefeller. David Rockefeller, an absolute genius in the field of finances, has been managing Chase Manhattan Bank, the most important bank in the world, since 1945. The power of this bank is great enough to bring about or destroy governments, to start or end wars, and ruin companies or let them flourish worldwide, ultimately exerting great influence on the entire human race.

Then something moved on the hall floor, just outside the bars. Her eyes swung there. Sunday Justice sat on his haunches staring at her dark eyes with his green ones. Her heart raced. Locked up alone all these weeks, and now this creature could step wizardlike between the bars. Be with her. Sunday Justice broke the stare and looked down the hall, toward the inmates' talk. Kya was terrified that he would leave her and walk to them. But he looked back at her, blinked in obligatory boredom, and squeezed easily between the bars. Inside. Kya breathed out. Whispered, "Please stay." Taking his time, he sniffed his way around the cell, researching the damp cement walls, the exposed pipes, and the sink, all the while compelled to ignore her. A small crack in the wall was the most interesting to him. She knew because he flicked his thoughts on his tail. He ended his tour next to the small bed. Then, just like that, he jumped onto her lap and circled, his large white paws finding soft purchase on her thighs. Kya sat frozen, her arms slightly raised, so as not to interfere with his maneuvering. Finally, he settled as though he had nested here every night of his life. He looked at her. Gently she touched his head, then scratched his neck. A loud purr erupted like a current. She closed her eyes at such easy acceptance. A deep pause in a lifetime of longing. Afraid to move, she sat stiff until her leg cramped, then shifted slightly to stretch her muscles. Sunday Justice, without opening his eyes, slid off her lap and curled up next to her side. She lay down fully clothed, and they both nestled in. She watched him sleep, then followed. Not falling toward a jolt, but a drifting, finally, into an empty calm. Once during the night, she opened her eyes and watched him sleeping on his back, forepaws stretched one way, hind paws the other.

Ryder turns off the radio and reaches for my camera, pointing it at me in the dark. It beeps, and a red light indicates that he’s filming. “Are you scared, Jemma?” I prop my head up on one elbow. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I say, carefully weighing my words. “But…we’ll be okay. This house has weathered plenty of storms through the years. It’ll keep us safe.” “I hope you’re right.” “Yeah, me too.” I hear him swallow hard. “I’m glad I’m here with you.” “I’m glad you are too,” I say automatically. But then…I realize with a start that it’s true. I am glad he’s here. I feel safe with him. More relaxed than I would be otherwise. He thinks I’m distracting him, making him forget his fears. But the truth is, he’s helping me just as much. Maybe more. I’m pretty sure I’d be a blubbering mess right about now if I were alone. “Thanks, Ryder,” I say, my voice thick. “For what?” “Everything.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “Turn off the camera, okay?” He does, setting it aside before stretching out on the far side of the bed, facing me. Our gazes meet, and my stomach flutters nervously. There’s something there in his dark eyes, something I’ve never seen before. Vulnerability…mixed with a kind of dark, melty chocolate expression that I don’t recognize. Our hands are lying there on the bed between us, nearly touching. I lift my pinkie, brushing it against his. Chills race down my spine at the contact, my heart pounding against my ribs. I hear his breath catch. Slowly, his hand moves over mine, his fingertips brushing my knuckles until his entire hand covers mine. His skin is hot, the pressure reassuring. A minute passes, maybe two. It’s almost like he’s waiting, watching to see if I pull my hand away. I don’t. In one quick movement, he slides his hand under mine and threads our fingers together. We lie like that for several minutes, arms outstretched, hands joined, eyes wide open. The storm continues to rage around us, but it’s like we’re locked in this safe, calm place where nothing can touch us. My breathing slows; my limbs grow heavy. My lids flutter shut. I try to resist, but it’s futile. I’m exhausted. I drift off to sleep with a smile on my lips, Ryder holding me fast.

My phone rang at midnight, just as I was clearing my bed of the scissors and magazines and glue. It was Marlboro Man, who’d just returned to his home after processing 250 head of cattle in the dark of night. He just wanted to say good night. I would forever love that about him. “What’ve you been doing tonight?” he asked. His voice was scratchy. He sounded spent. “Oh, I just finished up my homework assignment,” I answered, rubbing my eyes and glancing at the collage on my bed. “Oh…good job,” he said. “I’ve got to go get some sleep so I can get over there and get after it in the morning…” His voice drifted off. Poor Marlboro Man--I felt so sorry for him. He had cows on one side, Father Johnson on the other, a wedding in less than a week, and a three-week vacation in another continent. The last thing he needed to do was flip through old issues of Seventeen magazine for pictures of lip gloss and Sun-In. The last thing he needed to deal with was Elmer’s glue. My mind raced, and my heart spoke up. “Hey, listen…,” I said, suddenly thinking of a brilliant idea. “I have an idea. Just sleep in tomorrow morning--you’re so tired…” “Nah, that’s okay,” he said. “I need to do the--” “I’ll do your collage for you!” I interrupted. It seemed like the perfect solution. Marlboro Man chuckled. “Ha--no way. I do my own homework around here.” “No, seriously!” I insisted. “I’ll do it--I have all the stuff here and I’m totally in the zone right now. I can whip it out in less than an hour, then we can both sleep till at least eight.” As if he’d ever slept till eight in his life. “Nah…I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning…” “But…but…,” I tried again. “Then I can sleep till at least eight.” “Good night…” Marlboro Man trailed off, probably asleep with his ear to the receiver. I made the command decision to ignore his protest and spent the next hour making his collage. I poured my whole heart and soul into it, delving deep and pulling out all the stops, marveling as I worked at how well I actually knew myself, and occasionally cracking up at the fact that I was doing Marlboro Man’s premarital homework for him--homework that was mandatory if we were to be married by this Episcopal priest. But on the outside chance Marlboro Man’s tired body was to accidentally oversleep, at least he wouldn’t have to walk in the door of Father Johnson’s study empty-handed.

H. G. Wells wrote a history of humanity as a response to the carnage of World War I. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.… With nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction.2

As Matt began to turn the pages, he found himself distracted. His eyes began drifting around the room, finally coming to rest on the silent air conditioner that sat in one of his windows. He walked over to the air conditioner and turned it on full blast. Its soft hum was music to his ears. And what about music? Matt grinned and placed a tape in his tape deck and turned up the volume. Everything sounded and felt so good. Suddenly he remembered his reading lamp. He reached over to the wall and flipped the lamp’s switch. When the light came on, Matt whooped with joy. He felt a thrill of excitement as he turned on his clock radio. He even set the alarm to go off. “And TV!” Matt cried, racing over to his television set. “I’m going to watch TV!” By the time Mrs. Carlton appeared in the doorway, Matt was sitting on his bed reading, after turning on every electrical appliance in his room. “What on earth is going on in here?” his mother called over the din. Matt looked up from his book and grinned. “I was just checking to make sure that everything still works,” he told her. Mrs. Carlton shook her head. “Come and get yourself some breakfast,” she told Matt. “And for heaven’s sake take a bath and change your clothes.” As she walked away Matt could hear her mumble under her breath, “The way that boy looks after a simple backyard camping trip. You’d think he was just through a war!

Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the gray wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still. All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy were happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light-years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that. During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her half a mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back again forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement. It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky. Promenaders turned to stone. Traffic stopped on Beacon Street. The child’s body lay inert on the asphalt like a piece of crumpled newspaper. The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars. How are we to understand the silence of the universe? They say that certain meteorites, upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrate with noticeable sound, but beyond the Earth’s skin of air the sky is silent. There are no voices in the burning bush of the Galaxy. The Milky Way flows across the dark shoals of the summer sky without an audible ripple. Stars blow themselves to smithereens; we hear nothing. Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes at the centers of the galaxies; they fall like feathers. The universe fattens and swells in a Big Bang, a fireball of Creation exploding from a pinprick of infinite energy, the ultimate firecracker; there is no soundtrack. The membrane is ruptured, a child flies through the air, and the universe is silent.

Collectively, the veritable zoo of mobile genetic elements comprises a remarkable 40 percent of our genome. The retroviral sequences littered across all vertebrate genomes are termed endogenous retroviral elements (ERVs). Endogenous retroviral sequences themselves are so plentiful that they take up more space in our genomes than genes encoding human proteins. Their existence is evidence of waves of retroviral infection and germline infiltration throughout vertebrate evolution. We have only recently begun to realize the powerful influence that retroviruses wielded over the evolution of vertebrate genomes and the identity of our species. They were catalysts of genetic instability that fueled evolutionary change; today they are vestiges of their former selves, fossils of viruses that once preyed on vertebrate hosts. Their remains are evidence of pyrrhic victories of sorts in many wars and arms races that have taken place between retroviruses and hosts. Most endogenous retroviruses have long been silenced by host cell restriction mechanisms. Associated with no phenotype, and under no selective pressure they become nonviable after millions of years of mutational drift, resulting in the accumulation of mutations and deletions in their coding sequences and control elements.

Hunter’s name drifted to him on the wind, the call barely discernible yet shrill, like the whisper of a lost soul searching for solace. He reined his stallion to a halt, bracing himself against the sound, teeth clenched, eyes closed, his trapped breath searing his throat. Hunter. His woman still called for him. When he began killing her people, would she ever call for him again? It took all his strength not to go back for her. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her like this. Yet how could he not? He had to fight the great fight for his people. He had no choice. While he was away fighting, he wanted Loretta someplace safe. After the attack on his village, there was no question she would be safer here with her own kind. He had no control over the tosi tivo and their attacks, but he could see to it none of his own attacked Loretta’s wooden walls. Another cry shivered through the gloaming. Hunter. He opened his eyes, peering at the cloud of dust up ahead. His honor lay before him, his heart behind him. Nudging his stallion into a run, he leaned low against the animal’s neck, using the wind against his face to filter out her voice as he raced to catch up with the other warriors.

with a fading of the individual’s creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination toward joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.

Shivers break out over my entire body. My hair stands on end. Stopping with a jerk, I try to play it cool. I open my purse and make it look as though I’m searching for something important. My heart races. Where is he? I try to look around discreetly. My gaze drifts across the street to one of the many cafés there. My eyes dart around, looking for the familiar black hoodie. And just as I’m about to give up, I see him.

The box had been built effectively. It floated barge-like in the water, about two thirds of it below the waterline. It was a drift ship or a current rider, not a sailing vessel. Elohim would be its rudder. Inside, Noah’s family settled in for a long voyage. They did not know exactly how long it would be, but Elohim had told them it would rain for forty days and forty nights. They knew the terrible truth that he was going to blot out all living things in the land. They knew they would be the only survivors. They knew they would start anew Elohim’s plans for the human race.

Finally, I could see the four-ton trucks below me, parked in a small turnout next to a dam at the foot of the mountains. I raced down to the dam and clocked in. I knew I was slow, as I could see all the other recruits huddled in the woods next to the dam’s entrance. Wispy trails of smoke drifted up from the many little self-contained army Hexi stoves, each heating individual mugs of sweet tea. I knew the score. Each recruit quietly working in their own little world, trying to rehydrate and sort their kit out under their basha or camp, before the night march. The DS didn’t say anything. They simply sent me to join the others, and await the orders for the night-march. As dusk approached, we all stood on parade. Once more they announced: “Okay, the following will not start the night march. You have not passed today’s test.” I stood and waited. Four names were read out. Then the DS looked up at me. Cold. Unemotional. “…And Grylls.

I love the wheels, I mean steering wheel.

David tried to relax. His gaze drifted to the crowded sidewalks of stressed humanity, comparing them to the idealized versions in billboards and storefronts. Even without hallucinations, it was a horrifying scene, he reflected. And Wharton believed he was going to bring a revolution to all this. “Most people are other people,” he said aloud. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” “Which is itself a quotation,” chimed Wharton. “Oscar Wilde, I believe.” “Nothing gets past you.” “Not anymore.” David glanced at the confident figure sitting next to him. He tilted again, “So, how are you going to save all these people? They’re just a bunch of dupes who don’t even realise they’re getting fucked. There’s no golden future for the human race.” “Whoo! We need to get you detoxed – fast! Your mind is toxic!” “The fucks running this planet – they got us all stupid and downtrodden. They’ve got the media, the corporations, the banks. They just fill our troughs and we come a-gathering around, pushing each other about in the mud. They’ve got all the aces … Shit, they print the fucking aces!” “Do you think you’re telling me something new? You’ve got it wrong. I’m telling you something new here.” Wharton faced him and moved closer, almost confrontational. “The guys in charge – the fucks – the fat old dudes in the smoky backroom. They’re sitting on a powder keg, which is this: humanity and its potential – a potential so hard wired, so written into every cell, that it’s destiny. And they’re desperate to avoid anything that might cause a spark.” Light and dark took turns on Wharton’s face as they rolled on. He continued, “We are that spark. … Think small, you’ll be small. It’s time to go beyond all that programming and conditioning. The very fact that this material reality even exists is a fact too wondrous to truly behold. Too wondrous to behold! So, naturally, most of the time, it’s not ‘beheld’.” Despite the hushed tone, he was enjoying himself. “Don’t get made mundane just because of what the system tells you – it’s only the reigning ideology of the day. ‘Naive realism’, we call it. (…)

Our basic understanding of evolutionary theory (how evolution works) in the early twenty-first century may be summed up as follows:   1. Mutation introduces genetic variation, which may introduce phenotypic variation. 2. Developmental processes can introduce broader phenotypic variation, which may be heritable. 3. Gene flow and genetic drift mix genetic variation (and potentially its phenotypic correlates) without regard to the function of those genes or traits. 4. Natural selection shapes genotypic and phenotypic variation in response to specific constraints and pressures in the environment. 5. At any given time one or more of the processes above can be affecting a population. 6. Dynamic organism-environment interaction can result in niche construction, changing pressures of natural selection and resulting in ecological inheritance. 7. Cultural patterns and contexts can impact gene flow and the pressures of natural selection, which in turn can affect genetic evolution (gene-culture coevolution). 8. Multiple inheritance systems (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic) can all provide information and contexts that enable populations to change over time or avoid certain changes.

I couldn’t go to sleep. I kept hearing him calling me, wanting me. I got up and drifted down the hall and again got in his bed, where he lay waiting. “You’ll never be free of me, Cathy, never. As long as you live, it will be me and you.” “No!” “Yes!” “No!” But I kissed him, then jumped from his bed and raced back to my room, slamming and locking the door behind me.

As she left the wagons far behind, she felt more alone than she ever had in her life. Moonlight bathed the flats. Loretta turned in a slow circle but saw no one. If Hunter was out here, why didn’t he show himself? The call of the coyote trailed skyward again. Loretta whirled toward the sound and ran toward the rise. As she crested the slope, Hunter loomed up out of the shadows, tall and dark, his hair drifting in the wind. His upper chest and shoulder were crisscrossed with torn strips of cloth. Calico and muslin. Slowing her footsteps, she walked toward him a ways, then stopped. Did he even want her as his woman now? So much had happened since they last saw each other. So much pain and grief. His face was in shadow, so she could read nothing in his expression. When Loretta drew to a halt several feet away from him, Hunter’s heart skipped a beat, then started racing. Peering at her through the silvery darkness, he saw a tosi woman in tosi clothing, her pale skin and golden hair illuminated by the light of the Comanche moon. Just as the prophecy had foretold, they stood on a high place, she on the land of the tosi tivo, while he, Comanche to his bones, stood on the land of the People. A great distance divided them, a distance much harder to bridge than the few feet between them. Hunter ached with things he longed to say, but none of them seemed enough. He realized then that the great canyon filled with blood wasn’t a chasm in the earth but one in their hearts. There was an ache in Loretta’s eyes that cut clear through him. He knew the same ache was in his own. His father, Maiden of the Tall Grass, her parents. So many were lost to them. “Are you all right?” she asked. Hunter was weak from loss of blood. His shoulder felt as if it had a red-hot coal buried in it. “I am well. You came, yes? There is much we must talk about.

The offshore north wind built to a gale force. My poor dogs. They would hit a wind-polished spot, loose traction, and literally get rolled into a knot, requiring a frustrating untangling, under something lessthan good picnic conditions. Other times, away would go the sled skidding sideways, with me firmly attached, until it struck an immoveable drift or a crusted snow patch, and over I went, taking the entire team with me, ending, one time, a half block off the trail. Wha, storm. What an experience. Blinding and, at times, breath-sucking Dangerous, scary, but exciting and exhilarating at the same time. One remembrance I have kept—all these years—is thankfulness for the relatively mild temperature at the time. And another is an absolute, set-it-in-concrete admiration for my dogs. In the course of many untangles I rearranged my front end. Genghis, my old faithful, went in front with Kiana. Bandit was placed back in swing. We went. In spite of roll! overs, roll-ups, wraparounds, and tangles, we went. And even when a couple of males—Kuchik and Casper—repeatedly attempted to dive behind snowdrifts, out of the punishing tempest, we went. How gratifying it was to witness my years of training pay off. Uncounted hours: back on Kenai Lake and Resurrection River flats, driving this never-say-die team head-on into fiendish, violent snowstorms.

Old lad . . . good old lad,” Ed his eyes did not turn away from the from the flickering light, for he was thinking, planning, weighing the desperate odds against him, putting all his hard-earned knowledge of winter travel to work on the scheme to still beat Williams’ accomplice to Beaver Falls—to still win the race against dishonor. And as he crouched there with his arm thrown across the bloodstained shoulders of this loyal partner in a cause which was all but lost, Ed did not see the dancing flames. In spirit he was high above the ragged Ine of timber over the Beaver River range, fighting his way through the torturing miles of rocks and barrens and cruel wind of the altitudes. Eighteen hours without a fire, without hot food, without rest eighteen hours at least of heavy breaking through the treacherous, drifted snow of the divide. Yes, that was the best time he could make up there—and if he failed—

He made her feel alive. Real. A woman of flesh and bone. Of panted breaths and tingling nerves and a racing heart. She was somehow more than the drifting shadow she’d been for so long.

where you rise up and glide like the birds that I was soon to watch being carried by the airstreams, effortlessly drifting, dancing for hours in the twilight, just as I was dancing up the steps, weightless, floating, in an exhilarating ascent towards the undreamed-of unknown, the outside, the world that was not the cage; and I had no thoughts, only a visceral thrill that swept me along, and images, perhaps, that raced through my mind, or simply words that gushed up and rose to receive the imminent images—the sky, the night, the horizon, the sun, the wind, and many more, countless words that had accumulated over the years and which were in a hurry, spurring me on.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Above, they were the colour of the sea’s deepest blue; below, like the soiled whiteness of shadowed chalk. In the turbulent air above the cliffs and shallows they soared for hours, hoping perhaps to lure away intruders from their nesting place. Invisible even in a telescope magnifying sixty times, even in purest summer sky, they drifted idly above the glittering Channel water. They had no song. Their calls were harsh and ugly. But their soaring was like an endless silent singing. What else had they to do? They were sea falcons now; there was nothing to keep them to the land. Foul poison burned within them like a burrowing fuse. Their life was lonely death, and would not be renewed. All they could do was take their glory to the sky. They were the last of their race.

THE CITY Our story begins in a city, with buildings and streets and bridges and parks. Humans were strolling, automobiles were driving, airships were flying, robots were hard at work. Weaving through the city streets was a delivery truck. The truck knew where to go, and how to get there, all by itself. It pulled up to a construction site and automatically unloaded some crates. A few more turns and it unloaded more crates down at the docks. The truck zigged and zagged across the city, delivering crates as it went, and then it merged onto a highway. Cars and buses and trucks were cruising along the highway together. But as the delivery truck continued, the traffic became lighter, the buildings became smaller, and the landscape became greener. With nothing but open road ahead, the truck accelerated to its top speed. The landscape outside was now just a green blur, occasionally broken by a flicker of gray as a town flew past. On and on the delivery truck went, racing over long bridges, shooting through mountain tunnels, gliding down straight stretches of highway, until it started to slow. It drifted from the fast lane to the exit lane, and then it rolled down a ramp and into farm country. Clouds of dust billowed up behind the truck as it drove past fields and fences. In the hazy distance, enormous barns loomed above the plains. The air was thick with the smells of soil and livestock. Robot crews methodically worked the crops and fed the animals and operated the massive farm machines. A hill gradually climbed into view. The hill was crowned with

Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built -- unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood. The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gain by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form.

Joe raced from the house and hopped into the brothers’ convertible. He drove speedily toward Shorty’s Diner, located a few blocks away in the downtown section of Bayport. Reaching it, he hastily parked, bounded up the front steps, and pushed open the door. As the tempting aroma of sizzling hamburgers and coffee drifted to Joe’s nostrils, he glanced quickly toward the telephone booth at the end of the long counter. It was empty! Slowly a rotund youth sitting on a stool swung around. In his hand he held half of a triple-decker sandwich. “Hello, Joe,” he said. “What’s the big hurry?” “Chet!” Joe exclaimed.

What’s your name?” Bryce advanced up the ramp. Tharion murmured, “Legs.” She ignored the warning. Ithan kept quiet. Yet the old male replied, utterly unfazed, “Some people call me the Astronomer.” She couldn’t keep the bite from her voice. “What do other people call you?” The Astronomer didn’t answer. Up and up, Bryce ascended into the heavens, Tharion and Ithan trailing her. Like the assholes were second-guessing this. One of the mystics twitched, water splashing. “A normal reaction,” the Astronomer said, not even looking up from his dials as they approached. “Everyone is always so concerned for their well-being. They made the choice, you know. I didn’t force them into this.” He sighed. “To give up life in the waking world to glimpse wonders of the universe that no Vanir or mortal shall ever see …” Stroking his beard, he added, “This trio is a good one. I’ve had them for a while now with no issues. The last group … One drifted too far. Too far, and for too long. They dragged the others with them. Such a waste.” Bryce tried to block out the excuses. Everyone knew the truth: the mystics came from all races, and were usually poor. So poor that when they were born with the gift, their families sold them to people like the Astronomer, who exploited their talent until they died, alone in those tubs. Or wandered so deep into the cosmos they couldn’t find their way back to their minds.

As for me, I admire above all Noble Drew's aesthetic, his unique and special blend of Afro-American, Native-American, High Magical, and Oriental symbolism and imagery - as well as his courage, his martyrdom, and his revolutionary stance against "Pharaoh." By Americanizing the prophetic spirit he injected our culture with a kind of folk Sufism. On the esoteric level, anyone who loves Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice is a member of the "Asiatic race" and the Lost/Found Moorish Nation of North America.

The game FR Legends MOD APK is all about drifting and racing. You can customize your car and participate in various drift competitions. The game has a variety of cars to choose from, and you can modify them according to your preferences. The game also has different tracks that you can race on, and each track has its own unique challenges.

I stepped closer and put both of my hands on his chest. Part of me still half expected to feel a heartbeat, a warm and yielding male body beneath my palms. But Frederick's chest was cool and almost unnaturally solid where I touched him, no rhythmic thumping where one would have been if he were still human. Fortunately--- or, unfortunately--- my heart was beating more than enough for the both of us. Frederick was right. The fabric of his shirt was soft. I slowly slid my hands back and forth over the waffle-knit material, reveling in how silky it felt beneath my fingertips, how delicious the contrast was with the hard planes of the chest beneath. But I didn't. The shirt he was wearing was nice enough. But that wasn't what kept me rooted to the spot, what kept my hands on his body long beyond what he'd probably imagined when he asked me to do this. I'd known he was muscular, but now that I was actually touching him I realized he was all but made of muscle. Had he been this physically fit when he was still human, I wondered? Or was being built like a professional athlete a physiological peculiarity unique to vampires? Either way, I could feel his pectorals bunch and flex beneath my palms as I touched him, could feel his sharp intake of breath when I grew bolder and started gently tracing his collarbones with my thumb. His eyes were still trained on me, but growing glazed and unfocused. "How..." He stopped, his eyes drifting closed. When he opened them again there was a heat in his gaze that made the department store, the rest of the world, fall away. He inclined his head towards me, his mouth scant inches away from mine. I could feel each one of his breaths against my lips, cool and sweet. My heart raced. My knees wobbled. "How does it feel?

About ten miles away Third Officer Charles Victor Groves stood on the bridge of the Leyland Liner Californian bound from London to Boston. A plodding 6,000-tonner, she had room for 47 passengers, but none were being carried just now. On this Sunday night she had been stopped since 10:30 P.M., completely blocked by drifting ice. At about 11:10 Groves noticed the lights of another ship, racing up from the east on the starboard side. As the newcomer rapidly overhauled the motionless Californian, a blaze of deck lights showed she was a large passenger liner. Around 11:30 he knocked on the Venetian door of the chart room and told Captain Stanley Lord about it. Lord suggested contacting the new arrival by Morse lamp, and Groves prepared to do this. Then, at about 11:40, he saw the big ship suddenly stop and put out most of her lights. This didn’t surprise Groves very much. He had spent some time in the Far East trade, where they usually put deck lights out at midnight to encourage the passengers to turn in. It never occurred to him that perhaps the lights were still on … that they only seemed to go out because she was no longer broadside but had veered sharply to port.

There really were rabbits everywhere. They’d whoosh and bound past you in the blink of an eye, sometimes so fast that all you’d hear was the rapid thump thump on the ground before they were gone. They were as quick as the wind, and the only thing you really ever saw was their shadows as they skittered by. What impression did this give to us? Did it suggest the land was alive, vital and strong? Did it convey a sense of chaos, confusion and clamour? No, quite the opposite in fact, for the land seemed ever so silent. Indeed, I don’t know what other animal could’ve been as quiet as those wild rabbits. Although the wilderness was generally quiet, it took the appearance of the rabbits before you would become acutely aware of how quiet it really was. It was a sereneness that seemed more illusory than anything else - a type of nothingness, nothing but the wind and the grass, a rippling expanse that gifted a sense of kindness, the drifting clouds, thoughts dim and hazy. The instant the rabbits appeared, all of this nature awoke, the horizon suddenly shrank, and the air grew taut, ever so slightly. My heart followed suit, and so did my ears. My throat was empty, and all I could do was utter a gentle ah. That sound, let loose, became the most solid, most compact thing in the entire world. My body felt heavy, overwhelmingly so, and I was unable to move. But the rabbits bounded in front of me, racing back and forth, their gracefulness blending into the calmness of the land. Then another appeared, hopped up on a largish stone and stood motionless, its eyes directed towards me, peering into me. The silence of the scene increased tenfold. One more rabbit jumped into view and the quiet deepened yet again. They came, more and more, and as they did, all sound was evacuated from the world, transforming it into a clear, limpid pool of silence. I turned my head, a movement that now seemed magnified amid the stillness. My ah lingered in the air, not yet absorbed into the sweeping quiet of the landscape. It seemed to persist, perched just above the calm. I’d been enraptured by nature countless times before, caught in its web, unable to free myself, but I’ve never been able to put this into words. Nothing but my ah…I simply stood there in the midst of all of that confusion and clamour, the chaos swirling about, avid and avaricious. The silence encircled me, stealing the words from my throat. Countless times I’d praised the earth, the wild, but still I could not put into words that there was really no connection between us.

The river waters were bright honey, as intensely colored as paint. A faint mist drifted over its surface. The forest massing on either side was so dense it looked black, except where, strangely delicate, a slash of flowers glowed white, or tear-shaped mangoes dripped pale green. Strange smells seeped out of the foliage, savory and disturbing. There was the sense of unknown things hiding beneath that painted-honey water, behind the screen of trees, even below the slowly creaking planks of dock we stood on. Animal noises rumbled together in an ever-present background thunder, but no life was actually visible, apart from a single butterfly tumbling over the water, its wings flickering red as a racing heart.

Chaos broke out. Screams and shouts resounded through the entire house. The fighting drove them to the back yard. One raced here and the other there, still raising their voices at one another. My parents continued to fight stronger, louder, and with greater intensity. This fight was worse than any in a long while. As hostility raced, clouds gathered over head and rumbled with them. In the heated moment, my father clenched his fist and hit the tall Texas pine next to him. My mother prayed silently: "Lord, help me to know what to do.l" And just as their anger rose to its highest level, something unimaginable happened. A bolt of lightning struck the tree that stood between my parents. Bark flew from its side and hit my father in the head. Smoke drifted upward as the two jumped in fear and confusion. With deafened ears, they closed their mouths, walked inside, and remained married for fifty-two years.

Right across the species, everything must be stored away and put under seal - including the famous genome - doubtless for the use of a later race, who will exploit it as fossil material. We shall ourselves, by the combined pressure of the mass of computer data and the continental drift, be transformed into a metamorphic deposit (the Unconscious already seems like a psychical residue of the Carboniferous). Right now, one has the impression the human race is merely turning in on itself and its origins, desperately gathering together its distress flares and dematerializing to transform itself into a message. But a message to whom? Everyone is looking for a safe area, some form of permanent plot that can eclipse existence as a primary abode and protect us from death. The unfortunate thing is there aren't even any plots held in perpetuity in the cemeteries any more.

Assimilation: The Ideal and the Reality By B. A. Nelson, Ph.D Milton M. Gordon, in his Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, has defined three discrete stages in the development of this concept. The ideal of “Anglo-conformity,” which “demanded the complete renunciation of the immigrant’s ancestral culture in favor of the behavior and values of the Anglo-Saxon core group” prevailed almost until the end of the nineteenth century. It was superseded in the following two decades by the “melting pot” ideal, which heralded “a biological merger of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with other immigrant groups and a blending of their respective cultures into a new indigenous American type.” During the 1920s, the ideal of ”cultural pluralism” came into vogue, postulating “the preservation of the communal life and significant portions of the culture of the later immigrant groups within the context of American citizenship and political and economic integration into American society.” … total and widespread acceptance of “Anglo-conformity” would be an impossible anachronism in the 1980s, when the majority of the nation’s immigrants come from Third World nations. Despite the glaring contradiction between the ideal of “Anglo-conformity” and the reality of contemporary immigration, one aspect of “Anglo-conformity” does, however, linger on as a phantom “residue,” much like the whiff of scent which remains in a long-emptied bottle. Although both leaders and the led know that “Anglo-conformity” has become an impossible ideal, both retain this one notion that has become a perennial source of solace whenever anyone dares to suggest that future immigration might challenge and deny the national premise of e pluribus unum. … This notion assures those who believe in it that, even if the “Anglo-Saxon core group” dwindles in numbers and power to the point of becoming marginal, the Anglo-Saxon political heritage will yet survive. … This last “residue” of belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority would be simply an innocuous illusion were there not indications that official public policy is moving in a direction directly contrary to the Anglo-Saxon political tradition. ,,, The new American dilemma, as fateful as the one once addressed by Gunnar Myrdal, is the nation’s drift away from its tradition of “liberal pluralism,” in which “government gives no formal recognition to categories of people based on race or ethnicity,” and towards a new, “corporate pluralism,” which “envisages a nation where its racial and ethnic entities are formally recognized as such -- are given formal standing as groups in the national polity -- and where patterns of political power and economic reward are based on a distributive formula which postulates group rights and which defines group membership as an important factor in the outcome for individuals.” … Corporate pluralism is, in fact, the opposite of the popular notion of assimilation as the disappearance of alien characteristics in an all-transforming native culture. Since corporate pluralism replaces “individual meritocracy” with “group rewards,” it strongly discourages assimilation…

Oh it’s all so lovely, isn’t it? Life’s magnitude is madly bipolar—just look at Earth—betwixt it all we try so so desperately to be sensical. Life is the funniest joke ever told for those who manage to see its humour! I reckon we, the Human race, are the divine comedy: The Fools of Folly who, bored by drifting senselessly, crafted an endless universe of entertainment and intrigue; a stage where clueless puppets swing at each other in the name of love.

Far from being destroyed, however, the white “politics of difference” is now being trumpeted as an ideology of victimization. The situation would be farcical if it weren’t so dangerous, reflecting venerable white anxieties and fortifying the drift to the right which, now as in the past, is highly conducive to race-baiting

So I’ll be drifting in words, absorbing, and the words I absorb will be racing through my bloodstream. Every nerve, every neuron will be sparking and catching fire, and my heart will be quickening to carry it through faster, and my eyes will be tearing ahead to take in more and more.

Of the many attractions that draw people to the bottom of the canyon, perhaps the most potent and beguiling is the realization that the experience is the opposite of a race—the antithesis of rushing from where you are toward someplace you think you would rather be, only to discover, once you arrive, that your true goal lies somewhere else. That is a defining characteristic of life in the world above the rim, and if there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim—that is the paramount goal.

an airy-fairy sort of drifting movement

J. Edgerton/ The Spirit of Christmas Page 11 Mr. Angel smiled warmly at the vision of the two boys playing in the snow. “All God’s creatures . . . one and all . . . large and small! But some more important than others, in their magnificence. And I’ve found you both . . . at last”. Jonas took off racing through the snow, the cup in his hand. “Come on James!” James scrambled after him, the snow crunching pleasantly beneath his tiny feet. “Jonas wait for me!” The taller Nicholas stopped before a Cinder Vendor. “Two warm Ciders please, with extra spices.” The Cider Vendor raised an eyebrow as he took in the smudged face of the boy and his shabby clothes. “Very well, young Sir. Have you money? I’m not a charity you know!” Jonas quickly fished out coins and showed him the silver. “Oh yes Sir. I know of charities Sir and you’re better off not being one. They’re a cheat!” The Cider Vendor began filling two cups with steaming apple cider. The sweet smell of it made the boy’s mouth water. The burly Cider Vendor handed him the first cup of sweet, steaming, mouth puckering cider. “Many are, young master!” He replied. “I grew up in the system meself and it was a poor boy’s torment. That’ll be 2 cents!” The littlest Nicholas raced up and slid to a halt in the snow beside him. Jonas handed James the cup of cider. Then he paid the vendor with coins from the tin cup. “That’s highway robbery . . . but very well!” The Cider Vendor squinted through one eye, his thick eyebrow nearly obscuring it. “It’s very good cider, with extra spices.” James face lit up with joy as he took a sip. “M-mmm! It is good cider! J. Edgerton/ The Spirit of Christmas Page 12 The Vendor handed Jonas the second cup of steaming cider. “I’ve not had any complaints. I work hard to make my cider. It’s worth the money.” His lips smacking, Jonas sipped in the warm cider. “I’m sure it is Sir.” The angelic faced little one smiled up at him. “It’s yummy!” The Cider Vendor smiled down at him and tipped his hat to him “Yes it tis! Yummy!” Then he chuckled cheerfully with another satisfied customer, no matter how small. “Ummm, good!” Jonas agreed with them. The Cider Vendor took a sip of his own brew himself, his mouth puckering. “It’ll put the spirit of life back in you on a cold day like this, that Cider.” Two men in tall top hats and fine suits halted in front of the Cider Vendor. “Sir, we are collecting for the poor and wondered if a fine fellow such as yourself might have something to contribute.” Jonas glanced up at them in a wizened way. “We’ve a couple coins to contribute but it better get to the poor, understand?” “Of course, my fine fellow! “The taller of the two sharply dressed gentlemen spoke. Smiling a satisfied smile, Jonas dropped two silver coins into the gentleman’s hands. The tall gentleman took them and tipped his hat, smiling down at them both. “Very generous!” He glanced stone faced at the vendor, who immediately forked over several dollars. “A very Merry Christmas to you both!” They trod off through the snow in their finery, to the welcome crunch of the snow drifts beneath their feet. Mr. Angel paused at the Cheese vendor next to them, where a raggedy young girl was staring wide eyed at the rows and rows of cheeses above her.

With a smile that stops my breath and leaves my pulse racing, she leans into me, her eyes drifting lazily to my lips. “I know exactly how much heart you have.

As he walked, his gaze drifted to Findlater’s Corner. The familiar landmark, with its ornate clock and proud stag’s head cresting the building, should have been a reassuring sight. But something was wrong. The clock—he couldn’t look away—was spinning wildly, its hands racing in a frenzied loop. A jolt of fear shot through him, visceral and inexplicable, freezing him mid-step. And then it happened. A blinding flash seared his vision, the shriek of brakes tearing through the air. A horn blared, deafening and close. Time splintered into jagged fragments, each moment stretching into eternity as he turned, his pulse pounding in his ears. The truck barrelled toward him, a monstrous wall of gleaming metal and unstoppable force. His breath hitched—too fast, too close. Panic clutched at him; his body frozen in place even as his mind screamed to move.