Dune Water Quotes

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.

Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.

A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.

Strong winds buffet the sea oats and tall dune grasses, tossing sand and seabirds where it will, winding my sister's golden hair into sunlit spirals of silk until it becomes the only good memory I have of her -- the only memory I allowed myself to keep.

Flesh that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it played no tricks of subtle control—all gone, back into the water and the sand.

Move slowly and the day of your revenge will come," Tuek said. "Speed is a device of Shaitan. Cool your sorrow–we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart–water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.

My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.

Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.” She

The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.

His eyes looked at my body as if it were a drink of water on a desert dune.

His eyes looked at my body as if it were a drink of water on a desert dune. "I don't know much," I confessed, my voice barely audible. "Don't worry. I know a lot.

Food of Love Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II I'm going to murder you with love; I'm going to suffocate you with embraces; I'm going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you're dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow. You will become my personal Sahara; I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain you remaining brackish well. With my female blade I'll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole. But in the total desert you become You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold. So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move towards me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green. When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you'll begin to die again.

We walked into the forever white sand dunes, and soon we were far away from all the people in the world. Everyone had disappeared from the universe except the young man whose hand I was holding, and everything that had ever been born and everything that had ever died existed where his hand touched mine. Everything the blue of the sky, the rain in the clouds, the white of the sand, the water in the oceans, all the languages of all the nations, and all the broken hearts that had learned to beat in their brokenness. We didn't talk. This was the quietest moment I had ever been in. Even my busy brain--it was quiet. So quiet that I felt that I was in a church. And the thought entered my head that my love for Dante was holy, not because I was holy but because what I felt for him was pure.

Cloves Where is the scent of cloves coming from? her hair? armpit? or her dress thrown on the Tunisian rug? From the third step in the house? Layla makes everything smell of cloves. Layla is the orchard when it’s wet. She is what the orchard breathes when it’s watered at night. Layla knows now that I am drunk with the scent of cloves, she stiches together my clouds and then scatters them together in a sky like a sheet as she clasps me. Layla feels that my fingers are numb, over the dunes she knows my pulse is hers, my water is hers. Layla leaves me sleeping, rocking between clouds and cloves.

It's a beautiful morning, Sire," the guard said "Yes, it is." The Duke nodded, thinking: Perhaps this planet could grow on one. Perhaps it could ba a good home for my son. Then he saw the human figures moving into the flower fields, sweeping with them strange scythe-like devices--dew gatherers. Water so precious here that even the dew must be collected. And it could be a hideous place, the Duke thought.

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say? What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight out into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of the father facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide, what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam? If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the rocks what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a bottled message from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly defaulting into the clouds what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the moon, the basket with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood all picnics are eaten on the grave?

Qu'une goutee de vin tombe dans un verre d'eau; quelle que soit la loi du movement interne du liquide, nous verrons bientôt se colorer d'une teinte rose uniforme et à partir de ce moment on aura beau agiter le vase, le vin et l'eau ne partaîtront plus pouvoir se séparer. Tout cela, Maxwell et Boltzmann l'ont expliqué, mais celui qui l'a vu plus nettement, dans un livre trop peu lu parce qu'il est difficile à lire, c'est Gibbs dans ses principes de la Mécanique Statistique. Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All this, Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained, but the one who saw it in the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics.

MAGNITUDE of EXISTENCE U are a dot A point A speck An image A stillness A shadow A centrifugal force Turning into itself Emanating heat Emanating light You are a transient warmth Wave like u exist Resonating properties As body As mind As heart As human You are One dot in trillions exponentially Sifting through motion Expressed as e=motion You are engulfed in water From the inside out Wrapped in the Arms of giver of air Held ephemerally by the heart of sky In suspended attraction to the wooing of earth You are reflecting ash taken to travel Bathing in sun rays Resting as moonlight You are a resonant echo Given to name matter Bouncing dot like You are a distance timber Specified to forms A mountain A valley A hill A meadow A dune A desert Exacting measure You Are A magnitude of existences © Olivia Chumacero

Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous a a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself. He thinks of himself as worthless and either falls into masochistic loneliness, or, failing that, ultimately becomes suspicious and pious, forever denouncing the eccentricities of others.

What is going on inside me I cannot tell. In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I lie glued by the swing of the planet to the sand. A different weight brings me back to myself. I feel the weight of my body drawing me towards so many things. My dreams are more real than these dunes, than that moon, than these presences. My civilization is an empire more imperious than this empire. The marvel of a house is not that it shelters or warms a man, nor that its walls belong to him. It is that it leaves its trace on the language. Let it remain a sign. Let it form, deep in the heart, that obscure range from which, as waters from a spring, are born our dreams.

So I dream nightly of an embarcation, captains, captains, iron passageways, cabin lights, Brooklyn across the waters, the great dull boat, visitors, farewells, the blurred vast sea-- one trip a lifetime's loss or gain : as Europe is my own imagination --many shall see her, many shall not-- though it's only the old familiar world and not some abstract mystical dream. And in a moment of previsioning sleep I see that continent in rain, black streets, old night, a fading monument . . . And a long journey unaccomplished yet, on antique seas rolling in gray barren dunes under the world’s waste of light toward ports of childish geography the rusty ship will harbor in . . .

The water was calm and blue today, and as they walked along the dunes they could see the hump of Poplar Island off the Eastern Shore.

I thought, then, that I could see your own soul in the constant waves tearing unconcerned at the impenetrable dunes. I wanted, then, to believe the moon is a flower, fragrant, its stem tossed across the water. It was then that I entered some other world, the way your life wakes suddenly in the middle of the night to find your own worn-out dreams lying in sheets around you...

The waters which we spread upon the desert have become blood. Blood upon our land! Behold our desert which could rejoice and blossom; it has lured the stranger and seduced him in our midst. They come for violence! Their faces are closed up as for the last wind of Kralizec! They gather the captivity of the sand. They suck up the abundance of the sand, the treasure hidden in the depths. Behold them as they go forth to their evil work. It is written: 'And I stood upon the sand, and I saw a beast rise up out of that sand, and upon the head of that beast was the name of God!

I will tell you a thing about your new name,” Stilgar said. “The choice pleases us. Muad’Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad’Dib creates his own water. Muad’Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad’Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad’Dib we call ‘instructor-of-boys.’ That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad’Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you.” Stilgar

A few years ago, Ed and I were exploring the dunes on Cumberland Island, one of the barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and the mainland of south Georgia. He was looking for the fossilized teeth of long-dead sharks. I was looking for sand spurs so that I did not step on one. This meant that neither of us was looking very far past our own feet, so the huge loggerhead turtle took us both by surprise. She was still alive but just barely, her shell hot to the touch from the noonday sun. We both knew what had happened. She had come ashore during the night to lay her eggs, and when she had finished, she had looked around for the brightest horizon to lead her back to the sea. Mistaking the distant lights on the mainland for the sky reflected on the ocean, she went the wrong way. Judging by her tracks, she had dragged herself through the sand until her flippers were buried and she could go no farther. We found her where she had given up, half cooked by the sun but still able to turn one eye up to look at us when we bent over her. I buried her in cool sand while Ed ran to the ranger station. An hour later she was on her back with tire chains around her front legs, being dragged behind a park service Jeep back toward the ocean. The dunes were so deep that her mouth filled with sand as she went. Her head bent so far underneath her that I feared her neck would break. Finally the Jeep stopped at the edge of the water. Ed and I helped the ranger unchain her and flip her back over. Then all three of us watched as she lay motionless in the surf. Every wave brought her life back to her, washing the sand from her eyes and making her shell shine again. When a particularly large one broke over her, she lifted her head and tried her back legs. The next wave made her light enough to find a foothold, and she pushed off, back into the water that was her home. Watching her swim slowly away after her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

I'm a desert woman, and I'm proud of that. I want my husband to wander as free as the wind that shapes the dunes. And, if I have to, I will accept the fact that he has become a part of the clouds, and the animals, and the water of the desert.

Lilichka! (Instead of a letter)" Tobacco smoke eats the air away. The room,-- a chapter from Kruchenykh's Inferno. Recall,-- by the window, that day, I caressed you ecstatically, with fervor. Here you sit now, with your heart in iron armor. In a day, you'll scold me perhaps and tell me to leave. Frenzied, the trembling arm in the gloomy parlor will hardly be able to fit the sleeve. I'll rush out and hurl my body into the street,-- distraught, lashed by despair and sadness. There's no need for this, my darling, my sweet. Let's part tonight and end this madness. Either way, my love is an arduous weight, hanging on you wherever you flee. Let me bellow out in the final complaint all of my heartbroken misery. A laboring bull, if he had enough, will leave and find cool water to lie in. But for me, there's no sea except for your love,-- from which even tears won't earn me some quiet. If an elephant wants to relax, he'll lie, pompous, outside in the sun-baked dune, Except for your love, there's no sun in the sky and I don't even know where you are and with whom. If you thus tormented another poet, he would trade in his love for money and fame. But nothing sounds as precious to me as the ringing sound of your darling name. I won't drink poison, or jump to demise, or pull the trigger to take my own life. Except for your eyes, no blade can control me, no sharpened knife. Tomorrow you'll forget that it was I who crowned you, who burned out the blossoming soul with love and the days will form a whirling carnival that will ruffle my manuscripts and lift them above... Will the dry autumn leaves of my sentences cause you to pause, breathing hard? Let me pave a path with the final tenderness for your footsteps as you depart. (1916)

It's said that the Fremen scum drink the blood of their dead. Not the blood, sir. But all of a man's water ultimately, belongs to his people - to his tribe./ The human body is composed of some seventy percent water by weight./ A dead man, surely, no longer REQUIRES that water.

Her hips are dunes curved by the wind, Her eyes shine like summer heat, Two braids of hair hang down her back- Rich with water rings, her hair! My hands remember her skin, Fragrant as amber, flower-scented. Eyelids tremble with memories. . . I am stricken by love's white flame!

Jessica leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan—a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn't been noticed for itself... only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it. To stop , she thought. To rest... truly rest . It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.

Superb accuracy in water measurement, Jessica thought. And she noted that the walls of the meter trough held no trace of moisture after the water’s passage. The water flowed off those walls without binding tension. She saw a profound clue to Fremen technology in the simple fact: they were perfectionists.

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not... yet, I occurred.

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

They had nothing to eat but Ryan's food, and they ate little of that because it was so dry, but it seemed to sustain them. Their greatest worry was water. Though they drank only a little each day, Westerly's flask was empty and the bottle in Cally's pack now only half-full. "I wish I was a camel," Cally said. Westerly said, "I wouldn't want to spend this much time with a girl who looked like a camel." She tried to laugh, but her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and her mind full of hopelessness. "When this is gone, we shall just die of thirst." "We'll be out of the dunes by then," Westerly said encouragingly. But he knew that the mountains, though nearer now on the hazy horizon, were far more than a day's walk away.

Diana, meanwhile, reads every novel she can find that's set on the Cape, and describes for her father the pristine, golden beaches, sand dunes with cranberry bogs and poets' shacks hidden in their declivities. She conjures the taste of briny oysters and butter-drenched lobsters, fried clams eaten with salt water-pruned fingers, ice-cream cones devoured after a day in the sun.

Somewhere beneath him, the pre-spice mass had accumulated enough water and organic matter from the little makers, had reached the critical stage of wild growth. A gigantic bubble of carbon dioxide was forming deep in the sand, heaving upward in an enormous “blow” with a dust whirlpool at its center. It would exchange what had been formed deep in the sand for whatever lay on the surface. The

Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate." "It's rare to find members of a Great House aware of planetological problems," Kynes said. "Water is the least favorable condition for life on Arrakis. And remember that growth itself can produce unfavorable conditions unless treated with extreme care.

Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all.

I went up above the quay past the steps to the hotel. I saw a man through the window with a beer in his hand, and another man with a basket full of eggs. I was feeling heavy now, and tired, and I stood there leaning backwards with my hands crossed behind my back at the end of the breakwater before I walked on to the beach on the other side and some way along on the hard-frozen white sand. It had started to blow a bit, and it was still cold with no snow, so I took off my scarf and tied it round my head and ears and sat down in the shelter of a dune and blew into my hands to warm them before I lit a cigarette. Poker ran along the edge of the water with a seagull’s wing in his mouth, and I was so young then, and I remember thinking: I’m twenty-three years old, there is nothing left in life. Only the rest.

island’s handful of cops can’t enforce it when people ignore the signs and stroll the three miles up from the public beach. Connor is rumored to have set his dogs on such trespassers, even to have chased them off in his dune buggy. When we climb the last dune, I’m pleasantly distracted by the scene before us—the sun a few degrees above the water, miles of deserted sand in either direction, the crashing of the waves. Indeed, it has

What does a camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sand that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaler. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. Not the flavorless grass she chews, then chews again, then again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age, taller than most and top heavy, tipping from side to side as she carries this human, this Arthur Less, pointlessly across the Sahara.

Laura described the remnants of snake devotion still found in rural villages of the Black and Adriatic Seas. There, people believed black or green snakes bore guardian spirits who protected their cattle and their homes. In her travels Laura saw ornamental snakes carved to decorate the roofs and windows for protection. Great good fortune came to anyone who met a big white snake wearing a crown,; the crowned snake was the sister of the waterbird goddess, owner and guardian of life water and life milk.

This is likely one of the roots of Fremen emphasis on superstition (disregarding the Missionaria Protectiva’s ministrations). What matter that whistling sands are an omen? What matter that you must make the sign of the fist when first you see First Moon? A man’s flesh is his own and his water belongs to the tribe—and the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience. Omens help you remember this. And because you are here, because you have the religion, victory cannot evade you in the end.

As soon as she releases me, Galen grabs my hand and I don’t even have time to gasp before he snatches me to the surface and pulls me toward shore, only pausing to dislodge his pair of swimming trunks from under his favorite rock, where he had just moments before taken the time to hide them. I know the routine and turn away so he can change, but it seems like no time before he hauls me onto the beach and drags me to the sand dunes in front of my house. “What are we doing?” I ask. His legs are longer than mine so for every two of his strides I have to take three, which feels a lot like running. He stops us in between the dunes. “I’m doing something that is none of anyone else’s business.” Then he jerks me up against him and crushes his mouth on mine. And I see why he didn’t want an audience for this kiss. I wouldn’t want an audience for this kiss, either, especially if the audience included my mother. This is our first kiss after he announced that he wanted me for his mate. This kiss holds promises of things to come. When he pulls away I feel drunk and excited and nervous and filled with a craving that I’m not sure can ever be satisfied. And Galen looks startled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “That makes it about fifty times harder to leave, I think.” He tucks my head under his chin and I wrap my arms around him until both our breathing returns to normal. I take the time to soak in his scent, his warmth, the hard contours of his-well, his everything. It’s really not fair that he has to leave when he’s only just gotten back. We didn’t have much time to talk on the way back home. We haven’t had much time for anything. “Emma,” he murmurs. “The water isn’t safe for you right now. Please don’t get in it. Please.” “I won’t.” I really won’t. He said please, after all. He lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. His eyes hold all the gentleness and love in the world, with a pinch of mischief. “And take good notes in calculus, or I’ll be forced to cheat off you and for some weird reason that makes me feel guilty.” I wonder what Grom the Triton king would think of that. That Galen basically just stated his intention to keep doing human things. Galen pushes his lips against my forehead, then disentangles himself from me and leads me back toward the water. My body feels ten degrees cooler when his arms fall, and it’s got nothing to do with the temperature outside. We reach the others just in time to see Rayna all but throw herself at Toraf. I can’t help but smile as they kiss. It’s like watching Beauty and the Beast. And Toraf’s not the Beast.

I thought of the lands of Israel, Judaea and Samaria, of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, of Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee. Places where the sun bakes men’s heads, desiccates their bodies, afflicts their souls with thirst. Places that generate a yearning for oases where water flows cool, clear and free, where the air is balmy and fragrant, where food and drink are abundant. The afterlife suddenly struck me as a counterworld invented by men exhausted and parched by their ceaseless wanderings across the dunes or up and down rocky trails baked to white heat. Monotheism was born of the sand.

I am now at a time of life when I can look back on the past, for my soul has been refined in the crucible of interior and exterior trials. Now, like a flower after the storm, I can raise my head and see that the words of the Psalm are realised in me: "The Lord is my Shepherd and I shall want nothing. He hath set me in a place of pasture. He hath brought me up on the water of refreshment. He hath converted my soul. He hath led me on the paths of justice for His own Name's sake. For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils for Thou are with me."[6]

Bethany stands in the middle of the enormous, apparently endless beach surrounded by square miles of damp sand, the surf still some hundred yards off, the light pearly and uniform, the horizon a blurry, darker grey line shading into the clouds. Turning, she sees the black-green jagged stripe of the pines behind the dunes and, beyond that, more unchanging grey sky. A kind of dizziness afflicts her – she senses her insignificance, a small two-legged homunculus in the midst of all this space, a mere speck, a tiny crawling gnat in this elemental simplicity of sand, water and sky. She squats on her haunches, worried she might fall over, and to distract herself takes out her camera and frames a shot of the beach, the sea and the packed clouds – it looks like an abstract painting. Click. It looks like an abstract painting by – what was his name? Colour-field paintings they are called, the three layers of colour-fields in this case being broad, horizontal bands of dark taupe, slate grey, nebulous tarnished silver. It is rather beautiful. She stands up, feeling equilibrium return – maybe she was hungry, and felt faint for a second or two or maybe, she wonders, maybe she has experienced an actual existential moment – an epiphany – and has seen clearly the reality of her place in the world and has felt the nothingness, the vast indifference of the universe…

Far down the corridor, an image-voice screamed: "They denied us the Hajj!" Jessica saw the slave cribs on Bela Tegeuse down that inner corridor, saw the weeding out and the selecting that spread men to Rossak and Harmonthep. Scenes of brutal ferocity opened to her like the petals of a terrible flower. And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina—first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak...and now developed to subtle strength on Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life. Far down the inner corridor, another voice screamed: "Never to forgive! Never to forget!

Galen doesn’t get truly nervous until he senses the size of the Syrena mass coming toward them. Up until this point, he’d been worried about Emma. What she thought about all this. Her mother’s reunion with Grom. What she planned to do while they were gone. Whether or not she was going to keep her promise and stay out of the water. And…his thoughts keep wandering back to their kiss between the sand dunes. It was an exquisite torture, the way she tasted like a mixture of salt water and herself. A combination of two things he’s come to cherish. Water and land. Syrena world and human world. Love for his kind and love for Emma. Only now, as the party of Syrena approaches, its presence seems to encroach on Galen’s options. For some reason, it feels like a choice between water or land, Syrena world or human world, love for his kind or love for Emma. According to the law, there never was a choice. But that was before Emma. And Galen has the feeling that the time for truly deciding between the two is closing in on him. But haven’t I already made that decision? He steals a glance at Toraf, who’s been wearing the same grim expression since they left Emma’s house. Toraf is never grim. Since they were fingerlings, he’s always had a special talent for finding the positive in a situation, and if not the positive, then he can certainly find mischief in a situation. But not now. Now he’s keeping to himself. Toraf never keeps to himself. Even Grom, the usual sealed-up clam, has become boisterous and enlivened while he and Nalia chatter to each other, laughing and whispering and holding hands, all the while speculating over the events that separated them so long ago. But Toraf seems oblivious to the chatter and to Galen’s internal war of emotions and to the swarm of jellyfish he just narrowly avoided. Galen had thought Toraf might have been anxious about leaving Rayna behind. Usually, though, he comforts himself by talking about her until Galen wishes he’d had a twin brother instead of a twin sister. No, what’s troubling Toraf has nothing to do with leaving Rayna behind. He even persuaded her to stay. Which means he thinks it’s safer for her on land right now. Toraf’s motives are always simple: do what’s best for Rayna, in spite of Rayna.

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

Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue. Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You are unworthy of her. Yes. No. Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination. Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turns skyward. Is this drizzle? It is. Sound of small sheers closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty and here it is, the separation.

he same goes for new situations. Imagine a child who’s more afraid of the ocean than are other kids the same age. Thoughtful parents recognize that this fear is natural and even wise; the ocean is indeed dangerous. But they don’t allow her to spend the summer on the safety of the dunes, and neither do they drop her in the water and expect her to swim. Instead they signal that they understand her unease, while urging her to take small steps. Maybe they play in the sand for a few days with the ocean waves crashing at a safe distance. Then one day they approach the water’s edge, perhaps with the child riding on a parent’s shoulders. They wait for calm weather, or low tide, to immerse a toe, then a foot, then a knee. They don’t rush; every small step is a giant stride in a child’s world. When ultimately she learns to swim like a fish, she has reached a crucial turning point in her relationship not only with water but also with fear

The same goes for new situations. Imagine a child who’s more afraid of the ocean than are other kids the same age. Thoughtful parents recognize that this fear is natural and even wise; the ocean is indeed dangerous. But they don’t allow her to spend the summer on the safety of the dunes, and neither do they drop her in the water and expect her to swim. Instead they signal that they understand her unease, while urging her to take small steps. Maybe they play in the sand for a few days with the ocean waves crashing at a safe distance. Then one day they approach the water’s edge, perhaps with the child riding on a parent’s shoulders. They wait for calm weather, or low tide, to immerse a toe, then a foot, then a knee. They don’t rush; every small step is a giant stride in a child’s world. When ultimately she learns to swim like a fish, she has reached a crucial turning point in her relationship not only with water but also with fear.

But these things that Rome had to give, are they not good things?” Marcus demanded. “Justice, and order, and good roads; worth having, surely?” “These be all good things,” Esca agreed. “But the price is too high.” “The price? Freedom?” “Yes—and other things than freedom.” “What other things? Tell me, Esca; I want to know. I want to understand.” Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. “Look at the pattern embossed here on your dagger-sheath,” he said at last. “See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.” Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. “Go on.” Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside at Cottia’s coming. “Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to—if they ever had it.” He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. “You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.” “The sheath was made by a British craftsman,” Marcus said stubbornly. “I bought it at Anderida when I first landed.” “By a British craftsman, yes, making a Roman pattern. One who had lived so long under the wings of Rome—he and his fathers before him—that he had forgotten the ways and the spirit of his own people.” He laid the shield down again. “You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own.” For a while they were silent, watching Cub at his beetle-hunting. Then Marcus said, “When I came out from home, a year and a half ago, it all seemed so simple.” His gaze dropped again to the buckler on the bench beside him, seeing the strange, swelling curves of the boss with new eyes. Esca had chosen his symbol well, he thought: between the formal pattern on his dagger-sheath and the formless yet potent beauty of the shield-boss lay all the distance that could lie between two worlds. And yet between individual people, people like Esca, and Marcus, and Cottia, the distance narrowed so that you could reach across it, one to another, so that it ceased to matter.

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-​night diner down around Rockaway Beach. There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip. Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. . . thirty-​five, forty-​five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything. . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-​five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board. Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly -- zaaapppp -- going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea. The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-​slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-​inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I.” Indeed. . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-​burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From

Radatz described MK12’s first week on the job, ‘We felt like kid astronauts with keys to an actual shuttle, like someone was going to call our bluff at any minute.’139 MK12’s initial creative brief was to explore the element at the heart of the film – water: We learned that we’d been thinking about the film from an opposite perspective than that of Marc and the producers: where we saw water as the central theme, they saw the lack of water as Bond and Greene’s motivation. Our initial concept set Bond in a landscape made of backlit female forms submerged in water. After mulling over random ideas for a few days, it occurred to us that the same technique could be transplanted to a desert scenario, with the female forms instead becoming sand dunes.

She sleeps in the Waters of Life.” Chani

A graph of seal levels over the past five million years looks like a cross section through choppy surf. In yet deeper time, more than seventy million years ago, the height of this surf was magnificent. All of Florida and half of Georgia were shallow seas dotted with islands. The sabal palm’s ancestors likely grew on the sand of these beaches and islands with dinosaurs nibbling on their fruits. On the scale of thousands of years, sand behaves like water. A dune is a ripple. An island is a cresting wave. The sand water rolls, churns, and streams under the power of ocean and wind. Sabal palm is a surfer on those waves.

The masses of Arrakis will know that we work to make the land flow with water,” his father said. “Most of them, of course, will have only a semimystical understanding of how we intend to do this. Many, not understanding the prohibitive mass-ratio problem, may even think we’ll bring water from some other planet rich in it. Let them think anything they wish as long as they believe in us.

What do you think? There, isn’t that the finest of negative landscapes? Look, on the left we have that pile of ashes they call a dune here, with the grey dyke on our right, the pallid beach at our feet and, in front of us, the sea, the colour of diluted washing powder, it’s pale waters reflected in the vast sky above. A soft hell, it really is! Nothing but horizontals, no brightness: colourless space and dead life. Is it not universal obliteration, a void perceptible to the eyes? No men, above all, no men! Just you and I, only us, face-to-face with a planet that is finally empty. The sky is alive? You’re right, dear friend. It thickens then sinks back, opens up airy staircases, then closes its doors of cloud.

man’s flesh is his own and his water belongs to the tribe—and the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience.

I learned economics at my mother’s knee,” Teg said. “Food, water, breathable air, living space not contaminated by poisons—there are many kinds of money and the value changes according to the dependency.

See how little I value my water when it is taken by animals.

Kynes passed an unreadable glance across Bewt, said: 'It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.

There is enough water! But Kynes doesn't wish it to be known.

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others - it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual.

Look out the window of the train: you’re moving, but you can’t remember leaving. Jagged brown crater dwellings run across the landscape, pipes with thick black smoke pouring out. Smoke overflowing, as the buildings themselves are caked with a sort of black tar. Evening sun peeks over the horizon through rusted steel water towers and other ancient skeletons. Their frames stand fixed, albeit hunched forward, anchored in by the ankles in scrap iron dunes that stretch for miles with frigid desert rats scurrying through as giant shivering Scarabs hover in the sky: wired-in and vigilant, murmuring ancient mantras, overshadowing newer, but desperately cruel partisan inscriptions of code in the soot-stained brick facade. Look at your superimposed reflection in the window across from your seat and envision subatomic particles acquiring sentience in the vacuum of an Accelerator. All wondering how it is they got there, who it is they presume to be. Always wondering. Spiraling...really! Always spiraling at breakneck speeds through the vacuum—eternally in doubt. You are suddenly reminded of the words of that great Algorithmist painter, Carlotta Wakefield, 'Mediocre painters portray that which they understand. Fabulous painters: that which they Surmise...' You wonder if that, too, applies to our constructions of reality, ersatz or otherwise. (From the short story "Leapfrog")

And Jessica, noting the words and manner, caught the deeper implications in the phrase, “the body’s water.

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred.

I sat up a bit and looked out over the railing toward the ocean. The sight always took my breath away. The dark green velvet of the front yard contrasted with the radiant white of the sand dunes that separated the family’s property from the beach. The white mounds cut a wavy line across the deep blue of the Atlantic, like the finger paint of a child in his first attempt to create something beautiful. Feathery sea oats grew in clumps across their tops. The water glistened and the sun danced on the phosphorus. An illusory field of diamonds.

The Shore   I read the skies and am rendered silent. This would be a day for walking long on shores of vast expanse. I have been the sort of man I fear would rise again in moments of resolve. When I see him on the street or in the pew or in the mirror, his translucence quivers close to the frequency of fleshliness until I blink him down into the backwash, into the riptide of graces, for he was full of judgment. So I must walk. The tall grass of the dunes is tossing like the ocean’s anemone. Waves are faithful of the sands shaped unseen under the great breathing of the tides. Wind upon grasses. Waves upon sand. Some steady drawing of my surfaces out into the depths and gone, out into the piercing light. Return for more, o mighty patience, o mighty love of the wild and unspeakable, til I am wind and wave.

Then you should just go take one,” Hawat sneered. “Yes,” the Fremen said. “We took one. We have it hidden where Stilgar can study it for Liet and where Liet can see it for himself if he wishes. But I doubt he’ll want to: the weapon is not a very good one. Poor design for Arrakis.” “You…took one?” Hawat asked. “It was a good fight,” the Fremen said. “We lost only two men and spilled the water from more than a hundred of theirs.” There were Sardaukar at every gun, Hawat thought. This desert madman speaks casually of losing only two men against Sardaukar!

The sandtrout,” he repeated, “was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet . . . and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase.

Before Jessica could answer, Chani said: “It is not possible that you have tasted the blessed water. You are outworlder and unprivileged.

At the pole, the stars hover against the black of the universe. Below, a frozen ocean is lit by starlight and the thinnest paring of moon, its platinum surface pushed up into broken dunes, shadow rippling in the trenches between. Where the tides have tugged rips in the ice, narrow channels of open water breathe fog as they freeze over. Never has Marian seen a landscape so suffused with hush, so monochromatic and devoid of life.

Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time.

The water searched through rolling hills,

the chant for those committed to the desert, the ones whose water went to Shai-hulud: “Mother of sand, father of Time, beginning of Life, grant him passage.

I will tell you a thing about your new name,” Stilgar said. “The choice pleases us. Muad’Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad’Dib creates his own water. Muad’Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad’Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad’Dib we call ‘instructor-of-boys.’ That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad’Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you.

Here the spice was everywhere: in the air, food, garments, wall hangings and rugs. Melange was intertwined with sietch life as much as water.

Cool your sorrow—we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart—water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.

Drink all your water,” Paul said. “Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.

Climate engineers could certainly strong-arm the weather to what someone had foolishly decided was optimal—though they did it at their own peril, creating an environment that led, ultimately, to malaise of the mind, body, and spirit. The Imperial family would never understand that. They continued to relax under their sunny skies and stroll through their well-watered arboretums, oblivious to an environmental catastrophe just waiting to unfold before their covered eyes. It would be a challenge to stay on this planet

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others—it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual. Water.

Then he saw the human figures moving into the flower fields, sweeping them with strange scythelike devices—dew gatherers. Water so precious here that even the dew must be collected.

This fisherman was one of several in a boat—a craft for traveling on water—that foundered…sank beneath the water. Another fisherman helping recover the body said he’d seen marks like this man’s wounds several times. They meant another drowning fisherman had tried to stand on this poor fellow’s shoulders in the attempt to reach up to the surface—to reach air.” “Why is this interesting?” the banker asked. “Because of an observation made by my father at the time. He said the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable—except when you see it happen in the drawing room.

Kynes stared at him, seeing the water-fat flesh. He spoke coldly: “You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.

Memories rolled in his mind like the toothless muttering of old women. He remembered open waters and waves - days of grass instead of sand - dazed summers that had whipped past him like windstorms leaves. [...] I'm getting old, he thought. I've felt the cold hand of my mortality. And in what ? An old woman's greed.

Place Message Here" I knew that somewhere Jesus wept. --Larry Brown, Dirty Work That was when our love began for me, though late, the way a flock of darkness settles over your shoulders. I remember the muted reflections that smudged the water prowling among the lingering rocks, a snail crawling out of its shell, the drizzle of light, the blackened windows. It was when that the sun peeled away the dark from the air, the surface of the water, then the soul. It was only then that I could read the shadows that followed our words. It seemed that the whole planet was taking aim at our future. I thought, then, that I could see your own soul in the constant waves tearing unconcerned at the impenetrable dunes. I wanted, then, to believe the moon is a flower, fragrant, its stem tossed across the water. It was then that I entered some other world, the way your life wakes suddenly in the middle of the night to find your own worn-out dreams lying in sheets around you, an empty bottle on the table, and yet some voice stumbling down the hallway of the wind trying the locked doors of the heart, calling out your name. It was then on that shore after I heard the news of my friend's heart tearing open like a wet paper bag. I was standing where Marconi sent his messages which seemed to fill the air, still, like swallows. There is always another life in the corner of our eyes, one that begins because our poor words have never said what we meant at the time. Today, here, ladybugs fill my porch screen trying to reach the early sun that radiates through the fine mesh. They halt there like messages never received, empty husks of some abandoned future we can never know. Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones we collect, a story he would say begins with you, with me, a story that is forever lost among the backwaters of our lives, our endless fear of ourselves, and our endless need for hope, a story, perhaps an answer, a word suddenly on wing, the simple sound of a torn heart, or the unmistakable scent of the morning's fading moon. Richard Jackson, The Cortland Review. Spring 2005.

The absence of a thing,” the Baron said, “this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we’re addicted to.

C'était si agréable d'être au milieu d'une foule, de lever soudain la tête et de croiser son regard vert qui cherchait le sien. De savoir qu'il serait toujours à ses côtés...