Eager To Meet Quotes

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say

Roads Go Ever On Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea; Over snow by winter sown, And through the merry flowers of June, Over grass and over stone, And under mountains in the moon. Roads go ever ever on, Under cloud and under star. Yet feet that wandering have gone Turn at last to home afar. Eyes that fire and sword have seen, And horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green, And trees and hills they long have known. The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with weary feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. The Road goes ever on and on Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone. Let others follow, if they can! Let them a journey new begin. But I at last with weary feet Will turn towards the lighted inn, My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her-if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I'll watch her become someone else's. Because the beast doesn't get the beauty.

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.

For the young, death is an enemy they wish to try their strength against. For those of us a little older, she is an old friend, an old lover, but one we are not eager to meet again soon.

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox -- the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death... I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself... I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her.

I place my hands on his chest. He presses me into the curve of his body. Tilts my chin up to meet his eyes. "I'll be good to you," he whispers. "I'll be so good to you, Juliette. I promise." And he kisses me. Hungrily. Desperately. Eager to break me open and taste me.

She certainly did not hate him. No; hatred had vanished long ago, and she had almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against him, that could be so called. The respect created by the conviction of his valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly admitted, had for some time ceased to be repugnant to her feelings; and it was now heightened into somewhat of a friendlier nature, by the testimony so highly in his favour, and bringing forward his disposition in so amiable a light, which yesterday had produced. But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.--Gratitude not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude--for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed; and as such its impression on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no means unpleasing, though it could not exactly be defined.

I hope I haven’t already driven past my greatest moments. I hope there is something beautiful on the horizon that’s just as impatient as I am. Something so eager, it wants to meet me halfway. A moment that is diligently staring at its watch, trembling with nervousness, frustrated, and bursting at the seams, wondering what’s taking me so long to arrive.

Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.

When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.

A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.

The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his-- the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing-- he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.

He opened the front door and Gwen said, “Lock?” He stopped immediately. “Yeah?” Did he have to sound so eager when he was the one making the decision to go? Damn him! “Uh…could you leave him here? He kind of comes with the place.” Frowning, Lock glanced down. “Oh, jeez!” Oh, jeez? “Sorry about that.” He immediately dropped the lion he’d dragged from the couch to the door, back to the couch, and back to the door. “Habit. Usually I bat my prey around until they stop fighting and drag them off to the brush to…well…you know.” He looked down at Mitch. “Sorry about that…uh…” “Mitch,” she told him. “Mitch. Right. Sorry about that, Mitch. And nice to meet you.

He smiled down into her eyes and she looked right at him and she knew him. When hadn’t she known him? With a little sigh of acceptance, she moved into his arms, meeting his eager kiss with a mouth that was just as greedy as him

A man who can reason over trifles will become conceited, and will take pleasure in being described as 'odd'. He will start boasting that he was born with a personality that doesn't fit well with contemporary society, and be convinced that nobody else is above him. He will surely meet with divine retribution. Regardless of what abilities a man may possess, he will be of little use if rejected by others. People don't slight those who are eager to help and serve well, and who readily exhibit humility to their associates.

How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one's last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion's charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness.

It is well that we remember that the trials, difficulties, and experiences of life all have purpose. There came to me on the occasion of a year in my life to be remembered when the lovely sisters of our Relief Society wrote this as a prayer in my behalf. It was entitled 'May You Have': "Enough happiness to keep you sweet, Enough trials to keep you strong, Enough sorrow to keep you human, Enough hope to keep you happy, Enough failure to keep you humble, Enough success to keep you eager, Enough wealth to meet your needs, Enough enthusiasm to look forward, Enough friends to give you comfort, Enough faith to banish depression, Enough determination to make each day better than yesterday. "This is my prayer for the faithful Saints in every land and throughout the world as we look forward to the future with courage and with fortitude

Pride and Prejudice opens with one of the most famous sentences ever written: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." With these words, Jane Austen announced to her readers that they were about to meet such a man and the people eager to marry him off. What was more, they were going to have fun. The dark cynicism of Sense and Sensibility was largely gone, blown away by a clean, fresh wind.

Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.

This I would like to be- braver and bolder, Just a bit wiser because I am older, Just a bit kinder to those I may meet, Just a bit manlier taking defeat; This for the New Year my wish and my plea- Lord, make a regular man out of me. This I would like to be- just a bit finer, More of a smiler and less of a whiner, Just a bit quicker to stretch out my hand Helping another who's struggling to stand, This is my prayer for the New Year to be, Lord, make a regular man out of me. This I would like to be- just a bit fairer, Just a bit better, and just a bit squarer, Not quite so ready to censure and blame, Quicker to help every man in the game, Not quite so eager men's failings to see, Lord, make a regular man out of me. This I would like to be- just a bit truer, Less of the wisher and more of the doer, Broader and bigger, more willing to give, Living and helping my neighbor to live! This for the New Year my prayer and my plea- Lord, make a regular man out of me.

But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. -- Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister.

Now I think of breaking up as moving. Imagine you have your own house, full of your own boxes. A person you meet has his own house, full of his own boxes. When you have a relationship with that person, you shack up in a third house, into which you can each put any number of your boxes. You shouldn't move them all in at once, or else you will seem too eager. And don't dawdle too much either, or you will seem skittish about commitment. You kind of aim to match each other's pace, so that the power balance feels fair and equal. Happy marriage--at least ideally--would be the situation in which both parties enthusiastically choose to keep all of their boxes in their shared house. Conversely, when someone starts to doubt the relationship, he might move a box or two back into his own house, just in case. While he's weighing his options, he may transport a few more boxes to the safety of his own home. When he's ready to take back his final few boxes, he breaks up with you. If you were too infatuated to see it coming, there you are, with all of your boxes in the shared house, and none in the security of your own home.

I believe that the most important thing for a couple of any sort, to realize in their relationship with each other (and please allow me to share this with you), is that neither are a limited source. You see, the idea of the soul is that it is eternal and that it continually receives from an Eternal Source. So the idea in any relationship is never really what you can get from it; but the idea is what you can give to the other, what you can put into it. Withdrawing from eternity— and depositing into the physical realm. Of course, as you both give, you are also both receiving from one another, thus a beautiful relationship is formed and maintained. It's that certain flow that needs to be encouraged and allowed. I say "allowed" because it's natural, however, it's usually not "allowed" because our human faculties are taught and bombarded by stupid ideas in magazines that relationships are all about what one can get from it; it's never about giving! So in a nutshell, the idea is to give because you know that you are receiving from an Everlasting Source, but to also remain graceful and eager enough to also receive gratefully from the other. And this is how eternal relationships are born. We are all conduits of eternity and we happen to meet another conduit whom we feel we belong with, then we share what we receive from eternity and receive what the other has to share.

What are we going to tell the Intergalactic Council of Ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers threw her newborn baby into a dumpster, huh? How're we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? What are they gonna think when they find out that it's just a local custom that over 80 million women in the Third World have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasures so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up? Can't you see them out there?

It is astonishing what can be done when people are truly loyal to each other and eager to meet each other's needs.

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

What a patsy I must be to let you mock me like this! I didn't know that women were so eager to make fools of us men." "Uh, I hate to break it to ya, but most of you are actually DIY types.

She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her-if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I'll watch her become someone else's. Because the beast doesn't get the beauty.

Many people stimulate that good serotonin feeling by trying to rescue others. Feeling like a hero is a reliable way to stimulate your serotonin. But the good feeling soon passes and you have to rescue again. Sometimes rescuers reward bad behavior in others because they are so eager to rescue.

IN HER NOTEBOOKS, Mam used to write that people were like trees. Whenever I read this, I pretended to understand what she meant. But now, walking through Caille Woods, steeped in the heat and smell of twisted tree branches, I see: a growing tree, upon meeting an obstacle, does not stop, or reflect. It pushes itself blindly on, a surge of dumb life eager to continue itself, and it does this, again and again, till it becomes a warp of limbs, and this is how people are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.

Goddamn it," he said, seething. "Goddamn you! No fear. Not an ounce of fucking fear. You invite - you invite - destruction. What's the world to you, huh? A place to die in? You aren't even a girl - you're a… you're a tragedy. There isn't a monster in the world - not a monster in the world till he meets an eager victim.

Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men. Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake.

Desperately trying to remember her manners, she curtseyed and murmured, "Your Grace." The smile lines at his eyes deepened subtly. "You appear to be in need of rescue. Why don't you come inside with me, away from this riffraff? The duchess is eager to meet you." As Pandora hesitated, thoroughly intimidated, he assured her. "I'm quite trustworthy. In fact, I'm very nearly an angel. You'll come to love me in no time." "Take heed," Lord St. Vincent advised Pandora sardonically, fastening the loose sides of his vest. "My father is the pied piper of gullible women." "That's not true," the duke said, "The non-gullible ones follow me as well." Pandora couldn't help chuckling. She looked up into silvery-blue eyes lit with sparks of humor and playfulness. There was something reassuring about his presence, the sense of a man who truly liked women. When she and Cassandra were children, they had fantasized about a handsome father who would lavish them with affection and advice, and spoil them just a little, but not too much. A father who might have let them stand on his feet to dance. This man looked very much like the one Pandora had imagined. She moved forward and took his arm. "How was your journey, my dear?" the duke asked as he escorted her into the house. Before Pandora could reply, Lord St. Vincent spoke from behind them. "Lady Pandora doesn't like small talk, Father. She would prefer to discuss topics such as Darwin, or women's suffrage." "Naturally an intelligent young woman would wish to skip over mundane chitchat," the duke said, giving Pandora such an approving glance that she fairly glowed. "However," he continued thoughtfully, "most people need to be guided into a feeling of safety before they dare reveal their opinions to someone they've only just met. There's a beginning to everything, after all. Every opera has its prelude, every sonnet its opening quatrain. Small talk is merely a way of helping a stranger to trust you, by first finding something you can both agree on." "No one's ever explained it that way before," Pandora said with a touch of wonder. "It actually makes sense. But why must it be so often about weather? Isn't there something else we all agree on? Runcible spoons- everyone likes those, don't they? And teatime, and feeding ducks." "Blue ink," the duke added. "And a cat's purr. And summer storms- although I suppose that brings us back to weather." "I wouldn't mind talking about weather with you, Your Grace," Pandora said ingenuously. The duke laughed gently. "What a delightful girl.

For some, it is a beloved they are eager to meet. For some, it is an enemy they are anxious to face. For some, it is a stranger they are trying to ignore. In truth, it is a destiny that nobody can escape. So, for me, when death comes there will only be acceptance.

he is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her-if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I'll watch her become someone else's. Because the beast doesn't get the beauty.

The power-crazed leaders of the world would certainly be surprised to find that their military leaders and troops were only masquerading sodomites who were only too eager to meet the masquerading sodomite armies of other nations in order to have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps.

May you have enough happiness to keep you sweet, enough trials to keep you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human, enough hope to keep you happy, enough failure to keep you humble, enough success to keep you eager, enough friends to give you comfort, enough faith and courage in yourself to banish sadness, enough wealth to meet your needs,

I was in the army.... We went to fight a bad white man, or so the whites told us. We had meetings that were called orientation and education. There were films. It was to show us how this bad white man was doing terrible things in his country. Everybody was angry after the films, and eager to fight. Except me. I was only there because the army paid more than an Indian can earn anywhere else. So I was not angry, but puzzled. There was nothing that this white leader did that the white leaders in this country do not also do. They told us about a place named Lidice. It was much like Wounded Knee. They told us of families moved thousands of miles to be destroyed. It was much like the Trail of Tears. They told us of how this man ruled his nation, so that none dared disobey him. It was much like the way white men work in corporations in New York City, as Sam has described it to me. I asked another soldier about this, a black white man. He was easier to talk to than the regular white man. I asked him what he thought of the orientation and education. He said it was shit, and he spoke from the heart! I thought about it a long time, and I knew he was right. The orientation and education was shit.

This will be the rest of my life. Forced to love her from a distance. Mourn the loss of her each day. But I will. I will smother every emotion but the one that belongs to her. I will love her until I am incapable of the feeling. She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her—if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I’ll watch her become someone else’s. Because the beast doesn’t get the beauty.

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to. Creative individuals don’t have to be dragged out of bed; they are eager to start the day. This is not because they are cheerful, enthusiastic types. Nor do they necessarily have something exciting to do. But they believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can’t wait to get started on it. Most of us don’t feel our actions are that meaningful. Yet everyone can discover at least one thing every day that is worth waking up for. It could be meeting a certain person, shopping for a special item, potting a plant, cleaning the office desk, writing a letter, trying on a new dress. It is easier if each night before falling asleep, you review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesting and exciting. Then next morning, open your eyes and visualize the chosen event—play it out briefly in your mind, like an inner videotape, until you can hardly wait to get dressed and get going. It does not matter if at first the goals are trivial and not that interesting. The important thing is to take the easy first steps until you master the habit, and then slowly work up to more complex goals. Eventually most of the day should consist of tasks you look forward to, until you feel that getting up in the morning is a privilege, not a chore.

Her womanhood went eagerly to meet him.

I push back against him, meeting his forceful pounds with my eager pu*sy. Riding the razors edge of climactic heaven.

Smiling, Siddhartha felt happiness at the friendship and friendliness of the ferryman. He is like Govinda, he thought, smiling. All the people I meet upon my way are like Govinda. All of them are grateful, though they themselves have cause to expect gratitude. All of them are deferential, all are eager to be a friend, to obey and think little. People are children.

As he stood with his fingers in the iceflower bowls, he heard his mom and Cyra talking. “My son was eager for me to meet you, I could tell,” his mom said. “You must be a good friend.” “Um…yes,” Cyra said. “I think so, yes.” You think so, Akos thought, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He’d given her clear enough labels, back in the stairwell, but she still couldn’t quite believe it.

A pang of regret hit Tattersail upon meeting the boy’s bright, eager gaze. Chances were, he’d be dead within a few months. The Empire had many crimes staining its banner, but this was the worst of them.

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me – I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity – and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands; or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes; and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people ‘science’ is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.

That night in my apartment, and other nights, too, burrowed under the covers, I watch the shadows on the wall and think of meeting men, meeting men like in movies, and meeting men like Alice and her mysterious friends seem to - seem to at least in Alice’s stories - men met on buses between stops, in the frozen foods aisle, at Woolworth’s when buying a spool of thread, at the newsstand, perusing Look, in hotel lobbies, at supper clubs, while hailing cabs or looking in shop windows. Men with smooth felt hats and pencil mustaches, men with Arrow shirts and shiny hair, men eager to rush ahead for the doors and to steady your arm as you step over a wet patch on the road, men with umbrellas just when you need them, men who hold you up with a firm grip as the bus lurches before you can reach a seat, men with flickering eyes who seem to know just which coat you are trying to reach off the rack in the coffee shop, men with smooth cheeks smelling of tangy lime aftershave who would order you a gin and soda before you even knew you wanted one.

As Mr. Stevenson puts it: “. . . no civilization has ever had so haunting a sense of an ultimate order of goodness and rationality which can be known and achieved.” It makes me eager to rise and meet the new day, as

I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies. I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony. And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean.

She pictured Tony and Jim opposite each other, or meeting each other, each of them smiling, warm, friendly, easygoing, Jim less eager than Tony, less funny, less curious, but more self-contained and more sure of his own place in the world.

The apes are, after all, behind the bars of their cages, and we are not. Eager for the experiments to begin, they are also impatient for their food to be served, and they seem impatient for little else. After undergoing years of punishing trials at the hands of determined clinicians, a few have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their placards at each other.

But I’m not a moth. I’m human. And in humans, there are far more stages than just two. I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself. I might not be able to return to the other Ariadnes, but I would not always be the Ariadne floating in front of the mirror, either. I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her.

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. He

Beautiful was it to mark how the poorest began to improve in personal appearance immediately after they came to our Class; how they gradually got shoes and one bit of clothing after another, to enable them to attend our other Meetings, and then to go to Church; and, above all, how eagerly they sought to bring others with them, taking a deep personal interest in all the work of the Mission. Long after they themselves could appear in excellent dress, many of them still continued to attend in their working clothes, and to bring other and poorer girls with them to that Morning Class, and thereby helped to improve and elevate their companions. My delight in that Bible Class was among the purest joys in all my life, and the results were amongst the most certain and precious of all my Ministry.

My mind opened eagerly to meet them, but my soul was already ruined for ever, soiled and dead. It had been bitten by a mean, weak-nerved timidity, like a tick in a dog’s ear: you tear it off, but the small head remains to grow again into a complete, loathsome insect.

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people—always slow to move and irresolute—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people -- always slow to move and irresolute -- every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.

She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her-if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I'll watch her become someone else's. Because the beast doesn't get the beauty.

So if I tell you I want to re-do our senior year in one day…to go ice-skating at Rockefeller Center and let you get to second base like two teenagers…” I erased the gap between us, kissing a sliver of his exposed neck, and his breath stilled. “And go eat at P.J. Clarke’s and move to third base in the bathroom…” I rasped the words against his hot flesh and dragged my eyes up to meet his stormy ones. “And end the day at a Broadway show where I’d do something very inappropriate under your seat…” We melted into each other, and sure enough, I felt the swelling in his slacks getting bigger against my stomach. “You’d say…no?” His face was the funniest thing on earth as it moved from surprised to eager, then finally to turned on. “Fuck,” he muttered, pressing his hard cock against me. From the outside, it must’ve looked like we were sharing the dirtiest hug ever. “I’m about to go ice-skating for a hand job, and I’m not even sixteen anymore.” “You’re totally going on a day date,” I joked. He rolled his eyes but followed me back outside and into the nearest subway station, buttoning his pea coat to cover the massive bulge between his legs. “Lead the way.

You can recite random facts from the encyclopedia until you’re blue in the face, but that does little to advertise your generic facility with information. Similarly, when you meet someone for the first time, you’re more eager to sniff each other out for this generic skill, rather than to exchange the most important information each of you has gathered to this point in your lives. In other words, listeners generally prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.

Do you understand me, good people? Do you understand now why it is not as easy as it used to be to sit behind that desk and learn only what Oom Dawie has decided I must know? My head is rebellious. It refuses now to remember when the Dutch landed, and the Huguenots landed, and the British landed. It has already forgotten when the old Union become the proud young Republic. But it does know what happened in Kliptown in 1955, in Sharpville on 21st March, 1960, and in Soweto on the 16th of June 1976. Do you? Better find out because those are dates your children will have to learn one day. We don't need the Zolile classrooms any more. We know now what they really are ... traps which have been carefully set to catch our minds, our souls. No, good people. e have woken up at last.We have found another school ... the streets, the little rooms, the funeral parlours of the location ... anywhere the people meet and whisper names we have been told to forget, the dates of events they try to tell us never happened, and the speeches they try to say were never made. Those are the lessons we are eager and proud to learn, because they are lessons about our history, about our heroes. But the time for whispering them is past. Tomorrow we start shouting. AMANDLA!

You said earlier today that you wanted to talk about something,” Halt said. Crowley nodded, gathering his thoughts before he began. “We seem to share a lot of the same skills,” he said. “And the same weapons. I noticed you carry a saxe knife and a throwing knife like mine. I wondered where you came by them.” Crowley, of course, carried his two knives in the distinctive Ranger-issue double scabbard. Halt’s were in separate scabbards, placed close together on the left side of his belt. He glanced at them now, where the belt was draped over a rock beside the campfire. “My mentor gave them to me,” he said. “He was a Ranger, like you.” Crowley sat up at that piece of information. “A Ranger?” he said. “In Hibernia? What was his name?” “He called himself Pritchard. He was an amazing man.” “He was indeed,” Crowley affirmed, and now it was Halt’s turn to look surprised. “You knew him?” Crowley nodded eagerly. “I was his apprentice for five years. He taught me everything I know. How did you come to meet him?” “He turned up at Du . . . Droghela, some three years ago. He took me under his wing and taught me silent movement, knife work, tracking and the rest. I could already shoot, but he tightened up my technique quite a bit.” Crowley noticed the hesitation and correction when Halt mentioned the name of the place where he’d met Pritchard. But he let it pass. “Yes. He was very big on technique.” “And practice,” Halt agreed. Crowley smiled at the memory of his old teacher. “He had a saying. An ordinary archer practices until he gets it right. A Ranger—” “Practices until he never gets it wrong.” Halt

I think I’m drowning. But not into her blue eyes like I happily would. No, I’m sinking into the floor, letting it swallow me whole. I can hardly breathe under the crushing weight of Kitt’s words. My ears ring. My heart pounds. The command echoes in my skull, though I have no idea why he would want this. Why he would want her. Not now. Not after everything. I’m surrounded by the entire court and the only thing I can focus on is not falling to my knees beside her. Marriage. Marriage to someone who isn’t me. Marriage to someone I will spend the rest of my life serving. I’ll lose her forever while being forced to watch. I can’t even look at her. I’m a coward, morphing back into the monster I was when she found me. My vision is blurry, eyes fixed on the dais above. This is how I lose her. Not by death but by something just as binding. The command rings in my head. And to think I wasted so much time trying to hate her. To think I won’t have enough time to love her. My heart aches because every beat belongs to her. And I may never get to tell her that. Is this how she will remember me? Escorting her to this fate? Bound by duty alone? I could laugh. I could cry. I could burn this palace to the ground like I did her house, just for a chance to confess my love before the flames consumed me. Because I am bound to her very being. Hers until the day she realizes I don’t deserve to be. The king’s eyes are on me while mine are somewhere far away. Somewhere with her. A place where I am nothing and no one and happy being powerless, so long as she is beside me. My gaze falls from the fantasy, finding its way to her. This is not how I will remember us. Not as enemies or traitors or monsters, but as two people dancing in the dark, swaying beneath the stars. Her feet atop mine, her head on the heart that beats only for her. Just Pae and Kai. I step away from her kneeling form, masking every emotion with a blank stare. I’m leaving her to face him. Her future husband. I melt into the crowd, standing at a safe enough distance to prevent myself from stealing her away. This will be the rest of my life. Forced to love her from a distance. Mourn the loss of her each day. But I will. I will smother every emotion but the one that belongs to her. I will love her until I am incapable of the feeling. She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her—if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I’ll watch her become someone else’s. Because the beast doesn’t get the beauty.

Ildiko shuddered.  Her hope to never again see or eat the Kai’s most beloved and revolting delicacy had been in vain.  When Brishen informed her that the dish was one of Serovek’s favorites, she resigned herself to another culinary battle with her food and put the scarpatine on the menu.  She ordered roasted potatoes as well, much to the head cook’s disgust. When servants brought out the food and set it on the table, Brishen leaned close and whispered in her ear.  “Revenge, wife?” “Hardly,” she replied, keeping a wary eye on the pie closest to her.  The golden top crust, with its sprinkle of sparkling salt, pitched in a lazy undulation.  “But I’m starving, and I have no intention of filling up on that abomination.” Their guest of honor didn’t share their dislike of either food.  As deft as any Kai, Serovek made short work of the scarpatine and its whipping tail, cleaved open the shell with his knife and took a generous bite of the steaming gray meat. Ildiko’s stomach heaved.  She forgot her nausea when Serovek complimented her.  “An excellent choice to pair the scarpatine with the potato, Your Highness.  They are better together than apart.” Beside her, Brishen choked into his goblet.  He wiped his mouth with his sanap.  “What a waste of good scarpatine,” he muttered under his breath. What a waste of a nice potato, she thought.  However, the more she thought on Serovek’s remark, the more her amusement grew. “And what has you smiling so brightly?”  Brishen stared at her, his lambent eyes glowing nearly white in the hall’s torchlight. She glanced at Serovek, happily cleaning his plate and shooting the occasional glance at Anhuset nearby.  Brishen’s cousin refused to meet his gaze, but Ildiko had caught the woman watching the Beladine lord more than a few times during dinner. “That’s us, you know,” she said. “What is us?” “The scarpatine and the potato.  Better together than alone.  At least I think so.” One of Brishen’s eyebrows slid upward.  “I thought we were hag and dead eel.  I think I like those comparisons more.”  He shoved his barely-touched potato to the edge of his plate with his knife tip, upper lip curled in revulsion to reveal a gleaming white fang. Ildiko laughed and stabbed a piece of the potato off his plate.  She popped it into her mouth and chewed with gusto, eager to blunt the taste of scarpatine still lingering on her tongue.

On the brink alone he stands with quick and eager feet. Jump across and run, boy, don’t worry what you’ll meet. For in the days before you, life will intervene With all the things you yearn to see and all that you have seen…. Don’t close your eyes and wonder what lies across the gap; There is no road before you; you cannot find the map. For with your heart you forge a way that angels fear to tread, And gather up your troubles for the day when you are dead, And gather up your troubles for the day when you are dead…. Run, boy, run. Run with all your might. The sunrise burns before you, and on your heels the night. And if the darkness lingers long, you’ll lose your soul’s own song; Yes, if the darkness lingers, you’ll lose your own soul’s song.

Minli was not brown and dull like the rest of the village. She had glossy black hair with pink cheeks, shining eyes always eager for adventure, and a fast smile that flashed from her face. When people saw her lively and impulsive spirit, they thought her name, which meant quick thinking, suited her well. “Too well,” her mother sighed, as Minli had a habit of quick acting as well.

I know you,” he added, helping to arrange the blanket over my shoulders. “You won’t drop the subject until I agree to check on your cousin, so I’ll do it. But only under one condition.” “John,” I said, whirling around to clutch his arm again. “Don’t get too excited,” he warned. “You haven’t heard the condition.” “Oh,” I said, eagerly. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Thank you. Alex has never had a very good life-his mother ran away when he was a baby, and his dad spent most of his life in jail…But, John, what is all this?” I swept my free hand out to indicate the people remaining on the dock, waiting for the boat John had said was arriving soon. I’d noticed some of them had blankets like the one he’d wrapped around me. “A new customer service initiative?” John looked surprised at my change of topic…then uncomfortable. He stooped to reach for the driftwood Typhon had dashed up to drop at his feet. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, stiffly. “You’re giving blankets away to keep them warm while they wait. When did this start happening?” “You mentioned some things when you were here the last time….” He avoided meeting my gaze by tossing the stick for his dog. “They stayed with me.” My eyes widened. “Things I said?” “About how I should treat the people who end up here.” He paused at the approach of a wave-though it was yards off-and made quite a production of moving me, and my delicate slippers, out of its path. “So I decided to make a few changes.” It felt as if one of the kind of flowers I liked-a wild daisy, perhaps-had suddenly blossomed inside my heart. “Oh, John,” I said, and rose onto my toes to kiss his cheek. He looked more than a little surprised by the kiss. I thought I might actually have seen some color come into his cheeks. “What was that for?” he asked. “Henry said nothing was the same after I left. I assumed he meant everything was much worse. I couldn’t imagine it was the opposite, that things were better.” John’s discomfort at having been caught doing something kind-instead of reckless or violet-was sweet. “Henry talks too much,” he muttered. “But I’m glad you like it. Not that it hasn’t been a lot of added work. I’ll admit it’s cut down on the complaints, though, and even the fighting amongst our rowdier passengers. So you were right. Your suggestions helped.” I beamed up at him. Keeper of the dead. That’s how Mr. Smith, the cemetery sexton, had referred to John once, and that’s what he was. Although the title “protector of the dead” seemed more applicable. It was totally silly how much hope I was filled with by the fact that he’d remembered something I’d said so long ago-like maybe this whole consort thing might work out after all. I gasped a moment later when there was a sudden rush of white feathers, and the bird he’d given me emerged from the grizzly gray fog seeming to engulf the whole beach, plopping down onto the sand beside us with a disgruntled little humph. “Oh, Hope,” I said, dashing tears of laughter from my eyes. Apparently I had only to feel the emotion, and she showed up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you behind. It was his fault, you know.” I pointed at John. The bird ignored us both, poking around in the flotsam washed ashore by the waves, looking, as always, for something to eat. “Her name is Hope?” John asked, the corners of his mouth beginning to tug upwards. “No.” I bristled, thinking he was making fun of me. Then I realized I’d been caught. “Well, all right…so what if it is? I’m not going to name her after some depressing aspect of the Underworld like you do all your pets. I looked up the name Alastor. That was the name of one of the death horses that drew Hades’s chariot. And Typhon?” I glanced at the dog, cavorting in and out of the waves, seemingly oblivious of the cold. “I can only imagine, but I’m sure it means something equally unpleasant.

Psychology knows that he who imagines disasters in some way desires them. But why do they come so eagerly to meet him.l Something in reality strikes a chord in paranoid fantasy and is warped by it. The sadism latent in everyone unerringly divines the weakness latent in everyone. And the fantasy of persecution is contagious: wherever it occurs spectators are driven irresistibly to imitate it.

And suddenly it seemed utterly right to me that resistance had been his wish, his intention. It made a kind of emotional sense that caused me to feel, instantly, how little sense my earlier more or less unframed assumptions had made. Of course! I thought. And with that thought it was as though my father stepped forward to meet me as he had been in 1940: twenty-five years old, newly married, teaching literature and history and religion as his first real job, as an assistant professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. That stage of his life – and he in it – had always been indistinct to me, as the lives of parents before their children exist always are to those children; but now, holding this letter in my hands, I remembered anew and vividly the numerous photographs in our family albums of him then – a slender young man, intense-looking and handsome, with a shock of dark hair swept back from his high forehead. A radical young man, it would seem. More radical in many ways than my own son was now. A young man, ready, perhaps even eager to embrace the fate his powerful beliefs were calling him to. Sitting there, I felt a rush of love and pity for him in his youth, in his passionate convictions – really, the same feelings I often had for my son when he argued his heartfelt positions. Abruptly, they seemed alike to me and equally dear: my father, my son. I felt as though my father had been waiting for this moment to be born to me as the young man he’d been, so touchingly willing to bear witness to his conscience; and the surprise of this new sense of him, this birth, was a gift to me, a sudden balm in those days of my most intense grief.

She opened the book. “Don’t,” said Arin. “Please.” But she had already seen the inscription. For Arin, it read, from Amma and Etta, with love. This was Arin’s home. This house had been his, this library his, this book his, dedicated to him by his parents, some ten years ago. Kestrel breathed slowly. Her fingers rested on the page, just below the black line of writing. She lifted her gaze to meet Irex’s smirk. Her mind chilled. She assessed the situation as her father would a battle. She knew her objective. She knew her opponent’s. She understood what she could afford to lose, and what she could not. Kestrel closed the book, set it on a table, and turned her back to Arin. “Lord Irex,” she said, her voice warm. “It is but a book.” “It is my book,” Irex said. There was a choked sound behind her. Without looking, Kestrel said in Herrani, “Do you wish to be removed from the room?” Arin’s answer was low. “No.” “Then be silent.” She smiled at Irex. In their language, she said, “This is clearly not a case of theft. Who would dare steal from you? I’m certain he meant only to look at it. You can’t blame him for being curious about the luxuries your house holds.” “He shouldn’t have even been inside the library, let alone touching its contents. Besides, there were witnesses. A judge will rule in my favor. This is my property, so I will decide the number of lashes.” “Yes, your property. Let us not forget that we are also discussing my property.” “He will be returned to you.” “So the law says, but in what condition? I am not eager to see him damaged. He holds more value than a book in a language no one has any interest in reading.” Irex’s dark eyes flicked to look behind Kestrel, then returned to her. They grew sly. “You take a decided interest in your slave’s well-being. I wonder to what lengths you will go to prevent a punishment that is rightfully mine to give.” He rested a hand on her arm. “Perhaps we can settle the matter between us.” Kestrel heard Arin inhale as he understood Irex’s suggestion. She was angry, suddenly, at the way her mind snagged on the sound of that sharp breath. She was angry at herself, for feeling vulnerable because Arin was vulnerable, and at Irex for his knowing smile. “Yes.” Kestrel decided to twist Irex’s words into something else. “This is between us, and fate.” Having uttered the formal words of a challenge to a duel, Kestrel stepped back from Irex’s touch, drew her dagger, and held it sideways at the level of her chest like a line drawn between him and her. “Kestrel,” Irex said. “That isn’t what I had in mind when I said we might solve the matter.” “I think we’ll enjoy this method more.” “A challenge.” He tsked. “I’ll let you take it back. Just this one.” “I cannot take it back.” At that, Irex drew his dagger and imitated Kestrel’s gesture. They stood still, then sheathed their blades. “I’ll even let you choose the weapons,” Irex said. “Needles. Now it is to you to choose the time and place.” “My grounds. Tomorrow, two hours from sunset. That will give me time to gather the death-price.” This gave Kestrel pause. But she nodded, and finally turned to Arin. He looked nauseated. He sagged in the senators’ grip. It seemed they weren’t restraining him, but holding him up. “You can let go,” Kestrel told the senators, and when they did, she ordered Arin to follow her. As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.

She sniffs and shakes off her tears, then turns to me with an eager look. “So what’s the deal with him? How did you meet? You just tricked me to the worst snot-fest in the history of me. I demand this as repayment.” She has a point. I fiddle with my phone. “It started out as a wrong number, actually. Like you know those Buzzfeed articles where people text the wrong number while going into labor and then these randos show up with diapers and baby formula and they become besties?” “No, but I’ll take your word that it happened.” “Yeah, so, it’s kind of like that. He just texted the wrong number—I think he was looking for my dad because I inherited his phone. But then we just…I don’t know, we just kept talking and—” “So you legit don’t know him,” she interrupts. “I do know him.” “Have you talked, though?” I hold up my brick phone. “How do you think we’re communicating? Smoke signals?” She waves away my sarcasm. “No, I mean actually talked. Like,” she holds her hand up like a phone, “here’s my number, call me maybe talked.” I squirm. “Not exactly.” Sage rolls her eyes. “Elle! He could be a sixty-year-old with a collection of American Girl Dolls in his basement for all you know.” “He isn’t!” I cry. “He’s our age. And besides, I like texting him. It feels more, I don’t know, You’ve Got Mail-y.

Sometimes, however, unmet attachment needs have a positive impact on future relationships, if those later friendships are experienced as second chances. Eager to love and be loved, eager to meet those basic needs for caring and affiliation, children can make up for those unmet needs by being outgoing, having strong leadership qualities, and becoming devoted friends. So insecurely attached children are not doomed to a life of desperation, withdrawal, clinging, aggression, or insecurity, but they may need some additional help negotiating the complex terrain of the social world. The deeper a child’s unmet need, the harder it may be to ever have it filled later on. Expecting rejection, neglect, or smothering, the child may respond to peers with passivity, withdrawal, or aggression. Children who are afraid to assert their own needs may follow along with whatever the friend or the group says.

We have in this parable a lively emblem of the condition and behavior of sinners in their natural state. When enriched by the bounty of the great common Father, thus do they ungratefully run from Him, 15:12. Sensual pleasures are eagerly pursued, till they have squandered away all the grace of God, 15:13. But while these pleasures continue, not a serious thought of God can find a place in their minds. And even when afflictions come upon them, 15:14, still they will endure much hardship before they will let the grace of God, concurring with His Providence, persuade them to think of a return, 15:15, 16. But when they see themselves naked, indigent, and undone, then they recover the exercise of their reason, 15:17. Then they remember the blessings they have thrown away, and pay attention to the misery they have incurred. Upon this, they resolve to return to their Father, and put the resolution immediately in practice, 15:18, 19. Behold with wonder and pleasure the gracious reception they find from Divine, injured goodness! When such a prodigal comes to his Father, He sees him afar off, 15:20. He pities, meets, embraces him, and interrupts his acknowledgments with the tokens of His returning favor, 15:21. He arrays him with the robe of a Redeemer’s righteousness, with inward and outward holiness, adorns him with all His sanctifying graces, and honors him with the tokens of adopting love, 15:22. And all this He does with unutterable delight, in that he who was lost is now found, 15:23, 24. Let no older brother murmur at this indulgence, but rather welcome the prodigal back into the family. And let those who have been thus received, wander no more, but emulate the strictest piety of those who for many years have served their heavenly Father and not transgressed His commandments.

The day is no more, the shadow is upon the earth. It is time that I go to the stream to fill my pitcher. The evening air is eager with the sad music of the water. Ah, it calls me out into the dusk. In the lonely lane there is no passer-by, the wind is up, the ripples are rampant in the river. I know not if I shall come back home. I know not whom I shall chance to meet. There at the fording in the little boat the unknown man plays upon his lute.

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

If'n I was ye,I'd do nothin' else but hunt." "I've no doubt you'd do just that, for a more lazy individual I've yet to meet-other than myself,of course." Shelton beamed. "Thank ye,me lord! 'Tis a rare day I can consider meself an equal with ye on any grounds." "You're welcome," Dougal returned gravely. "Aye,ye've made bein' lazy a form o' art that few-look!" The groom pointed eagerly at the soft shoulder of the road, where a fox print appeared. "Cooee,looks fresh, too!" Dougal eyed the thicket beyond. "Fresh or no, it would take a better man than me to get a horse over this uneven ground without breaking a leg." Shelton shot him a sharp look. "Ye're many things,me lord, but unskilled on a horse ain't one of 'em." "You unman me, Shelton. I don't know how to react to such excessive praise." The groom's expression turned to one of long suffering. "There ye go ag'in with the nonsense, me lord. Are ye sure ye ain't a bit Irish?" Dougal grinned. "Not that my mother would admit to.

depressed like you ruined everything God had planned for you? This is not the end! Just like the artists who spent consistent time with their creations in order for them to become masterpieces, we get this opportunity with God. He is eager to continue molding, shaping, and creating us to become the masterpieces he had in mind from the beginning. Even though he is eager, we must decide to meet with him to let him do his work. Spending consistent time with the Lord is the way to let him continue his work with us.

think I’m drowning. But not into her blue eyes like I happily would. No, I’m sinking into the oor, letting it swallow me whole. I can hardly breathe under the crushing weight of Kitt’s words. My ears ring. My heart pounds. The command echoes in my skull, though I have no idea why he would want this. Why he would want her. Not now. Not after everything. And yet, I still want her after everything. I’m surrounded by the entire court and the only thing I can focus on is not falling to my knees beside her. Marriage. Marriage to someone who isn’t me. Marriage to someone I will spend the rest of my life serving. I’ll lose her forever while being forced to watch. I can’t even look at her. I’m a coward, morphing back into the monster I was when she found me. My vision is blurry, eyes xed on the dais above. This is how I lose her. Not by death but by something just as binding. The command rings in my head. And to think I wasted so much time trying to hate her. To think I won’t have enough time to love her. My heart aches because every beat belongs to her. And I may never get to tell her that. Is this how she will remember me? Escorting her to this fate? Bound by duty alone? I could laugh. I could cry. I could burn this palace to the ground like I did her house, just for a chance to confess my love before the ames consumed me. Because I am bound to her very being. Hers until the day she realizes I don’t deserve to be. The king’s eyes are on me while mine are somewhere far away. Somewhere with her. A place where I am nothing and no one and happy being powerless, so long as she is beside me. My gaze falls from the fantasy, nding its way to her. This is not how I will remember us. Not as enemies or traitors or monsters, but as two people dancing in the dark, swaying beneath the stars. Her feet atop mine, her head on the heart that beats only for her. Just Pae and Kai. I step away from her kneeling form, masking every emotion with a blank stare. I’m leaving her to face him. Her future husband. I melt into the crowd, standing at a safe enough distance to prevent myself from stealing her away. This will be the rest of my life. Forced to love her from a distance. Mourn the loss of her each day. But I will. I will smother every emotion but the one that belongs to her. I will love her until I am incapable of the feeling. She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her—if she allows it. She was supposed to be my forever. Now I’ll watch her become someone else’s. Because the beast doesn’t get the beauty.

Krishna, I go to swarga with my friends and relatives. But you and your friends will live on earth to suffer,” said the stubborn Duryodhana. “I studied the Vedas. I have given gifts ordained by law and I have reigned supreme over all the sea-girt earth. While I lived, I stood upon the humbled heads of foes. All human joys, such joys as even the Gods cannot despise and kings sigh for in vain, the very pinnacle of power, were mine. Dying now, such death as warriors deem the crown of kshatriya life, I go to meet in heaven my friends and brothers gone before, eager to welcome me. Who is more blest, I, or you who, doomed to linger here, mourning for slaughtered friends in desolate homes, find the long sought triumph but ashes in your mouth?” said Duryodhana and the gods showered flowers down on the dying warrior and the gandharvas played music and the sky was illuminated. Vasudeva and the Pandavas felt small. “There is truth,” said Krishna, “in what Duryodhana said. You could not have defeated him by fair means. This wicked man was invincible in battle.

Is there another city in the world where husbands are so patient as here? Do we not meet with them in every variety, and well provided with everything? One heaps up wealth, which his wife shares with those who are eager to make him a dupe; another, slightly more fortunate, but not less infamous, sees his wife receive presents day after day, and is not troubled in mind by any jealous twinge when she tells him that they are the rewards of virtue. One makes a great noise, which does him not the slightest good; another lets matters take their course in all meekness, and, seeing the gallant arrive at his house, very politely takes up his gloves and his cloak. One married woman cunningly pretends to make a confident of her confiding husband, who slumbers securely under such a delusion, and pities the gallant for his pains, which, however, the latter does not throw away. Another married woman, to account for her extravagance, says that the money she spends has been won at play; and the silly husband, without considering at what play, thanks Heaven for her winnings.

At work, I was still attending all the meetings I always had while also grappling with most of the same responsibilities. The only real difference was that I now made half my original salary and was trying to cram everything into a twenty-hour week. If a meeting ran late, I’d end up tearing home at breakneck speed to fetch Malia so that we could arrive on time (Malia eager and happy, me sweaty and hyperventilating) to the afternoon Wiggleworms class at a music studio on the North Side. To me, it felt like a sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred. Meanwhile, it seemed that Barack had hardly missed a stride. A few months after Malia’s birth, he’d been reelected to a four-year term in the state senate, winning with 89 percent of the vote.

Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and looked in vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. The certainty of meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that might not unreasonably have alarmed her. She had dressed with more than usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than might be won in the course of the evening. But in an instant arose the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted for Mr. Darcy's pleasure in the Bingleys' invitation to the officers; and though this was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was pronounced by his friend Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and who told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business the day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant smile, "I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if he had not wanted to avoid a certain gentleman here.

And suddenly...it made a kind of emotional sense that caused me to feel, instantly, how little sense my earlier...assumptions had made...And with that thought it was as though my father stepped forward to meet me as he had been in 1940: twenty-five years old, newly married, teaching literature and history and religion as his first real job, as an assistant professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. That stage of his life – and he in it – had always been indistinct to me, as the lives of parents before their children exist always are to those children; but now, holding this letter in my hands, I remembered anew and vividly the numerous photographs in our family albums of him then – a slender young man, intense-looking and handsome, with a shock of dark hair swept back from his high forehead. A radical young man, it would seem. More radical in many ways than my own son was now. A young man, ready, perhaps even eager to embrace the fate his powerful beliefs were calling him to. Sitting there, I felt a rush of love and pity for him in his youth, in his passionate convictions...

Whenever I try to forget you, Erick, something brings you back into my memory. And whenever I want to drive emotions away from me, they quickly return as thoughts or dreams . . . or the words of an old woman. Perhaps loneliness has forced me to hang on to the faint spectrum of your memory—kept my heart longing in painstaking eagerness. But no . . . no more, and not again. How long can my heart withstand the seesaw of emotions? If I had one wish, I would want you and me to be two parallel lines, either on flat or spherical earth . . . never to meet.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, The photographing of ravens; all the fun under Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician, The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, The eager election of chairmen By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle, To-morrow for the young poets exploding like bombs, The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle. To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting, Today the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette, The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert, The masculine jokes; to-day the Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting. The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say alas but cannot help or pardon.

Carl Bridenbaugh’s study of colonial cities, Cities in the Wilderness, reveals a clear-cut class system. He finds: The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country. By means of their control of trade and commerce, by their political domination of the inhabitants through church and Town Meeting, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves, members of this little oligarchy laid the foundations for an aristocratic class in seventeenth century Boston.

It was gratitude; gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister.

The real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper's rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but it does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says "go!" allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains. Those berries are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain--and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.

This little colloquy in Adele's box was really the foundation of the secret society of the Luciaphils, and the membership of the Luciaphils began swiftly to increase. Aggie Sandeman was scarcely eligible, for complete goodwill towards Lucia was a sine qua non of membership, and there was in her mind a certain asperity when she thought that it was she who had given Lucia her gambit, and that already she was beginning to be relegated to second circles in Lucia's scale of social precedence. It was true that she had been asked to dine to meet Marcelle Periscope, but the party to meet Alf and his flute was clearly the smarter of the two. Adele, however, and Tony Limpsfield were real members, so too, when she came up a few days later, was Olga. Marcia Whitby was another who greedily followed her career, and such as these, whenever they met, gave eager news to each other about it. There was, of course, another camp, consisting of those whom Lucia bombarded with pleasant invitations, but who (at present) firmly refused them. They professed not to know her and not to take the slightest interest in her, which showed, as Adele said, a deplorable narrowness of mind. Types and striking characters like Lucia, who pursued undaunted and indefatigable their aim in life, were rare, and when they occurred should be studied with reverent affection... Sometimes one of the old and original members of the Luciaphils discovered others, and if when Lucia's name was mentioned an eager and a kindly light shone in their eyes, and they said in a hushed whisper "Did you hear who was there on Thursday?" they thus disclosed themselves as Luciaphils... All this was gradual, but the movement went steadily on, keeping pace with her astonishing career, for the days were few on which some gratifying achievement was not recorded in the veracious columns of Hermione.

I went to look for Love among the roses, the roses, The pretty winged boy with the arrow and the bow; In the fair and fragrant places, 'Mid the Muses and the Graces, At the feet of Aphrodite, with the roses all aglow. Then I sought among the shrines where the rosy flames were leaping- the rose and golden flames, never ceasing, never still- For the boy so fair and slender, The imperious, the tender, With the whole world moving slowly to make the music of his will. Sought, and found not for my seeking, till the sweet quest led me further, And before me rose the temple, marble-based and gold above, Where the long procession marches 'Neath the incense-clouded arches In the world-compelling worship of the mighty God of Love. Yea, I passed with bated breath to the holiest of holies, And I lifted the great curtain from the Inmost, - the Most Fair, - Eager for the joy of finding, For the glory, beating, blinding, Meeting but an empty darkness; darkness, silence- nothing there. Where is Love? I cried in anguish, while the temple reeled and faded; Where is Love? - for I must find him, I must know and understand! Died the music and the laughter, Flames and roses dying after, And the curtain I was holding fell to ashes in my hand.

Hearing the footsteps of his mortality made Steve all the more focused on family. We had a beautiful daughter. Now we wanted a boy. “One of each would be perfect,” Steve said. Seeing the way he played with Bindi made me eager to have another child. Bindi and Steve played together endlessly. Steve was like a big kid himself and could always be counted on for stacks of fun. I had read about how, through nutrition management, it was possible to sway the odds for having either a boy or a girl. I ducked down to Melbourne to meet with a nutritionist. She gave me all the information for “the boy-baby diet.” I had to cut out dairy, which meant no milk, cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, or cream cheese. In fact, it was best to cut out calcium altogether. Also, I couldn’t have nuts, shellfish, or, alas, chocolate. That was the tough one. Maybe having two girls wouldn’t be bad after all. For his part in our effort to skew our chances toward having a boy, Steve had to keep his nether regions as cool as possible. He was gung ho. “I’m going to wear an onion bag instead of underpants, babe,” he said. “Everything is going to stay real well ventilated.” But it was true that keeping his bits cool was an important part of the process, so he made the sacrifice and did his best.

As he stood with his fingers in the iceflower bowls, he heard his mom and Cyra talking. “My son was eager for me to meet you, I could tell,” his mom said. “You must be a good friend.” “Um…yes,” Cyra said. “I think so, yes.” You think so, Akos thought, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He’d given her clear enough labels, back in the stairwell, but she still couldn’t quite believe it. That was the problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness--you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you. “I have heard that you have a talent for death,” his mom said. At least Akos had warned Cyra about Sifa’s lack of charm.

The Bible is full of evidence that God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a Great Cosmic Cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us—loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here—and—now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew—laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” (Ps 90:5), or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:16). Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people’s domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present to us in everything we do. It is this God who speaks to us through the psalmist as he wakes from sleep, amazed, to declare, “I will bless you, Lord, you give me counsel, and even at night direct my heart” (Ps 16:7, GR). It is this God who speaks to us through the prophets, reminding us that by meeting the daily needs of the poor and vulnerable, characterized in the scriptures as the widows and orphans, we prepare the way of the Lord and make our own hearts ready for the day of salvation. When it comes to the nitty—gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that makes each day rich with the possibility of salvation, a concept that is beautifully summed up in an ancient saying from the monastic tradition: “Abba Poeman said concerning Abba Pior that every day he made a new beginning.

Here are the crossroads where old women come Under the quarter moon to cast their spells, And where young lovers meet to argue out The secret terms of their surrender. It is a place that each sees differently- The salesman scouting, soldiers tramping home, The scholar napping by the riverbank While someone else's fortune drifts downstream. But if you stand at crossroads long enough, Most of the eager world comes strutting by- Businessmen, preachers, cats-all going somewhere, Even the Devil striking up a deal. I used to wonder if they ever got there. Be careful here in choosing where to turn. You learn a lot by staying in one place But never how the story truly ends.

And I would have contented, or, at least, I would clearly have enlightened him, and taught him well never again to expect of me the part of officious soubrette in a love drama; when, following his, soft, eager, murmur, meeting almost his pleading, mellow—“Do content me, Lucy!” a sharp hiss pierced my ear on the other side. “Petite chatte, doucerette, coquette!” sibillated the sudden boa-constrictor; “vous avez l’air bien triste, soumis, rêveur, mais vous ne l’êtes pas: c’est moi qui vous le dis: Sauvage! la flamme à l’âme, l’éclair aux yeux!” “Oui; j’ai la flamme à l’âme, et je dois l’avoir!” retorted I, turning in just wrath: but Professor Emanuel had hissed his insult and was gone.

Once upon a time, a greedy prince fell in love with a wicked girl. The prince had far more than he needed, but it was never enough. When he grew ill, he visited the Kingdom of the Great Ocean, where the Underworld meets the living world, to bargain with Moritas, the goddess of Death, for more life. When she refused, he stole her immortal gold and fled to the surface. In revenge, Moritas sent her daughter Caldora, the angel of Fury, to retrieve him. Caldora materialized out of the sea foam on a warm, stormy night, clad in nothing but silver silk, an achingly beautiful phantom in the mist. The prince ran to the shore to greet her. She smiled at him and touched his cheek. “What will you give me in return for my affection?” she asked. “Are you willing to part with your kingdom, your army, and your jewels?” The prince, blinded by her beauty and eager to boast, nodded. “Anything you want,” he replied. “I am the greatest man in the world. Even the gods are no match for me.” So he gave her his kingdom, his army, and his jewels. She accepted his offerings with a smile, only to reveal her true angel form—skeletal, finned, monstrous. Then she burned his kingdom to the ground and pulled him below the sea into the Underworld, where her mother, Moritas, was patiently waiting. The prince tried once again to bargain with the goddess, but it was too late. In exchange for the gold he’d stolen, Moritas devoured his soul.

if consumer demand should increase for the goods or services of any private business, the private firm is delighted; it woos and welcomes the new business and expands its operations eagerly to fill the new orders. Government, in contrast, generally meets this situation by sourly urging or even ordering consumers to “buy” less, and allows shortages to develop, along with deterioration in the quality of its service. Thus, the increased consumer use of government streets in the cities is met by aggravated traffic congestion and by continuing denunciations and threats against people who drive their own cars. The New York City administration, for example, is continually threatening to outlaw the use of private cars in Manhattan, where congestion has been most troublesome. It is only government, of course, that would ever think of bludgeoning consumers in this way; it is only government that has the audacity to “solve” traffic congestion by forcing private cars (or trucks or taxis or whatever) off the road. According to this principle, of course, the “ideal” solution to traffic congestion is simply to outlaw all vehicles! But this sort of attitude toward the consumer is not confined to traffic on the streets. New York City, for example, has suffered periodically from a water “shortage.” Here is a situation where, for many years, the city government has had a compulsory monopoly of the supply of water to its citizens. Failing to supply enough water, and failing to price that water in such a way as to clear the market, to equate supply and demand (which private enterprise does automatically), New York’s response to water shortages has always been to blame not itself, but the consumer, whose sin has been to use “too much” water. The city administration could only react by outlawing the sprinkling of lawns, restricting use of water, and demanding that people drink less water. In this way, government transfers its own failings to the scapegoat user, who is threatened and bludgeoned instead of being served well and efficiently. There has been similar response by government to the ever-accelerating crime problem in New York City. Instead of providing efficient police protection, the city’s reaction has been to force the innocent citizen to stay out of crime-prone areas. Thus, after Central Park in Manhattan became a notorious center for muggings and other crime in the night hours, New York City’s “solution” to the problem was to impose a curfew, banning use of the park in those hours. In short, if an innocent citizen wants to stay in Central Park at night, it is he who is arrested for disobeying the curfew; it is, of course, easier to arrest him than to rid the park of crime. In short, while the long-held motto of private enterprise is that “the customer is always right,” the implicit maxim of government operation is that the customer is always to be blamed.

Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.

This is the real thing. This is bedlam in bed. As Mr. Stevenson puts it: “. . . no civilization has ever had so haunting a sense of an ultimate order of goodness and rationality which can be known and achieved.” It makes me eager to rise and meet the new day, as Fred used to rise to his, with the complete conviction that through vigilance and good works all porcupines, all cats, all skunks, all squirrels, all houseflies, all footballs, all evil birds in the sky could be successfully brought to account and the scene made safe and pleasant for the sensible individual—namely, him. However distorted was his crazy vision of the beautiful world, however perverse his scheme for establishing an order of goodness by murdering every creature that seemed to him bad, I had to hand him this: he really worked at it.

Roses, roses! An interminable chain of these royal blossoms, red and white, wreathed by the radiant fingers of small rainbow-winged creatures as airy as moonlight mist, as delicate as thistledown! They cluster round me with smiling faces and eager eyes; they place the end of their rose-garland in my hand, and whisper, "FOLLOW!" Gladly I obey, and hasten onward. Guiding myself by the fragrant chain I hold, I pass through a labyrinth of trees, whose luxuriant branches quiver with the flight and song of birds. Then comes a sound of waters; the riotous rushing of a torrent unchecked, that leaps sheer down from rocks a thousand feet high, thundering forth the praise of its own beauty as it tosses in the air triumphant crowns of silver spray. How the living diamonds within it shift, and change, and sparkle! Fain would I linger to watch this magnificence; but the coil of roses still unwinds before me, and the fairy voices still cry, "FOLLOW!" I press on. The trees grow thicker; the songs of the birds cease; the light around me grows pale and subdued. In the far distance I see a golden crescent that seems suspended by some invisible thread in the air. Is it the young moon? No; for as I gaze it breaks apart into a thousand points of vivid light like wandering stars. These meet; they blaze into letters of fire. I strain my dazzled eyes to spell out their meaning. They form one word—HELIOBAS. I read it. I utter it aloud. The rose-chain breaks at my feet, and disappears. The fairy voices die away on my ear. There is utter silence, utter darkness,—save where that one NAME writes itself in burning gold on the blackness of the heavens.

all this modified the nature of my retrospective sadness just as much as the impressions of light and scent which were associated with it, and complemented each of the solar years that I had lived through and which even with just their springs, autumns and winters were already so sad because of their memory being inseparable from her, augmenting it with a sort of sentimental year where the hours were not defined by the position of the sun but by time spent waiting for a rendezvous; where the length of the days or the changes in temperature were measured by the rise in my hopes, the progress of our intimacy, the gradual transformation of her face, the places she had visited, the frequency and style of the letters that she had sent me during her absence, her greater or lesser eagerness to meet me when she had returned.

Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. Our impulse is to dismiss this lifestyle, create reasons why it can’t work, why it doesn’t even warrant consideration. Why not? Living outdoors is cheap and can be afforded by a half year of marginal employment. They can’t buy things that most of us have, but what they lose in possessions, they gain in freedom. In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, lead character Larry returns from the First World War and declares that he would like to “loaf.”23 The term “loafing” inadequately describes the life he would spend traveling, studying, searching for meaning, and even laboring. Larry meets with the disapproval of peers and would-be mentors: “Common sense assured…that if you wanted to get on in this world, you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.” Larry had an inheritance that enabled him to live modestly and pursue his dreams. Larry’s acquaintances didn’t fear the consequences of his failure; they feared his failure to conform. I’m no maverick. Upon leaving college I dove into the workforce, eager to have my own stuff and a job to pay for it. Parents approved, bosses gave raises, and my friends could relate. The approval, the comforts, the commitments wound themselves around me like invisible threads. When my life stayed the course, I wouldn’t even feel them binding. Then I would waiver enough to sense the growing entrapment, the taming of my life in which I had been complicit. Working a nine-to-five job took more energy than I had expected, leaving less time to pursue diverse interests. I grew to detest the statement “I am a…” with the sentence completed by an occupational title. Self-help books emphasize “defining priorities” and “staying focused,” euphemisms for specialization and stifling spontaneity. Our vision becomes so narrow that risk is trying a new brand of cereal, and adventure is watching a new sitcom. Over time I have elevated my opinion of nonconformity nearly to the level of an obligation. We should have a bias toward doing activities that we don’t normally do to keep loose the moorings of society. Hiking the AT is “pointless.” What life is not “pointless”? Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform? Hiking the AT before joining the workforce was an opportunity not taken. Doing it in retirement would be sensible; doing it at this time in my life is abnormal, and therein lay the appeal. I want to make my life less ordinary.

island—the pirates he’d defeated, before he in turn was defeated by the boy, and those hideous demon she-fish. But it didn’t matter whose camp it was. Anybody—or any thing—who got in their way would be no match for Nerezza’s raiders and their…guest. If the starstuff was on the island, they would have it. Slank tried not to think about what could happen to him if the starstuff wasn’t on the island. It has to be here, he told himself. It has to be. The men were lowering the boats now. Slank eyed the dark water; his face betrayed the apprehension he felt. “What is it?” sneered Nerezza. “Afraid of the fishes, are you?” “I ain’t afraid,” snapped Slank. “But I ain’t eager to meet up with them she-fish again.” He shuddered, remembering when he had last been there, remembering the feel of the mermaids’ teeth sinking into him, recalling his blood clouding the water. Nerezza, who wasn’t sure he believed in these she-fish, coughed out a laugh. It wasn’t natural, coming from him; it sounded a bit painful. He pointed to the darkened companionway. “There’s no fish—no creature alive—can possibly match our dark friend down there,” he said. “Nothing on that island, neither.” Slank looked back to the island. He figured it to be about two miles to the smoke if they went along the shore; far shorter if they cut directly across the island. Slank wanted to take the coast—he didn’t care to be in the jungle at night, not on this island—but Nerezza overruled him. “We’ll set off through the jungle,” Nerezza said. “Not only for the sake of speed, but for the sake of darkness. Our guest don’t want no light whatsoever. We go the darkest way.” “No light? How do we find the way?” “That ain’t up to us,” said Nerezza. “Our guest leads, and we follow. Mark my words, Mister Slank, there’s only one man in

The situation appeared to be convenient, and the Acharnians, being a considerable section of the city and furnishing three thousand hoplites, were likely to be impatient at the destruction of their property, and would communicate to the whole people a desire to fight. Or if the Athenians did not come out to meet him during this invasion, he could henceforward ravage the plain with more confidence, and march right up to the walls of the city. The Acharnians, having lost their own possessions, would be less willing to hazard their lives on behalf of their neighours, and so there would be a division in the Athenian counsels. Such was the motive of Archidamus in remaining at Acharnae. (Book 2 Chapter 20.4-5) But when they (Athenians) saw the army in the neighbourhood of Acharnae, and barely seven miles from the city, they felt the presence of the invader to be intolerable. The devastation of their country before their eyes, which the younger men had never seen at all, nor the elder except in the Persian invasion, naturally appeared to them a horrible thing, and the whole people, the young men especially, were anxious to go forth and put a stop to it. Knots were formed in the streets, and there were loud disputes, some eager to go out, a minority resisting. Soothsayers were repeating oracles of the most different kinds, which all found in some one or other enthusiastic listeners. The Acharnians, who in their own estimation were no small part of the Athenian state, seeing their land ravaged, strongly insisted that they should go out and fight.The excitement in the city was universal; the people were furious with Pericles, and, forgetting all his previous warnings, they abused him for not leading them to battle, as their general should, and laid all their miseries to his charge. (Ibid Chapter 21.2-3)

I'm sure we'll need some- oof!" She was never to finish the thoughts she was startled by a creature that came bounding swiftly around the side of the carriage. A glimpse of floppy ears and jolly brown eyes filled her vision before the enthusiastic canine pounced so eagerly that she toppled backward from her squatting position. She landed on her rump, the impact knocking her hat to the ground. A swath of hair came loose and slid over her face, while a young tan-and black retriever leapt around her as if he were on springs. She felt a huff of dog breath on at her ear and the swipe of a tongue on her cheek. "Ajax, no," she heard Ivo exclaim. Realizing what a mess she'd become, all in a matter of seconds, Pandora experienced a moment of despair, followed by resignation. Of course this would happen. Of course she would have to meet the duke and duchess after tumbling on the drive like a half-witted carnival performer. It was so dreadful that she began to giggle, while the dog nudged his head against hers. In the next moment, Pandora was lifted to her feet and caught firmly against a hard surface. The momentum threw her off balance, and she clung to St. Vincent dizzily. He kept her anchored securely against him with an arm around her back. "Down, idiot," St. Vincent commanded. The dog subsided, panting happily. "He must have slipped past the front door," Ivo said. St. Vincent smoothed Pandora's hair back from her face. "Are you hurt?" His gaze ran over her swiftly. "No... no." Helpless giggles kept bubbling up as her nervous tension released. She tried to smother the giddy sounds against his shoulder. "I was... trying so hard to be ladylike..." A brief chuckle escaped him, and his hand moved over her upper back in a calming circle. "I would imagine it's not easy to be ladylike in the midst of a dog mauling.

As he stood with his fingers in the iceflower bowls, he heard his mom and Cyra talking. “My son was eager for me to meet you, I could tell,” his mom said. “You must be a good friend.” “Um…yes,” Cyra said. “I think so, yes.” You think so, Akos thought, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He’d given her clear enough labels, back in the stairwell, but she still couldn’t quite believe it. That was the problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness--you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you. “I have heard that you have a talent for death,” his mom said. At least Akos had warned Cyra about Sifa’s lack of charm. He glanced at Cyra. She held her armored wrist against her gut. “I suppose I do,” she said. “But I don’t have a passion for it.” Vapor slipped from the nose of the water kettle, not yet thick enough for Akos to pour. Water had never boiled so slowly. “You two have spent a lot of time together,” his mom said. “Yes.” “Are you to blame for his survival these past few seasons?” “No,” Cyra said. “Your son survives because of his own will.” His mom smiled. “You should defensive.” “I don’t take credit for other people’s strength,” Cyra said. “Only my own.” His mom’s smile got even bigger. “And a little cocky.” “I’ve been called worse.” The vapor was thick enough. Akos grabbed the hook with the wooden handle that hung next to the stove, and attached it to the kettle. It caught, and locked in place as he poured water in each of the mugs. Isae came forward for one, standing on tiptoe so she could whisper in his ear. “If it hasn’t already, it should be dawning on you right about now that your girl and your mother are very similar people,” she said. “I will pause as that irrefutable fact chills you to the core.” Akos eyed her. “Was that humor, Chancellor?” “On occasion, I have been known to make a humorous remark.

in Dumfries his moral career was downwards. Heron, who had some acquaintance with the matter, says, “His dissipation became still more deeply habitual; he was here more exposed than in the country to be solicited to share the revels of the dissolute and the idle; foolish young men flocked eagerly about him, and from time to time pressed him to drink with them, that they might enjoy his wit. The Caledonia Club, too, and the Dumfries-shire and Galloway Hunt, had occasional meetings in Dumfries after Burns went to reside there: and the poet was of course invited to share their conviviality, and hesitated not to accept the invitation. In the intervals between his different fits of intemperance, he suffered the keenest anguish of remorse, and horribly afflictive foresight. His Jane behaved with a degree of conjugal and maternal tenderness and prudence, which made him feel more bitterly the evil of his misconduct, although they could not reclaim him.” This is a dark picture—perhaps too dark.

That they were false, the general had learnt from the very person who had suggested them, from Thorpe himself, whom he had chanced to meet again in town, and who, under the influence of exactly opposite feelings, irritated by Catherine’s refusal, and yet more by the failure of a very recent endeavour to accomplish a reconciliation between Morland and Isabella, convinced that they were separated forever, and spurning a friendship which could be no longer serviceable, hastened to contradict all that he had said before to the advantage of the Morlands—confessed himself to have been totally mistaken in his opinion of their circumstances and character, misled by the rhodomontade of his friend to believe his father a man of substance and credit, whereas the transactions of the two or three last weeks proved him to be neither; for after coming eagerly forward on the first overture of a marriage between the families, with the most liberal proposals, he had, on being brought to the point by the shrewdness of the relator, been constrained to acknowledge himself incapable of giving the young people even a decent support. They

You will leave as soon as our meeting concludes. Right under his nose. And when you return, you will praise him.” Gauri balked. “Praise him? He did nothing!” “You would do well to learn how to play the games of court,” I said. “Sometimes an illusion is just as good as the actual thing. The difference lies in the telling. Make this one concession. Find out what happens next. If you bring back these soldiers and word gets out that it was your idea and your escape, he may punish them on your behalf.” Gauri considered me. “What are you?” “A maybe-false queen!” butted in Kamala. It must have come out as another deranged horse whinny because Gauri nearly jumped. “I told you,” I said, not meeting her gaze. “I’m a person who lived here once upon a time.” “You know far too much about the political schemes of Bharata.” “My father was a diplomat.” “No, he wasn’t! No, he wasn’t!” sang Kamala. “Lies are fun. Lies are nice. They taste like rice soaked in milk and sliced and diced with cardamom and--” “Is your horse ill?” asked Gauri. “No, not at all,” I said and smacked Kamala on her flank. “She’s eager.” “For blood,” said Kamala.

My husband and I have been a part of the same small group for the past five years.... Like many small groups, we regularly share a meal together, love one another practically, and serve together to meet needs outside our small group. We worship, study God’s Word, and pray. It has been a rich time to grow in our understanding of God, what Jesus has accomplished for us, God’s purposes for us as a part of his kingdom, his power and desire to change us, and many other precious truths. We have grown in our love for God and others, and have been challenged to repent of our sin and trust God in every area of our lives. It was a new and refreshing experience for us to be in a group where people were willing to share their struggles with temptation and sin and ask for prayer....We have been welcomed by others, challenged to become more vulnerable, held up in prayer, encouraged in specific ongoing struggles, and have developed sweet friendships. I have seen one woman who had one foot in the world and one foot in the church openly share her struggles with us. We prayed that God would show her the way of escape from temptation many times and have seen God’s work in delivering her. Her openness has given us a front row seat to see the power of God intersect with her weakness. Her continued vulnerability and growth in godliness encourage us to be humble with one another, and to believe that God is able to change us too. Because years have now passed in close community, God’s work can be seen more clearly than on a week-by-week basis. One man who had some deep struggles and a lot of anger has grown through repenting of sin and being vulnerable one on one and in the group. He has been willing to hear the encouragement and challenges of others, and to stay in community throughout his struggle.... He has become an example in serving others, a better listener, and more gentle with his wife. As a group, we have confronted anxiety, interpersonal strife, the need to forgive, lust, family troubles, unbelief, the fear of man, hypocrisy, unemployment, sickness, lack of love, idolatry, and marital strife. We have been helped, held accountable, and lifted up by one another. We have also grieved together, celebrated together, laughed together, offended one another, reconciled with one another, put up with one another,...and sought to love God and one another. As a group we were saddened in the spring when a man who had recently joined us felt that we let him down by not being sensitive to his loneliness. He chose to leave. I say this because, with all the benefits of being in a small group, it is still just a group of sinners. It is Jesus who makes it worth getting together. Apart from our relationship with him...,we have nothing to offer. But because our focus is on Jesus, the group has the potential to make a significant and life-changing difference in all our lives. ...When 7 o’clock on Monday night comes around, I eagerly look forward to the sound of my brothers and sisters coming in our front door. I never know how the evening will go, what burdens people will be carrying, how I will be challenged, or what laughter or tears we will share. But I always know that the great Shepherd will meet us and that our lives will be richer and fuller because we have been together. ...I hope that by hearing my story you will be encouraged to make a commitment to become a part of a small group and experience the blessing of Christian community within the smaller, more intimate setting that it makes possible. 6

As he stood with his fingers in the iceflower bowls, he heard his mom and Cyra talking. “My son was eager for me to meet you, I could tell,” his mom said. “You must be a good friend.” “Um…yes,” Cyra said. “I think so, yes.” You think so, Akos thought, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He’d given her clear enough labels, back in the stairwell, but she still couldn’t quite believe it. That was the problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness--you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you. “I have heard that you have a talent for death,” his mom said. At least Akos had warned Cyra about Sifa’s lack of charm. He glanced at Cyra. She held her armored wrist against her gut. “I suppose I do,” she said. “But I don’t have a passion for it.” Vapor slipped from the nose of the water kettle, not yet thick enough for Akos to pour. Water had never boiled so slowly. “You two have spent a lot of time together,” his mom said. “Yes.” “Are you to blame for his survival these past few seasons?” “No,” Cyra said. “Your son survives because of his own will.” His mom smiled. “You should defensive.” “I don’t take credit for other people’s strength,” Cyra said. “Only my own.” His mom’s smile got even bigger. “And a little cocky.” “I’ve been called worse.

My dear, dear ladies,” Sir Francis effused as he hastened forward, “what a long-awaited delight this is!” Courtesy demanded that he acknowledge the older lady first, and so he turned to her. Picking up Berta’s limp hand from her side, he presed his lips to it and said, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Sir Francis Belhaven.” Lady Berta curtsied, her fear-widened eyes fastened on his face, and continued to press her handkerchief to her lips. To his astonishment, she did not acknowledge him at all; she did not say she was charmed to meet him or inquire after his health. Instead, the woman curtsied again. And once again. “There’s hardly a need for all that,” he said, covering his puzzlement with forced jovially. “I’m only a knight, you know. Not a duke or even an earl.” Lady Berta curtsied again, and Elizabeth nudged her sharply with her elbow. “How do!” burst out the plump lady. “My aunt is a trifle-er-shy with strangers,” Elizabeth managed weakly. The sound of Elizabeth Cameron’s soft, musical voice made Sir Francis’s blood sing. He turned with unhidden eagerness to his future bride and realized that it was a bust of himself that Elizabeth was clutching so protectively, so very affectionately to her bosom. He could scarcely contain his delight. “I knew it would be this way between us-no pretense, no maidenly shyness,” he burst out, beaming at her blank, wary expression as he gently took the bust of himself from Elizabeth’s arms. “But, my lovely, there’s no need for you to caress a hunk of clay when I am here in the flesh.” Momentarily struck dumb, Elizabeth gaped at the bust she’d been holding as he first set it gently upon its stand, then turned expectantly to her, leaving her with the horrifying-and accurate-thought that he now expected her to reach out and draw his balding head to her bosom. She stared at him, her mind in paralyzed chaos. “I-I would ask a favor of you, Sir Francis,” she burst out finally. “Anything, my dear,” he said huskily. “I would like to-to rest before supper.” He stepped back, looking disappointed, but then he recalled his manners and reluctantly nodded. “We don’t keep country hours. Supper is at eight-thirty.” For the first time he took a moment to really look at her. His memories of her exquisite face and delicious body had been so strong, so clear, that until then he’d been seeing the Lady Elizabeth Cameron he’d met long ago. Now he belatedly registered the stark, unattractive gown she wore and the severe way her hair was dressed. His gaze dropped to the ugly iron cross that hung about her neck, and he recoiled in shock. “Oh, and my dear, I’ve invited a few guests,” he added pointedly, his eyes on her unattractive gown. “I thought you would want to know, in order to attire yourself more appropriately.” Elizabeth suffered that insult with the same numb paralysis she’d felt since she set eyes on him. Not until the door closed behind him did she feel able to move. “Berta,” she burst out, flopping disconsolately onto the chair beside her, “how could you curtsy like that-he’ll know you for a lady’s maid before the night is out! We’ll never pull this off.” “Well!” Berta exclaimed, hurt and indignant. “Twasn’t I who was clutching his head to my bosom when he came in.” “We’ll do better after this,” Elizabeth vowed with an apologetic glance over her shoulder, and the trepidation was gone from her voice, replaced by steely determination and urgency. “We have to do better. I want us both out of here tomorrow. The day after at the very latest.” “The butler stared at my bosom,” Berta complained. “I saw him!” Elizabeth sent her a wry, mirthless smile. “The footman stared at mine. No woman is safe in this place. We only had a bit of-of stage fright just now. We’re new to playacting, but tonight I’ll carry it off. You’ll see. No matter what if takes, I’ll do it.

He got in beside her and impatiently reached for her seat belt, snapping it in place. “You always forget,” he murmured, meeting her eyes. Her breath came uneasily through her lips as she met that level stare and responded helplessly to it. He was handsome and sexy and she loved him more than her own life. She had for years. But it was a hopeless, unreturned adoration that left her unfulfilled. He’d never touched her, not even in the most innocent way. He only looked. “I should close my door to you,” she said huskily. “Refuse to speak to you, refuse to see you, and get on with my life. You’re a constant torment.” Unexpectedly he reached out and touched her soft cheek with just his fingertips. They smoothed down to her full, soft mouth and teased the lower lip away from the upper one. “I’m Lakota,” he said quietly. “You’re white.” “There is,” she said unsteadily, “such a thing as birth control.” His face was very solemn and his eyes were narrow and intent on hers. “And sex is all you want from me, Cecily?” he asked mockingly. “No kids, ever?” It was the most serious conversation they’d ever had. She couldn’t look away from his dark eyes. She wanted him. But she wanted children, too, eventually. Her expression told him so. “No, Cecily,” he continued gently. “Sex isn’t what you want at all. And what you really want, I can’t give you. We have no future together. If I marry one day, it’s important to me that I marry a woman with the same background as my own. And I don’t want to live with a young, and all too innocent, white woman.” “I wouldn’t be innocent if you’d cooperate for an hour,” she muttered outrageously. His dark eyes twinkled. “Under different circumstances, I would,” he said, and there was suddenly something hot and dangerous in the way he looked at her as the smile faded from his chiseled lips, something that made her heart race even faster. “I’d love to strip you and throw you onto a bed and bend you like a willow twig under y body.” “Stop!” she whispered theatrically. “I’ll swoon!” And it wasn’t all acting. His hand slid behind her nape and contracted, dragging her rapt face just under his, so close that she could smell the coffee that clung to his clean breath, so close that her breasts almost touched his jacket. “You’ll tempt me once too often,” he bit off. “This teasing is more dangerous than you realize.” She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was throbbing, aroused, sick with desire. In all her life, there had been only this man who made her feel alive, who made her feel passion. Despite the traumatic experience of her teens, she had a fierce physical attraction to Tate that she was incapable of feeling with any other man. She touched his lean cheek with cold fingertips, slid them back, around his neck into the thick mane of long hair that he kept tightly bound-like his own passions. “You could kiss me,” she whispered unsteadily, “just to see how it feels.” He tensed. His mouth poised just above her parted lips. The silence in the car was pregnant, tense, alive with possibilities and anticipation. He looked into her wide, pale, eager green eyes and saw the heat she couldn’t disguise. His own body felt the pressure and warmth of hers and began to swell, against his will. “Tate,” she breathed, pushing upward, toward his mouth, his chiseled, beautiful mouth that promised heaven, promised satisfaction, promised paradise. His dark fingers corded in her hair. They hurt, and she didn’t care. Her whole body ached. “Cecily, you little fool,” he ground out. Her lips parted even more. He was weak. This once, he was weak. She could tempt him. It could happen. She could feel his mouth, taste it, breathe it. She felt him waver. She felt the sharp explosion of his breath against her lips as he let his control slip. His mouth parted and his head bent. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it, wanted it, wanted it…

He ran his hand up her calf, over her knee, and up the sensitive slope of her thigh, until he cupped her mound in his palm. She gasped at the shock of pleasure. His fingers caressed her gently, stroking up and down the seam of her sex, teasing her with light passes until she was breathless. She reached between their bodies, feeling for his trouser buttons and tugging at them with eager, inexpert fingers. At last, his placket fell open, and his erection sprang into her hand. Hot, hard, and heavy. She explored him the same way he touched her- skating her fingertips up and down his length, marveling at the silky softness of his skin and tracing the intriguing, yet entirely unfamiliar contours. "Let me see you," she whispered. He rose up on his knees, and his male organ jutted toward her. The dark hair on his chest arrowed straight toward it, like a signpost indicating a point of natural interest:THIS WAY TO THE MANHOOD. As if it could be missed. Rude, large, framed by dark hair, and impressively male. No surprises, really. It simply looked like a part of him. An intimidatingly large part of him, considering what was about to occur and where she hoped he could put it. But it wasn't foreign or frightening. As was the case with all the other parts of his body, she found it bold, strong, unabashed in its nature, and arousing in the extreme.

in the men's room. I couldn't control the want or the need." He moves his hands up my sides, pulling the dress with them. "That tight little body teasing me from across the room." I lift my hands above my head and he pulls the dress over. "I wanted you too," I whisper. "You came to the club to get fucked." He pulls the front clasp of my bra open. "You were made to be fucked by me." He takes one of my nipples into his mouth, twirling his tongue around it. I throw my head back at the sensation and I feel his hand push down my belly. "You're so wet and ready." He moves his finger quickly across my clit. The pressure is so light I can barely feel it. "Sometimes, at night, I close my eyes and think about how you taste and I jerk myself off." I moan at the thought of him coming to any thoughts of me. I push his hand back down, towards my center. He pulls it back up as I moan in protest. "I'm going to make you scream, Jessica." He holds my hips as he shifts his hips to the side, pulling himself down on his back. "You're going to ride my face until you can't take it anymore." I feel him pull my thighs towards him and I eagerly acquiesce. I move my body so my core is right above his mouth. I feel so close already and he hasn't even touched me with his tongue yet. He jerks my legs and I fall forward, my cleft meeting his mouth. He sucks the folds between his lips and

At that time Eugene had quite reached the conclusion that there was no hereafter—there was nothing save blind, dark force moving aimlessly—where formerly he had believed vaguely in a heaven and had speculated as to a possible hell. His reading had led him through some main roads and some odd by-paths of logic and philosophy. He was an omnivorous reader now and a fairly logical thinker. He had already tackler Spencer's 'First Principles,' which had literally torn him up by the roots and set him adrift and from that had gone back to Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Spinoza and Schopenhauer—men who ripped out all his private theories and wonder what life really was. He had walked the streets for a long time after reading some of these things, speculating on the play of forces, the decay of matter, the fact that thought-forms had no more stability than cloud-forms. Philosophies came and went, governments came and went, races arose and disappeared. He walked into the great natural history museum of New York once to discover enormous skeletons of prehistoric animals—things said to have lived two, three, five millions of years before his day and he marvelled at the forces which produced them, the indifference, apparently, with which they had been allowed to die. Nature seemed lavish of its types and utterly indifferent to the persistence of anything. He came to the conclusion that he was nothing, a mere shell, a sound, a leaf which had no great significance, and for the time being it almost broke his heart. It tended to smash his egotism, to tear away his intellectual pride. He wandered about dazed, hurt, moody, like a lost child. But he was thinking persistently. ¶ Then came Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lubbock—a whole string of British thinkers who fortified the original conclusions of the others, but showed him a beauty, a formality, a lavishness of form and idea in nature's methods which fairly transfixed him. He was still reading—poets, naturalists, essayists, but he was still gloomy. Life was nothing save dark forces moving aimlessly. ¶ The manner in which he applied this thinking to his life was characteristic and individual. To think that beauty should blossom for a little while and disappear for ever seemed sad. To think that his life should endure but for seventy years and then be no more was terrible. He and Angela were chance acquaintances—chemical affinities—never to meet again in all time. He and Christina, he and Ruby—he and anyone—a few bright hours were all they could have together, and then would come the great silence, dissolution, and he would never be anymore. It hurt him to think of this, but it made him all the more eager to live, to be loved while he was here. If he could only have a lovely girl's arms to shut him in safely always!

For example, let us say that a woman has recently come from a bad relationship where her partner has verbally and physically abused her. She did not want that or like that. In fact she hated the life that she lived with that person. So, from her place of really knowing what she does not want, she makes a clear statement of what she does want. She wants a partner who loves her and treats her with kindness and respect. But she feels very insecure without a partner, and she wants a new partner immediately. And so, she goes someplace where she is accustomed to going and meets a new person who seems nice enough. But what she may not realize is that the Law of Attraction is still matching her up with whatever is dominant within her. And right now, what is still dominant within her is the vibration of what she does not want because the unwanted parts of her last relationship are much more active within her thoughts than the new intentions that have been established. In her eagerness to soothe her feelings of insecurity, she takes action and jumps into this new relationship—and gets more of what is dominant within her vibration. It would be our encouragement that she take things more slowly and spend more time thinking about what she wants until those thoughts are the basis for the dominant vibration within her. And then, let the Law of Attraction bring her wonderful new partner to her.

A second point that caught my attention was that the very persons who insist upon keeping religion and science separate are eager to use their science as a basis for pronouncements about religion. The literature of Darwinism is full of anti-theistic conclusions, such as that the universe was not designed and has no purpose, and that we humans are the product of blind natural processes that care nothing about us. What is more, these statements are not presented as personal opinions but as the logical implications of evolutionary science. Another factor that makes evolutionary science seem a lot like religion is the evident zeal of Darwinists to evangelize the world, by insisting that even non-scientists accept the truth of their theory as a matter of moral obligation. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford Zoologist who is one of the most influential figures in evolutionary science, is unabashedly explicit about the religious side of Darwinism. his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker is at one level about biology, but at a more fundamental level it is a sustained argument for atheism. According to Dawkins, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." When he contemplates the perfidy of those who refuse to believe, Dawkins can scarcely restrain his fury. "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." Dawkins went to explain, by the way, that what he dislikes particularly about creationists is that they are intolerant.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

Come in, sweetheart," Emma purrs, her voice dripping with seduction as she extends a welcoming hand. Viggi, drawn by the magnetic pull of Emma's presence, follows her every step through the doorway, eager to explore the depths of desire that await within. Each footfall echoes with the promise of passion, igniting a flame of longing that burns hotter with every passing moment. As they cross the threshold together, the world outside fades into obscurity, leaving only the intoxicating allure of Emma's embrace. Emma closes the door behind them, sealing them in a world of their own. Before she can fully register the click of the lock, Emma's arms envelop her, pulling her irresistibly close. A shiver of anticipation courses through Viggi's body as she surrenders to Emma's embrace, her lips parting in eager anticipation. In a tantalizing dance of desire, Emma's soft, inviting lips meet Viggi's own, setting her ablaze with a fiery passion that threatens to consume them both. Lost in the intoxicating whirlwind of their kiss, time seems to stand still, leaving only the exquisite feeling of Emma's touch lingering on Viggi's trembling lips. “Lets go up to my room, I don´t think my father comes any time soon, but there we are more save” Emma smiles all over her face, graps Viggi and pulls her up the stairs to the first floor. Viggi follows her without saying a word, too much she is taken by this captivating situation, however, she feels the excitement all over her body. In the sanctuary of Emma's room, the air hums with anticipation as they stand face to face, their eyes locked in a silent exchange of longing.

The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which shall give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternative if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and of despair, all these make our observation, in the beloved object’s presence, too tremulous to be able to carry away a clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which endeavours to learn from the visible aspect alone what lies behind it is over-indulgent to the thousand forms, to the changing fragrance, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent position. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her are always blurred. I did not rightly know how Gilberte’s features were composed, save in the heavenly moments when she disclosed them to me; I could remember nothing but her smile. And not being able to see again that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture it, I would be disgusted to find, outlined in my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the man with the wooden horses and of the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost a dear friend whom they never see even while they are asleep, are exasperated at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable creatures whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their inability to form any image of the object of their grief they are almost led to assert that they feel no grief.

it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

Do you remember…(doesn’t that appear in each of my letters?), do you remember that you spoke of how eagerly you experienced that period when for the first time autumn and winter were to meet you not in the city, but among the trees whose happiness you knew, whose spring and summer rang in your earliest memories and were mingled with everything warm and dear and tender and with the infinitely blissful melancholies of summer evenings and of long, yearning nights of spring. You knew just as much of them as of the dear people in your surroundings, among whom also summer and spring, kindness and happiness were dedicated to you and whose influence held sway above your growing up and maturing, and whose other experiences would touch you only by report and rarely like a shot in the wood of which superstitious folk tell for a long time. But now you were to remain out in the country house that was growing lonely and were to see the beloved trees suffer in the rising wind, and were to see how the dense park is torn apart before the windows and becomes spacious and everywhere, even in very deep places, discloses the sky which, with infinite weariness, lets itself rain and strikes with heavy drops on the aging leaves that are dying in touching humility. And you were to see suffering where until now was only rapture and anticipation, and were to learn to endure dying in the very place where the heart of life had beaten most loudly upon yours. And you were to behave like the grownups who all at once may know everything, yes, who become grown up just because of the fact that even the darkest and saddest things do not have to be hidden from them, that one does not cover up the dead when they enter, nor hide those whose faces are sawed and torn by a sharp pain.” ―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900)

Coming as a kind of pleasure-package with her parents and sisters, as a girl Theodora performed acrobatic tricks and erotic dances in and around the hippodrome – part of the fringe of shows, spectacles and penny theatricals that accompanied the games. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that one of Theodora’s most popular turns was a re-enactment of the story of Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the Swan (Zeus in disguise). The Greek myth went that Zeus was so enraptured with Queen Leda when he espied her bathing by the banks of the River Eurotas that he turned himself into a swan so that he could ravish the Spartan Queen. Theodora, as Leda, would leave a trail of grain up on to (some said into) her body, which the ‘swan’ (in Constantinople in fact a goose) then eagerly consumed. The Empress’s detractors delighted in memorialising the fact that Theodora’s services were eagerly sought out for anal intercourse, as both an active and a passive partner. As a child and as an adolescent woman Theodora would have been considered dirt, but she was, physically, right at the heart of human affairs in a burgeoning city in interesting times. Theodora was also, obviously, wildly attractive. Born in either Cyprus or Syria, as a teenager – already the mother of a young girl and with a history of abortions – she left Constantinople as the companion of a Syrian official, the governor of Libya Pentapolis. The two travelled to North Africa, where, after four years of maltreatment, she found herself abandoned by the Byzantine official, her meal-ticket revoked. A discarded mistress, on the road, was as wretched as things could get in the sixth century. (...) Theodora tried to find her way back to the mother city, making ends meet as a prostitute, and the only people to give the twenty-year-old reject shelter were a group of Christians in the city of Alexandria. That random act of kindness was epoch-forming.

Do you remember that time we played spin the bottle in my basement?” I nod. “I was nervous to kiss you, because I’d never kissed a girl before,” he says, and picks up the glass of sweet tea again. He takes a swig, but there’s no tea left, just ice. His eyes meet mine, and he grins. “All the guys gave me such a hard time afterward for whiffing it.” “You didn’t whiff it,” I say. “I think that was around when Trevor’s old brother told us he made a girl…” John hesitates, and I nod eagerly so he’ll go on. “He claimed he gave a girl an orgasm just by kissing her.” I let out a shrieky laugh and clap my hands to my mouth. “That’s the biggest lie I ever heard! I never saw him talk to even one girl. Besides, I don’t think that’s even possible. And if it was possible, I highly doubt Sean Pike was capable of it.” John laughs too. “Well, I know it’s a lie now, but at the time we all believed him.” “I mean, was it a great kiss? No, it wasn’t.” John winces and I quickly continue. “But it wasn’t an altogether terrible one. I swear. And listen, it’s not like I’m an expert on kissing anyway. Who am I to say?” “Okay okay, you can stop trying to make me feel better.” He sets down his glass. “I’ve gotten much better at it. That’s what the girls tell me.” This conversation has taken a strange and confessional turn, and I’m nervous but not in a bad way. I like sharing secrets, being coconspirators. “Oh, so you’ve kissed that many, huh?” He laughs again. “A respectable number.” He pauses. “I’m surprised you even remember that day. You were so into Kavinsky, I don’t think you even noticed who else was there.” I push him in the shoulder. “I was not ‘so into Kavinsky’!” “Yes you were. You kept your eyes on that bottle the whole game, like this.” John picks up the bottle and lasers his eyes at it. “Waiting for your moment.” I’m bright red, I know I am. “Oh, be quiet.” Laughing, he says, “Like a hawk on its prey.” “Shut up!” Now I’m laughing too. “How do you even remember that?” “Because I was doing the same thing,” he says. “You were staring at Peter too?” I say it like a joke, to tease, because this is fun. For the first time in days I’m having fun. He looks right at me, navy-blue eyes sure and steady, and my breath catches in my chest. “No. I was looking at you.

While limerence has been called love, it is not love. Although the limerent feels a kind of love for LO at the time, from LO’s point of view limerence and love are quite different from each other. It is limerence, not love, that increases when lovers are able to meet only infrequently or when there is anger between them. No wonder those who view limerence from an external vantage are baffled by what seems more a form of insanity than a form of love. Jean-Paul Sartre calls it a project with a “contradictory ideal.” He notes that each of the lovers seek the love of the other without realizing that what they want is to be loved. His conclusion is that the amorous relation is “a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror game which carries within itself its own frustration,” a kind of “dupery.” It should also be clear now that limerent uncertainly as well as projection can be viewed as the consequence of your limerent inclination to hide your own feelings: If you hide your true reactions, then LO, if indeed limerent, can be expected to do the same. When LO appears not to be eager, or even interested, it is not unreasonable to interpret that behavior as evidence itself of limerence; and a kind of “paranoia” becomes an entirely logical consequence of a situation that may indeed be what Simone de Beauvoir has called it: “impossible.” Because one of the invariant characteristics of limerence is extreme emotional dependency on LO’s behavior, the actual course of the limerence must depend on the actions and reactions of both lovers. Uncertainty increases limerence; increased limerence dictates altered action which serves to increase or decrease limerence in the other according to the interpretation given. The interplay is delicate if the relationship hovers near mutuality; a subtle imbalance, constantly shifting, appears to maintain it. Each knows who “loves more.” If limerence were measurable by an instrument that enabled its intensity to be read by the points on a dial, one could imagine that, if lovers sat together reading each other’s degree of reciprocation, the dials would rarely if ever set themselves at the same point on the scales. For instance, if you found yourself more limerent than your partner, then your limerence might decline through reduced hope, or if your partner’s were higher, it might decline through reduced uncertainty. Perhaps such true awareness would provide a means of controlling the reaction.

#1 of 2 Leah munched another chip as she watched a couple on-screen race madly away from men with guns who were intent on killing them. She and Seth sat shoulder to shoulder on the sofa, both slumped down until they were practically lying on their backs. Seth had pulled the matching ottoman up against the sofa, so it really did feel as if they were lying in bed together, watching a movie. She slid him a covert glance. He had donned black cargo pants and a black T-shirt after his shower but had left his big feet bare. He had also left his hair loose. It now spilled over the back of the sofa in a glossy curtain, the thick wavy tresses still drying. He chuckled at something the male protagonist said. Leah smiled. She loved seeing him laugh. She didn’t think he did so as often as he should. Every once in a while, she noticed his gaze would slide to her legs. Her feet were propped on the ottoman close to his. The robe she had borrowed had parted just above her knees and fallen back, leaving most of her legs bare. And that pale flesh repeatedly drew Seth’s attention. She held the bag of chips out to him. Smiling, unaware that the faint golden light of desire illuminated his eyes, he poked his hand in and drew out a couple of chips. She smiled back, then returned her attention to the screen. The protagonists had at last made it to safety. They checked each other over for wounds, something both had miraculously escaped incurring in true Hollywood fashion. Then they fell into each other’s arms, finally giving in to the lust that had sparked between them ever since their first contentious meeting. Leah sighed as she watched them peel each other’s clothes off with eager hands. It made her want to do the same with Seth. Her body even began to respond as her imagination kicked in. “I miss sex.” The words were out of her mouth before she could question the wisdom of speaking them. “I do, too,” Seth confessed. She glanced over at him and found his eyes glued to the screen. More so since I met you. Her eyes widened when his voice sounded in her head. “Really?” “Yes.” The actors on-screen fell naked onto the bed and began to simulate sex, their moans and groans and cries of passion filling the room. “It’s natural to miss it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Nothing to feel guilty about.” “No. I mean, you really miss it more since you met me?” He froze. A look of dismay crossed his features as he cut her a glance. “I said that out loud?” “No. I heard it in my head.” Sh**. She grinned. “I heard that, too.” F**k.

Those minutes were the beginning of his abandoning himself to a very strange kind of devotion, such a reeling, intoxicated sensation that the proud and portentous word ‘love’ is not quite right for it. It was that faithful, dog-like devotion without desire that those in mid-life seldom feel, and is known only to the very young and the very old. A love devoid of any deliberation, not thinking but only dreaming. He entirely forgot the unjust yet ineradicable disdain that even the clever and considerate show to those who wear a waiter’s tailcoat, he did not look for opportunities and chance meetings, but nurtured this strange affection in his blood until its secret fervour was beyond all mockery and criticism. His love was not a matter of secret winks and lurking glances, the sudden boldness of audacious gestures, the senseless ardour of salivating lips and trembling hands; it was quiet toil, the performance of those small services that are all the more sacred and sublime in their humility because they are intended to go unnoticed. After the evening meal he smoothed out the crumpled folds of the tablecloth where she had been sitting with tender, caressing fingers, as one would stroke a beloved woman’s soft hands at rest; he adjusted everything close to her with devout symmetry, as if he were preparing it for a special occasion. He carefully carried the glasses that her lips had touched up to his own small, musty attic bedroom, and watched them sparkle like precious jewellery by night when the moonlight streamed in. He was always to be found in some corner, secretly attentive to her as she strolled and walked about. He drank in what she said as you might relish a sweet, fragrantly intoxicating wine on the tongue, and responded to every one of her words and orders as eagerly as children run to catch a ball flying through the air. So his intoxicated soul brought an ever-changing , rich glow into his dull, ordinary life. The wise folly of clothing the whole experience in the cold, destructive words of reality was an idea that never entered his mind: the poor waiter François was in love with an exotic Baroness who would be for ever unattainable. For he did not think of her as reality, but as something very distant, very high above him, sufficient in its mere reflection of life. He loved the imperious pride of her orders, the commanding arch of her black eyebrows that almost touched one another, the wilful lines around her small mouth, the confident grace of her bearing. Subservience seemed to him quite natural, and he felt the humiliating intimacy of menial labour as good fortune, because it enabled him to step so often into the magic circle that surrounded her.

Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich? In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead! I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame. I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight. I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them. Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president. I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door. I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here. It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.

In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin Over the asphalt where no other sound was Between three districts whence the smoke arose I met one walking, loitering and hurried As if blown towards me like the metal leaves Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. And as I fixed upon the down-turned face That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge The first-met stranger in the waning dusk I caught the sudden look of some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many; in the brown baked features The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable. So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?' Although we were not. I was still the same, Knowing myself yet being someone other— And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed To compel the recognition they preceded. And so, compliant to the common wind, Too strange to each other for misunderstanding, In concord at this intersection time Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, We trod the pavement in a dead patrol. I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy, Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: I may not comprehend, may not remember.' And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten. These things have served their purpose: let them be. So with your own, and pray they be forgiven By others, as I pray you to forgive Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice. But, as the passage now presents no hindrance To the spirit unappeased and peregrine Between two worlds become much like each other, So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore. Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight, Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.' The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn. -T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding

DEAR CHILD Please to fancy, if you can, that you are reading a real letter, from a real friend whom you have seen, and whose voice you can seem to yourself to hear wishing you, as I do now with all my heart, a happy Easter. Do you know that delicious dreamy feeling when one first wakes on a summer morning, with the twitter of birds in the air, and the fresh breeze coming in at the open window – when, lying lazily with eyes half-shut, one sees as in a dream green boughs waving, or water rippling in a golden light? It is a pleasure very near to sadness, bringing tears to one’s eyes like a beautiful picture or poem. And is not that a Mother’s gentle hand that undraws your curtains, and a Mother’s sweet voice that summons you to rise? To rise and forget, in the bright sunlight, the ugly dreams that frightened you so when all was dark – to rise and enjoy another happy day, first kneeling to thank that unseen Friend, who sends you the beautiful sun? Are these strange words from a writer of such tales as ‘Alice’? And is this a strange letter to find in a book of nonsense? It may be so. Some perhaps may blame me for thus mixing together things grave and gay; others may smile and think it odd that any one should speak of solemn things at all, except in church and on Sunday: but I think – nay, I am sure – that some children will read this gently and lovingly, and in the spirit of which I have written it. For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into two halves – to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a week-day. Do you think He cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer – and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children, as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in His ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the ‘dim religious light’ of some solemn cathedral? And if I have written anything to add to those stories of innocent and healthy amusement that are laid up in books for the children I love so well, it is surely something I may hope to look back upon without shame and sorrow (as how much of life must then be recalled!) when my turn comes to walk through the valley of shadows. This Easter sun will rise on you, dear child, feeling your ‘life in every limb’, and eager to rush out into the fresh morning air – and many an Easter-day will come and go, before it finds you feeble and gray-headed, creeping wearily out to bask once more in the sunlight – but it is good, even now, to think sometimes of that great morning when the ‘Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings’. Surely your gladness need not be less for the thought that you will one day see a brighter dawn than this – when lovelier sights will meet your eyes than any waving trees or rippling waters – when angel-hands shall undraw your curtains, and sweeter tones than ever loving Mother breathed shall wake you to a new and glorious day – and when all the sadness, and the sin, that darkened life on this little earth, shall be forgotten like the dreams of a night that is past! Your affectionate friend, LEWIS CARROLL Easter, 1876

During the conversation she [7th-GGM, Anna Maria Hoepflinger Floerl] also talked about the guidance with which God had provided her when they started to expel the Salzburgers. She was born in the state of Bavaria and brought up in ignorance by her seriously erring mother and some relatives. However, when God recognized that He could save her soul, He saw to it that among the twelve journeyman of a papal masterbuilder from Salzburg who worked on a church in Bavaria, there was a Lutheran journeyman, called “the Lutheran,” about whose religion strange things were said. Because he got room and board at the house of her cousin, for whom she worked, she was very much aware of his Christian behavior. And, since she noticed great peace, nonconformance to the world, and diligent prayer and intercession as well as sympathy and tears when he saw the bound Evangelical Salzburgers being led past him, she had the deep desire to talk to this man secretly about his and her religious faith. One evening God arranged for her cousin to be busy with the soldiers who were accompanying the Salzburgers on their way across Bavaria, while the servants were in the tavern. She grasped this opportunity to make this knowledgeable man, who was experienced in Christianity, teach her the Evangelical truth for three hours; upon her request, he also sent her a good book, namely the Schaitberger, in a small well-secured barrel. In it, they eagerly read for three consecutive weeks at night about the Evangelical truth and her previous misunderstandings. Because the people concluded from her overall behavior, especially her absence from monthly confession, observance of brotherhood meetings, participation in pilgrimages, and telling a rosary, that she might have suspicious books, they waylaid her, took the book away from her, and threatened her with jail and death unless she stayed away from this heresy. At the priest’s instigation, her mother, in particular, behaved very badly. Finally God gave her the courage to leave, although she knew neither the way nor the area. A woman potter, also a secret Lutheran, referred her to her very close kinswoman in Austria; but there she was advised in confidence that she was to go to Salzburg rather than to pretend, in violation of her conscience, because here they searched very much after Evangelical people and books. Since the journeyman bricklayer had given her instructions on how to get to the Goldeck jurisdiction and, there, to a Lutheran family, she traveled there without a passport, like a poor abandoned sheep, in the name of God, who was her leader and guide, and she was well received. However, because the Evangelical people were being expelled at that time, she was summoned to appear before the authorities and was threatened that, if she stayed with these Evangelical people, she would enjoy neither God’s care nor any favor from the people in the Empire, but would die a horrible death. Nevertheless, she said that she would go with them regardless of what might happen to her. She preferred all misery and even death itself to renouncing God, her Savior, and the Evangelical truth. She did not start with good days, but with misery and death, as the bricklayer had told her earlier while assuring her of God’s help.

Isn’t this the weekend of Xander Eckhart’s party?” “Yes.” Jordan held her breath in a silent plea. Don’t ask if I’m bringing anyone. Don’t ask if I’m bringing anyone. “So are you bringing anyone?” Melinda asked. Foiled. Having realized there was a distinct possibility the subject would come up, Jordan had spent some time running through potential answers to this very question. She had decided that being casual was the best approach. “Oh, there’s this guy I met a few days ago, and I was thinking about asking him.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll just go by myself, who knows.” Melinda put down her forkful of gnocchi, zoning in on this like a heat-seeking missile to its target. “What guy you met a few days ago? And why is this the first we’re hearing of him?” “Because I just met him a few days ago.” Corinne rubbed her hands together, eager for the details. “So? Tell us. How’d you meet him?” “What does he do?” Melinda asked. “Nice, Melinda. You’re so shallow.” Corinne turned back to Jordan. “Is he hot?” Of course, Jordan had known there would be questions. The three of them had been friends since college and still saw each other regularly despite busy schedules, and this was what they did. Before Corinne had gotten married, they talked about her now-husband, Charles. The same was true of Melinda and her soon-to-be-fiancé, Pete. So Jordan knew that she, in turn, was expected to give up the goods in similar circumstances. But she also knew that she really didn’t want to lie to her friends. With that in mind, she’d come up with a backup plan in the event the conversation went this way. Having no choice, she resorted to the strategy she had used in sticky situations ever since she was five years old, when she’d set her Western Barbie’s hair on fire while trying to give her a suntan on the family-room lamp. Blame it on Kyle. I’d like to thank the Academy . . . “Sure, I’ll tell you all about this new guy. We met the other day and he’s . . . um . . .” She paused, then ran her hands through her hair and exhaled dramatically. “Sorry. Do you mind if we talk about this later? After seeing Kyle today with the bruise on his face, I feel guilty rattling on about Xander’s party. Like I’m not taking my brother’s incarceration seriously enough.” She bit her lip, feeling guilty about the lie. So sorry, girls. But this has to stay my secret for now. Her diversion worked like a charm. Perhaps one of the few benefits of having a convicted felon of a brother known as the Twitter Terrorist was that she would never lack for non sequiturs in extracting herself from unwanted conversation. Corinne reached out and squeezed her hand. “No one has stood by Kyle’s side more than you, Jordan. But we understand. We can talk about this some other time. And try not to worry—Kyle can handle himself. He’s a big boy.” “Oh, he definitely is that,” Melinda said with a gleam in her eye. Jordan smiled. “Thanks, Corinne.” She turned to Melinda, thoroughly skeeved out. “And, eww—Kyle?” Melinda shrugged matter-of-factly. “To you, he’s your brother. But to the rest of the female population, he has a certain appeal. I’ll leave it at that.” “He used to fart in our Mr. Turtle pool and call it a ‘Jacuzzi.’ How’s that for appeal?” “Ah . . . the lifestyles of the rich and famous,” Corinne said with a grin. “And on that note, my secret fantasies about Kyle Rhodes now thoroughly destroyed, I move that we put a temporary hold on any further discussions related to the less fair of the sexes,” Melinda said. “I second that,” Jordan said, and the three women clinked their glasses in agreement

ever. Amen. Thank God for self-help books. No wonder the business is booming. It reminds me of junior high school, where everybody was afraid of the really cool kids because they knew the latest, most potent putdowns, and were not afraid to use them. Dah! But there must be another reason that one of the best-selling books in the history of the world is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray. Could it be that our culture is oh so eager for a quick fix? What a relief it must be for some people to think “Oh, that’s why we fight like cats and dogs, it is because he’s from Mars and I am from Venus. I thought it was just because we’re messed up in the head.” Can you imagine Calvin Consumer’s excitement and relief to get the video on “The Secret to her Sexual Satisfaction” with Dr. GraySpot, a picture chart, a big pointer, and an X marking the spot. Could that “G” be for “giggle” rather than Dr. “Graffenberg?” Perhaps we are always looking for the secret, the gold mine, the G-spot because we are afraid of the real G-word: Growth—and the energy it requires of us. I am worried that just becoming more educated or well-read is chopping at the leaves of ignorance but is not cutting at the roots. Take my own example: I used to be a lowly busboy at 12 East Restaurant in Florida. One Christmas Eve the manager fired me for eating on the job. As I slunk away I muttered under my breath, “Scrooge!” Years later, after obtaining a Masters Degree in Psychology and getting a California license to practice psychotherapy, I was fired by the clinical director of a psychiatric institute for being unorthodox. This time I knew just what to say. This time I was much more assertive and articulate. As I left I told the director “You obviously have a narcissistic pseudo-neurotic paranoia of anything that does not fit your myopic Procrustean paradigm.” Thank God for higher education. No wonder colleges are packed. What if there was a language designed not to put down or control each other, but nurture and release each other to grow? What if you could develop a consciousness of expressing your feelings and needs fully and completely without having any intention of blaming, attacking, intimidating, begging, punishing, coercing or disrespecting the other person? What if there was a language that kept us focused in the present, and prevented us from speaking like moralistic mini-gods? There is: The name of one such language is Nonviolent Communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a wealth of simple principles and effective techniques to maintain a laser focus on the human heart and innocent child within the other person, even when they have lost contact with that part of themselves. You know how it is when you are hurt or scared: suddenly you become cold and critical, or aloof and analytical. Would it not be wonderful if someone could see through the mask, and warmly meet your need for understanding or reassurance? What I am presenting are some tools for staying locked onto the other person’s humanness, even when they have become an alien monster. Remember that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was turned into a Klingon, and Bones was freaking out? (I felt sorry for Bones because I’ve had friends turn into Cling-ons too.) But then Spock, in his cool, Vulcan way, performed a mind meld to determine that James T. Kirk was trapped inside the alien form. And finally Scotty was able to put some dilithium crystals into his phaser and destroy the alien cloaking device, freeing the captain from his Klingon form. Oh, how I wish that, in my youth or childhood,

Before their chaise drew to a complete halt in front of the house a door was already being flung open, and a tall, stocky man was bouncing down the steps. “It would appear that our greeting here is going to be far more enthusiastic than the one we received at our last stop,” Elizabeth said in a resolute voice that still shook with nerves as she drew on her gloves, bravely preparing to meet and defy the next obstacle to her happiness and independence. The door of their chaise was wrenched open with enough force to pull it from its hinges, and a masculine face poked inside. “Lady Elizabeth!” boomed Lord Marchman, his face flushed with eagerness-or drink; Elizabeth wasn’t certain. “This is indeed a long-awaited surprise,” and then, as if dumbstruck by his inane remark, he shook his large head and hastily said, “A long-awaited pleasure, that is! The surprise is that you’ve arrived early.” Elizabeth firmly repressed a surge of compassion for his obvious embarrassment, along with the thought that he might be rather likeable. “I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you overmuch,” she said. “Not overmuch. That is,” he corrected, gazing into her wide eyes and feeling himself drowning, “not at all.” Elizabeth smiled and introduced “Aunt Berta,” then allowed their exuberant host to escort them up the steps. Beside her Berta whispered with some satisfaction, “I think he’s as nervous as I am.” The interior of the house seemed drab and rather gloomy after the sunny splendor outside. As their host led her forward Elizabeth glimpsed the furnishings in the salon and drawing room-all of which were upholstered in dark leathers that appeared to have once been maroon and brown. Lord Marchman, who was watching her closely and hopefully, glanced about and suddenly saw his home as she must be seeing it. Trying to explain away the inadequacies of his furnishings, he said hastily, “This home is in need of a woman’s touch. I’m an old bachelor, you see, as was my father.” Berta’s eyes snapped to his face. “Well, I never!” she exclaimed in outraged reaction to his apparent admission of being a bastard.” “I didn’t mean,” Lord Marchman hastily assured, “that my father was never married. I meant”-he paused to nervously tug on his neckcloth, as if trying to loosen it-“that my mother died when I was very young, and my father never remarried. We lived here together.” At the juncture of two hallways and the stairs Lord Marchman turned and looked at Berta and Elizabeth. “Would you care for refreshment, or would you rather go straight to bed?” Elizabeth wanted a rest, and she particularly wanted to spend as little time in his company as was possible. “The latter, if you please.” “In that case,” he said with a sweeping gesture of his arm toward the staircase, “let’s go.” Berta let out a gasp of indignant outrage at what she perceived to be a clear indication that he was no better than Sir Francis. “Now see here, milord! I’ve been putting her in bed for nigh onto two score, and I don’t need help from the likes of you!” And then, as if she realized her true station, she ruined the whole magnificent effect by curtsying and adding in a servile whisper, “if you don’t mind, sir.” “Mind? No, I-“ It finally occurred to John Marchmen what she thought, and he colored up clear to the roots of his hair. “I-I only meant to show you how,” he began, and then he leaned his head back and briefly closed his eyes as if praying for deliverance from his own tongue. “How to find the way,” he finished with a gusty sigh of relief. Elizabeth was secretly touched by his sincerity and his awkwardness, and were the situation less threatening, she would have gone out of her way to put him at his ease.

unwritten law for the truth seeker is patience; a master may purposely make a test of one’s eagerness to meet him. This psychological ruse is freely employed in the West by doctors and dentists!

Eager to meet the demand, the company had compromised on safety. Specifically, it did not inactivate the virus adequately, which contaminated six lots of vaccine—the ones from which the infected recipients had obtained their shots.

Valley of the Damned. Valkyrie Kari tells of the great warrior Crazy Horse (abridged) ’Twas written of those of long ago, That honor should be “as long as grass shall grow.” In battle honor is a fearsome beast, none can contain, In the strength of heart, it brings only shame. A mighty warrior of the plains was he, Crazy Horse of Sioux battle creed. Given to the ravages of noble, savage war, Against his enemies, he vaulted fore. Peering down from lofty mountain hold, The Horse in dream; the warrior was of olde. The promises they were broken one by one, Until only war unbridled could be hardtily done. Understanding and honor was not for those weak, Only the evil Long-knives now he eagerly did seek. The Knives came to steal, to plunder their land, To kill sacred mother with marauding, guilty hands. They had no regard for their own swelling words, With lust in their eyes, their greed greatly stirred. From southern lands came noise that Longhair did kill, Black Kettle’s camp, their blood he had spilled. Longhair destroyed all; dastard agent of evil strife, Deprived them of children and their bountiful life. Yet this lone, brave holy man stood in Longhair’s way, Crazy Horse, vision man, his plans were well framed. His command rode north hard to that destined battle, To meet wicked Longhair—to dash him from the saddle. Fate led him on to Little Bighorn, Where warriors of the sun met with sacred horn. A hellish dry place of calamitous battle, Found many a soul hearing death’s final rattle. The Long-snakes scouted for the great camp, That morn’ they set their fateful, forked-tongue attack. They raised their sabers, waved them strong, Entered eternity, their deaths foresaw. A sea of pilfered blue engulfed in crimson red, Amidst swirls of feathers sacred of the motherland. Through carnage, The Horse did lead his men, Beyond the battle, to the place where legend began. Up hill rode the bold Crazy Horse, With a thousand others to show determined force. To engage Long-knives at their last stand, Striking them down until dead was every man. Great Gall and Crazy Horse led that righteous attack, Against forceful Custer, whose plans did not lack, For ’twas he himself who boasted, wantonly said, “I will become a great chief, if my enemies I fill with lead.” With righteous honor as their sacred ally, Holy arrows that day swiftly let fly. Horse met Longhair in battle forever stayed, Defeated mighty Custer; his corpse on the field in state. Upon that fateful day, on sage choked sandy plain, Spirits clashed with spirits, for the sacred domain. Unconquerable, indomitable this sacred warrior heart, Leads many against the evil now, for this righteous court. Thus, Horse brought the valiants into stark raved battle, Battle scarred by holy wounds delivered by blue devils. Yet he would not relent, this honorable man of gifted vision, But peace came through the lie; his life ended by steel incision. Breathing his last, quiet honor came his way, “Bring my heart home, the Great Spirit will find my way.” Thus ˊtis with all whose understanding shows what may, Honor leads righteousness to death, ask they of that claim. War spirit vigilant with mighty spear and bow in hand, Leads Great Plains spirits, under his gallant command. His spirit never conquered lives it to this good day, Among the heroic mighty, let us his spirit proclaim. In the hour of travail, honor can be finely seen, Leading multitudes unto battle, their hearts boundlessly free. Cowards can never know the freedom of the plains and wind, Or how she musters a soul and the courage found within. Born in deep commune of Earth and Great Spirit above, Understanding and honor flow from hearts of great love. One without understanding is a fool at best, One without honor is a spirit that ne’er rests. O’ majestic One of the relentless plain, The mountains ring joyous with thy name.

JEFF, WHAT DOES Day 2 look like?” That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic. “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come. I’m interested in the question “How do you fend off Day 2?” What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization? Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

Much to the slaveholders' delight, the degradation of slave life increased the social distance between plantation slaves and urban free people of color. Nothing seemed to be further from the cosmopolitan world of New Orleans and the other Gulf ports than the narrow alternatives of the plantation, with its isolation, machine-like regimentation, and harsh discipline. As free people of color strove to establish themselves in the urban marketplace and master the etiquette of a multilingual society, they drew back from the horrors of plantation life and from the men and women forced to live that nightmare. The repulsion may have been mutual. Plantation slaves, many of them newly arrived Africans, little appreciated the intricacies of urban life and had neither the desire nor the ability to meet its complex conventions. Rather than embrace European-American standards, planation slaves sought to escape them. Their cultural practices pointed toward Africa - as did their filed teeth and tribal markings. While free people of color embraced Christianity and identified with the Catholic Church, the trappings of the white man's religions were not to be found in the quarter. Planters, ever eager to divide the black majority, labored to enlarge differences between city-bound free people of color and plantation slaves. Rewarding with freedom those men and women who displayed the physical and cultural attributes of European Americans fit their purpose exactly, as did employing free colored militiamen against maroons or feting white gentlemen and colored ladies at quadroon balls. It was no accident that the privileges afforded to free people of color expanded when the danger of slave rebellion was greatest. Nor was it mysterious that the free colored population grew physically lighter as the slave population - much of it just arrived from Africa - grew darker. But somatic coding was just one means of dividing slave and free blacks. Every time black militiamen took to the field against the maroons or a young white gentlemen took a colored mistress, the distance between slaves and free people of color widened.

For more than two centuries, black people had resisted Christianity, often with the tacit acquiescence of their owners. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Christian missionaries who attempted to bring slaves into the fold confronted a hostile planter class, whose only interest in the slaves' spirituality was to denigrate it as idolatry. Westward-moving planters showed little sympathy with slaves who prayed when they might be working and even less patience with separate gatherings of converts, which they suspected to be revolutionary cabals. An 1822 Mississippi law barring black people from meeting without white supervision spoke directly to the planters' fears. But the trauma of the Second Middle Passage and the cotton revolution sensitized transplanted slaves to the evangelicals' message. Young men and women forcibly displaced from their old homes were eager to find alternative sources of authority and comfort. Responding to the evangelical message, they found new meaning in the emotional deliverance of conversion and the baptismal rituals of the church. In turning their lives over to Christ, the deportees took control of their own destiny. White missionaries, some of them still committed to the evangelical egalitarianism of the eighteenth-century revivals, welcomed black believers into their churches. Slaves - sometimes carrying letters of separation from their home congregations - were present in the first evangelical services in Mississippi and Alabama. The earliest religious associations listed black churches, and black preachers - free and slave - won fame for the exercise of 'their gift.' Established denominational lines informed much of slaves' Christianity. The large Protestant denominations - Baptist and Methodist, Anglican and Presbyterian - made the most substantial claims, although Catholicism had a powerful impact all along the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana and Florida. From this melange, slaves selectively appropriated those ideas that best fit their own sacred universe and secular world. With little standing in the church of the master, these men and women fostered a new faith. For that reason, it was not the church of the master or even the church of the missionary that attracted black converts; they much preferred their own religious conclaves. These fugitive meetings were often held deep in the woods in brush tents called 'arbors.' Kept private by overturning a pot to muffle the sound of their prayers, these meetings promised African-American spirituality and mixed black and white religious forms into a theological amalgam that white clerics found unrecognizable - what one planter-preacher called 'a jumble of Protestantism, Romanism, and Fetishism.' Under the brush arbor, notions of secular and sacred life took on new meanings. The experience of spiritual rebirth and the conviction that Christ spoke directly to them armed slaves against their owners, assuring them that they too were God's children, perhaps even his chosen people. It infused daily life with the promise of the Great Jubilee and eternal life that offered a final escape from earthly captivity. In the end, it would be they - not their owners - who would stand at God's side and enjoy the blessing of eternal salvation.

When two sympathetic hearts meet in the marriage state, matrimony may be called a happy life. When such a wedded pair find thorns in their path, each will be eager, for the sake of the other, to tear them from the root. Where they have to mount hills, or wind a labyrinth, the most experienced will lead the way, and be a guide to his companion. Patience and love will accompany them in their journey, while melancholy and discord they leave far behind. -- Hand in hand they pass on from morning till evening, through their summer's day, till the night of age draws on, and the sleep of death overtakes the one. The other, weeping and mourning, yet looks forward to the bright region where he shall meet his still surviving partner, among trees and flowers which themselves have planted, in fields of eternal verdure.

There is nothing wrong with spontaneous worship, just as there’s nothing wrong with two friends meeting by chance, grabbing a sandwich from a shop, and going off together for an impromptu picnic. But if the friends get to know one another better and decide to meet more regularly, they might decide that, though they could indeed repeat the picnic from time to time, a better setting for their friendship, and a way of showing that friendship in action, might be to take thought over proper meals for one another and prepare thoroughly. In the same way, good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared—an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about. In particular, Christian worship is all about the church celebrating God’s mighty acts, the acts of creation and covenant followed by the acts of new creation and new covenant. The church needs constantly to learn, and constantly to be working on, the practice of telling and retelling the great stories of the world and Israel, especially the creation and the Exodus; the great promises that emerged from those stories; and the ways in which those promises came to their fruition in Jesus Christ. The reading of scripture—the written account of those stories—has therefore always been central to the church’s worship. It isn’t only that people need to be reminded what the stories say. It’s that these stories should be rehearsed in acts of celebration and worship, “telling out the greatness of the Lord,” as Mary sang in the Magnificat. Good liturgy uses tried and tested ways of making sure that scripture is read thoroughly and clearly, and is constantly on the lookout for ways of doing it even more effectively—just as good liturgy is also eager to discover better and better ways of singing and praying the Psalms together, so that they come to be “second nature” within the memory, imagination, and spirituality of all the worshipping faithful, not just of a few musically minded leaders.

Then another participant, Mr. Deng, raised his hand, I restated the specific question: “What steps should the team leader in this case take to manage different attitudes toward confrontation on the team?” Mr. Deng began: Let me give my perspective. I have been working in the technology industry for many years. In my company, we have lots of young people who are very eager and hardworking. Yet hierarchy is still strong in our company. During a meeting, if a young person is asked a question, he will look to his boss first to see if the boss’s face indicates approval. If the boss approves, the younger employee will also express approval.

Just as computer science was erecting barriers to entry, medicine—an equally competitive and selective field—was adjusting them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of new medical schools opened across the country, and many of the newly created spots went to women. Standardized entry exams also began to change. In 1977, the MCAT, a test for entrance into medical school, was revamped to reduce cultural and social bias. But the game changer was the implementation of Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in educational programs. From then on, if a woman could score high enough on the newly revised MCATs and meet other requirements, med schools could not legally deny her entry, and women poured in. Why wasn’t the same progress being made in computer science? Professor Eric Roberts, now at Stanford, was chairing the computer science department at Wellesley when the department instituted a GPA threshold. Of that period he later wrote, “In the 1970s, students were welcomed eagerly into this new and exciting field. Around 1984, everything changed. Instead of welcoming students, departments began trying to push them away.

I headed for Constanza's place on Doheny Road, a couple of miles or so from where I was, but I wasn't as eager as I'd been a few minutes before. If Constanza had a gun, I'd better go in waving my white handkerchief. About half a mile from her place, I figured that I'd just drive up, park, and walk up like a traveling salesman, grinning and looking as pleasant as possible. I'd make it quick and be out of there in fifteen minutes. I was anxious to get to Wandra's. There was a little hitch in my plans. I turned off Sunset and was almost at the end of curving Loma Vista Drive, where it meets Doheny Road at the big Doheny Ranch, when the windshield splintered

During the depression, W. C. Fields, the comedian, lost all his money, and found himself without income, without a job, and his means of earning a living (vaudeville) no longer existed. Moreover, he was past sixty, when many men consider themselves old. He was so eager to stage a comeback that he offered to work without pay, in a new field (movies). In addition to his other troubles, he fell and injured his neck. To many that would have been the place to give up and quit. But Fields was persistent. He knew that if he carried on he would get the breaks sooner or later, and he did get them, but not by chance. Marie Dressler found herself down and out, with her money gone, with no job, when she was about sixty. She, too, went after the “breaks,” and got them. Her persistence brought an astounding triumph late in life, long beyond the age when most men and women are done with ambition to achieve. Eddie Cantor lost his money in the 1929 stock crash, but he still had his persistence and his courage. With these, plus two prominent eyes, he exploited himself back into an income of $10,000 a week! Verily, if one has persistence, one can get along very well without many other qualities. The only break anyone can afford to rely upon is a self-made break. These come through the application of persistence. The starting point is definiteness of purpose. Examine the first hundred people you meet, ask them what they want most in life, and ninety-eight of them will not be able to tell you.

Before she could catch her breath, he rubbed his cum into her skin. "This is me marking you. I want every fucking man you meet, to look away, when they smell me on you." He stuck his fingers in her mouth and she eagerly licked them clean. Soaked in her saliva, he thrust two fingers inside of her. "I meant what I said, this pussy is mine." He didn't know where the possessiveness was coming from, but he owned it.

Ember smiled brightly. “Hello! We haven’t met before. My name is Ellen. I’m an antiques dealer around these parts?” Mrs. Bailey looked surprised, but gave a polite smile. “Oh, yes?” “Yes. I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, I know it’s early. But I heard from one of the women in the historical society--Yolanda? You know her, don’t you?--that you collect antique ice picks. Best collection in the county, she said.” Mrs. Bailey smiled, looking a little confused. Ember wasn’t sure if there was a Yolanda in the historical society, but evidently Mrs. Bailey wasn’t sure, either. “Of course,” said Mrs. Bailey. “I have some very special pieces. I didn’t realize the historical society knew about them. Would you like to see them? I keep them just in here.” She pointed back behind her, into the house. “That would be lovely,” Ember said eagerly. So Mrs. Bailey let Ember inside. Ember noticed with a bashful feeling that the large picture she had knocked had been replaced on the wall, but all the glass of the frame was missing. Probably it had taken a long time to clean up all those many pieces. “My name is Anna, by the way,” Mrs. Bailey was saying. “It’s nice to meet you, Ember. I’m always so pleased to know young people such as yourself who are interested in antiques.

We need not doubt that the Evangelical movement had a powerful effect in waking up eighteenth-century England from its religious apathy, or that eighteenth-century England needed it. Where it failed was in its long-term effects. Religion became identified in the popular mind with a series of moods, in which the worshipper, disposed thereto by all the arts of the revivalist, relished the flavours of spiritual peace. You needed neither a theology nor a liturgy; you did not take the strain of intellectual inquiry, nor associate yourself whole-heartedly with any historic tradition of worship. You floated, safely enough, on the little raft of your own faith, eagerly throwing out the lifeline to such drowning neighbours as were ready to catch it; meanwhile the ship was foundering. It is this by-passing of an historic tradition in favour of a personal experience that has created the modem religious situation in England, and to some extent in the English-speaking world. The Oxford Movement did but lock the door on a stolen horse. On the one hand, it is assumed that every man's religion is his own affair; it does not concern, need not alarm his neighbours. On the other hand, the Christian witness has become a sectional affair; Christianity is one of the fads which people adopt if they are interested in that kind of thing. A poster in a railway station, bidding you be prepared to meet your God, is passed by with an indulgent smile. If people are burdened with a sense of sin, by all means let them seek comfort in some conventicle which promises them release from it; the same is perhaps true of people who begin to feel lonely in old age. But always religion is thought of, instinctively, as a way of changing from one state of mind into another.

Turning my head away from his bourbon-heavy scent, I twisted his cummerbund around and undid the cheap buckle. His breath grew shorter as he cupped and massaged the generous D cups, his touch rudimentary but acceptable. “Tonight?” he gasped hopefully. I considered the request. It had been weeks since we’d last had sex, the quick event occurring after Matt had, from out of nowhere, put an offer on the Atherton house. Granted, it was a horrible home. Ugly and with a choppy floor plan that was badly out of style, but still. For my cheap husband, it was a huge and unexpected step in the right direction for our social standing and my happiness. “Yes.” I moved closer, as if in enjoyment of his touch. Matt had been a sexual disappointment early on, one that required me to take care of my own needs. Most recently, I had done so with the explosive but short-lived Ned Plymouth dalliance. I’d had high hopes for that pairing, and I frowned as I placed the cummerbund on the counter, thinking of the lost potential with my former boss. Matt grunted, his mouth now sucking at my nipples with loud and frantic wet smacks of his lips. I undid his pants and pulled down on the zipper. “Let’s go to the bed.” I injected some husk into my voice, as if I were eager, and not just to get it over with. On my back, with him above me, I thought of William Winthorpe. There was something dark and delicious about him, a temptation that had existed as soon as he’d introduced himself at my interview. William. There had been a tug in his tone, a tightening of the cord between us. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Gruff and sexual.

Eager. I like that, Manny." "Good morning to you too, Sleeping Beauty. Or should that be good afternoon?" "It's still morning, though I feel like I've slept away the day." "You must've needed it." "Is that your medical opinion?" "No. I'm off duty." Just hearing his deep voice had Harper snuggling back under the covers, wishing he was next to her. "Pity. Because I'm not feeling so good, and I was hoping you made house calls." "What's wrong?" "A distinct case of I-miss-you-itis." "Damn it, if I wasn't halfway along this Craters of the Moon geothermal hike, I'd be there in a flash." He muttered a curse. "I know. I can give you a more accurate diagnosis over the phone if you do one thing." Smiling, she said, "What?" "Tell me what you're wearing." Her thighs clenched as her smile extended into a grin. "My, my, Doctor, I didn't think this was one of those calls." "You're in bed. You're missing me. What did you expect?" "A little decorum." "Yeah, sure." "You're right. I want to torture you a little." "A lot, considering I'm now envisaging you cute and sleep rumpled." "What are you wearing?" "Why?" he asked. "Because I'm assuming there are families on that hike, and too much envisaging may lead to more than one tent pole in that national park." He laughed so loudly she had to hold the cell away from her ear. "You really are something else," he said. "And for the record? I miss you too." "So I'll meet you in the foyer at four for our picnic?" "Yeah. I found the perfect spot." "Secluded?" "Babe, you're killing me." "Not yet, but maybe this will help." She lowered her voice. "I'm wearing nothing and I'm thinking of you." She hung up on his garbled cry, grinning madly.

Hire the right people. “We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees,” he wrote in an early shareholder letter. Compensation, especially early on, was heavily weighted to stock options rather than cash. “We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner.” There are three criteria he instructs managers to consider when they are hiring: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? It’s never been easy to work at Amazon. When Bezos interviews people, he warns them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” Bezos makes no apologies. “We are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about,” he says. “Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com.” These lessons remind me of the way Steve Jobs operated. Sometimes such a style can be crushing, and to some people it may feel tough or even cruel. But it also can lead to the creation of grand, new innovations and companies that change the way we live. Bezos has done all of this. But he still has many chapters to write in his story. He has always been public spirited, but I suspect in the coming years he will do more with philanthropy. Just as Bill Gates’s parents led him into such endeavors, Jackie and Mike Bezos have been models for Bezos as he focuses on missions such as providing great early-childhood education to all kids. I am also confident that he has at least one more major leap to make. I suspect that he will be—and is, indeed, eager to be—one of the first private citizens to blast himself into space. As he told his high school graduating class back in 1982, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!

One of the things, it seems to me, that most of us eagerly accept and take for granted is the question of beliefs. I am not attacking beliefs. What we are trying to do is to find out why we accept beliefs; and if we can understand the motives, the causation of acceptance, then perhaps we may be able not only to understand why we do it, but also be free of it. One can see how political and religious beliefs, national and various other types of beliefs, do separate people, do create conflict, confusion, and antagonism—which is an obvious fact; and yet we are unwilling to give them up. There is the Hindu belief, the Christian belief, the Buddhist—innumerable sectarian and national beliefs, various political ideologies, all contending with each other, trying to convert each other. One can see, obviously, that belief is separating people, creating intolerance; is it possible to live without belief? One can find that out only if one can study oneself in relationship to a belief. Is it possible to live in this world without a belief—not change beliefs, not substitute one belief for another, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute? This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is.

Let me be crystal clear, however, that being willing is very different than being open. I meet many people who are closed up for whatever reason. They may have been abandoned as children, they may have deep-seated trust issues, have been abused or be painfully shy by nature. They might simply be skeptical about me, believing that no one (especially a tattooed “exorcist” wearing a skull T-shirt) can truly help them. As long as they are willing to open up to the idea that I might help, then I’m eager to try. When I meet with closed-off clients, I know their exorcism is going to be exhausting and tough. Either they’re so full of malevolent entities that I won’t be able to see the source of the darkness inside them, or they’re so guarded that they’re going to repeatedly resist opening up to me. In the first case, I know I’ll always succeed and perform a top-notch exorcism—it’s just going to take me a little longer. But in the second case, I’ll need my client to work with me.

She is the torture I may not survive. Eagerly, she is my undoing. Her gaze lifts, meeting eyes that are not my own. Eyes of the man who gets to have her—if she allows it.

However, one aspect is common to all successful innovations—they solve problems. That may seem obvious, but understanding the kind of problem a new product solves can be a topic of much debate. “Are you building a vitamin or painkiller?” is a common, almost clichéd question many investors ask founders eager to cash their first venture capital check. The correct answer, from the perspective of most investors, is the latter: a painkiller. Likewise, innovators in companies big and small are constantly asked to prove their idea is important enough to merit the time and money needed to build it. Gatekeepers such as investors and managers want to invest in solving real problems or meeting immediate needs by backing painkillers. Painkillers solve an obvious need, relieving a specific pain, and often have quantifiable markets.

IF THE NAZIS wanted paintings, one might think that they could simply have stolen them. And they could have. But they had scruples, of a sort, about stealing from “fellow Nordics.” Instead, they concocted “legal” means of obtaining what they wanted. In any case, the Dutch would have responded to outright theft by hiding their art away. As it was, with the Nazis flush with cash and spending like sailors on a spree, and the Dutch eager to take advantage where they could, buyer and seller raced to meet each other. Prices spiraled upward.

Nowadays, when I’m talking to young people, I’ll often hear them express fear or hesitation about exactly this moment in a new friendship—that hinge point when you make the move from Nice to meet you to Hey, let’s hang out. They’ll say it feels weird and awkward to pursue a potential friend, to ask someone to have coffee or get together outside of work or school, or to try talking face-to-face with someone they’ve only known online. They worry about appearing too eager, thinking it makes them seem desperate or uncool. They are afraid to take that risk, worried about rejection. Their fears—no surprise—become their limits this way.

Will he ever invite Nurul to his home? Wouldn't his mother like that? Nurul is a real girl, a Muslim girl, friendly, eager to please. But Nurul would have to meet his dying mother and sit with his mannequin girlfriend on the couch, unless he could somehow stash her away, behind house near the chickens.

Do you rise from bed with gusto—eager to take on new projects and meet new challenges? Or, do you close your eyes in sorrow—sickened by the thought of spending yet another day at the office? If your answer to this question was more akin to the latter response, then perhaps you haven’t found your Ikigai yet.

She eagerly showed him her updates—and he ignored her obvious disappointment as he just as quickly undid them, stripping away one safety practice after another. Toxic exposure was a small price to pay to meet the Emperor’s quota.

Moses had underlined the part where David ran to meet Goliath. Eager little beaver, that David. The biblical David apparently enjoyed fighting too

24th May, 1872.—Speke at Kasengé islet inadvertently made a general statement thus: "The mothers of these savage people have infinitely less affection than many savage beasts of my acquaintance. I have seen a mother bear, galled by frequent shots, obstinately meet her death by repeatedly returning under fire whilst endeavouring to rescue her young from the grasp of intruding men. But here, for a simple loin-cloth or two, human mothers eagerly exchanged their little offspring, delivering them into perpetual bondage to my Beluch soldiers."—Speke, pp. 234,5. For the sake of the little story of "a bear mother," Speke made a general assertion on a very small and exceptional foundation. Frequent inquiries among the most intelligent and far-travelled Arabs failed to find confirmation of this child-selling, except in the very rare case of a child cutting the upper front teeth before the under, and because this child is believed to be "moiko" (unlucky), and certain to bring death into the family. It is called an Arab child, and sold to the first Arab, or even left at his door. This is the only case the Arabs know of child-selling. Speke

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I’m too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She’s waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I’m eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I’m so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met?

Hunter was still too focused on his dick to respond so Roman fell silent as he waited. And the second Hunter’s questioning gaze lifted to meet his, Roman nodded in silent permission. Hunter licked his lips and then reached out a shaky hand. His fingers barely touched Roman’s cock on their first pass but his dick did its own version of a happy dance and twitched hungrily. Fascinated, Hunter ran his thumb over the slit and Roman bit back a curse. With each hesitant touch, Hunter grew a little bit more emboldened and within a minute he was eagerly closing his hand around Roman and giving him little tugs. “I

The week started and Genesis was eager to please as he looked forward enthusiastically to engaging with his own clients Caton had assigned to him; he'd provided him with a detailed briefing about the five clients he'd be meeting the next week throughout the Friday they'd spent together.

tagged along. He felt that Marvin was now his responsibility, and he wanted to keep an eye on him. No telling what the captain might say that could possibly upset Marvin. A brisk, cold wind was blowing as the passengers stepped from the ferry onto the dock at Ostend. Marvin later commented that he had never felt such raw weather, but his memory was short. He had forgotten the freezing winters we had lived through when we were growing up in Washington, D.C. From the waterfront at Ostend, Freddy led Marvin, Bubby, and Eugenie to a small boarding house at 77 Rue Promenade, just a block from the beach. Freddy’s wife, Lilliane, a joyous woman, was waiting for them with open arms. She had already prepared a room on the fifth floor for Freddy’s guests and had a hot meal simmering on the stove. The boarding house was owned by Freddy and managed by his wife. They lived in the basement apartment, along with their two young daughters. Lilliane had told them that a new playmate would be arriving, and they had eagerly anticipated meeting Bubby. Freddy seemed happy too, now that Marvin was safely in tow. As for Marvin, he was simply relieved to be warm again and on dry land. From the moment she first saw Marvin,

As a Facebook product manager, you resembled an Afghan warlord or a pirate captain: fearsome in appearance to any outsiders, the scourge of entire companies and industries, but actually barely in control of your small band of engineer-hooligans, and always one step from mutiny. To the outside world, your job was easy: a two-line email would have the senior management of any company waiting eagerly in the Facebook reception area almost instantaneously. Many were the startups I conjured thusly, they sputtering in flattery despite my showing up late and surly, demanding and getting a full walk-through of their entire product and business model, then dismissing them after a forty-five-minute meeting.

This meeting is what the hermit is longing for and awaiting eagerly.

how else could you describe a guy who made the entire city? I was already very eager to meet this Major Creative. “We're here!” The Hummobile took a few more turns then finally made a stop at another tall building. Hum parked the car outside, and we entered the building. A guard let us in, and smiled at Hum. “Good morning, Hum! Come to see the big man himself?” the guard said. “Yeah! Just want to introduce my friend here to Major Creative!” Hum said. “He's upstairs. Go ahead.

Blue Eyes, if you do not know the tosi tivo way, we must do it the Comanche way.” “Well…yes, I suppose. It’s just that I--Hunter?” He bent his dark head and trailed his lips to her other breast, nibbling and nudging her rigidly cupped fingers. “H-Hunter?” “Be easy,” he whispered. “It is well.” He dipped his tongue between her knuckles, searching for the sensitive, throbbing nubbin that she guarded so protectively. When his plunging tongue grazed what he sought, she snapped taut. He made another pass and another. A cry crawled up her throat. She couldn’t think when he did this. “It is mine,” he whispered raggedly. “Give it to me. No pain, little one. Trust me.” As if of their own volition, her fingers parted. Her rosy nipple popped through, its pebbled peak thrusting upward eagerly to meet him. Hunter seized it gently between his teeth and worried it until she began to shiver and moan. His uncertainty fled. No matter how odd her customs, her body, though more lovely than most, responded like any other.

there are brief enchanted moments in history and in the short lives of men and women, there is wonder and there is cynicism, there are dreams that can come true, and dreams that can’t. And there was a time, you know, not so long ago, as recently as my own childhood in fact, when everyone believed in the future and eagerly awaited it or rushed to meet it. But now nearly everyone I know or used to know is trying to slow the speed of the world as the future starts to look more and more like someplace you don’t want to be.

The world will not be free of me who will establish religion secretly and openly in order that the proofs of God are not obliterated. They will be few in number but they will be great in honour. They will be lost openly, but their pictures will reign in hearts. God will preserve His religion through them. They will leave the religion for their successors and they will plant it in the hearts of the young. The real nature of knowledge will be disclosed with their help. They will get good news from the life of sure faith. They will make easy what the rich think difficult and they will make clear what the heedless think obscure. They will keep company with the world witht their bodies, but their souls will be kept hanging in lofty places. They are servants of God among His people, His trustees and deputies on the earth. Then he wept and said: How eager I am to meet them.

Thomas nodded his head and thought, soon, soon it will be mayhem. Thousands more will join the thousands already gone to meet their maker. Look at them, all eager to die, mine, and theirs. Almighty God, protect us all this day and, if it should please you, provide us with the means to hold until nightfall and then safe passage away from this place. He looked skyward and muttered, "Amen." He

People Say…” Craig, I just want to say “thank you” for the care and attention you give to our churches. No one can doubt your eagerness to service your clients nor your attention to detail in meeting their needs. That, along with your love for Christ and commitment to him, makes you our choice when it comes to proving first class travel service for the members of our purchasing group. Thanks, John Griffin, Shared Church Services.

Now I think of breaking up as moving. Imagine you have your own house, full of your own boxes. A person you meet has his own house, full of his own boxes. When you have a relationship with that person, you shack up in a third house, into which you can each put any number of your boxes. You shouldn’t move them all in at once, or else you will seem too eager. And don’t dawdle too much either, or you will seem skittish about commitment. You kind of aim to match each other’s pace, so that the power balance feels fair and equal. Happy marriage—at least ideally—would be the situation in which both parties enthusiastically choose to keep all of their boxes in their shared house. Conversely, when someone starts to doubt the relationship, he might move a box or two back into his own house, just in case. While he’s weighing his options, he may transport a few more boxes to the safety of his own home. When he’s ready to take back his final few boxes, he breaks up with you. If you were too infatuated to see it coming, there you are, with all of your boxes in the shared house, and none in the security of your own home.

The Soviet counterpart to the Green Bank meeting, the First All-Union Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations and Interstellar Communication, was held in May 1964, at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Soviet Armenia. Perhaps less concerned about the “ridicule barrier” and any public threat to research funding in their more centralized scientific enterprise, the Soviet scientists were eager to publish their papers. So this is the first SETI meeting for which published proceedings exist. The

If, for example, you and I were anteaters, rather than two people sitting in the corner of a bar, I might feel more comfortable with your silence, with your motionless hands holding your glass, with your glazed fish eyes fixing now on my balding head and now on my navel, we might be able to understand each other better in a meeting of restless snouts sniffing halfheartedly at the concrete for nonexistent insects, we might come together, under cover of darkness, in acts of sexual coitus as sad as Lisbon nights, when the Neptunes in the lakes slough off the mud and slime and scan the deserted squares with blank, eager, rust-colored eyes. Perhaps you would finally tell me about yourself. Perhaps behind your Cranach brow there lies sleeping a secret fondness for rhinoceroses. Perhaps, if you felt my body, you would discover that I had been suddenly transformed into a unicorn, and I would embrace you, and you would flap startled arms, like a butterfly transfixed by a pin, your voice grown husky with desire. We would buy tickets for the train that travels around the zoo, from creature to creature, with its clockwork engine, an escapee from some provincial haunted castle, and we would wave, as we passed, at the grotto-cum-crib of those recycled carpets—the polar bears. We would observe with an ophthalmological eye the baboons' anal conjunctivitis, like eyelids inflamed with combustible hemorrhoids. We would kiss outside the lions' den, where the lions—moth-eaten old overcoats—would curl their lips to reveal toothless gums. I would stroke your breasts in the oblique shade cast by the foxes, you would buy me an ice cream on a stick from the clowns' enclosure, where they, eyebrows permanently arched, exchanged blows to the tragic accompaniment of a saxophone. And that way we would have recovered a little of the childhood that belongs to neither of us and that insists on whizzing down the children's slide with a laugh that reaches us now as an occasional faint, almost angry echo.

The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to frame him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump cluster-fuck. It’s likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably surrounded and interrupted by a long list of retainers—indeed, everybody strove to be in every meeting. Furtive people skulked around without clear purpose: Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others. Trump liked to keep Hicks, Conway, and, often, his old Apprentice sidekick Omarosa Manigault—now with a confounding White House title—in constant hovering presence. As always, Trump wanted an eager audience, encouraging as many people as possible to make as many attempts as possible to be as close to him as possible. In time, however, he would take derisive notice of those who seemed most eager to suck up to him.

DAY 17: How does Paul describe the return of Jesus Christ in 1 Thessalonians 4:15, 16? It is clear the Thessalonians had come to believe in and hope for the reality of their Savior’s return (1:3, 9, 10; 2:19; 5:1, 2). They were living in expectation of that coming, eagerly awaiting Christ. First Thessalonians 4:13 indicates they were even agitated about some things that might affect their participation in it. They knew Christ’s return was the climactic event in redemptive history and didn’t want to miss it. The major question they had was: “What happens to the Christians who die before He comes? Do they miss His return?” Clearly, they had an imminent view of Christ’s return, and Paul had left the impression it could happen in their lifetime. Their confusion came as they were being persecuted, an experience they thought they were to be delivered from by the Lord’s return (3:3, 4). Paul answers by saying “the Lord Himself will descend with a shout” (v. 16). This fulfills the pledge of John 14:1–3 (Acts 1:11). Until then He remains in heaven (1:10; Heb. 1:1–3). “With the voice of an archangel.” Perhaps it is Michael, the archangel, whose voice is heard as he is identified with Israel’s resurrection in Daniel 12:1–3. At that moment, the dead rise first. They will not miss the Rapture but will be the first participants. “And with the trumpet of God.” This trumpet is illustrated by the trumpet of Exodus 19:16–19, which called the people out of the camp to meet God. It will be a trumpet of deliverance (Zeph. 1:16; Zech. 9:14). After the dead come forth, their spirits, already with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23), now being joined to resurrected new bodies, the living Christians will be raptured, “caught up” (v. 17). This passage along with John 14:1–3 and 1 Corinthians 15:51, 52 form the biblical basis for “the Rapture” of the church.

He was presented to her as Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister of England. Kassandra stiffened as he bent over her hand. Mercifully, he released her swiftly but then proceeded to speak with exaggerated enunciation as though he presumed “foreign” and “slow” were synonymous. “I do hope your stay will be pleasant, Your Highness.” “Thank you, Prime Minister, I am quite assured that it will be. England is a delightful conjunction of seeming conflicts and contradictions, don’t you think?” Perceval frowned, taken by surprise and unsure how to respond. “Well, as to that-“ “After all, the culture that has produced that astonishing novel Sense and Sensibility and Lord Byron’s…ummm…affecting work within the space of just a few short months can hardly be considered merely> a self-aggrandizing island with delusions of empire, can it?” “I suppose not; that is to say?” “Do excuse us, Prime Minister,” Alex interjected smoothly. “I am sure you will understand there are so many waiting to meet Her Highness.” As he guided her toward the next eager greeter, Alex murmured, “Pray do try to remember we are not actually attempting to incite war with England.” Kassandra shrugged, feeling better since she had set down that vile Perceval. “Didn’t you suspect the Prime Minister of plotting an invasion of Akora just last year?” Her brother cast her a sharp look. “You weren’t supposed to know about that.” “For pity’s sake…” “All right, yes I did, but he was soundly discouraged by the Prince Regent himself. There is no reason to have any further concern in that regard.” Kassandra did not answer. She had her own thoughts on the subject and was not ye ready to share them. The introductions continued. Too soon, her head throbbed and the small of her back ached, but she kept her smile firmly in place. When the gong sounded for dinner, she resisted the urge to sag with relief.

He was presented to her as Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister of England. Kassandra stiffened as he bent over her hand. Mercifully, he released her swiftly but then proceeded to speak with exaggerated enunciation as though he presumed “foreign” and “slow” were synonymous. “I do hope your stay will be pleasant, Your Highness.” “Thank you, Prime Minister, I am quite assured that it will be. England is a delightful conjunction of seeming conflicts and contradictions, don’t you think?” Perceval frowned, taken by surprise and unsure how to respond. “Well, as to that-“ “After all, the culture that has produced that astonishing novel Sense and Sensibility and Lord Byron’s…ummm…affecting work within the space of just a few short months can hardly be considered merely a self-aggrandizing island with delusions of empire, can it?” “I suppose not; that is to say?” “Do excuse us, Prime Minister,” Alex interjected smoothly. “I am sure you will understand there are so many waiting to meet Her Highness.” As he guided her toward the next eager greeter, Alex murmured, “Pray do try to remember we are not actually attempting to incite war with England.” Kassandra shrugged, feeling better since she had set down that vile Perceval. “Didn’t you suspect the Prime Minister of plotting an invasion of Akora just last year?” Her brother cast her a sharp look. “You weren’t supposed to know about that.” “For pity’s sake…” “All right, yes I did, but he was soundly discouraged by the Prince Regent himself. There is no reason to have any further concern in that regard.” Kassandra did not answer. She had her own thoughts on the subject and was not ye ready to share them. The introductions continued. Too soon, her head throbbed and the small of her back ached, but she kept her smile firmly in place. When the gong sounded for dinner, she resisted the urge to sag with relief.

And there was a time, you know, not so long ago, as recently as my own childhood in fact, when everyone believed in the future and eagerly awaited it or rushed to meet it. But now nearly everyone I know or used to know is trying to slow the speed of the world as the future starts to look more and more like someplace you don't want to be.

I visited with every customer it made sense to see. I sought to discover what they liked and disliked about their current situation and suppliers, and tried to position my company as a better partner that was easier to work with, more flexible, and more eager to meet their needs. I asked lots of questions, toured their facilities, and talked about improvements to our product and ways we were willing to customize our service. It didn’t take long to learn that it was a lot more fun calling on business owners and senior executives than purchasing agents,

Nay. I cannot believe in a God that would chastise thee for doing aught in love.” She moved in close, bending down to view his face that he hid in shame. “And now thou must do what should have been done years ago.” He lifted his head, meeting her eyes, eager to hear what could be done to absolve himself of his crime. She moved in close, slipping her arms around him. “Thou must forgive thyself. For I am certain that God has already done so.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

Maury and I spent more than one month in Pakistan, talking with AID personnel and their Pakistani counterparts and learning about the conduct of the projects over the six-year period. Most importantly, we focused on the dialogue between senior U.S. embassy and mission personnel and those in the Pakistani government responsible for economic policy formulation. One day, he and I were asked to attend a “brown bag luncheon” with the senior mission staff. The idea was to be totally informal, put our feet on the desks and just chat about our impressions. Everyone was eager to learn what Maury thought about the program. Three important things emerged for me out of that discussion. 1. The mission director explained that he had held some very successful consultations and brainstorming sessions with senior Pakistani government leaders. He said the Pakistanis were open to his ideas for needed reform, listened carefully and took extensive notes during these meetings. Although there had been little concrete action to implement these recommendations to date, he was confident they were seriously considering them. Maury smiled and responded, “Yeah. They used to jerk me around the same way when I was in your position. The Paks are masters at that game. They know how to make you feel good. I doubt that they are serious. This is a government of inaction.” The mission director was crestfallen. 2. Then the program officer asked what Maury thought about the mix of projects that had been selected by the government of Pakistan and the mission for inclusion in the program for funding. Maury responded that the projects selected were “old friends” of his. He too, had focused on the same areas i.e. agriculture, health, and power generation and supply. That said, the development problems had not gone away. He gave the new program credit for identifying the same obstacles to economic development that had existed twenty years earlier. 3. Finally, the mission director asked Maury for his impressions of any major changes he sensed had occurred in Pakistan since his departure. Maury thought about that for a while. Then he offered perhaps the most prescient observation of the entire review. He said, when he served in Pakistan in the 1960s, he had found that the educated Pakistani visualized himself and his society as being an important part of the South-Asian subcontinent. “Today” he said, “after having lost East Pakistan, they seem to perceive themselves as being the eastern anchor of the Middle-East.” One wonders whether the Indian government understands this significant shift in its neighbor’s outlook and how important it is to work to reverse that world view among the Pakistanis for India’s own security andwell-being.

bow, quiver, and decorum and hastened to meet her. She flew hard into his arms, laughing and crying at once, knocking the wind from his chest and the good sense from his brain. His rogue mouth went in search of hers. Despite her happy little murmurings and the sighs hot at his ear, he regained himself and angled away, pressing his cheek to hers, unable to draw her close enough. Her body was softer than he recalled, warmer, more eager. And Little Warrior was right—she smelled as sweet as honey. Nose buried in his shirt, she inhaled until her ribs strained against his hold. “Tell me you’ve come to take me home,” she said on a contented discharge of breath.

His muscles twitched in anticipation, but he moderated his steps, determined not to let his absolute weakness for the woman propel him into an unmanly display of emotion. Especially here, under her father’s scrutiny. She, on the other hand, began a jog. Then she broke into a skirt-lifting sprint—as she’d done outside the burning fort. Except this time, she was not running to Phillip, and the only object in flames was Totka’s throat as it burned with the effort to swallow. He braced himself to receive her all-out run, but when she loosed his name on a jagged cry, he dropped his bow, quiver, and decorum and hastened to meet her. She flew hard into his arms, laughing and crying at once, knocking the wind from his chest and the good sense from his brain. His rogue mouth went in search of hers. Despite her happy little murmurings and the sighs hot at his ear, he regained himself and angled away, pressing his cheek to hers, unable to draw her close enough. Her body was softer than he recalled, warmer, more eager. And Little Warrior was right—she smelled as sweet as honey. Nose buried in his shirt, she inhaled until her ribs strained against his hold. “Tell me you’ve come to take me home,” she said on a contented discharge of breath.

I frequently forward the message that our spirit people are quite all right where they are. They respond with eagerness when a guest recognizes them, and are happy to spend some time conversing back and forth, through me. Yet they also seem to know that this kind of communication is only temporary, so most are quick to point out before they leave that they will meet their physical friends one day in the future. A forty-ish woman came for an appointment one day with her friend. As I tuned in, I felt the presence of a young woman who’d passed before her time in a vehicle accident. My client acknowledged her daughter, who had died at the age of nineteen while traveling to a camping weekend with friends. The spirit conveyed her joy at her mother’s presence, and insistently repeated that she really was safe and happy. Her younger sister needed to hear this message in particular, and she urged her mother to pass it on. “Do you miss us?” the mother asked. “Do you think about us and miss us, are you counting the days till we can be together again, too?” With a feeling of frustration from the spirit, I had to translate, “I’m fine!” yet again. This spirit came across as being almost dismissive of her family’s grief. As her mother cried on my couch, the spirit came through very much like a teenaged girl, saying “Oh Mom, come on! I’m fine!” After we concluded, I spent some time in meditation asking for help. How could I translate a spirit’s genuine well-being, without sounding dismissive myself? How could I show my clients that the spirit people are so certain of meeting again, that they rarely spend much time trying to convince us?

[Winning in] India is essential. For GE, winning with India requires a new business model, one in which we are “local” in every sense of the word. That means migrating P&L responsibility and major business functions [like R&D, manufacturing and marketing] from a centralized headquarters to an experienced in-country team that is closest to the action and uniquely in touch with local customers and capabilities. Shifting power to where the growth is, putting more resources, more people and more products in the country, and integrating all elements of the GE product and services pipeline makes good business sense. This new One GE in India approach will speed progress. With an integrated team, we can develop products and services designed specifically to meet local needs and, potentially, for export to other markets. Since we’ve changed the model in India to align with the market more directly, there’s great excitement. It gives us entirely new opportunities to develop more products at more price points. This will help open up access to large, underserved markets in India, China, Brazil, and Africa while also fueling innovation that opens a door into new markets in the more developed regions of the world. The establishment of a new business model in India is an important step and I am eager to see it take off.

We knew that the prospect of our little studio being absorbed into a much larger entity would worry many people. While we’d worked hard to put safeguards in place that would ensure our independence, we still expected our employees to be fearful that the merger would negatively impact our culture. I’ll say more about the specific steps we took to protect Pixar in a later chapter, but here I want to discuss what happened when, in my eagerness to ease my colleagues’ fears, I stood up and assured them that Pixar would not change. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. For the next year or so, whenever we wanted to try something new or rethink an established way of working, a steady stream of alarmed and upset people would show up at my office. “You promised the merger wouldn’t affect the way we work,” they’d say. “You said that Pixar would never change.” This happened enough that I called another company-wide meeting to explain myself. “What I meant,” I said, “was that we aren’t going to change because we were acquired by a larger company. We will still go through the kinds of changes that we would have gone through anyway. Furthermore, we are always changing, because change is a good thing.” I was glad I’d cleared that up. Except that I hadn’t. In the end, I had to give the “Of course we will continue to change” speech three times before it finally sunk in. What was interesting to me was that the changes that sparked so much concern had nothing to do with the merger. These were the normal adjustments that have to be made when a business expands and evolves. It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.

I conclude that what I love best about travel is all the new people one meets—fast friends with open minds, always eager for a laugh and up for an adventure.

where everyone was severely controlled by the government structures. From early childhood I was given firm instructions about what I was supposed to do, say, and even think. I was afraid to try anything new. However, I was very lucky to meet many incredible people in my life from whom I learned to dare to try everything I wanted. I absolutely have to tell you about Alexander Suvorov, whom I met several times and who became my hero and inspiration for many years. Suvorov became totally blind and deaf when he was three years old. Nevertheless, he was so eager to live his life to the fullest that he learned to

The panic of 2007–2009 had hit Western Europe hard. Following the Lehman shock, many European countries experienced output declines and job losses similar to those in the United States. Many Europeans, especially politicians, had blamed Anglo-American “cowboy capitalism” for their predicament. (At international meetings, Tim and I never denied the United States’ responsibility for the original crisis, although the European banks that eagerly bought securitized subprime loans were hardly blameless.) This new European crisis, however, was almost entirely homegrown. Fundamentally, it arose because of a mismatch in European monetary and fiscal arrangements. Sixteen countries, in 2010, shared a common currency, the euro, but each—within ill-enforced limits—pursued separate tax and spending policies. The adoption of the euro was a grand experiment, part of a broader move, started in the 1950s, toward greater economic integration. By drawing member states closer economically, Europe’s leaders hoped not only to promote growth but also to increase political unity, which they saw as a necessary antidote to a long history of intra-European warfare, including two catastrophic world wars. Perhaps, they hoped, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese would someday think of themselves as citizens of Europe first and citizens of their home country second.