Electric Shock Quotes

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new.

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.

It's not Cam's fault," Bex told her. "We rigged her bed so that if she gets up, I get an electric shock." "Liz designed it," Macey said, and Bex shrugged. "We told you we were taking precautions." Of course. Because at Gallagher Academy, "precautions" usually equals "voluntary shock therapy".

...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure.

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.

War?" Something cold touched my cheek, and I glanched up to see snowflakes swirling in a lightning-riddled sky. It was eerily beautiful, and I shivered. "What will happen then?" Ash stepped closer. His fingers came up to brush the hair from my face, sending an electric shock through me from my spine to my toes. His cool breath tickled my ear as he leaned in. "I'll kill you.

True love is an electric shock with someone else in control of the switch.

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

The night we met, I felt you like an electric shock. Something about you calls to the devil in me.

Watching them, she realized they made so much sense together. Every look, every touch, was a reassurance, almost electric, as if they were shocking each other with every contact.

Besides, Reyna will do what she can to slow things down. She's still on our side. I know she is." "You trust her." Piper's voice sounded hollow, even to herself. "Look Pipes. I told you, you've got nothing to be jealous about." "She's beautiful. She's powerful. Se's so...Roman." Jason put down his hammer. He took her hand, which sent a tingle up her arm. Piper's dad had once taken her to the Aquarium of the Pacific and shown her an electric eel. He told her that the eel sent out pulses that shocked and paralyzed its prey. Each time Jason looked at her or touched her hand, Piper felt like that. "You're beautiful and powerful," he said. "And I don't want you to be Roman. I want you to be Piper. Besides, we're a team, you and me.

What will happen then?" Ash stepped closer. His fingers came up to brush the hair from my face, sending an electric shock through me from my spine to my toes. His cool breath tickled my ear as he leaned in. "I'll kill you.

Truth is not fully explosive, but purely electric. You don't blow the world up with the truth; you shock it into motion.

It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go.

I was tired enough to sleep, but I fought against the weariness. I wasn't going to miss a second of the time I had with him. Now and then, as he talked with Alice, he would lean down suddenly and kiss me―his glass-smooth lips brushing against my hair, my forehead, the tip of my nose. Each time it was like an electric shock to my long dormant heart. The sound of its beating seemed to fill the entire room. It was heaven―right smack in the middle of hell.

In this country people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure. Believe me, it is the mornings that determine a man's character.

Forget about the scant hours in her brief life when Sylvia Plath was able to produce the works in Ariel. Forget about that tiny bit of time and just remember the days that spanned into years when she could not move, couldn’t think straight, could only lie in wait in a hospital bed, hoping for the relief that electroconvulsive therapy would bring. Don’t think of the striking on-screen picture, the mental movie you create of the pretty young woman being wheeled on the gurney to get her shock treatments, and don’t think of the psychedelic, photonegative image of this sane woman at the moment she receives that bolt of electricity. Think, instead, of the girl herself, of the way she must have felt right then, of the way no amount of great poetry and fascination and fame could make the pain she felt at that moment worth suffering. Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes a its by-product.

You never became ordinary to me, my love. You were electric shocks and fire.

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks — already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy electricities of passion,—these two souls which held love as two clouds hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glace like clouds in a flash. The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark. At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette.

Their eyes met, and Nancy felt a charge pass between them, like a small electric shock. Hold it, she warned herself. Since when do you respond to anyone other than Ned Nickerson?

I mean, electric shock? Isn’t that a bit... electric shock-y?

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility

The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!

Now they're really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: 'Clipped prick… clipped prick.' Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: 'Jew… Clipped prick… Jew… Clipped prick.' It seems they're no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate [....]

It's shocking, isn't it, that a kiss could have led to something so big and violent and full of light as a human being? It makes me dizzy to think of all the things that start that way. Whole families, whole countries, whole worlds. Isn't it strange how a whole life can begin with a little spark?

An idea hit me so fast I didn't pause to analyse it. I just acted. My body might be constrained, but my head and neck had just enough freedom to shift up-and kiss him. My lips met his, and I learned a few things. One was that it was possible to catch him totally by surprise. His body froze and locked up, shocked at the sudden turn of events. I also realized that he was just as good a kisser as I recalled. The last time we'd kissed had been when he was a Strigoi. There had been an eerie sexiness to that, but it didn't compare to the heat and energy of being alive. His lips were just like a remembered from out time at St. Vladimir's, both soft and hungry at the same time. Electricity spread through the rest of my body as he kissed me back. It was both comforting and exhilarating. And that was was the third thing I discovered. He was kissing me back. Maybe, just maybe, Dimitri wasn't as resolved as he claimed to be. Maybe under all that guilt and certainty that he couldn't love again, he still wanted me. I would have liked to have found out. But I didn't have the time. Instead, I punched him.

Decapitation is faster and more predictable than death by hanging, lethal injection, electric shock or gassing, but the spectacle is too grim for our sensibilities.

Now I wanted to show you such a beach Would set inside your head another jewel, And lift you like the gentlest electric shock Into an altogether other England-- An Avalon for which I had the wavelength, Deep inside my head a little crystal.

Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, I broke into a total of six offices, one penthouse suite and a small bank, and cursed them all. I cursed the stones they were built on, the bricks in their walls, the paint on their ceilings, the carpets on their floors. I cursed the nylon chairs to give their owners little electric shocks, I cursed the markers to squeak on the whiteboard, the hinges to rust, the glass to run, the windows to stick, the fans to whir, the chairs to break, the computers to crash, the papers to crease, the pens to smear; I cursed the pipes to leak, the coolers to drip, the pictures to sag, the phones to crackle and the wires to spark. And we enjoyed it.

Check on Ren.” – Sundown “In the electricity cube? What kind of psycho are you?” – Sasha “Sasha…” – Sundown “Fine. I get shocked, you better start checking shoes before you put them on.” – Sasha

Haymitch isn't thinking of arenas, but something else. "Johanna's back in the hospital." I assumed Johanna was fine, had passed her exam, but simply wasn't assigned to a sharp shooters' unit. She's wicked with a throwing axe but about average with a gun. "Is she hurt? What happened?" "It was while she was on the Block. They try to ferret out a soldier's potential weakness. So they flooded the street, " says Haymitch. This doesn't help. Johanna can swim. At least, I seem to remember her swimming around some in the Quarter Quell. Not like Finnick, of course, but none of us are like Finnick. "So?" "That's how they tortured her in the Capitol. Soaked her then used electric shocks," says Haymitch. "In the Block, she had some kind of flashback. Panicked, didn't know where she was. She's back under sedation." Finnick and I just stand there as if we've lost the ability to respond. I think of the way Johanna never showers. How she forced herself into the rain like it was acid that day. I had attributed her misery to morphling withdrawal. "You two should go see her. You're as close to friends as she's got," says Haymitch. That makes the whole thing worse. I don't really know what's between Johanna and Finnick, but I hardly know her. No family. No friends.Not so much as a token from District 7 to set beside her regulation clothes in her anonymous drawer. Nothing.

In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs. He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov--the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn't. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it--it jumped the fence. You are just like these dogs. If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act--you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism. Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. . . Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state. . . Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.

Other girls carried tasers or pepper spray for safety. Rosa had bought herself a stapler in a hardware store on the corner of Baltic and Clinton Streets. Her thinking was simple. An electric shock is nasty but leaves no marks. With her method, though, she could put two or three staples into any attacker’s body. Then he’d have to stop and decide whether to tangle with her or start getting the staples out of his skin.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

I read about that in introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?

A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. (The subjects were well compensated, at least by undergraduate standards.)

The air around Weston was always electric. A crackling force field that kept people away, fueled by his barbed tongue and acid wit. If I reached through it to touch him, no doubt I’d be shocked. It would hurt like hell.

Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts -- if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?

Therapy had clearly mellowed him out. Not. He needed electric shock therapy, or a lobotomy, or both. I was willing to experiment.

waking up in space is akin to being struck by lightning. There’s no electric shock, as such, rather the shock of suddenly being aware of falling.

Insisting that women are naturally more agreeable is like offering a rat a spoonful of cod liver oil and a spoonful of peanut butter, delivering ering electric shocks every time the rat touches the peanut butter, and then concluding that rats have a natural taste for cod.

I don't want you two hurt because of me."... "At least try, sweetling. Please." At her slight nod, he did what came natural and lowered his head. She gasped into his mouth, and he pressed his lips to hers. The electric shock between them only pushed him to kiss her deeper.... "I think I can try if you're going to keep kissing me like that," she finally said, and he grinned.

This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I'm imbued, Max. I'm imbued with some special spirit. It's not a religious feeling at all. It's a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I'd been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. I feel connected to all living things. To flowers, birds, all the animals of the world. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana. But it's not a breakdown. I've never felt more orderly in my life. It is a shattering and beautiful sensation. It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and... of such loveliness. I feel on the verge of some great, ultimate truth.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.

No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

Love is like electricity sometimes; it may shock you anytime, yet you cannot live without it.

A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.

I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. Pig balls were large colored balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked having something to think about. I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first one got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked? I wish I had a pig ball.

Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news.

At the Emory University School of Medicine in 2013, researchers conducted an experiment with male mice. They exposed the mice to the smell of cherry blossoms, then gave them an electric shock. The mice came to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with danger. Eventually, the mice were able to identify the smell at trace concentrations. The smell receptors in their brain enlarged—they changed to identify the scent. Researchers even identified changes in the mice’s sperm. Then, after the mice had offspring, the researchers exposed this next generation of mice to the cherry blossom scent. Despite the fact that these mice had never smelled cherry blossoms before and had never been shocked, they still shuddered and jumped when it wafted into their cages. This generation of mice had inherited their parents’ trauma.

People don’t have anniversaries for the day they fall in love.” “They should. I remember every day and every moment that was special with you. Love is fragile... a gift. And when you love someone, you should be the caretaker of their heart.” “Loving you has been the greatest gift I’ve ever been given. You know that, right?” Xuan nodded and then pulled me close to him as if to reply. The feel of his lips on my neck was like an electric shock, making the little hairs stand. “Stay still or I’ll ruin your makeup,” he whispered in my ear. “I don’t mind being fashionably late,” I suggested.

I take small, shallow breaths, even though my lungs are begging for more air. I feel the heat of Ten’s controlled breaths against my face. As we stand there, it feels as if an electric charge is growing between us, so powerful that it would shock us if we moved even a millimeter closer together. And yet I feel like I want to.

My hands ache from the fists I hadn’t realized I’d clenched. My body shouts to run. Every nerve is alive and on fire. If I get to my drugs in time I can cut off the worst parts…the shaking involuntarily, the feeling of being shocked with an electrical current, the horrible knowledge that the world is going to end and no one knows it but me.

For more than half a century they belonged to one another. She detested the same characteristics in him that last day as she had the first time she saw him under that tree, and still adored all the others. “When you looked straight at me when I was seventy I fell just as hard as I did when I was sixteen.” She smiles. His fingertips touch the skin above her collarbone. “You never became ordinary to me, my love. You were electric shocks and fire.” Her teeth tickle his earlobe when she replies: “No one could ask for more.

His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.

You don't want to be on Electric Avenue when it rains.

Fate, with its mysterious and inexorable patience, was slowly bringing together these two beings charged, like thunder-clouds, with electricity, with the latent forces of passion, and destined to meet and mingle in a look as clouds do in a lightning-flash. So much has been made in love-stories of the power of a glance that we have ended by undervaluing it. We scarcely dare say in these days that two persons fell in love because their eyes met. Yet that is how one falls in love and in no other way. What remains is simply what remains, and it comes later. Nothing is more real than the shock two beings sustain when that spark flies between them.

This person is (pick one): 1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns; 2. possessed by (pick one) a) the gods, b) God (that is, a prophet), c) some bad spirits, demons, or devils, d) the Devil, 3. a witch 4. bewitched (variant of 2); 5. bad, and must be isolated and punished, 6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by (pick one): a) purging and leeches, b) removing the uterus if the person has one, c) electric shock to the brain, d) cold sheets wrapped tight around the body, e) Thorazine or Stelazine; 7. ill, and must spend the next seven years talking about it; 8. a victim of society's low tolerance of deviant behavior; 9. sane in an insane world; 10. on a perilous journey from which he or she may never return.

The night was fading. It was too early to be called dawn yet, but Taylor could just make out the outline of Will's weary, unshaven face. His deep blue eyes were the only color in the gray world of rain and shadows. Will leaned in, and his mouth covered Taylor's, rough but sweet, his tongue seeking Taylor's. Taylor opened willingly to that kiss, forgetting for a second his scratched, scraped hands and the rain running down the back of his neck. They kissed a lot these days, especially for men who had never been much for kissing. Taylor had become expert in all Will's kisses, from the hungry, lustful kisses that always made his own cock rise so fast it hurt, to the tender, almost cherishing kisses that Will generally saved for when he thought Taylor was sleeping. That dawn kiss beneath the pine trees rippled through him like an electric shock, a reminder that, tired, wet, and lost as they might be, so long as they were together, they were all right.

The town itself had been swallowed, strangled, and buried. In a very real sense there was no Augustam and there were no more fat ladies, or pretty girls, or pompous men, or wet-crotched children waving puffy clouds of cotton candy. There was no bustling Italian man here to throw slices of watermelon. Only Crowd, a creature with no body, no head, no mind. Crowd was nothing but a Voice and an Eye, and it was not surprising that Crowd was both God and Mammon. Garraty felt it. He knew the others were feeling it. It was like walking between giants electrical pylons, feeling the tingles and shocks stand every hair on end, making the tongue jitter nuttily in the mouth, making the eyes seem to crackle and shoot of sparks as they rolled in their beds of moisture. Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshiped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.

in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realize (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazka's daring talk but the rape of his life; they realized (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals.

My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always comes as a shock, exactly like an electric jolt, that grounds itself perfectly in my memory.

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to / not true’. As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.

What Disneyland proposes is a technique of abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient's rich psychic relation to his country's history and language and literature. In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique may be extremely useful both as a substitute for education and, eventually, as a substitute for experience.

A fascinating and somewhat disturbing study out of the University of Virginia showed that, given the choice, many preferred undergoing electric shock to sitting alone with their thoughts. Study participants were exposed to a mild shock, which they all reported they didn’t like and would pay money not to undergo again. But when left alone in an empty room with a “shocker” button for up to fifteen minutes, removed from all distractions, unable to check their phones or listen to music, two-thirds of men and one-fourth of women in the study chose to voluntarily shock themselves rather than sit in silence. Dr. Tim Wilson, who helped conduct the study, said, “I think this could be why, for many of us, external activities are so appealing, even at the level of the ubiquitous cell phone that so many of us keep consulting. . . . The mind is so prone to want to engage with the world, it will take any opportunity to do so.

My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days. Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while. Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.

When I got to school the next morning I had stepped only one foot in the quad when he spotted me and nearly tackled me to the ground. “Jamie!” he hollered, rushing across the lawn without caring the least bit about the scene he was creating. The next thing I knew, my feet were off the ground and I was squished so tightly in Ryan’s arms that I could barely breathe. “Okay, Ryan?” I coughed in a hushed tone. “This is exactly the kind of thing that can get you killed.” “I don’t care, I’m not letting go. Don’t ever disappear like that again!” he scolded, but his voice was more relieved than angry. “It’s been days! You had your mother worried sick!” “My mother?” I questioned sarcastically. Ryan laughed as he finally set me back on my feet. “Okay, fine, me too.” He still wouldn’t let go of me, though. He was gripping my arms while he looked at me with those eyes, and that smile… You know, being all Ryan-ish. And then, when I got lost in the moment, he totally took advantage of how whipped I was and he kissed me. The jerk. He just pulled my face to his right then and there, in the middle of a crowded quad full of students, where I could have accidentally unleashed an electrical storm at any moment. And okay, maybe I liked it, and maybe I even needed it, but still! You can’t just go kissing Jamie Baker whenever you want, even if you are Ryan Miller! “Ryan!” I yelled as soon as I was able to pull away from him—which admittedly took a minute. “I’m sorry.” Ryan laughed with this big dopey grin on his face and then kissed me some more. I had to push him away from me. “Don’t be sorry, just stop!” I realized I was screaming at him when I felt a hundred different pairs of eyes on me. I tried to ignore the audience that Ryan seemed oblivious to and dropped the audio a few decibels. “I wasn’t kidding when I said this has to stop. Look, I will be your friend. I want to be your friend. But that’s it. We can’t be anything more. It’ll never work.” Ryan watched me for a minute and then whispered, “Don’t do that.” I was shocked to hear the sudden emotion in his voice. “Don’t give up.” It was hopeless. “Fine!” I snapped. “I’ll be your stupid girlfriend!” Big shocker, me giving Ryan his way, I know. But let’s face it—it’s just what I do best. I had to at least act a little tough, though. “But!” I said in the harshest voice I was capable of. “You can’t ever touch me unless I say. No more tackling me, and especially no more surprise kissing.” He actually laughed at my request. “No promises.” Stupid, cocky boyfriend. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?” Ryan got this big cheesy smile on his face and said, “Crazy about you.” “Ugh,” I groaned. “Would you be serious for a minute? Why do you insist on putting your life in danger?” “Because I like you.” His stupid grin was infectious. I wanted to be angry, but how could I with him looking at me like that? “I’m not worth it, you know,” I said stubbornly. “I have issues. I’m unstable.” “You’re cute when you’re unstable,” Ryan said, “and I like your issues.” The stupid boy was straight-up giddy now. But he was so cute that I cracked a smile despite myself. “You really are crazy,” I muttered.

I wasn't in danger today," I tell him in a choked voice. "I escaped danger today." And I did... I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn't even known I was in. "I escaped," I repeat.

Why worry? if you have done your best you can. worrying wont make it any better. If you want to be successful, respect one rule - Never let failures take control of you... Everybody has gone through something that has changed them in a way that they never could go back to the person they once were. Relationships are like electric currents, wrong connection will give you shock throughout your life, but the right one will light up your life.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing your foot on a carpet). Over a series of these, the rat develops a prolonged stress-response: its heart rate and glucocorticoid secretion rate go up, for example. For convenience, we can express the long-term consequences by how likely the rat is to get an ulcer, and in this situation, the probability soars. In the next room, a different rat gets the same series of shocks—identical pattern and intensity; its allostatic balance is challenged to exactly the same extent. But this time, whenever the rat gets a shock, it can run over to a bar of wood and gnaw on it. The rat in this situation is far less likely to get an ulcer. You have given it an outlet for frustration. Other types of outlets work as well—let the stressed rat eat something, drink water, or sprint on a running wheel, and it is less likely to develop an ulcer.

When I change I change fast. The moon drags the whatever-it-is up from the earth and it goes through me with crazy wriggling impatience. I picture it as an electrical discharge, entering at my soles and racing upwards in haywire detonations that shock the bones and explode the neurons. The magic's dark red, violent, compressed. I get random flashes of mundane memory-- pushing a shopping cart around Met Foods; opening my apartment window; standing on a subway platform; saying to someone, No, that's carbohydrates in the evenings-- intercut with images of the kills; a white male body on an oil-stained warehouse floor; a solitary trailer with a storm lamp burning; a female thigh releasing a dark arc of blood; my clawed hand scooping out a still-hot heart. This is the Curse's neatest trick: one type of memory doesn't destroy the other. It's still you. It's still all you. You wouldn't think you were built to bear such opposites, but you are. You'd think the system would crash, but it doesn't.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

Guilt is different from shame. It has a different weight. Shame just heavies the bones, in a most insinuating way, rousing them to a dense, salty jelly. Guilt, though, is quick and hot and silvery, and it flashes through you with the regular, metered pulse of an electrical current, animating everything inside you to do something, anything, to make the shock stop.

In a set of classic experiments, the psychologist Z. Y. Kuo6 showed that almost all kittens who witness their mother killing and eating a rodent eventually do so themselves. However, when kittens are raised in the same cage with a rat, never seeing any other rat, and never seeing a cat kill a rat, then they almost never kill rats themselves. When kittens have a rat for a littermate and also witness their mothers killing rats outside the cage, about half of them learn to kill—but they tend to kill only the kinds of rat they had seen their mothers kill, and not the kinds that they grew up with. Finally, when kittens are given an electric shock each time they see a rat, they soon learn not to kill rats—indeed, to run in terror from them.

I want to see her naked, " Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene's and said, "You can't have her. I love her, my daughter." My father said, "Take the younger one. She's smarter, " as he pushed me over forward. Marlene cried because father said I was smarter even though he was just trying to manipulate Mengele. The doctor's chest grew large.

Zits,” I said. “Z-I-T-S. Actually, I don’t think you even need electric bolts. You could just breathe on us.” I looked him in the eyes and smiled. “Seriously, dude, when was the last time you brushed your teeth?” “Shut up!” “No, really. Did you eat a diaper?” “Shut up!” he shouted. He squinted. “Do you know how much I enjoyed guarding your mother? I shocked her at least a dozen times just to watch her squeal.” “Yeah, well you could have just sat next to her and let her smell you. That would have been much worse. I’ve had hamsters with better hygiene.” “Enough! Don’t think I won’t electrocute you, Vey!” Taylor looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “It’s his Tourette’s, he can’t help it.” “I’m scared, Zits,” I said. “You know Hatch would have your head if you did. But here’s my promise: after I’m in charge, my first command is to make you my shoeshine boy. You’ll be following me around with a towel.” “You’ll never be in charge.” “No, that’s what Hatch said. You heard him. He wants my power. I’m not kidding, Zits. When Hatch was trying to get me to join you guys, he promised me that you would be my servant.” Zeus looked at me with a worried expression. After a moment he shouted, “Shut up! And stop calling me Zits!” “I don’t think I will. In fact, it’s going to be the first rule I make. I’m going to have everyone else call you that.” “I don’t care what Hatch says. I’m gonna fry you, Vey.” “Oooh, now I’m really shaking. You don’t have enough juice in you to light a flashlight.” “Michael!” Taylor shouted. “Stop it. He’s got a temper. I’ve seen it.” “You should listen to the cheerleader, Vey.” He stepped toward me. “You think you’re so cool. But you can’t shoot electricity like me, can you? You’re just a flesh-covered battery.” “And you’re a flesh-covered outhouse. You should tie a couple hundred of those car air fresheners around your neck.” “Last warning!” Zeus shouted. “I’m not kidding, Zits. There are porta-potties with better aromas. Would a little deodorant kill you? What was the last year you took a bath?

The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. When my mother, alone at college, heard that her father, who had championed her right to an education in rural 1960s India, had finally died after a long hospitalization, she had a psychogenic seizure—which continued until she returned home to attend the funeral.

One night, during a storm, an engineer named W. W. Bradfield was sitting at the Wimereux transmitter, when suddenly the door to the room crashed open. In the portal stood a man disheveled by the storm and apparently experiencing some form of internal agony. He blamed the transmissions and shouted that they must stop. The revolver in his hand imparted a certain added gravity. Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the intruder he understood his problem and that his experience was not unusual. He was in luck, however, Bradfield said, for he had “come to the only man alive who could cure him.” This would require an “electrical inoculation,” after which, Bradfield promised, he “would be immune to electro-magnetic waves for the rest of his life.” The man consented. Bradfield instructed him that for his own safety he must first remove from his person anything made of metal, including coins, timepieces, and of course the revolver in his hand. The intruder obliged, at which point Bradfield gave him a potent electrical shock, not so powerful as to kill him, but certainly enough to command his attention. The man left, convinced that he was indeed cured.

I pushed her shiny blond hair away from her face and leaned down, our faces only inches apart. She inhaled softly, our lips so close I could feel her breath and the scent of her skin, like honeysuckle in springtime. She smelled like sweet tea and old books, like she had always been here. I pulled my fingers through her hair and held it at the back of her neck. Her skin was soft and warm, like a Mortal girl's. There was no electric current, no shocks. We could kiss for as long as we wanted. If we had a fight, there wouldn't be a flood or a hurricane, or even a storm. I wouldn't find her on the ceiling of her bedroom. No windows would shatter. No exams would catch fire. Liv held up her face to be kissed. She wanted me.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

It was getting late, but sleep was the furthest thing from my racing mind. Apparently that was not the case for Mr. Sugar Buns. He lay back, closed his eyes, and threw an arm over his forehead, his favorite sleeping position. I could hardly have that. So, I crawled on top of him and started chest compressions. It seemed like the right thing to do. "What are you doing?" he asked without removing his arm. "Giving you CPR." I pressed into his chest, trying not to lose count. Wearing a red-and-black football jersey and boxers that read, DRIVERS WANTED. SEE INSIDE FOR DETAILS, I'd straddled him and now worked furiously to save his life, my focus like that of a seasoned trauma nurse. Or a seasoned pot roast. It was hard to say. "I'm not sure I'm in the market," he said, his voice smooth and filled with a humor I found appalling. He clearly didn't appreciate my dedication. "Damn it, man! I'm trying to save your life! Don't interrupt." A sensuous grin slid across his face. He tucked his arms behind his head while I worked. I finished my count, leaned down, put my lips on his, and blew. He laughed softly, the sound rumbling from his chest, deep and sexy, as he took my breath into his lungs. That part down, I went back to counting chest compressions. "Don't you die on me!" And praying. After another round, he asked, "Am I going to make it?" "It's touch-and-go. I'm going to have to bring out the defibrillator." "We have a defibrillator?" he asked, quirking a brow, clearly impressed. I reached for my phone. "I have an app. Hold on." As I punched buttons, I realized a major flaw in my plan. I needed a second phone. I could hardly shock him with only one paddle. I reached over and grabbed his phone as well. Started punching buttons. Rolled my eyes. "You don't have the app," I said from between clenched teeth. "I had no idea smartphones were so versatile." "I'll just have to download it. It'll just take a sec." "Do I have that long?" Humor sparkled in his eyes as he waited for me to find the app. I'd forgotten the name of it, so I had to go back to my phone, then back to his, then do a search, then download, then install it, all while my patient lay dying. Did no one understand that seconds counted? "Got it!" I said at last. I pressed one phone to his chest and one to the side of his rib cage like they did in the movies, and yelled, "Clear!" Granted, I didn't get off him or anything as the electrical charge riddled his body, slammed his heart into action, and probably scorched his skin. Or that was my hope, anyway. He handled it well. One corner of his mouth twitched, but that was about it. He was such a trouper. After two more jolts of electricity--it had to be done--I leaned forward and pressed my fingertips to his throat. "Well?" he asked after a tense moment. I released a ragged sigh of relief,and my shoulders fell forward in exhaustion. "You're going to be okay, Mr. Farrow." Without warning, my patient pulled me into his arms and rolled me over, pinning me to the bed with his considerable weight and burying his face in my hair. It was a miracle!

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

MICHAEL (standing up and stretching) Gosh, Steve. I don't know how to thank you. STEVE (also standing) Hey, don't thank me. It means you haven't got any excuse now not to get back to work. They are facing each other. STEVE is looking into MICHAEL's eyes. MICHAEL (embarrassed) So... STEVE (also slightly awkward) Right. Well, I guess I'd better be... MICHAEL, surprising himself, silently pulls STEVE towards him. He puts a hand on his cheek. STEVE stares at MICHAEL, unable to move. The feeling of MICHAEL's hand on his cheek is like an electric shock. MICHAEL (whispering, hardly audible) I mean it, really... thanks. He leans forward and kisses STEVE on the lips. STEVE puts his arms round MICHAEL's neck and holds him tightly. MICHAEL suddenly ends the kiss and pulls away. He goes to the door, opens it and says, in a clear voice. MICHAEL Goodnight, then, Steve. STEVE (disappointed, hurt) Right... sure. G'night. MICHAEL immediately closes the door loudly, before STEVE has had a chance to leave. MICHAEL puts a finger to his lips. STEVE suddenly understands. He smiles in radiant relief, pure love and joy in his eyes. They embrace.

We lunged for each other at the same time and collided, crazy with need and starving for a taste. Warnings and alarms wailed in my mind, but I shut them down. Screw it. I wanted him. He found my mouth. The thrust of his tongue against mine made my head spin. He tasted like heaven. I kissed him back, nipping, licking, melting against him. It felt so good . . . His lips traced a fiery line from my mouth to the corner of my jaw and down my neck. My whole body sang in warm liquid triumph. His voice was a ragged whisper in my ear. “Only if you want to . . . Say no, and I’ll stop.” “No,” I whispered to see if he would do it. Curran pulled back. His eyes were pure need, raw and barely under control. He swallowed. “Okay.” It was the most erotic thing I had ever seen. I reached for him and slid my hand up his chest, feeling the taut muscle. He caught my hand and kissed my palm gently. Heated, tightly controlled want shone in his eyes. I pulled my fingers free, pushed from the wall, and kissed his throat just under the jaw. This was bliss. There was no hope for me. He growled, closing his eyes. “What are you doing?” “Pulling on Death’s whiskers,” I murmured, letting my tongue play over his skin, rough with stubble. He smelled divine, clean and male. My hands slid up his biceps. His muscles tensed under the light pressure of my fingers. He was trying very, very hard to stand still and I almost laughed. All those times when he’d called me “baby” . . . Revenge was sweet. “Is that a yes or a no?” he asked. I slid against him and nipped his bottom lip. “I’ll take it as a yes.” The steel muscles of his arms flexed under my hands. He grabbed me, hoisted me up onto him, and kissed me, thrusting into my mouth with his tongue in a hot, slick rhythm, greedy and eager. I threw my arms around his neck. His right hand grasped my hair, his left cupped my butt and pushed me closer against him, his erection a hard, hot length across my lap. Finally— “Let me in,” Derek growled at the door. Go away. The guard said something. Curran’s hand found my breast and caressed the nipple, sending an electric shock through my skin, threatening to melt me . . . “Yes,” Derek snarled. “I’m a member of the damn team. Ask them.” “Curran,” I whispered. “Curran!” He snarled and kept going. The door swung open. I hit him on the back of the neck. He submerged. Help. I’ve drowned the Beast Lord.

During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate. “Always be happy.” It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

Once the spark catches, once the prepared, courageous combination of camp, melody, enigma, fantasy, paranoia, electric guitars, shock, male make-up and flirtation took hold, and he found himself at last in the right place at the right time, nothing can stop the momentum from growing. Repressed fantasies, forbidden pleasures, rule-breaking spirit and highly suggestive erotic discrepancies are released with tremendous force into the mainstream. They make it there mostly through Bowie’s insatiable mind and body, which has adopted the perfect disguise of an ambiguously sexy, deadly smart and attractively damaged pop star.

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think is worth describing in detail. Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock---no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others. From personal convictions which will be mentioned later, I made myself a firm promise, on my first evening in camp, that I would not “run into the wire.” This was a phrase used in camp to describe the most popular method of suicide—touching the electrically charged barbed-wire fence. It was not entirely difficult for me to make this decision. There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation, calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor. He could not with any assurance expect to be among the small percentage of men who survived all the selections. The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide.

a perfect description of the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate men are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of man’s slavery to his social system. But in Kierkegaard’s time it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was triviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security: Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs… . Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial…

It ascended by levels: Da's cameo recessed against the glow of the tuner's parade,the drawer of utensils withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate attempt by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him, I no longer feeling my features' movements so much as seeing them on that writhing white face against the pantry's black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the gag's restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even my ears, my face before us bother farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the fun-house mirror- the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges- as the mimicry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man's sobs blocked by cloth, storm's thrum and electric hiss and Da's mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs, an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white, knowing past sight that my twin's face would show the same, to mock it- until the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank sack gagged mask's mindless stare-un seen and seeing- into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again.

I am sure you understand," Father began, looking past Violet at the wall, "that I cannot allow you back into my house after what you have done. I have arranged for you to be taken to a finishing school in Scotland. You will stay there for two years, and after that I will decide what is to be done with you." Violet heard Graham clear his throat. "No," she said, before her brother could open his mouth to speak. "That won't be acceptable, I'm afraid, Father." His jowls slackened with shock. He looked as if she had slapped him. "I beg your pardon?" "I won't be going to Scotland. In fact, I won't be going anywhere. I'm staying right here." As she spoke, Violet became aware of a strange simmering sensation, as though electricity was humming beneath her skin. Images flashed in her mind---a crow cutting through the air, wings glittered with snow; the spokes of a wheel spinning. Briefly, she closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling until she could almost see it, glinting gold inside her. "That is not for you to decide," said Father. The window was open, and a bee flitted about the room, wings a silver blur. It flew near Father's cheek and he jerked away from it. "It's been decided." She stood up straight, her dark eyes boring into Father's watery ones. He blinked. The bee hovered about his face, dancing away from his hands, and she saw sweat break out on his nose. Soon it was joined by another, and then another and another, until it seemed like Father---shouting and swearing---had been engulfed in a cloud of tawny, glistening bodies. "I think it would be best if you left now, Father," said Violet softly. "After all, as you said, I'm my mother's daughter.

The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

Pretty soft!' he cried. 'To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!' I felt rather like Lot's friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent. 'It would kill me to have to live in New York,' he went on. 'To have to share the air with six million people! TO have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To - ' He started. 'Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!' I was shocked, absolutely shocked. 'My dear chap!' I said, reproachfully. 'Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?' 'Jeeves,' I said coldly. 'How many suits of evening clothes have we?' 'We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets- ' 'Three.' 'For practical purposes, two only, sir. If you remember, we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.' 'And shirts?' 'Four dozen, sir.' 'And white ties?' 'The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our white ties, sir.' I turned to Rocky. 'You see?' The chappie writhed like an electric fan. 'I won't do it! I can't do it! I'll be hanged if I'll do it! How on earth can I dress up like that? Do you realise that most days I don't get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon and then I just put on an old sweater?' I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap. This sort of revelation shocked his finest feelings.

Obama occasionally pointed out that the post–Cold War moment was always going to be transitory. The rest of the world will accede to American leadership, but not dominance. I remember a snippet from a column around 9/11: America bestrides the world like a colossus. Did we? It was a story we told ourselves. Shock and awe. Regime change. Freedom on the march. A trillion dollars later, we couldn’t keep the electricity running in Baghdad. The Iraq War disturbed other countries—including U.S. allies—in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power and influence that was further advanced by the global financial crisis. By the time Obama took office, a global correction had already taken place. Russia was resisting American influence. China was throwing its weight around. Europeans were untangling a crisis in the Eurozone. Obama didn’t want to disengage from the world; he wanted to engage more. By limiting our military involvement in the Middle East, we’d be in a better position to husband our own resources and assert ourselves in more places, on more issues. To rebuild our economy at home. To help shape the future of the Asia Pacific and manage China’s rise. To open up places like Cuba and expand American influence in Africa and Latin America. To mobilize the world to deal with truly existential threats such as climate change, which is almost never discussed in debates about American national security.

When Bill died, I was for the first time faced with the loss of a friend, and what I initially felt when I read the news of his death in the New York Times—he had died suddenly of a heart attack—was numbness and shock. I kept thinking I should have felt more pain or sadness or grief or something. I kept trying to figure out how to grieve properly. While I was trying to sort out my response to Bill’s death, I had a conversation over lunch with my ex-boyfriend Keith, who had remained a good friend after we’d split up. He’d always been a great sounding board and an uncommonly clearheaded source of wisdom and advice. “I don’t know what to do about all this,” I told him. “I don’t know how to process it.” “Well,” he said, leaning forward intensely, as he always did when he talked, his right hand chopping the air, his boyish face bobbing up and down, “the thing is, the thing is, when you have someone you know who’s died, you have to grieve, of course, but really, there are different things you have to grieve.” “What do you mean?” “Well, you know, you have to grieve the loss of the person, you know, the fact that the actual person won’t be there anymore to talk to, to laugh with, to share memories with, that sort of thing.” “Right.” “And then you have to, you have to mourn the loss of who that person held you to be. Because that dies with them. Their vision of you no longer exists. And a whole world of who you are is gone. So you have to mourn that, too.” I sat there and took that in, an electric current of recognition coursing through my body. “That…makes sense,” I said. Keith nodded vigorously. “Yeah, it does. It does.” I shook my head. “How do you know all this stuff?” It was a question I often asked Keith; he and I were the same age, but his insight into profound human matters often outshined my own. He laughed a high-pitched giggle. “I don’t know.” That was always his answer.

Jack Sanford looks back fondly on childhood visits to the old family farmhouse in New Hampshire. In particular, he’s never forgotten the old well that stood outside the front door. The water from the well was surprisingly pure and cold, and no matter how hot the summer or how severe the drought, the well was always dependable, a source of refreshment and joy. The faithful old well was a big part of his memories of summer vacations at the family farmhouse. Time passed and eventually the farmhouse was modernized. Wiring brought electric lights, and indoor plumbing brought hot and cold running water. The old well was no longer needed, so it was sealed shut. Years later while vacationing at the farmhouse, Sanford hankered for the cold, pure water of his youth. So he unsealed the well and lowered the bucket for a nostalgic taste of the delightful refreshment he once knew. But he was shocked to discover that the well that had once survived the worst droughts was bone dry. Perplexed, he began to ask questions of the locals who knew about these kinds of things. He learned that wells of that sort were fed by hundreds of tiny underground rivulets, which seep a steady flow of water. As long as water is drawn out of the well, new water will flow in through the rivulets, keeping them open for more to flow. But when the water stops flowing, the rivulets clog with mud and close up. The well dried up not because it was used too much but because it wasn’t used enough. Our souls are like that well. If we do not draw regularly and frequently on the living water that Jesus promised would well up in us like a spring,66 our hearts will close and dry up. The consequence of not drinking deeply of God is to eventually lose the ability to drink at all. Prayerlessness is its own worst punishment, both its disease and cause. David’s description of his prayer life is a picture of a man who knew the importance of frequent, regular prayer—disciplined prayer, each morning. Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly. He knew how important it was to keep the water flowing—that from the human side of prayer, the most important thing to do is just to keep showing up. Steady, disciplined routine may be the most underrated necessity of the prayerful life.

It takes some getting used to,' Mr. Forkle said. 'But what you're seeing is a visual representation of each other's moods.' 'So that means if I do this...' Keefe tickled Sophie's neck. 'GAH--everything just went supersonic!' Fitz said. Sophie snatched Keefe's wrist as he reached to tickle her again. 'Don't. You. Dare.' 'Whoa, now everything's red and ripply,' Fitz said. 'Is that because she's angry?' 'Precisely, Mr. Vacker. Every time her emotions shift, the patterns and colors will change. And with practice, you'll learn to interpret what you see.' 'Okay, but...can't they just say, "Hey, I'm feeling this?"' Keefe asked. 'People aren't always honest about their feelings--even with themselves,' Mr. Forkle told him. 'Plus, many telepathic missions involve stealth and secrecy. So for this exercise I'm going to need both of you to forget everything around you. Let the world drop away, leaving only you two.' Keefe sighed. 'Just tell them to stare into each other's eyes and they'll be good.' 'None of that, Mr. Sencen. From this moment on, you have one job and one job only: to judge their translations of the various emotions I'll be triggering.' 'Triggering how?' Sophie asked. 'You'll see soon enough. And you'll go first, Miss Foster. For this to work, Mr. Vacker, it's crucial that you not react externally. No yelling or thrashing or screaming or--' 'Uhhh, what are you going to do to me?' Fitz asked. 'Nothing you won't survive. Consider it an exercise in self-control. And try not to listen to his thoughts, Miss Foster. Study only the changes in his emotional center and make your deduction. We begin now.' Sophie closed her eyes and focus on the colors weaving around Fitz's mind. She was about to ask if she was missing something when the pattern exploded into a swirl of pale blue tendrils. The color felt to bright to be sad, but also too wild to be peaceful. 'Tension?' she guessed. 'Kinda close,' Keefe told her. The laughter in his voice made her wonder what had happened to poor Fitz. She tried to think of other emotions as his mind turned electric blue. 'Shock?' she guessed. 'That counts,' Keefe said. 'Though the best answer would've been "surprise."' 'Is that an emotion?' she asked. 'Indeed it is,' Mr. Forkle said. 'One of the most common emotions you'll experience as you navigate someone's mind--hence why I chose it as our starting point.' 'Can I talk now?' Fitz asked. 'Because that was seriously disgusting!' Sophie opened her eyes and tried not to laugh when she saw red fruit smashed all over Fitz's face. He wiped his cheeks on his sleeves, but that only smeared the pulp. 'I think I'm going to like this assignment,' Keefe said. 'What else can we fling at Fitz?' 'Nothing for the moment,' Mr. Forkle told him. 'It's his turn to interpret. Everyone close your eyes. And remember, no cues of any kind, Miss Foster.' Sophie counted the seconds, bracing for the worst--and when nothing chaned, she opened her eyes and found Mr. Forkle with his finger over his lips in a 'shhh' sign. 'Um...confusion,' Fitz guessed. 'That works,' Keefe said. 'It started as anticipation, but then it shifted.' 'Very good,' Mr. Forkle said. 'And well done, Mr. Sencen. I wasn't sure you'd recognize confusion. It's one of the more challenging emotions for Empaths.' 'Maybe on other people,' Keefe said. 'But on Foster it's easy. Why are her emotions so much stronger?' 'Honestly, I'm not sure,' Mr. Forkle admitted. 'I suspect it stems from the combination of her inflicting ability and her human upbringing. But it was one of the surprises of her development. Much like her teleporting. Okay, Miss Foster, it's your turn to guess again.' She closed her eyes and watched as the lines of color in Fitz's mind blossomed to a snowflake of purple. 'Pride?' she guessed. Keefe laughed. 'Wow, add more fail points to Sophitz.' 'Quiet,' Mr. Forkle told him.