Elsewhere Book Quotes

It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

My body is but wax and wick for flame. When the candle burns out, the light shines elsewhere.

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

What are you reading?" Owen asks. "Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died." "You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.

I like to imagine my used books as little soldiers that have gone off to serve their duty elsewhere before coming into my hands. Books are something to be stepped inside of, to be occupied and lived in.

The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.

Ms. McMartin had no close family. Her nearest relative was a distant cousin who had recently died in Shanghai, after a severe allergic reaction to a bowl of turtle and arsenic soup.

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself.

One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: 'The editor is always right.' The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection.

I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.

It's been my experience that those people who seem the most 'normal' are in fact the most dangerous.

The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here. •

Whenever a soldier needed an escape, the antidote to anxiety, relief from boredom, a bit of laughter, inspiration, or hope, he cracked open a book and drank in the words that would transport him elsewhere.

The thing about Shakespeare is you can only read his books if someone is making you.

Don't be fooled by the many books on complexity or by the many complex and arcane algorithms you find in this book or elsewhere. Although there are no textbooks on simplicity, simple systems work and complex don't.

With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.

As women, do we have the same rights as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have a equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don't satisfy us, then we have a right to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through.

Old Mother Hubbard Went to the cupboard To get her dear dog a bone. Though the cupboard was bare, When she focused elsewhere Her heart overflowed with fun!

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul. Real friendship and holiness enable a person to frequently visit the hearth of his solitude;

If it is peace you seek then you need only turn and walk away. Leave." "To leave here is to arrive elsewhere. I cannot retreat from disorder, for it shall surely follow. Peace must be asserted where one finds oneself. Only when discord is resolved will there be peace.

do not look for me in other people.   i do not exist elsewhere   and when you meet another, do not mention my name nor keep me in your memory.   for surely you will try to find me in her but you will not be satisfied. forget me. and make sure she doesn't read this book.

The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?

Adieu, sucky speed-reading critics and reviewers!" Terry Dare, gothic author in Blatty's book "Elsewhere", just before he crosses over.

But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

My research continues to amaze and baffle me. As human beings, we are geniuses. What we didn’t get from the home, we find ways of getting elsewhere. It’s evident, then, when one looks at the stats we don’t have a teenage pregnancy problem and we don’t have a street gang problem. I will even suggest that we don’t have a drug and alcohol problem, nor do we have a crime problem rather, these are only the symptoms that we are experiencing, and the real problem is broken homes that result in broken lives.

Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.

How many times in life have I been advised to "toe the line," to "tone it down," to stop "pushing the envelope"? As a journalist, I had to keep my opinions to myself for 30 years. I thought that, as an artist, I'd have the liberty to express my views. Now I'm told that doing so might hurt my readership. I'm so idealistic, as I said elsewhere on FB today, that I think people ought to read my books because they're good. Period.

We were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. […] We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren’t ‘real geeks’ because we were girls.

Unless you can refute the central argument of this book, you should now recognize that speciesism is wrong, and this means that, if you take morality seriously, you should try to eliminate speciesist practices from your own life, and oppose them elsewhere. Otherwise no basis remains from which you can, without hypocrisy, criticize racism or sexism.

All I want is a home, books, and the peace to read them.

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

I have always used writing to learn what it is that I think. And I find myself disinclined to leave these mysteries unexamined. I would like to know what I think about this.

Basically, until we are very enlightened, some odd mixture of compassion and confusion motivates everything we do, as mentioned elsewhere, and so we have to learn to work with this.

Libraries are not safe places, for their shelves are filled with books, but also with ideas regarding freedom, justice, truth, faith, and much more, ideas that some find intolerable.

One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: “The editor is always right.” The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.

The story of human nature is a fair romance. Am I to blame if it is not found elsewhere? I am trying to write the history of mankind. If my book is a romance, the fault lies with those who deprave mankind.

What are we after when we open one of those books? What is it that makes a classic a classic? ... in old-fashioned terms, the answer is that it wll elevate your spirit. And that's why I can't take much stock in the idea of going through a list of books or 'covering' a fixed number of selections, or anyway striving for the blessed state of having read this, or the other. Having read a book means nothing. Reading a book may be the most tremendous experience of your life; having read it is an item in your memory, part of your receding past... Why we have that odd faith in the magic of having read a book, I don't know. We don't apply the same principle elsewhere: We don't believe in having heard Mendelssohn's violin concerto... I say, don't read the classics -- try to discover your own classics; every life has its own.

That, ultimately, is the whole point of language, isn’t it? To lessen the crushing burden of existence by creating a tiny bridge between us. I make some sounds, and you feel seen and understood and less lonely.

Olive was the type of girl who would rather climb a teetering stack of chairs up to a high shelf than ask for help, perhaps because she had a lot more practice at falling down than she did at talking to people.

The better a writer, the better he erases his footprints- yet the better the writer, the more he wants us to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author’s soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.

even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West

On a shirt, every button has its own button-hole. Fix a button elsewhere and your dressing goes crazy and nasty! On earth, everyone has his/her dreams. You have your own. Fix yourself there and your life will be fully fulfilled!

It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, recognize myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them.

(Always bring a book, as protection against strangers. Magazines don’t last. Newspapers from home will make you homesick, and newspapers from elsewhere will remind you you don’t belong. You know how alien another paper’s typeface seems.)

It's worth remembering that [having a baby] is not of vital use to you as a woman. Yes, you could learn thousands of interesting things about love, strength, faith, fear, human relationships, genetic loyalty, and the effect of apricots on an immune digestive system. But I don't think there's a single lesson that motherhood has to offer that couldn't be learned elsewhere. If you want to know what's in motherhood for you, as a woman, then-in truth-it's nothing you couldn't get from, say, reading the 100 greatest books in human history; learning a foreign language well enough to argue in it; climbing hills; loving recklessly; sitting quietly, alone, in the dawn; drinking whiskey with revolutionaries; learning to do close-hand magic; swimming in a river in the winter; growing foxgloves, peas, and roses; calling your mum; singing while you walk; being polite; and always, always helping strangers. No one has ever claimed for a minute that childless men have missed out on a vital aspect of their existence, and were the poorer and crippled by it. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Newton, Faraday, Plato, Aquinas, Beethoven, Handel, Kant, Hume, Jesus. They all seem to have managed quite well.

In that room on Via Clelia, I manage to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside it. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over this buildings, a film that washed down Via Clelia like a sheet of rainwater, casting a shimmering spell on this hard, humdrum, here-and-now area of lower-middle-class Rome.

Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program. There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools. You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.

What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me. The values that dominated my childhood had no place there. That world enchanted me. I could leave the real world behind and be someone else, without any ties or obligations. With you, I was elsewhere, in a foreign place, foreign to myself. You gave me access to another dimension when I'd always rejected any fixed identity and just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine. By speaking to you in English, I made your language mine. I've continued to talk to you in English right up to this day, even when you answered me in French. For me, English, which I knew mainly through you and through books, was from the start like a private language that preserved our intimacy against the intrusion of the real world, and its prevailing social normals. I felt like I was building a protected and protective world with you.

Here again the Japanese method of interior decoration differs from that of the Occident, where we see objects arrayed symmetrically on mantelpieces and elsewhere. In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud.

The great, great run of us, in the tales told by winds and mountains and trees and cities and the sea and Leviathan and the abyss and by him, my erstwhile master then companion, of whom we spoke, are full stops. We are what happens in the infinitely small instance between one moment worthy of remark and another. We are specks. Milliards of us contained within each such tiny beady ink eye. But I believe, and I hope it is not the arrogance of love that befuddles me because I do not say I loved him and I know he never loved me, but I believe that were he ever to speak of me, if he were to write the great book of his own life, when it came to the few years I was at his side, that he, for the curl of a moment, as if raising a finger, would pause as if for breath. That I am one of the elect, privileged forever to be a comma.

Once you spent three lifetimes sitting without moving on a stone chair halfway up a mountain, to see what would happen. Nothing happened.

books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil

The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.

The global securities industry, for example, once overwhelmingly concentrated in the financial districts of London and New York, has gradually shifted an ever larger share of their operations to their respective suburban rings, other smaller cities, and overseas. The headquarters might remain in a midtown high-rise, but more and more the jobs are located elsewhere.

I grew up in a small town in rural North Carolina and no matter where I live, I will always consider myself a Southerner. My complicated relationship with the South is something I think about every day. There is so much to love about the Southeastern states—and so much that hurts my soul. But I want to make it perfectly clear that the issues addressed in this novel—book banning, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc.—are by no means unique to the South. These are American problems. Pretending they only occur in the South has allowed them to flourish unchecked elsewhere in the United States.

It seems so easy now to destroy libraries--mainly by taking away all the books--and to say that books and libraries are not relevant to people's lives. There's a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together? In the North people met in the church, in the pub, in the marketplace, and in those philanthropic buildings where they could continue their education and their interests. Now, maybe, the pub is left--but mainly nothing is left. The library was my door to elsewhere.

Blessed are the pure in heart: [25] for they shall see God." How foolish, therefore, are those who seek God with these outward eyes, since He is seen with the heart! as it is written elsewhere, "And in singleness of heart seek Him." [26] For that is a pure heart which is a single heart: and just as this light cannot be seen, except with pure eyes; so neither is God seen, unless that is pure by which He can be seen. [27]

Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book...

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent 'late period' prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, 'To ask after God's reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is.' This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for 'natural evil'—childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands—and for moral evil also even though 'he' is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and 'he' is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random. Elsewhere, such qualities might get in the way of the story. With Trump, they are the story.

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what’s at stake, namely its credibility as God’s infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably. But you can’t fail at something you’re not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That’s a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. As we have seen, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere.

Understand, you wretched of the earth, we should strive to improve what we can. Here. Right here, in Moldova. We can clean our own houses; fix our own roads. We can trim our own shrubs and works the fields. We can stop gossiping, drinking and loafing. We can become kinder, more patient, more tender with each other. We can stop ripping pages out of library books and spitting on a cleanly swept floor. Quit deceiving. Start living honest lives. Italy- the real Italy- is in us ourselves!

One of the most fascinating things about the Dewey decimal system is that while there are distinct categories for every subject imaginable, it also allows for internal referencing, acknowledging that while a book may be about one subject and exist in one place, it also has a corollary placement elsewhere. At the same time. And that’s okay. I understood that a book could be many things at once, without conflict or contradiction, long before I realized it about people. Or, at least, long before I admitted it.

Taking good care of our bodies, eating well but not too much, sleeping, and drinking water, we have to trust the power of understanding, healing, and loving within us. It is our refuge. If we lose our faith and confidence in it, we lose everything. Instead of panicking or giving ourselves up to despair, we practice mindful breathing and put our trust in the healing power within us. We call this the island within ourselves in which we can take refuge. It is an island of peace, confidence, solidity, love, and freedom. Be that island for yourself. You don’t have to look elsewhere.

Owing to the circumstances of my grandmother’s death, the subject interested me, and I had recently read in a book by a great specialist that perspiration was injurious to the kidneys, by making moisture pass through the skin when its proper outlet was elsewhere. I thought with regret of those dog-days at the time of my grandmother’s death, and was inclined to blame them for it. I did not mention this to Dr. E——but of his own accord he said to me: “The advantage of this very hot weather in which perspiration is abundant is that the kidney is correspondingly relieved.” Medicine is not an exact science.

He sees the truth as with a jolt. There it is, within his own being, lying deep down but still in his own self. There never was any need to travel anywhere to find it; no need to visit anyone who was supposed to have it already, and sit at his feet; not even to read any book, however sacred or inspired. Nor could another person, place, or writing give it to him--he would have to unveil it for himself in himself. The others could direct him to look inwards, thus saving all the effort of looking elsewhere. But he himself would have to give the needful attention to himself. The discovery must be his own, made within the still centre of his being.

(Athenian embassy:) How moderate we are would speedily appear if others took our place; indeed our very moderation, which should be our glory, has been unjustly converted into a reproach. For because in our suits with our allies, regulated by treaty, we do not even stand upon our rights, but have instituted the practice of deciding them at Athens and by Athenian law, we are supposed to be litigious. None of our opponents observe why others, who exercise dominion elsewhere and are less moderate than we are in their dealings with their subjects, escape this reproach. Why is it? Because men who practise violence have no longer any need of law. (Book 1 Chapter 76.4-77.2)

Elio: What were you doing? Oliver: Thinking. Elio: About? Oliver: Things. Going back to the States. The courses I have to teach this fall. The book. You. Elio: Me? Oliver: Me? Elio: No one else? Oliver: No one else. I come here every night and just sit here. Sometimes I spend hours. Elio: All by yourself? I never knew. I thougt... Oliver: I know what you thought. This spot is probably what I'll miss the most. I've been happy in B. I was looking out towards there and thinking that in two weeks I'll be back at Columbia. Elio: All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won't be here. i don't know what I'll do then. At least you'll be elsewhere, where there are no memories.

They had not been there many days when the plague broke out at Athens for the first time. A similar disorder is said to have previously smitten many places, particularly Lemnos, but there is no record of such a pestilence occurring elsewhere, or of so great a destruction of human life. For a while physicians, in ignorance of the nature of the disease, sought to apply remedies; but it was in vain, and they themselves were among the first victims, because they oftenest came into contact with it. No human art was of any avail, and as to supplications in temples, enquiries of oracles, and the like, they were utterly useless, and at last men were overpowered by the calamity and gave them all up. (Book 2 Chapter 47.3-4)

1:354-355 BEING TAKEN When you begin to surrender, forget yourself. Become senseless with no motive, so you can be blown from east to west and back without knowing anything, or caring either. It would not be surprising if in such mindlessness your essential being went hundreds of miles without you being aware of it. We see such wandering in the clouds and the waters. The forests and the crops too in their ways travel with caravans of people along the earth. God takes our souls on journeys he knows nothing of. Why? We don't know, being as we are the passed-out reveler laid in a wagon and driven elsewhere. What we love, what we want, is this being held in the presence, this being taken. That is the satisfaction, not learning why or how or where we are, or when we'll arrive somewhere else.

Blood spilled requires more blood to pay the debt. The books must be balanced. Such thinking illustrates the law of the conservation of psychic energy. There is so much psychic life to be lived. If it is denied fulfillment in one area, it must be made up elsewhere. There must be blood for blood. Repression, which is internal murder, will out. It is a crime against life for which payment will be extracted.

A good family farm produces more, in net terms, than the farm family consumes. The good farmer has secured enough land to grow crops and support his or her livestock. The extra production beyond the farm family’s own consumption can be sold and traded for other goods and services—TVs, clothes, books. Some countries are like good family farms, with more bio-capacity than what it takes, in net terms, to provide for their inhabitants. Compare this with a weekend hobby farm, with honeybees, a rabbit, and an apple tree, where most resources have to be bought from elsewhere. Presently 80% of the world population lives in countries that are like hobby farms. They consume more, in net terms, than what the ecosystems of their country can regenerate. The rest is imported or derives from unsustainable overuse of local fields and forests.

But as the words of the story wash over him, he traces the sentences with his fingers, trying to re-create that feeling of being grounded, rooted to the spot, nothing more than a body, reading words, allowing his mind to wander elsewhere. He can feel the story take control of his mind, pulling him away. His own thoughts, his worries, that voice, begin to buzz at the back of his mind, and eventually they become nothing but white noise.

To the secular arm, therefore, be delivered any and every book which, catering for the youngsters, throttles the life of the old folktales with coils of explanatory notes, and heaps on their maimed corpses the dead weight of biographical appendices. Nevertheless, that which delighted our childhood may instruct our manhood; and notes, appendices, and all the gear of didactic exposition, have their place elsewhere in helping the student, anxious to reach the seed of fact which is covered by the pulp of fiction. For, to effect this is to make approach to man's thoughts and conceptions of himself and his surroundings, to his way of looking at things and to explanation of his conduct both in work and play. Hence the folk-tale and the game are alike pressed into the service of study of the human mind. Turn where we may, the pastimes of children are seen to mimic the serious pursuits of men.

In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: "We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone's mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals." I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone else was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them. The world in my image.All I cared for were streets that bore my name and the trace of my passage there; and all I wanted were novels in which everyone's soul was laid bare and anatomized because nothing interested me more than the nether, undisclosed aspects of people and things that were identical to mine. Exposed, everyone would turn out to be just like me. They understood me, I understood them, we were no longer strangers. I dissembled, they dissembled. The more they were like me, the more I'd learn to accept and perhaps grow to like who I was. My hunches, my insights were nothing more than furtive ways of bridging the insuperable distance between me and the world.

Baruk looked up, then twisted in his chair to regard his guest, who was busy preening herself on his map-table. ‘Crone, the inconsistencies in this text are infuriating.’ The Great Raven cocked her head, beak gaping for a moment in laughter, then said, ‘So what? Show me a written history that makes sense, and I will show you true fiction. If that is all you want, then look elsewhere! My master concluded that Dillat’s nonsense would make a fine gift for your collection. If you are truly displeased, there are plenty of other idiocies in his library, those that he bothered to extract from Moon’s Spawn, that is. He left whole rooms crammed with the rubbish, you know.’ Baruk blinked slowly, struggling to keep his horror from his voice as he said, ‘No, I did not know that.’ Undeceived, Crone cackled. Then she said, ‘My master was most amused at the notion of falling to his knees and crying out to the Hundred Gods-’ ‘Thousand. The Thousand Gods.’ ‘Whatever.

she couldn’t quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins “Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun,” partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I’d felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother’s death—Kate had gotten married, I’d finally published another book and gone on tour with it—some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I’d specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we’d barely spoken of her.

Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases, the ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving of reproach as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 2395 of nature. Nature, as we have elsewhere said, ‘looks before her.’ Nature divides living beings into those who are arriving and those who are departing. Those who are departing are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the old, and involuntary on the part of the young. This breach, at first insensible, increases slowly, like all separations of branches. The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of theirs. Youth goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love. Old age goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other, but there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel the cooling off of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not blame these poor children.

The problem of abortion in America was never just the law,” Sobelsohn would write in a book review for the Journal of Sex Research. “Overturning criminal abortion laws couldn’t solve the problem any more than did the enactment of those laws in the first place—no more than repealing Prohibition ended the Mafia, or the enactment of Prohibition did away with alcoholism. No, the source of the problem always lies elsewhere, in the hearts and minds of human beings. Changing hearts and minds takes more than a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Orange Book produced after the outbreak of war by the Russian government to justify its actions during the crisis, the editors backdated by three days the Austrian order of general mobilization so as to make the Russian measure appear a mere reaction to developments elsewhere. A telegram dated 29 July from Ambassador Shebeko in Vienna stating that an order of general mobilization was ‘anticipated’ for the following day, was backdated to 28 July and reworded to say ‘The Order for General Mobilization has been signed’ – in fact, the order for Austrian general mobilization would not be issued until 31 July, to go into effect on the following day. The French Yellow Book played even more adventurously with the documentary record, by inserting a fictional communiqué from Paléologue dated 31 July stating that the Russian order had been issued ‘as a result of the general mobilization of Austria’ and of the ‘measures for mobilization taken secretly, but continuously, by Germany for the past six days . . .’ In reality, the Germans had remained, in military terms, an island of relative calm throughout the crisis.

Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: 'Everyone has an ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read.' She is ambitious, but it is a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing. They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the favela. Her ideal makes her a pariah: her desire to read makes her more an outcast than if she sat in the street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know. Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have dreams of being in the world, not merely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. 'Women dream,' Florence Nightingale wrote in Cassandra, 'till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. . . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect.

To understand hardware and software (as applied to the human brain) perform the following meditation. Sit in a room where you will not be disturbed for a half hour and begin thinking, “I am sitting in this room doing this exercize because . . .“ and list as many of the “causes” as you can think of. For instance, you are doing this exercize because, obviously, you read about it in this book. Why did you buy this book? Did somebody recommend it? How did that person come into your life? If you just picked the book up in a store, why did you happen to be in just that store on just that day? Why do you read books of this sort — on psychology, consciousness, evolution etc.? How did you get interested in those fields? Who turned you on, and how long ago? What factors in your childhood inclined you to be interested in these subjects later? Why are you doing this exercize in this room and not elsewhere? Why did you buy or rent this house or apartment? Why are you in this city and not another? Why on this continent and not another? Why are you here at all — that is, how did your parents meet? Did they consciously decide to have a child, do you happen to know, or were you an accident? What cities were they born in? If in different cities, why did they move in space-time so that their paths would intersect? Why is this planet capable of supporting life, and why did it produce the kind of life that would dream up an exercize of this sort? Repeat this exercize a few days later, trying to ask and answer fifty questions you didn’t think of the first time. (Note that you cannot ever ask all possible questions.) Avoid all metaphysical speculations (e.g., karma, reincarnation, “destiny” etc.). The point of the exercize will be mind-blowing enough without introducing “occult” theories, and it will be more startling if you carefully avoid such overtly “mystical” speculations.

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

In each of the following chapters, dealing in turn with policing and repression, culture and propaganda, religion and education, the economy, society and everyday life, racial policy and antisemitism, and foreign policy, the overriding imperative of preparing Germany and its people for a major war emerges clearly as the common thread. But that imperative was neither rational in itself, nor followed in a coherent way. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the regime emerge; the Nazi's headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that run through this book and binds its separate parts together. So do many further questions: about the extent to which the Third Reich won over the German people; the manner in which it worked; the degree to which Hitler, rather than broader systematic factors inherent in the structure of the Third Reich as a whole, drove policy onward; the possibilities of opposition, resistence, and dissent or even non-conformity to the dictates of National Socialism under a dictatorship that claimed the total allegiance of all its citizens; the nature of the Third Reich's relationship with modernity; the ways in which its policies in different areas resembled, or differed from, those pursued elsewhere in Europe and beyond during the 1930s; and much more besides.

[OBSERVATIONS RELATED TO EXAMINING THE NATURE OF MIND] Be certain that the nature of mind is empty and without foundation. One’s own mind is insubstantial, like an empty sky. Look at your own mind to see whether it is like that or not. Divorced from views which constructedly determine [the nature of] emptiness, Be certain that pristine cognition, naturally originating, is primordially radiant – Just like the nucleus of the sun, which is itself naturally originating. Look at your own mind to see whether it is like that or not! Be certain that this awareness, which is pristine cognition, is uninterrupted, Like the coursing central torrent of a river which flows unceasingly. Look at your own mind to see whether it is like that or not! Be certain that conceptual thoughts and fleeting memories are not strictly identifiable, But insubstantial in their motion, like the breezes of the atmosphere. Look at your own mind to see whether it is like that or not! Be certain that all that appears is naturally manifest [in the mind], Like the images in a mirror which [also] appear naturally. Look at your own mind to see whether it is like that or not! Be certain that all characteristics are liberated right where they are, Like the clouds of the atmosphere, naturally originating and naturally dissolving. Look at your own mind to see whether it is like that or not! There are no phenomena extraneous to those that originate from the mind. [So], now could there be anything on which to meditate apart from the mind? There are no phenomena extraneous to those that originate from the mind. [So], there are no modes of conduct to be undertaken extraneous [to those that originate from the mind]. There are no phenomena extraneous to those that originate from the mind. [So], there are no commitments to be kept extraneous [to those that originate from the mind]. There are no phenomena extraneous to those that originate from the mind. [So], there are no results to be attained extraneous [to those that originate from the mind]. There are no phenomena extraneous to those that originate from the mind. [So], one should observe one’s own mind, looking into its nature again and again. If, upon looking outwards towards the external expanse of the sky, There are no projections emanated by the mind, And if, on looking inwards at one’s own mind, There is no projectionist who projects [thoughts] by thinking them, Then, one’s own mind, completely free from conceptual projections, will become luminously clear. [This] intrinsic awareness, [union of] inner radiance and emptiness, is the Buddha-body of Reality, [Appearing] like [the illumining effect of] a sunrise on a clear and cloudless sky,. It is clearly knowable, despite its lack of specific shape or form. There is a great distinction between those who understand and those who misunderstand this point. This naturally originating inner radiance, uncreated from the very beginning, Is the parentless child of awareness – how amazing! It is the naturally originating pristine cognition, uncreated by anyone – how amazing! [This radiant awareness] has never been born and will never die – how amazing! Though manifestly radiant, it lacks an [extraneous] perceiver – how amazing! Though it has roamed throughout cyclic existence, it does not degenerate – how amazing! Though it has seen buddhahood itself, it does not improve – how amazing! Though it is present in everyone, it remains unrecognised – how amazing! Still, one hopes for some attainment other than this – how amazing! Though it is present within oneself, one continues to seek it elsewhere – how amazing!

Filoteo: Because the First Principle is the most fundamental, it follows that if one attribute were finite, then all attributes would likewise be finite; or else, if by one intrinsic rationale He is finite, and by another infinite, then necessarily we must consider him as composite. If therefore, he is the operator of the universe, then He is surely an infinite operator; in the sense that all is dependent on Him. Furthermore, since our imagination is able to move toward infinity, imagining always greater size and yet still greater, and number beyond number, following a certain succession, and as they say, power, so too we must also understand, that God actually conceives infinite dimension and infinite number. And from that understanding follows the possibility with the convenience and opportunity such as may be: that should the active power be infinite, then by necessary consequence, the subject power takes part in the infinite: because, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, what can be done must be done, the ability to measure implies the measurable thing, and the measurer implies the measured. Thus, as there really are bodies with finite dimension, the Prime Intellect understands bodies and dimension. If He has understanding of this, He understands infinity no less, and if He understands the infinite, and such bodies, then necessarily these are intelligible species, and are products of that intellect, for what is divine is most real, and as such what is that real must exist more surely than what we can actually see before our eyes.

We are all looking for this world. It’s what the scholars were made for,” Johannes says. “She seeks Elandriel.” Elandriel. Violet rolls the unfamiliar name on her tongue. “To be the first person to rediscover it…what a thing that would be. Our ancestral home, untouched for a thousand years. They said the very walls used to be lined with doors leading elsewhere, that scholars from countless worlds came to study in our hallowed halls. Imagine the knowledge we could regain. Imagine the possibilities. The rebirth of an entire world.” And Violet does imagine, with a kind of longing that stuns her with its ferocity. Her mind is already conjuring a city full of potential libraries crammed wall-to-wall with books, adventure only a step through a doorway. Even though it’s something she’s supposed to have outgrown, she can’t help the thrill that runs through her. To the effervescent sea under the sun. To the witches in their forests. To mysteries beyond comprehension.

And she loved you with all her heart." He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room. "I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness. I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I’ve satisfied my passion I'm ready for other things.I can't overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions. “ I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time. He spoke with a passion of indignation. But neither here nor elsewhere do I pretend to give his exact words; his vocabulary was small, and he had no gift for framing sentences, so that one had to piece his meaning together out of interjections, the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed phrases. "You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves, “ I said. "It just happens that I am a completely normal man." I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness; but he went on, walking up and down the room like a caged beast, intent on expressing what he felt, but found such difficulty in putting coherently. "When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.She has a small mind and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks. With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere.

If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement. This is a portmanteau word and means “government by advertisement.” But my intention is not satiric; I am trying to be objective. The change is this. In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live “a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” and “pass their time in rest and quietness.” But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of “appeal,” “drives,” and “campaigns.” Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding “keenness.” And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them “rulers.” “Leaders” is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call “magnetism” or “personality.

When the dress for Irex’s dinner party arrived wrapped in muslin and tied with twine, it was Arin who brought the package to Kestrel. She hadn’t seen him since the first green storm. She didn’t like to think about that day. It was her grief, she decided, that she didn’t want to remember. She was learning to live around it. She had returned to her music, and let that outings and lessons flow around the fact of Enai’s death, smoothing its jagged edges. She spent little time at the villa. She sent no invitations to Arin for Bite and Sting. If she went into society, she chose other escorts. When Arin stepped into her sitting room that was really a writing room, Kestrel set her book next to her on the divan and turned its spine so that he wouldn’t see the title. “Hmm,” Arin said, turning the packaged dress over in his hands. “What could this be?” “I am sure you know.” He pressed it between his fingers. “A very soft kind of weapon, I think.” “Why are you delivering my dress?” “I saw Lirah with it. I asked if I could bring it to you.” “And she let you, of course.” He lifted his brows at her tone. “She was busy. I thought she would be glad for one less thing to do.” “That was kind of you then,” Kestrel said, though she heard her voice indicate otherwise and was annoyed with herself. Slowly, he said, “What do you mean?” “I mean nothing.” “You asked me to be honest with you. Do you think I have been?” She remembered his harsh words during the storm. “Yes.” “Can I not ask the same thing of you?” The answer was no, no slave could ask anything of her. The answer was no, if he wanted her secret thoughts he could try to win them at Bite and Sting. But Kestrel swallowed a sudden flare of nervousness and admitted to herself that she valued his honesty--and her own, when she was around him. There was nothing wrong with speaking the truth. “I think that you are not fair to Lirah.” His brows drew together. “I don’t understand.” “It’s not fair for you to encourage Lirah when your heart is elsewhere.” He inhaled sharply. Kestrel thought that he might tell her it was no business of hers, for it was not, but then she saw that he wasn’t offended, only taken aback. He pulled up a chair in that possessive, natural way of his and sank into it, dropping the dress onto his knees. He studied her. She willed herself not to look away. “I hadn’t thought of Lirah like that.” Arin shook his head. “I’m not thinking clearly at all. I need to be more careful.” Kestrel supposed that she should feel reassured. Arin set the package on the divan where she sat. “A new dress means an event on the horizon.” “Yes, a dinner party. Lord Irex is hosting.” He frowned. “And you’re going?” She shrugged. “Do you need an escort?” Kestrel intended to say no, but became distracted by the determined set to Arin’s mouth. He looked almost…protective. She was surprised that he should look that way. She was confused, and perhaps this made her say, “To be honest, I would be glad for your company.” His eyes held hers. Then his gaze fell to the book by Kestrel’s side. Before she could stop him, he took it with a nimble hand and read the title. It was a Valorian history of its empire and wars. Arin’s face changed. He returned the book and left.

According to Freud here, it is only by inhibiting or prohibiting sexual satisfaction that a more enduring investment can be made in someone. When real sexual satisfactions are thwarted, sexual desire for that person gives rise to a kind of symbolic idealization of him or her, leading to an affectionate current which is secondary, not primary. Idealization of the partner and affectionate love itself (we perhaps see the fullest expression of idealization in courtly love, as we shall see in Chapter 7) thus involve endless deferral and sublimation of the sexual drives. Affectionate love, which earlier in his work was either anaclitic or narcissistic (we shall turn to the latter of these in the second part of this book), here seems to involve idealization of the object, attention being paid to its spiritual merits as opposed to its sensual merits. Love is not considered here to precede sexual desire, but rather to result from the inhibition of sexual satisfaction. It leads to far greater excitement about the potential sexual partner than would have existed without such inhibition. In other words, restricted sexual access to the partner intensifies sexual excitation, ultimately leading to greater sexual satisfaction than would have been possible otherwise. Education or socialization channels the sexual drives so extensively into narrow pathways that they reach a feverish pitch and the sexual act becomes, in a certain sense, overvalued – this, Freud believes, is especially true of men. The idea here seems to be that the more a certain activity is inhibited or restricted, the more intense our desire for it becomes. As I have put it elsewhere, “prohibition eroticizes.

There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life. Almost as illuminating, to him, was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman – the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed – would allow him to tell the truth. He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivalled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld. Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones. Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it. His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) ‘of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable’.