Enclave Quotes

I never belonged anywhere until I met you.

There were different kinds of strength. I knew that now. It didn't always come from a knife or a willingness to fight. Sometimes it came from endurance, where the well ran deep and quiet. Sometimes it came from compassion and forgiveness.

I have your back. I didn't mean only when it's easy. All the time.

A good huntress respected her partners instincts, even if he was socially ignorant.

He'd said the sun could burn me. It certainly looked angry enough, all orange and glowing mad.

Here in the enclave, one didn't prosper by demonstrating too much independent thought.

We stood back-to-back, blocking and striking in harmony; sometimes it felt like his arms and legs were an extension of me. I could count on him to keep them off me from behind.

While the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools, to prevent the clever kids from the working-class post codes ousting them from the Enclave of Privilege.

You could miss someone, but it did no good to fixate on loss. I wished I had the ready words of a Breeder or the ability to comfort with a soft touch. I didn't. Instead I had daggers and determination. That would have to do.

A huntress never stabbed anything she didn't want to.

A curve of silver hung amid the brighter specks; it looked to me like a curved dagger, pretty but deadly, as if it might slice the sky in two.

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.

My heart shifted a little in my chest; it seemed to swell and beat against my bones until I couldn't hear.

Most human subjugates are young,” said Will. “Vampires like to acquire their subjugates when they’re youthful—prettier to look at, and less chance of diseased blood. And they’ll live a bit longer, though not much.” He looked pleased with himself. “Most of the rest of the Enclave wouldn’t be able to pass convincingly as a handsome young human subjugate—” “Because the rest of us all are hideous, are we?” Jem inquired, looking amused.

In the enclave, the strong and the physically perfect survived, but if you were strong, you protected the weak until they had an opportunity to grow into their own power.

... Where did you go?” “Down below.” “Ugh,” she said. “I’ve heard they’re little better than animals.” Funny. I thought the same thing about most Topsiders I encountered. Tegan touched my hand in silent sympathy, and I set my jaw. ... I stepped forward and pasted on a false smile. We were in her home, after all. The least I could do was be polite. “I’m Deuce, animal from the underground.

My body was a machine, plain and simple. I worked it to stay strong; I fed it to keep it running.

But I couldn't just be angry at her. Obviously I wanted to scream at her and set her whole enclave on fire, but that was just habit.

Before he bent his head, I knew what he was going to do. Touch his lips to mine. Oh, and I wanted him to... I stilled, hardly daring to breathe. The old refrain of cant and shouldn't sank beneath the weight of new worlds like please and yes.

He was the heat of a fire and the sweetness of the moon I'd only just met.

If I ever win you," he said, anger bright in his pale eyes, "it will be because you want me more. Not because he's gone. I'm nobody's second best.

So you’re now an official member of Enclave Three. You weirdo.” I snorted. “I’m a weirdo? You’re a werewolf.” “I suggest you say that with respect, Parker.” “Or what?” “Or I’ll have to bite you.” His lips widened into a grin of heart-stopping proportions. I guessed it would have been pretty effective on him in werewolf form, too.

The whole world is like Whitewall's razors," I burst out. "It cuts us, and we bleed, but there's no purpose to it.

Don’t let them see you weak.

He went in, lean and deadly, and ended the creature with a lightning-fast spike of his blade. It shrieked, likely altering the rest. The death call carried like a mournful song.

Also I hadn't lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.

Black behavior—not the wrenching housing and economic discrimination—was blamed for these impoverished Black enclaves.

We are, as you can see, going out—Charles has invoked the Consul’s authority and called a meeting in Grosvenor Square to discuss last night’s attack. Only for high-level Enclave members, apparently.” Will explained. Matthew grimaced. “By the Angel, that sounds awful. I hope it’s all right for me to stay here tonight.” Tessa smiled. “We already made up one of the spare rooms for you.” “As I have known Charles since he was born, I have a difficult time taking him seriously as an authority figure,” said Will thoughtfully. “I suppose if he says anything I don’t like, I can request that he be spanked.” “Oh, yes, please,” said Matthew. “It would do him a world of good.

I admired Stalkers style. He was incredibly fast using two small blades strapped to the backs of his hands. Slash slash slash. Fighting him you wouldn’t die of one great wound but instead bleed out slowly surprised to find yourself weak and dying after a thousand cuts.

They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.

If there had been another female for him since we arrived in Salvation, I needed to cut off all her hair and beat her half to death. The strength of that impulse scared me, and I took a step back. Deuce the girl was every bit as vicious as the Huntress, it seemed

And maybe what I meant when I said that about Deuce is I don't want to do without her.

Intent doesn't matter, she'd say, when you've really injured someone else. You need to be open to their pain and anger if you're ever to make things whole between you.

If I ever did go maleficer, if I ever did start pulling malia out of people like toffee and tossing off those killing spells of mine left and right, I’d be unstoppable. Maybe literally. Raining death and destruction on all the enclaves of the world like a maw-mouth myself, like the biggest maw-mouth ever, tearing the others apart because they were my competition.

Finally, I understood what else was going on. I might be slow, but given time, I put the pieces together. "You have no reason to be jealous, I promise. We talked... and trained. You're the only boy who gets close like this." "Oh." A long, slow breath escaped him. "I feel so stupid." I put my lips to his cheek and whispered, "Don't. I love you, Fade.

I lived in an enclave in which our oldest had seen twenty-five years. His face was withered, and his fingers shook when he attempted the smallest tasks. Some whispered it would be a kindness to kill him, but they meant they didn't want to see their futures written in his skin.

I swept down the stairs to find Fade waiting for me at the bottom. His dark eyes widened, and for the first time since I'd known him, he was speechless. He stared up at me like I was everything he ever wanted.

It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward. Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.

I imagine it’s always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren’t going to, up to the last minute, until you do.

I refused to show my fear. Lock it down, Huntress.

Stalkers lips curled into a sneer. "You won't make a move without him, huh? That's embarrassing." "No," I said softly. "It just hurts because you wish it was you.

We're all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth.

There were different kinds of strength. I knew that now. It didn’t always come from a knife or a willingness to fight. Sometimes it came from endurance, where the well ran deep and quiet. Sometimes it came from compassion and forgiveness.

He bent his head and brushed my lips with his. His hair spilled against my forehead, sleek and startling. Shock held me immobile, shock—and something else. Part of me wanted to lean into him.

Why do those hard choices in life—you know, the ones you make because they're the right damn thing to do—always feel like you've just been kicked in the balls? Dark Desires at Midnight - Arran

Nobody would ever be like Fade. That much, I knew.

I think it says, 'Color will not fade.

The strong survive.

Section 8 vouchers ought to be administered in a way that doesn’t segregate the poor into little enclaves.

We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

On our last mission - our "final exam" - we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. This is no defeatism...The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too... All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of...the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but...with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it.

Will." Charlotte sighed on seeing him, and shook her head at Tessa and Jem. "I told you the Enclave would be meeting here at four-o'clock." "Did you?" Will said. "I must have forgotten that. Dreadful.

The population of every country is nowadays a collection of diasporas. Every sizable city is now an aggregate of ethnic, religious, and lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing insiders from outsiders is a hotly contested issue, while the right to draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is the prime stake in the skirmishes over influence and battles for recognition that follow.

I never felt beautiful unless I was fighting, and even then it was something that went beyond skin and bone into the kinetic joy of successive movements. Kick, thrust, slash. I never doubted Fade at my back. I never faltered.

me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.

Edmund cleared his throat. "Pretty as a picture, isn't she?" Fade only nodded. His hungry stare brought color to my cheeks, and I was conscious of the warmth of his fingers when he touched me. Just on the arm, but my skin was bare, and it felt shocking, intimate, too darking in front of my foster parents.

Manila is a city of extremes. The poor are very poor and the rich very rich. They live side by side. The rich live in sprawling houses in residential subdivisions with fancy names like Green Meadows, White Plains, Corinthian Plaza, Bel Air, San Lorenzo, Magallanes and the very exclusive Forbes Park, a leafy enclave that was home to the famous Manila Polo Club. The poor are not far from sight. They live in little pockets on the periphery of these affluent subdivisions. A constant reminder to the rich that there is another side to life.

You know you can get in trouble for visiting a boy’s personal space. But if you do something for me, I won’t tell anyone.” Oh, not today.

The dead are past saving.” You could miss someone, but it did no good to fixate on loss.

The idea didn’t make me like her less, but I did feel sad and heavy, as if I’d lost something without ever knowing what it was.

because if I was ever going to, I’d have done it already.

It was exactly what I wanted, only once I was in it, I didn’t want it after all.

I never belonged anywhere until I met you,” he said, resting his cheek against my hair.

The sound of his anguish spiraled up into a desert night, across a vast spread of tiny stars. Through Shahrzad’s very skin. Without a word, Shahrzad took his hand and led him into the desert, far beyond the enclave of tents. When she finally turned to face him, Tariq appeared to have aged a decade in a matter of moments. They stared at each other across a small sea of glittering sand. Across years of friendship and trust, seemingly lost in an instant.

contemplating that, while the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons. This is why the elite need a prophylactic barrier of shitty state schools, to prevent clever kids from working-class post codes ousting them from the Enclave of Privilege.

A shiver ran through me. Freaks looked almost human -- and weren't. They had lesions on their skin, razor-sharp teeth, and claws instead of fingernails. I'd heard you could detect them by smell, though in the tunnels, that could be hard.

Stalker put his hands on my shoulders - and for a moment, his pale eyes blazed with the power of what he felt for me. The reflected head warmed me where I hadn't even know I was cold. Then his golden, spiky lashes swept down, veiling his thoughts. I shouldn't let this boy comfort me when I'd rejected him. Weakness made me selfish, but I didn't resist when he pulled me against him.

Even when mundanes didn't have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn't really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn't drag a witch to the stake; you'd have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead.

I didn't ask if he meant his rescue or the deal with Stalker that involved kissing. I couldn't resist pushing, just a little. "So it won't bother you if I find someone else?" His jaw clenched, and I saw the muscle move before he got it under control. "I thought you said you'd fight for me." "And /you/ said it's too late." I offered him a faint smile along with his watch. "So it's a good thing I don't intend to listen to you.

I’m sure she felt rejected by Fade, but she hadn’t spent long nights in the tunnels with him, or guarded his back when Freaks were determined to eat him. All she had to offer were maps, and he didn’t need those forever.

Cordelia frowned seeing Anna’s expression. “Anna? What’s wrong?” Anna scowled. “I had come here to horsewhip Charles, but it appears that he is elsewhere.” “Charles Fairchild?” Cordelia echoed blankly. “I believe he’s at home—he called a gathering at his house for high-ranking Enclave members. You could go horsewhip him there, but it would make for a very strange meeting.” “High-ranking Enclave members?” Anna rolled her eyes. “Well, no wonder I don’t know about it. So I suppose I’ll have to wait until later to puncture him like the pustulant boil he is.

The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.

We have paid a price for our inclusiveness, but but we have bought ourselves a more humane society, with greater opportunity for racial minorities, women, gay people, the handicapped, and others - that is, for most people. And even if some people think the price was too steep, we can't go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves. All we can do is search for ways that we might reduce our anomie without excluding large classes of people.

There was no hiding my ignorance this time. They should be used to it by now.

Y’did some backcountry doctoring. Right brave, that was. But her thigh looks bad, and we’re a day out of Salvation.

I love you. Not when it's easy, all the time. -Horde

All of magic essentially involves sneaking something you want past reality while it’s distracted and looking the other way.

Yes, because just what I wanted was to make a friend of a rich enclave girl so I could routinely rub my face around in all the luxuries I couldn’t have, all of which were in fact quite nice even if they didn’t measure up to the things I’d chosen in their place. And if Chloe Rasmussen turned out to be an actual decent person and a real friend, that would mean the things I didn’t have weren’t necessarily incompatible with the things I really cared about, and how exactly I was meant to put that together without being discontented all the time, I didn’t see, only I was reasonably certain that saying no and on your way now would in fact make me rude and stuck-up after all, just in a quixotic and contrary way. “Yeah, all right,

What a pretty dress,” Ariadne said to Cordelia, her voice warm. Her own gown was of flattering wine-colored silk. “I believe that’s the shade they call ‘ashes of roses.’ Very popular in Paris.” “Oh, yes,” Cordelia said eagerly. She’d known so few girls growing up—just Lucie, really—so how did one impress them and charm them? It was desperately important. “I did get this dress in Paris, as a matter of fact. On Rue de la Paix. Jeanne Paquin made it herself.” She saw Lucie’s eyes widen in concern. Rosamund’s lips tightened. “How fortunate you are,” she said coolly. “Most of us here in the poky little London Enclave rarely get to travel abroad. You must think us so dull.” “Oh,” said Cordelia, realizing she had put her foot in it. “No, not at all—” “My mother has always said Shadowhunters aren’t meant to have much of an interest in fashion,” said Catherine. “She says it’s mundane.” “Since you’ve spoken of Matthew’s clothes admiringly so often,” said Ariadne tartly, “should we assume that rule is only for girls?

And here in this other realm she looms over him, vast and sprawling, wildly patchwork and dense. Not just older and bigger. Stronger in many ways: her arms and core are thick with muscled neighborhoods that each have their own rhythms and reputations. Williamsburg, Hasidim enclave and artist haven turned hipster ground zero. Bed Stuy (do or die). Crown Heights, where now the only riots are over seats at brunch. Her jaw is tight with the stubborn ferocity of Brighton Beach's old mobsters and the Rockaways' working-class holdouts against the brutal inevitability of rising seas. But there are spires at Brooklyn's heart, too- perhaps not as grand as his own, and maybe some of hers are actually the airy, fanciful amusement-park towers of Coney Island- but all are just as shining, just as sharp.

I'm trying not to get kicked out of your life," and I got it, embarrassingly belated. I had Aadhya and Liu, now, and not just him. It was like all that mana at my hands, something so vital you could get used to it so fast you'd almost forget what life had been like without it--until it went away again. But he didn't. He didn't have anybody else; he'd never had anybody, the same way I'd never had anybody, but now he'd had me, and he wanted to lose that about as much as I wanted to trade him and Aadhya and Liu for an enclave seat in New York.

We're all greedy, btu children make it easier to be. We feel it's only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else's mouth.

All that remains of the garden city in our own day are traffic-free enclaves, islands in a sea of traffic where the pedestrian leads a legally protected by languishing existence, comparable to that of the North American Indians on their reservations...In reality the modern urbanist regards the city as a gigantic centre of production, geared to the efficient transport of workers and goods, to the accommodation of people and the storage of wares, to industrial and commercial activity. The rest, that is to say creativity, life, is optional and comes under the heading of recreation and leisure activities.

we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.

We are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff because we have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world. We are living in a very dangerous age in which insatiably greedy men are prepared to sacrifice anybody’s health and tranquility to satisfy their own insatiable greed for money and power. I am aghast at what selfishness, and the drive for power have done to our society. I worry as I find the world so increasingly horrible that I do not see how anything as wonderful as your life can escape. The best thing you can do is to keep some enclaves of satisfying decent life. I am fed up with everything but God and nature and human beings (whom I love and pity, as I always did). I feel glad I am a Christian, glad that I am without allegiance to any bloc, party, or groups, except to our Judeo-Christian tradition (modified by science and common sense). God keep you all and help you to grow.

Mum told me she’d helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn’t tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won’t happen to you.

A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk-show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort.

Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein the present feels more abbreviated than it used to be – at least for the world's privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers that often compound the sensation of not having enough time. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under neoliberalism, the gulf between the enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders "uneventful" violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable –often insensate– quest for quicker sensation".

Fundamentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly unable to understand one another. Fundamentalism thus begins as an internal dispute, with liberalizers or secularists within one’s own culture or nation. In the first instance, for example, Muslim fundamentalists will often oppose their fellow countrymen or fellow Muslims who take a more positive view of modernity, rather than such external foes as the West or Israel. Very often, fundamentalists begin by withdrawing from mainstream culture to create an enclave of pure faith (as, for example, within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem or New York). Thence they will sometimes conduct an offensive which can take many forms, designed to bring the mainstream back to the right path and resacralize the world. All fundamentalists feel that they are fighting for survival, and because their backs are to the wall, they can believe that they have to fight their way out of the impasse. In this frame of mind, on rare occasions, some resort to terrorism. The vast majority, however, do not commit acts of violence, but simply try to revive their faith in a more conventional, lawful way.

Charles had climbed on a bench and was calling out that he had something to say, creating a racket that quickly got the attention of the room. Everyone looked immensely surprised, including Tessa and Will. Sona frowned, clearly thinking Charles was very rude. She didn’t know the half of it, Cordelia thought darkly. “Let me be the first to raise a glass to the happy couple!” said Charles, doing just that. “To James Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs. I wish to add personally that James, my brother’s parabatai, has always been like a younger brother to me.” “A younger brother he accused of vandalizing greenhouses across our fair nation,” muttered Will. “As for Cordelia Carstairs—how to describe her?” Charles went on. “Especially when one has not bothered to get to know her at all,” murmured James. “She is both beautiful and fair,” said Charles, leaving Cordelia to wonder what the difference was, “as well as being brave. I am sure she will make James as happy as my lovely Grace makes me.” He smiled at Grace, who stood quietly near him, her face a mask. “That’s right. I am formally announcing my intention to wed Grace Blackthorn. You will all be invited, of course.” Cordelia glanced over at Alastair; he was expressionless, but his hands, jammed into his pockets, were fists. James had narrowed his eyes. Charles went on merrily. “And lastly, my thanks go out to the folk of the Enclave, who supported my actions as acting Consul through our recent troubles. I am young to have borne so much responsibility, but what could I say when duty called? Only this. I am honored by the trust of my mother, the love of my bride-to-be, and the belief of my people—” “Thank you, Charles!” James had appeared at Charles’s side and done something rather ingenious with his feet that caused the bench Charles had been standing on to tip over. He caught Charles around the shoulder as he slid to the floor, clapping him on the back. Cordelia doubted most people in the room had noticed anything amiss. “What an excellent speech!” Magnus Bane, looking fiendishly amused, snapped his fingers. The loops of golden ribbons dangling from the chandeliers formed the shapes of soaring herons while “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” began to play in ghostly fashion on the unmanned piano. James hustled Charles away from the bench he had clambered onto and into a crowd of well-wishers. The room, as a whole, seemed relieved. “We have raised a fine son, my darling,” Will said, kissing Tessa on the cheek.

The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented....So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids of f the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway....the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it's going, there'll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you'll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that's not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile. WE have to find some other way....So I started imagining....Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given over to front and back lawns, would be common too. And there could be vegetable gardens, and fields and woods for the kids to play in. There's be problems about somebody picking the tomatoes somebody else planted, or the roses, or the kids trampling through the pea patch, but the fifty groups or individuals who lived in the houses would have complete charge and complete responsibility for what went on in their little enclave. At the other side of the houses, facing the, would be a little community center. It would have a community laundry -- why does everybody have to own a washing machine?-- and some playrooms and a little cafe and a communal kitchen. The cafe would be an outdoor one, with sliding glass panels to close it in in winter, like the ones in Paris. This wouldn't be a full commune: everybody would have their own way of earning a living, everybody would retain their own income, and the dwellings would be priced according to size. Each would have a little kitchen, in case people wanted to eat alone, a good-sized living space, but not enormous, because the community center would be there. Maybe the community center would be beautiful, lush even. With playrooms for the kids and the adults, and sitting rooms with books. But everyone in the community, from the smallest walking child, would have a job in it.

Many live where they must, not where they choose, yet still endeavor to form lifestyle enclaves to whatever degree they are able. Simlarly, people now live within what we might call "cultural enclaves." Individuals with very different meaning systems - from cyberpunks to fundamentalist Muslims - can create and receive their own distinct cultural objects and confine their interactions to others who share their meaning systems. These interacting cultural groups may be labeled communities, and they may and do cross political and geographical boundaries, but they are built around sameness rather than around diversity. Their tendency is not to increase tolerance - the stated goal of multiculturalism - but to diminish it.

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.

The food wasn’t as bad as the Scholomance cafeteria, which was as much as you could really say for it, although they presented it with the confident triumph of someone offering you marvels of the culinary art, complete with heavy white napkins and inconvenient cutlery that repeatedly threatened to fall down and disappear into the crevices of the seat or into spots unreachable except by someone with arms like a flamingo’s legs.

Luz leaned her head against the window. The bus was already on the outskirts of Mexico City and the endless urban landscape had never seemed so gray and or so harsh. Most of the city was nothing like the old money enclave of Lomas Virreyes where the Vegas lived or Polanco where the city’s most expensive restaurants and clubs catered to the wealthy. The bus passed block after block of sooty concrete cut into houses and shops and shanties and parking garages and mercados and schools and more shanties where people lived surrounded by hulks of old cars and plastic things no one bothered to throw away. Sometimes there wasn’t concrete for homes, just sheets of corrugated metal and big pieces of cardboard that would last until the next rainy season. It was the detritus of millions upon millions of people who had nowhere to go and nothing to do and were angry about it. The Reforma newspaper had reported a few weeks ago that the city’s population was in excess of 28 million--more than 25 percent of the country’s entire population--and Luz believed it. All of those people were clawing at each other in a huge fishbowl suspended 7500 feet above sea level, where there was never enough oxygen and the air was thin and dirty. The city was hemmed in by mountains on all sides; mountains like Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl that sometimes spewed smoke and ash and prevented the contaminatión from cars and factories and sewers from escaping. Luz privately thought of it as la sopa--a white soup that often blotted out the stars and prevented the night sky from getting dark. The bus slowed in traffic. As they crept along Luz saw a car stopped on the side of the road, pulled over by a transito traffic cop. As Luz watched, the driver handed the cop a peso bill from his wallet. The transito accepted it but kept talking, gesturing at the car. The motorist handed him another bill. La mordida--the bite--of the traffic cop, right under her nose. Los Hierros was crap.

Whatever else she’d been on the verge of saying lodged in her throat as if her mind had suddenly registered what he'd meant. A solitary tear crested and trailed unchecked down her cheek. Oh, hell. At that moment, he'd give his life to take away the pain in her eyes. Her knees wobbled. “Come here.” He made the request, but she didn't move. And it took every last drop of patience he could muster not to drag her into him by force. But Eve was not a damsel in distress who needed a hero to save her. Not that she'd admit, anyway.

Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom? Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.

We find, therefore, Lowell and Mailer ostensibly locked in converse. In fact, out of the thousand separate enclaves of their very separate personalities, they sensed quickly that they now shared one enclave to the hilt: their secret detestation of liberal academic parties to accompany worthy causes. Yes, their snobbery was on this mountainous face close to identical—each had a delight in exactly the other kind of party, a posh evil social affair, they even supported a similar vein of vanity (Lowell with considerably more justice) that if they were doomed to be revolutionaries, rebels, dissenters, anarchists, protesters, and general champions of one Left cause or another, they were also, in private, grands conservateurs, and if the truth be told, poor damn émigré princes. They were willing if necessary (probably) to die for the cause—one could hope the cause might finally at the end have an unexpected hint of wit, a touch of the Lord’s last grace—but wit or no, grace or grace failing, it was bitter rue to have to root up one’s occupations of the day, the week, and the weekend and trot down to Washington for idiot mass manifestations which could only drench one in the most ineradicable kind of mucked-up publicity and have for compensation nothing at this party which might be representative of some of the Devil’s better creations. So Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer feigned deep conversation. They turned their heads to one another at the empty table, ignoring the potentially acolytic drinkers at either elbow, they projected their elbows out in fact like flying buttresses or old Republicans, they exuded waves of Interruption Repellent from the posture of their backs, and concentrated on their conversation, for indeed they were the only two men of remotely similar status in the room. (Explanations about the position of Paul Goodman will follow later.)

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.