Entrance Gate Quotes

The very quality of your life, whether you love it or hate it, is based upon how thankful you are toward God. It is one's attitude that determines whether life unfolds into a place of blessedness or wretchedness. Indeed, looking at the same rose bush, some people complain that the roses have thorns while others rejoice that some thorns come with roses. It all depends on your perspective. This is the only life you will have before you enter eternity. If you want to find joy, you must first find thankfulness. Indeed, the one who is thankful for even a little enjoys much. But the unappreciative soul is always miserable, always complaining. He lives outside the shelter of the Most High God. Perhaps the worst enemy we have is not the devil but our own tongue. James tells us, "The tongue is set among our members as that which . . . sets on fire the course of our life" (James 3:6). He goes on to say this fire is ignited by hell. Consider: with our own words we can enter the spirit of heaven or the agonies of hell! It is hell with its punishments, torments and misery that controls the life of the grumbler and complainer! Paul expands this thought in 1 Corinthians 10:10, where he reminds us of the Jews who "grumble[d] . . . and were destroyed by the destroyer." The fact is, every time we open up to grumbling and complaining, the quality of our life is reduced proportionally -- a destroyer is bringing our life to ruin! People often ask me, "What is the ruling demon over our church or city?" They expect me to answer with the ancient Aramaic or Phoenician name of a fallen angel. What I usually tell them is a lot more practical: one of the most pervasive evil influences over our nation is ingratitude! Do not minimize the strength and cunning of this enemy! Paul said that the Jews who grumbled and complained during their difficult circumstances were "destroyed by the destroyer." Who was this destroyer? If you insist on discerning an ancient world ruler, one of the most powerful spirits mentioned in the Bible is Abaddon, whose Greek name is Apollyon. It means "destroyer" (Rev. 9:11). Paul said the Jews were destroyed by this spirit. In other words, when we are complaining or unthankful, we open the door to the destroyer, Abaddon, the demon king over the abyss of hell! In the Presence of God Multitudes in our nation have become specialists in the "science of misery." They are experts -- moral accountants who can, in a moment, tally all the wrongs society has ever done to them or their group. I have never talked with one of these people who was happy, blessed or content about anything. They expect an imperfect world to treat them perfectly. Truly, there are people in this wounded country of ours who need special attention. However, most of us simply need to repent of ingratitude, for it is ingratitude itself that is keeping wounds alive! We simply need to forgive the wrongs of the past and become thankful for what we have in the present. The moment we become grateful, we actually begin to ascend spiritually into the presence of God. The psalmist wrote, "Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful singing. . . . Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For the Lord is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations" (Psalm 100:2, 4-5). It does not matter what your circumstances are; the instant you begin to thank God, even though your situation has not changed, you begin to change. The key that unlocks the gates of heaven is a thankful heart. Entrance into the courts of God comes as you simply begin to praise the Lord.

She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving - perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.

Somewhere along the way I came upon a mews with a small sign on the entrance gate addressed to the passing world. The sign orders flatly: COMMIT NO NUISANCE The more you stare at that, the more territory it covers. From dirtying the streets to housebreaking to invading Viet Nam, that covers all the territory there is.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.

إنني أعتبر الإيمان بهذه الطريقة، مثل البستان فيه ورود مخفية كنت أطوف فيه ذات يومٍ وأستنشق الروائح العطرة التي تعبق منه، لكن لم يعد بإمكاني أن أدخله. أريد أن يعود الله صديقًا لي كما كان ذات مرة، وبهذا الشوق أدور حول تلك الحديقة أبحث عن مدخل لعلي أجد بوابة تمكنني من الدخول. Which is how I think of faith—like a hidden rose garden where I once roamed and inhaled its perfumed smells but can no longer enter. I want God to be my friend again. With that longing I am circling that garden, searching for an entrance, hoping to find a gate that will let me in.

According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

The wrought-iron gate squeaked as Lucas opened it. He lowered the rented bike down the stone steps and onto the sidewalk. To his right was the most famous Globe Hotel in Paris, disguised under another name. In front of the entrance five Curukians sat on mopeds. Lu-cas and his eighteen-month-old friend then shot out across the street and through the invisible beam of an-other security camera. He rode diagonally across the place de la Concorde and headed toward the river. It seemed only natural. The motorcycles trailed him. He pedaled fast across the Alex-andre III bridge and zipped past Les Invalides hospital. He tried to turn left at the Rodin Museum, but Goper rode next to him, blocking his escape.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me. San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold---rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark.

The three golden balls were above his head. The entrance to the shop (not so good a one as Mr. Rabinowitz’s but a pawnshop all the same, with a cash-register in the rear) was shuttered with a grey iron gate, fixed with a padlock.

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travelers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruits means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you leave the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open the gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

Soon they reached the opened city gates. Two massive horse statues stood, one on either side of the entrance. They weren’t identical but asymmetrical complements of each other. The left one, carved in sleek ivory, was leaned back on its haunches, just coming up to a rear, muzzle pointed skyward. The right, carved from glistening onyx, black as pitch, was in full rear, its head curved downward, forelegs striking.

The Lights..." said Norv the Raw, as if we might not have noticed. Before any further statements of the obvious could be made doors of gleaming steel started to slide down from recesses above every entrance above the Gilden Gate. The action accompanied by a squealing noise that set my teeth on edge, the sound of nails down Lundist's chalkboard. "The doors..." said Norv. I resisted temptation to beat him around the head.

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.

Underachieving people, use little chitchats had with successful people as gate passes to obtain entrance into places their reputation cannot get them.

Most don't enter through a gated entrance as is done at so many other national parks, but through invisible passageways by sea.

All morning he organized the silver polishers and cake decorators, the oilers of trolley wheels and lift gates, the lint and vomit removers, the replacers of soap at each sink, the replacers of chlorine medallions in the urinals, and the men hosing the pavement outside the entrance, as well as immigrants who squeezed out English names they had never spelled before onto birthday cakes, diced up onions, slashed open pigs with terrible knives, or prepared whatever else would be desired twelve hours later in the Ivor Novello Room or the Miguel Invernio Room.

The entrance gate at the far end of the quadrangle was open wide, and beyond it I could see a mass of people assembled on the green, men, women, children.The shouting was coming from them, and the creaking sounds were the wheels of an enormous covered wagon drawn by five horses, the second leader and the horse between the shafts carrying riders upon their backs. The wooden canopy

As the carriage proceeded past the main gate, the estate mansion came into view. Contrary to Pandora's expectations, it wasn't at all cold and imposing. It was a gracious, low-slung residence of two stories, inhabiting its surroundings with comfortable ease. Its classic lines were softened by an abundance of glossy green ivy that mantled the cream stucco façade, and arbors of pink roses that arched cheerfully over the courtyard entrance. Two extended wings curved around the front gardens, as if the house had decided to fill its arms with bouquets. Nearby, a slope of dark, dreaming forest rested beneath a blanket of sunlight.

Cried out to us, "Debark, here is the entrance." More than a thousand at the gates I saw Out of the Heavens rained down, who angrily Were saying, "Who is this that without death Goes through the kingdom of the people dead?

They veer off the main highway onto a private road that travels away from the ocean. A thin row of tall bamboo lines both sides of the narrow roadway that continues 150 feet before dead-ending at a lavish, single-story, traditional Japanese-style home. The entire property is surrounded by an eight-foot-high maroon wooden fence with three separate entrance gates, one in the front, next to the house, and two others in opposite corners of the triangular-shaped backyard.

Does not  l wisdom call?         Does not  m understanding raise her voice? 2    On  n the heights beside the way,         at the crossroads she takes her stand; 3    beside  o the gates in front of  p the town,         at the entrance of the portals she

Aside the narrow path leading from the house entrance door to the wicket, the perennials like variegated carnations and creamy color spots of pyrethrum made a curvy line looking like a kind of flowery brook falling into the odorous ocean of phloxes at the gate.

Let’s think about the fake sense of urgency that pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse on violence: in it, abstraction and graphic (pseudo)concreteness coexist in the staging of the scene of violence-against women, blacks, the homeless, gays . . . “A woman is rpaed every six seconds in this country” and “In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, ten children will die of hunger” are just two examples. Underlying all this is a hypocritical sentiment of moral outrage. Just this kind of pseudo-urgency was exploited by Starbucks a couple of years ago when, at store entrances, posters greeting costumers pointed out that a portion of the chain’s profits went into health-care for the children of Guatemala, the source of their coffee, the inference being that with every cup you drink, you save a child’s life. There is a fundamental anti-theoretical edge to these urgent injunctions. There is no time to reflect: we have to act now. Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich, living in their secluded virtual world, not only do not deny or ignore the harsh reality outside the area-they actively refer to it all the time. As Bill Gates recently put it: “What do the computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying of dysentery?” Against this fake urgency, we might want to place Marx’s wonderful letter to Engels of 1870, when, for a brief moment, it seemed that a European revolution was again at the gates. Marx’s letter conveys his sheer panic: can’t the revolution wait for a couple of years? He hasn’t yet finished his ‘Capital’.

Strength, good looks, connections, and the competitive instinct may bring a person success in a society like ours, but those very qualities may block entrance to the kingdom of heaven. Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change — these are the gates to God’s kingdom.

Mmm,” I hum. “Did you plead for him like this?” I whisper in her ear, my free hand grasping her throat. My eyes glance at the royal guards lining the entrance gates and the bystanders gathering around them. A few people’s gazes skim over us but just as quickly leave. They all know better than to interfere. “Do not make the mistake of confusing me with my brother,” I continue, my fingers flexing in her strands. “And don’t forget your place again, or I’ll take great pleasure in reminding you.” I release her, pushing her head until she collapses onto the ground, her hands reaching out to catch her fall. “And unlike him, I won’t care how much you beg.

The guards at the gate nodded and smiled at them. “I hate that,” Royce muttered as they passed. “What?” “They didn’t even think to stop us, and they actually smiled. They know us by sight now—by sight. Alric used to have the decency to send word discreetly and receive us unannounced. Now uniformed soldiers knock on the door in daylight, waving and saying, ‘Hello, we have a job for you.’” “He didn’t wave.” “Give it time, he will be—waving and grinning. One day Jeremy will be buying drinks for his soldier buddies at The Rose and Thorn. They’ll all be there, the entire sentry squad, laughing, smiling, throwing their arms over our shoulders and asking us to sing ‘Calide Portmore’ with them—‘Once more, with gusto!’ And at some point one particularly sweaty ox will give me a hug and say how honored he is to be in our company.” “Jeremy?” “What? That’s his name.” “You know the name of the soldier at the gate?” Royce scowled. “You see my point? Yes, I know his name and they know ours. We might as well wear uniforms and move into Arista’s old room.” They climbed the stone steps to the main entrance, where a soldier quickly opened a door for them and gave a slight bow. “Master Melborn, Master Blackwater.” “Hey, Digby.” Hadrian waved as he passed. When he caught Royce scowling, he added, “Sorry.” “It’s a good thing we’re both retired. You know, there’s a reason there are no famous living thieves

  Th' Angelic Guards ascended, mute and sad   For Man, for of his state by this they knew,   Much wondring how the suttle Fiend had stoln   Entrance unseen. Soon as th' unwelcome news   From Earth arriv'd at Heaven Gate, displeas'd   All were who heard, dim sadness did not spare   That time Celestial visages, yet mixt   With pitie, violated not thir bliss.

In effect, our bodies and brains are a device or vessel ‘birthed’ by our Divine Spark out of DNA to act as information gathering equipment, as well as earthly transportation vehicles and as energy harvesting and processing devises. Additionally, the Divine Spark is capable of “morphing” our bodies into a star or light-gate for entrance to Sion and to be able to function there.

There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures would be for dealing with this experience of loss. I resent that. At the same time, I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death of their lovers, friends, and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. I worry because of the urgency of the situations, because of seeing death coming in from the edges of abstraction where those with the luxury of time have cast it. I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way. But, bottom line, this is my own feelings of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.

FOR YEARS I have carried in my head a thought tossed out by Aldo Leopold. In the early 20th century, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Eastern Arizona, and he killed a wolf to protect the cattle and increase the deer. He went on to become a pioneer in wildlife management and a leading conservationist. He wrote an essay about that killing. He’d decided that when he’d pulled the trigger and helped remove the wolf from the Southwest, he’d made the mountain a lesser place. He said we had to learn to think like a mountain. I stare into the gate of rock framing the entrance to Pima Canyon. The mesquite leaves hang listless in the heat. Underfoot, a broken field of granite spreads out. Past that stone gate, the freedom of the Pusch Ridge Wilderness begins. The place feels wanting without bighorns watching me. I can’t prove this. But I’ve known it since I was a boy. That’s why we look at the mountains and crave to be near them. Maybe we can’t think like a mountain. But we can do better than we have. We can bring the bighorns back where they belong. Counting sheep, An Essay by

The guard locks the gates of the turbeh, letting the heavy sound of the lock fall into the dark interior, as though leaving the name of the key inside. Dispirited, like me, he sits down on the stone beside me and closes his eyes. Just when I think he has dozed off in his part of the shade, the guard lifts his hand and points to a moth fluttering above the entrance to the tomb, having come out of our clothes or the Persian carpets in the turbeh. "You see," he says to me casually, "the moth is way up there by the white wall of the doorway, and it is visible only because it moves. From here it almost looks like a bird in the sky. That's probably how the moth sees the wall, and only we know it is wrong. But it doesn't know that we know. It doesn't even know we exist. You try to communicate with it if you can. Can you tell it anything in a way it understands; can you be sure it understood you completely?" "I don't know," I replied. "Can You?" "Yes," the old man said quietly, and with a clap of his hands he killed the moth, then profered its crushed body on the palm of his hand. "Do you think it didn't understand what I told it?" "You can do the same thing with a candle, extinguish it with your two fingers to prove you exist," I commented. "Certainly, if a candle is capable of dying... Now, imagine," he went on, "that there is somebody who knows about us what we know about the moth. Somebody who knows how, with what, and why this space that we call the sky and assume to be boundless, is bounded-- somebody who cannot approach us to let us know that he exists except in one way-- by killing us. Somebody, on whose garments we are nourished, somebody who carries our death in his hand like a tongue, as a means of communicating with us. By killing us, this anonymous being informs us about himself. And we, through our deaths, which may be no more than a warning to some wayfarer sitting alongside the assassin, we, I say, can at the last moment perceive, as through an opened door, new fields and other boundaries. This sixth and highest degree of deathly fear (where there is no memory) is what holds and links us anonymous participants in the game. The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between the various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes...

Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being. Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.

Wait a second,” Andy said, snapping his fingers. “You're Vietnamese.” “Don't say it,” Sun warned. But Andy, a grin stretched across his face, couldn't resist. “You're a Vietnam vet.” Sun’s face became even harder, something Andy hadn't thought possible. “Never heard that one before. Open the pen there.” Andy lifted the latch on the gate and Sun led the sheep out of the pen and over to the entrance door. “I've visited Viet Nam twice,” Andy said. “Beautiful place. All of those war movies make it look like hell, but it's actually very tranquil, don't you think?” “I wouldn't know. I've never been there. I’m an American.

When I mentioned the guard at the emperor’s gate, perhaps you imagined a front corridor with two doors, one entrance and one exit, with your mind as the guard. Whatever feeling or thought enters, you are aware of its entrance, and when it leaves, you are aware of its exit. But the image has a shortcoming: it suggests that those who enter and exit the corridor are different from the guard. In fact our thoughts and feelings are us. They are a part of ourselves. There is a temptation to look upon them, or at least some of them, as an enemy force which is trying to disturb the concentration and understanding of your mind. But, in fact, when we are angry, we ourselves are anger. When we are happy, we ourselves are happiness. When we have certain thoughts, we are those thoughts. We are both the guard and the visitor at the same time. We are both the mind and the observer of the mind. Therefore, chasing away or dwelling on any thought isn’t the important thing. The important thing is to be aware of the thought. This observation is not an objectification of the mind: it does not establish distinction between subject and object. Mind does not grab on to mind; mind does not push mind away. Mind can only observe itself. This observation isn’t an observation of some object outside and independent of the observer.

wind whirled the fallen leaves and discarded trash littering the entrance to the old water park. As a young man approached the looming gate, an eerie chill snaked down his spine. “This place is creepy as hell,” he muttered, shining his flashlight on the weathered sign. “You sure you want to do this?” The young woman who had coerced him into coming out here ripped the lid from the plastic bucket she was holding. “Dr. Cooper needs to take notice that the students of Ashmore College are not going to stand for this new research facility of his. You heard how smug he sounded at the protest tonight. He thinks he can get away with anything just because his mother is president of the college. Someone has

The outsiders stood always in awe in front of what they had surnamed the Celestial City with Mighty Walls. The great mystery that cloaked its very foundations kept impelling the youth of Crotona, as well as those of the adjacent cities, to seek admittance. In spite of the difficult rules of the Master, curiosity goaded many to venture inside its secrecy, with a passionate aspiration to discover the unknown. Yet, to enroll, young men and women should be introduced by their parents. Sometimes, it was one of the assigned Masters of the Pythagorean Society who assumed the introduction. At the massive wooden gated entrance, one could admire the marble statue of Hermes-Enoch, the father of the spiritual laws. A cubical stone formed its stall where a skillful hand had carved the words: No entry to the vulgar

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit had tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you say goodbye to the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open a gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.

Meet Me In Toyland by Stewart Stafford Santa handed me the keys to Toyland, And, placing them squarely in the palm of my hand, He bid me go and have lots of fun, With all kinds of everyone. I skipped across the gingerbread bridge, Yuletide coffee flowing down from the ridge, To a Christmas tree consisting of mint, Lit all around by falling star glint. At the frosting gates of Castle St Nicholas, Silver snake tinsel began to hiss, As polar bears to a clockwork orchestra danced, With elves as their partners gleefully entranced. Multitudes of children whooped and cheered, Forgetting all their doubts and fears, Celebrating their gifts of toys, With every kind of girl and boy. Alas, our midwinter joy came to an end, And I tearfully bid adieu to all my new friends, And took a shooting star comet home, Across the Northern Lights in the sky’s dome. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

And in front of it all are the pearly gates: the proverbial entrance to Heaven that she, in earthly life, thought might not exist. But they are real, not myth or fantasy. As she passes through them, several people greet her. In foreign tongues even, but she understands. Language no longer matter. There are no barriers between herself and others, just love. The gorgeous views seem to go on forever. Ornate structures, mansions, banquet halls, and natural beauty, orchards, gardens. People congregate around huge marble fountains. In the distance are snow-capped mountains of the purist white. She can hear the sounds of rushing rivers and the surf of the ocean at once. Everyone around her is happy, loving, thankful. A choir sings songs of joy and peace while others play musical instruments of every kind in perfect harmony. Children laugh and play in the streets as well as in the clouds above her head.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

A businessman buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything that he knows how to do but just cannot make it go. Year after year the ledger shows red, and he is not making a profit. He borrows what he can, has a little spirit and a little hope, but that spirit and hope die and he goes broke. Finally, he sells out, hopelessly in debt, and is left a failure in the business world. A woman is educated to be a teacher but just cannot get along with the other teachers. Something in her constitution or temperament will not allow her to get along with children or young people. So after being shuttled from one school to another, she finally gives up, goes somewhere and takes a job running a stapling machine. She just cannot teach and is a failure in the education world. I have known ministers who thought they were called to preach. They prayed and studied and learned Greek and Hebrew, but somehow they just could not make the public want to listen to them. They just couldn’t do it. They were failures in the congregational world. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. This is the same as Israel in the desert, wandering around. The Israelites were God’s people, protected and fed, but they were failures. They were not where God meant them to be. They compromised. They were halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be. And that describes many of the Lord’s people. They live and die spiritual failures. I am glad God is good and kind. Failures can crawl into God’s arms, relax and say, “Father, I made a mess of it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly, but here I am, Father, and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.” Our kind and gracious heavenly Father will not say to that person, “Depart from me—I never knew you,” because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. The individual has simply been a failure all of his life. He is ready for death and ready for heaven. I wonder if that is what Paul, the man of God, meant when he said: [No] other foundation can [any] man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he should receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). I think that’s what it means, all right. We ought to be the kind of Christian that cannot only save our souls but also save our lives. When Lot left Sodom, he had nothing but the garments on his back. Thank God, he got out. But how much better it would have been if he had said farewell at the gate and had camels loaded with his goods. He could have gone out with his head up, chin out, saying good riddance to old Sodom. How much better he could have marched away from there with his family. And when he settled in a new place, he could have had “an abundant entrance” (see 2 Pet. 1:11). Thank God, you are going to make it. But do you want to make it in the way you have been acting lately? Wandering, roaming aimlessly? When there is a place where Jesus will pour “the oil of gladness” on our heads, a place sweeter than any other in the entire world, the blood-bought mercy seat (Ps. 45:7; Heb. 1:9)? It is the will of God that you should enter the holy of holies, live under the shadow of the mercy seat, and go out from there and always come back to be renewed and recharged and re-fed. It is the will of God that you live by the mercy seat, living a separated, clean, holy, sacrificial life—a life of continual spiritual difference. Wouldn’t that be better than the way you are doing it now?

But I was wrong about that. From the moment of my reluctant entrance into the vaccine debate in 2005, I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”5 When I learned that extraordinary fact, the disastrous health of the American people was no longer a mystery; I wondered what the environment would look like if the EPA received 45 percent of its budget from the coal industry!

Anything I can do to help?” “Convince the entire Dark Court to abandon their queen’s plan and join Team Leave Now?” “I was thinking more along the lines of recording tonight’s Easton Heights rerun so that hour was freed up for you.” She held up her hands at my outraged look of horror. “Kidding. Kidding. I’ve been helping David and Raquel set up emergency places for all the faerie land transplants and IPCA refugees who aren’t leaving. We’ll get everything ready here. You focus on the faerie stuff.” “Can’t I be in charge of the DVR, instead?” I stood and turned around. Arianna swatted my butt as I walked away. I wanted to laugh, but it was all I could do not to hyperventilate. Everything was finally happening. I hadn’t made it very far back up the path when Reth stepped out of the woods, scaring me half to death. “Way to make an entrance,” I said, my hand over my rapidly beating heart. “You need to come with me.” “Did you know I have to open the gate tonight? Never mind. Don’t answer. If you did know, I’ll want to kick you in the nuts for not telling me, and I don’t have time to do it. Good news is I’m going to save your life.

We approached the long, heavily guarded causeway. There were soldiers at the entrance. Our names were taken, and our permissions scrutinized, and then a bell rang and a military escort went with us through the gate. We didn’t go to the side where the government offices are. We walked inside the huge place, past the old cathedrals which have been there for so long, and we went through the museums in the giant palace which was used by so many czars, from Ivan the Terrible on. We went into the tiny bedroom that Ivan used, and into the little withdrawing rooms, and the private chapels. And they are very beautiful, and strange, and ancient, and they are kept just as they were. And we saw the museum where the armor, the plate, the weapons, the china services, the costumes, and the royal gifts for five hundred years are stored. There were huge crowns covered with diamonds and emeralds, there was the big sledge of Catherine the Great. We saw the fur garments and the fantastic armor of the old boyars. There were the gifts sent by other royal houses to the czars—a great silver dog sent by Queen Elizabeth, presents of German silver and china from Frederick the Great to Catherine, the swords of honor, the incredible claptrap of monarchy. It became apparent, after looking at a royal museum, that bad taste, far from being undesirable in royalty, is an absolute necessity.

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver. "Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station." "It looks like a cemetery." "It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin." "You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?" West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly." They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward better things," Garrett translated beneath her breath.

She fell asleep rapidly, swimming through a haze of pleasant images... walking through the forest in Hampshire... dangling her feet in a cool pond on a hot day... pausing in the kissing gate, while the smell of sun-warmed meadowsweet rose thickly to her nostrils. She closed her eyes and tilted her chin upward, relishing the sultry rays, while a butterfly's wings brushed lightly against her cheek. Entranced by the delicate tickle, she held very still. The silken strokes moved over the tip of her nose, the sensitive periphery of her upper lip, the tender corners of her mouth. Searching blindly, she lifted her face to the brushes of warmth and was rewarded by a gentle pressure that opened her lips and drew a moan from the upper part of her lungs. Lord Sydney was standing with her in the kissing gate, his arms trapping her against the painted ribs of latticework. His mouth searched hers so gently, his body firm against hers, and she writhed in a mute plea for him to hold her more tightly. Seeming to know exactly what she wanted, he pushed his knee into her skirts, right against the place that felt swollen and yearning. Gasping, she curled her fingers in his glossy hair, and he whispered for her to relax, that he would take care of her, satisfy her- "Oh." Blinking hard, she stirred from the sensuous dream as she realized that she was not alone. The bed curtains had been drawn aside, and Nick Gentry's long body was entangled with hers. One large hand was cupped beneath her hips, while his leg wedged more intimately between hers. His breath surged against her ear, filling the shell with moist heat, and then his lips wandered back to hers in a searing path. He absorbed her protest as he kissed her, his tongue searching her mouth, his body levering over hers.

Esther Agrees to Help the Jews ESTHER 4 When Mordecai learned all that had been done, Mordecai tore his clothes  o and put on sackcloth and ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry. 2He went up to the entrance of the king’s gate, for no one was allowed to enter the king’s gate clothed in sackcloth. 3And in every province, wherever the king’s command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews,  p with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them  q lay in sackcloth and ashes. 4When Esther’s young women and her eunuchs came and told her, the queen was deeply distressed. She sent garments to clothe Mordecai, so that he might take off his sackcloth, but he would not accept them. 5Then Esther called for Hathach, one of the king’s eunuchs, who had been appointed to attend her, and ordered him to go to Mordecai to learn what this was and why it was. 6Hathach went out to Mordecai in the open square of the city in front of the king’s gate, 7and Mordecai told him all that had happened to him,  r and the exact sum of money that Haman had promised to pay into the king’s treasuries for the destruction of the Jews. 8Mordecai also gave him  s a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her and command her to go to the king to beg his favor and plead with him on behalf of her people. 9And Hathach went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. 10Then Esther spoke to Hathach and commanded him to go to Mordecai and say, 11“All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside  t the inner court without being called,  u there is but one law—to be put to death, except the one  v to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.” 12And they told Mordecai what Esther had said. 13Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. 14For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” 15Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, 16“Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for  w three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the law,  x and if I perish, I perish.” 17Mordecai then went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

Are you Hilary Westfield?” She sounded like she hoped it wasn’t the case. Hilary nodded. “Oh. Well, I’m Philomena. I have to show you to your room.” Hilary looked wildly at Miss Greyson. “I’m Miss Westfield’s governess,” Miss Greyson said, to Hilary’s relief. Maybe talking politely to people like Philomena was something you learned at Miss Pimm’s, or maybe getting past Philomena was a sort of entrance exam. “Is there any chance we could see Miss Pimm? We’re old acquaintances. I used to go to school here, you see.” Miss Greyson smiled for the second time that day—the world was getting stranger and stranger by the minute—but Philomena didn’t smile back. “I’m terribly sorry,” said Philomena, “but Miss Pimm doesn’t receive visitors. You can leave Miss Westfield with me, and the porter will collect Miss Westfield’s bags.” She raised her eyebrows as the carriage driver deposited the golden traveling trunk on the doorstep. “I hope you have another pair of stockings in there.” “I do.” Hilary met Philomena’s stare. “I have nineteen pairs, in fact. And a sword.” Miss Greyson groaned and put her hand to her forehead. “Excuse me?” said Philomena. “I’m afraid Miss Westfield is prone to fits of imagination,” Miss Greyson said quickly. Philomena’s eyebrows retreated. “I understand completely,” she said. “Well, you have nothing to worry about. Miss Pimm’s will cure her of that nasty habit soon enough. Now, Miss Westfield, please come along with me.” Hilary and Miss Greyson started to follow Philomena inside. “Only students and instructors are permitted inside the school building,” said Philomena to Miss Greyson. “With all the thefts breaking out in the kingdom these days, one really can’t be too careful. But you’re perfectly welcome to say your good-byes outside.” Miss Greyson agreed and knelt down in front of Hilary. “A sword?” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Miss Greyson.” “All I ask is that you take care not to carve up your classmates. If I were not a governess, however, I might mention that the lovely Philomena is in need of a haircut.” Hilary nearly laughed, but she suspected it might be against the rules to laugh on the grounds of Miss Pimm’s, so she gave Miss Greyson her most solemn nod instead. “Now,” said Miss Greyson, “you must promise to write. You must keep up with the news of the day and tell me all about it in your letters. And you’ll come and visit me in my bookshop at the end of the term, won’t you?” “Of course.” Hilary’s stomach was starting to feel very strange, and she didn’t trust herself to say more than a few words at a time. This couldn’t be right; pirates were hardly ever sentimental. Then again, neither was Miss Greyson. Yet here she was, leaning forward to hug Hilary, and Hilary found herself hugging Miss Greyson back. “Please don’t tell me to be a good little girl,” she said. Miss Greyson sniffed and stood up. “My dear,” she said, “I would never dream of it.” She gave Hilary’s canvas bag an affectionate pat, nodded politely to Philomena, and walked down the steps and through the gate, back to the waiting carriage. “Come along,” said Philomena, picking up the lightest of Hilary’s bags. “And please don’t dawdle. I have lessons to finish.” HILARY FOLLOWED PHILOMENA through a maze of dark stone walls and high archways. From the inside, the building seemed more like a fortress

A man decides to be a lawyer and spends years studying law and finally puts out his shingle. He soon finds something in his temperament that makes it impossible for him to make good as a lawyer. He is a complete failure. He is 50 years old, was admitted to the bar when he was 30, and 20 years later, he has not been able to make a living as a lawyer. As a lawyer, he is a failure. A businessman buys a business and tries to operate it. He does everything that he knows how to do but just cannot make it go. Year after year the ledger shows red, and he is not making a profit. He borrows what he can, has a little spirit and a little hope, but that spirit and hope die and he goes broke. Finally, he sells out, hopelessly in debt, and is left a failure in the business world. A woman is educated to be a teacher but just cannot get along with the other teachers. Something in her constitution or temperament will not allow her to get along with children or young people. So after being shuttled from one school to another, she finally gives up, goes somewhere and takes a job running a stapling machine. She just cannot teach and is a failure in the education world. I have known ministers who thought they were called to preach. They prayed and studied and learned Greek and Hebrew, but somehow they just could not make the public want to listen to them. They just couldn’t do it. They were failures in the congregational world. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. This is the same as Israel in the desert, wandering around. The Israelites were God’s people, protected and fed, but they were failures. They were not where God meant them to be. They compromised. They were halfway between where they used to be and where they ought to be. And that describes many of the Lord’s people. They live and die spiritual failures. I am glad God is good and kind. Failures can crawl into God’s arms, relax and say, “Father, I made a mess of it. I’m a spiritual failure. I haven’t been out doing evil things exactly, but here I am, Father, and I’m old and ready to go and I’m a failure.” Our kind and gracious heavenly Father will not say to that person, “Depart from me—I never knew you,” because that person has believed and does believe in Jesus Christ. The individual has simply been a failure all of his life. He is ready for death and ready for heaven. I wonder if that is what Paul, the man of God, meant when he said: [No] other foundation can [any] man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he should receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). I think that’s what it means, all right. We ought to be the kind of Christian that cannot only save our souls but also save our lives. When Lot left Sodom, he had nothing but the garments on his back. Thank God, he got out. But how much better it would have been if he had said farewell at the gate and had camels loaded with his goods. He could have gone out with his head up, chin out, saying good riddance to old Sodom. How much better he could have marched away from there with his family. And when he settled in a new place, he could have had “an abundant entrance

Southern California’s most convivial street, which, in a sad commentary on the state of American public space, sits beyond the fare gate at the entrance to Disneyland.

Are we through here, I need to move all my stuff into my new house. Are you coming, Gary?” she walked out of the office. “So it begins,” remarked Gary. “Gary, good luck with her.” remarked Reverend Light. “Thanks, looks like I might need some good luck.” Gary left the office to move all of his stuff to his new house. When he arrived a day later, after packing all of his things into a moving truck, the house looked like a really expensive mansion to him. It was even equipped with gates at the entrance of the driveway. He went inside, was impressed with the size, and also impressed by the very fact that the mansion was already furnished. The mansion was two stories, had a huge kitchen, a dining room, a living room, office space, and bedrooms that were twice as big as his apartment bedroom. He unpacked all of his things, and waited for his new wife to show up with her stuff, which she did six hours later. Once she unpacked all of her stuff, they decided to sit down and talk for a while, so that they could get to know each other.

The facility, an old farmhouse, is sheltered from outside intrusion, nestled amid oaks and willows, miles from the nearest village. A winding driveway leads to a front entrance area and continues behind the building to the staff parking lot. The lawns are groomed and maintained at a consistent length and shade of green. At the end of the drive there is an entrance gate, manned by one guard. She turns her attention back to the contours of the room. The walls

Panhandle's residence was situated in a remote part of the country, and at this moment I have no clear recollection of the complicated journey, with its many changes at little-known junctions, which I had to make in order to find my friend. The residence stood in the midst of elevated woodlands, and was well hidden by the trees. An immense sky-sign, standing out high above all other objects and plainly visible to the traveller from whatever side he made his approach, had been erected on the roof. The sky-sign carried the legend "No Psychologists!" It turned with the wind, gyrating continually, and when darkness fell the letters were outlined in electric lamps. Only a blind man could miss the warning. This legend was repeated over the main entrance to the grounds, with the addition of the word "Beware!" I thought of mantraps and ferocious dogs, and for some minutes I stood before the gates, wondering if it would be safe for me to enter. At last, remembering how several friends had assured me that I was "no psychologist," I concluded that little harm awaited me, plucked up my courage, and boldly advanced. Beyond the gates I found the warning again repeated with a more emphatic truculence and a finer particularity. At intervals along the drive I saw notice-boards projecting from the barberries and the laurels, each with some new version of the original theme. "Death to the Psychology of Religion" were the words inscribed on one. The next was even more precise in its application, and ran as follows:— "Inquisitive psychologists take notice! Panhandle has a gun, And will not hesitate to shoot." Somewhat shaken I approached the front door and was startled to see a long, glittering thing suddenly thrust through an open window in the upper storey; and the man behind the weapon was unquestionably Panhandle himself. "Can it be," I said aloud, "that Panhandle has taken me for an inquisitive psychologist?" "Advance," cried my host, who had a keen ear for such undertones. "Advance and fear nothing." A moment later he grasped me warmly by the hand, "Welcome, dearest of friends," he was saying. "You have arrived at an opportune moment. The house is full of guests who are longing to meet you." "But, Panhandle," I expostulated as we stood on the doorstep, "I understood we were to be alone. I have come for one purpose only, that you might explain your familiarity with—with those people." I used this expression, rather than one more explicit, because the footman was still present, knowing from long experience how dangerous it is to speak plainly about metaphysical realities in the hearing of the proletariat. "Those very people are now awaiting you," said Panhandle, as he drew me into the library. "I will be quite frank with you at once. This house is haunted; and if on consideration you find your nerves unequal to an encounter with ghosts, you had better go back at once, for there is no telling how soon the apparitions will begin.

Al-Azhar mosque in El Hussein Square. One of Cairo’s oldest houses of worship, it once doubled as a university, renowned in Europe and throughout the Arab world for its scholarship. Standing on the footpath, Alex took a moment to admire the structure, named after Fatima al-Zahra, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Five minarets stretched toward the sky, each with balconies and intricately carved columns. There were six entrances. The main one now before him was built in the eighteenth century and known as Bab El Muzayini, the barber’s gate. Students had once been shaved there. The mosque was a potpourri of architectural styles, built piecemeal over its thousand-year history. But the overall effect was quite beautiful.

this one four or five feet high. The horse’s ears pricked and its stride lengthened as it approached the jump. Rachel’s body stretched along the animal’s neck as they soared over the top rail. The girl slumped as Rachel slowed the horse and walked to her side. Rachel dismounted and handed the girl the reins. “Cool him out.” With a hard look at Mike and Sean, the slim man moved to the entrance. He focused intently on Rachel as she opened the gate. After the girl and horse passed through and headed for the barn, the man stepped up behind Rachel. “You were supposed to train the horse so that my daughter can ride it,” he said quietly.

Proverb 1:20-33 1:20 Wisdom calls aloud in the street. She utters her voice in the public squares. 1:21 She calls at the head of noisy places. At the entrance of the city gates, she utters her words: 1:22 "How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? How long will mockers delight themselves in mockery, and fools hate knowledge? 1:23 Turn at my reproof. Behold, I will pour out my spirit on you. I will make known my words to you. 1:24 Because I have called, and you have refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no one has paid attention; 1:25 but you have ignored all my counsel, and wanted none of my reproof; 1:26 I also will laugh at your disaster. I will mock when calamity overtakes you; 1:27 when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when your disaster comes on like a whirlwind; when distress and anguish come on you. 1:28 Then will they call on me, but I will not answer. They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me; 1:29 because they hated knowledge, and didn't choose the fear of the Lord. 1:30 They wanted none of my counsel. They despised all my reproof. 1:31 Therefore they will eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own schemes. 1:32 For the backsliding of the simple will kill them. The careless ease of fools will destroy them. 1:33 But whoever listens to me will dwell securely, and will be at ease, without fear of harm.

It was somewhere between being awake and being asleep—a netherworld of sorts. That was the only explanation for why he was walking in a park, through a large baseball field with short, recently cut grass. No one cuts grass anymore. Slowly, the sights became familiar, and he pieced together the evidence. There, a gazebo surrounded by hurricane fencing, with a sign across the entrance gate reading: “Gazebo Reservations Available.

Jeremiah’s prophecy had predicted what would happen. “Thus saith the Lord to…Cyrus…I will…open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut.” So had the prophets prophesied, and so it came to pass. The enormous gates that barred entrance from the riverbed to the streets that crossed the river were carelessly left open. While the Babylonians feasted and drank, once again fulfilling prophecy, Cyrus and his invaders casually walked into the city without challenge. “I will make drunk her princes, and her wise men, and her captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men, and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts.

20 When they had finished dividing the land, 1the Lord said to Joshua: 2“Speak to the Israelites: Designate the cities of refuge—about which I commanded you through Moses—3to which a manslayer who kills a person by mistake, unintentionally, may flee. They shall serve you as a refuge from the blood avenger. 4He shall flee to one of those cities, present himself at the entrance to the city gate, and plead his case before the elders of that city; and they shall admit him into the city and give him a place in which to live among them. 5Should the blood avenger pursue him, they shall not hand the manslayer over to him, since he killed the other person without intent and had not been his enemy in the past. 6He shall live in that city until he can stand trial before the assembly, [and remain there] until the death of the high priest who is in office at that time. Thereafter, the manslayer may go back to his home in his own town, to the town from which he fled.

The city of Gath was the earliest Philistine settlement in Canaan. It had a large urban populace on one hundred and twenty-five square miles of land. As the furthest inland stronghold, nearest the Valley of the Terebinth, it maintained a strong siege system that made it impregnable to hostile forces. The walls were thirty feet high, surrounded by a man-made siege trench and an earthen embankment called a “berm” that made approach to the walls by besiegers extremely difficult. It was guarded by a threefold entrance gate to the city, watched over by a regiment of Gittite warriors. All this fortification would be useless against the six figures who rode their horses to the city entrance. They would not be besieging the walls, and they would not be fighting the army of Gittites. They were simply nomadic travelers on a personal quest. They did not hide themselves, because they were not recognizable to any human inhabitants. They were archangels. Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, Saraqael, Raguel, and Remiel walked their horses through the large Phoenician carved gates and into the city. They made no attempt to disguise themselves from the gods of the Philistines because they wanted the gods to know they had arrived. They wanted a showdown.

David strode through the battle raging between his men and the castle defenders in the courtyard and headed straight for the keep, intent on his goal. The castle would fall quickly. The defenders lacked leadership and were in disarray. His only concern was whether the castle had a secret tunnel for escape. During the siege, he had spread his men out through the fields surrounding the fortress to keep watch. But he had concentrated his forces for the attack and most were now inside the castle. If there was a tunnel, he must secure the widow and her daughters before they had a chance to escape. He did not relish the idea of having to chase them down through the fields with dogs. The defenders had foolishly waited too long to withdraw to the keep, and most were caught in the courtyard when David’s men burst through the gate. He barely spared them a glance as he ran up the steps of the keep. With several of his warriors at his back, he burst through the doors brandishing his sword. He paused inside the entrance to hall. Women and children were screaming, and the few Blackadder warriors who had made it inside were overturning tables in a useless attempt to set up a defense. “If ye hope for mercy, drop your weapons,” David shouted, making his voice heard above the chaos. He locked gazes with the men who hesitated to obey his order until every weapon clanked to the floor, then he swept his gaze over the women. Their clothing confirmed what he’d known the moment he entered the hall. Blackadder’s widow was not in the room. “Where is she?” he demanded of the closest Blackadder man. “Who, m’lord?” the man said, shifting his gaze to the side. “Your mistress!” David picked him up by the front of his tunic and leaned in close. “Tell me now.” “In her bedchamber,” the man squeaked, pointing to an arched doorway. “’Tis up the stairs.” David caught a sudden whiff of urine and dropped the man to the floor in disgust. The wretch had wet himself. “Take him to the dungeon,” he ordered. The coward had given up his mistress far too easily.

Idling the dinghy, bringing it quietly in closer and closer to the croc, Steve would finally make his move. He’d creep to the front of the boat and hold the spotlight until the last moment. Then he would leap into the water. Grabbing the crocodile around the scruff of the neck, he would secure its tail between his legs and wrap his body around the thrashing creature. Crocodiles are amazingly strong in the water. Even a six-foot-long subadult would easily take Steve to the bottom of the river, rolling and fighting, trying to dislodge him by scraping against the rocks and snags at the bottom of the river. But Steve would hang on. He knew he could push off the bottom, reach the surface for air, flip the crocodile into his dinghy, and pin the snapping animal down. “Piece of cake,” he said. That was the most incredible story I had ever heard. And Steve was the most incredible man I had ever seen--catching crocodiles by hand to save their lives? This was just unreal. I had an overwhelming sensation. I wanted to build a big campfire, sit down with Steve next to it, and hear his stories all night long. I didn’t want them to ever end. But eventually the tour was over, and I felt I just had to talk to this man. Steve had a broad, easy smile and the biggest hands I had ever seen. I could tell by his stature and stride that he was accustomed to hard work. I saw a series of small scars on the sides of his face and down his arms. He came up and, with a broad Australian accent, said, “G’day, mate.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in trouble. I’d never, ever believed in love at first sight. But I had the strangest, most overwhelming feeling that it was destiny that took me into that little wildlife park that day. Steve started talking to me as if we’d known each other all our lives. I interrupted only to have my friend Lori take a picture of us, and the moment I first met Steve was forever captured. I told him about my wildlife rescue work with cougars in Oregon. He told me about his work with crocodiles. The tour was long over, and the zoo was about to close, but we kept talking. Finally I could hear Lori honking her horn in the car park. “I have to go,” I said to Steve, managing a grim smile. I felt a connection as I never had before, and I was about to leave, never to see him again. “Why do you love cougars so much?” he asked, walking me toward the park’s front gate. I had to think for a beat. There were many reasons. “I think it’s how they can actually kill with their mouths,” I finally said. “They can conquer an animal several times their size, grab it in their jaws, and kill it instantly by snapping its neck.” Steve grinned. I hadn’t realized how similar we really were. “That’s what I love about crocodiles,” he said. “They are the most powerful apex predators.” Apex predators. Meaning both cougars and crocs were at the top of the food chain. On opposite sides of the world, this man and I had somehow formed the same interest, the same passion. At the zoo entrance I could see Lori and her friends in the car, anxious to get going back to Brisbane. “Call the zoo if you’re ever here again,” Steve said. “I’d really like to see you again.” Could it be that he felt the same way I did? As we drove back to Brisbane, I was quiet, contemplative. I had no idea how I would accomplish it, but I was determined to figure out a way to see him. The next weekend, Lori was going diving with a friend, and I took a chance and called Steve. “What do you reckon, could I come back for the weekend?” I asked. “Absolutely. I’ll take care of everything,” came Steve’s reply.

Close to the left of the school entrance gate are uncompleted rooms which lack everything else but a base foundation and load-bearing walls. And as for the toilets - in all six years of my life as a student, I never used them once, as they were hardly ever clean. The sight of decayed excrement and worms crawling all over the floors and toilet seats was enough to make one lose interest in passing out waste. One fateful day, I held back the faeces in my anus and walked the mile-long journey home from school. It was painful yet needful as anything would be better than having to do my business in a smelly worm-infested room. No sane individual would subject their own human waste to that kind of treatment. We are all kidding ourselves - OGS is not a school, it is an extension of Kirikiri prison!

When I heard the ear-piercing scream tonight, I figured someone in the Fourth was having a nightmare of the impending-danger variety. Then I realized the shrieks weren’t coming from the barracks but from inside the bathhouse. For our safety, nobody is supposed to be in the baths after eleven, because there are no lifeguards on duty. Janice says the real reason the doors are locked is to thwart romantically inclined legionnaires from getting up to shenanigans in there. That thwarting can be thwarted, though, if you know about the secret entrance to the main pool. Which everybody does, although not many people use it, because you have to swim underwater through a narrow concrete pipe, then squeeze through a small mesh gate that leads into the pool. You’d better hope you’re an underwater-breathing descendent of Neptune if you get stuck in there. Apparently, a girl and a boy from the First Cohort thought the risk was worth it, because they sneaked in via the not-so-secret entrance tonight. I’m thinking their lovey-dovey mood evaporated when they surfaced, though. Because dead rats. Hundreds of them. Floating in the pool. Blocking the hot-springs water supply. Clogging the drains. Even hanging from the basket for used towels. I can’t imagine anything more totally, completely, scream-inducingly disgusting. And mysterious, too, because no one can explain how so many rats got in there so quickly. The filtration system is shut off when the baths close, so they weren’t pumped in with the water. And the lifeguard swears the place was clean when he locked up at eleven. The couple sneaked in around eleven fifteen. Could someone have broken in and distributed all those rats in just fifteen minutes? Didn’t seem likely.

Three car doors slammed in quick staccato as we got out. For a long moment we looked around at the lot, where we were just one in a massive sea of cars. Patrons who parked in the lot of the Willow Creek Faire could see the entrance when they got out of their cars: a two-dimensional castle façade that some volunteers had put together about five years ago. But not here. Our entire Faire could probably fit in this parking lot, and all we could see around us was row after row of cars. Like parking at Disney World, but without the trams or mouse ears. “Holy shit.” April wasn’t part of our Faire, but even she sounded impressed. “Where’s the entrance?” “Up that way.” I couldn’t see the gates I was pointing toward, but the stream of people told me I was indicating the right way. “A little bit of a hike, then.” April looked behind us, where the grassy lot continued to fill slowly with cars. “Holy shit,” she said again. “This isn’t a Faire. This is a town.” “Yeah.” Mitch had been here before—so had I; if you grew up around here you went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival at least once during your childhood—but even his eyes were a little wide at the vastness of it all. “This place is . . . It’s pretty big.” He paused. “That’s what she said.” I was too nervous to snicker, but April elbowed him in the ribs, and that was good enough. “Okay. We’re going in.” He reached over his head for the back of his T-shirt, pulling it off and tossing it into the back of the truck. April sighed. “All right, Kilty. Naked enough?” “Look on the bright side.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her as he stuck his keys into the sporran he wore attached to the kilt. “I’m not working this Faire. Which means I get to wear this kilt the way it’s meant to be worn.” I coughed. I didn’t want to think about what Mitch was or was not wearing under there. Which was sad, because thinking about Mitch in a kilt used to be one of my favorite hobbies. The man was born to wear that green plaid

Scylla and Charybdis. From misremembering the Mythology lessons at St Peter’s School – unless it was at Copenhagen Street – I believed for a long time that these names referred to innocent rocky islets at the entrance to the Straits of Messina in Sicily. Two columns forming Italy’s southern gate, in this Mare Nostrum glorified by il Duce. And I thought that if pillars like these existed in London they would be, on the one hand, Clerkenwell, the Little Italy where we lay rotting, and then Soho, the capital’s other Italian neighbourhood, at once sulphurous and more dazzling.

It was a beautiful garden: the proportions, the plants, the feeling of enclosure granted by the surrounding stone wall. The fragrance, too, was heady: a hint of late-blooming jasmine mingled with lavender and honeysuckle. Birds flitted in the gaps between leaves, and bees and butterflies hovered over flowers in the ample garden beds. The gate through which she'd come was the side entrance, Juliet saw now, for another, larger path led away from the house towards a solid wooden gate set into the stones of the front wall. The wider path was lined on either side by standard roses wearing soft pink petals, and at its end was a large Japanese maple tree that had grown to reach across the front entrance.

Up ahead, a shadowy building loomed. It looked more like a gothic cathedral than a school, with grossly elongated black spires jutting into the night sky. They unnerved Tony. Somehow, they resembled horns silhouetted against the moon. He counted ten of these protuberances, each with an arrowhead as its tip. Tony found the structure difficult to make his mind up about. It was beautiful, that was for sure, but its beauty was intermingled with an ill-masked sense of horror. The black exterior had a pair of peculiar projections on either side of the building resembling a bat's wings. His feet on concrete now, he pulled up to a webbed gate— also reminiscent of a bats with the hind, bone-like array supporting an oily black, translucent texture. He saw some girls a few dozen feet from the gate at the entrance of the building. They were garbed in black sailor fuku skirts too high above the knees to facilitate concentration upon anything academic. The males were also dressed in black corduroy pants and black dress shirt. A throng by the massive doors stared holes through them as they approached. Up close, he noted some of the girls were quite pale, sporting piercings and tattoos on their necks and hands. He even saw one with a spider web inked on the side of her face. When he followed Silver Man into the building— his toes squeaking in his soaked shoes—he was awed by the aesthetics. There was a rather large gathering in the hall that looked more like large shadows with all the children in black. Tony felt out of place in his brown pants and long sleeved white shirt. The hall was bleak; the only source of illumination was a pair of horizontal cylindrical lamps set upon wooden rafters near the ceiling. Silver Man proceeded toward the platform where Tony could just make out the form of a thin man donning a monocle. He looked like an old scientist. He was sitting cross-legged, stroking his chest-length pearl white beard. The man appeared to be watching them as they progressed through the hall. Then he stood as they neared the stage, now caressing his bald head. He had a monkish appearance. His black robe— quite similar to the one Silver Man wore— was tied at the waist by a red cloth. The bald, monocled man extended a spindly hand which Silver Man gave a firm tug before leaning in and whispering something. The man nodded, turning to Tony. Tony flinched as he regarded him through his peculiar eyewear: a single gold-rimmed, circular lens. He now folded himself into an accentuated bow. "Listen up folks!" he shouted. Tony saw the students rushing inside the castle pell-mell, summoned by the voice of the bespectacled man. “We have a late recruit ladies and gentlemen,” the man said. His voice was much stronger than his thin frame suggested. “Join me as I induct him into the hallowed spirit of Imajinaereum.

The first battle in Fallujah happens three months later, in April. Some Blackwater guys riding in an up-armored Chevy Suburban stop on a road by the bridge at the entrance to the gates of Fallujah when they’re approached by a group of kids selling gum, candy, soda, and fake Rolexes. A guy rolls down the window to buy some candy, and a kid drops a frag grenade into the Suburban. The burned, charred bodies of four Americans are dragged from the wreckage and strung up by the bridge. The insurgents declare an all-out war against the Americans in Iraq.

ducked behind some bushes to watch the witches at their next stop. It was an older house, with a large metal gate that allowed entrance onto the small front porch. The witches pushed the gate open, took a few steps, and then climbed three stairs to stand before the door.

Now let us say (a few words) to refute this doctrine also. If mind as well as external objects be unreal, who is it that knows they are so? Again, if there be nothing real in the universe, what is it that causes unreal objects to appear? We stand witness to the fact there is no one of the unreal things on earth that is not made to appear by something real. If there be no water of unchanging fluidity,[FN#373] how can there be the unreal and temporary forms of waves? If there be no unchanging mirror, bright and clean, how can there be various images, unreal and temporary, reflected in it? It is true in sooth that the dreaming mind as well as the things dreamed, as said above, are equally unreal, but does not that unreal dream necessarily presuppose the existence of some (real) sleepers? [FN#373] The Absolute is compared with the ocean, and the phenomenal universe with the waves. Now, if both mind and external objects, as declared above, be nothing at all, no- one can tell what it is that causes these unreal appearances. Therefore this doctrine, we know, simply serves to refute the erroneous theory held by those who are passionately attached to Dharma-laksana, but never clearly discloses spiritual Reality. So that Mahabheri-harakaparivarta-sutra[FN#374] says as follows: "All the sutras that teach the unreality of things belong to an imperfect doctrine (of the Buddha). Mahaprajnya-paramita-sutra[FN#375] says: "The doctrine of unreality is the first entrance-gate to Mahayanism.

Now, should a man attempt to go to court, clothed in filthy rags, and endeavor to gain admission to the royal presence in such raiment as that, would not he be refused entrance, and driven with indignation from the palace gate?--certainly he would; and can we expect to stand in the hour of death and day of judgment, undaunted before the holy Lord God, arrayed in no better robe, and defended with no better armour than that imperfect righteousness of ours, which the Scripture calls filthy rags?

His brother Najib owned an auto-parts store at bustling Shikarpur Gate, the mouth of the narrow road linking their village to the city—an ancient byway that had once led southward through the passes all the way to India. At dusk it is clogged with a riot of vegetable sellers’ handcarts beset by shoppers, Toyota pickup trucks, horse-drawn taxis, and three-wheeled rickshaws clambering around and through the throng like gaudy dung beetles. Nurallah’s brother Najib had gone to Chaman, just across the border in Pakistan, where the streets are lined with cargo containers serving as shops, and used motor oil cements the dust to the ground in a glossy tarmac, and every variety of automotive organ or sinew is laid bare, spread out, and strung up for sale. He had made his purchases and set off back to Kandahar. “He paid his customs dues”—Nurallah emphasized the remarkable point—“because that’s the law. He paid at every checkpoint on the way back, fifty afghanis, a hundred afghanis.” A dollar or two every time an unkempt, underage police boy in green fatigues slouched out of a sandbagged lean-to into the middle of the road—eight times in the sixty-six miles when last I counted. “And then when he reached the entrance to town, the police there wanted five hundred afghanis. Five hundred!” A double arch marks the place where the road that swoops down from Kabul joins the road leading in from Pakistan. The police range from one side to the other, like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows. “He refused,” Nurallah continued. “He said he had paid his customs dues—he showed them the receipt. He said he had paid the bribes at every checkpoint all along the way, and he was not paying again.” I waited a beat. “So what happened?” “They reached into his window and smacked him.” “They hit him?” I was shocked. Najib might be a sunny guy, but Kandahar tempers are strung on tripwires. For a second I thought we’d have to go bail him out. “What did he do?” Nurallah’s eyes, beneath his widow’s peak, were banked and smoldering. “What could he do? He paid the money. But then he pulled over to the side of the road and called me. I told him to stay right there. And I called Police Chief Matiullah Qatih, to report the officer who was taking the bribes.” And Matiullah had scoffed at him: Did he die of it? The police buzzards had seen Najib make the call. They had descended on him, snatched the phone out of his hand, and smashed it. “You call that law?” Now Nurallah was ablaze. “They’re the police! They should be showing people what the law is; they should be enforcing the law. And they’re the ones breaking it.” Nurallah was once a police officer himself. He left the force the day his own boss, Kabul police chief Zabit Akrem, was assassinated in that blast in the mosque in 2005.1 Yet so stout was Nurallah’s pride in his former profession that he brought his dark green uniform into work and kept it there, hung neatly on a hook in his locker. “My sacred oath,” he vowed, concluding: “If I see someone planting an IED on a road, and then I see a police truck coming, I will turn away. I will not warn them.” I caught my breath. So maybe he didn’t mean it literally. Maybe Nurallah wouldn’t actually connive with the Taliban. Still, if a former police officer like him was even mouthing such thoughts, then others were acting on them. Afghan government corruption was manufacturing Taliban.

something hard, she presses her lips together just in time to silence a yelp that nearly escapes her throat. “Move!” the guard yells, but marches by without stopping. Finally, Mila senses a structure overhead. They are beneath the main entrance—the arched vehicle gate. A gust of wind lashes at their backs and Mila reaches for her hat to keep it from blowing away. She tugs its brim low over her brow and glances down at Felicia, who is white in the face but whose expression is remarkably calm. Stay focused, Mila reminds herself. You’re so close! Count your steps. One . . . two . . . They creep backward. Three . . .

There is a gate across the entrance, which Liam moves aside for me, and there is a scrabbling noise as a red blur comes zooming across the room. Liam reaches down and picks up the dervish, who licks him frantically. "Hello, girl. Nice to see you too. This is Anneke, she's a friend of mine. Anneke, this is Kerry. Like the country." I can finally see that she is an Irish setter, maybe four or five months old, and I reach out to pet her, and Liam drops her unceremoniously in my arms. She is soft and warm, and immediately snuggles cozily against me. "Cute pup." "Yeah, I have to say, she has stolen my heart." "That's just because she's Irish." "That might be it. Always did have a thing for redheads." This makes me blush, and I focus on cuddling the puppy to cover my discomfit.

Csikszentmihalyi goes on to share a personal story that helps explain his perspective. In Hungary, where he grew up, on the tall wooden gate at the entrance to the local elementary school, hung a sign that read: The roots of knowledge are bitter, but its fruits are sweet. This always struck him as deeply untrue: “Even when the learning is hard,” he writes, “it is not bitter when you feel that it is worth having, that you can master it, that practicing what you learned will express who you are and help you achieve what you desire.

Jesus said, "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life and only a few find it." Mathew 7:13-14. Jesus was speaking of an entrance, not an exit. He was speaking of a beginning, not an end.

My attention is caught by a delivery van coming through the black gates at the entrance to The Circle, directly opposite our house. It turns down the left side of the horseshoe-shaped

The historian, Josephus, explains how Cyrus arrived at this decision. In the first year of Cyrus’s reign, Daniel showed Cyrus the writings of Isaiah, addressing Cyrus by name. Written 120 years earlier, the prophecy is remarkable in its details, right down to Cyrus’s entering Babylon by drying up and crossing the Euphrates river. Isaiah even added a description of the famed “double doors” at the entrance of Babylon. The majestic entrance to the city was a massive double gate, flanked with bright towers of blue enameled brick. The prophecy was even more remarkable in light of the fact that at the time of Isaiah, Babylon did not have these doors and was not yet a world power. Neither did the majestic temple of Solomon and the city of Jerusalem need to be rebuilt. Put yourself in the seat of Cyrus, and imagine reading a letter from God written to you by name 120 years before you were born.

More than two thousand years later, one of the abominations God showed the prophet Ezekiel was women at the entrance of the north gate of the Temple weeping for Dumuzi, called Tammuz in the Bible.

forced to join the fighting, which was why their families and communities—including Salva’s schoolmaster—had sent the boys running into the bush at the first sign of fighting. Children who arrived at the refugee camp without their families were grouped together, so Salva was separated at once from the people he had traveled with. Even though they had not been kind to him, at least he had known them. Now, among strangers once again, he felt uncertain and maybe even afraid. As he walked through the camp with several other boys, Salva glanced at every face he passed. Uncle had said that no one knew where his family was for certain . . . so wasn’t there at least a chance that they might be here in the camp? Salva looked around at the masses of people stretched out as far as he could see. He felt his heart sink a little, but he clenched his hands into fists and made himself a promise. If they are here, I will find them. After so many weeks of walking, Salva found it strange to be staying in one place. During that long, terrible trek, finding a safe place to stop and stay for a while had been desperately important. But now that he was at the camp, he felt restless—almost as if he should begin walking again. The camp was safe from the war. There were no men with guns or machetes, no planes with bombs overhead. On the evening of his very first day, Salva was given a bowl of boiled maize to eat, and another one the next morning. Already things were better here than they had been during the journey. During the afternoon of the second day, Salva picked his way slowly through the crowds. Eventually, he found himself standing near the gate that was the main entrance to the camp, watching the new arrivals enter. It did not seem as if the camp could possibly hold any more, but still they kept coming: long lines of people, some emaciated, some hurt or sick, all exhausted. As Salva scanned the faces, a flash of orange caught his eye. Orange . . . an orange headscarf . . . He began pushing and stumbling past people. Someone spoke to him angrily, but he did not stop to excuse himself. He could still see the vivid spot of orange—yes, it was a headscarf—the woman’s back was to him, but she was tall, like his mother—he had to catch up, there were too many people in the way— A half-sob broke free from Salva’s lips. He mustn’t lose track of her! Chapter Twelve Southern Sudan, 2009

Reev stood near the entrance in his usual spot, arms crossed and doing his best “Don’t mess with me” impression.

Those men had long since given themselves without reservation to do the will of God. So far as they knew, they were to be plain ordinary missionaries—Roj to the Atshuaras; Jim, Ed, and Pete to the Quichuas; Nate to serve all the jungle stations with his airplane. But small things happen (Nate found some inhabited Waorani houses). Small decisions are made (he told Jim and Ed), which lead to bigger ones (they began to pray with new vigor for an entrance into the territory), and ultimately a man’s individual choices become momentous.

The boys hurried to the convertible and sped away. Soon the outlines of a Ferris wheel came in sight. “Quite a show,” Joe remarked as he and Frank got out of the car. Just inside the entrance gate a man standing on a platform was announcing loudly: “Ten dollars, I said! Ten dollars ! Easiest way in the world to earn ten dollars! All you have to be is smart!” The barker held up a large padlock. “You just have to open this. Sure, it’s a trick lock. But it’ll cost you only a dime to try. Step this way, gentlemen!” Frank nudged Joe. The first customer to ascend the stairs was Chet Morton! The crowd roared with laughter as Chet struggled with the padlock. He seemed determined to win the ten dollars. “Hey! You better quit before you bust,” cried one of the bystanders. Chet was bent double and was very red in the face. “It’ll cost you more than ten dollars for a doctor!” another man shouted. Frank and Joe were grinning from ear to ear. They knew their friend thought he could open the padlock because he had heard so much about locks and keys lately. But Chet finally gave up and turned away to buy some peanuts.

The day he is found out, O’Brien is herded by a dumbfounded crowd to the Shinto torii gate that marks the entrance to our campus. Avery is in tears, something none of us could have imagined. Before passing through the torii, O’Brien stops and addresses all of us: “Hey, I’m sorry for fucking you over. You’re my friends and my family because I don’t have any other friends or family. If you consider what I’ve gained by enabling so many proxies to function undetected, and thereby so many eluders to successfully elude—that is, nothing—versus what I’ve lost—everything—you’ll understand that only one thing could justify that appalling cost-benefit analysis. That thing is belief. I believe in what the eluders are doing, I believe in their right to do it, and the force of my belief more than compensates for the fact that acting on it will cost me everyone and everything I love. I have no regrets, even now,” O’Brien concludes, “much as I will miss you.” And then he walks out through the torii gate. The chaos that follows this revelation takes many forms and strains. An inquiry begins into whether the man who made that speech was really O’Brien, or whether the real O’Brien was kidnapped by eluders and animated holographically beside the torii gate using gray grabs from the collective to capture his workplace tones and gestures and speech. Another hypothesis has it that the eluders somehow breached O’Brien’s skull with a weevil—a burrowing electronic device that can interfere with thought—and were controlling his behavior and speech from afar. It is difficult to disprove either of these theses, and I owe it to trusted typicals who persuade me of their unlikelihood on two bases: 1) Such actions would entail the use of the very invasive technologies the eluders abhor and are trying to elude. 2) Interventions like these are beyond the eluders’ technological range; they simply could not pull them off.

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My grandfather built Darling House five years after he'd arrived from Scotland. He knew by then that the climate was going to require something different from what he'd been used to as a boy." "She's a grand old lady," Matt said of the house. "Dressed up in an iron-lace shawl, looking out over her harbor." Nora smiled. "That's exactly what she is. It's the reason she and I get on so well together. We're two of a kind." Nora had lived in Darling House all her life and was as much a part of the building as the pair of lions guarding its entrance gate and the brick chimneys punctuating the sparkling blue sky. It was almost impossible to imagine her anywhere else. Jess had only to close her eyes now to invoke a vivid picture of her grandmother standing on the wide concrete steps that led to the front door, both arms lifted in welcome.

surrounding the courtyard, an old iron fence quite overgrown with roses. From his study window Reynie might easily have been looking out upon that tree or those flowers, or he might have lifted his gaze to the sky, which on this fine spring morning was a lovely shade of cobalt blue. Instead, he sat at his desk in an attitude of attention, staring at the door, wondering who in the world could be standing on the other side. For a stranger to be lurking in the hallway should have been impossible, given the fact of locked doors, security codes, and a trustworthy guard. Yet Reynie’s ears had detected an unfamiliar tread. His ears were not particularly sharp; indeed, his hearing, like almost everything else about him, was perfectly average: He had average brown eyes and hair, an average fair complexion, an average tendency to sing in the shower, and so on. But when it came to noticing things—noticing things, understanding things, and figuring things out—“average” could hardly describe him. He had been aware, for the last thirty seconds or so, of something different in the house. Preoccupied as he’d been with urgent matters, however, Reynie had given the signs little thought. The shriek and clang of the courtyard gate had raised no suspicions, for not a minute earlier he had spied Captain Plugg, the diligent guard, leaving through that gate to make one of her rounds about the neighborhood. Hearing the sounds again after he’d turned from the window, Reynie had simply assumed the guard forgot something, or was struck by a need for the bathroom. The sudden draft in his study, which always accompanied the opening of the front door downstairs, he had naturally attributed to the return of Captain Plugg as well. He had wondered, vaguely, at the absence of her heavy footsteps below, but his mind had quickly conjured an image of that powerfully built woman taking a seat near the entrance to remove something from her boot. Too quickly, Reynie realized, when he heard that unfamiliar tread in the hallway. And now he sat staring at the door with a great intensity of focus. A knock sounded—a light, tentative tapping—and in an instant Reynie’s apprehension left him. There were people in Stonetown right now who would very much like to hurt him, but this, he could tell, was not one of them. “Come in?” said Reynie, his tone inquisitive.

There was a gate to this court, and past this gate was the entrance to the Tabernacle, past the first gate stood the altar of burnt offering and the laver of bronze.

We began this book with a passage from Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, in which we accompanied Antisthenes in his descent to Hades. We now conclude this chapter with yet another passage from Lucian, in which we find Antisthenes already in Hades. Antisthenes, Diogenes, and other Cynics, Lucian tells us, persist in doing in the underworld exactly what they did while in this physical world, namely, raising hell about whatever they saw and heard. That and only that is what they are still doing after death, in fact, in so loud and harsh a fashion that those whose fate has been to share with them the same place in Hades beg the gods of the underworld to segregate the Cynics to some remote comer where their shouting cannot be heard. The gods, however, ignore this request, because they know that an important component of the punishment for those who passed their time on earth seeking pleasure, amassing fortunes, exploiting the weak and the poor, confusing people through deceptive language, and in other subhuman forms of behavior, is that they need to be reminded of how empty their lives were on earth. The Cynics wait at the gates of Hades for new arrivals, men and women who, while alive, turned themselves into less than human creatures and who now are about to suffer the unhappy consequences of their actions. As Diogenes invites Antisthenes to rush with him to the gates because new arrivals are entering, Antisthenes remarks: Let us be off at once, Diogenes, for, indeed, the spectacle will surely be an amusing one-to see them weeping and lamenting, and some begging to be let go, and some making their entrance with reluctance, and, regardless of how hard Hermes pushes them in, resisting and struggling, but all to no purpose.

Not only that, but the loose stones in the pavement had been repaired and the gate at the entrance to the street of brothels had been painted. It was now a dark, dull green, the colour of leftover lentils - a colour only a government official hurrying to get work done would ever choose.

We need to enter the castle, first,” he said instead. As if the gates had heard him, the metal bars flared to a pale green and then their glow faded back to red and finally dulled into non-existence. The entrance was unbarred and their way apparently clear. “I like not that,” growled Moonglum. “Too easy. A trap awaits us—are we to spring it at the pleasure of whoever dwells within the castle confines?

Be proactive at protecting your sanity; extricate from your circle the harpies of negative energies. Be as vigilant as a gate keeper, for they will seek entrance to your sanctum only to wreak havoc and create disharmony. Not every patron needs to be granted entrance to you place of happiness.

To the narcissist, may karma intercept you at the gates, where heaven’s entrance is denied, but a lifetime pass to eternal hell is generously granted.

On the evening of Saturday, the 13th of August, 1859, the superb steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms, bound up from the Isthmus of Panama, neared the entrance to San Francisco, the great centre of a world-wide commerce.

. . . Max glanced at the camp entrance, where the train came through. A gate marked the entrance. The sign read: “Arbeit macht frei” a German phrase meaning “work sets you free.” The sign was a cruel taunt, as this was certainly not a place where work set a person free.

the Abbotsford visitors’ entrance, but the gate was

After lunch the boys set off in their convertible for the Greenville Museum. It was a small building at an intersection of two roads at the edge of town. The main entrance was on one road, with a tall hedge in front of the building. Extensive grounds stretched to the rear on the side road, along which ran a high iron picket fence. Frank parked alongside the hedge, and the young detectives strode through a gate to the spacious lawn at the back.