Excise Quotes

Sometimes you gotta excise a wound before it can heal.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

This felt cosmic, like a piece of me was being excised so it could take up residence in you

Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life – that’s a lonely way to live.

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.

As always, Adam was reminded of how Ronan belonged in this place. Something about the familiar way he stood as he searched for ripe fruit implied that he had done it many times before. It made it easy to understand that Ronan had grown up here and would grow old here. Easy to see how to exile him was to excise his soul.

Sometimes when really bad things happen, you put them in a box and never look at them again because they’ll cost you the rest of your life. Some wounds never heal. You excise the savaged flesh and become the next thing.

Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.

…the cardinal labor of composition, which is excision…

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation.

I do not wish to criticize any system that can nourish people’s spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing cherry-picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them; it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but is what I would call “soft” thinking.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

This is my life, I thought...I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of secual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record.

On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!

Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

War is our time. Sevro thought he could escape it. I thought I could end it. But our enemy is like the Hydra. Cut off one head, two more sprout. They will not sue for peace. They will not surrender. Their heart must be excised, their will to fight ground to the finest dust.

I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor. A

Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart.

Excision of my genitals didn’t eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The

I lay in my bed a few minutes later, resigned as the pain finally made its appearance. It was a crippling thing, this sensation that a huge hole had been pushed through my chest, excising my most vital organs and leaving ragged, unhealed gashes around the edges that continued to throb and bleed despite the passage of time. Rationally, I knew my lungs must still be intact, yet I gasped for air and my head spun like my efforts yielded me nothing. My heart must have been beating, too, but I couldn't hear the sound of my pulse in my ears; my hands felt blue with cold. I curled inward, hugging my ribs to hold myself together. I scrambled for my numbness, my denial, but it evaded me. And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain--the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head--but it was managable. I could live through it. It didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.

Still, the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year of 1948

How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the point seems absolute. But ask your interlocutor to think about the validity of this surgical procedure, which consists of removing a healthy part of a nonconsenting child’s body on nonmedical grounds – the legal definition of… mutilation.

This time I will cut it out, excise that fragile and anemic part of me, let it ooze heavy as iron from me, smother it in dirt. I have not learned how to be obedient, only to hurt myself as much as you.

Youth is not a curse, but a fleeting blessing. Youth enables us to cavort freely unconcerned with the larger issues in life. Aging and the accompanying responsibilities that come with added maturity is what augments, vexes, and then excises us. Maturation represents the accumulation of supplanting changes happening in a person over time including physical, mental, and social growth and development. Growing old gracefully entails submission to biological alterations and witnessing unsettling changes in cultural and societal conventions.

The reader, knowing nothing about the ‘dark continent,’ filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.

It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild.

Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We're none of us one thing or the other; we're legion. There's a different Yaz inside your skull for everyday of your life. We deceive others. We deceive ourselves. We keep secrets that even we don't know and hold beliefs we don't understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance, we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves. We think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed.

That story Noam wove last night about their future had sunk deep into his bones, and he couldn’t excise it. Dara wanted that. For the first time in years, Dara wanted to live. The Electric Heir

The symbolic evidence of women’s invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for “I am who am.” So much for “Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them.” What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important.

A Palleseen writer once described the world of superstition and unreason that they were bringing perfection to as ‘the Great Night’, contrasted with the clarity of their rational sun. Which writer was subsequently excised from the Pal canon because personification of an abstract is in itself irrational. Nonetheless, the night persists.

I had great plans to surgically excise the quaking, complaining teenager within someday. If I could just get rid of her and her thousands upon thousands of issues - Do I look fat? Am I ugly? Will anyone ever love me? Will I always be alone? Is she fatter than me? How ugly am I? Are they making fun of me? - I was convinced I would immediately become the sort of casual and laid back adult person who was forever smiling and was genuinely unconcerned with the size and/or shape of her body. I wasn't holding my breath.

Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.

The Church combats the passions with excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its ‘cure’ is castration. It never asks: ‘How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?’ – it has at all times laid the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of avarice, of revengefulness). – But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life…

Nicky scrambled to his feet. "That's what I wanted, but I didn't really think you'd get it, especially not on the first try. I just knew you were my best shot at getting Andrew to listen. You're amazing, you know that?" He yanked Neil into a fierce hug before Neil thought to dodge. "Oh, you just might be the best thing to happen to the Foxes." "I doubt that." "I don't." Nicky beamed as he let go of Neil. "How did you do it?" Neil neatly excised ninety percent of the truth and said, "I asked." "Yeah, right. Do you know what would have happened to me if I asked? Violence, Neil. Extreme and uncalled-for violence.

How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.

But can you ever excise a bad parent? Though you might come to terms with all that they have psychologically bequeathed you, they can never really be expunged. They're the stubborn, permanent stain that will never entirely vanish in the wash.

You are sure that I would not be well advised to make certain excisions and eliminations? You do not think it would be a good thing to cut, to prune? I might, for example, delete the rather exhaustive excursus into the family life of the early Assyrians?

Diogenes’s central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.

I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain. Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more. The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community. I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. [...] Most of it is garbage. Most of it needs excising. Even if we’re fearful that we might be missing something. We are probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that matter, what will we retain.

The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very definitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female. ” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial, useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by men.

both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

Fasting is a struggle against nature and the removal of all that stimulates the palate, the inhibition of lust, the excision of evil thoughts, liberation from dreams, purity in prayer, the radiance of the soul, the defense of the mind, liberation from blindness, the gateway of remorse, humble sorrow, joyful remorse, a break from speaking, an agent for stillness, a watch for obedience, alleviation of sleep, health of body, a means to dispassion, a clearing of sins, a door to Paradise and its joy.

This is my life, I thought, as my taxi slogged through heavy traffic and inched through the tunnel to Logan Airport. I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and just become the master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India’s Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record.

Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me. The excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead, it cleared the way for me to rebuild. Because now came the hard part: replacing them. Many believe that in order to heal from C-PTSD, we must receive kind and compassionate parenting. If we can’t receive that from our own parents, then we must find a new parent to do the job.

Removing my parents from my life protected me, but it did not fix me, the excision was not healing in and of itself. Instead? It cleared the way for me to rebuild. Because now came the hard part: replacing them. Many believe that in order to heal from C-PTSD, we must receive kind and compassionate parenting. If we can’t receive that from our own parents, then we must find a new parent to do the job.

Of the myriad lies that people often tell themselves, two of the most common, potent and destructive are “We really love our children” and “Our parents really loved us.” It may be that our parents did love us and we do love our children, but when it is not the case, people often go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the realization. I frequently refer to psychotherapy as the “truth game” or the “honesty game” because its business is among other things to help patients confront such lies. One of the roots of mental illness is invariably an interlocking system of lies we have been told and lies we have told ourselves. These roots can be uncovered and excised only in an atmosphere of utter honesty. To create this atmosphere it is essential for therapists to bring to their relationships with patients a total capacity for openness and truthfulness. How can a patient be expected to endure the pain of confronting reality unless we bear the same pain? We can lead only insofar as we go before.

Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker and excise officer issued a resounding call for American independence that sold a stupendous 120,000 copies by year’s end.

The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.” A sentence the biologist had excised from her thesis, but one that had burned bright in her mind, and now in Ghost Bird’s, where, even analyzed and kept at arm’s length like all received memories, it had a kind of power.

I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.

productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul.

Like most Americans, when I was in school, I never read about the murders in any books; it was as if these crimes had been excised from history.

while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised a part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life—that’s a lonely way to live. I

Ten kings met once a year to decide about water sharing, fixing customs, excise, and toll rates, port levies, and to exchange musicians and artisans. An

Shame was one of those things that had to be excised like a cancer, but it was a hard thing to remove when it was wrapped around your heart.

He fell into sleep so cavernous it felt less like rest than an excision of memory.

The sampling period is not incidental to the development of great performers—something to be excised in the interest of a head start—it is integral.

The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute.

She understood what perhaps they are only just learning. That if you attempt to clean the messiness of life you end up scrubbing the life away from living. We can't excise joy from pain.

There are persons who can speak no more, whose very names have vanished. Yet a name excised from the verge where it once lived still casts its sound on all who sleep there and enters their throats.

To ask God to redeem Jerusalem but not cast sin outside the city walls is like asking a doctor to heal your body without excising the disease. Like asking the light to arise without casting out the darkness. Like asking for restoration to come and destruction to remain. It is to ask for a contradiction. God excludes sin from his kingdom because of his goodness, not in opposition to or in spite of it.

It's Friday night the city is a heart that beats alone,despite the millions of blood cells that race through its dog-legged arteries, oblivious to each other yet performing a life sustaining dance. [...] You're tired of being part of this blood dance. The immune system has been trying to excise you as diseased for as long you can remember, but you've been tenacious,clinging to the walls and floors as the torrent pushes you around.

But why?" Gabriel asks. "Why do they wish to cause such pain to another human?" "Why does the Spanish Inquisition do what it does?" I ask. "Why does our own Church burn witches at the stake? Why did our own crusaders punish the Moors so exquisitely?" Gabriel thinks about this. He knows I don't beg answers for these questions. "Of course it's easy to say that we mete out punishment to those who are an abomination in God's eyes," I say. "But it's more than that, isn't it? I think we don't just allow torturers but condone them as a way to excise the fear we all have of death. To torture someone is to take control of death, to be the master of it, even for a short time.

The first obligation is to Truth, and that a Truth derived from an apprehension of an order more than natural or material. I think that man who will not acknowledge the Author of their being have no sanction for truth Dedication to an abiding Truth and to the spiritual aspirations of humanity excised, the pursuit of power and the gratification of concupiscence are the logical occupations of rational men in a world that is merely human and merely natural.

I'm proud of you, and I love you," Blay said yet again, that old, familiar voice cutting through all of those years of rejection and judgement, giving him not just a rope of acceptance to hang onto, but a flesh-and-blood hand to lead him out of the darkness of his past... And into a future that didn't require lies or excises, because of what he was, and what they were, was both extraordinary--and nothing out of the ordinary. Love, after all, was universal.

The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles - that is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences. I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and "love" begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male - clitoral touch and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the body (which needn't - and shouldn't - be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread - that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise everything in them that they now value as distinctively "male." No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.

Just as girls are pressured to yield that half of their human potential consonant with assertive action, just as they have been systematically discouraged from developing and celebrating the self-concepts and skills that belong to the public world, so are boys pressured to yield attributes of dependency, expressiveness, affiliation—all the self-concepts and skills that belong to the relational, emotive world. These wholesale excisions are equally damaging to the healthy development of both girls and boys. The price for traditional socialization of girls is oppression, as Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan put it, “the tyranny of the kind and nice.” The price of traditional socialization for boys is disconnection—from themselves, from their mothers, from those around them.

I want to lay out my dissected body next to his and show him the pieces of us that are the same. Could he tell his arteries from mine, the folds of my brain from his own? If I excised both our eyes and laid them out on a microscope, would there be a difference?

He is engaged in barter and no nonsense. He pays taxes he can’t evade and doesn’t care whether they are called “excise” or “king’s pence” or “squeeze” or straight-out bribes. It is the other kid’s bat and ball and backyard, so you play by his rules—nothing to get in a sweat about. Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that’s why they are all smugglers. Men often believe—or pretend—that the “Law” is something sacred, or at least a science—an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments.

The subject of human races is so explosive that Darwin excised all discussion of it from his famous 1859 book On the Origin of Species. Even today, few scientists dare to study racial origins, lest they be branded racists simply for being interested in the problem.

girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn’t bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes

I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you could write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he'd read in his life were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated this nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth.

In December 1790, with other options foreclosed, Hamilton revived a proposal he had floated in his Report on Public Credit: an excise tax on whiskey and other domestic spirits. He knew the measure would be loathed in rural areas that thrived on moonshine, but he thought this might be more palatable to farmers than a land tax. Hamilton confessed to Washington an ulterior political motive for this liquor tax: he wanted to lay “hold of so valuable a resource of revenue before it was generally preoccupied by the state governments.” As with assumption, he wanted to starve the states of revenue and shore up the federal government. Jefferson did not exaggerate Hamilton’s canny capacity to clothe political objectives in technical garb. There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton’s economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public.

The bible has been edited, rewritten, excised, supplemented, translated, retranslated, and mistranslated so many times that claims of immutability are laughable. Yet about thirty percent of Americans, many of them Christian nationalists, believe the bible is the literal, inerrant word of their god.

--she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch.

I realise suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I’m afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me. Are they gossiping, or has some moribund discretion fallen over my name? I’m not sure which is worse. I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand. Most of all, I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record. But that, I know, would only leave a human-shaped hole. I imagine everybody gazing into the space where I ought to be.

All the women in me are tired.

Reactionaries seek to excise and destroy the deepest and most essentially human aspects of a nation’s character; they promulgate its most inhuman and superficial aspects. They prefer the husk to the kernel. When they promulgate nationalism, reactionaries try to destroy what people share at a deep level; they recognize only what people share at the most superficial level.

Customs inspectors could not stop the export of software through telephone lines; labour inspectors could not stop software engineers from talking to customers in America at night; excise inspectors could not harass the IT firms because the government did not levy tax on services. Much like Gurgaon, India’s knowledge economy literally grew at night when the government slept.

Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as the head of the first Christian community.... Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?

But above all, the center of all the misery remains. I cannot write; I have not done a line I respect; on the other hand, I have excised everything I wrote after Paris—it wasn’t much! My whole body warns me against every word; every word, before it lets me write it down, first looks around in all directions. The sentences literally crumble before me; I see their insides and then have to stop quickly.

I used to believe there was a part of the human brain we couldn’t quite excise, and its sole purpose was to encourage self-destruction. Someday, I thought, the guys working on the BRAIN Initiative would push aside a contour in the gray matter and find a pulsing, jet-black spot. They’d insert a probe into the patient’s head to press the nodule and the patient’s immediate response would be to shout out, “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

For so long, he and I had danced around each other’s pasts. It didn’t behoove either of us to learn too much about the other. The less we knew, the easier it would be to carve each other out of our lives with a single well-placed strike of our blades, like a cancer excised. But in this moment, I came to the horrifying realization that I would never be able to carve Raihn from my heart. He had embedded too deep. Roots through stone.

With a painful slice, I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretative loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meaning that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

Having fled to the New World, but with the scars of the Old World still etched in their skin, they had burned casks of pitch and herbs in the streets to drive away the tainted pestilential air while carrying their dead in sinister processions to be burned on pyres, all the while spreading the disease by excising their infected buboes. And here their descendants were driven one by one into the Hudson on a winter morning, never to be found.

psychopathy of surgeons; the most audacious and godlike healers, who were also the only group of people encouraged to slice open human bodies, saw off limbs, cut out flesh, remove organs and excise brain tissue, operating at the edge of paralysis, stroke and haemorrhage. It was a profession that seemed to fuse compassion and brutality, without having to reveal which was the dominant impulse, as long as both were accompanied by a high degree of precision.

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not? Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet.

it was England that shone as Hamilton’s true lodestar in public finance. Back in the 1690s, the British had set up the Bank of England, enacted an excise tax on spirits, and funded its public debt—that is, pledged specific revenues to insure repayment of its debt. During the eighteenth century, it had vastly expanded that public debt. Far from weakening the country, it had produced manifold benefits. Public credit had enabled England to build up the Royal Navy, to prosecute wars around the world, to maintain a global commercial empire. At the same time, government bonds issued to pay for the debt galvanized the economy, since creditors could use them as collateral for loans. By imitating British practice, Hamilton did not intend to make America subservient to the former mother country, as critics claimed. His objective was to promote American prosperity and self-sufficiency and make the country ultimately less reliant on British capital. Hamilton wanted to use British methods to defeat Britain economically.

There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.

Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra. Silence. “I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.” Silence. “The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal. “ Silence. “Being magic is even worse,” said Ezra. “Your body doesn’t want to die, it has too much inside it. So you want more powerfully. You starve more quickly. Your capacity to have nothing is abysmal, cataclysmic. There isn’t a medeian on earth capable of casting themselves down into ordinariness, much less to dust. We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly. They take in small amounts, in survivable doses. We’re immunizing ourselves to something— against something. Everything we manage to have successfully becomes a vaccine over time, but the illness is always much larger. We’re still naturally susceptible. We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes. “What does?” asked Atlas. Ezra smiled, closing his eyes to the sun. “Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.

Like the musician's portrait, the person who has become a real part of your life is not located in one part of you, and can never be neatly excised. To really lose the notion of them... Well, how would you? You couldn't lose the picture without destroying the room. In time, however, the furniture will be rearranged and will come to represent other people and places. But the old shapes linger, haunt the room. If you look from a certain angle, you can still see them there. But you move on, your perspective shifts. New friends walk beside you through the streets of Belfast. You practise and perform new routines until, eventually, you can't quite remember how the room used to look or how the streets used to feel when walked in the days of love. That is perhaps the saddest loss of all, and why we want to linger for a while at the end of grief. We don't want to lose the notion. There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind. Only and.

ASSIMILATION We never unpacked, dreaming in the wrong language, carrying our mother’s fears in our feet— if he raises his voice we will flee if he looks bored we will pack our bags unable to excise the refugee from our hearts, unable to sleep through the night. The refugee’s heart has six chambers. In the first is your mother’s unpacked suitcase. In the second, your father cries into his hands. The third room is an immigration office, your severed legs in the fourth, in the fifth a uterus—yours? The sixth opens with the right papers. I can’t get the refugee out of my body, I bolt my body whenever I get the chance. How many pills does it take to fall asleep? How many to meet the dead? The refugee’s heart often grows an outer layer. An assimilation. It cocoons the organ. Those unable to grow the extra skin die within the first six months in a host country. At each and every checkpoint the refugee is asked are you human? The refugee is sure it’s still human but worries that overnight, while it slept, there may have been a change in classification.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not? Normal people think of recovery as a kind of abstinence: they imagine us sitting around white-knuckled, sweating as we count our hours trying desperately to distract ourselves enough to not relapse. This is because for normal people, drinking is an activity, like brushing their teeth or watching TV. They can reasonably imagine excising drinking, like any other activity, without collapsing their entire person. For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash. Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not punch every person who talks to you in the face. There’s no abstinence in it. There’s no self-will. It’s a chisel. It’s surrender to the chisel. Of course you don’t hope to come out a David. It’s miracle enough to emerge still standing on two feet. —from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams

A number of other studies have been conducted on the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and all have found comparable outcomes. For example: 60 people with limb-threatening diabetic infections were split into three groups: 1) full-thickness skin ulcer; 2) deep-tissue infection and osteomyelitis; 3) gangrenous lesions. All ulcers in group 1 healed and 92 percent of those in group 2 healed. All people in group 3 healed after surgical excision, debridement of necrotic tissue, and treatment with honey ointment (which also included royal jelly).

You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.

We are under the sway of a surgical compulsion that seeks to excise negative characteristics and remodel things synthetically into ideal forms. Cosmetic surgery: a face's chance configuration, its beauty or ugliness, its distinctive traits, its negative traits - all these have to be corrected, so as to produce something more beautiful than beautiful: an ideal face, a surgical face. [...] Even the sex to which we belong - that small portion of destiny still remaining to us, that minimum of fatality and otherness -will be changeable at will. Not to mention cosmetic surgery as applied to green spaces, to nature in general, to genes, to events, to history (e.g. the French Revolution revised and corrected - given a facelift under the banner of human rights). Everything has to become postsynchable according to criteria of optimal convenience and compatibility. This inhuman formalization of face, speech, sex, body, will and public opinion is a tendency everywhere in evidence. Every last glimmer of fate and negativity has to be expunged in favour of something resembling the smile of a corpse in a funeral home...

Dick pulled out his yellow pads, filling line after line with notes and reminders, intent on leaving nothing to chance: Set up budget…office furniture…need for paid workers…call on newspapers, former candidates, leaders…arrange church and lodge and veterans meetings…set up lists for mailings…billboards…bumper stickers…Nixon clubs each town (now)…study V. voting record. This was his hour; his chance to be someone. To excise the hurt. To stake his claim. He needed to win, and his plans revealed his hunger, and an incipient susceptibility to intrigue. Set up…spies in V. camp, he wrote.

The Constituent Assembly enjoyed a prestige accorded none of its successors, but the populace observed only such decrees as suited it. What did the people want above all else? Tax reform, abolition of indirect levies, institution of controls over the grain trade. Tax collection was suspended; the salt tax, excises, and municipal tolls were suppressed; exchange of grains was either forbidden or continually thwarted. Proclamations and decrees against this had no effect. [...] In their eyes national sovereignty entailed direct democracy, an idea that would remain dear to the sans-culottes.

Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I? Acknowledgments I owe huge thanks to the amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Emma, Pippa, Rosanna and Kristina; Andrea Schulz, my wonderful editor, whose enormous skill, patience and wisdom have made this book so much better than I thought it could be; Ben Petrone, who is just plain great, and everyone at Viking; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Katy Loftus, for her faith in this book and for putting her finger on the one thing that would make the most difference; my brother, Alex French, for the computer bits and for sending me the link to the case of Bella in the Wych Elm; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; Ellen at ancestrysisters.com, for genealogy help; Dave Walsh, for his enormous help with the intricacies of police procedure; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro and Sue Fletcher,

I pushed the thought away. Doubt was like rot. Excise it at the first speckling, the first stain, the first faint stench of decay. But then—I suppose because my mind was on the wine—I thought of that other kind of rot, the soft gray fungus that sometimes afflicts the late grape harvest if the air turns unexpectedly moist. That rot causes the grapes to yield up a heavy, viscous juice of stupendously rich flavor. The wine pressed from such grapes was the best of all. Maybe doubt was like that sometimes. Maybe it, too, could yield rich fruit. Perhaps, then, it was right to doubt. Perhaps I had a right to doubt.

A witch needs only the right look, the right stuff, the right feelings. I look at the part: like a Hollywood witch, dark-haired and pale-skinned (because of my European ancestry). And I'm into the Instagram-witch lifestyle: black dresses, lavender baths, affirmations about being worthy of things. But I don't like calling myself a witch. I don't want to be seen as following a fad, and I don't want the white witches I resemble to take my presence in their spaces as permission for theft. Really, I just want a version of the occult that isn't built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excise the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left.

This collection of short stories was first published in 1914, two years after Stoker’s death. Now, it is widely believed that Dracula’s Guest is actually the deleted first chapter from the original Dracula manuscript, which the publisher deemed superfluous to the story, although some scholars disagree with this belief.  In the preface of the collection, Stoker’s wife Florence explains, “To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband’s most remarkable work.

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution. But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

This decision produced a scene that provides the most graphic and dramatic illustration of the two competing versions of what the American Revolution had come to mean in the 1790s. On one side stood the rebels, a defiant collection of aggrieved farmers emboldened by their conviction that the excise tax levied by Congress was every bit as illegitimate as the taxes levied by the British ministry. On the other side stood Washington and his federalized troops, an updated version of the Continental army, marching west to enforce the authority of the constitutionally elected government that claimed to represent all the American people. It was “the spirit of ’76” against “the spirit of ’87,” one historic embodiment of “the people” against another.

Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945. The world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons, because they sene so many purposes. But as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete.

CARROLL: In the place called Adulthood, there's precious few golden afternoons. They've gone away to make way for other things like business and housekeeping and wanting everyone to be the same, just like you, all the lives lived in neat hedgerows, all excess banished, all joyous peculiarities excised. It's grim and shabby. There are no Mad Hatters and there are no Cheshire Cats, for they can't endure the suffering of the place. ALICE: Please stop... CARROLL: That's the place called Adulthood... I'm there now. You'll be there soon enough. And you'll never leave... But here and now, in this room, and on this glass plate, and in the story I'm writing, you'll never be there... And you'll never be hurt. And you'll never be heart-sick. And you'll never be alone.... You will be beloved.

My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she'd tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked into bed, I would send out a thank-you prayer to the carpentry boss for taking in what I could not. But this morning I was the only one, and it was the weekend, and carpentry rested, and the whole kitchen smelled of hometown America, of Atlanta's orchards and Oregon's berry bushes, of England's pie legacy, packed with the Puritans over the Mayflower.

One day the Dalai Lama received a visit from a monk arriving from Tibet after spending twenty-five years in Chinese labor camps. His torturers had brought him to the brink of death several times. The Dalai Lama talked at length with the monk, deeply moved to find him so serene after so much suffering. He asked him if he had ever been afraid. The monk answered: “I was often afraid of hating my torturers, for in so doing I would have destroyed myself.” A few months before she died at Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum wrote: “I can see no way around it. Each of us must look inside himself and excise and destroy everything he finds there which he believes should be excised and destroyed in others. We may be quite certain that the least iota of hatred that we bring into the world will make it even more inhospitable to us than it already is.

There is, I am afraid we have to say, a certain arrogance about the theological liberalism which deviates from historic biblical Christianity. For anyone who refuses to submit to God’s Word, and “does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness” is “puffed up with conceit,” and “insubordinate” (1 Tim. 6:3–4; Titus 1:9, 10). The Christian preacher is to be neither a speculator who invents new doctrines which please him, nor an editor who excises old doctrines which displease him, but a steward, God’s steward, dispensing faithfully to God’s household the truths committed to him in the Scriptures, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else. For this ministry a humble mind is necessary. We need to come daily to the Scriptures and to sit like Mary at Jesus’ feet, listening to his Word.

Neurotic suffering indicates inner conflict. Each side of the conflict is likely to be a composite of many partial forces, each one of which has been structured into behavior, attitude, perception, value. Each component asserts itself, claims priority, insists that something else yield, accommodates. The conflict therefore is fixed, stubborn, enduring. It may be impugned and dismissed without effect, imprecations and remorse are of no avail, strenuous acts of will may be futile; it causes - yet survives and continues to cause - the most intense suffering, humiliation, rending of flesh. Such a conflict is not to be uprooted or excised. It is not an ailment, it is the patient himself. The suffering will not disappear without a change in the conflict, and a change in the conflict amounts to a change in what one is and how one lives, feels, reacts.

But the best reward from that meditation center was a familiar face I could access every time I sat down to meditate. For a couple of minutes, I basked in the sun and breathed, and then I summoned an older version of myself, a year into the future. I imagined she was sitting behind me, enveloping me in a big-spoon hug. She had a few more wrinkles. A couple more freckles. She was wearing baggy, soft clothing. 'Hi,' I said. 'Hi,' she said. 'I’m sad today,' I admitted. 'It’s okay to be sad. You won’t be sad a week from now. I love you, and you are doing your best,' she said, and I knew she was right. I leaned back into her belly. I could almost feel it pushing back against me, a solid pressure, telling me I was not alone. She silenced my mother’s voice in my head. Excised her not just in body but in mind. She did it because, as my third parent, that is her right.

One recent case highlighted by Dan Simons relates again to the work of Yale psychologist John Bargh. In 2012, Bargh and colleague Idit Shalev published a study claiming that lonelier people prefer warmer baths and showers, thereby compensating for a lack of “social warmth” through physical warmth.44 In 2014, psychologist Brent Donnellan and colleagues reported a failure to replicate this finding—and not just in a single experiment but across nine experiments and more than 3,000 participants, over 30 times the sample size of the original study.45 Despite this failure to replicate, as well as the presence of unexplained anomalies in the original data, Bargh and Shalev refused to retract their original paper. In many other sciences, a false discovery of this magnitude would automatically trigger excision of the original work from the scientific record. In psychology, unreliability is business as usual.

Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra. Silence. “I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.” Silence. “The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.

Once again the resistance the visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that, like memory, vision was also distributed, and after Pribram became aware of holography he began to wonder if it, too, was holographic. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual cortex could be removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks. If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal hologram, even a very small piece of the hologram could still reconstruct the whole of what the eyes were seeing. It also explained the lack of any one-to-one correspondence between the external world and the brain's electrical activity. Again, if the brain was using holographic principles to process visual information, there would be no more one-to-one correspondence between electrical activity and images seen than there was between the meaningless swirl of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film encoded.

This man constructed along the most convincing, believable emotional lines, this force with a history as a force, this benignly wily, smoothly charming, seeming totality of a manly man nonetheless has a gigantic secret. How do I reach this conclusion? Why a secret? Because it is there when he’s with her. And when he’s not with her it’s there too—it’s the secret that’s his magnetism. It’s something not there that beguiles, and it’s what’s been drawing me all along, the enigmatic it that he holds apart as his and no one else’s. He’s set himself up like the moon to be only half visible. And I cannot make him fully visible. There is a blank. That’s all I can say. They are, together, a pair of blanks. There’s a blank in her and, despite his air of being someone firmly established, if need be an obstinate and purposeful opponent—the angry faculty giant who quit rather than take their humiliating crap—somewhere there’s a blank in him too, a blotting out, an excision, though of what I can’t begin to guess… can’t even know, really, if I am making sense with this hunch or fancifully registering my ignorance of another human being.

Insurance Adjuster Tom We have studied your case and we have decided the policy applies. That means you’re entitled to a settlement of $13,600. I see. How did you reach that figure? That’s how much we decided the car was worth. I understand, but what standard did you use to determine that amount? Do you know where I can buy a comparable car for that much? How much are you asking for? Whatever I’m entitled to under the policy. I found a secondhand car just about like it for $17,700. Adding the sales and excise tax, it would come to about $19,000. $19,000! That’s too much! I’m not asking for $19,000 or $18,000 or $20,000, but for fair compensation. Do you agree that it’s only fair I get enough to replace the car? OK, I’ll offer you $15,000. That’s the highest I can go. Company policy. How does the company figure that? Look, $15,000 is all you’ll get. Take it or leave it. $15,000 may be fair. I don’t know. I certainly understand your position if you’re bound by company policy. But unless you can state objectively why that amount is what I’m entitled to, I think I’ll do better in court. Why don’t we study the matter and talk again? Is Wednesday at eleven a good time to talk? . . .

Senator Hill has done me the honor to take me as the antitype of his political methods and political views, and has singled me out for attack in connection with the Excise Law. Senator Hill’s complaint is that I honestly enforce the law which he and Tammany put on the statute books … [His] assault upon that honest enforcement is the admission, in the first place, that it never has been honestly enforced before, and, in the next place, that he never expected it to be … It is but natural that he and Tammany should grow wild with anger at the honest enforcement of the law, for it was a law which was intended to be the most potent weapon in keeping the saloons subservient allies to Tammany Hall. With a law such as this, enforced only against the poor or the honest man and violated with impunity by every rich scoundrel and every corrupt politician, the machine did indeed seem to have its yoke on the neck of the people. But we throw off that yoke, and no special pleading of Senator Hill can avail to make us put it on … Where justice is bought, where favor is the price of money or political influence, the rich man held his own and the poor man went to the wall. Now all are treated exactly alike.107

The Savior came and is coming again, but our healing is in his hands, not our own. If our Savior chose to enter the human story in a human body, then we should enter one another’s places of suffering remembering we carry and extend the presence of Christ. Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus. When we reduce pain to an individual problem, we don’t know what to do with ourselves and our stories. In an increasingly individualistic society, where the space between self, tradition, and our embodied connection to each other feels wide, suffering can be a massive assault to our sense of self and our ability to hope. We become lost in a chasm of overspiritualized pain and undervalued physicality, not knowing where our lives fit alongside a Christianity glittering with the veneer of abundance. Already exhausted, we sink under the weight of existing as an aberration of the abundant life our Christian friends and families want us to project. Defeated and lonely, many of us subconsciously attempt to detach from the grief in our bodies, excising it from our minds to feel accepted in the community of the able and successful. We push pain away with effort, pretending to be okay among the shiny, smiling faces at church or work. For if we were honest about how sad or sick or hopeless we really feel, would we be accepted at all?

Most people don't know how to starve... I guess that's a weird thing to say, but it's true. It's something you learn. People think that they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn, or whatever. Either you are or you aren't. That sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing. But it's not true. You can be taught to want, you can be taught to crave, and you can also learn to starve. The issue is when you eventually get fed... prosperity is anguish. The body adjusts, but the mind doesn't. You can't erase history, you can't just excise the wanting and worse, you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and you can't go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue, that's a lesson. For some people its lifelong. For others, it's developmental if they're lucky and then eventually it fades. But still, you never forget it, how to starve, how to watch others with envy, how to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn't it? The mind still hungers, even when the body adjusts. There's tension, always. Survival only requires so much, but existence? Completion? That becomes insatiable. The longer you starve, the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you've learned to starve when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder, you hoard., and technically that's the same as having, but it isn't, not really. Starvation continues, you still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can't learn how to have... the excess is a poison. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic.

As an anology, consider the word structure. In bacteria, the gene is embedded in the genome in precisely that format, structure, with no breaks, stuffers, interpositions, or interruptions. In the human genome, in contrast, the word is interrupted by intermediate stretches of DNA: s...tru...ct...ur...e. The long stretches of DNA marked by the ellipses (...) do not contain any protein-encoding information. When such an interrupted gene is used to generate a message-i.e., when DNA is used to build RNA-the stuffer frragments are excised from the RNA message, and the RNA is stitched together again with the intervening pieces removed: s...tru...ct...ur...e became simplified to structure. Roberts and Sharp later coined a phrase for the process: gene splicing or RNA splicing (since the RNA message of the gene was "spliced" to removed the stuffer fragments). At first, this split structure of genes seemed puzzling: Why would an animal genome waste such long stretches of DNA splitting genes into bits and pieces, only to stitch them back into a continuous message? But the inner logic of split genes soon became evident: by splitting genes into modules, a cell could generate bewildering combinations of messages out of a single gene. The word s...tru...c...t...ur...e can be spliced to yield cure and true and so forth, thereby creating vast numbers of variant messages-called isoforms-out of a single gene. From g...e...n...om...e you can use splicing to generate gene, gnome, and om. And modular genes also had an evolutionary advantage: the individual modules from different genes could be mixed and matched to build entirely new kinds of genes (c...om...e...t). Wally Gilbert, the Harvard geneticist, created a new word for these modules; he called them exons. The inbetween stuffer fragments were termed introns.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

his Calvinism would not outlast his undergraduate education, though its excision would be long and painful.

Because this is Frank. This is what she does. She seeps in, like a very dangerous gas leak; she finds a way to lodge herself where she is not wanted. Roots herself so deep she cannot be excised.

These days, as a result of my encounters with growth–mind-set research, I have modified my feedback vocabulary considerably. Statements like “You are a really talented writer” have been excised from my vocabulary and have been replaced with, “Excellent work—you took the strategies we have been working on in class and deployed them beautifully in here,” or, “You have obviously worked very hard at your writing, and it shows in this essay.

don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Rick Perry said Trump’s candidacy was “a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.” Rand Paul said Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” Marco Rubio called him “dangerous” and warned that we should not hand “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.” And then every single one of those Republicans endorsed Trump.

Then he saw it. He brought out the knife and excised the one word that created the entire angering effect of that sentence. The word was “just.” Why should Quality be just what you like? Why should “what you like” be “just”? What did “just” mean in this case? When separated out like this for independent examination it became apparent that “just” in this case really didn’t mean a damn thing. It was a purely pejorative term, whose logical contribution to the sentence was nil. Now, with that word removed, the sentence became “Quality is what you like,” and its meaning was entirely changed. It had become an innocuous truism.

If the Sussexes had any residual misgivings about whether they wanted out, those doubts vanished when they viewed the Queen’s 2019 televised Christmas message. With their own eyes, they saw that they had been kicked to the margins of the monarchy. Her Majesty eloquently made the point in her speech by saying nothing. The subtext was all in the flotilla of carefully arranged family photographs positioned on her writing desk, a grouping that, in case anyone thinks is accidental, has been artfully changed every year since the monarch’s first televised seasonal message in 1957. The previous Christmas, a family portrait of Charles, Camilla, the five Cambridges, and Harry and Meghan was exhibited at Her Majesty’s elbow. But in December 2019, the Sussexes had evaporated, their image excised as skillfully as Stalin would have done to an apparatchik out of favor. According to author Christopher Andersen, the Queen told the director of the broadcast that all the displayed photographs were fine to remain in the shot except for one. Her Majesty pointed at a winsome portrait of Harry, Meghan, and baby Archie. “ That one,” said the Queen. “I suppose we don’t need that one.” And a happy Christmas to you too, Granny! William was said to have been appalled when he saw the Sussexes had been edited out. He knew his brother well enough to predict a Category 5 tantrum brewing.

One morning Áine had sailed out of their lives and the next the Welleses stopped talking about her. But she lingered. There were parts of her that were too well woven into the fabric of their lives to excise neatly

The British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century are punctuated by riot, occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise, ‘rescue’, strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances.

Once the facts that repressional mechanisms hide are accessed, they must be excised from our memory—or new repressional mechanisms must replace the old—so that we may continue to be protected by our cocoon of lies. If this is not done, we will be whimpering misereres morning, noon, and night instead of chanting that day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better. Although we may sometimes admit to the guileful means we use to keep us doing what we do, this is only a higher level of self-deception and paradox, not evidence that we stand on the heights of some meta-reality where we are really real. We say we know what is in store for us in this life, and we do. But we do not know.

Lertzman the bureaucrat. The cyst in "system", too dormant to contribute, too deeply embedded to excise, too ineffective to matter.

Publisher’s note: The story here uses some racial and ethnic slurs and prejudices commonplace during the time it was written. Rather than excise offensive words or passages, the editors have chosen to leave the stories as-is because, while such language is ugly and offensive, the editors believe that ignoring the past discourages dialogue, misrepresents the timeframe and voice in which the piece was written, and makes such topics more difficult to face in the forthright manner that’s necessary to enact positive change.

Bombay, a city where Gujaratis and Maharashtrians and Tamilians and Parsis become Bombaykars, allegiances shifted to contemporary urban existence rather than to the regions that created them. The Joshis considered themselves modern, but in one respect they rang a bit of the bygone days: the parents—an excise tax officer and a housewife

Nevertheless, it would appear that one of your number, I doubt more than one, is unhappy. This person is a cancer within us, which I plan to excise as surely as Mr. Tradescant would excise a tumor from any of

...le féminisme s'est toujours battu contre certaines femmes : celles qui voulaient rester à la maison, s'occuper de leur marmaille et servir leur mari quand il rentrait, et perpétuaient ainsi une vision réductrice et enfermante de la femme ; celles qui s'opposaient au droit à la contraception ou à l'avortement ; celles qui, aujourd'hui encore, excisent les gamines... Pourquoi, soudain, devrait-on être l'alliée de femmes qui, clairement, défendent un projet politique ou une vision du monde qui va vers moins d'égalité entre hommes et femmes ?

The parliamentarian represented a bottleneck in the process. She would need to scrutinize each provision, judging whether it fell within the acceptable bounds of the rule governing reconciliation, an audit known as a Byrd Bath—in honor of the West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who created the arcane rules back in the seventies. Every provision in a reconciliation bill needed to have a “fiscal implication.” Otherwise, the parliamentarian would rule it out of bounds and excise it from the bill. If she rejected a provision, Schumer would be sent scrambling for a last-minute fix. The fragile structure that Schumer and Manchin had concocted might collapse. Before the Senate dispersed, Schumer summoned Manchin to his office. He felt as if he needed to light a fire under Manchin, to convince him that it was time to rush. —

In 1880, the US government raised 90 percent of its tax revenue from customs duties (56 percent) and excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol (34 percent). By 1930, income taxes accounted for nearly 60 percent of US government receipts.

Think about how children move through their emotions, quickly experiencing negative feelings, letting them go, and moving with ease on to positive feelings. At a young age, people are often allowed, if not expected, to express negative emotions though yelling, crying, sulking, or tantrums. After children express and essentially excise these feelings, they can refocus—sometimes with support and guidance from caregivers—on welcoming, more positive emotions.

Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life—that’s a lonely way to live.

Indeed, the excise tax system had very elaborate record keeping. Officers kept three different types of records, all of which were supposed to match one another, and any tampering with these records was a serious offense. This remarkable level of state supervision of society exceeds what the governments of most poor countries can achieve today, and this in 1710.

Nine hours of surgery to salvage his bladder so it might work half as well as it did, if infections do not consume him. His prostate cut from his thin boy body, seminal vesicles too, rendering him unable to know a certain intimacy but familiar with the incontinence of the old man he probably will never be, his injuries likely to shorten his life by at least two decades. If he survives the next breath. If he ever wakes. And this surgery came only after another that was more vital. Seventeen hours of delicate, intensive surgery on his lower spine, two cracked vertebrae fused together using bone from his hip, the shrapnel from a bullet lodged too close to his spinal cord to risk removal. His gallbladder gone, as well as a lymph node. Feet of small intestine excised, the lower lobe of his right lung damaged, leaving him with such diminished capacity that playing on the jungle gym will be tantamount to summiting Everest. My boy’s body parts incinerated somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. All this just his bodily damage. Who can know the damage to his soul and mind?

While the Reconstruction struggle ensued in Washington and across the South, Edward A. Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote his long manifesto, The Lost Cause, published in 1867. Pollard issued a warning to all who would ever try to shape the memory of the Civil War, much less Reconstruction policy. “All that is left the South,” wrote Pollard, “is the war of ideas.” The war may have decided the “restoration of the union and the excision of slavery,” declared Pollard, “but the war did not decide Negro equality.”39 Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and memory.

What we gave mostly was wine. Especially after we made this legal(!) by acquiring that Master Wine Grower’s license in 1973. Most requests were made by women (not men) who had been drafted by their respective organizations to somehow get wine for an event. We made a specialty of giving them a warm welcome from the first call. All we wanted was the organization’s 501c3 number, and from which store they wanted to pick it up. We wanted to make that woman, and her friends, our customers. But we didn’t want credit in the program, as we knew the word would get out from that oh-so-grateful woman who had probably been turned down by six markets before she called us. Everybody wanted champagne. We firmly refused to donate it, because the federal excise tax on sparkling wine is so great compared with the tax on still wine. To relieve pressure on our managers, we finally centralized giving into the office. When I left Trader Joe’s, Pat St. John had set up a special Macintosh file just to handle the three hundred organizations to which we would donate in the course of a year. I charged all this to advertising. That’s what it was, and it was advertising of the most productive sort. Giving Space on Shopping Bags One of the most productive ways into the hearts of nonprofits was to print their programs on our shopping bags. Thus, each year, we printed the upcoming season for the Los Angeles Opera Co., or an upcoming exhibition at the Huntington Library, or the season for the San Diego Symphony, etc. Just printing this advertising material won us the support of all the members of the organization, and often made the season or the event a success. Our biggest problem was rationing the space on the shopping bags. All we wanted was camera-ready copy from the opera, symphony, museum, etc. This was a very effective way to build the core customers of Trader Joe’s. We even localized the bags, customizing them for the San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco market areas. Several years after I left, Trader Joe’s abandoned the practice because it was just too complicated to administer after they expanded into Arizona, Washington, etc., and they no longer had my wife, Alice, running interference with the music and arts groups. This left an opportunity for small retailers in local areas, and I strongly recommended it to them. In 1994, while running the troubled Petrini’s Markets in San Francisco, I tried the same thing, again with success, for the San Francisco Ballet and a couple of museums.

While the rich became richer, the taxation policy of the government, instead of correcting this trend, actively strengthened it. One of the first decisions of the first Modi government was to abolish the wealth tax that had been introduced in 1957. While the fiscal resources generated by this tax were never significant, the decision was more than a symbolic one.126 The wealth tax was replaced with an income tax increase of 2 percent for households that earned more than Rs 10 million (133,333 USD) annually.127 Few people pay income tax in India anyway: only 14.6 million people (2 percent of the population) did in 2019. As a result, the income-tax-to-GDP ratio remained below 11 percent. Not only has the Modi government not tried to introduce any reforms to change this, but it has instead increased indirect taxes (such as excise taxes), which are the most unfair as they affect everyone, irrespective of income. Taxes on alcohol and petroleum products are a case in point. As some state governments have also imposed their own taxes, this strategy means that India has one of the highest taxation rates on fuel in the world. The share of indirect taxes in the state’s fiscal resources has increased under the Modi government to reach 50 percent of the total taxes—compared to 39 percent under UPA I and 44 percent under UPA II.128 Modi’s taxation policy, a supply-side economics approach, is in keeping with the managerial rhetoric of promoting the spirit of enterprise that the prime minister, who readily presents himself as an efficiency-conscious “apolitical CEO,” relishes. One of the neoliberal measures the Modi government enacted in the name of economic rationality, right from his very first budget in 2015, was to lower the corporate tax.129 For existing companies it was reduced from 30 to 22 percent, and for manufacturing firms incorporated after October 1, 2019 that started operations before March 31, 2023, it was reduced from 25 to 15 percent—the biggest reduction in twenty-eight years. In addition to these tax reductions, the government withdrew the enhanced surcharge on long- and short-term capital gains for foreign portfolio investors as well as domestic portfolio investors.130

…I then look up into the evening sky where the e-mail courses and the internet surfs. Here, like modern sorcerers, fly the young, each alone, to type his or her way into what must pass as a communication — but of a strange and limited kind: one where you must draw little faces with smiles or frowns to show what you feel — an analogue system of emotions, either yes or no, but nothing in between. Here, it is said, a kind of dialogue takes place. But it takes place between two keyboards in two rooms in two cities or countries or continents. And the hands on those keyboards fabricate the person — he or she is arbitrarily created according to the wishes or desires or compulsions of the moment: a protean creature, which can change into any self. It is not communication but imposture. In a further sense as well — this is a universe of words, only words, and words are only agreed upon signals to denote a reality, not the reality itself. They are notoriously clumsy; they are coarse compared to the real. It is the real that is excised in this modern mode. (10 January 1996)

MAX BARRY MACHINE MAN Max Barry began removing parts at an early age. In 1999, he successfully excised a steady job at tech giant HP in order to upgrade to the more compatible alternative of manufacturing fiction. While producing three novels, he developed the online nation simulation game NationStates, as well as contributing to various open source software projects and developing religious views on operating systems. He did not leave the house much. For Machine Man, Max wrote a website to deliver pages of fiction to readers via e-mail and RSS. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters, and is thirty-eight years old. He uses vi.

The boy was bright, Andrew knew; his Calvinism would not outlast his undergraduate education, though its excision would be long and painful.

Consider the author. Living or dead, they have all done the same thing: laid down word after word, making a story. They have many ways of doing it. Some create a story as though they are knitting a scarf. One stitch is made from the last. Quietly, slowly, through work and patience, a book – a scarf – grows. Some authors create their stories in a frenzy of activity, short and sharp and frantic, as though they and their idea are lovers reunited. Some treat their work with caution, and do not so much write as listen, sometimes for years, for whispers and words to set down. Some authors begin with a blueprint they have laboured over; others are chasing a thought or a feeling down on to the page; others yet write while hoping to excise the thing that squats in their belly and makes them separate to everyone else, however hard they try to fit in. There are authors who write for a ravenous, waiting public, and authors who put down word after word with no expectation that their work will ever be seen by someone else. The result is the same. There is a book in your hand. Behind it – maybe centuries behind it – stands an author. When you read their first sentence, you are completing their work. Not all authors care about readers. Some of them write for the good of their own souls, and some of them, for all of their vivid imaginings, could never see their work being published. But for others, many others, your gaze on the page of words they have written is the manifestation of a dream. Thank you.

The company claimed to have interviewed some 2,210 “experts,” of whom it said 1,184 were exclusive Luckies smokers. Of these, federal investigators tracked down 440 and discovered that more than 100 denied smoking Luckies exclusively, 50 did not smoke at all, and some smoked other brands exclusively, some did not recall having ever been interviewed on the subject by American Tobacco, and some had no connection with the tobacco industry. Such details aside, the campaign and the company’s new media-buying strategy were hugely successful, and by 1941 Lucky Strike would narrowly reclaim the market share lead from Camel and widen it dramatically in ensuing years. “He was a dictator, of course,” Pat Weaver recalled of the newly triumphant George Hill of this period, but now he invited the input of others. “His strength,” said Weaver, “was his tremendous conviction about the importance of the business he was in. His weakness was tunnel vision—he was really obsessed with Lucky Strike, I’m afraid.” But not to such a degree that he failed to recognize the danger of his company’s dependence on a single brand amid the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace. “One day, I came into his office,” Weaver remembered, “and I said, ‘Mr. Hill, I have a good idea.’ He said, ‘Great, what is it?’—he loved ideas.” Weaver’s was a not entirely harebrained scheme to get around the federal excise tax of six cents per pack of twenty cigarettes by putting out a brand in which each smoke was twice the normal length and the package would include a razor blade for slicing each one in two, thereby saving the customer the equivalent of three cents a pack. Hill listened and nodded,

I want to lay out my dissected body next to his and show him the pieces of us that are the same. Could he tell his arteries from mine, the folds of my brain from his own? If I excised our eyes and laid them out on a microscope, would there be a difference?

You need to turn off the part of you that’s thinking,” Madoc said. “Guilt. Shame. The desire to make people like you. Whatever is getting in your way, you need to excise it. Cut it out from your heart. From the time your sword leaves your sheath, put all that aside and strike!” Oak bit his lip, not sure if that was possible. He liked being liked. “Once your sword is out of your sheath, you aren’t Oak anymore. And you stay that way until the fight is over,” Madoc frowned. “And you know how to tell the fight is over? All your enemies are dead. Understand?

IRS Authorized service provider for online form 2290 & form 8849 Tax in a simple & easy and get your IRS 2290 Schedule-1 less than 1 minutes. starts with $7.95 per filing.

It is possible, at one level, to read the omitted passage and to grieve at the fact that America declared its independence without repudiating its “original sin.” The stone that should have been laid at the corner was discarded by the builders, with consequences that still have the power to make the reader tremble. However, Jefferson was perhaps a little naive, as well as a little self-righteous, when he attributed the excision of the above paragraph to the influence of “Georgia and South Carolina, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.

I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor.

Mother once said Fear is born of hope if you could excise hope from your life you would excise fear

Now more than ever we must kill the owners and smash the state, because as scarcity becomes more and more actually material, manufactured-scarcity will become even more terribly desperate. The enclosure of the possibility of joy adds to the historical task of the revolutionary the need to produce a world which, in the face of ecological collapse, can produce a joy that rejects all deathly logics, that rejects the “we” that must survive, that builds an us that can live, truly live.  No to the prophets of resilience, who tell us every catastrophe can be withstood, as long as we stay exactly where we are, piling sandbags and building seawalls! No to the surgeons of survival, who believe politics means deciding who and where must be excised from the body-ecologic! No to the partisans of death, who say since it is all already over, there is only further division, so do something and get dividing! It will be the creativity of the masses again become historical subject, or else all there will be is the cold unfolding of an increasingly miserable survival cut through with moments of the hot suicidal embrace of mass-death.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

The United States is absolutely ripe for a rise in gasoline taxes. The nominal gasoline excise tax rate has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1994.29 Inflation alone has reduced the real value of that tax per gallon by around 30 percent. As with other federal tax rates, the U.S. excise tax rate on gasoline is extremely low by international comparison. We might conservatively assume that by 2015 an extra 0.5 percent of GDP could be collected by some combination of a higher gasoline excise tax and modest carbon levies on other fossil fuels (such as on coal at the utilities). Other

To long for the dawning of the light is to long for the casting out of darkness. To hope for the resurrection of life is to hope for the banishment of death. To dream for the healing of the body is to dream for the excising of the disease.

The RAG [(Recombination-Activating Gene)] genes [which assist in the facilitation of V(D)J recombination] lack the introns that characterize eukaryotic genes. In this unusual feature they resemble the transposase gene of a transposon, a type of genetic element that can make and move copies of itself to different chromosomal locations. The essential components of a transposon are a transposase—an enzyme that cuts double-stranded DNA—and regions of repetitive DNA, called the terminal repeat sequences, that are recognized by the transposase. These two features allow the transposon to be excised from one location and inserted into another. The similarity of the RAG recombinase to a transposase has led to the hypothesis that the mechanism now used to rearrange immunoglobulin and T-cell receptor gene segments originated in a vertebrate ancestor with the insertion of a transposon into a gene encoding a receptor of innate immunity. The inserted transposase genes evolved to encode RAG proteins, and the terminal repeat sequences evolved to become the recombination signal sequences for the first rearranging gene segments. During this evolution, the transposase gene and the long terminal repeats of the transposon were separated and became components of different genes, both expressed specifically in lymphocytes. Today, the human RAG genes are on chromosome 11[,] and on four other chromosomes are the much-expanded sets of rearranging antigen-receptor genes.

The 1931 application to the Superior Court of the State of Washington for King County stated that Bob failed to do his part on the farm and left everything to Betty. The greater part of raising the chickens had fallen to Betty's lot, and the living and returns from this labor were very meager. She had had to work 'beyond her strength' in carrying water and gathering wood to keep herself and the babies from cold. Bob had neglected and refused to make provision for his family, now and during the marriage. He was an alcoholic and was frequently drunken and abusive. On one occasion he had poured coal-oil on the side of the house and set it on fire, and it was only a timely discovery by Betty and her younger sister that destruction of the house and injury to the family were averted, the statement declared. (Some sources suggest that Bob was running a moonshine operation, and certainly there are plenty of references to moonshine in Egg, including Bob drinking it with his Native American friends. A chapter on the local moonshiner was reportedly excised from the book by lawyers before publication.)

hyper-geometric Arithmetic —Oddition, Extraction, Uglification, and Excision.” “I

Unlike lytic phages, CTXφ can actively replicate within V. cholerae and generate progeny phages without killing its host cell. The process of phage induction for CTXφ is also different; it occurs without excision of the prophage from the host cell chromosome. Consequently, the CTXφ lysogen can be induced to enter its replicative cycle and release progeny phage particles while preserving both the cell host and the prophage. CTXφ can, therefore, pursue lysogeny, being replicated as part of the bacterial genome as well as productive infection and release of progeny phage. It can thus simultaneously be propagated vertically and horizontally between host cells. It can have its cake and eat it too.

Being a girl, being That Girl, is easy if you’re white and averagely pretty. There’s no trick to it. You don’t even have to totally excise the parts of your personality that don’t fit, the parts that are smart and difficult and loud and angry and ambitious and masculine and mature. You just dial those parts down until they become background noise, dial them down and down until the male ear can’t pick up their frequency and pretty soon you won’t even be able to hear them inside your own head. Tune them out and swallow them down like the hot meals you can’t eat any more because That Girl must stay slim and fragile if she wants to be beautiful and loved. And you do want to be beautiful and loved.

What about Cathead?” Thomas asked the precis machine. “Cathead is the cancer that is being excised from this world. It is the cancer because the inhabitants of Cathead regard themselves as individuals and believe in the importance of themselves. Yes, Cathead is quite large, the largest of the cities, larger even than Cosmopolis the capital. We will leave Cathead out of account here since it is not typical of Astrobe.

I wanted to tell him that sometimes the only way to excise an infected wound was to slice it open and let all the poison out.

They had begun telling each other stories about their childhoods and young adult years - adventures and misadventures that occurred before the great calamities that had sent each of them, ten years apart, into exile in Malinqua ..... But they never mentioned the calamities themselves - the circumstances, the occurrences, the conversations, the miscalculations, the emotions. It was if each of them had excised crucial years from their lives and spliced the remaining part together into one imperfect whole. Such a feat should have made them both seem younger, Leah thought, but the opposite was true. Each of them carried those missing years around as if they had spanned twice the allotted days; each of them had been aged by events. Each of them had been broken.

To me, it means using pain to find clarity. If pain is examined and not ignored, it can show you what to excise from your life.

Schwartzman smiled, sharing his enthusiasm. When the morgue had installed a camera with a UV filter on a tripod for timed exposures to help her identify pre- and perimortem injury patterns under the skin, she’d been as excited as Roger was now. Of course, at the time she’d been surrounded by dead people in drawers, so she’d kept the excitement to herself.

In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the "excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse"… For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi - the town were three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 - he assured the crowd "I believe and states rights," and promised to restore to states and local government the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar, arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language. (48)

It stings to clean a wound, to poke it and prod it until certain that any contagions have been excised, but we want to heal.

His eyes, staring out at her from the photograph, looked – she searched for another word to describe them and failed – he looked evil. There was a blankness to him, as if the normal human emotions that you took for granted in everyone you met had been excised. It was the kind of stare you might see in a wolf or a shark; a creature who did not care how kind you were, what your story was, the dreams you had for your child.

I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, “strong medicine,” transfusions, and other forms of surgery, only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in “cells” that never knew the “cells” that left.

The disposition of universal discussion—the unending, discursive process of public altercation which was so admired, and so execrated, for much of the eighteenth century—was concerned, often, with economic policy. “From the scholastic disputes of theologians to matters of trade,” d’Alembert wrote, “everything has been discussed and analyzed, or at least mentioned.”55 For Edmund Burke, “it has been the misfortune (not as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed”; the age was one of “oeconomists, and calculators.”56 Taxes and regulations, guilds and excise inspections, were a principal preoccupation, together with religion, of enlightened opinion. Adam Smith’s most serious offense, for his Edinburgh contemporary the Reverend Alexander Carlyle, consisted in “introducing that unrestrained and universal commerce, which propagates opinions as well as commodities.”57 The commerce in opinions was itself, in large part, a commerce in opinions about commerce, or about commercial policy. The “focal point of enlightenment,” Kant says in What is Enlightenment?—the subject to be disputed, in the imperative to “argue as much as you like and about whatever you like”—consists in matters of religion. But economic matters are also a subject of enlightened discussion in Kant’s description; the tax official says, “‘Don’t argue, pay!’” and the cosmopolitan citizen “publicly voices his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice of such fiscal measures.”58

One of the biggest obstacles on the path of peace, or even peaceful coexistence, between Israelis and Palestinians was placed by the international community and media when it redefined Hamas as an "organization." One result is that outsiders try to reach a solution based on the assumption that Hamas has structure and leaders. It does not. It has no "political wing" or "militant wing." Hamas is a loosely-knit band of terrorists. Its leaders are whoever has weapons, plans, and influence. Hamas is thuggish and cowardly. Those who fly the green flag are not military combatants. Nor do they represent, or care a whit, for the Palestinian people, as evidenced by their strategy of hiding in and fighting from schools, clinics, hospitals, and people's homes. After what passed for an election some Hamas terrorists were further redefined as politicians and diplomats, though they were neither politic nor diplomatic, evidenced by the fact that many "govern" from Israeli prisons. Prior to the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Hamas had been emasculated and nearly eradicated by Yassir Arafat, who rounded up, disarmed, and imprisoned the terrorist "leaders," leaving its remaining members to return to their homes. Arafat ensured that members of Hamas had no place to hide among the Palestinian people. And that is the only way the terrorist cancer in Gaza will be excised today. In the absence of Arafat, the task falls by default to Israel, which would do better to enable the citizens of Gaza to purge themselves of Hamas and reward them for doing so than try to get rid of the bad apples by blowing up the barrel, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor.

As the saw teeth caught on the bone, she had performed a second surgery, one less bloody but no less brutal, excising from his heart the impulse to run, to cower, to let the man bleed to death rather than face the horror of saving him. The amputation had left both patients lighter. p 121-122

It was like the violence of the world he’d grown up in had embedded itself in him, taken root, and could never be fully excised. He’d never been able to escape death. Apparently, he was a good Irish Catholic after all

Two more weeks and the two-hundred-twenty-pound hemorrhoid would be excised from her rectum forever.

The things they see as unnecessary extras, the accretions of myth and legend, are excised by the scissors to expose the real Jesus. It seems so scientific, but it is all done with mirrors. The magician's art leaves us with the portrait of Rudolf Bultmann or John A. T. Robinson, and again the real Jesus is obscured. By preserving a modicum of New Testament data, we think we have avoided subjectivity. However, the result is the same-a Jesus shaped by the bias of the scholar wielding the scissors and getting

Dreams, visions or ideas can come like a traffic congestion on your mind sometimes and they can create confusion, frustration, stagnation...you name it. The first thing to do is to sit back, relax and try to figure out how to tackle the situation. There are number of simply things that can help you to regain your mind sight like: .taking a walk .listening to music .doing excise or .jogging These can put you in a better place.

They had cut him open and excised his Free Will.

In the case of Christianity, though, there was no resurrection expectation to dash. The disciples had lived with a rabbi they believed was mortal. And, if you end the story with the crucifixion scene, he indeed proved to be mortal. If the story had ended there, it would have coincided with the disciples’ expectation. There was no reason to stop the ministry of the Jesus movement. Jesus had said some very worthwhile things. After his death, teach his message by all means. Circulate the poetry of the Sermon on the Mount. Publish the kingdom parables. Tell the world that Jesus had been a great teacher. But that is precisely what the disciples did not do. They went to their deaths saying that they had been completely surprised by the next phase of the story. They said they had been completely wrong in their expectation. They said that Jesus had risen. And that was the core of their preaching. Excise the resurrection from the teaching of the early church and you have no teaching and no early church at all.

Until then, my teenage soul--suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority--would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had be excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn't talk about in church, or with people from church--what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn't been written by C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair--the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.

Central Excise 2.3 Central Excise Duty is levied by the Central Government under the Central Excise Act, 1944. The levy is on all goods manufactured and produced in India, which are specified in the schedule to the Central Excise Tariff Act subject to certain exemptions. The effective rate may vary from product to product though most goods are subject to excise duty at 10% (without education cess). As manufacturer, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a setoff against the excise duty payable on the output. Cross credit utilisation between credit of service tax and excise duty has been enabled w.e.f.10.9.2004. Service tax 2.4 Service tax is levied by the Central Government under Chapter V and Chapter VA of Finance Act, 1994. Service tax is levied on specified services, referred to as taxable services, when rendered by a service provider. Service tax is presently taxed at 10% (without education cess).Ordinarily, service tax is payable by the service provider, except in specified cases. As service provider, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a set-off against the service tax payable on taxable services. VAT & CST 2.5 Value Added Tax (VAT) is levied by the State Governments on transfer of property in goods from one person to another, when such transfer is for cash, deferred payment or other valuable consideration. VAT is also payable on certain transactions that are deemed to be sale such as transfer of right to use goods, hire purchase and sale by instalments, works contract and sale of food and drink as a part of rendering of any service. 2.6 Local VAT is payable when goods are sold within the State and Central Sales Tax (CST) is payable when sale occasions the movement of goods 4

Nothing that truly matters Can ever evaporate, Be excised, Burnt out of your soul.

The hatred the 'Christian' right wing harbors for the SA Constitution is not htere because of an absence of 'God' in state machinery and the excised phrase 'in humble submission to almighty God' - but because it no longer places THEM in a position to claim that THEY represent the will of that 'God' and to act as though it were true.

I ran into similar, though less dramatic events after moving to Yale Law School, where I spent two years as a Senior Research Scholar. Hawaii’s two Democratic U.S. Senators once contacted the law school to complain about testimony that I gave before the Hawaii state legislature. They blamed me for somehow single-handedly scuttling the new gun registration laws that were being considered. The associate dean of the law school called me up about the complaints and grilled me about my testimony. I am certain that neither of these incidents would have occurred if I had been on the other side the gun debate. Over the years, many academics have told me that they would have studied gun control if not for fear of damage to their careers. They didn’t want to run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of the debate. From my experience, that is understandable. Eventually, I was forced out of academia. There is only an abundance of funding for those researchers who support gun control. There is a war on guns. Just like with any war there are real casualties. Police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, but police themselves understand that they almost always show up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. When the police can’t be there, guns are by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves from criminals. And the most vulnerable people are the ones who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves: women and the elderly, people who are relatively weaker physically, as well as poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas—the most likely victims of violent crime. When gun control advocates can’t simply ban guns outright, they impose high fees and taxes on guns. When the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, had their handgun ban struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in March 2016, they passed a $1,000 excise tax on guns—a tax they hoped would serve as a model for the rest of the U.S.8 I hope that this book provides the ammunition people need for some of the major battles ahead. We must fight to keep people safe.

In the desire to do them good, we have done them the most harm. In the hope of excising their savage defects, we have inoculated them with, the most terrific vices. This is a sad picture, but it cannot be denied. What

What was it about humans that they had to fixate on blame? It was like a get out of jail free card. If you could find someone else to blame then you could excise it from your heart and pass it on.

There was nothing quite like that first scream, so said Alfred, who likened it to the initial gurgling sip of wine on the palate of an expert. But the last bit was important, too, and to get at that, he had to keep screaming. He had only one rule: Don’t interact. His job was simply and only to scream and await the Something Happens Phase—“something” usually taking the form of a physical incursion. Alfred had been slapped, punched, tossed out doors onto sidewalks; had a rug thrown over his head, an orange wedged into his mouth, and a shot of anesthesia administered without his consent. He’d been Tasered, billy-clubbed, and arrested for disturbing the peace. He’d spent eight separate nights in jail. About thirty seconds after Alfred’s first scream, the Avis bus veered to the curb and the driver, a tall African-American man, parted the flailing crowd and strode to the back. Alfred braced for physical confrontation, being guilty of prejudice about Black men and violence despite a passionate belief that he was free of it. But the driver, whose name patch read “Kinghorn,” fixed upon Alfred the laparoscopic gaze of a surgeon teasing muscle from bone as prelude to excising a tumor. His invasive scrutiny prompted a discovery for Alfred: Being studied, while screaming, was actually more uncomfortable than being thrown or punched or kicked. And that discovery yielded a second: Physical assaults, while painful, gave him a way to end his uninterrupted screaming. Which led to a third discovery: Screaming is not uninterrupted. In order to scream, one must breathe; in order to breathe, one must inhale; and in order to inhale, one must interrupt one’s screaming. “Did someone hurt this man?” Mr. Kinghorn inquired sharply

I once fell in love with a girl whose parents had divorced when she was very young. She told me about how, having learned from her mother what was going to happen—that the two of them and her baby sister were going to move into a new house, across town—she became preoccupied with questions of what you can and cannot take with you when you move. Repeatedly, she went back to her mother for clarification. Can I take my desk? My dog? My books? My crayons? Years later, a psychologist would suggest that perhaps this fixation on what she could and could not take had arisen because she had already been told what they were not going to take: her father. And, if not a father, what should a little girl be allowed to hold on to? At the time, I felt ill-equipped to judge this hypothesis, but I did have my doubts about the validity of the memory itself. I asked Maddie whether it wasn’t possible that she did not, in fact, recall the actual moment in which she asked these questions, but rather whether her mother had told her the story so many times that it had retroactively acquired the status of a memory in her mind. Eventually, Maddie would concede that maybe the memory had, in fact, been born in her mother’s telling. But she also said that she did not see what difference this made, if either way it was part of her story and she was not going out of her way to delude herself. She also remarked that it surprised her not to remember anything at all about the actual moment of separation from her father, despite it being one of her life’s most critical developments. I asked how old she’d been at the time. Four, she said. Four going on five. Being under the impression that my own superior memory would never have excised such an event, I suggested that maybe Maddie was one of those people who don’t remember anything from before they were, say, six. I was very arrogant then. It would not surprise me to learn that when Maddie thinks of our time together she does not remember loving me at all.

excised