Famous Reflection Quotes

Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion.

Effort makes some great men famous. Even greater effort enables other great men to remain unknown.

The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.

Cal ’s eyes reflected a weird combination of frenzy and fear as he twisted toward his father. “My God! She’s on her way to becoming the most famous physicist in the country, and she’s dumb as a post ! You are not having your baby in this house! You’re having it at the county hospital!

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free

People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat. Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher.

On further reflection regarding the pros and cons of the various possibilities the city offers, I decide in the end to head down Rue du Bac and to go to the Bon Marchè to try a few of their famous macarons. Like colored communion wafers, macarons are an almost intangible and spiritual nutrition: they provide a good quantity of sugar and don’t represent a challenge for one’s digestive system.

A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself. . . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine.

And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan’s and was carefully built just a little taller (see plate 10). 70.

Roots cannot grow into trees if there are no supernatural elements in the soil. Man cannot grow wealthy and famous if he doesn't contribute to either, the good or evil.

G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, “There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.

I guess if you go around with famous people you are assured of some reflected (or deflected) glory.

Think about the most famous geniuses in history: Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Darwin, da Vinci, Mozart. What do they have in common?” Charlie reflected on that for a moment. “They’re all men.

Wanderlust is never truly quenched—as C. S. Lewis famously penned, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

think about how brave it is, to do this: to queue up, and meet your hero. There’s something incredibly intimate about reading, or listening, or looking at someone else’s art. When it truly moves you—when you whoop when Prince whoops in Purple Rain; or cry when Bastian cries in The NeverEnding Story, it is as if you have been them, for a while. You traveled inside them, in their shoes, breathing their breath. Moving with their pulse. A faint ghost of them imprinted, inside you, forever—it responds when you meet them, as if it recognizes its own reflection.

Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing” it? The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I’ve said about e-reading, but the title of the series, “Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.

One day, with his usual head (I do not mean to imply that one can change heads as one changes hats, wearing at will a party head or an everyday head or a Sunday-go-to-meeting head, but simply that on this occasion the head of Aeschylus was as bald as ever), this famous writer went out walking in the streets, where he allowed the brilliant Grecian sunshine to be reflected from his scalp.

...the most important aspects of someone’s life are the very things not listed in an index.' There were never entries for “memory,” or 'regrets,' or even 'love,' in the lowercase. It was always 'Education (post-secondary)' or 'Awards (see also: Best Debut R&B Country CD by a Female Artist, Solo).' Indexes never seemed to get to the heart of the matter. There was never a heading for hope or fear. Or dreams, recalled. Smiles, remem­ bered. Anger. Beauty. Or even images that lingered, glimpses of something that had made an impression. A doorway. A window. A reflection on glass. The smell of rain. Never any of that. Just a tally of proper nouns and famous names. And why only one life? Why not the web of other lives that define us? What of their indexes, their moments?

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.

In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.

On his thirty-first birthday, Lewis wrote, in a famous passage, “This day I completed my thirty first year. . . . I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.” He resolved: “In future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”5

Finland is world-famous for its architects and decorators, who know how to produce beautiful effects in simple ways. On my first visit to Finland, I remember being invited into the living room of one of my host’s homes, and immediately thinking to myself, “This is the most beautiful room that I’ve ever seen!” On reflection, I then wondered why I found it so beautiful, because the room was a nearly-empty cubicle with just a few pieces of simple furniture. But the materials and form of the room, and those few pieces of furniture, were typically Finnish in their simplicity and beauty

My poor father who is dead" (it is the sacristan who is speaking,) "was in his lifetime a grave-digger. He was of an agreeable disposition, the result, no doubt, of the calling he followed, for it has often been pointed out that people who work in cemeteries are of a jovial turn. Death has no terrors for them; they never give it a thought. I, for instance, monsieur, enter a cemetery at night as little perturbed as though it were the arbor of the White Horse. And if by chance I meet with a ghost, I don't disturb myself in the least about it, for I reflect that he may just as likely have business of his own to attend to as I.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

Just as it is not the wish to be famous, but a habit of hard work, that may make a creative artist of us, so it is not the joy we take in the present, but sober reflection on the past, that may enable us to safeguard the future.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

Mr Murray was sorry to find that his two authors could not agree better, but he reflected that it probably could not be helped since both men were famous for quarrelling: Strange with Norrell, and Byron with practically everybody.3 When

Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We

I thought about the famous line from indigenous Australian writer and activist Lilla Watson, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

THEY SAY THAT the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, which just goes to show they’re as confused about anatomy as they gen’rally are about everything else, unless they’re talking about instructions on how to stab him, in which case a better way is up and under the ribcage.

As I approached the field, I called the tower, identified myself, and said I would like to land and pay my respects to General Patton if that was agreeable and convenient. I was cleared to land. When I parked, there was Georgie in his famous Jeep with the three-star flags flying, his helmet reflecting the sun gloriously and his ivory-handled revolvers at his side. He rushed forward, threw his arms around me, and with great tears streaming down his face, said, "Jimmy, I'm glad to see you. I didn't think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me.

Even the orbit of Pluto, however, is nothing like as eccentric as that of a comet. The most famous one, Halley’s Comet, becomes visible to us only near perihelion, when it is closest to the sun and reflects the sun’s light. Its elliptical orbit takes it far, far away, and it returns to our neighbourhood only every 75 to 76 years. I saw it in 1986 and showed it to my baby daughter Juliet. I whispered in her ear (of course she couldn’t understand what I was saying, but I obstinately whispered it anyway) that I would never see it again, but that she would have another chance when it returned in 2061.

Once, sitting in my car in the parking lot outside Building 5 during a prolonged downpour after a long lunch off premises, Mark, Larry, and I pondered the famous two-condom combinatorial problem that spread through the Center: Two (heterosexual) couples decide to have group sex with each other in all possible male-female combinations. They have only two condoms, and everyone is scared of catching some venereal disease. How can they manage four couplings with only two condoms? The first man puts on two condoms, one over the other, and then sleeps with the first woman. Only the outer surface of the outer condom and the inner surface of the inner one has had contact with any potentially infectious surface. The man removes the outer condom and sleeps with the second woman. The second man then dons the removed outer condom whose inner surface has until now had no contact with anyone’s skin, and sleeps with the first woman, whose only contact has thus far been with the outside of the same condom. Finally, the second man dons the second condom over the one he is already wearing, and sleeps with the second woman, who again only experiences a condom she has already touched. It was impossible to resist the temptation to generalize to N couples.

The Parisian bourgeoisie laugh at the bourgeoisie from a small town; the Court nobility mock the provincial nobility: the famous man scorns one who is unknown, without reflecting that time serves equal justice on their pretensions, and that they are all equally ridiculous or tedious in the eyes of succeeding generations.

There’s a saying we have in reality,” Jess, the producer, told me, while we were sitting in Midtown. “Everyone signs. Most people want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.

Churches, politicians, even some educational institutions teach hate and normalize it long before it ends up in a song lyric or being parroted in an interview by a newly famous sixteen-year-old. In that way the hood is a reflection of the wider world. We don’t have bigotry by accident; it’s built and sustained by the same cultural institutions we’re taught to revere.

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

The style of a soul “What’s the matter with both of you, Ellsworth? Why such talk—over nothing at all? People’s faces and first impressions don’t mean a thing.” “That, my dear Kiki,” he answered, his voice soft and distant, as if he were giving an answer, not to her, but to a thought of his own, “is one of our greatest common fallacies. There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Have you ever thought about the style of a soul, Kiki?” “The … what?” “The style of a soul. Do you remember the famous philosopher who spoke of the style of a civilization? He called it ‘style.’ He said it was the nearest word he could find for it. He said that every civilization has its one basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle. … I think, Kiki, that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You’ll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won’t show it to you. His face will. You’d have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else.” “That sounds fantastic, Ellsworth. And unfair, if true. It would leave people naked before you.” “It’s worse than that. It also leaves you naked before them. You betray yourself by the manner in which you react to a certain face. To a certain kind of face. … The style of your soul … There’s nothing important on earth, except human beings. There’s nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another. …” —Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

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

So I did some research,” she went on. “The good thing about being a famous model is that you can call anyone and they’ll talk to you. So I called this illusionist I’d seen on Broadway a couple of years ago. He heard the story and then he laughed. I said what’s so funny. He asked me a question: Did this guru do this after dinner? I was surprised. What the hell could that have to do with it? But I said yes, how did you know? He asked if we had coffee. Again I said yes. Did he take his black? One more time I said yes.” Shauna was smiling now. “Do you know how he did it, Beck?” I shook my head. “No clue.” “When he passed the card to Wendy, it went over his coffee cup. Black coffee, Beck. It reflects like a mirror. That’s how he saw what I’d written. It was just a dumb parlor trick.

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous. London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him

Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”). A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.

When it came to "getting away from it all," there really weren’t many places quite like the top of the tallest mountain in the world. He glanced around the summit, noting the other reason why he enjoyed coming up here. It was tradition for every expedition to the top of Everest to leave something behind—a small token or marker indicating their successful climb to the famous peak. Each one was different and each one seemed to reflect the personality of the party it represented: small flags and banners with the hand-written names of climbers past, a used oxygen canister, a spare glove, even a small metal lunchbox with (Clark noted with a small smile) a picture of Superman on the cover. To Clark, each of these markers indicated the pinnacle of human achievement, the fulfilled promise of the best the human race had to offer. And today, it represented something else as well: man’s ability to conquer the harsh reality of nature… a point in stark contrast to the previous night’s activities. This set were Sherpa prayer flags, each displaying a symbol, not of a distant god or mythological beast, but denoting some aspect of the enlightened human mind: compassion, perfect action, fearlessness. His thoughts turned to another example of the peak of human achievement, of what one man with drive, desire and dedication could accomplish without the benefit of superpowers or metagene enhancement. One that held a much more personal meaning to Clark. Bruce.

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

Narrative horror, disgust. That's what drives him mad, I'm sure of it, what obsesses him. I've known other people with the same aversion, or awareness, and they weren't even famous, fame is not a deciding factor, there are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material of some detailed report, and they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, in a way, as if there were always spectators or permanent witnesses, even of their most trivial goings-on and in the dullest of times. Perhaps it's a substitute for the old idea of the omnipresence of God, who saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, very comforting despite the implicit threat and punishment, and three or four generations aren't enough for Man to accept that his gruelling existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it. And in truth there is always someone: a listener, a reader, a spectator, a witness, who can also double up as simultaneous narrator and actor: the individuals tell their stories to themselves, to each his own, they are the ones who peer in and look at and notice things on a daily basis, from the outside in a way; or, rather, from a false outside, from a generalised narcissism, sometimes known as "consciousness". That's why so few people can withstand mockery, humiliation, ridicule, the rush of blood to the face, a snub, that least of all ... I've known men like that, men who were nobody yet who had that same immense fear of their own history, of what might be told and what, therefore, they might tell too. Of their blotted, ugly history. But, I insist, the determining factor always comes from outside, from something external: all this has little to do with shame, regret, remorse, self-hatred although these might make a fleeting appearance at some point. These individuals only feel obliged to give a true account of their acts or omissions, good or bad, brave, contemptible, cowardly or generous, if other people (the majority, that is) know about them, and those acts or omissions are thus encorporated into what is known about them, that is, into their official portraits. It isn't really a matter of conscience, but of performance, of mirrors. One can easily cast doubt on what is reflected in mirrors, and believe that it was all illusory, wrap it up in a mist of diffuse or faulty memory and decide finally that it didn't happen and that there is no memory of it, because there is no memory of what did not take place. Then it will no longer torment them: some people have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves that what happened didn't happen and what didn't exist did.

Our fate is reflected in our most famous invention: the computer. Those local area networks that sprang up like cities in the eighties and nineties got connected at the turn of the century by the internet. Just like European colonization connected the globe. Globalization is to the human race what the internet is to computers—a method for sharing resources and ideas. Ideas can now move around the world in nanoseconds. We have a platform for enabling the strongest minds to transform their thoughts into reality—and deploy that reality for the good of the masses.

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

In contrast to our society’s mistaken emphasis on positive emotions in our relationship with God, the great Spanish mystic and poet John of the Cross (1542–1591), who is most famous for his reflections on the “dark night of the soul,” also wrote a piece called “Advice on Disregarding Spiritual Sweetness.” In this work St. John compliments the person who loves God without feeling any emotional sweetness, for that individual is focusing on truly loving God and not the feelings. To set our will on gratifying and soothing sensations, to concentrate on capturing them and basking in them, is simply to set our will on what God has created, instead of God Himself. Thereby, we turn those created feelings into the end instead of a means—and a non-necessary means at that. According to St. John, we are ignorant if we suppose that because we fail to have any sweetness or bliss God is failing us. Similarly, we are uninstructed if we presume that in having such delectable emotions we have God. But the height of ignorance, he claims, is if we would follow God only to seek the sweetness and consequently stopped our yearning for God to wallow in delightful feelings when we acquired them.

Christopher’s anti-God campaign was based on a fundamental error reflected in the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything. On the contrary, since religion, as practiced, is a human activity, the reverse is true. Human beings poison religion, imposing their prejudices, superstitions, and corruptions onto its rituals and texts, not the other way around. “Pascal Is a Fraud!” When I first became acquainted with Christopher’s crusade, I immediately thought of the seventeenth-century scientist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. In addition to major contributions to scientific knowledge, Pascal produced exquisite reflections on religious themes: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here?4 These are the questions that only a religious faith can attempt to answer. There is no science of the why of our existence, no scientific counsel or solace for our human longings, loneliness, and fear. Without a God to make sense of our existence, Pascal wrote, human life is intolerable: This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there that revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied. . . .5 To resolve this dilemma, Pascal devised his famous “wager,” which, simply stated, is that since we cannot know whether there is a God or not, it is better to wager that there is one, rather than that there is not.

By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.

The safe answer is also close to my own operational answer throughout the rest of the book, as I use eminence to characterize people and importance to characterize events; words with meanings that overlap with fame. But if fame were at the core of what I really meant, the exercise would not be worth my time to conduct nor yours to read. Who cares who the most famous artists are, if their fame signifies nothing more substantive than celebrity? Let it be understood from the outset that I do not consider eminence and importance to be slightly glorified measures of fame, but more than that. They are reflections of excellence in human accomplishment. The Sistine Chapel keeps popping up because it is home to one of the greatest works of art ever to come from a human hand and mind.

One of the most asked questions about the stories told in my family is “How much of that is true?” Of course, the answer depends on who is telling the story. There is no doubt that Uncle Si is the most entertaining storyteller among the Robertson clan. One of his most famous stories is about the time his secondhand smoke made a deer cough. The story came about after many members of my family jokingly refused to let Si hunt our deer stands because of the odor he left behind. Deer hunters know the best survival defense for a deer is his sense of smell. Si seems to think that is just a superstition and has a coughing deer story to prove it. Even though Si has quit smoking, we encourage him to hunt his own stand with the wind blowing in his face for best results. What makes Si’s stories so funny is his passion and mannerisms in telling them.

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

There has been an enduring misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up. Turing’s core message was never “If a machine can imitate a man, the machine must be intelligent.” Rather, it was “Inability to imitate does not rule out intelligence.” In his classic essay on the Turing test, Turing encouraged his readers to take a broader perspective on intelligence and conceive of it more universally and indeed more ethically. He was concerned with the possibility of unusual forms of intelligence, our inability to recognize those intelligences, and the limitations of the concept of indistinguishability as a standard for defining what is intelligence and what is not. In section two of the paper, Turing asks directly whether imitation should be the standard of intelligence. He considers whether a man can imitate a machine rather than vice versa. Of course the answer is no, especially in matters of arithmetic, yet obviously a man thinks and can think computationally (in terms of chess problems, for example). We are warned that imitation cannot be the fundamental standard or marker of intelligence. Reflecting on Turing’s life can change one’s perspective on what the Turing test really means. Turing was gay. He was persecuted for this difference in a manner that included chemical castration and led to his suicide. In the mainstream British society of that time, he proved unable to consistently “pass” for straight. Interestingly, the second paragraph of Turing’s famous paper starts with the question of whether a male or female can pass for a member of the other gender in a typed conversation. The notion of “passing” was of direct personal concern to Turing and in more personal settings Turing probably did not view “passing” as synonymous with actually being a particular way.

This is well set out in Rodney Stark’s famous book The Rise of Christianity (1996, Ch. 4). Stark makes a compelling case that the way the Christians behaved in the great plagues of the early centuries was a significant factor in contributing to the spread of the faith. Stark, and others who have followed him, have collected the evidence from the plagues of the 170s AD, which killed the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the 250s. (Nobody is quite sure what diseases they were. One might have been smallpox, the other measles, both killers when attacking unprepared populations.) The emperor Julian, who tried to deconvert the Roman empire in the late fourth century after it had become officially Christian under Constantine, complained that the Christians were much better at looking after the sick, and for that matter the poor, than the ordinary non-Christian population. He was trying to lock the stable door after the horse had bolted. The Christians were being for the world what Jesus had been for Israel. People took notice. Something new was happening.

He found Rhy standing in the middle of his room, his back to Kell as he considered himself in a full-length mirror. From this angle, Kell couldn’t see Rhy’s face, and for a moment, a memory surged into his mind, of Rhy waiting for him to wake—only it hadn’t been Rhy, of course, but Astrid wearing his skin, and they were in Rhy’s chambers then, not his. But for an instant the details blurred and he found himself searching Rhy for any pendants or charms, searching his floor for blood, before the past crumbled back into memory. “About time,” said Rhy, and Kell was secretly relieved when the voice that came from Rhy’s lips was undoubtedly his brother’s. “What brings you to my room?” he asked, relief bleeding into annoyance. “Adventure. Intrigue. Brotherly concern. Or,” continued the prince lazily, “perhaps I’m just giving your mirror something to look at besides your constant pout.” Kell frowned, and Rhy smiled. “Ah, there it is! That famous scowl.” “I don’t scowl,” grumbled Kell. Rhy shot a conspiratorial look at his own reflection. Kell sighed and tossed his coat onto the nearest couch before heading for the alcove off his chamber.

Freud famously saw the ‘horror’ of Medusa’s head as a symbol of male castration, but the original trauma in the Medusa story is not castration but rape. Most scholars and historians dismiss Poseidon’s rape of Medusa as an insignificant detail, merely one among so many rapes of mortal, immortal and semi-divine women committed by male gods. However, myths which glorify rape as a strategy ‘to enact the principle of domination by means of sex’ are comparatively recent, becoming widespread in Attica around the 5th century BCE. It is likely that myths celebrating rape reflect a devastating historical shift in cultural values, the change from a society based on equality and partnership to a hierarchical structure based on unequal distribution of resources and the need to control women’s sexuality. Joseph Campbell describes the myth of Perseus and Medusa as reflecting ‘an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma’ which occurred in the early thirteenth century B.C.E. The myth may refer to the overrunning of the peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal and most likely matrilineal early civilizations of Old Europe by patriarchal warlike Indo-European invaders.

Speaking generally, there are two kinds of descriptive music. The first comes under the heading of literal description. A composer wishes to recreate the sound of bells in the night. He therefore writes certain chords, for orchestra or piano or whatever medium he is using, which actually sound like bells in the night. Something real is being imitated realistically. A famous example of that kind of description in music is the passage in one of Strauss’s tone poems where he imitates the bleating of sheep. The music has no other raison d’être than mere imitation at that point. The other type of descriptive music is less literal and more poetic. No attempt is made to describe a particular scene or event; nevertheless some outward circumstance arouses certain emotions in the composer which he wishes to communicate to the listener. It may be clouds or the sea or a country fair or an airplane. But the point is that instead of literal imitation, one gets a musicopoetic transcription of the phenomenon as reflected in the composer’s mind. That constitutes a higher form of program music. The bleating of sheep will always sound like the bleating of sheep, but a cloud portrayed in music allows the imagination more freedom. One principle must be kept firmly

Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.” Einstein used only about half his allotted number of words. It became the most famous version of an answer he gave often: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”9 Einstein’s response was not comforting to everyone. Some religious Jews, for example, noted that Spinoza had been excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for holding these beliefs, and he had also been condemned by the Catholic Church for good measure. “Cardinal O’Connell would have done well had he not attacked the Einstein theory,” said one Bronx rabbi. “Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his nonbelief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction.”10 Nevertheless, most people were satisfied, whether they fully agreed or not, because they could appreciate what he was saying. The idea of an impersonal God, whose hand is reflected in the glory of creation but who does not meddle in daily existence, is part of a respectable tradition in both Europe and America. It is to be found in some of Einstein’s favorite philosophers, and it generally accords with the religious beliefs of many of America’s founders, such as Jefferson and Franklin.

In about 1980, he says, at a time when he was still struggling to articulate his own vision of a dynamic, evolving economy, he happened to read a book by the geneticist Richard Lewontin. And he was struck by a passage in which Lewontin said that scientists come in two types. Scientists of the first type see the world as being basically in equilibrium. And if untidy forces sometimes push a system slightly out of equilibrium, then they feel the whole trick is to push it back again. Lewontin called these scientists "Platonists," after the renowned Athenian philosopher who declared that the messy, imperfect objects we see around us are merely the reflections of perfect "archetypes." Scientists of the second type, however, see the world as a process of flow and change, with the same material constantly going around and around in endless combinations. Lewontin called these scientists "Heraclitans," after the Ionian philosopher who passionately and poetically argued that the world is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus, who lived nearly a century before Plato, is famous for observing that "Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters," a statement that Plato himself paraphrased as "You can never step into the same river twice." "When I read what Lewontin said," says Arthur, "it was a moment of revelation. That's when it finally became clear to me what was going on. I thought to myself, "Yes! We're finally beginning to recover from Newton.

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

Everything and Nothing* There was no one inside him; behind his face (which even in the bad paintings of the time resembles no other) and his words (which were multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated turn) there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream. At first he thought that everyone was like him, but the surprise and bewilderment of an acquaintance to whom he began to describe that hollowness showed him his error, and also let him know, forever after, that an individual ought not to differ from its species. He thought at one point that books might hold some remedy for his condition, and so he learned the "little Latin and less Greek" that a contemporary would later mention. Then he reflected that what he was looking for might be found in the performance of an elemental ritual of humanity, and so he allowed himself to be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long evening in June. At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his "nobodiness" might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to; he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Cassar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man—that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Proteus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, and Iago says, with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to famous passages. For twenty years he inhabited that guided and directed hallucination, but one morning he was overwhelmed with the surfeit and horror of being so many kings that die by the sword and so many unrequited lovers who come together, separate, and melodiously expire. That very day, he decided to sell his theater. Within a week he had returned to his birthplace, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood and did not associate them with those others, fabled with mythological allusion and Latin words, that his muse had celebrated. He had to be somebody; he became a retired businessman who'd made a fortune and had an interest in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. It was in that role that he dictated the arid last will and testament that we know today, from which he deliberately banished every trace of sentiment or literature. Friends from London would visit his re-treat, and he would once again play the role of poet for them. History adds that before or after he died, he discovered himself standing before God, and said to Him: I , who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself. God's voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me, are many, yet no one.

The Outer Cape is famous for a dazzling quality of light that is like no other place on Earth. Some of the magic has to do with the land being surrounded by water, but it’s also because that far north of the equator, the sunlight enters the atmosphere at a low angle. Both factors combine to leave everything it bathes both softer and more defined. For centuries writers, poets, and fine artists have been trying to capture its essence. Some have succeeded, but most have only sketched its truth. That’s no reflection of their talent, because no matter how beautiful the words or stunning the painting, Provincetown’s light has to be experienced. The light is one thing, but there is also the way everything smells. Those people lucky enough to have experienced the Cape at its best—and most would agree it’s sometime in the late days of summer when everything has finally been toasted by the sun—know that simply walking on the beach through the tall seagrass and rose hip bushes to the ocean, the air redolent with life, is almost as good as it gets. If in that moment someone was asked to choose between being able to see or smell, they would linger over their decision, realizing the temptation to forsake sight for even one breath of Cape Cod in August. Those aromas are as lush as any rain forest, as sweet as any rose garden, as distinct as any memory the body holds. Anyone who spent a week in summer camp on the Cape can be transported back to that spare cabin in the woods with a single waft of a pine forest on a rainy day. Winter alters the Cape, but it doesn’t entirely rob it of magic. Gone are the soft, warm scents of suntan oil and sand, replaced by a crisp, almost cruel cold. And while the seagrass and rose hips bend toward the ground and seagulls turn their backs to a bitter wind, the pine trees thrive through the long, dark months of winter, remaining tall over the hibernation at their feet. While their sap may drain into the roots and soil until the first warmth of spring, their needles remain fragrant through the coldest month, the harshest storm. And on any particular winter day on the Outer Cape, if one is blessed enough to take a walk in the woods on a clear, cold, windless day, they will realize the air and ocean and trees all talk the same language and declare We are alive. Even in the depths of winter: we are alive. It

The story of Cassius Clay’s lost bicycle would later be told as an indication of the boxer’s determination and the wonders of accidental encounters, but it carries broader meaning, too. If Cassius Clay had been a white boy, the theft of his bicycle and an introduction to Joe Martin might have led as easily to an interest in a career in law enforcement as boxing. But Cassius, who had already developed a keen understanding of America’s racial striation, knew that law enforcement wasn’t a promising option. This subject—what white America allowed and expected of black people—would intrigue him all his life. “At twelve years old I wanted to be a big celebrity,” he said years later. “I wanted to be world famous.” The interviewer pushed him: Why did he want to be famous? Upon reflection he answered from a more adult perspective: “So that I could rebel and be different from all the rest of them and show everyone behind me that you don’t have to Uncle Tom, you don’t have to kiss you-know-what to make it . . . I wanted to be free. I wanted to say what I wanna say . . . Go where I wanna go. Do what I wanna do.” For young Cassius, what mattered was that boxing was permitted, even encouraged, and that it gave him more or less equal status to the white boys who trained with him. Every day, on his way to the gym, Cassius passed a Cadillac dealership. Boxing wasn’t the only way for him to acquire one of those big, beautiful cars in the showroom window, but it might have seemed that way at the time. Boxing suggested a path to prosperity that did not require reading and writing. It came with the authorization of a white man in Joe Martin. It offered respect, visibility, power, and money. Boxing transcended race in ways that were highly unusual in the 1950s, when black Americans had limited control of their economic and political lives. Boxing more than most other sports allowed black athletes to compete on level ground with white athletes, to openly display their strength and even superiority, and to earn money on a relatively equal scale. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, many black people of Clay’s generation believed that getting an education and saving money would never be enough to earn respect. “One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear,” Baldwin wrote. “It was absolutely clear the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous. London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.

Reflective nostalgics miss the past and dream about the past. Some of them study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past. But they do not really want the past back. Perhaps this is because, deep down, they know that the old homestead is in ruins, or because it has been gentrified beyond recognition--or because they quietly recognize that they wouldn't much like it now anyway. Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust. Radically different from the reflective nostalgics are what Boym calls the restorative nostalgics, not all of whom recognize themselves as nostalgics at all. Restorative nostalgics don't just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to "rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps." Many of them don't recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: "They believe their project is about truth." They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don't acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. They don't want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as think their ancestors did, without irony. It is not by accident that restorative nostalgia often goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories and the medium-sized lies. These needn't be as harsh or crazy as the Smolensk conspiracy theory or the Soros conspiracy theory; they can gently invoke scapegoats rather than a full-fledged alternative reality. At a minimum, they can offer an explanation: The nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. Someone—the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU—has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. The essential identity that we once had has been taken away and replaced with something cheap and artificial. Eventually, those who seek power on the back of restorative nostalgia will begin to cultivate these conspiracy theories, or alternative histories, or alternative fibs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.

Every human being with normal mental and emotional faculties longs for more. People typically associate their longing for more with a desire to somehow improve their lot in life—to get a better job, a nicer house, a more loving spouse, become famous, and so on. If only this, that, or some other thing were different, we say to ourselves, then we’d feel complete and happy. Some chase this “if only” all their lives. For others, the “if only” turns into resentment when they lose hope of ever acquiring completeness. But even if we get lucky and acquire our “if only,” it never quite satisfies. Acquiring the better job, the bigger house, the new spouse, or world fame we longed for may provide a temporary sense of happiness and completeness, but it never lasts. Sooner or later, the hunger returns. The best word in any language that captures this vague, unquenchable yearning, according to C. S. Lewis and other writers, is the German word Sehnsucht (pronounced “zane-zookt”).[9] It’s an unusual word that is hard to translate, for it expresses a deep longing or craving for something that you can’t quite identify and that always feels just out of reach. Some have described Sehnsucht as a vague and bittersweet nostalgia and/or longing for a distant country, but one that cannot be found on earth. Others have described it as a quasi-mystical sense that we (and our present world) are incomplete, combined with an unattainable yearning for whatever it is that would complete it. Scientists have offered several different explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—puzzling, because it’s hard to understand how natural processes alone could have evolved beings that hunger for something nature itself doesn’t provide.[10] But this longing is not puzzling from a biblical perspective, for Scripture teaches us that humans and the entire creation are fallen and estranged from God. Lewis saw Sehnsucht as reflective of our “pilgrim status.” It indicates that we are not where we were meant to be, where we are destined to be; we are not home. Lewis once wrote to a friend that “our best havings are wantings,” for our “wantings” are reminders that humans are meant for a different and better state.[11] In another place he wrote: Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is . . . the truest index of our real situation.[12] With Lewis, Christians have always identified this Sehnsucht that resides in the human heart as a yearning for God. As St. Augustine famously prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”[13] In this light, we might think of Sehnsucht as a sort of homing device placed in us by our Creator to lead us into a passionate relationship with him.

Reed was involved in some of our most famous duck hunts; he even has a blind named after him. It’s called the Reed Robertson Hole. One year, we were having a really bad duck season. It was hot and there always seemed to be southwest winds, which aren’t ideal conditions on Phil’s property. One Sunday, the forecast called for more southwest winds, so nobody wanted to go hunting. I wasn’t going to pass up a morning in the duck blind, so I decided to take Reed with me. My expectations were so low that I was really only taking him to see the sunrise. I was convinced we wouldn’t see a single duck. Well, it got to be daylight and nothing happened. But we were still spending quality time together, and I was talking to him about God and the outdoors. I looked up and saw two birds. I literally thought it was two crows flying overhead. But then I realized it was two mallard drakes. I called them and they made two passes over our blind before backpedaling right in front of us. They seemed to stop in motion about ten feet in front of us. “Shoot!” I said. Reed raised his gun and shot three times in less than three seconds. Apparently, he still believed his shotgun was an AK-47. He went boom! Boom! Boom! By the time Reed was gone, I raised my gun and shot both of them. He looked at me and was like, “What happened?” He looked at his gun and thought something was wrong with it. “Son, you got excited and fired too quickly,” I said. “You’ve got to get on the duck.” As soon as I looked up, I saw ten teals circling toward us. They came right into our decoys. I decided to give Reed the first shot again. “Cut ‘em,” I said. Reed raised his gun and fired again. Boom! Boom! Boom! He shot one and then I shot another one. “Hey, you’re on the board,” I said. A while later, about seventy-five teals made three passes over us. I was going to let them light so Reed could get a good shot. About half of them lit and the other half came right toward us. “Cut ’em,” I said. I raised my gun and shot two of them. I heard Reed fire three times but didn’t see anything on the water. “I think I got three of them that time,” he said. “Son, don’t be making up stories,” I told him. I was looking right where he shot and didn’t see anything. But then I looked to the right and realized he’d actually shot four. He hit three on one side and a stray pellet hit one in the back. “Son, you have arrived,” I said. We wound up killing our limit that day, when I didn’t expect us to see any ducks at all. Phil and everybody else made a big deal about it because we hadn’t seen many ducks in days. It was the most ducks we’d ever shot out of that blind, and we’ve never mauled them like that again there. Because I shared the experience with my son, it was one of my most special and memorable hunts. I learned a valuable lesson that day: you never know when the ducks are going to show up. That is why I go every day the season is open.

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.

She started to head out, but she passed her room. It was the same as she'd left it: a pile of cushions by her bed for Little Brother to sleep on, a stack of poetry and famous literature on her desk that she was supposed to study to become a "model bride," and the lavender shawl and silk robes she'd worn the day before she left home. The jade comb Mulan had left in exchange for the conscription notice caught her eye; it now rested in front of her mirror. Mulan's gaze lingered on the comb, on its green teeth and the pearl-colored flower nestled on its shoulder. She wanted to hold it, to put it in her hair and show her family- to show everyone- she was worthy. After all, her surname, Fa, meant flower. She needed to show them that she had bloomed to be worthy of her family name. But no one was here, and she didn't want to face her reflection. Who knew what it would show, especially in Diyu? She isn't a boy, her mother had told her father once. She shouldn't be riding horses and letting her hair loose. The neighbors will talk. She won't find a good husband- Let her, Fa Zhou had consoled his wife. When she leaves this household as a bride, she'll no longer be able to do these things. Mulan hadn't understood what he meant then. She hadn't understood the significance of what it meant for her to be the only girl in the village who skipped learning ribbon dances to ride Khan through the village rice fields, who chased after chickens and helped herd the cows instead of learning the zither or practicing her painting, who was allowed to have opinions- at all. She'd taken the freedom of her childhood for granted. When she turned fourteen, everything changed. I know this will be a hard change to make, Fa Li had told her, but it's for your own good. Men want a girl who is quiet and demure, polite and poised- not someone who speaks out of turn and runs wild about the garden. A girl who can't make a good match won't bring honor to the family. And worse yet, she'll have nothing: not respect, or money of her own, or a home. She'd touched Mulan's cheek with a resigned sigh. I don't want that fate for you, Mulan. Every morning for a year, her mother tied a rod of bamboo to Mulan's spine to remind her to stand straight, stuffed her mouth with persimmon seeds to remind her to speak softly, and helped Mulan practice wearing heeled shoes by tying ribbons to her feet and guiding her along the garden. Oh, how she'd wanted to please her mother, and especially her father. She hadn't wanted to let them down. But maybe she hadn't tried enough. For despite Fa Li's careful preparation, she had failed the Matchmaker's exam. The look of hopefulness on her father's face that day- the thought that she'd disappointed him still haunted her. Then fate had taken its turn, and Mulan had thrown everything away to become a soldier. To learn how to punch and kick and hold a sword and shield, to shoot arrows and run and yell. To save her country, and bring honor home to her family. How much she had wanted them to be proud of her.

(3) Theology of Exodus: A Covenant People “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Exod 6:7). When God first demanded that the Egyptian Pharaoh let Israel leave Egypt, he referred to Israel as “my … people.” Again and again he said those famous words to Pharaoh, Let my people go.56 Pharaoh may not have known who Yahweh was,57 but Yahweh certainly knew Israel. He knew them not just as a nation needing rescue but as his own people needing to be closely bound to him by the beneficent covenant he had in store for them once they reached the place he was taking them to himself, out of harm's way, and into his sacred space.58 To be in the image of God is to have a job assignment. God's “image”59 is supposed to represent him on earth and accomplish his purposes here. Reasoning from a degenerate form of this truth, pagan religions thought that an image (idol) in the form of something they fashioned would convey to its worshipers the presence of a god or goddess. But the real purpose of the heavenly decision described in 1:26 was not to have a humanlike statue as a representative of God on earth but to have humans do his work here, as the Lord's Prayer asks (“your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Matt 6:10). Although the fall of humanity as described in Genesis 3 corrupted the ability of humans to function properly in the image of God, the divine plan of redemption was hardly thwarted. It took the form of the calling of Abraham and the promises to him of a special people. In both Exod 6:6–8 and 19:4–6 God reiterates his plan to develop a people that will be his very own, a special people that, in distinction from all other peoples of the earth, will belong to him and accomplish his purposes, being as Exod 19:6 says “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Since the essence of holiness is belonging to God, by belonging to God this people became holy, reflecting the character of their Lord as well as being obedient to his purposes. No other nation in the ancient world ever claimed Yahweh as its God, and Yahweh never claimed any other nation as his people. This is not to say that he did not love and care for other nations60 but only to say that he chose Israel as the focus of his plan of redemption for the world. In the New Testament, Israel becomes all who will place faith in Jesus Christ—not an ethnic or political entity at all but now a spiritual entity, a family of God. Thus the New Testament speaks of the true Israel as defined by conversion to Christ in rebirth and not by physical birth at all. But in the Old Covenant, the true Israel was the people group that, from the various ethnic groups that gathered at Sinai, agreed to accept God's covenant and therefore to benefit from this abiding presence among them (see comments on Exod 33:12–24:28). Exodus is the place in the Bible where God's full covenant with a nation—as opposed to a person or small group—emerges, and the language of Exod 6:7, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God,” is language predicting that covenant establishment.61

the principles of power branding aren’t mysteries; in fact, they reflect the principles of any healthy relationship. To paraphrase the title of a famous book, just about all you need to know about branding you learned in kindergarten.

Then the king made a great feast, the Feast of Esther, for all his officials and servants; and he proclaimed a holiday in the provinces and gave gifts according to the generosity of a king. Esther 2:18 After the king decides Esther will be his queen, he throws a party. You might remember that this guy is famous for his parties! He proclaims the day he met Esther as a holiday: “The Feast of Esther”. Ahasuerus celebrates with all his servants and all his officials, and the news of the new queen is spread to all the provinces. Ahasuerus also gives Esther gifts “according to the generosity of a king”... that must have really been something! I love that little phrase... “gave gifts according to the generosity of a king”. It is another little parallel to make between you and Esther: your King — the Lord of Lords — gives to you gifts according to His generosity as well, doesn’t He? Every day is something new! Esther prepared and gave her best to King Ahasuerus, and the response from him was tremendous. Imagine if you prepared your heart daily to give God your very best — wow! The Lord cannot resist that! Open yourself up to your King and expect great things!   Before you close the word today, consider that phrase again: “gifts according to the generosity of a king”. You have a king celebrating you today — the King of Kings, truly the greatest King... He desires to give you gifts according to His generosity!

I might refer here to Jeff’s concept of the Human as Two, and mention that these may be glimpses, as it were, through the fence that surrounds Charles Fort’s famous comment in Book of the Damned, “I think we’re property.” We are little, curious animals, as it were, peering through the slats of the fence that surrounds our barnyard, and seeing beyond the edge not another world, but a more real vision of ourselves reflected as noumena and wondering, “What is that?

Wealth is not about accumulating money into bank accounts or pockets or having multi properties to make you look rich and famous to people, it is when you make others surrounding you healthier, happier and have balanced lives matched to your wealth so as to reflect your wealth and life for the benefit of others.

Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish.

The reactions of our personal friends may reflect to a large degree Diana’s worldwide and lasting appeal. We received letters and phone calls from friends living, literally, all over the world--Malaysia, Sumatra, Brazil, Australia, Europe, and throughout America--many of whom had not known of our connection with Diana until they saw me on television. The fact that so many of our far-flung and diverse friends were watching the television coverage of Diana’s death and funeral spoke volumes in itself. They were shocked and saddened by Diana’s death but acknowledged, “It must be so much worse for you. You knew her.” One comment I heard repeated by men and women friends alike, was, “I didn’t really follow her that closely, so I was surprised at how upset I was by her death.” Again, that undeniable and universal appeal. Women friends, mothers my own age, referred to her so often as “that poor child.” Incredible. Diana was beautiful, rich, the most famous woman of her era, yet what spoke to all of us was her vulnerability.

Among the dismissive was writer Tom Wolfe, who divined the zeitgeist of the era when he dubbed the seventies “The Me Decade” in his famous 1976 essay. Wolfe appropriately defamed the era as a time in which individual emancipation trumped the idea of the civic good, in which decadence looked liked politics, and glitter could be mistaken for substance. If the political revolution could not be realized in post-sixties America, Wolfe argued, the only thing left was the “alchemical dream” of revolutionizing the self. As if to confirm Wolfe’s analysis, the seventies would often be symbolized by a spinning mirrored disco ball reflecting a mosaic of “hundreds of little me’s”—swirling fragments of individualism that made a mockery of the antediluvian dream of solidarity.9

Mankiw’s famous quote was ‘People react to incentives, all else is just explanation’. However, poor people are helpless. They do not have or face a willingness to pay choice in helpless scenarios. A literal application of definition of demand would imply that the poor people do not have demand for the essential goods. Their wants are not backed up by purchasing power. Economics does not differentiate between essential and non-essential wants. If a rich person demands golf course in a locality near a big population of homeless people, then, the golf course will be built first if he can afford it. Are poor willing to give fewer dollar votes by choice to buy the essential needs? Is it their conscious and sovereign decision?

She stared at the water until the sun’s reflection became too much, and then reached for her single bag of belongings. Digging around, she found the clay turtle. It was made of earth. It was tiny. She could use it for practice. Small, she thought as she cradled it with both hands. Precise. Silent. Small. She curled her lips in concentration. It was like crooking the tip of her pinky while wiggling her opposite ear. She needed a whole-body effort to keep her focus sufficiently narrow. There was another reason why she didn’t want to seek instruction from a famous bending master with a sterling reputation and wisdom to spare. Such a teacher would never let her kill Jianzhu in cold blood. Her hunger to learn all four elements had nothing to do with becoming a fully realized Avatar. Fire, Air, and Water were simply more weapons she could bring to bear on a single target. And she had to bring her earthbending up to speed too. Small. Precise. The turtle floated upward, trembling in the air. It wasn’t steady the way bent earth should be, more of a wobbling top on its last few spins. But she was bending it. The smallest piece of earth she’d ever managed to control. A minor victory. This was only the beginning of her path. She would need much more practice to see Jianzhu broken in pieces before her feet, to steal his world away from him the way he had stolen hers, to make him suffer as much as possible before she ended his miserable worthless life— There was a sharp crack. The turtle fractured along innumerable fault lines. The smallest parts, the blunt little tail and squat legs, crumbled first. The head fell off and bounced over the edge of the saddle. She tried to close her grip around the rest of it and caught only dust. The powdered clay slipped between her fingers and was taken by the breeze. Her only keepsake of Kelsang flew away on the wind.

Weak argument: talk loudly.' Winston Churchill's famous marginal note is a classic example of a meta-equation. More precisely, it is a reminder of the basic principle of total valency: both halves of any equation strive toward self-repetition. In this respect, an equation is the ideal image of any reflection. Mimesis is tautological, and tautology as a universal phenomenon has its equivalent not only in mathematics but also in art; if in mathematics it takes form in an equation, then its ideal genre equivalent lies the riddle (the equation is the rationalization of a riddle, and detective fiction is its dramatization). As it grows into 'higher' genres, the riddle preserves its principle: two equal sides with unknowns, in which the sides demonstrate that they are identical. A riddle is a game. The process of solving it essentially boils down to proving the obvious; one knows from the start that the meanings of the two functions given are equal. This transforms the whole process into a sort of intellectual ostensibility.

How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes way, and with what an intensified melancholy, did I reflect on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regrets that I felt for this, as I lingered behind to muse awhile on my own, made me suffer so acutely that, in order to banish them, my mind of its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the face of pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on which my lack of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite independently of all these literary preoccupations and in no way connected with them, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which despite all my efforts I have never managed to discover. Since I felt that this something was to be found in them, I would stand there motionless, looking, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I then had to hasten after my grandfather, to continue my walk, I would try to racapture them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate on recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be bursting, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the lids. It was certainly not impressions of this kind that could restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of intellectual value and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and thereby distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work. But so arduous was the task imposed on my conscience by those impressions of form or scent or colour - to try to perceive what lay hidden beneath them - that I was not long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved.

In the ensuing centuries, texts that contained such dangerous ideas paid a heavy price for their ‘heresy’. As has been lucidly argued by Dirk Rohmann, an academic who has produced a comprehensive and powerful account of the effect of Christianity on books, some of the greatest figures in the early Church rounded on the atomists. Augustine disliked atomism for precisely the same reason that atomists liked it: it weakened mankind’s terror of divine punishment and Hell. Texts by philosophical schools that championed atomic theory suffered. The Greek philosopher Democritus had perhaps done more than anyone to popularize this theory – though not only this one. Democritus was an astonishing polymath who had written works on a breathless array of other topics. A far from complete list of his titles includes: On History; On Nature; the Science of Medicine; On the Tangents of the Circle and the Sphere; On Irrational Lines and Solids; On the Causes of Celestial Phenomena; On the Causes of Atmospheric Phenomena; On Reflected Images . . . The list goes on. Today Democritus’s most famous theory is his atomism. What did the other theories state? We have no idea: every single one of his works was lost in the ensuing centuries. As the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli recently wrote, after citing an even longer list of the philosopher’s titles: ‘the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation’.

The style of a soul. Do you remember the famous philosopher who spoke of the style of a civilization? He called it 'style.' He said it was the nearest word he could find for it. He said that every civilization has its one basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle... every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You'll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature.

W.E.B. Du Bois famously asked back in 1897: “Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: How does it feel to be a problem?” White people are generally allowed to have problems, and they’ve historically been granted the power to define and respond to them. But people of color—in this “land of the free” forged through slavery and genocide—are regularly viewed and treated as the problem. This distinction has made all the difference. Once human beings are defined as the problem in the public consciousness, their elimination through deportation, incarceration, or even genocide becomes nearly inevitable. White nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation’s problems would be solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least better controlled.

A house in the country to find out what’s true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you.” This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It’s a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine. Marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.” When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. People are far more susceptible to infatuation when they are going through delicate or vulnerable times in their lives. The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely fall in love. Infatuation alters your brain chemistry, as though you were dousing yourself with opiates and stimulants. And infatuation is the most perilous aspect of human desire. Infatuation leads to what psychologists call “intrusive thinking”—that famously distracted state in which you cannot concentrate on anything other than the object of your obsession. An old Polish adage warns: “Before going to war, say one prayer. Before going to sea, say two prayers. Before getting married, say three.” “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” We derail our life’s journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time.

Reverence for the ancestors refers to a thoughtful regard for the many people, famous and unknown, who have preceded us on the spiritual path. They were no better equipped than we are; they experienced the same trials and tribulations we experience. Attaining a certain enlightenment, they resisted adopting images of themselves as enlightened; they simply persevered and were faithful to the end. Through reflecting on their perseverance and patience, we are helped to keep steady on our path, and to bridge the chasm of our fears. We honor them when we correct our attitude and return to the true and the good within ourselves

Among the Muslim contributions to social sciences, Imam Ghazali and Ibn-e-Khuldun discussed the concept of the labour theory of value and division of labour in economics several centuries earlier than Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The famous Laffer curve in economics was first discovered by Ibn-e-Khuldun.

In earnest, I shall echo your earlier proclamation, my friend, and state that in my mind the acquaintance of not only Cyprian Wythe, but any lover of King George is a grave displeasure.” Thomas raised his glass. “Hear, hear, my friend.” “Then I am surprised that you are able to abide my presence.” Kitty’s stiff response blasted a hole through Nathaniel’s middle and the resulting silence choked the merriment from their little circle like thick black smoke. He looked up only to be censured from the shock that drained the light from her eyes. Her lips pressed tight, turning them colorless.  The blood drained from his face. Idiot!  He couldn’t bring himself to look away from her wounded expression, aching for words that would soothe the pain he’d inflicted. The pleasant tune from the quartet and the quiet hum of voices continued around them, each guest blissfully unaware of his thoughtless remark. Thomas reached out to her, his brow pinching. “Kitty, you must know our comments are no reflection on you.” “Are they not?” She handed her glass to Eliza. “If you’ll excuse me, I shall take my leave so as not to injure you with my presence any longer.” Kitty brushed between them before facing them one last time. “Forgive me, Eliza.” She darted from the room, holding her skirts as she wove through the tangle of party-goers toward the exit. The hollow chill her absence created smacked Nathaniel on the back of the head like an irritated father. He exchanged a narrow glance with Thomas before slamming his eyes shut. How could he be so foolish? How could he have allowed himself to say something so hurtful to someone so gracious? The temperature of the room went hot, then instantly cold. So much for your famous charm, Nathaniel. You’ve proven your lack of it with amazing skill. “I’m

Those who believe it is immoral to kill animals for any reason, including eating and humane medical experimentation, should reflect on this: While there are strong links between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans, there are no links between kindness to animals and kindness to humans. Cruelty to animals frequently indicates a tendency toward cruelty to fellow human beings. But kindness to animals does not indicate that a person will be kind to other people. The Nazis, noted for their cruelty to human beings, were also the most pro-animal-rights group prior to the contemporary period. They outlawed experimentation on animals—but performed widespread experiments on human beings. And Hitler was famously affectionate toward his German shepherd, Blondie, while consigning millions of people to hellish misery and agonizing death.

Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *truth in itself* in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspective with that of other consciousnesses—that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text—that what is now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes perceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and *ipso facto* defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal components the processes actually observed. It established statistically the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents, that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence in which each event could be related to physical conditions responsible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of determinant consciousness, even if it were conceded that the constitution of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general properties. It was no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value, for this reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was concerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not escape the determinations which alone made the object into an object and without which it would have had no place in the system of experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgment confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.” —from_Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, pp. 62-64 —Artwork by Cristian Boian

On March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists. In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself. That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow socialists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.”2 For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism. Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

2,000–3,000 PEOPLE, NOT GENERAL FAME This is one of the messages Eric burned into my brain last year, and it’s guided many decisions since. We were sitting in a large soaking tub talking about the world (as mathematicians and human guinea pigs do in San Francisco), and he said: “General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities than benefits. However, if you’re known and respected by 2–3K high-caliber people (e.g., the live TED audience), you can do anything and everything you want in life. It provides maximal upside and minimal downside. GOOD QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN TACKLING INCUMBENT COMPANIES (OR IDEAS) “How is their bread buttered?” “What is it that they can’t afford to say or think?” “CONSENSUS” SHOULD SET OFF YOUR SPIDEY SENSE “Somehow, people have to learn that consensus is a huge problem. There’s no ‘arithmetic consensus’ because it doesn’t require a consensus. But there is a Washington consensus. There is a climate consensus. In general, consensus is how we bully people into pretending that there’s nothing to see. ‘Move along, everyone.’ I think that, in part, you should learn that people don’t naturally come to high levels of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear, in which case consensus isn’t present, or there’s an implied threat of violence to livelihood or self.” TF: I start nearly every public presentation I give with a slide that contains one quote: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” —Mark Twain. This isn’t just for my audience. It’s also a reminder for me.

Scientists, famously, use a lot of mathematics, at least in many disciplines (including both cognitive science and economics). Much of this is simply statistics, and derives from the importance of exact measurement. But that is not the whole story. Natural languages and the distinctions they draw are evolutionary products shaped by the interaction of cultural and genetic selection. They therefore encode, in deeply embedded and mutually reinforcing levels, distinctions important to folk theories—that is, the nonscientific social-cognitive structures that organize relationships important to special human purposes. Mathematical language is quite different, and this reflects differences between the nature of mathematical and of practical reasoning. Mathematical reasoning begins from sets of rigorously fixed procedural concepts, and these fixed points then have absolute authority, relative to special purposes in application, over what can and cannot be stated in the language. If we suspect there may be some particular structural fact but cannot figure out how to express it mathematically, this does not show that there is no such fact; but it implies that we must do some more work, either logical or empirical or both, before we can say that we are quite sure just what the putative structural fact is that we are trying to claim.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, who famously admonished his fellow jurists and the nation as a whole: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” More than a half century later, the Supreme Court would validate Harlan’s humanity with a unanimous decision in Brown v.

The style of a soul. Do you remember the famous philosopher who spoke of the style of a civilization? He called it 'style.' He said it was the nearest word he could find for it. He said that every civilization has its one basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle....I think, Kiki, that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You'll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won't show it to you. His face will. You'd have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else.

Conversational Chameleon We know that chameleons are lizards who are famous for their ability to change their colors and fit in as their environments require. This ability enables them to change themselves for safety, survival, and healthy well-being. Their colors adjust to reflect their mood, their surroundings, and serve as camouflage when necessary. Fossils prove they have been on this planet for over eighty million years, so they must be doing something right. Their innate ability for adaptability deserves appreciation, respect, and further consideration. It obviously works!

- “The consequence?” - “Globalization.” - “Implication?” - “Our fate is reflected in our most famous invention: the computer. Those local area networks that sprang up like cities in the eighties and nineties got connected at the turn of the century by the internet. Just like European colonization connected the globe. Globalization is to the human race what the internet is to computers—a method for sharing resources and ideas. Ideas can now move around the world in nanoseconds. We have a platform for enabling the strongest minds to transform their thoughts into reality—and deploy that reality for the good of the masses. If you think about it, vision—fictive simulation—remains the most powerful human ability. Look at the Forbes list of the richest people. The individuals listed are very different, but they all share one trait: vision. The ability to imagine a future that doesn’t exist—to imagine what the world would be like if something changed, if a product or service existed. And these people’s fortunes were made because their visions were accurate—they correctly predicted that something that didn’t already exist both could be created and would be valuable to a specific group of people.

Later, after Rule became famous, she stopped writing those kind of books and started writing about a different kind of true-crime case. She started writing about real-life gothic soap operas, dream-come-true husbands who turn out to have a dark past and crap. I don’t have any interest in those crimes or those books, which I think are written for women, and I haven’t been able to read anything she’s written in 25 years, although I keep trying.

And they know they are not drawn to the bulb at the back of the oven, but by the flare signals sent out by their fellow travelers. They are flashes of light and recognition, momentary reflections of the sun onto a shred of glitter. But they are something vital nonetheless.