Fascinating View Quotes

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists - I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

It was fascinating, seeing how Verity always writes from the antagonist’s point of view.

But when you are week the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you’re still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you. That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you’ll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig.

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.

What job a fascinating view does, apart from fascinating you? It does this: It perfectly motivates you to love existence much more than you can love!

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.

Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. Speech and writing are undoubtedly marvelous, but for this very reason they have a hypnotic and fascinating quality which can lead to the neglect of nature itself until they become too much of a good thing.

At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze.

Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.

So, there was this beautiful princess. She was locked in a high tower, one whose smart walls had cleaver holes in them that could give her anything: food, a clique of fantastic friends, wonderful clothes. And, best of all, there was this mirror on the wall, so that the princess could look at her beautiful self all day long. The only problem with the tower was that there way no way out. The builders had forgotten to put in an elevator, or even a set of stairs. She was stuck up there. One day, the princess realized that she was bored. The view from the tower--gentle hills, fields of white flowers, and a deep, dark forest--fascinated her. She started spending more time looking out the window than at her own reflection, as is often the case with troublesome girls. And it was pretty clear that no prince was showing up, or at least that he was really late. So the only thing was to jump. The hole in the wall gave her a lovely parasol to catch her when she fell, and a wonderful new dress to wear in the fields and forest, and a brass key to make sure she could get back into the tower if she needed to. But the princess, laughing pridefully, tossed the key into the fireplace, convinced she would never need to return to the tower. Without another glance in the mirror, she strolled out onto the balcony and stepped off into midair. The thing was, it was a long way down, a lot farther than the princess had expected, and the parasol turned out to be total crap. As she fell, the princess realized she should have asked for a bungee jacket or a parachute or something better than a parasol, you know? She struck the ground hard, and lay there in a crumpled heap, smarting and confused, wondering how things had worked out this way. There was no prince around to pick her up, her new dress was ruined, and thanks to her pride, she had no way back into the tower. And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful . . . or if the fall had changed the story completely.

He was the glimmer of adrenaline, the roughness of tracks beneath bare feet, and the siren of a freight train coming head-on. And I was fascinated. His eyes were unreadable. “You will be safe here.” I believed him. But before his dark silhouette disappeared from view, I remembered what “moy kotyonok” meant. My kitten.

In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny.

I had a fascination with 3D that goes back to the View-Master. I'd always dreamed of making a film in 3D. It's like a combination of theatre and film. There's something 3D gives to a movie that takes you to another land. Working with RealD creatively was a liberating experience. Thank you RealD for allowing us to make something like Hugo.

Enjoying the view?” I asked, finally, tired of his eyes drilling into the side of my head. “Enjoying isn’t the right word,” he returned, swirling his amaretto. “It’s more a morbid fascination with your spiral into self-destruction.

Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes: the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness; how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour. We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible. Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful, but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with. A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased. Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too. Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.

There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket—but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel.

We both had a fascination with, and a delight in, stories. Do not give either of us gifts: give us the tale that accompanies the gift. That is what makes the gift worth having.

Ordinary life is fascinating when viewed with extraordinary perspective.

Devaluation of the Earth, hostility towards the Earth, fear of the Earth: these are all from the psychological point of view the expression of a weak patriarchal consciousness that knows no other way to help itself than to withdraw violently from the fascinating and overwhelming domain of the Earthly. For we know that the archetypal projection of the Masculine experiences, not without justice, the Earth as the unconscious-making, instinct-entangling, and therefore dangerous Feminine. At the same time the projection of the masculine anima is mingled with the living image of the Earth archetype in the unconscious of man; and the more one-sidedly masculine man's conscious mind is the more primitive, unreliable, and therefore dangerous his anima will be. However, the Earth archetype, in compensation to the divinity of the archetype of Heaven and the Father, that determined the consciousness of medieval man, is fused together with the archaic image of the Mother Goddess. Yet in its struggle against this Mother Goddess, the conscious mind, in its historical development, has had great difficulty in asserting itself so as to reach its – patriarchal - independence. The insecurity of this conscious mind-and we have profound experience of how insecure the position of the conscious mind still is in modern man-is always bound up with fear of the unconscious, and no well-meaning theory "against fear" will be able to rid the world of this deeply rooted anxiety, which at different times has been projected on different objects. Whether this anxiety expresses itself in a religious form as the medieval fear of demons or witches, or politically as the modern fear of war with the State beyond the Iron Curtain, in every case we are dealing with a projection, though at the same time the anxiety is justified. In reality, our small ego-consciousness is justifiably afraid of the superior power of the collective forces, both without and within. In the history of the development of the conscious mind, for reasons which we cannot pursue here, the archetype of the Masculine Heaven is connected positively with the conscious mind, and the collective powers that threaten and devour the conscious mind both from without and within, are regarded as Feminine. A negative evaluation of the Earth archetype is therefore necessary and inevitable for a masculine, patriarchal conscious mind that is still weak. But this validity only applies in relation to a specific type of conscious mind; it alters as the integration of the human personality advances, and the conscious mind is strengthened and extended. A one-sided conscious mind, such as prevailed in the medieval patriarchal order, is certainly radical, even fanatical, but in a psychological sense it is by no means strong. As a result of the one-sidedness of the conscious mind, the human personality becomes involved in an equally one-sided opposition to its own unconscious, so that actually a split occurs. Even if, for example, the Masculine principle identifies itself with the world of Heaven, and projects the evil world of Earth outwards on the alien Feminine principle, both worlds are still parts of the personality, and the repressing masculine spiritual world of Heaven and of the values of the conscious mind is continually undermined and threatened by the repressed but constantly attacking opposite side. That is why the religious fanaticism of the representatives of the patriarchal World of Heaven reached its climax in the Inquisition and the witch trials, at the very moment when the influence of the archetype of Heaven, which had ruled the Middle Ages and the previous period, began to wane, and the opposite image of the Feminine Earth archetype began to emerge.

I came to view the world as a word puzzle and, with no special aptitude I can name, fixed on the whys and wherefores of language from my earliest days. Song lyrics. Signs. The stories read in first and second grades. My parents almost always read to us at bedtime. Poems by Whittier. Scenes from Oliver Twist. Kidnapped. Treasure Island. The names alone intrigued me. Dr. Livesey, Squire Trelawney. The name Balfour sounded the knell of the romantic. Robinson Crusoe. I loved to hear read the exploits of Natty Bumppo. Authors had an aura of the godlike to me. The Latin prayers fascinated me as an altar boy. I can still recall carved names on buildings I saw from the MTA train when I was a youngster. Who can explain why? Words were magic to me. I once inadvisably glued my finger and thumb together at the Magoun Library in fourth grade trying to amuse a pretty little girl on whom I had a crush, and when the librarian came over angrily to inquire what the problem was and I pointed with a shrug and replied, “Mucilage”—a word that always made me laugh—she very coldly stated, “You are more to be pitied than censured.

of the troops there with a view to writing a feature for ‘Die Wehrmacht’ magazine. He was fascinated by the enormous preparations being made to defend the Atlantic coast against an invasion launched from

I was just rather fascinated by certain what seemed to me insoluble paradoxes about reflection, about what it was like to look in one direction and see in another. I was struck by the strange capability we have to look through the front window of a motor car and at the same time look through the driving mirror and not to confuse the view that one saw inside one frame with the view that surrounded it in another frame.

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.

Now, looking for labels, it is hard to call the Hell's Angels anything but mutants. They are urban outlaws with a rural ethic and a new, improvised style of self-preservation. Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in. Very few read books, and in most cases their formal education ended at fifteen or sixteen. What little they know of history has come from the mass media, beginning with comics ... so if they see themselves in terms of the past, it's because they can't grasp the terms of the present, much less the future. They are the sons of poor men and drifters, losers and the sons of losers. Their backgrounds are overwhelmingly ordinary. As people, they are like millions of other people. But in their collective identity they have a peculiar fascination so obvious that even the press has recognized it, although not without cynicism. In its ritual flirtation with reality the press has viewed the Angels with a mixture of awe, humor and terror -- justified, as always, by a slavish dedication to the public appetite, which most journalists find so puzzling and contemptible that they have long since abandoned the task of understanding it to a handful of poll-takers and "experts.

„For your mind it was impossible that there are vampires and now you knew that it’s true. Now you had to identify that it was a lie. The fact that the impossible is possible.“ She stared in his wonderful green eyes and felt bespelled by his view. „What is more impossible in your regard? The fact that there are immortal, blood drinking beings like us or that you can ram these 6 knives into three dolls?“ „You mean...“ she began quietly and her voice died. She was fascinated too much by his eyes. „If for you already the impossible has become possible Seline, you hit these dolls with ease. As soon as you believe it.“, he breathed her in the ear and disappeared slowly from her angle of view.

We all started off as children with an abundance mindset and genuine fascination and curiosity about life. Somewhere along the way, it was lost. Mindset is a choice. We can choose to view the world as one of scarcity or one of abundance. Change

A humorous treatment of the rigid uniformitarian view came from Mark Twain. Although the shortening of the Mississippi River he referred to was the result of engineering projects eliminating many of the bends in the river, it is a thought-provoking spoof: The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. . . . Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past . . . what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! . . . In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

However, there have always been “society pedagogues”, less outstanding but more numerous, who have become fascinated by their own great ideas, which might, sometimes, even be true, but are more often constricted or contain the taint of some hidden pathological thought processes. Such people have always striven to impose pedagogical methods which would impoverish and deform the development of individuals’ and societies’ psychological world view; they inflict permanent harm upon societies, depriving them of universally useful values. By claiming to act in the name of a more valuable idea, such pedagogues actually undermine the values they claim and open the door for destructive ideologies. At the same time, as we have already mentioned, each society contains a small but active minority of persons with various deviant worldviews, especially in the areas treated above, which are caused either by psychological anomalies, to be discussed below, or by the long-term influence of such anomalies upon their psyches, especially during childhood. Such people later exert a pernicious influence upon the formative process of the psychological world view in society, whether by direct activity or by means of written or other transmission, especially if they engage in the service of some ideology or other.

Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire--nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.3 I am fascinated by this research

In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny. His

Some of his [Chester Bowles's] friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy. ... He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.

I concentrate on the picturesque sight of the beach, whose light sand offers a fascinating contrast to the rugged black rocks. The rolling waves with their white crests add even more sparkling nuances to the countless shades of blue and white of the sky with the low-hanging fog. And the Golden Gate Bridge towers majestically above it all. It’s overwhelming.

The most frequent misconception about celebrities, is that they must be so fascinating. The opposite is often the case. Most of my famous clients with some important exceptions, have been uninteresting, some have been outright boring. We tend to confuse their public persona and surroundings which fascinate us with their private personalities which are banal, mundane and self-centered. Many of them have no ideas, no insights, and little to say about matters outside the narrow spheres of their professional lives. Yet we listen to their often uninformed opinions on important issues of the day affecting the world, just because they have a handsome face, strong muscles or other talents or attributes that are irrelevant to their presumed credibility on the matters about which they’re opining. Celebrities may seem fascinating from a distance, but the reality viewed up close, is often very different.

Tourists see invisible things. Sometimes their point of view eluded him. By now, he was often the first in the group to raise his camera: to a roadside shrine or a sunset, to a buffalo plowing a paddy, ribs curved like a boat. But why were the others laughing at a billboard advertising Perlwite soap? What was fascinating about two village women grinding chilies on a stone? The dust of familiarity still lay in patches on the scenes through which he moved.

But if you could just pay her some small attention-or better yet, escort her yourself-it would be ever so helpful, and I would be grateful forever.” “Alex, if you were married to anyone but Jordan Townsende, I might consider asking you how you’d be willing to express your gratitude. However, since I haven’t any real wish to see my life brought to a premature end, I shall refrain from doing so and say instead that your smile is gratitude enough.” “Don’t joke, Roddy, I’m quite desperately in need of your help, and I would be eternally grateful for it.” “You are making me quake with trepidation, my sweet. Whoever she is, she must be in a deal of trouble if you need me.” “She’s lovely and spirited, and you will admire her tremendously.” “In that case, I shall deem it an embarrassing honor to lend my support to her. Who-“ His gaze flicked to a sudden movement in the doorway and riveted there, his eternally bland expression giving way to reverent admiration. “My God,” he whispered. Standing in the doorway like a vision from heaven was an unknown young woman clad in a shimmering silver-blue gown with a low, square neckline that offered a tantalizing view of smooth, voluptuous flesh, and a diagonally wrapped bodice that emphasized a tiny waist. Her glossy golden hair was swept back off her forehead and held in place with a sapphire clip, then left to fall artlessly about her shoulders and midway down her back, where it ended in luxurious waves and curls that gleamed brightly in the dancing candlelight. Beneath gracefully winged brows and long, curly lashes her glowing green eyes were neither jade nor emerald, but a startling color somewhere in between. In that moment of stunned silence Roddy observed her with the impartiality of a true connoisseur, looking for flaws that others would miss and finding only perfection in the delicately sculpted cheekbones, slender white throat, and soft mouth. The vision in the doorway moved imperceptibly. “Excuse me,” she said to Alexandra with a melting smile, her voice like wind chimes, “I didn’t realize you weren’t alone.” In a graceful swirl of silvery blue skirts she turned and vanished, and still Roddy stared at the empty doorway while Alexandra’s hopes soared. Never had she seen Roddy display the slightest genuine fascination for a feminine face and figure. His words sent her spirits even higher: “My God,” he said again in a reverent whisper. “Was she real?” “Very real,” Alex eagerly assured him, “and very desperately in need of your help, though she mustn’t know what I’ve asked of you. You will help, won’t you?” Dragging his gaze from the doorway, he shook his head as if to clear it. “Help?” he uttered dryly. “I’m tempted to offer her my very desirable hand in marriage!

Although he was neither fully original nor correct in his description of a senso comune, he was right in his general view that the human brain receives visual and other stimuli, processes them into perceptions, then transmits reactions through the nervous system to the muscles. More important, his fascination with the connection between the mind and the body became a key component of his artistic genius: showing how inner emotions are manifest in outward gestures.

It was raining and I had to walk on the grass. I’ve got mud all over my shoes. They’re brand-new, too.” “I’ll carry you across the grass on the return trip, if you like,” Colby offered with twinkling eyes. “It would have to be over one shoulder, of course,” he added with a wry glance at his artificial arm. She frowned at the bitterness in his tone. He was a little fuzzy because she needed glasses to see at distances. “Listen, nobody in her right mind would ever take you for a cripple,” she said gently and with a warm smile. She laid a hand on his sleeve. “Anyway,” she added with a wicked grin, “I’ve already given the news media enough to gossip about just recently. I don’t need any more complications in my life. I’ve only just gotten rid of one big one.” Colby studied her with an amused smile. She was the only woman he’d ever known that he genuinely liked. He was about to speak when he happened to glance over her shoulder at a man approaching them. “About that big complication, Cecily?” “What about it?” she asked. “I’d say it’s just reappeared with a vengeance. No, don’t turn around,” he said, suddenly jerking her close to him with the artificial arm that looked so real, a souvenir of one of his foreign assignments. “Just keep looking at me and pretend to be fascinated with my nose, and we’ll give him something to think about.” She laughed in spite of the racing pulse that always accompanied Tate’s appearances in her life. She studied Colby’s lean, scarred face. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of a pinup, but he had style and guts and if it hadn’t been for Tate, she would have found him very attractive. “Your nose has been broken twice, I see,” she told Colby. “Three times, but who’s counting?” He lifted his eyes and his eyebrows at someone behind her. “Well, hi, Tate! I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.” “Obviously,” came a deep, gruff voice that cut like a knife. Colby loosened his grip on Cecily and moved back a little. “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said. Tate moved into Cecily’s line of view, half a head taller than Colby Lane. He was wearing evening clothes, like the other men present, but he had an elegance that made him stand apart. She never tired of gazing into his large black eyes which were deep-set in a dark, handsome face with a straight nose, and a wide, narrow, sexy mouth and faintly cleft chin. He was the most beautiful man. He looked as if all he needed was a breastplate and feathers in his hair to bring back the heyday of the Lakota warrior in the nineteenth century. Cecily remembered him that way from the ceremonial gatherings at Wapiti Ridge, and the image stuck stubbornly in her mind. “Audrey likes to rub elbows with the rich and famous,” Tate returned. His dark eyes met Cecily’s fierce green ones. “I see you’re still in Holden’s good graces. Has he bought you a ring yet?” “What’s the matter with you, Tate?” Cecily asked with a cold smile. “Feeling…crabby?” His eyes smoldered as he glared at her. “What did you give Holden to get that job at the museum?” he asked with pure malice. Anger at the vicious insinuation caused her to draw back her hand holding the half-full coffee cup, and Colby caught her wrist smoothly before she could sling the contents at the man towering over her. Tate ignored Colby. “Don’t make that mistake again,” he said in a voice so quiet it was barely audible. He looked as if all his latent hostilities were waiting for an excuse to turn on her. “If you throw that cup at me, so help me, I’ll carry you over and put you down in the punch bowl!” “You and the CIA, maybe!” Cecily hissed. “Go ahead and try…!” Tate actually took a step toward her just as Colby managed to get between them. “Now, now,” he cautioned. Cecily wasn’t backing down an inch. Neither was Tate.

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that…well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-. It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own….And the exported popular arts! The singing and dancing!…each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.

To her mortification, she was staring at him openly, ogling, and she couldn't seem to stop. If the back view of West Ravenel was fascinating, the front was absolutely mesmerizing. He was much harrier than her husband had been, his chest covered with dark fur that narrowed to a V at his midriff, and there was more hair on his forearms, and even a little trail below the navel. His shoulders and arms were so powerfully developed, one had to wonder why he hadn't simply wrestled the bull into submission.

His life was a state of peculiar calm, of tranquil equilibrium. His strongest drive was curiosity, the simple wish to know, to be let in on what was hidden from others. Everything to him had the aspect of a cipher. Life was a mundane mystery, the clues to the solving of which were strewn all about, concealed or, far more fascinatingly, hidden in plain view, for all to see but for him alone to recognize. The dullest object could, for him, flare into sudden significance, could throb in the sudden awareness of itself.

When it was the better one speaking from her father’s heart, her views were broad, inspiring one to engage with her in some fine, uplifting enterprise; but when you had told her this, and it was time to launch into it, you found that her mother’s heart had taken her over and was speaking through her; and a petty remark or a sly little snigger, in which she took pleasure as an expression of who she was at that moment, would disappoint you, irritate you, almost fascinate you, as though you were faced with an impostor.

When I was a young man, I loved to write poems And I called a spade a spade And the only only thing that made me sing Was to lift the masks at the masquerade. I took them off my own face, I took them off others too And the only only wrong in all my song Was the view that I knew what was true. Now I am older and tireder too And the tasks with the masks are quite trying. I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew A better way to keep from lying, And not get nervous and blue When I said something quite untrue: I looked all around and all over To find something else to do: I tried to be less romantic I tried to be less starry-eyed too: But I only got mixed up and frantic Forgetting what was false and what was true. But tonight I am going to the masked ball, Because it has occurred to me That the masks are more true than the faces: —Perhaps this too is poetry? I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern And masked balls fascinate me: Now that I know that most falsehoods are true Perhaps I can join the charade? This is, at any rate, my new and true view: Let live and believe, I say. The only only thing is to believe in everything: It’s more fun and safer that way!

Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom. Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.

In the Judeo-Christian view--and thus, the dominant Western view--to die by suicide is a sinful, selfish act. This perception has been slow to fade, though the science is clear that suicide has root causes in diagnosable mental disorders and substance abuse. ("Sin" does not qualify for the DSM-5.) The cultural meaning of suicide in Japan is different. It's viewed as a selfless, even honorable act... Outsiders say that the Japanese romanticize suicide, and that Japan has a "suicide culture." But the reality is more complicated. The Japanese view of self-inflicted death as altruistic is more about wanting not to be a burden, rather than fascination with mortality itself.

[After a period of separation, Phaeton and Daphne are cuddling.] Diomedes, meanwhile, was leaning to look behind Helion, staring with open fascination at the display Phaethon and Daphne made. “I have not seen non-parthenogenic bioforms before. Are they going to copulate?” Atkins and Helion looked at him, then looked at each other. A glance of understanding passed between them. Atkins put his hand on Diomedes’s elbow, and pulled him back in front of Helion. “Perhaps not at this time,” Atkins said, straight-faced. “They are young and in love,” explained Helion, stepping so as to block Diomedes’s view. “So perhaps the excesses and, ah, exuberance of their, ah, greeting, can be overlooked this once.” Diomedes craned his neck, trying to peer past Helion. “There’s nothing like that on Neptune.” Helion murmured, “Perhaps certain peculiarities of the Neptunian character are thereby clarified, hmm…?” “It looks very old-fashioned,” said Diomedes. Helion said, “It is that most ancient and most precious romantic character of mankind which impels all great men to their greatness.” Atkins said, “It’s what young men do before they go to war.” Diomedes said, “It is not the way Cerebellines or Compositions or Hermaphrodites or Neptunians arrange these matters. I’m not sure I see the value of it. But it looks interesting. Do all Silver-Gray get to do that? I wonder if Phaethon would mind if I helped him.” “He’d mind.” Atkins interrupted curtly. “Really. He’d mind.

Considering the monotony and consequent insipidity of life one would find it unendurably tedious after any considerable length of time, were it not for the continual advance of knowledge and insight and the acquisition of even better and clearer understanding of all things, which is partly the fruit of experience, partly the result of the changes we ourselves undergo through the different stages of life by which our point of view is to a certain extent being continually altered, whereby things reveal to us sides we did not yet know. In this way, despite the decline in our mental powers, dies diem docet still holds indefatigably true and gives life an ever-renewed fascination, that what is identical continually appears as something new and different.

This is an art I can enjoy. There is a kind of sorcery in all cooking; in the choosing of ingredients, the process of mixing, grating, melting, infusing, and flavoring, the recipes taken from ancient books, the traditional utensils- the pestle and mortar with which my mother made her incense turned to a more homely purpose, her spices and aromatics giving up their subtleties to a baser, more sensual magic. And it is partly the transience of it delights me; so much loving preparation, so much art and experience, put into a pleasure that can last only a moment, and which only a few will ever fully appreciate. My mother always viewed my interest with indulgent contempt. To her, food was no pleasure but a tiresome necessity to be worried over, a tax on the price of our freedom. I stole menus from restaurants and looked longingly into patisserie windows. I must have been ten years old- maybe older- before I first tasted real chocolate. But still the fascination endured. I carried recipes in my head like maps. All kinds of recipes: torn from abandoned magazines in busy railway stations, wheedled from people on the road, strange marriages of my own confection. Mother with her cards, her divinations, directed our mad course across Europe. Cookery cards anchored us, placed landmarks on the bleak borders. Paris smells of baking bread and croissants; Marseille of bouillabaisse and grilled garlic. Berlin was Eisbrei with sauerkraut and Kartoffelsalat, Rome was the ice cream I ate without paying in a tiny restaurant beside the river.

Two predominant strategies characterize reactions to the unfolding environmental and social breakdowns evident in climate change, political paralysis and corruption, spreading poverty, and the failures of mainstream institutions of education, health care, government, and business: “muddling through” and “fighting back.” Muddling through is the strategy that characterizes most of us in the rich northern countries. It embraces a combination of working to preserve the status quo combined with an almost hypnotic fascination with wondrous new technologies that, so the belief goes, will solve our problems. Fighting back, as is evident in the vocal protests of millions of people around the world opposed to the “Washington consensus” view of globalization, combines a longing for an earlier social and moral order with anger at having lost control over our future.

Oh, it's a good story, as a story,' returned that gentleman; 'as good a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a partner in a house in some large way—spirits, or buttons, or wine, or blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron, or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops, or seamen, or somebody—and the house burst, and we being among the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a scientific manner, and all the rest Of it. When the fairy had appeared and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing, that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,' said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, 'You never saw such a lot of forms in your life. "Why," the attorney said to me one day, "if I wanted this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it, I couldn't have more trouble about it." "You are right, old fellow," I told him, "and in future you'll know that we have something to do here."' The pleasant young Barnacle finished by once more laughing heartily. He was a very easy, pleasant fellow indeed, and his manners were exceedingly winning. Mr Tite Barnacle's view of the business was of a less airy character. He took it ill that Mr Dorrit had troubled the Department by wanting to pay the money, and considered it a grossly informal thing to do after so many years. But Mr Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up men are believed in. Whether or no the reserved and never-exercised power of unbuttoning, fascinates mankind;

The media suffer from an internalised as well as institutionalised Islamophilia. They could never broadcast, or print, during Ramadan, Eid or any other Muslim festival a programme or article explaining from the Christian – or any other – point of view why Islam’s founding story simply doesn’t stack up. It wouldn’t be hard to write or make it. Let any scholar loose on the materials and they could do it. Biblical or Torah scholars using the tools of criticism could use them on the Koran and have a wonderful and fascinating time of it. But would the nation’s broadcaster run it? Or the ‘paper of record’ print it? If during any day of the year – let alone a major Muslim festival – the main newspapers in Britain or America chose to commission a Christian scholar to review a book casting doubt on the likelihood of Mohammed’s existence, say, or his claims to be a prophet, I think everybody knows what would happen. The papers and broadcasters know what would happen too. Which is why they don’t do it. And which is why when it comes to Islam we begin by avoiding it, go on to treat it with kid gloves,

Soiree in Rome. The women are more attractive than the men - they always are. My first impression is that all the men are ugly (they are producers and film directors) and that all the women are beautiful (they are actresses). On a second view: the men are ugly, but they have character; all the women have something erotic about them, but nothing remarkable - a purely macho society, the world of showbiz. The big scene with the male lead is played out in all its grandeur, from one palazzo to the next in the Roman night. The most beautiful actress I know is marrying a rich director, author of 97 screenplays. This is the rule among the showbiz crowd. As usual I feel alienation from all the men there and solidarity with all the women, whom the men pretend to scorn in order to please them, but to whom they are basically indifferent. It must be nice to live in bodies so beautiful, so ingenuous, and allow the men to dominate you with all their ugliness, wealth and pretensions. It must be marvellous to be a woman. Ultimately, it is this which is fascinating: woman is unimaginable. The more beautiful she is, the more unimaginable.

James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.” What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.

The second of these quaternios is the negative of the first; it is its shadow. By “shadow” I mean the inferior personality, the lowest levels of which are indistinguishable from the instinctuality of an animal. This is a view that can be found at a very early date, in the idea of the προσϕύης ψʋχή, the ‘excrescent soul’32 of Isidorus.33 We also meet it in Origen, who speaks of the animals contained in man.34 Since the shadow, in itself, is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other. Its unrelatedness, coldness, and dangerousness express the instinctuality that with ruthless cruelty rides roughshod over all moral and any other human wishes and considerations and is therefore just as terrifying and fascinating in its effects as the sudden glance of a poisonous snake.

However, it looks somewhat different when viewed not from the personalistic standpoint, i.e., from the personal situation of Miss Miller, but from the standpoint of the archetype’s own life. As we have already explained, the phenomena of the unconscious can be regarded as more or less spontaneous manifestations of autonomous archetypes, and though this hypothesis may seem very strange to the layman, it is amply supported by the fact the archetype has a numinous character: it exerts a fascination, it enters into active opposition to the conscious mind, and may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards. The primordial image is itself a “pattern of behaviour”4 which will assert itself with or without the co-operation of the conscious personality. Although the Miller case gives us some idea of the manner in which an archetype gradually draws nearer to consciousness and finally takes possession of it, the material is too scanty to serve as a complete illustration of the process. I must therefore refer my reader to the dream-series discussed in Psychology and Alchemy, where he will be able to follow the gradual emergence of a definite archetype with all the specific marks of its autonomy and authority.

Our time together is drawing short, my reader. Possibly you will view these pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care. Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens to words. Perhaps you’ll be a student of history, in which case I hope you’ll make something useful of me: a warts-and-all portrait, a definitive account of my life and times, suitably footnoted; though if you don’t accuse me of bad faith I will be astonished. Or, in fact, not astonished: I will be dead, and the dead are hard to astonish. I picture you as a young woman, bright, ambitious. You’ll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You’re frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age. I hover behind you, peering over your shoulder: your muse, your unseen inspiration, urging you on. You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often come to feel for their subjects. How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

So to avoid the twin dangers of nostalgia and despairing bitterness, I'll just say that in Cartagena we'd spend a whole month of happiness, and sometimes even a month and a half, or even longer, going out in Uncle Rafa's motorboat, La Fiorella, to Bocachica to collect seashells and eat fried fish with plantain chips and cassava, and to the Rosary Islands, where I tried lobster, or to the beach at Bocagrande, or walking to the pool at the Caribe Hotel, until we were mildly burned on our shoulders, which after a few days started peeling and turned freckly forever, or playing football with my cousins, in the little park opposite Bocagrande Church, or tennis in the Cartagena Club or ping-pong in their house, or going for bike rides, or swimming under the little nameless waterfalls along the coast, or making the most of the rain and the drowsiness of siesta time to read the complete works of Agatha Christie or the fascinating novels of Ayn Rand (I remember confusing the antics of the architect protagonist of The Fountainhead with those of my uncle Rafael), or Pearl S. Buck's interminable sagas, in cool hammocks strung up in the shade on the terrace of the house, with a view of the sea, drinking Kola Roman, eating Chinese empanadas on Sundays, coconut rice with red snapper on Mondays, Syrian-Lebanese kibbeh on Wednesdays, sirloin steak on Fridays and, my favourite, egg arepas on Saturday mornings, piping hot and brought fresh from a nearby village, Luruaco, where they had the best recipe.

She stole surreptitious glances at Christopher, as she had been doing all evening, mesmerized by the sight of him. He was tawny and sun glazed, the candlelight finding threads of gold in his hair. The yellow glow struck sparkling glints in the new growth of bristle on his face. She was fascinated by the raw, restless masculinity beneath his quietness. She wanted to revel in him as one might dash out-of-doors in a storm, letting the elements have their way. Most of all she longed to talk with him…to pry each other open with words, share every thought and secret. “My sincere thanks for your hospitality,” Christopher finally said at the conclusion of the meal. “It was much needed.” “You must return soon,” Cam said, “especially to view the timber yard in operation. We have installed some innovations that you may want to use at Riverton someday.” “Thank you. I would like to see them.” Christopher looked directly at Beatrix. “Before I depart, Miss Hathaway, I wonder if you would introduce me to this notorious mule of yours?” His manner was relaxed…but his eyes were those of a predator. Beatrix’s mouth went dry. There would be no escaping him. That much was clear. He wanted answers. He would have them either now or later. “Now?” she asked wanly. “Tonight?” “If you don’t mind,” he said in a far too pleasant tone. “The barn is but a short walk from the house, is it not?” “Yes,” Beatrix said, rising from her chair. The men at the table stood obligingly. “Excuse us, please. I won’t be long.” “May I go with you?” Rye asked eagerly. “No, darling,” Amelia said, “it’s time for your bath.” “But why must I wash if I can’t see any dirt?” “Those of us who have a difficult time with godliness,” Amelia replied with a grin, “must settle for cleanliness.

Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.

Kennewick Man is a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, carbon-dated to older than 9,000 years. Anthropologists were intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, and therefore might represent a separate early migration across what is now the Bering Strait, or even from Iceland. They were preparing to do all-important DNA tests when the legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Naturally there was widespread opposition from the scientific and archaeological community. Even if Kennewick Man is an American Indian of some kind, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie with whichever particular tribe happens to live in the same area 9,000 years later. Native Americans have impressive legal muscle, and ‘The Ancient One’ might have been handed over to the tribes, but for a bizarre twist. The Asatru Folk Assembly, a group of worshippers of the Norse gods Thor and Odin, filed an independent legal claim that Kennewick Man was actually a Viking. This Nordic sect, whose views you may follow in the Summer 1997 issue of The Runestone, were actually allowed to hold a religious service over the bones. This upset the Yakama Indian community, whose spokesman feared that the Viking ceremony could be ‘keeping Kennewick Man’s spirit from finding his body’. The dispute between Indians and Norsemen could well be settled by DNA comparison, and the Norsemen are quite keen to be put to this test. Scientific study of the remains would certainly cast fascinating light on the question of when humans first arrived in America. But Indian leaders resent the very idea of studying this question, because they believe their ancestors have been in America since the creation. As Armand Minthorn, religious leader of the Umatilla tribe, put it: ‘From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.’ Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. Facetious but, such is the climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, it is possibly the only recourse that would work.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

Very devout like his great-grandfather St. Louis, though not his equal in intelligence or will, Philip was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatific Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait until the Day of Judgment. The question was of real concern because the intercession of the saints on behalf of man was effective only if they had been admitted into the presence of God. Shrines possessing saints’ relics relied for revenue on popular confidence that a particular saint was in a position to make a personal appeal to the Almighty. Philip VI twice summoned theologians to debate the issue before him and fell into a “mighty choler” when the papal legate to Paris conveyed Pope John XXII’s doubts of the Beatific Vision. “The King reprimanded him sharply and threatened to burn him like an Albigensian unless he retracted, and said further that if the Pope really held such views he would regard him as a heretic.” A worried man, Philip wrote to the Pope that to deny the Beatific Vision was to destroy belief in the intercession of the Virgin and saints. Fortunately for the King’s peace of mind, a papal commission decided after thorough investigation that the souls of the Blessed did indeed come face to face with the Divine Essence.

No need to split my eardrums. I’m not going to hurt you.” Something familiar about the boy’s lilting tone made Cass stop screaming and flailing in his grip. She looked up just slightly, into his face. Even by the dim light of the moon, she recognized his dazzling blue eyes. “You,” she breathed. “Mourning girl?” The boy laughed, and steadied her on her feet. “So nice to run into you again.” She wrenched away from his grasp, pulling her cloak tight around her body. “What are you doing here?” The boy shrugged his broad shoulders. “I was just standing here enjoying the view when you almost ran me over.” “The view?” Her voice rang out shrilly. “In a graveyard? At this hour?” Her fear began to give way to irritation. He was clearly lying to her. The boy gestured around him. In the dark, a group of flowering weeds looked like a giant hairy spider crouched against the side of a crypt. “These flowers actually grow best in cemeteries. Did you know that? Something about the mix of soil and shade. Death and life, intertwined. One feeding off the other. It’s kind of magical, don’t you think?” He seemed distracted for a moment, like he really was fascinated by their surroundings. Just as Cass was about to respond, he turned to her again. “Plus the company here is much more agreeable than at la taverna. And much less likely to talk my ear off.” Cass felt dizzy. She took one more step back. “What’s on your face?” she demanded, pointing at his right cheekbone. “What?” He licked a finger and wiped haphazardly at the area Cass had indicated. His hand came away smudged with red. “Oh. Paint, probably. It gets all over everything.” His lips twitched as if he were trying not to smile. “It’s a wonder you aren’t the one being mourned, as accident prone as you seem to be.” “I hardly think you jumping on me earlier qualifies me as accident prone.” She was surprised by how quickly the response came to her. “Oh, if I had jumped on you, you’d know it,” he said with a wink. He reached toward Cass to dislodge a twig from her hair. “I’m Falco, by the way.” Cass narrowed her eyes. Now, since he was obviously laughing at her, she found his mischievous grin annoying. Still, it didn’t seem to be the deranged smile of a murderer.

Harry was fascinated by the Hathaways, the mysterious connections between them, as if they shared some collective secret. One could almost see the wordless understanding that passed between them. Although Harry knew a great deal about people, he knew nothing about being part of a family. After Harry’s mother had run off with one of her lovers, his father had tried to get rid of every remaining trace of her existence. And he had done his best to forget that he even had a son, leaving Harry to the hotel staff and a succession of tutors. Harry had few memories of his mother, only that she had been beautiful and had had golden hair. It seemed she had always been going out, away from him, forever elusive. He remembered crying for her once, clutching his hands in her velvet skirts, and she had tried to make him let go, laughing softly at his persistence. In the wake of his parents’ abandonment, Harry had taken his meals in the kitchen with the hotel employees. When he was sick, one or another of the maids had taken care of him. He saw families come and go, and he had learned to view them with the same detachment that the hotel staff did. Deep down Harry harbored a suspicion that the reason his mother had left, the reason his father never had anything to do with him, was because he was unlovable. And therefore he had no desire to be part of a family. Even if or when Poppy bore him children, Harry would never allow anyone close enough to form an attachment. He would never let himself be shackled that way. And yet he sometimes knew a fleeting envy for those who were capable of it, like the Hathaways.

The organization of insect colonies involves several mysterious features quite apart from the prodigious complexity of the social organization itself. For example, in his studies of South African termites, the naturalist Eugene Marais found that they could speedily repair damage to the mounds, rebuilding tunnels and arches, working from both sides of the breach he had made, and meeting up perfectly in the middle, even though the individual insects are blind. He then carried out a simple but fascinating experiment. He took a large steel plate several feet wider and higher than the termitary and drove it right through the center of the breach so that it divided the mound, and indeed the entire termitary, into two separate parts: The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on both sides of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute. From the present point of view, such a plan would exist within the morphic field of the colony as a whole. By morphic resonance, this would contain a collective memory of all similar termite colonies in the past, as well as a memory of the colony's own past, by self-resonance.

[Clyde's] story is fascinating because he is able to intellectualize what he was thinking and feeling at the time, even if he is discussing his paranoid delusional thoughts . . . As someone with a Master's of Science degree in a counseling field, I have found my greatest lessons have been from real people and not material in textbooks. As I read Clyde's story, I felt like I learned many lessons through what he has to share. My work will definitely be more beneficial by what I learned from him.

Wilma P. Mankiller No writer has more clearly articulated the unspoken emotions, dreams, and lifeways of contemporary Native people than Vine Deloria. This collection of Deloria’s works takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Indian country as Deloria responds to some of the most important issues of the last three decades. Deloria’s literary gift is amply demonstrated in pieces that are a mix of logic, humor, irreverence, and spirituality. But it is his clarity of thought and stunning ability to express complex concepts in a simple, straightforward manner that captivate the reader. One of the most compelling pieces in the collection, “If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True,” reminded me of the phrase coined by Alice Walker, “looking backward toward the future.” With flawless logic and adroit use of language, Deloria examines the way many traditional Native people look at the universe, the connectedness of all living things, and our own insignificance in the totality of things compared to the objective, segmented way scientists in the academy view the universe. Deloria points out that “everything that humans experience has value and instructs in some aspect of life. . . . The

Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.

In both pleasant experience producing karma effect (shata vedaniya) and unpleasant experience producing karma effect (ashata-vedaniya), there is indeed a constant inner burning (antardaah, inner suffering). But because one has moorcha (worldly engrossment/fascination due to deluded worldly view), one does not notice it; he remains in a state similar to being unconscious.

Bannon had become fascinated by the size and agency of the audiences congregating on MMO message boards such as Wowhead, Allakhazam, and (his favorite) Thottbot. “In 2006, 2007, they were doing 1.5 billion page views a month,” he recalled. “Just insane traffic. I thought we could monetize it, but it turned out I couldn’t give the advertising away.” Instead, the gamers ended up wrecking IGE’s business model by organizing themselves on the message boards and forcing the companies behind World of Warcraft and other MMO games to curb the disruptive practice of gold farming. IGE’s investors lost millions of dollars. But Bannon gained a perverse appreciation for the gamers who’d done him in. “These

Old friends who knew the family, including Paul Smith, Nixon’s professor at Whittier College, were fascinated by the vastly disparate characters of the two parents: Frank, with his anger and rage, Hannah, with her beatific gentleness and quiet, unbending sense of purpose. To her, a Milhous was still special and her son was a Milhous, destined to be extremely successful and yet highly moral. The effect of that on Nixon, Smith thought, was powerful: He was a young man caught between his father’s rage and sense of injustice and his mother’s high moral purpose, ambition, and concern for correct behavior. In Smith’s view, this was the key to his character—his inability to reconcile the two sides.

In May “Rock Around the Clock” hit the charts, and it rose to Number One. In June it crossed over to the R&B charts, where it hit Number Four. “Rock Around the Clock” became the best-selling rock record in history, with sales of almost seventeen million to date. But what I find more fascinating, more important about the record, and about Bill Haley, is this: “Rock Around the Clock” was recorded three months before Elvis made his first record, and it was a hit nine months before Elvis appeared on the pop charts. Viewing Haley’s earlier records, such as “Rock the Joint,” as the first white rock-and-roll, and “Rock Around the Clock” as not only the first Number One rock hit, but also the first clear example of rock gone wholly astray, of fake Tin Pan Alley rock, one can plainly see that in the brief span from 1952 to 1955 rock-and-roll had already risen and fallen.

He and Shinsou followed his gaze to the horizon, and watched with interest as the sky became bluer and gold edged the distant mountains. Todoroki couldn't help a gasp as within minutes the sky was flooded with pinks and oranges, purples and golds. However when Shinsou also gasped he looked over, and froze. Izuku was leant forward, drinking in the view hungrily. The gold of the sunrise lit up his hair, a curly chaotic mass after sleep but angelic in the light. The sun picked out the different colours in his eyes, streaks of blue and flecks of gold among many shades of green. Those beautiful big eyes were wide and innocently fascinated with what they saw Izuku's lips parted in a broad smile. The sight of him like that took their breaths away.

Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. In my clients and in myself I find that when life is richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its everchanging complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points.

Watching the child gaze on his mother in fascination, putting on make-up out of love and curiosity, only then to be scolded, was completely illuminating for me. As I watched the little boy respond on the monitor, it became utterly clear – he was only a child. I was only a child when I was being made to feel that I was a problem. Watching this encounter from an objective distance, it was so obvious. In the lucky (and probably unlikely) event you have access to a willing cast of actors and a set like a scene from your childhood frozen in time, I would genuinely encourage any of you trying to work out your feelings around a difficult childhood to re-stage it with actors and watch it on playback. Otherwise, trying to see your memories is like trying to get a full view of a hand that’s planted on your face. Your perspective is all over the place.

With its glass walls, you can enjoy the view even when it’s raining. It has a huge outdoor terrace with a panoramic view across the city, but the big draw is that you are up high, directly in front of the ‘cricket cage’ balustrade of Brunelleschi’s dome. Just between you and me, the Folco Portinari–Dante connection had me sold before I even arrived. It could have had a view of the men’s toilets and I still would have been thrilled, just because I love the Alighieri-Portinari story! (See Chapter 23: A Walk With Dante.) My first time here was with the city archivist I told you about in the chapter on the Duomo, so I associate this place with cool local 30-somethings with fascinating jobs in the city and endless stories about Florence, dating back to Julius Caesar. Caffeteria della Oblate is a little tricky to find, but that means the tourist crowd can’t find it either, so walking around in circles trying to get here is worth it. And of course, there’s that view… Address: Via dell’ Oriuolo, 26

It's because of Kate that we were able to get to the Alchemist's scrolls and keep them out of the hands of the Prometheans." He took out the key from Valerian's tomb and opened the case. At once, Jordan was on his feet, crossing to the trove of scrolls, crouching down to view them in fascination. "You'll have your work cut out for you now," Max remarked to him. "They're all in code," Kate spoke up, "but I-I made some progress on that from my mother's book. Maybe I could help." They all looked at her. Virgil eyed her as if she were some manner of rat that had crawled up from the river. Kate finally took umbrage at his hostility, knitting her eyebrows together. "I know I have Promethean bloodlines, sir, but I-I am a good person!" she asserted firmly, her heart pounding. "I love Rohan, and I will do whatever I can to help your cause, just like my grandfather did. My own mother was a victim of Promethean evil, too, you know. I understand your skepticism, but I hope you will at least give me a chance!" Max stared at her, a faint twinkle of approval in his eyes at her refusal to be intimidated. "Well, well," he murmured. "She certainly sounds like a Warrington." Rohan smiled ruefully.

he was so astounded by the beauty and complexity of the universe itself, that he saw no need to go seeking gods or goddesses to explain it. His philosophy was that no concept of a creator or overseer could possibly match the awe-inspiring grandeur of nature itself. This is the way the Pagan atheist views the world, and the universe at large. It’s not some dry, clinical and bitter philosophy. It’s a vibrant, dynamic view of life and the environment that births and sustains it. In fact, many Pagans view the universe as a sort of living organism—either metaphorically or in actual terms. The parallels are, indeed, fascinating. And, in fact, many Pagans believe that the distinction between natural and supernatural is a false one—that nature is the totality of all there is, and that it’s meaningless to speak of anything being somehow outside of nature.

On the other hand, a New Yorker charged me with hero worship of Lee and more: "Over-emphasis upon the Christianity of the butcher in a human slaughter business by one who was a parasitic blueblood all his life." This one is filed under "Views of the War, Marxist.

The Homeric view of existence: to find joy exclusively in life, in youth, to love the perfection of forms. From a religious point of view, the Homeric view is more simplistic than broader mediterranean religiosity (the "mysteries"). But still, "the Homerics" fascinate and enchant: they accept biology as the only real dimension of human existence.

One of the most fascinating things I stumbled across was a Ted Talk by Aaron O’Connell entitled “Making Sense of a Visible Quantum Object.” Unlike most material on quantum mechanics, which focuses on subatomic matter and can feel very abstract, O’Connell’s talk is about how quantum mechanics might actually be at work at the macro level. At our level. And what that might imply about the world around us. His presentation (which is short and easily findable on YouTube) is worth viewing.

Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua: Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction…But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’…Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword…And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD. Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Unlike Maimonides, the children in Tamarin’s experiment were young enough to be innocent. Presumably the savage views they expressed were those of their parents, or the cultural group in which they were brought up. It is, I suppose, not unlikely that Palestinian children, brought up in the same wartorn country, would offer equivalent opinions in the opposite direction. These considerations fill me with despair. They seem to show the immense power of religion, and especially the religious upbringing of children, to divide people and foster historic enmities and hereditary vendettas. Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from the book of Joshua, but with Joshua’s own name replaced by ‘General Lin’ and ‘Israel’ replaced by ‘a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago’. Now the experiment gave opposite results. Only 7 per cent approved of General Lin’s behaviour, and 75 per cent disapproved. In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share.

From the investor’s standpoint it is probably best for him in most cases that he should have (1) an unconditional right to receive interest payments when they are earned by the company, and (2) a right to other forms of protection than bankruptcy proceedings if interest is not earned and paid. The terms of income bonds can be tailored to the advantage of both the borrower and the lender in the manner best suited to both. (Conversion privileges can, of course, be included.) The acceptance by everybody of the inherently weak preferred-stock form and the rejection of the stronger income-bond form is a fascinating illustration of the way in which traditional institutions and habits often tend to persist on Wall Street despite new conditions calling for a fresh point of view. With every new wave of optimism or pessimism, we are ready to abandon history and time-tested principles, but we cling tenaciously and unquestioningly to our prejudices.

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It was fascinating, how people could be so reluctant to recognize blackmail, how eager they could be to convince themselves it was something else, even something fundamentally mutually cooperative. And sometimes it seemed the more powerful the individual, the greater the capacity for self-deception. He

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

When the consequences of reporting failure are too severe, employees avoid acknowledging mistakes altogether. But when a work environment feels psychologically safe and mistakes are viewed as a natural part of the learning process, employees are less prone to covering them up. The fascinating implication is that fearful teams avoid examining the causes of their blunders, making it all the more likely that their mistakes will be repeated again in the future.

Popery, in the ordinary state of its profession, combines the form of godliness with a total denial of its power. A heap of unmeaning ceremonies, adapted to fascinate the imagination, and engage the senses; implicit faith in human authority, combined with an utter neglect of divine teaching; ignorance the most profound, joined to dogmatism the most presumptuous; a vigilant exclusion of Biblical knowledge, together with a total extinction of free inquiry—present the spectacle of religion lying in state, surrounded with all the silent pomp of death. The very absurdities of such a religion, render it less unacceptable to men whose decided hostility to truth inclines them to view with complacency whatever obscures its beauty, or impedes its operation. Of all the corruptions of Christianity which have prevailed to any considerable extent, Popery presents the most numerous points of contrast to the simple doctrines of the Gospel; and just in proportion as it gains ground, the religion of Christ must decline.—Robert Hall

We are becoming too solemn about downtown. The architects, planners—and businessmen–are seized with dreams of order, and they have become fascinated with scale models and bird’s­eye views. This is a vicarious way to deal with reality, and it is, unhappily, symptomatic of a design philosophy now dominant: buildings come first, for the goal is to remake the city to fit an abstract concept of what, logically, it should be. But whose logic? The logic of the projects is the logic egocentric children, playing with pretty blocks and shouting “See what I made!”–a viewpoint much cultivated in our schools of architecture and design. And citizens who should know better are so fascinated by the sheer process of rebuilding that the end results are secondary to them

It is not an overstatement if one characterizes this revision of the false metaphysical classification of beings as the contemporary gigantomachy that reaches deeply into ingrained human self-relations. Very many view this revision suspiciously as an expropriation of the self and condemn it as technological devilry. The uncanniness of the process is not to be denied, precisely because it impresses by means of its results. The humanistically minded observer cannot withdraw his fascination because everything that happens on the technological front leads to consequences for human self-understanding. In the progress of technological evolution the citadel of subjectivity, that is to say, the thinking and experiencing ego, is impinged on, and to be sure not only by symbolic deconstructions that were, incidentally, anticipated in various ways in regional high cultures—one might think here of the mystical and yogic systems, of negative theology and Romantic irony—but also by material modifications, for instance, the alteration of mental states with the help of psychotropic substances (a procedure that for millennia has been common in drug cultures, and for decades in Western psychiatry). In addition, a time is foreseeable when the contents of ideas and experience will be induced by means of nootropic substances.

I want you, and you say you want me, and the only thing standing in our way is you. Don’t tell me that you survived all those battles, and suffered through so much, merely to come home for this--” He laid his fingers against her mouth. “Quiet. Let me think.” “What is there to--” “Beatrix,” he warned. She fell silent, her gaze locked on his severe features. Christopher frowned, weighing possibilities, inwardly debating the issue without seeming to come to any satisfactory conclusion. In the silence, Beatrix rested her head on his shoulder. His body was warm and comforting, the deep-flexing muscles easily accommodating her weight. She wriggled to press closer to him, until she felt the satisfying hardness of his chest against her breasts. And she adjusted her position as she felt the firm pressure of him lower down. Her body ached to gather him in. Furtively she brushed her lips against the salt-scented skin of his neck. He clamped his hand on her hip. Amusement threaded through his voice. “Stop squirming. There is no possible way a man can think when you’re doing that.” “Haven’t you finished thinking yet?” “No.” But she felt him smile as he kissed her forehead. “If you and I marry,” he said eventually, “I would be put in the position of trying to protect my wife against myself. And your well-being and happiness are everything to me.” If…Beatrix’s heart leaped into her throat. She began to speak, but Christopher nudged his knuckles beneath her chin, gently closing her mouth. “And regardless of what fascinating ideas your family may have about the marital relationship,” he continued, “I have a traditional view. The husband is master of the household.” “Oh, absolutely,” Beatrix said, a bit too quickly. “That’s what my family believes, too.” His eyes narrowed skeptically. Perhaps that had been taking it a bit far. Hoping to distract him, Beatrix nuzzled her cheek into his hand. “Could I keep my animals?” “Of course.” His voice softened. “I would never deny something so important to you. Although I can’t help but ask…is the hedgehog negotiable?” “Medusa? Oh, no, she couldn’t survive on her own. She was abandoned by her mother as kit, and I’ve taken care of her ever since. I suppose I could try to find a new home for her, but for some reason people don’t take readily to the idea of pet hedgehogs.” “How odd of them,” Christopher said. “Very well, Medusa stays.” “Are you proposing to me?” Beatrix asked hopefully. “No.” Closing his eyes, Christopher let out a short sigh. “But I’m considering it against all better judgment.

And regardless of what fascinating ideas your family may have about the marital relationship,” he continued, “I have a traditional view. The husband is master of the household.” “Oh, absolutely,” Beatrix said, a bit too quickly. “That’s what my family believes, too.” His eyes narrowed skeptically. Perhaps that had been taking it a bit far.

Nathan Myrhvold had been a protégé of the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking before forming a software company in Berkeley, California, with some fellow Princeton University Ph.D’s. What drew Myrhvold, or any physicist, to programming? The outer reaches of science increasingly relied on computers; the days of a genius scribbling formulas on the back of an envelope had almost vanished. Physicists usually saw programming as a means to an end. Myrhvold found that his attachment to software superseded his fascination with physical science. His company gained wide notice when he and his friends wrote a faster, smaller clone of IBM’s TopView graphics program. IBM briefly considered making TopView the software interface—the piece seen by customers—for PCs. Trying to keep pace with IBM, Gates wanted a clone of TopView, so he bought Myrhvold’s company. Since

The general public is bewildered and fascinated by Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder. Through books, television and movies, a distorted view of MPD/DID is often presented. While it may make for good entertainment, it fails to truly present the depth and intensity of the inherent trauma. Outside the ordinary day-to-day life experience of most people, it is hard to understand.

Amelia went to the parlor windows and watched the two distant figures proceed through the orchard toward the forest. The apple trees, frosted with light green buds and white blossoms, soon conspired to hide the pair from view. She puzzled over the way Beatrix had behaved with the stern-faced soldier, pecking and chirping at him, almost as if she were trying to remind him of something he’d forgotten. Cam joined her at the window, standing behind her. She leaned back against him, taking comfort in her husband’s steady, strong presence. One of his hands glided along her front. She shivered in pleasure at the casual sensuality of his touch. “Poor man,” Amelia murmured, thinking of Phelan’s haunting eyes. “I didn’t recognize him at first. I wonder if he knows how much he has changed?” Cam’s lips played lightly at her temple as he replied. “I suspect he is realizing it now that he’s home.” “He was very charming before. Now he seems so austere. And the way he stares sometimes, as if he’s looking right through one…” “He’s spent two years burying his friends,” Cam replied quietly. “And he’s taken part in the kind of close combat that makes a man as hard as nails.” He paused reflectively. “Some of it you can’t leave behind. The faces of the men you kill stay with you forever.” Knowing that he was remembering a particular episode of his own past, Amelia turned and hugged herself close to him. “The Rom don’t believe in war,” Cam said against her hair. “Conflict, arguing, fighting, yes. But not in taking the life of a man with whom one has no personal grievance. Which is one of many reasons why I would not make a good soldier.” “But for those same reasons, you make a very good husband.” Cam’s arms tightened around her, and he whispered something in Romany. Although she didn’t understand the words, the rough-soft sound of them caused her nerves to tingle. Amelia nestled closer. With her cheek against his chest, she reflected aloud, “It’s obvious that Beatrix is fascinated by Captain Phelan.” “She’s always been drawn to wounded creatures.” “The wounded ones are often the most dangerous.” His hand moved in a soothing stroke along her spine. “We’ll keep a close watch on her, monisha.

I have a conflicted view on beer styles. As historical artifacts, they're endlessly fascinating to study. And I think that they generally represent confluences -- and compromises -- of technology, agriculture, cuisine, and geology that make the most of what a region has to offer. That means existing styles are usually quite wonderful to drink, and I'm all for that.

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.3 I am fascinated by this research by Dweck because it

First —we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here— the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: 'capitalism with Asian values' (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts. What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple progressivism, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.

Now, as a non-Amish person in the twentieth century who is not a part of the aging and thus noncoveted seventy-five-plus marketing demographic that views things like cell phones and iPads with that quaint, old-people mixture of astonishment, fascination, confusion, and abject fear, I spend as much time pawing my cell phone as members of the postpubescent marketing demographic spend pawing each other and themselves.