Feature Wall Quotes

In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

Hark ye yet again,--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.

By the time he painted Estefania's features, her appearance had already been hag-ridden and struck by sheer madness and delusion. But he still did what so many other male painters did before him; he created an idol.

Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There was’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool–the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild–like life in the raw.

The studio also featured a large wall calendar with cryptic abbreviations, presumably reminders. Also doodles of gears, sprockets, and malformed genitalia, because artists were artists.

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror. "O

I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it—if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time. Then it is, too, a kind of grownness by which I see three squares of light on my wall, the shadow of a tree trembling in two of them, and hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom or horrible align- ment, but simply observe the signs—light and song—for what they are—light and song. And, knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.

The human resources cabin is mostly bare. A large poster on the wall features a cat with a peg leg paw. "There is no Purr in Pirate!" reads the caption.

In one hallway, the floor gleaming parquet and the ceiling festooned with golden cherubs, there was a boy in a grumpy cat mask and biker boots, not involved in any sexual activity, legs crossed and leaning against the wall. As a bevy of faeries passed the boy, giggling and groping, the boy scooted away. Alec remembered being younger, and how overwhelming large groups of people had seemed. He came over and leaned against the wall beside the boy. He saw the boy texting, PARTIES WERE INVENTED TO ANNOY ME. THEY FEATURE MY LEAST FAVORITE THING: PEOPLE, ALL INTENT ON MY LEAST FAVORITE ACTIVITY: SOCIAL INTERACTION. “I don’t really like parties either,” Alec said sympathetically. “No hablo italiano,” the boy mumbled without looking up. “Er,” said Alec. “This conversation is happening in English.” “No hablo ingles,” he said without missing a beat. “Oh, come on. Really?” “Worth a shot,” said the boy. Alec considered going away. The boy wrote another text to a contact he had saved as RF. Alec could not help but notice that the conversation was entirely one-sided, the boy sending text after text with no response. The last text read VENICE SMELLS LIKE A TOILET. AS A NEW YORKER, I DO NOT SAY THIS LIGHTLY. The weird coincidence emboldened Alec to try again. “I get shy when there are strangers too,” Alec told the kid. “I’m not shy,” the boy sneered. “I just hate everyone around me and everything that is happening.” “Well.” Alec shrugged. “Those feel like similar things sometimes.” The boy lifted his curly head, pushing the grumpy cat mask off his face, and froze. Alec froze too, at the twin shock of fangs and familiarity. This was a vampire, and Alec knew him. “Raphael?” he asked. “Raphael Santiago?” He wondered what the second-in-command of the New York clan was doing here. Downworlders might be flooding in from all over the world, but Raphael had never struck Alec as a party animal. Of course, he was not exactly coming off as a party animal now. “Oh no, it’s you,” said Raphael. “The twelve-year-old idiot.” Alec was not keen on vampires. They were, after all, people who had died. Alec had seen too much death to want reminders of it. He understood that they were immortal, but there was no need to show off about it. “We just fought a war together. I was with you in the graveyard when Simon came back as a vampire. You’ve seen me multiple times since I was twelve.” “The thought of you at twelve haunts me,” Raphael said darkly. “Okay,” Alec said, humoring him. “So have you seen a guy called Mori Shu anywhere around here?” “I am trying not to make eye contact with anyone here,” said Raphael. “And I’m not a snitch for Shadowhunters. Or a fan of talking to people, of any kind, in any place.” Alec rolled his eyes.

At street corners, where walls join, I thought I could see some familiar features, like outlines of human faces, the shadows of cheekbones and eyebrows. They are really there, caught in stone for all time, along with the marks left by earthquakes, winters and scourges wrought by men.

The human body is a funny machine. When you want to move something - say, your arm - the brain actually sends two signals at the same time: "More power!" and "Less power!" The operating system that runs the body automatically holds some power back to avoid overexerting and tearing itself apart. Not all machines have that built - in safety feature. You can point a car at a wall, slam the accelerator to the floor, and the car will crush itself against the wall until the engine is destroyed or runs out of gas. Martial arts use every scrap of strength the body has at its disposal. In martial arts training, you punch and shout at the same time. Your "Shout louder!" command helps to override the "Less power!" command. With practice, you can throttle the amount of power your body holds back. In essence, you're learning to channel the body's power to destroy itself.

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?’ I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?

A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited. Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten." Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth. Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism. Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability. No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")

A KING WHO PLACED MIRRORS IN HIS PALACE There lived a king; his comeliness was such The world could not acclaim his charm too much. The world's wealth seemed a portion of his grace; It was a miracle to view his face. If he had rivals,then I know of none; The earth resounded with this paragon. When riding through his streets he did not fail To hide his features with a scarlet veil. Whoever scanned the veil would lose his head; Whoever spoke his name was left for dead, The tongue ripped from his mouth; whoever thrilled With passion for this king was quickly killed. A thousand for his love expired each day, And those who saw his face, in blank dismay Would rave and grieve and mourn their lives away- To die for love of that bewitching sight Was worth a hundred lives without his light. None could survive his absence patiently, None could endure this king's proximity- How strange it was that man could neither brook The presence nor the absence of his look! Since few could bear his sight, they were content To hear the king in sober argument, But while they listened they endure such pain As made them long to see their king again. The king commanded mirrors to be placed About the palace walls, and when he faced Their polished surfaces his image shone With mitigated splendour to the throne. If you would glimpse the beauty we revere Look in your heart-its image will appear. Make of your heart a looking-glass and see Reflected there the Friend's nobility; Your sovereign's glory will illuminate The palace where he reigns in proper state. Search for this king within your heart; His soul Reveals itself in atoms of the Whole. The multitude of forms that masquerade Throughout the world spring from the Simorgh's shade. If you catch sight of His magnificence It is His shadow that beguiles your glance; The Simorgh's shadow and Himself are one; Seek them together, twinned in unison. But you are lost in vague uncertainty... Pass beyond shadows to Reality. How can you reach the Simorgh's splendid court? First find its gateway, and the sun, long-sought, Erupts through clouds; when victory is won, Your sight knows nothing but the blinding sun.

Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.

After death, you go on a very long way, that is going up. As you go, little by little, your features change. Your nose and ears retract in the flesh of your face like the little legs of a shellfish. Your fingers retract in your palm, your hands rebsorb in your shoulders. The same, your feet retract to your hips and you don’t walk anymore, you just float along a red brick wall, on which you leave your shadow like a streched disk. You are so round, that you become translucent and begin to see on all sides at once. While we are alive, we see through a postal box, but after death, we see around, with all our skin. Floating and looking at the the brick wall closer and closer, we get to a round place. There, in the middle, there is a cell, for we are in a mother’s womb. We enter the cell, and as the stages of our birth take place, we can see through the eyes of all beings, of the flea, of the rabbit, of the cat, the dog, the monkey, the man.. and with a little bit of luck, we can see through the eyes of the wonderful beings that follow the human being. A dead man is now looking at you through my eyes.

...while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House - Luda kuća. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serbs' military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžić performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.

And that’s how Canning and I came to have a big framed photo on our living room wall featuring the entire Toronto team dressed in very loud gingham. I swear the color rendered a little bolder in print than it looks in real life, because this photo is kind of blinding. But Jamie snickers whenever I suggest that.

You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.

No matter what she did, she could never escape being her father’s greatest mistake. A mistake carved in her features, painted on her skin, knitted in her hair. She would never be good enough or white enough. For him. For the kids at school. For the women in the photos plastered on her closet walls. She hated them.

a square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly bastioned and turreted with dried camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a feature that is exceedingly festive and picturesque, especially if one is careful to remember to stick in a cat wherever, about the premises, there is room for a cat to sit.

The house was bay-windowed, clinging to its original features the way a pensioner clung to her handbag on pension day. The neighbours had put up a pierced cement wall,

Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.

off. Next I moved on to scrutinize the aged plaster walls near the desk. Beside a museum calendar featuring old woodblock prints was a taped-up paper that looked like a printed reproduction of an

Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen, rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend.

I am indeed Dr. Templeman. One of them, anyway.” The amusement fades from his face and he coughs and begins to turn away. I catch his sleeve to try to see how much of Josh is in his features. He stills obediently, but his eyes flick to Josh, who is tense as a brick wall behind me. “Sorry, yes. Josh is better looking.” There’s a pause before both brothers laugh. Patrick isn’t remotely offended and Josh’s arm relaxes.

Tears shone in Lucien’s remaining eye as he raised his hands and removed the fox mask. The brutally scarred face beneath was still handsome—his features sharp and elegant. But my host was looking at Tamlin now, who slowly faced my dead body. Tamlin’s still-masked face twisted into something truly lupine as he raised his eyes to the queen and snarled. Fangs lengthened. Amarantha backed away—away from my corpse. She only whispered “Please” before golden light exploded. The queen was blasted back, thrown against the far wall, and Tamlin let out a roar that shook the mountain as he launched himself at her. He shifted into his beast form faster than I could see—fur and claws and pound upon pound of lethal muscle. She had no sooner hit the wall than he gripped her by the neck, and the stones cracked as he shoved her against it with a clawed paw. She thrashed but could do nothing against the brutal onslaught of Tamlin’s beast. Blood ran down his furred arm from where she scratched. The Attor and the guards rushed for the queen, but several faeries and High Fae, their masks clattering to the ground, jumped into their path, tackling them. Amarantha screeched, kicking at Tamlin, lashing at him with her dark magic, but a wall of gold encompassed his fur like a second skin. She couldn’t touch him. “Tam!” Lucien cried over the chaos. A sword hurtled through the air, a shooting star of steel. Tamlin caught it in a massive paw. Amarantha’s scream was cut short as he drove the sword through her head and into the stone beneath. And then closed his powerful jaws around her throat—and ripped it out.

German perspective of D Day was simple: shortly before the Normandy landings, he had visited several locations on the Atlantic Wall and interviewed a number of the troops there with a view to writing a feature for ‘Die Wehrmacht’ magazine. He

The more conscious I was of all the good and of all this "beautiful and lofty," the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it. But the main feature was that this was all in me not as if by chance, but as if it had to be so. As if it were my most normal condition and in no way a sickness or a blight, so that finally I lost any wish to struggle against this blight. I ended up almost believing (and maybe indeed believing) that this perhaps was my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, how much torment I endured in this struggle! I did not believe that such things happened to others, and therefore kept it to myself all my life as a secret. I was ashamed (maybe I am ashamed even now); it reached the point with me where I would feel some secret, abnormal, mean little pleasure in returning to my corner on some nasty Petersburg night and being highly conscious of having once again done a nasty thing that day, and again that what had been done could in no way be undone, and I would gnaw, gnaw at myself with my teeth, inwardly, secretly, tear and suck at myself until the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness, and finally-into a decided, serious pleasure! Yes, a pleasure, a pleasure! I stand upon it. The reason I've begun to speak is that I keep wanting to find out for certain: do other people have such pleasures? I'll explain it to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one's own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and enough faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.

It had a strange resemblance to Kafka's novel,The Trial- that dream-like allegory of a man who,having received a mysterious convocation to attend his 'trial",strives and struggles in vain to find out where the trial would be held and what it would be about; wherever he inquires he receives non - commital,elusive replies,as if everybody has joined in a secret conspiracy:the closer he gets to his aim,the farther it recedes,like the transparent walls of a dream:and the story ends abruptly,as it began,in tormenting suspense.The High Court which Kafka's hero is unable to find is his own conscience:but what was the symbolic meaning of all these nut-cracker-faced,nail-biting,pimpled,slimy features,spinning their spider webs of intrigue and sabotage in the bureaux of the French Administration?Perhaps I was really guilty,I and my like:perhaps our guilt was the past,the guilt of having forseen the catastrophe and yet failed to open the eyes of the blind.But if we were guilty-who were they to sit in judgement over us?

He’d found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline . . . And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.

Homo sapiens is not going to be exterminated by a robot revolt. Rather, Homo sapiens is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process, until our descendants will look back and realise that they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible, built the Great Wall of China and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s antics. This will not happen in a day, or a year. Indeed, it is already happening right now, through innumerable mundane actions. Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.

Emily Zanotti is a Republican political strategist and author. She is a regular contributor to The American Spectator and a featured opinion columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared across the political spectrum, in National Review, The Daily Caller, Slate, and elsewhere.

delicate masks hiding some of their features better than others. Multiple luminium chandeliers sparkled from the golden ceiling, a string orchestra played from a balcony high above their heads, and at their ankles swirled a layer of misted cloud — kept in place by elemental magic, no doubt, as were the floating specks of light dotting the air, like starbursts hovering among the dancing couples. On the far side, the glass wall had been opened to a reveal a balcony beyond which the Serin lay, its surface dusted with enough luminium candles to make it sparkle brighter than the moonlight shining down on the city.

He was leaning against the ledge of an open lattice, but not looking out: his face was turned to the interior gloom. The fire had smouldered to ashes; the room was filled with the damp, mild air of the cloudy evening; and so still, that not only the murmur of the beck down Gimmerton was distinguishable, but its ripples and its gurgling over the pebbles, or through the large stones which it could not cover. I uttered an ejaculation of discontent at seeing the dismal grate, and commenced shutting the casements, one after another, till I came to his. 'Must I close this?' I asked, in order to rouse him; for he would not stir. The light flashed on his features as I spoke. Oh, Mr. Lockwood, I cannot express what a terrible start I got by the momentary view! Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness! It appeared to me, not Mr. Heathcliff, but a goblin; and, in my terror, I let the candle bend towards the wall, and it left me in darkness.

One of its most distinctive features was the ninety-six meters high and twelve thousand tons heavy sandstone dome that stood the test of time and wars until it came down during the bombing of Saxony by Anglo-American allied forces during the Second World War. Only the altar, a relief description of Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the chancel behind it survived. The church then lay dormant for more than forty-five years before it was restored to its former glory as Communist rule enveloped Germany. One of the reasons for the delay was the tensions that ensued before the demolition of the Berlin Wall that divided East and West Germany.

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

You think a few features scattered on your face make you plain? I am ugly to the core. All England knows it. And after reading through my papers, you must know it. You sifted through a mountain of my misdeeds. Of course you’d build a wall around your heart. You’re a clever girl. How could you love this? How could anyone?” ~Ransom

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from beind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

But here, window boxes overflowed with peppermint, chervil, and geraniums of pink, lilac, and white, while ivy crept cheerfully up the walls of stone buildings that looked as if they’d been here since long before the French Revolution. Clothes dried on lines strung across wooden balconies, and even the church overlooking the small town seemed to glow, the lights inside illuminating the colorful windows. The town square was anchored by a stone fountain featuring a bearded man with a cross in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. Water gurgled cheerfully around the statue’s feet. This was a town whose heart hadn’t yet been trampled, and for a few seconds, Eva didn’t know what to make of it.

To impress my Ph.D. students with just how bizarre the quantum theory is, I sometimes ask them to calculate the probability that their atoms will suddenly dissolve and reappear on the other side of a brick wall. Such a teleportation event is impossible under Newtonian physics but is actually allowed under quantum mechanics. The answer, however, is that one would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for this to occur. (If you used a computer to graph the Schrödinger wave of your own body, you would find that it very much resembles all the features of your body, except that the graph would be a bit fuzzy, with some of your waves oozing out in all directions. Some of your waves would extend even as far as the distant stars. So there is a very tiny probability that one day you might wake up on a distant planet.)

Traditionally siloed technical teams interact through complex ticketing systems and ritualistic request procedures, which may require director-level intervention. A team taking a more DevOps approach talks about the product throughout its lifecycle, discussing requirements, features, schedules, resources, and whatever else might come up. The focus is on the product, not building fiefdoms and amassing political power.

Yes, for every man there exist certain things which, instantly that they are said, seem to touch him more closely, more intimately, than anything has done before. Nor is it an uncommon occurrence that in the most unexpected fashion, and in the most retired of retreats, one will suddenly come face to face with a man whose burning periods will lead one to forget oneself and the tracklessness of the route and the discomfort of one's nightly halting-places, and the futility of crazes and the falseness of tricks by which one human being deceives another. And at once there will become engraven upon one's memory—vividly, and for all time—the evening thus spent. And of that evening one's remembrance will hold true, both as to who was present, and where each such person sat, and what he or she was wearing, and what the walls and the stove and other trifling features of the room looked like.

Similarly, at Microsoft, many employees enjoy their own private offices, yet they come with sliding doors, movable walls, and other features that allow occupants to decide when they want to collaborate and when they need private time to think. These kinds of diverse workspaces benefit introverts as well as extroverts, the systems design researcher Matt Davis told me, because they offer more spaces to retreat to than traditional open-plan offices.

In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (population 800), there’s a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once-bustling steel town of Bethlehem. The proprietors have adorned the walls with photographs of other local things that are no more. There’s one of the East Bangor band, a group of about twenty men and boys, in uniform, in front of a bandstand draped with bunting. There’s also one of the Kaysers, a local baseball club, on the day of an exhibition ballgame against the Philadelphia Athletics. These were Connie Mack’s A’s, which team in those early 1930s featured Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove. How did a village of under a thousand people manage to have its own band? How did a cluster of slate-belt villages field a regular baseball club, apparently good enough to stay on the same field for nine innings with the Philadelphia Athletics? What

The infirmary door slid up. Maarev poked his head out. He glanced up and down the hallway, inspected the walls, then focused on Dagon and Eliana, still standing in each other’s arms. He arched a brow. “Just thought I’d check to see if Eliana was out here punching holes in the walls. We have a wager going.” She offered him a wry smile. “No. Dagon calmed me down.” A twinkle of amusement entered the warrior’s eyes as he stepped out. “So I see. With a hug, apparently.” Liden joined them in the hallway. A boyish grin lit his rugged features as he held out his arms. “Need any more calming down?” She laughed . . . even as a low growl of irritation rumbled up from Dagon’s throat. “No, thank you.” Reluctantly stepping back, she took Dagon’s hand and twined her fingers through his. “We have a saying on Earth: Go big or go home.” She tossed Dagon—the tallest man present—a wink. “I’m going big.” He grinned.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms,” he wrote, “so that one can be alone if one wishes to.” The central room featured a massive stone hearth with trophy heads gazing down from the walls and buffalo robes covering the couches. His own chamber held a rubber tub for bathing and rough shelves for his favorite books—“Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell”—along with a growing assortment of volumes sent from New York by his devoted sister.

Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation --- by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. "He'll say, 'Larry, there's a hundred volts coming out of the wall, isn't there?' I'll go measure it, and yeah, sure --- he can hear the difference." Shakey's innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young's feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box's angular red wooden housing to Young's extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out. Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young's trademark ax--Old Black, a '53 Gold Top Les Paul some knot-head daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black's features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and Firebird picking so sensitive you can talk through it. It's a demonic instrument. "Old black doesn't sound like any other guitar," said Cragg, shaking his head. For Cragg, Old Black is a nightmare. Young won't permit the ancient frets to be changed, likes his strings old and used, and the Bigsby causes the guitar to go out of tune constantly. "At Sound check, everything will work great. Neil picks up the guitar, and for some reason that's when things go wrong.

THE ANTHEM OF HOPE Tiny footprints in mud, metal scraps among thistles Child who ambles barefooted through humanity’s war An Elderflower in mud, landmines hidden in bristles Blood clings to your feet, your wee hands stiff and sore You who walk among trenches, midst our filth and our gore Box of crayons in hand, your tears tumble like crystals Gentle, scared little boy, at the heel of Hope Valley, The grassy heel of Hope Valley. And the bombs fall-fall-fall Down the slopes of Hope Valley Bayonets cut-cut-cut Through the ranks of Hope Valley Napalm clouds burn-burn-burn All who fight in Hope Valley, All who fall in Hope Valley. Bullets fly past your shoulder, fireflies light the sky Child who digs through the trenches for his long sleeping father You plant a kiss on his forehead, and you whisper goodbye Vain corpses, brave soldiers, offered as cannon fodder Nothing is left but a wall; near its pallor you gather Crayon ready, you draw: the memory of a lie Kind, sad little boy, sketching your dream of Hope Valley Your little dream of Hope Valley. Missiles fly-fly-fly Over the fields of Hope Valley Carabines shoot-shoot-shoot The brave souls of Hope Valley And the tanks shell-shell-shell Those who toiled for Hope Valley, Those who died for Hope Valley. In the light of gunfire, the little child draws the valley Every trench is a creek; every bloodstain a flower No battlefield, but a garden with large fields ripe with barley Ideations of peace in his dark, final hour And so the child drew his future, on the wall of that tower Memories of times past; your tiny village lush alley Great, brave little boy, the future hope of Hope Valley The only hope of Hope Valley. And the grass grows-grows-grows On the knolls of Hope Valley Daffodils bloom-bloom-bloom Across the hills of Hope Valley The midday sun shines-shines-shines On the folk of Hope Valley On the dead of Hope Valley From his Aerodyne fleet The soldier faces the carnage Uttering words to the fallen He commends their great courage Across a wrecked, tower wall A child’s hand limns the valley And this drawing speaks volumes Words of hope, not of bally He wipes his tears and marvels The miracle of Hope Valley The only miracle of Hope Valley And the grass grows-grows-grows Midst all the dead of Hope Valley Daffodils bloom-bloom-bloom For all the dead of Hope Valley The evening sun sets-sets-sets On the miracle of Hope Valley The only miracle of Hope Valley (lyrics to "the Anthem of Hope", a fictional song featured in Louise Blackwick's Neon Science-Fiction novel "5 Stars".

He was beautiful. Whatever else he was, Sage was by far the most magnetic man I had ever seen. I had felt it in my dreams, and it was even more true in real life. I welcomed the chance to study him without his knowledge. He glanced up, and I quickly closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Had he seen me? The scratching stopped. He was looking at me, I knew it. I held my breath and willed my eyes not to pop open and see if he was staring. Finally the scratching started up again. I forced myself to slowly count to ten before I opened my eyelids the tiniest bit and peeked through my lashes. Good-he wasn’t looking at me. I opened my eyes a little wider. What was he doing? Moving only my eyes, I glanced down at the dirt floor in front of him… …and saw a picture of me, fast asleep. It was incredible. I could see his tools laid out beside the picture: rocks in several sizes and shapes, a couple of twigs…the most rudimentary materials, and yet what he was etching into the floor wouldn’t look out of place on an art gallery wall. It was beautiful…far more beautiful than I thought I actually looked in my sleep. Is that how he saw me? Sage lifted his head again, and I shut my eyes. I imagined him studying me, taking careful note of my features and filtering them through his own senses. My heartbeat quickened, and it took all my willpower to remain still. “You can keep pretending to be asleep if you’d like, but I don’t see a career for you as an actress,” he teased. My eyes sprang open. Sage’s head was again bent over his etching, but a grin played on his face as he worked. “You knew?” I asked, mortified. Sage put a finger to his lips, glancing toward Ben. “About two minutes before you woke up, I knew,” he whispered. “Your breathing hanged.” He bent back over the drawing, then impishly asked, “Pleasant dreams?” My heart stopped, and I felt myself blush bright crimson as I remembered our encounter in the bottom of the rowboat. I sent a quick prayer to whoever or whatever might be listening that I hadn’t re-enacted any of it in my sleep, then said as nonchalantly as possible, “I don’t know, I can’t remember what I dreamed about. Why?” He swapped out the rock in his hand for one with a thinner edge and worked for another moment. “No reason…just heard my name.” I hoped the dim moonlight shadowed the worst of my blush. “Your name,” I reiterated. “That’s…interesting. They say dreams sort out things that happen when we’re awake.” “Hmm. Did you sort anything out?” he asked. “Like I said, I can’t remember.” I knew he didn’t believe me. Time to change the subject. I nodded to the etching. “Can I come look?

Human history is the ancient story of the umbilical conflict between a lone individual versus a cabalistic society. A love-hate relationship defines our personal history with society, where the suppression of individuality for the sake of the collective good battles the notion that the purpose of society is to enable each person to flourish. A conspicuous feature of cultural development involves societies teaching children the sublimation of unacceptable impulses or idealizations, consciously to transform their inappropriate instinctual impulses into socially acceptable actions or behavior. The paradox rest in the concept that in order for any person to flourish they must preserve the spiritual texture of themselves, a process that requires the individual to resist societal restraint, push off against the community, and reject the walls of traditionalism that seek to pen us in. The climatic defining event in a person’s life represents the liberation of the self from crippling conformism, staunchly rebuffing capitulating to the whimsy of the super ego of society.

Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power. The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds. The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue. A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold. A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet. A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears. A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns. Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond. Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.

Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

He undid the lock and pulled open the cover to reveal a large stack of envelopes, each one labeled with a different name: Franklin Hobart, Brian Yancey, Everett Singer, Larry Steczynski…it was this last one he grabbed and pulled open, emptying its contents into his wallet and pockets. “Larry Steczynski?” I asked incredulously. Sage smiled. “You don’t think it suits me?” “Oh, I think you suits you perfectly. How many aliases do you have?” “I’m a bit of a collector.” I placed a hand on his wrist, stopping him as he transferred something into his wallet. “Does Larry Steczynski carry a black AmEx?” “He might.” “My mom doesn’t even carry a black AmEx.” “Apparently your mom doesn’t move in the same circles as Larry Steczynski.” “Sage,” Ben called from across the room. He had knelt down to gaze closely at a sculpted figurine that sat on an end table, and his voice broke with awe. “This...this is a real Michelangelo, isn’t it?” “Yeah, yeah it is.” “But it’s a Michelangelo!” “Yep.” “And that painting,” Ben said, nodding to a piece on the wall featuring a sketch of what looked like a somewhat cherubic version of Sage himself. “That’s a real Rubens?” “It is.” “It looks like you.” “Strong genetics in the family line,” Sage explained.

They were two-thirds of the way up when he heard a woman’s voice right behind him. “Pretty. So very pretty.” He turned to see the lady patting Deedee’s head, almost petting her like an animal at the zoo. The little girl’s face was filled with horror. “Such a pretty child,” the woman said. “I could just eat you up. Like a turkey dinner. Yes. So sweet.” Mark faced front again, repulsed. There was a bulging feeling in his chest, as if something were trying to escape. He’d just taken another step when a man reached out and poked his shoulder with a finger. “Good, strong young boy, you are,” the stranger said. “I bet your mama’s proud, eh?” Mark ignored him, went up another step. This time people on either side of him put their hands on his arm—not in a threatening way, just a touch. Another step. A woman moved away from the wall and threw her arms around his neck, squeezed him in a quick and fierce hug. Then she released him and stepped back into her position to the side. A wicked smile distorted her features. Revulsion filled Mark. He couldn’t take another minute in that house. He threw caution to the wind and reached behind him, grabbed Deedee’s hand, then started moving faster up the steps. He could hear Alec’s feet pounding as he brought up the rear.

Brightly and merrily swaying, like an April shower, came the young lady. Perhaps if she had been sad and conscience stricken, like certain dames of old who left the site of their illicit love as woe-begone as the passing moment that never returns; if the lady had approached in full cognizance of her frailty, ready to forego a man's respectful handkisses of greeting, and trembling in shame at the tryst exposed in broad daylight, like Risoulette, sixty-six times, whenever having misbehaved, she hastened back home teary-eyed to her Captain; or if a lifelong memory's untearable veil had floated over her fine features, like the otherworldly wimple of a nun . . . Then Pistoli would have stood aside, closed his eyes, swallowed the bitter pill, and come next winter, might have scrawled on the wall something about women's unpredictability. Then he would have glimpsed ghostly, skeletal pelvic bones reflected in his wine goblet, and strands of female hair, once wrapped around the executioner's wrist, hanging from his rafters; and would have heard wails and cackles emanating from the cellar's musty wine casks, but eventually Pistoli would have forgiven this fading memory, simply because women are related to the sea and the moon, and that is why at times they know not what they do.

He hoped and feared,' continued Solon, in a low. mournful voice; 'but at times he was very miserable, because he did not think it possible that so much happiness was reserved for him as the love of this beautiful, innocent girl. At night, when he was in bed, and all the world was dreaming, he lay awake looking up at the old books against the walls, thinking how he could bring about the charming of her heart. One night, when he was thinking of this, he suddenly found himself in a beautiful country, where the light did not come from sun or moon or stars, but floated round and over and in everything like the atmosphere. On all sides he heard mysterious melodies sung by strangely musical voices. None of the features of the landscape was definite; yet when he looked on the vague harmonies of colour that melted one into another before his sight he was filled with a sense of inexplicable beauty. On every side of him fluttered radiant bodies, which darted to and fro through the illuminated space. They were not birds, yet they flew like birds; and as each one crossed the path of his vision he felt a strange delight flash through his brain, and straightaway an interior voice seemed to sing beneath the vaulted dome of his temples a verse containing some beautiful thought. Little fairies were all this time dancing and fluttering around him, perching on his head, on his shoulders, or balancing themselves on his fingertips. 'Where am I?' he asked. 'Ah, Solon?' he heard them whisper, in tones that sounded like the distant tinkling of silver bells, "this land is nameless; but those who tread its soil, and breathe its air, and gaze on its floating sparks of light, are poets forevermore.' Having said this, they vanished, and with them the beautiful indefinite land, and the flashing lights, and the illumined air; and the hunchback found himself again in bed, with the moonlight quivering on the floor, and the dusty books on their shelves, grim and mouldy as ever.' ("The Wondersmith")

When it came to listening to the folks who used Twitter, we put our money where our mouths were. Watching for patterns of use across the system, we built features based on those patterns. Larry Wall, who created the programming language Perl, once said, “When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks; they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.” Hashtags, @replies, and retweets emerged in just that way.

In the sketch, I was sitting on the garden wall, my face in profile as I stared into the distance. My eyes were unfocused. A cigarette burned, forgotten, between my fingers. Raf drew me as I was, with round curves, folds in my stomach, and chubby thighs—but through his eyes I was beautiful. Because those features were just small parts of the picture. My face, which undoubtedly was blotchy from crying that night, was clear and angled. Even my messy bun was more of a purposeful updo, with soft tendrils that framed my face. The shirt that I'd been wearing that I'd worried was too tight instead hugged my curves purposefully and exposed a little cleavage. Or at least, that's how Raf had drawn it.

Regardless, his crankiness had hit a level not previously documented in the history of the universe. That was saying something, considering I’d grown up with three older sisters who all had periods at the same time. Because of them, most things—most people—didn’t bother me. I knew what it was like to be bullied, and Aiden never crossed the line into being unnecessarily mean. He was just a jackass sometimes. He was lucky I had a tiny, itty, bitty crush on him; otherwise, he would have gotten the shank years ago. Then again, just about everyone with eyes who happened to also like men, had some kind of a thing for Aiden Graves. When he raised his eyebrows and looked at me from beneath those curly black eyelashes, flashing me rich-brown eyes set deep into a face that I’d only seen smile in the presence of dogs, I swallowed and shook my head slowly as I gritted my teeth and took him in. The size of a small building, he should have had these big, uneven features that made him look like a caveman, but of course he didn’t. Apparently, he liked to defy every stereotype he’d ever been assigned in his life. He was smart, fast, coordinated, and—as far as I knew—had never seen a game of hockey. He had only said ‘eh’ in front of me twice, and he didn’t consume animal protein. The man didn’t eat bacon. He was the last person I would ever consider polite, and he never apologized. Ever. Basically, he was an anomaly; a Canadian football-playing, plant-based lifestyle—he didn’t like calling himself a vegan—anomaly that was strangely proportional all over and so handsome I might have thanked God for giving me eyes on a couple of occasions.

He looked her face over, loving the strong features and the short hair and the piercing forest green eyes. “I never would have asked you, you know…to blow everything you have here away for me.” “That’s only one of the reasons I love you.” “Will you tell me the others later?” “Maybe.” She slipped her hand between his legs, shocking the shit out of him and making him gasp. “Might show you, too.” He covered her mouth with his and pushed his tongue into her as he backed her up against the wall. He didn’t care if Rhage waited on the front lawn for an extra— His phone went off. And kept ringing. V lifted his head and looked through the window by the front door. Rhage was on the front lawn, phone to his ear, staring back. The brother made a show of checking his watch, then flashing his middle finger at V. Vishous pounded a fist into the Sheetrock and stepped off from Jane. “I’m coming back at the end of the night. Be naked.” “Wouldn’t you rather undress me?” “No, because I’d shred that shirt, and I want you sleeping in it every night until you’re in my bed with me. Be. Naked.” “We’ll see.” His whole body throbbed at the disobedience. And she knew it, her stare level and erotic. “God, I love you,” he said. “I know. Now run along and kill something. I’ll be waiting for you.” He smiled at her. “Couldn’t love you more if I tried.” “Ditto.” He kissed her and dematerialized out front to Rhage’s side, making sure some mhis was in place. Oh, great. It was raining. Man, he’d so much rather be cozied up with Jane than out with his brother, and he couldn’t help but shoot a short-stack glare at Rhage. “Like another five minutes would kill you?” “Please. You start down that road with your female and I’ll be here until summer.” -Vishous, Jane, & Rhage

A meltdown is when the core components (fuel, cladding, control rods etc.) of a reactor get so hot that they melt together and become a kind of radioactive magma. This can burn down through a containment vessel and potentially through the concrete foundations of the reactor building. If the molten core were to breach all containment and burn down to the water table in the earth below, there was a chance of triggering a colossal steam explosion, with results much the same as an explosion in the pressure suppression pool. Interestingly, modern Russian reactors have a safety feature designed specifically to deal with this eventuality: a solid pool of metallic alloy lying beneath the reactor. If a melting core breaches its containment vessel, the pool catches it and liquefies, creating currents that swirl the molten core against water-cooled steel walls to prevent it from burning through the foundations.

It is especially in the faubourgs, we must insist, that the Parisian race appears. This is where the thoroughbred is; this is where the true features of the breed are to be found; this is where the people work and suffer, and this suffering and work are the two faces of the man. The place is teeming with heaps of unknown beings, the strangest specimens from the stevedore of La Rapée to the knacker of Montfaucon. Fex Urbis, cries Cicero; mob, adds Burke, indignant. Riffraff, mob, rabble- those words are easily said. But so be it. What does it matter? What do I care if they go about barefoot? Too bad if they can't read. Are you going to abandon them for that? Are you going to turn their distress into a curse? Can't the light penetrate the teeming masses? Let's get back to that cry: Let there be light! And let's stick to it! Light! Light! Who knows if these opaque walls won't become transparent? Aren't revolutions transfigurations? Off you go, philosophers- teach, enlighten, fire up, think out loud, speak out loud, go on joyful romps in broad daylight, fraternize in public places, bring glad tidings, spray alphabets lavishly all over the place, proclaim rights, since the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasm, rip green branches off the oaks. Whip up ideas into a whirlwind. The hordes can be made sublime. Let's learn how to use this vast blaze of principles and virtues that crackles and flames out and occasionally sputters. These bare feet, these bare arms, these rags, this ignorance, this abjectness, this darkness, can be put to work in the conquest of the ideal. Look through the people and you will see truth. This vile sand that you trample beneath your feet, throw it in the furnace, and if it melts there and boils, it will become sparkling crystal. And it is thanks to this that Galileo and Newton will discover the stars.

Dan’s features showcased a mixture of intense confusion and frustration, and a small little voice in my head wondered if it was too late. If our chance had passed. I glared at that voice and shut a door in its face. What a stupid voice. You can’t sit here, voice. NEVER COME BACK! While I was berating my doubt, the cloud of confusion hovering over Dan’s features abruptly cleared and his stare cut to mine. It startled me because—lo and behold—the sexy eyes were back. Boy oh boy, were they back. Dan was legit bringing sexy back. Whoa. In the next moment, his mouth hooked upward and he pushed away from the wall, sauntering toward me. Instinctively, I took two steps back. “Kit-Kat.” He wagged a finger at me, like I’d been naughty. “You liked me.” “You liked me, you just said so,” I volleyed back, the words sounding like an accusation. “I did.” His grin grew and his voice deepened. “And I do.” Oh. Okay. Here we go.

The warm of his voice touched a quickness in her that left her fingers trembling as she raised the candle. “Will you light this please? I need it to find my way back.” He ignored her request and reached to take the lantern from the wall. “I’ll take you upstairs.” “It isn’t necessary,” she was quick to insist, afraid for more reasons than one. “I’d never forgive myself if some harm came to you down here,” he responded lightly. He lifted the lantern, casting its glow before them, and waited on her pleasure with amused patience. Erienne saw the challenge in his eyes and groaned inwardly. How could she refuse to pick up the gauntlet when she knew he would taunt her with his chiding humor if she did not? Adjusting the oversize coat about her shoulders, she rose to the bait against her better judgment and moved with him along the stony corridor. They were well past the bend when a sudden scurrying accompanied by strident squeaking came from the darkness. At the sound, Erienne stumbled back with a gasp, having an intense aversion for the rodents. In the next instant, the heel of her slipper caught on a rock lip, twisting her ankle and nearly sending her sprawling. Almost before the cry of pain was wrenched from her lips, Christopher’s arms were about her, and he used the excuse to bring her snugly against his own hard body. Embarrassed by the contact that brought bosom to chest and thigh to thigh and made her excruciatingly aware of his masculinity, Erienne pushed hurriedly away. She tried to walk again, anxious to be away, but when her weight came down on her ankle, a quick grimace touched her features. Christopher caught her reaction and, without so much as a murmured pardon, took the coat from her shoulders, pressed the lantern in her hand, and lifted her up in his arms. “You can’t take me upstairs!” she protested. “What if you’re seen?” The lights danced in his eyes as he met her astonished stare. “I’m beginning to think, madam, that you worry more about propriety than yourself. Most of the servants are in bed asleep.” “But what if Stuart comes?” she argued. “You said he’s on his way.” Christopher chuckled. “Meeting him now would be most interesting. He might even challenge me to a duel over your honor.” He raised a brow at her. “Would you be grieved if he wounded me?” “Don’t you realize a thing like that could happen?” she questioned, angry because he dismissed the possibility with flippant ease. “Don’t fret, my love,” he cajoled with a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “If I hear him coming, I’ll run, and as clumsy as he is, he’ll never be able to catch me.” He shifted her weight closer against him and smiled into her chiding stare. “I like the way you feel in my arms.” “Remember yourself, sir,” she admonished crisply, ignoring her leaping pulse. “I’m trying, madam. I’m really trying.” -Erienne & Christopher

Your butler informed me you were here. I thought-that is, I wondered how things were going.” “And since my butler didn’t know,” Ian concluded with amused irritation, “you decided to call on Elizabeth and see if you could discover for yourself?” “Something like that,” the vicar said calmly. “Elizabeth regards me as a friend, I think. And so I planned to call on her and, if you weren’t here, to put in a good word for you.” “Only one?” Ian said mildly. The vicar did not back down; he rarely did, particularly in matters of morality or justice. “Given your treatment of her, I was hard pressed to think of one. How did matters turn out with your grandfather?” “Well enough,” Ina said, his mind on meeting with Elizabeth. “He’s here in London.” “And?” “And,” Ian said sardonically, “you may now address me as ‘my lord.’” “I’ve come here,” Duncan persisted implacably, “to address you as ‘the bridegroom.’” A flash of annoyance crossed Ian’s tanned features. “You never stop pressing, do you? I’ve managed my own life for thirty years, Duncan. I think I can do it now.” Duncan had the grace to look slightly abashed. “You’re right, of course. Shall I leave?” Ian considered the benefits of Duncan’s soothing presence and reluctantly shook his head. “No. In fact, since you’re here,” he continued as they neared the top step, “you may as well be the one to announce us to the butler. I can’t get past him.” Duncan lifted the knocker while bestowing a mocking glance on Ian. “You can’t get past the butler, and you think you’re managing very well without me?” Declining to rise to that bait, Ian remained silent. The door opened a moment later, and the butler looked politely from Duncan, who began to give his name, to Ian. To Duncan’s startled disbelief, the door came crashing forward in his face. An instant before it banged into its frame Ian twisted, slamming his shoulder into it and sending the butler flying backward into the hall and ricocheting off the wall. In a low, savage voice he said, “Tell your mistress I’m here, or I’ll find her myself and tell her.” With a glance of furious outrage the older man considered Ian’s superior size and powerful frame, then turned and started reluctantly for a room ahead and to the left, where muted voices could be heard. Duncan eyed Ian with one gray eyebrow lifted and said sardonically, “Very clever of you to ingratiate yourself so well with Elizabeth’s servants.” The group in the drawing room reacted with diverse emotions to Bentner’s announcement that “Thornton is here and forced his way into the house.” The dowager duchess looked fascinated, Julius looked both relived and dismayed, Alexandra looked wary, and Elizabeth, who was still preoccupied with her uncle’s unstated purpose for his visit, looked nonplussed. Only Lucinda showed no expression at all, but she laid her needlework aside and lifted her face attentively toward the doorway.

No, certainly. We shall not have to explore our way into a hall dimly lighted by the expiring embers of a wood fire—nor be obliged to spread our beds on the floor of a room without windows, doors, or furniture. But you must be aware that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy, the ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can you stand such a ceremony as this? Will not your mind misgive you when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber—too lofty and extensive for you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size—its walls hung with tapestry exhibiting figures as large as life, and the bed, of dark green stuff or purple velvet, presenting even a funereal appearance? Will not your heart sink within you?” “Oh! But this will not happen to me, I am sure.” “How fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apartment! And what will you discern? Not tables, toilettes, wardrobes, or drawers, but on one side perhaps the remains of a broken lute, on the other a ponderous chest which no efforts can open, and over the fireplace the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose features will so incomprehensibly strike you, that you will not be able to withdraw your eyes from it. Dorothy, meanwhile, no less struck by your appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and drops a few unintelligible hints. To raise your spirits, moreover, she gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted, and informs you that you will not have a single domestic within call. With this parting cordial she curtsies off—you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the last echo can reach you—and when, with fainting spirits, you attempt to fasten your door, you discover, with increased alarm, that it has no lock.

Cassian was sizing up Nesta, a gleam in his eyes that I could only interpret as a warrior finding himself faced with a new, interesting opponent. Then, Mother above, Nesta shifted her attention to Cassian, noticing that gleam- what it meant. She snarled softly. 'What are you looking at?' Cassian's brows rose- little amusement to be found now. 'Someone who let her younger sister risk her life every day in the woods while she did nothing. Someone who let a fourteen-year-old child go out into that forest, so close to the wall.' My face began heating, and I opened my mouth. To say what, I don't know. 'Your sister died- died to save my people. She is willing to do so again to protect you from war. So don't expect me to sit here with my mouth shut while you sneer at her for a choice she did not get to make- and insult my people in the process.' Nesta didn't bat an eyelash as she studied the handsome features, the muscled torso. Then turned to me. Dismissing him entirely. Cassian's face went almost feral. A wolf who had been circling a doe... only to find a mountain cat wearing its hide instead.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

Why do you go like this? Are you a thief?” “I’m going to kill him.” Shadows from the lamplight shifted on the old man’s features as he tilted his head. “What did he do?” “He kidnapped my wife.” “How do you know this?” “He threatened it. And it has been done.” The man stepped nearer the pickup, raising the lantern to see Arif better. “Truly?” “Truly.” “Is it tha’r?” A revenge killing. “Yes.” The old one kept the lantern high while he studied Arif from below. His tongue worked inside his cheeks, behind his gray beard. In the light, the man was not so old and blue-eyed. He pointed to the big house behind the wall. “You know who he is? This family, the Bayt Ba-Jalal?” “I know very well.” The old man squinted. “You have killed before?” “A long time ago.” “So you understand?” “Yes.” Slowly, the man inclined his head to Arif as if in the presence of someone exalted. “Insha’Allah.” If God wills. He turned to gesture the younger one forward. This man came leading the mule. The elder took the animal by the bridle while the younger man stepped onto the pickup truck bed. He was burly and the truck’s springs sagged under him. He bent, clasping his hands to make a step. The old man shook the lantern at Arif. “Up you go, then.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

If something is true and you try to disprove it, you will fail. We are trained to to think of failure as bad, but it's not all bad. You can learn from failure. You try to disprove the statement one way, and you hit a wall. You try another way, and you hit another wall. Each night you try, each night you fail, each night a new wall, and if you are lucky, those walls start to come together into a structure, and that structure is the structure of the proof of the theorem. For if you have really understood what's keeping you from disproving the theorem, you very likely understand, in a way inaccessible to you before, why the theorem is true. This is what happened to Bolyai, who bucked his father's well-meaning advice and tried, like so many before him, to prove that the parallel postulate followed from Euclid's other axioms. Like all the others, he failed. But unlike the others, he was able to understand the shape of his failure. What was blocking all his attempts to prove that there was no geometry without the parallel postulate was the existence of just such a geometry! And with each failed attempt he learned more about the features of the thing he didn't think existed, getting to know it more and more intimately, until the moment when he realized it was really there.

Fear is one of the biggest single factors that deprives one of being able to achieve your full potential. We experience fear more as a result of our internal communication of mind rather than because of actual external factors.Fear is an unseen enemy that whispers negative thoughts into your mind, body and soul. It tries to convince you that you will not prosper and that you cannot achieve your full potential.Our lives can be compared to beautiful streams, which are destined to flow, grow in majesty to create wonderful features such as cascading waterfalls, and give nourishment and life to those in its path.Sometimes we let fear put up a small dam in our rivers of life and it causes us to have stunted growth. We need to be able to rise above it, rise above the fear, break the dam and let our potential flow.When we allow fear to create dams in our rivers of life, then our streams become like the Dead Sea, which is stagnant and void of life and movement. When we confront fear, we break the dams and free our potential to flow forward.We are beings of immense potential, ability and skills. In order to realize our God given talents we need to break through the fear barrier, which through its invisible walls traps us better than any physical prison can be constructed by the hands of man. Our human will and faith can break any barriers that fear can construct.

A figure held his daughter in the rocker. In the dim light he couldn’t make out the features, but the sight of anyone he didn’t know sitting in Wendy’s rocker with their daughter was enough to scare the shit out of him. Judging by the shuddering movements of his daughter’s body it had frightened her too, had caused her to mewl. He wanted to charge forward and reclaim his daughter, but he didn’t know what would happen if he acted so quickly. What would he do if it hurt her? What would he do if it killed her? “What-what do you want? I’ll do anything just don’t take my daughter. She’s…all I have left.” The figure stopped rocking and slowly eased its way to its feet. There’s not much light in the room but as it moved closer to the bed and it settled the baby in her crib, he saw just enough of her face in the moonlight. “Wendy?” His voice is as full of horror as it is with awe. He can’t help but be horrified at the sight of her now, the way that death has changed her, making her a terrible figure indeed. Her eyes are strange; some depth, some dark and terrible nothing has swallowed up all of her light, and in this first moment he swears he can feel the awful cold of that operating room coming off of her flesh. She is so small and so hard to look at, as if his mind can’t quite focus on her form. Through the bars of the crib he can see her anger and hear the terrible, alien sound of her hiss. “What do you want?” She doesn’t answer him, staring cold and blank through those stark white bars, and then she was scrambling toward him across the floor, making him press flat against the wall to get away from her skittering shape.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter desperation of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter desperation of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

A shudder went through me at the thought of what I should still learn in this hour. How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible? And what would remain when I also learned about myself, about my own character and history from the knowledge stored in these archives? I must be prepared for anything. Suddenly I could bear the uncertainty and suspense no longer. I hastened to the section Chattorum res gestas, looked for my sub-division and number and stood in front of the part marked with my name. This was a niche, and when I drew the thin curtains aside I saw that it contained nothing written. It contained nothing but a figure, an old and worn-looking model made from wood or wax, in pale colours. It appeared to be a kind of deity or barbaric idol. At first glance it was entirely incomprehensible to me. It was a figure that really consisted of two; it had a common back. I stared at it for a while, disappointed and surprised. Then I noticed a candle in a metal candlestick fixed to the wall of the niche. A match-box lay there. I lit the candle and the strange double figure was now brightly illuminated. Only slowly did it dawn upon me. Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die, and looked rather like a piece of sculpture which could be called "Transitoriness" or "Decay," or something similar. On the other hand, the other figure which was joined to mine to make one, was strong in colour and form, and just as I began to realise whom it resembled, namely, the servant and President Leo, I discovered a second candle in the wall and lit this also. I now saw the double figure representing Leo and myself, not only becoming clearer and each image more alike, but I also saw that the surface of the figures was transparent and that one could look inside as one can look through the glass of a bottle or vase. Inside the figures I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my image to that of Leo's. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo's, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. The candles burned low and went out. I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.

So often have I studied the views of Florence, that I was familiar with the city before I ever set foot within its walls; I found that I could thread my way through the streets without a guide. Turning to the left I passed before a bookseller's shop, where I bought a couple of descriptive surveys of the city (guide). Twice only was I forced to inquire my way of passers by, who answered me with politeness which was wholly French and with a most singular accent; and at last I found myself before the facade of Santa Croce. Within, upon the right of the doorway, rises the tomb of Michelangelo; lo! There stands Canova's effigy of Alfieri; I needed no cicerone to recognise the features of the great Italian writer. Further still, I discovered the tomb of Machiavelli; while facing Michelangelo lies Galileo. What a race of men! And to these already named, Tuscany might further add Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. What a fantastic gathering! The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious awe. The mystic dimness which filled the church, its plain, timbered roof, its unfinished facade – all these things spoke volumes to my soul. Ah! Could I but forget...! A Friar moved silently towards me; and I, in the place of that sense of revulsion all but bordering on physical horror which usually possesses me in such circumstances, discovered in my heart a feeling which was almost friendship. Was not he likewise a Friar, Fra Bartolomeo di San Marco, that great painter who invented the art of chiaroscuro, and showed it to Raphael, and was the forefather of Correggio? I spoke to my tonsured acquaintance, and found in him an exquisite degree of politeness. Indeed, he was delighted to meet a Frenchman. I begged him to unlock for me the chapel in the north-east corner of the church, where are preserved the frescoes of Volterrano. He introduced me to the place, then left me to my own devices. There, seated upon the step of a folds tool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling, I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano's Sybills, the profoundest experience of ecstasy that, as far as I am aware, I ever encountered through the painter's art. My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitations of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. I sat down on one of the benches which line the piazza di Santa Croce; in my wallet, I discovered the following lines by Ugo Foscolo, which I re-read now with a great surge of pleasure; I could find no fault with such poetry; I desperately needed to hear the voice of a friend who shared my own emotion (…)

But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things to coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be. Whatever money did, it didn't do the things it was popularly supposed to do, and I thought I could speak with a certain minor authority on the matter because [...] I no longer spoke with the suspect voice of poverty. My hostility, if there was still hostility in me toward the rich, now seemed to flow from another source: a feeling, not quite identifiable, that there was something sinister about the way these people lived. But then, how could this life possibly be sinister? What harm could there be in the Braque bought in an art shop in Paris and now featured over the low couch against the pale wall? What danger could accrue from the immense albums of records stored in the living room or the den with the brick fireplace and the spotless desk? Why should it strike me darkly that a huge refrigerator, with Coca-Cola perpetually on ice, and the grapes kept perfectly cold by a servant, stood on the patio beside the thirty-foot pool? Why did I persist in reacting so oddly to all their comforts, their acquisitions, their rarities, their cool, large and enviable homes? The fault, most likely, was in myself; they weren't, perhaps, sinister at all. It was only a kind of voracity which struck me so, an insatiety that gave off, perhaps, a slight aura of the sinister.

It was about time he opened his eyes to see just to whom he was speaking. After several quick blinks, he managed to do just that, gazing up into a small, heart-shaped face. A pretty face. Not one of a curvy seductress or a cool-hearted courtesan, but a feminine, delicately featured face. He knew this face. He adored this face. "Miss Charlotte Greene," he stated finally, taking a risk and raising his head to get a better look. Sitting at his side, the white skirt of her thick night rail tucked around her legs, she smiled down at him with concerned eyes of deep blue. Gorgeous sapphire eyes often hidden behind the rims of small, round spectacles. Truthfully, she happened to be the complete opposite of what he was usually attracted to. She was a bit too thin, too short, and too quiet for his tastes, which had always leaned toward the voluptuous, the tall, and the spirited. Normally, she wasn't one to stand out. And he rather suspected she preferred it that way. However, while most young bucks readily discounted her merits and furtively joked about her quirky behavior behind her back, Rothbury had always sensed a subtle undercurrent of passion in her dark blue gaze. Unlike the "diamonds" of the ton and demimonde, who slinked across assembly rooms completely aware of their beauty and the power that accompanied it, Miss Greene moved like a woman who hadn't yet realized how utterly fetching she truly was. She clung to the walls, sometimes barely raising her eyes from the floor, rarely spoke but to her closest friends, and shied away from situations that demanded she converse with the opposite sex. Strange it was for him to notice those facets in such an unassuming woman. Strange it was he should have noticed her at all. But he always did. The second she walked into a room.

Visible over Madame’s shoulder was a clock, hanging on the wall between a flag and a poster. The poster was for a new brand of beer, featuring three bikini-clad young women sprouting breasts the size and shape of children’s balloons; the flag was of the defeated Republic of Vietnam, three bold red horizontal stripes on a vivid field of yellow. This was the flag, as the General had noted more than once to me, of the free Vietnamese people. I had seen the flag countless times before, and posters like that one often, but I had never seen this type of clock, carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland. For this clock that was a country, and this country that was a clock, the minute and hour hands pivoted in the south, the numbers of the dial a halo around Saigon. Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return? Speaking of punctuality, I said to Madame, your clock is set to the wrong time. No, she said, rising to fetch the beer. It’s set to Saigon time. Of course it was. How could I not have seen it? Saigon time was fourteen hours off, although if one judged time by this clock, it was we who were fourteen hours off. Refugee, exile, immigrant—whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space. The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.

Aortic dissection results from an intimal tear in the aortic wall. The primary morbidity and mortality results from extension of the tear. This extension is promoted by factors that increase the rate of change of aortic pressure (dp/dt), including elevation in BP, heart rate, and myocardial stroke volume. Blood pressure should be reduced promptly to near-normal levels. Aggressive control of BP with a vasodilator can trigger reflex tachycardia, leading to increased dp/dt.

the September 1970 Supplement featured a "Birch Bark Crib."48 The walls of the crib were constructed of birch bark, into which the builders had inserted Plexiglas windows for the baby. The mattress was made of polystyrene. With its back-to-the-land allegiance to birch bark and its easy appropriation of industrial plastics, the crib neatly linked the world of the commune to the world of the high-technology factory.

It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels.

Articulating upfront what your goals are will help you with other phases of your DevOps roll out. Some common measurable goals are: Reduce time-to-market for new features. Increase overall availability of the product. Reduce the time it takes to deploy a software release. Increase the percentage of defects detected in testing before production release. Make more efficient use of hardware infrastructure. Provide performance and user feedback to the product manager in a more timely manner.

As a result, anecdotes abound in the tech world about scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors who study and train here but move to Silicon Valley or Austin or North Carolina, lured by climate and lifestyle and a more freewheeling atmosphere. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have branch offices in Cambridge, but are headquartered on the West Coast. To compete on a global scale, Bostonians need to claim their place in the global conversation. Friday marks a step in that direction. At a press conference at the Ragon Institute, The Boston Globe will join Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MGH in announcing HUBweek, a week-long festival of discussions and creative problem-solving scheduled for Oct. 3 to 10 of next year. It’s a collaborative effort to bring big ideas out from behind institutional walls. To draw participants from all over the nation, and the world, all four co-hosts are creating programming that will focus on game-changing science, technology, engineering, and art. The week will feature some central events, kicking off with a master class at Fenway Park.

Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime’s invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap.

Where are the faces that somehow imprinted their features on your memory for ever, and the faces whose details have been erased and whose ghostly passage across the screen of your memory keeps you awake at night? Where are the smells that mysteriously preserve the images and feelings you secretly treasure? Where are the pavements, the cold, life when it became just a lucky coincidence, the skies as low as a wall of grey, the long sleepless nights, the cough, the stubborn hopes, the dancing lights of return?

Bill rents an apartment in Chicago and goes immediately to the lobby to put his name on the group mailbox. While he’s standing there, an attractive young lady comes out of the apartment next to the mailboxes, wearing a robe. Bill smiles at her and they begin to chat. As they talk her robe slips open, and it’s quite obvious that she has nothing on underneath it. Poor Bill breaks into a sweat trying to maintain eye contact. After a few minutes, she places her hand on his arm and says, “Let’s go into my apartment. I hear someone coming.” Bill follows her inside, and once the door is closed she leans against the wall, allowing her robe to fall off completely. As she reveals her beautiful nude body she purrs, “What would you say is my best feature?” Flustered, Bill manages to squeak out, “Oh, your best feature has to be your ears!” She’s astounded! “Why my ears? Looks at these breasts! They’re full, they don’t sag, and they’re one hundred percent natural! My ass is taut and round and completely without cellulite! My waist is slim and inviting. My skin is silky and begs to be touched. Why in the world would you say my EARS are my best feature?” “Be-be-because,” he stammers, “when we were in the hallway you said you heard someone coming... That was me!

a temporary solution to the city’s sectarian bloodletting. Now they were a permanent feature of its geography—indeed, their number, length, and scale had actually increased since the signing of the Good Friday accords. On Springfield Road the barricade was a transparent green fence about ten meters in height. But on Cupar Way, a particularly tense part of the Ardoyne, it was a Berlin Wall–like structure topped by razor wire. Residents on both sides had covered it in murals. One likened it to the separation fence between Israel and the West Bank. “Does this look like peace to you?” asked Keller. “No,” answered Gabriel. “It looks like home.” Finally, at half past one, Keller turned into Stratford Gardens. Number 8, like its neighbors, was a two-level redbrick house with a white door and a single window on each floor. Weeds flourished in the forecourt; a green rubbish bin lay toppled by the wind. Keller pulled to the curb and switched off the engine.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

The Light Fae. As a race, they were supposed to be all about good and decency, but there wasn’t a shred of either emotion within the walls of Usaeil’s castle. Neve observed Talin examining everything around him – from the castle, the Fae walking outside, the trees, and even the sky. His pale silver eyes missed nothing. She wondered what he saw, and how he catalogued things. His long, black hair had the barest hint of a wave to it as it hung to the shoulders of his pale blue shirt. He shoved one side behind an ear and tilted his head as if listening. She didn’t think he realized she was still beside him, not that she minded. It gave her a chance to fill her gaze with his sharply chiseled features. The hard planes of his jaw and chin were in direct contrast to his wide lips and thick eyelashes. It was difficult to look at Talin and notice anything but those beautiful eyes. Except when she did look down, she saw a body that made her hands itch to touch him. His shirt barely contained wide shoulders that tapered to narrow hips where navy pants encased his legs. Every muscle was honed and defined. As eye-catching as Talin’s personal package was, it didn’t hold a candle to what drew her interest – his bearing. The way he stood, walked, talked. In a castle full of Light who believed themselves above others, the only one who had the attitude and demeanor to carry it off was Talin.

Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in black magic marker) because they were having an argument and 'he yells louder than me' and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.

What could possibly," he said slowly, "be weird about a DNA sample from a simple crocodile?" he said. "We have vials of similar cells. I could run a slide projector and display them on the walls like a psychedelic 1960s dance party, and none of them – not one – would be in any way remarkable without the accompanying LSD.

My walk to Alex’s study is like the green mile. I wonder what he’s going to say. This isn’t going to be fun. I step inside his study, but no one announces me, and he doesn’t notice. So I just stare. He’s writing something. With a quill and ink. The well is sitting next to his right hand. He’s so intent on whatever he’s writing he keeps at it for thirty seconds before he sees me. Long enough for me to see the way he narrows his eyes when he’s concentrating and the way he purses his lips. Long enough for me to wonder what it would be like to kiss him. Oh God, where did that come from? I hate him. Hate him. There’s no way I could possibly want to kiss him. He looks up at that instant, and I do my best to just smile right at him and not give away my thoughts. “Please sit,” he says, rising. I nod and sit down in the same fancy chair as before. The door stays open. I sit as erect as possible, my hands in my lap, my ankles crossed beneath me. Victoria must be rubbing off on me. Alex comes around to the front of his desk and rests on it, crossing one ankle over the other as he leans back. “What you did was overstepping your bounds.” I clench my teeth, hard, to stop from snapping back. I have to see where he’s going with this before I get angry. “You went behind my back and orchestrated one of the most ill-planned, riskiest schemes I’ve ever seen. I am shocked.” “But--” He puts his hand up to silence me. “I won’t tell you what I had to do to convince her father to consent to the new arrangement. You are lucky Mr. Rallsmouth will have the means necessary to support Miss Emily, as she will not be receiving a thing from her father from here on out.” All I hear is convince her father. So it worked?” A grin spreads across my features and I jump to my feet. “She’s going to marry Mr. Rallsmouth?” Alex pushes off the desk behind him and stands in front of me. “Have you not heard a word I said? You made grievous errors of judgment. You--” “But I was right! And thanks to me, she’s going to marry the love of her life!” He’s standing right in front of me, inches away. “You were not right! You interfered and it was not your place!” I clench my fists as my anger flares to match his. “You think nothing is my place because I’m some lowly, untitled girl! But someone had to do it, and you didn’t care to!” “You should not have gotten involved!” he growls. “You should not have forced me to!” I say, jabbing my finger into his chest. “You should have been there for her when she needed you!” In an instant, he closes the gap between us. His lips hit mine so fast I can’t even close my eyes. His hands find a place on either side of my face and pull me close, and for two-point-five seconds, I’m lost somewhere between closing my eyes and standing there, frozen. Somehow the eyes win out and I shut them, and my knees start to buckle as I press my lips into to his. I stop breathing and grip his sleeves with both hands to keep from falling straight over. His lips are warm and soft and… And then I realize what’s going on. Who I’m kissing. You’re not a lady, he’s said. It stings as much now as it did the moment he said it. He thinks I’m unworthy. What am I doing? I reel back and knock into the wall with a loud crash that makes him jerk his eyes open. “I, uh…” I stutter, then spin around so fast my skirts twist around my legs and I have to wait for them to swing around again before dashing out of the room.

On May 4, 1932 (...) the New York Times featured side-by-side front page stories on the world's two most infamous criminals. First, the paper reported that, late the previous evening, a police squad car had whisked Alphonse "Scarface" Capone from the Cook County Jail to the Dearborn Street station, where he and several government agents had boarded the Dixie Flyer, headed for Atlanta and the federal penitentiary there. The adjacent story described the first day of hearings before the federal referee overseeing the bankruptcy of International Match. "Glad to start, he says", was the tagline for the Capone column. the one about Ivar said "Trusted Him Implicitly".