Fleet Week Quotes

What win I, if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?

Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I choose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.

What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy?

Everything in the media is fleeting. Don't get the wrong idea. Fame is when you're still the hot topic next week or even the week after.

Art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It's the pealed lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It's him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he'll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you've always understood that. You've always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

Take fireflies for example. Try to imagine their beauty, the evanescent beauty of their lives, which don't even last a week. Female fireflies flash their lights only to have intercourse with the males; males twinkle just to have intercourse with the females. And once their mating has finished, they die. In short, their reproductive instinct is the single, absolute reason for fireflies to live. In that simple instinct and their simple world, no kind of sadness can intervene. This is precisely why fireflies are so fleetingly beautiful.

You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I’m scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I’m going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets, and my biggest concern, if I have any, will be my wife back here grieving. When I die, I will be identified with Christ’s exaltation. But right now, I’m identified with His affliction.

I love you body, soul, and breath. Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.

love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.

Cherry trees are in full bloom for two weeks at the most. The perfect, delicate flowers have come to represent the essence of life itself - shockingly beautiful and heartbreakingly fleeting.

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. This situation makes the "current-events man" a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more striking, more distressing, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants. Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a certain attitude. But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.

The bridge was geologically ancient, an impassive observer, surrounded by life that was fleeting in comparison: trees that would only survive hundreds of years, tourists who would only live decades, insects that would thrive only for weeks.

For over two weeks, the defenders of Wake Island held off a vastly superior force of Japanese ships and troops, inspiring the whole nation with their plucky spirit and sacrifice. Unfortunately, Navy leaders at Pearl Harbor, struggling to protect what was left of the shattered Pacific Fleet, canceled a relief mission, allowing the island and its defenders to fall without support. Wake damaged the long-standing trust between the Corps and the Navy, a memory that still rankles Marines and shames sailors.

Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia Mendes did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life’s normal condition. So, as the first weeks after the massacre passed, she simply counted herself lucky to be among others who did not weep and wail for the dead.

Hawkins was eloquent and poetic--but most of all he was exquisitely sensitive to a woman's moods. He sensed it when Annie was depressed, though she never told him she was, and he would say just the right thing to cheer her. And when she was elated, he nourished her elation, and kept it alive for weeks instead of fleeting minutes. --"Out, Brief Candle

Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness - a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair - then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one - well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.

Somehow in the last weeks, so fleeting yet so long, duty had taken on another face. Elizabeth. What he owed to her now was above what he owed to any other—above even his obligation to Georgiana. Somehow, duty and inclination had aligned themselves.

I love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.

I love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fade with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life. - Karris White Oak

After dinner, Mary Alice and I went for a walk. We didn’t talk, we just held hands. I found it curious that so much of this, our last full day together, had been spent just being together. (...) [P]robably no more than two dozen words had been exchanged between us. I could sense that for the first time, the heartsoreness that had plagued me at times over the past several weeks whenever I contemplated this moment was now visiting Mary Alice. As such, we were both adrift in a sea of sadness where words seemed vapid and superfluous. A plaintive expression, a momentary gesture, a fleeting touch: these were all enough to convey thousands of words of emotion that crowded our hearts and rendered our eyes heavy with tears.

Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy. Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homer's Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead... ...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin. It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus... ...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

I'd promised myself I wouldn't cry. I wanted to deliver the only gift I had to offer in the memory of Cora Frost. But as I started blowing the first notes of "Shenandoah," the tears began to run. I played on anyway, and Miss Stratton followed, and the music itself seemed to weep and not just for what we'd lost that week. It was for the families and the childhoods and the dreams that were, even for those of us so young, already gone forever. But as I continued, I went to that place only music could take me, and although Cora Frost was dead and about to be buried along with my fleeting hope of a better life, I imagined she was listening somewhere, with her husband by her side, and they were both smiling down on me and Emmy and Albert and Mose and all the others whose lives, at least for a while, had been better because of them. And in the end, that's where my tears were coming from." p. 63

Message traffic indicated that IUSS (Integrated Undersea Surveillance System) had sniffs of a number of the newest operational class of Russian SSNs, the Akula II, heading south from the Sea of Okhotsk area toward the South China Sea—and the numbers did not match naval intelligence’s initial expectations. Satellite imagery of Vladivostok showed three submarines missing, and data from Petropavlosk added another missing sub, for a total of four, but IUSS was picking up seven different Akula class SSNs. New data, however, showed three more missing from the Russian base in the Kola Peninsula. Naval intelligence had been concentrating on the Pacific theater and had missed the departure of the North Fleet Akula II SSNs the week before. These Akulas had completed an under-ice transfer through the Bering Straits before they were detected in the Bering Sea, and had rendezvoused with the PACFLT Akulas east of the Kurile Islands.

It was not these policies alone that turned things around; it was also the energy behind the policies: the six-week tour, the firing and hiring, the tough decisions made about the fleet and the fields. A light was burning in the pilothouse, a firm hand had taken hold of the tiller. United Fruit’s stock price stabilized, then began to climb. It doubled in the first two weeks of Zemurray’s reign, reaching $26 a share by the fall of 1933. This had less to do with tangible results—it was too early for that—than the confidence of investors. If you looked in the newspaper, you would see the new head of the company landing his plane on a strip in the jungle, anchoring his boat on the north coast of Honduras, going here and there, working, working, working. In a time of crisis, the mere evidence of activity can be enough to get things moving. Though Zemurray would stay at the helm for another twenty years, United Fruit was saved in his first sixty days.

Anyway, as I was saying, marriage sucks.  It sucks the life and soul out of you.  There are days I want to kill him, and there are days I want to torture him before I kill him.”  Lizzy is working so hard at containing her laughter that she almost falls out of her chair.  “There are days I wish he’d never been born.  There are days I wish I’d never been born.  But, listen to this carefully.  They are just thoughts.  Random fleeting thoughts that cross my mind when I’m upset about accidentally burning supper.  Did he make me burn supper?  No, he didn’t, but I heaped that blame on him.  Or when I forgot about a load of his underpants in the washer and they soured.  He bore the brunt of that blame, too.  What about the abuse he got when I gave birth to our child?  Twelve hours of non-stop name calling during labor, and that man took every last bit of it and fed me words of love and encouragement to boot!” Lizzy and I are now captivated by her speech. “When and if you get married, those thoughts will come to you.  You’re going to fight.  You’re going to have resentful moments.  You’re going to wonder if it’s worth it all.  My Stanley is eighty-six years old, and he was diagnosed with terminal cancer four weeks ago.  If we’re lucky, I might have another couple of months with him the doctors say.  All that complaining I did earlier… all that truth I gave you… you’d think I regretted marrying him, wouldn’t you?  Well, I don’t.  I’d give anything to have sixty-eight more years with him. 

A LITTLE while, a little while, The weary task is put away, And I can sing and I can smile, Alike, while I have holiday. Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart-- What thought, what scene invites thee now What spot, or near or far apart, Has rest for thee, my weary brow? There is a spot, 'mid barren hills, Where winter howls, and driving rain; But, if the dreary tempest chills, There is a light that warms again. The house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome; But what on earth is half so dear-- So longed for--as the hearth of home? The mute bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them--how I love them all! Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom, I passed to bright, unclouded day. A little and a lone green lane That opened on a common wide; A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain Of mountains circling every side. A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; And, deepening still the dream-like charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. THAT was the scene, I knew it well; I knew the turfy pathway's sweep, That, winding o'er each billowy swell, Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep. Could I have lingered but an hour, It well had paid a week of toil; But Truth has banished Fancy's power: Restraint and heavy task recoil. Even as I stood with raptured eye, Absorbed in bliss so deep and dear, My hour of rest had fleeted by, And back came labour, bondage, care.

art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he’ll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you’ve always understood that. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.

Ex ‘Fleet man?” “He was a full Commander, last I heard, sir.” “Interesting.” Falconer commented. “Get me his specs. If I have to take him aboard my ship, I want to know all about him.” She swallowed. “Yes sir.” Falconer returned his attention to Nordyke. “What’s their location?” “They’re about a week outside the Hermes system, Captain.” “Helm, set a course – best possible speed!” “Um – sir, we’re on conversion drive at the moment.” The helmsman reported. “I know, Linson – d’you think I’m senile?” “No, sir – I…” The young helmsman stammered. “I did say ‘best possible speed’, didn’t I?” “Yes, sir.

When the attendant at Britz Rentals of Australia whipped around in our prepaid-in-full honeymoon car, my eyes grew wide and I knew we were in trouble. It was an SUV, yes, and a Toyota Land Cruiser at that--just as Marlboro Man had ordered. It was white and clean and very shiny. And painted in huge bright orange and royal blue lettering across the hood, the roof, all four doors, and the tailgate of the vehicle, were scrawled the enormous words: BRITZ RENTALS OF AUSTRALIA. I could see Marlboro Man’s jaw muscles flex as he beheld his worst nightmare playing out in front of his eyes. He could hardly even bear to gaze upon such an attention-grabbing abomination, let alone conceive of driving it all over an entire continent. Unfortunately, our last-minute attempts to trade to another vehicle proved to be futile; even if Britz hadn’t been completely booked that week, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Every single car in their fleet was smeared with the exact same orange and blue promotional graffiti. Having no other transportational alternative, we set off on our drive, a black cloud of conspicuousness and, in Marlboro Man’s case, dread following us everywhere we went. Being an attention-seeking middle child, I didn’t really mind it much. But for Marlboro Man, this was more than his makeup was programmed to handle. As far as he was concerned, we were the Griswolds, and the Land Cruiser was our Family Truckster. It was a pox on what might have been the perfect honeymoon. Except for my inner ear disturbance. And the vomiting. And the slightly marsupial undertone to the hamburgers.

The last encounter was one Ian enjoyed, because Elizabeth was with him after they’d had their second-and last permissible-dance. Viscount Mondevale had approached them with Valerie hanging on his arm, and the rest of their group fanned around them. The sight of the young woman who’d caused them both so much pain evoked almost as much ire in Ian as the sight of Mondevale watching Elizabeth like a lovelorn swain. “Mondevale,” Ian had said curtly, feeling the tension in Elizabeth’s fingers when she looked at Valerie, “I applaud your taste. I’m certain Miss Jamison will make you a fine wife, if you ever get up the spine to ask her. If you do, however, take my advice, and hire her a tutor, because she can’t write and she can’t spell.” Transferring his blistering gaze to the gaping young woman, Ian clipped, “’Greenhouse’ has a ‘u’ in it. Shall I spell ‘malice’ for you as well?” “Ian,” Elizabeth chided gently as they walked away. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” She looked up at him and smiled, and Ian grinned back at her. Suddenly he felt completely in harmony with the world. The feeling was so lasting that he managed to endure the remaining three weeks-with all the requisite social and courtship rituals and betrothal formalities-with equanimity while he mentally marked off each day before he could make her his and join his starving body with hers. With a polite smile on his face Ian appeared at teas and mentally composed letters to his secretary; he sat through the opera and slowly undressed her in his mind; he endured eleven Venetian breakfasts where he mentally designed an entirely new kind of mast for his fleet of ships; he escorted her to eighteen balls and politely refrained from acting our his recurring fantasy of dismembering the fops who clustered around her, eyeing her lush curves and mouthing platitudes to her. It was the longest three weeks of his life. It was the shortest three weeks of hers.

My world had stopped, but the outside one kept going. On Saturday, one week after the murder, Bubba had a basketball game. He wanted to go. I wanted him to go, too. And if he went, I was going, too. Even though I hadn’t been out of the house except to go to the funeral home. A friend picked Bubba up early so he could get there for the pregame warm-up. When it came time to leave to watch the game, I decided to run rather than drive. It was five minutes by car, and I thought it wouldn’t take long to trot over. I was wrong about that. Four or five of the men at the house accompanied me, including my brother-in-law Jeff, who had just gone through an operation and was still recovering. I’m sure his rehab plan didn’t include running alongside a half-crazy woman, but he did anyway, without a complaint or even a “Hey, slow down.” We got to the church gym just in time for the game. I felt such pure joy watching Bubba play. It was one of the very few times that whole month that I was able to completely forget my grief and feel fully myself. They were fleeting moments, but they loom large now in my memory, little islands of relief in a sea of dread. We all walked home. The men tossed a ball back and forth with Bubba. They couldn’t replace Chris, but they provided an enormous, unstated reassurance to Bubba that he would never be alone.

Spring was a long time unfolding. During the last weeks of Lent the weather was clear and frosty. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night it went down to seven below; there was such a crust that carts could go over it where there was no road. There was still snow at Easter. Then suddenly, on Easter Monday, a warm wind began to blow, dark clouds gathered, and for three days and nights warm, heavy rain poured down. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature. Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feet, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants’ axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come.

I looked around and realized we were headed down a different road than Marlboro Man would normally take. “I have to give you your wedding present,” Marlboro Man said before I could ask where we were going. “I can’t wait a month before I give it to you.” Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. “But…,” I stammered. “I haven’t gotten yours yet.” Marlboro Man clasped my hand, continuing to look forward at the road. “Yes you have,” he said, bringing my hand to his lips and turning me to a pool of melted butter right in his big Ford truck. We wound through several curves in the road, and I tried to discern whether I’d been there before. My sense of direction was lousy; everything looked the same to me. Finally, just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, we came upon an old barn. Marlboro Man pulled up beside it and parked. Confused, I looked around. He got me a barn? “What…what are we doing here?” I asked. Marlboro Man didn’t answer. Instead, he just turned off the pickup, turned to me…and smiled. “What is it?” I asked as Marlboro Man and I exited the pickup and walked toward the barn. “You’ll see,” he replied. He definitely had something up his sleeve. I was nervous. I always hated opening gifts in front of the person who gave them to me. It made me uncomfortable, as if I were sitting in a dark room with a huge spotlight shining on my head. I squirmed with discomfort. I wanted to turn and run away. Hide in his pickup. Hide in the pasture. Lie low for a few weeks. I didn’t want a wedding present. I was weird that way. “But…but…,” I said, trying to back out. “But I don’t have your wedding present yet.” As if anything would have derailed him at that point. “Don’t worry about that,” Marlboro Man replied, hugging me around the waist as we walked. He smelled so good, and I inhaled deeply. “Besides, we can share this one.” That’s strange, I thought. Any fleeting ideas I’d had that he’d be giving me a shiny bracelet or sparkly necklace or other bauble suddenly seemed far-fetched. How could he and I share the same tennis bracelet? Maybe he got me one of those two-necklace sets, the ones with the halved hearts, I thought, and he’ll wear one half and I’ll wear the other. I couldn’t exactly picture it, but Marlboro Man had never been above surprising me. Then again, we were walking toward a barn.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such — and those living more peaceably around them — we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition. This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an often distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits.

Godly sorrow gets busy and fervently seeks to fight against sin in a battle that lasts and lasts. Biblical remorse over sin extends far beyond a momentary wince of pain and a fleeting twinge of conviction. Godly sorrow is busy battling pornography weeks, months, and years after worldly sorrow has given up the struggle.

The last couple of weeks I have been okay, I really have. I have barely thought about you or us, and if a fleeting thought ever appeared, it silently floated away without disturbing my peace. The peace I so desperately was seeking from you. An explanation, a phone call, a love declaration for everybody to hear. But you never came.

It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else. The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.

The transcendent moments in worship where all of God’s people are rallied together, praising the Lord, are like those fleeting moments above the depths: a dark, hard week is coming, and you need all the sustenance you can get. Never take for granted the opportunity to breathe deeply when you are surrounded by an atmosphere of expectant faith supercharged by the presence of God. It is also crucial that you don’t wait for a crisis before you get these sorts of rhythms in place. You must train for the trial you’re not yet in. The worst time to try to get ready for a marathon is when you are running one. We

I love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.” There

Growing up in upstate New York, one of the grayest parts of the U.S., meant whole weeks might pass with no more than a fleeting ray of light, a momentary sun escape before it was swallowed up again by dense, omnipresent clouds.

the horses to the oak freight wagon, and McCloskey helped him load, distributing the weight evenly in the wagon. When they were done, Johnny got a tarpaulin, and as he'd done many times, he threw it over the load and tucked it in carefully to keep out any rain he might encounter. Finally he'd strapped it all down tight with ropes. McCloskey had looked over the load and said, "Good job, Johnny. You sure you can do this run by yourself?" He said, "I'm sure I'll be fine, Fleet. It's just 19 miles over there and mostly flat. I won't have to use the brakes at all."   "Be sure though and set the brake when you stop." Johnny nodded, and Fleet asked, "You got your book?" Nodding and smiling, Johnny said, "Yessir, got it," as he drove the wagon out of the warehouse yard, headed west to Forest City, which was often referred to as "Irish City" because it had been settled by Irishmen. The folks there were still mostly Irish, which was evident from the heavy Irish lilt to the speech of many of the folks living there. McCloskey's face showed tiny creases of worry as he watched Johnny drive off. He was a good boy, but he was still a boy being asked to do a man's job. In his year on the job, Johnny had grown to be a fine young man. He was only a few inches short of six feet, and he'd added a lot of muscle. He could lift as much as most of the teamsters. Even so, McCloskey worried about sending the boy out alone, but he'd had no choice in the matter. He'd promised the load would reach Forest City by tomorrow morning. Johnny had a brand-new Spencer repeating rifle leaning against his leg. Peter Sarpy, the owner, had used his contacts back east and gotten a shipment of the new rifles. Now, with his four drivers armed with repeating rifles, Sarpy worried a little less about being robbed. But the rifle made Johnny worry more because if outlaws did hit a wagon, they'd kill the driver if he lifted a rifle. Johnny had helped take a load to Forest City with old Monk Beeson two weeks before, and they hadn't had any problems, and he didn't expect any problems with today's load. But during that trip, Beeson had told Johnny about an outlaw gang living a few miles north of Forest City led by a man the Irish called Ranger Jones who collected tribute from prospective

Pair that with the fleeting time we’ve managed to spend together over this past week, and this position where I stand right now in the very place I never wanted to be, like all the women before me, the strings of meaningless hookups… All of it only heightens my insecurities, my fears. I’ve always been confident in who I am as a person, what I have to offer someone. Except now half of North America is watching, placing bets on how long it will last.

Willoughby: My Darling Anne, There's a longer letter in the dresser drawer I've been writing for the last week or so, that one covers us, and my memories of us, and how much I've always loved you. This one just covers tonight, and more importantly, today. Tonight I have gone out to the horses to end it. I cannot say sorry for the act itself, although I know for a short time you will be angry at me, or even hate me for it. Please don't. This is not a case of, I came in this world alone and I'm goin' out of it alone, or anything dumb like that. I did not come in this world alone, my mom was there. And I am not goin' out of it alone, 'cause you were there, drunk on the couch, making Oscar Wilde cock jokes. No, this is a case, in some senses, of bravery. Not the bravery of facing a bullet down. The next few months of pain would be far harder than that small flash. No, it's the bravery of weighing up the next few months of still being with you, still waking up with you, of playing with the kids... Against the next few months of seeing in your eyes how much my pain is killing you. How my weakened body, as it ebbs away, and you tend to it, are your final and lasting memories of me. I won't have that. Your final memories of me will be us at the riverside, and that dumb fishing game, which I think they cheated at. And me inside of you, and you on top of me... And barely a fleeting thought, of the darkness yet to come. That was the best Anne. A whooole day of not thinking about it. Dwell on this day baby, 'cause it was the best day of my life. Kiss the girls for me, and know that I've always loved you... And maybe I'll see ya again if there's another place, and if there ain't... Well, it's been heaven knowing you. Your Boy, Bill

Did you eventually find that connection?” “No, not like I had hoped. But I’ve felt something close to it—a fleeting intensity that proved a deeper connection can exist.” “When was that?” “Several weeks ago,” he says quietly. “In a random coffee shop bathroom with a woman who wasn’t my wife.

Happiness is fleeting, but satisfaction, fulfillment, and love of our own lives can last forever. It is impossible to experience happiness for days or weeks on end. Eventually, it will burn out like any other hedonistic emotion. The sense of fulfillment of our purpose - the knowledge that we made the world a better place and enjoyed the process - is what life is truly about.

There’s another related concept that I share with John: impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again. For John, on Gabe’s birthday, on certain holidays, or simply running in the background, there will always be pain. Hearing a certain song in the car or having a fleeting memory might even plunge him into momentary despair. But another song, or another memory, might minutes or hours later bring intense joy.

The formal Salvage Organization began on 14 December 1941, an even week after the Japanese attack. It was under the direction of then Commander James M. Steele, who was previously in command of Utah. He remained in command of salvage under the Base Force until relieved by the author, Captain Homer N. Wallin, on 9 January, 1942. At that time the Salvage Division became a part of the Navy Yard under the Manager, Captain Claude S. Gillette.

They weren't children; they knew this was a special time and a fleeting one, but there was nothing cynical in that recognition, nor at all resigned to eventual stagnation: they were, simply, in the first great thaw of spring, and they were enjoying the warmth of the sun, without demanding that it never rain or snow again.

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvelously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.

Amanda looked over at Lieutenants Stalls and Trask; it was comforting to see at least two familiar faces. - At Kenward Seven, High Leader Nartel was in the largest of the four massive shipyards that orbited the planet. He was meeting with Fleet Commodore Resmunt, Fleet Commodore Versith, Commodore Tantil, and Commodore Parco. “How many ships do we have updated?” he demanded in his harsh, commanding voice. “A little over two thousand,” answered Fleet Commodore Resmunt, recalling the latest figures. “We still have an additional four hundred to be updated in the next few weeks. Once they are done we shall have updated all of the warships in our region of space.” “Excellent!” Nartel responded, pleased to hear that they were nearly ready to go back on the offensive. “The other shipyards in the different

a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.” He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, señor, how long will all this take?” To which the American replied, “15–20 years. 25 tops.” “But what then, señor?” The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Millions, señor? Then what?” “Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos …

Dear Christopher, This is the perfume of March: rain, loam, feathers, mint. Every morning and afternoon I drink fresh mint tea sweetened with honey. I’ve done a great deal of walking lately. I seem to think better outdoors. Last night was remarkably clear. I looked up at the sky to find the Argo. I’m terrible at constellations. I can never make out any of them except for Orion and his belt. But the longer I stared, the more the sky seemed like an ocean, and then I saw an entire fleet of ships made of stars. A flotilla was anchored at the moon, while others were casting off. I imagined we were on one of those ships, sailing on moonlight. In truth, I find the ocean unnerving. Too vast. I must prefer the forests around Stony Cross. They’re always fascinating, and full of commonplace miracles…spiderwebs glittering with rain, new trees growing from the trunks of fallen oaks. I wish you could see them with me. And together we would listen to the wind rushing through the leaves overhead, a lovely swooshy melody…tree music! As I sit here writing to you, I have propped my stocking feet much too close to the hearth. I’ve actually singed my stockings on occasion, and once I had to stomp out my feet when they started smoking. Even after that, I still can’t seem to rid myself of the habit. There, now you could pick me out of a crowd blindfolded. Simply follow the scent of scorched stockings. Enclosed is a robin’s feather that I found during my walk this morning. It’s for luck. Keep it in your pocket. Just now I had the oddest feeling while writing this letter, as if you were standing in the room with me. As if my pen had become a magic wand, and I had conjured you right here. If I wish hard enough… Dearest Prudence, I have the robin’s feather in my pocket. How did you know I needed token to carry into battle? For the past two weeks I’ve been in a rifle pit, sniping back and forth with the Russians. It’s no longer a cavalry war, it’s all engineers and artillery. Albert stayed in the trench with me, only going out to carry messages up and down the line. During the lulls, I try to imagine being in some other place. I imagine you with your feet propped near the hearth, and your breath sweet with mint tea. I imagine walking through the Stony Cross forests with you. I would love to see some commonplace miracles, but I don’t think I could find them without you. I need your help, Pru. I think you might be my only chance of becoming part of the world again. I feel as if I have more memories of you than I actually do. I was with you on only a handful of occasions. A dance. A conversation. A kiss. I wish I could relive those moments. I would appreciate them more. I would appreciate everything more. Last night I dreamed of you again. I couldn’t see your face, but I felt you near me. You were whispering to me. The last time I held you, I didn’t know who you truly were. Or who I was, for that matter. We never looked beneath the surface. Perhaps it’s better we didn’t--I don’t think I could have left you, had I felt for you then what I do now. I’ll tell you what I’m fighting for. Not for England, nor her allies, nor any patriotic cause. It’s all come down to the hope of being with you.

It was about six weeks later that Reginald and the fleet arrived. Tom had done everything in his power to dissuade them, including telling Reginald that the whole crew had died in the storm, but the crazed ex-soldier wasn’t satisfied with Tom’s answers. Instead, he had put poor Fresia in irons and tortured her for a day and a half before she caved. She had since recovered but had chosen to leave town with a wealthy man who offered to put her up in a house of her own, and Tom didn’t blame her. Tom had sent the letter as soon as he could, hoping that it would reach Jon in time. (Why didn’t you come? asked Jon with a frown. How? With my own boat? Ye think I got rich floatin’ in the ocean? Listen, love… I would have come. I would have. I prayed for ye every night, replied Tom.)

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I used to think grief was grey and spacious and insubstantial, like a damp fog that surrounds you on every side, one that you can't get away from because it colours the air, and you breathe it in and out, and it has its own earthy smell that seeps into your ores. I thought of grief as a fleeting thing like fog, like a damp that eventually disperses. One day the greyness is slightly lighter; after a few weeks the damp no longer collects on your skin, the musty smell diminishes, somewhere in the distance a pale sun flashes from between tatters of mist, and the grief dissolves into melancholy and then memory. Never, not for a moment, did I think that grief could be as hard as a dagger, sharp and unrelenting. That it could strike again and again, always unexpected, hard, straight between my ribs, bright lights in my eyes, black and violet and pain so big that I gasp and stagger. I forget the dagger sometimes for a few moments, perhaps an hour, and that's the very worst--the stroke of the blade takes me by surprise, still just as hard, cruel, painful.

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Dreamforce turns out to be a four-day orgy worthy of Caligula, a triumph of vulgarity and wasteful spending, with free booze and endless shrimp cocktail and a rate of STD transmission that probably rivals Fleet Week.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mk 13:31). The word—which seems almost nothing in comparison to the mighty power of the immeasurable material cosmos, like a fleeting breath against the silent grandeur of the universe—the word is more real and more lasting than the entire material world. The word is the true, dependable reality: the solid ground on which we can stand, which holds firm even when the sun goes dark and the firmament disintegrates.

The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts. CHAPTER 2 The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined

After years of watching newborns smile, we wish to deflate the gas bubble. Newborns do smile, and not because of gas (unless after passing it). As veteran smile watchers we divide smiles into two types: inside smiles and outside smiles. Inside smiles, occurring in the first few weeks, are a beautiful reflection of an inner feeling of rightness. Some are sleep grins; some are only a happy twitch in the corner of the mouth. Relief smiles occur after being rescued from a colicky period, after a satisfying feeding, or after being picked up and rocked. During face-to-face games is another time to catch a smile. Baby’s early smiles convey an “I feel good inside” message and leave you feeling good inside. Be prepared to wait until next month for the true outside (or social) smiles, which you can initiate and which will absolutely captivate all adoring smile watchers. Whatever their cause, enjoy these fleeting grins as glimpses of the whole happy-face smiles that are soon to come.

In August 1519, Magellan disembarked with a crew of 280 men among the five ships of his fleet: the Concepción, the San Antonio, the Santiago, the Victoria, and the flagship Trinidad. Four of the ships were three- or four-masted sailing ships called carracks; the Trinidad was a caravel. Each vessel held massive stores of supplies to last the men for weeks and months at sea, with plans to resupply in stops along the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, and South American port towns. No shipping clerk could have guessed how much they dangerously underestimated the needs of the voyage.

Frag out!” I heard Mgurn call from behind the Skrangs and I dropped to the floor faster than a Lipian whore’s panties during Fleet week. More

Body and mind need repose; the soul needs quiet communion with God. No vigorous physical, intellectual, or religious life will long be kept up, if that need be disregarded. The week was meant to be given to work, which is blessed and right if done after the pattern of God's. The Sabbath was meant to lift to a share in His rest, to bring eternity into time, to renew wasted strength 'by a wise passiveness,' and to draw hearts dissipated by contact with fleeting tasks back into the stillness where they can find themselves in fellowship with God. We

Then, even before those advance ships were all the way through the system, they would begin their own still more violent deceleration, to come to a stop a light month beyond, and get back to Ulubis weeks after the main fleet had arrived: at best to help with the mopping up, at worst to deliver a retaliatory hammer-blow.

For almost seven weeks, the ships of the fleet sailed their leisurely way across the Atlantic. Since the ships’ captains wanted to stay in contact, the fleet could sail no faster than its slowest vessel. That meant even the larger, faster vessels only made about five or six knots under ideal circumstances.

John Smith, for one, knew the value of good food during an ocean voyage. The want of good food, he said, “occasions the losse of more men, then in any English fleet hath bin slaine in any fight since 1588.”8 Smith was not exaggerating. Scurvy, a terrible wasting disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, wreaked havoc on crews during long ocean voyages. Symptoms often appeared within weeks of leaving port as men complained of weakness and a feeling of general malaise. Soon bleeding was seen around hair follicles on the arms and legs and around rapidly loosening teeth. As the illness progressed, skin was discolored by large purple bruises that often became open sores. In the worst cases, old wounds that seemed to be healed reopened. Eventually sufferers died screaming in agony.

Men were recruited—no women, for this initial attempt at colonization—and ships and supplies were obtained. In December of that year, a fleet of three vessels dropped down the Thames from London. For long weeks, the ships lay anchored in the Downs, just off the southeast coast of England, battered by terrible storms, waiting for favorable weather. Finally, in February 1607, the three ships set out across the wintry Atlantic. After crossing from England to the West Indies and then north along the Atlantic coast, the ships—the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed—dropped anchor in the Chesapeake on April 26, 1607.

Still, John Smith knew he had to have backing if he was to lead the colony successfully even for a few weeks. He would have deeply felt his responsibility to both the four hundred or so newcomers who had survived the hurricane as well as the approximately two hundred already living in Jamestown when the remnants of the 1609 fleet arrived.

Within a week or two weeks of their grounding, Gates and the others knew that the other ships in the fleet had either been lost in the storm or had sailed on to Jamestown. If any of the other sea captains had decided after the storm to search for the Sea Venture and those who sailed in her, they had abandoned those efforts as futile within just a few days. Those in Bermuda knew that they had to try to let the Virginia colonists know of the shipwreck and, if possible, to arrange for their own rescue.

Anna and the boys escorted me into Boston last week to meet with Mr. Niles about your book. Afterward, we rode on these marvelous little pontoons called Swan Boats in the Public Garden. An inventive fellow has capitalized on the bicycle craze and created a paddle-wheel boat in which the driver propels the boat by peddling—all while the driver’s presence is covered up by the statue of an enormous swan. Apparently, he was inspired by the German opera “Lohengrin” in which a knight of the Grail must cross the river in a boat disguised as a swan to rescue his princess. And you’ve said Boston has no culture! You would love the romance of these beautiful boats. Sadly, the man who invented the fanciful little fleet perished unexpectedly, yet his wife wants to keep the operation afloat.

The infamous Fray Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres, who had sniveled around the Royal Court wanting to become a favorite of the pious Queen Isabella, was appointed Governor of the Indies, replacing Francisco de Bobadilla, the man who had been responsible for sending Columbus from Hispaniola, back to Spain in irons. Prior to his appointment Fray Nicolás de Ovando had been a Spanish soldier, coming from a noble family, and was a Knight of the Order of Alcántara. On February 13, 1502, Fray Nicolás sailed from Spain with a record breaking fleet of thirty ships. Since Columbus’ discovery of the islands in the Caribbean, the number of Spanish ships that ventured west across the Atlantic had consistently increased. For reasons of safety in numbers, the ships usually made the transit in convoys, carrying nobility, public servants and conquistadors on the larger galleons that had a crew of 180 to 200. On these ships a total of 40 to 50 passengers had their own cabins midship. These ships carried paintings, finished furniture, fabric and, of course, gold on the return trip. The smaller vessels including the popular caravels had a crew of only 30, but carried as many people as they could fit in the cargo holds. Normally they would carry about 100 lesser public servants, soldiers, and settlers, along with farm animals and equipment, seeds, plant cuttings and diverse manufactured goods. For those that went before, European goods reminded them of home and were in great demand. Normally the ships would sail south along the sandy coast of the Sahara until they reached the Canary Islands, where they would stop for potable water and provisions before heading west with the trade winds. Even on a good voyage, they could count on burying a third of these adventurous at sea. Life was harsh and six to eight weeks out of sight of land, always took its toll! In all it is estimated that 30,500 colonists made that treacherous voyage over time. Most of them had been intentionally selected to promote Spanish interests and culture in the New World. Queen Isabella wanted to introduce Christianity into the West Indies, improve the islands economically and proliferate the Spanish and Christian influences in the region.

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.

But it may well have been love that filled each spoonful of warm broth she fed me during those long weeks. Or perhaps the root of her fleeting gentleness came from the sickbeds she had experienced as a child.

We knew nothing about these ships, which would become infamous in the annals of Second World War history as ‘hellships’ - a fleet of dozens of rusting hulks used to shuttle supplies and prisoners around Japan’s Far Eastern empire. Some of the most appalling episodes of the war occurred on these ships in which men driven crazy by thirst killed fellow prisoners to drink their blood. In some cases prisoners trying to escape from the seething mass of hysterical captives were shot by Japanese soldiers guarding the stairways from the holds. Some voyages took weeks with only a handful of prisoners surviving. Men drank their own urine. Sick prisoners were trampled to death or suffocated. The sane murdered the insane and wondered when it would be their turn to go mad. Cannibalism as well as vampirism was not unknown and even Japanese medics were shocked by what they found when the holds were finally opened. In the case of the Oryoku Maru, where insane prisoners killed fellow men for their blood, only 271 men survived out of 1619. The experience of one Dutch group was fairly typical: of 1500 men shipped from Java to Rangoon to work on the Death Railway, 200 died and 450 were unable to walk on arrival in Burma. Nineteen of the fifty-six hellships were sunk by submarines and aircraft and a total of 22,000 allied prisoners died during agonising voyages to the slave camps in Japan and Taiwan.

all happiness is fleeting, but I see now that there is fleeting and then there is the true and wall-like impossibility of ever experiencing this kind of happiness again, even once, even next week, let alone a year from now. Doors are closing around us, all the time.

A week after leaving Seville, the fleet reached the snug coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda,

Hugging the coast, the fleet spent the last week of February sailing west toward Bahía Blanca,

Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced. Cloth isn’t just for clothes, after all. “Increasingly complex societies required more and more textiles,” she writes. The Roman army, for instance, was a mass consumer of textiles.… Building a fleet required long term planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce. The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested, and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.

Father spoke of a light that is older than the stars, a divine light that is fleeting yet always present if only one could recognize it. It pours in and out of the souls of the living and dead, gathers in the quiet places in the forest, and on occasion, might reveal itself in the rarest of true art. The entirety of his life was devoted to the hope that someday he would create a sculpture so perfectly carved and balanced, set in just the right place among the trees, that it would be capable of reflecting this light. He had seen it in the works of others, yet he believed he had failed in his own. I wish he could have known the truth. Just weeks after he died, I went to see the bear. It was the end of an autumn day, and as I stepped into the meadow, the light of the setting sun was cooling from oranges and reds to the bluer shades. He had never looked so alive; shadows dipped and curved along his outstretched claws, his fur and muscles seemed poised for life, and for a moment, the sun just touching the horizon, the marble seemed to be formed of translucent light itself. I had no doubt of what I was witnessing—this was not simply a flattering cast of sunset; this was the light Father had sought his entire life. The nearest I can describe is when Father took the back off a piano and showed me how a strong, clear note could cause other strings to vibrate without ever setting finger to them. He said the strings were

In Honolulu, Lieutenant Commander Suzuki spent a busy week. From occasional visitors to his ship he learned that the fleet wasn’t now assembling at Lahaina Anchorage as it used to. He confirmed that the weekend was a universally observed American institution. He picked up some choice titbits — structural data on the Hickam Field hangars, interesting aerial shots of Pearl Harbor taken October 21. These were made from a private plane that took up sightseers at nearby John Rogers Airport. Anybody could do it.

Did you eventually find that connection?" "No, not like I had hoped. But I've felt something close to it-a fleeting intensity that proved a deeper connection can exist." "When was that?" "Several weeks ago," he says quietly. "In a random coffee shop bathroom with a woman who wasn't my wife.

The second factor is that almost all of us at some point in our lives have experienced moments of greater rationality. This often comes with what we shall call the maker’s mind-set. We have a project to get done, perhaps with a deadline. The only emotion we can afford is excitement and energy. Other emotions simply make it impossible to concentrate. Because we have to get results, we become exceptionally practical. We focus on the work—our mind calm, our ego not intruding. If people try to interrupt or infect us with emotions, we resent it. These moments—as fleeting as a few weeks or hours—reveal the rational self that is waiting to come out. It just requires some awareness and some practice.

I’ll tell you what, though. Death, as inevitably wicked a concept as it is, has made me stronger. It has made me realize that I can walk through fire and come out still intact. Different, sure, but intact, nonetheless. It has taught me that life is more fleeting than it is precious. In those fleeting moments is when we decide what we want to do with the time we are given.

Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action,

Master carpenters were well paid, at 7 shillings a week. They were an essential part of Edward III’s invasion fleet in 1346. He enlisted forty of them, ready to construct wooden towers and other engines of war for use in sieges, and to repair or build bridges that the enemy might destroy on his route across France, just as the Royal Engineers built Bailey bridges during the Allied invasion of France in the Second World War.

He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane. I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?” He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.” I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.

Even at that hour, London was awake and there would be cutpurses and pickpockets and maunderers about. Each week he saw more and more of them, lurking on street corners and huddled in doorways – vagrants and paupers pouring in from the countryside where they could not eke out a living on land being enclosed for animals, and could no longer turn to the charity of the old religious houses. For all their extravagance and corruption, the ancient monasteries had provided food and shelter to the poor and sick of their counties. Now London grew larger, dirtier and more overcrowded with each day while Londoners grumbled and cursed and demanded an end to the river of vagrants and harsher penalties for their crimes. But to no avail. A man had only to walk along Fleet Street to see that the problem was getting worse by the week. On the corner of Pilgrim Street, butchers and bakers were already setting out their stalls and aiming kicks at the half-naked urchins who scrabbled about in the dirt, squabbling over a stale crust or a scrap of offal. The urchins had to be quick. Hungry dogs sniffed about while kites watched hopefully from the rooftops. Christopher saw a bird swoop from its perch, take a morsel in its beak and flap away before it could be frightened off. A filthy child saw him and dashed across the street to demand a coin. She grabbed his gown and held on like a terrier with a rat until he gave up trying to free himself and tossed

Her tongue flicked out, nimble and curious. And all too fleeting. “Better?” “Better.” Almost too good. “Hmm. You taste of spirits here.” Her tongue traced the edge of his lip. “But here”—she dipped her head to nuzzle the underside of his jaw—“you smell of spice. Cloves.” Bloody hell. Colin’s eyes went wide in the dark as she sipped at his skin, over and over, tracing the curve of his throat. When she reached the center, she brushed her lips over his Adam’s apple. His breath was a painful rasp in his throat. He couldn’t take much more of this. “You still haven’t properly kissed me,” he said. “Are you afraid?” She lifted her head. “No.” “I think you are.” I think I might be, too, just a little. And for good reason.

The Tottenham directors soon discovered that Blanchflower was no ordinary footballer. He’d written a weekly column in the Birmingham Argus and had agreed to write a similar column for a Fleet Street paper. He had a feel for words and was a good writer.

A fleet of oil tankers carried oil from the Gulf Coast around Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard to supply Eastern cities and for transshipment to England and Europe. With the German declaration of war in alliance with Japan on 11 December 1941, Germany sent a small submarine force under Admiral and U-boat Commander Karl Dönitz to attack the vulnerable tankers. Dönitz had asked for twelve submarines. Hitler, giving priority at that time to Mediterranean support of his campaign in North Africa, awarded the admiral only five. Dönitz chose the best crews, and in the six weeks between 11 January and 28 February 1942, his U-boats working the American East Coast attacked no fewer than seventy-four tankers, sinking forty-six of them and damaging sixteen more.55 The submarines escaped unscathed. “Our U-boats are operating close inshore along the coast of the United States of America,” Dönitz reported, “so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witness to the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.

Turning things around, I asked him what his feelings were about our ending things. 'I'm incredibly angry,' he responded fondly. 'How dare you? You should at least have to come have coffee with me once a week.' I asked if he felt that way about most of his patients. 'Not really,' he responded.(Sigh. Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness--a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering yo the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that each passing year you fave the unavoidable certainly of a solitary feature in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver to yourself over the back of a kitchen chair-- then this confirmation that you have triumphed and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it is the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on "adorable" even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one...well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.) 

While some biographers claim Rommel had retrieved the goggles from an abandoned British vehicle, stating that “even a general was allowed a little booty,” a 2015 Daily Mail article claims that a British POW actually gave his goggles to the general.  After his capture, Major General Michael Gambier-Parry was invited to supper with Rommel, where he informed the field marshal that his hat had been stolen by a German soldier.  Rommel investigated, and returned Gambier-Parry’s hat, but asked if he could keep the British-issue goggles that the general had left in his staff car.[83]  They became part of his signature appearance, and he was rarely photographed without them after 1941.   Rommel would also receive his moniker, the Desert Fox, in the weeks following his victories there.  In German “Wustenfuchs,” it described a “small fox with a habit of burrowing quickly into the sand to escape predators, affording human occupants of the desert only an occasional fleeting glance.

P.S. If your intention is to mint French silver into English coin to pay the French and Irish troops that have been preparing to invade England from around Cherbourg in the third week of May, then I congratulate you on your ingenuity. Delivery of the coins from Mint to Front shall pose a not inconsiderable logistical challenge, and so I make you the following offer: If Admiral Tourville’s invasion-fleet makes it across the Channel without being sunk by the Royal Navy, and if the Papist legion establishes a beachhead on English soil without being destroyed by the Army or torn to bits by an enraged Mobb of English rurals, then I shall personally carry every single one of your coins from the Tower of London to the front in my arse-hole, and Deposit them in some Place where they may be easily Picked Up.

The British military and naval authorities were also about to fall out with each other. There had been a great deal of co-operation between the two services in the first weeks of war and the Hunstanton Lifeboat Station was among the fruits of that relationship. But Clarke wandered into the Admiralty one day and suggested a weekend trial of listening in to the less powerful German naval transmitters. Ewing wasn’t keen, but agreed to try and the test was a huge success. Suddenly a whole world opened up for them. The air was alive with signals which they had no idea could reach so far before. The signals were loud and clear and directed towards the German fleet base of Wilhelmshaven from their naval transmitter at Norddeich. By trial and error, Clarke, Hippisley and Lambert found themselves listening directly to wireless signals to and from the High Seas Fleet itself.

I have been thinking of light, the way it collected in the rain drops that morning I was so full of joy, and the way it shifts and moves in unexpected ways, so that at times this cabin is dark and cool and the next filled with golden warmth. Father spoke of a light that is older than the stars, a divine light that is fleeting yet always present if only one could recognize it. It pours in and out of the souls of the living and dead, gathers in the quiet places in the forest, and on occasion, might reveal itself in the rarest of true art. The entirety of his life was devoted to the hope that someday he would create a sculpture so perfectly carved and balanced, set in just the right place among the trees, that it would be capable of reflecting this light. He had seen it in the works of others, yet be believed he had failed in his own. I wish he could have known the truth. Just weeks after he died, I went to see the bear. It was the end of an autumn day, and as I stepped into the meadow, the light of the setting sun was cooling from oranges and reds to the bluer shades. He had never looked so alive; shadows dipped and curved along his outstretched claws, his fur and muscles seems poised for life, and for a moment, the sun just touching the horizon, the marble seemed to be formed of translucent light itself. I had no doubt of what I was witnessing -- this was not simply a flattering cast of sunset; this was the light Father had sought his entire life. The nearest I can describe is when Father took the back off a piano and showed me how a strong, clear note could cause other strings to vibrate without ever setting finger to them. He said the strings were resonating in sympathy to that pure sound. So it was within me. Shall I allow myself to believe in an immortal soul? If so, then I am certain it was Father's spirit that gathered with the divine light of the world and radiated from that finely carved marble. He always looked to his angels and gods and his Pietà. He never thought to look so near.