Flight Of Passage Quotes

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences. What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others. What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry. Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves.

Ghost bird, do you love me?" he whispered once in the dark, before he left for hs expedition training, even though he was the ghost. "Ghost bird, do you need me?" I loved him, but I didn't need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

What are you doing here?" He takes a deep breath. "I came for you." "And how on EARTH did you know I was up here?" "I saw you." He pauses. "I came to make another wish,and I was standing on Point Zero when I saw you enter the tower. I called your name,and you looked around,but you didn't see me." "So you decided to just...come up?" I'm doubtful,despite the evidence in front of me.It must have taken superhuman strength for him to make it past the first flight of stairs alone. "I had to.I couldn't wait for you to come down,I couldn't wait any longer. I had to see you now.I have to know-" He breaks off,and my pulse races. What what what? "Why did you lie to me?" The question startles me.Not what I was expecting.Nor hoping.He's still on the ground,but he stares up at me.His brown eyes are huge and heartbroken. I'm confused. "I'm sorry, I don't know what-" "November.At the creperie. I asked you if we'd talked about anything strange that night I was drunk in your room.If I had said anything about our relationship,or my relationship with Ellie.And you said no." Oh my God. "How did you know?" "Josh told me." "When?" "November." I'm stunned. "I...I..." My throat is dry. "If you'd seen the look on your face that day.In the restaurant. How could I possibly tell you? With your mother-" "But if you had,I wouldn't have wasted all of these months.I thought you were turning me down.I thought you weren't interested." "But you were drunk! You had a girlfriend! What was I supposed to do? God,St. Clair,I didn't even know if you meant it." "Of course I meant it." He stands,and his legs falter. "Careful!" Step.Step.Step. He toddles toward me,and I reach for his hand to guide him.We're so close to the edge. He sits next to me and grips my hand harder. "I meant it,Anna.I mean it." "I don't under-" He's exasperated. "I'm saying I'm in love with you! I've been in love with you this whole bleeding year!" My mind spins. "But Ellie-" "I cheated on her every day.In my mind, I thought of you in ways I shouldn't have,again and again. She was nothing compared to you.I've never felt this way about anybody before-" "But-" "The first day of school." He scoots closer. "We weren't physics partners by accident.I saw Professeur Wakefield assigning lab partners based on where people were sitting,so I leaned forward to borrow a pencil from you at just the right moment so he'd think we were next to each other.Anna,I wanted to be your partner the first day." "But..." I can't think straight. "I doubt you love poetry! 'I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly,between the shadow and the soul.'" I blink at him. "Neruda.I starred the passage.God," he moans. "Why didn't you open it?" "Because you said it was for school." "I said you were beautiful.I slept in your bed!" "You never mave a move! You had a girlfriend!" "No matter what a terrible boyfriend I was,I wouldn't actually cheat on her. But I thought you'd know.With me being there,I thought you'd know." We're going in circles. "How could I know if you never said anything?" "How could I know if you never said anyting?" "You had Ellie!" "You had Toph! And Dave!

Then beneath the colour [of the paint] was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.

All the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence.

For cleverness and wisdom are as different as are the circuitous passages of a labyrinth and the straight, upward flight of a bird.

And then he realized that the thing that was blocking his passage was cleared, and he was falling; his body had begun its short earthly flight — which it completed almost instantaneously — before Yogesh Murthy's soul was released for its much longer flight over the oceans of the other world.

She had no need in her heart for either book or magazine. She had her own way of escape, her own passage into contentment: her rosary. That string of white beads, the tiny links worn in a dozen places and held together by strands of white thread which in turn broke regularly, was, bead for bead, her quiet flight out of the world. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And Maria began to climb. Bead for bead, life and living fell away. Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Dream without sleep encompassed her. Passion without flesh lulled her. Love without death crooned the melody of belief. She was away: she was free; she was no longer Maria, American or Italian, poor or rich, with or without electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners; here was the land of all-possessing. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over, a thousand and a hundred thousand times, prayer upon prayer, the sleep of the body, the escape of the mind, the death of memory, the slipping away of pain, the deep silent reverie of belief. Hail Mary and Hail Mary. It was for this that she lived.

A flight attendant is the guide who helps you navigate that passage smoothly. As a death doula, I do the same thing, but the journey is from life to death, and at the end, you don’t disembark with two hundred other travelers. You go alone.

The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt—a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn’t been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else’s baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.

If you are a millionaire beset by blackmailers or anyone else to whose comfort the best legal advice is essential, and have decided to put your affairs in the hands of the ablest and discreetest firm in London, you proceed through a dark and grimy entry and up a dark and grimy flight of stairs; and, having felt your way along a dark and grimy passage, you come at length to a dark and grimy door. There is plenty of dirt in other parts of Ridgeway's Inn, but nowhere is it so plentiful, so rich in alluvial deposits, as on the exterior of the offices of Marlowe, Thorpe, Prescott, Winslow and Appleby. As you tap on the topmost of the geological strata concealing the ground-glass of the door, a sense of relief and security floods your being. For in London grubbiness is the gauge of a lawyer's respectability.

The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations.

At a bend in the river, an upland stream fell into the Middle Mother, which itself came from higher ground. The marrow-chilling air had caught and stilled the waters in the act of falling, and the strong dry winds had sculpted them into strange and grotesque shapes. Caricatures of living creatures captured by frost, poised to begin a headlong flight down the course of the long river, seemed to be waiting impatiently, as if knowing the turning of the season, and their release, was not far off.

My idealized account was so much to her liking that it brought us together. At that moment Lola seemed to discover that we had at least one taste in common, well concealed in my case, namely, a taste for social functions. She went so far as to kiss me in a burst of spontaneous emotion, something, I have to admit, that she seldom did. And then she was touched by the sadness of bygone fashions. Everyone has his own way of mourning the passage of time. It was through dead fashions that Lola perceived the flight of the years. "Ferdinand," she asked, "do you think there will be races here again?" "When the war is over, Lola, I should think..." "We can't be sure, can we?" "No, we can't be sure." The possibility that there would never again be races at Longchamp overwhelmed her. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. but just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original, The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters the sky on its first test flight. Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation,. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movement's in an illuminated tank).

If you’re on a plane, you’re not where you started, and you’re not where you’re going. You’re caught in between. A flight attendant is the guide who helps you navigate that passage smoothly. As a death doula, I do the same thing, but the journey is from life to death, and at the end, you don’t disembark with two hundred other travelers. You go alone.

Of the poetical parts of the Bible, that are called prophecies, I have spoken in the former part of 'The Age of Reason,' and already in this, where I have said that the word for prophet is the Bible-word for Poet, and that the flights and metaphors of those poets, many of which have become obscure by the lapse of time and the change of circumstances, have been ridiculously erected into things called prophecies, and applied to purposes the writers never thought of. When a priest quotes any of those passages, he unriddles it agreeably to his own views, and imposes that explanation upon his congregation as the meaning of the writer. The whore of Babylon has been the common whore of all the priests, and each has accused the other of keeping the strumpet; so well do they agree in their explanations.

Delay The warmth Of the smooth rocks In the sun Ripples On the surface Of pools in the surf And on the beach The rush Of colour In every destination The uninterrupted flight plan Vanishing acts Flashbacks and passages Rare appearances of family The timeless dance The swift motion Of the perfect match Of leaves against grass Chameleon-like and provocative This season is festive Uncomplicated Filled with high hopes A portrait of a family My demands are small Summer is when you'll be home From school More grown up than before.

Telling you all this, Camilo, the stab of pain that sliced through my chest that day comes back in full force; it’s a recurring pain that ambushes me out of nowhere. There can’t be a pain worse than that one, so great it has no name. I know, I know, who am I to complain? My daughter’s death wasn’t a punishment. I’m just a statistic, this is the oldest and most common suffering in human history. Before, no one even expected children to survive, so many died in childhood, and it’s still that way in a large part of the world, but that does nothing to lessen the horror when you’re the mother. I felt like I’d been emptied out from the inside, I was a bloody cavity, I couldn’t breathe, my bones were made of wax, my soul had taken flight. And the world still turned as if nothing had happened: I stand up, take one step then another, find my voice and respond, I haven’t lost my mind, I drink water, my mouth full of sand, my eyes burning, and my little girl stiff, frozen, sculpted in alabaster—my daughter who will never again call me Mom, who left a tremendous imprint in her passage through my life, the memory of her laughter, her grace, her rebelliousness, her suffering.

She opened the door of the room and went into the corridor, and then she began her wanderings. It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There were doors and doors, and there were pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were pictures of dark, curious landscapes, but oftenest they were portraits of men and women in queer, grand costumes made of satin and velvet. She found herself in one long gallery whose walls were covered with these portraits. She had never thought there could be so many in any house. She walked slowly down this place and stared at the faces which also seemed to stare at her. She felt as if they were wondering what a little girl from India was doing in their house. Some were pictures of children—little girls in thick satin frocks which reached to their feet and stood out about them, and boys with puffed sleeves and lace collars and long hair, or with big ruffs around their necks. She always stopped to look at the children, and wonder what their names were, and where they had gone, and why they wore such odd clothes. There was a stiff, plain little girl rather like herself. She wore a green brocade dress and held a green parrot on her finger. Her eyes had a sharp, curious look. "Where do you live now?" said Mary aloud to her. "I wish you were here." Surely no other little girl ever spent such a queer morning. It seemed as if there was no one in all the huge rambling house but her own small self, wandering about up-stairs and down, through narrow passages and wide ones, where it seemed to her that no one but herself had ever walked. Since so many rooms had been built, people must have lived in them, but it all seemed so empty that she could not quite believe it true.

Amir took flight. Headlong into the seaborne sky, the roof of the great inverted world. In meeting him the water was not cold or concussive but warm and tranquil, its temperature the temperature of a body, the temperature of blood. With ease and without pain, he flew past the surface, past the depths, past the places where light and life surrendered and the domain of stillness began. And then lower, farther, past the crust of a million interlocking bodies who’d braved this passage before him and come to rest at the bottom, sick with the secrets of their own unallowed mourning. Past the smallest flour-white bones, past the world at the feet of the world. To the lowest deep, then a lower deep still. Until finally to a dry womb of a place in which were kept safe and unchanging everyone he had ever known, and everyone each of those had ever known, outward forever to encompass the whole of the living and the lived. And each of these the boy met, in their old lives and their new lives waiting, and from each drew confession and each he felt into as though there were no barrier between them, no silo of self to keep a soul waiting. What beautiful rebellion, to feel into another, to feel anything at all. —

They turned a corner and there ahead of them was the end of the passage. Another short flight of steps led to a door just like the one hidden behind Ariana’s portrait. Neville pushed it open and climbed through. As Harry followed, he heard Neville call out to unseen people: “Look who it is! Didn’t I tell you?” As Harry emerged into the room beyond the passage, there were several screams and yells: “HARRY!” “It’s Potter, it’s POTTER!” “Ron!” “Hermione!” He had a confused impression of colored hangings, of lamps and many faces. The next moment, he, Ron, and Hermione were engulfed, hugged, pounded on the back, their hair ruffled, their hands shaken, by what seemed to be more than twenty people: They might just have won a Quidditch final. “Okay, okay, calm down!” Neville called, and as the crowd backed away, Harry was able to take in their surroundings. He did not recognize the room at all. It was enormous, and looked rather like the interior of a particularly sumptuous tree house, or perhaps a gigantic ship’s cabin. Multicolored hammocks were strung from the ceiling and from a balcony that ran around the dark wood-paneled and windowless walls, which were covered in bright tapestry hangings: Harry saw the gold Gryffindor lion, emblazoned on scarlet;

The internet itself led him from one word to the next, giving links, pointing out. When it didn’t know something it tactfully kept quiet or stubbornly showed him the same pages, ad nauseam. Then Kunicki had the impression that he had just landed at the border of the known world, at the wall, at the membrane of the heavenly firmament. There wasn’t any way to break through it with his head and look through. The internet is a fraud. It promises so much—that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfillment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiply, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place where you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight, disappears in the passage of more and more pages, businesses that always promise more than they can give, shamelessly pretending that under the flat plane of the screen there is some cosmos. But nothing could be more deceptive, dear Kunicki. What are you, Kunicki, looking for? What are you aiming at? You feel like spreading out your arms and plunging into it, into that abyss, but there is nothing more deceptive: the landscape turns out to be a wallpaper, you can’t go any farther.

I hurled myself into the study of my subject with renewed fervor, able to see the dry facts and arid descriptions in the same transforming magical light that had favored them when I was younger. A scientific understanding of the beautifully synchronized and articulated motion of an owl's individual feathers during flight does not impede a poetic appreciation for the same phenomenon. Rather, the two enhance each other, a more lyrical eye lending the cold data a romance from which it has long been divorced. Immersing myself avidly in dusty and long untouched reference books I came across forgotten passages that would make me almost breathless, dreary-looking tomes that would reveal themselves to be treasure houses of iridescent wonder.

It seems to me just as imbecile, just as infernal, to have to go to the office on Monday,' said Jonathan, 'as it always has done and always will do. To spend all the best years of one's life sitting on a stool from nine to five, scratching in somebody's ledger! It's a queer use to make of one's...one and only life, isn't it? Or do I fondly dream?' He rolled over on the grass and looked up at Linda. 'Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner? The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody's ever going to let me out. That's a more intolerable situation than the other. For if I'd been--pushed in, against my will--kicking, even--once the door was locked, or at any rate in five years or so, I might have accepted the fact and begun to take an interest in the flight of flies or counting the warder's steps along the passage with particular attention to variations of tread and so on. But as it is, I'm like an insect that's flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God's earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I'm thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, "The shortness of life! The shortness of life!" I've only one night or one day, and there's this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored. [...] I'm exactly like that insect again. For some reason, it's not allowed, it's forbidden, it's against the insect law, to stop banging and flopping and crawling up the pane even for an instant.

My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.

The Portal Potion Success! After weeks and weeks of trying, I’ve finally discovered the correct ingredients for the potion I’d hoped to create for my son! With just a few drops, the potion turns any written work into a portal to the world it describes. Even with my ability to create portals to and from the Otherworld, I never thought it would be possible to create a substance that allowed me passage to any world I wished. My son will get to see the places and meet the characters he’s spent his whole childhood dreaming about! And best of all, I’ll get to watch his happiness soar as it happens! The ingredients are much simpler than I imagined, but difficult to obtain. Their purposes are more metaphysical than practical, so it took some imagination to get the concoction right. The first requirement is a branch from the oldest tree in the woods. To bring the pages to life, I figured the potion would need the very thing that brought the paper to life in the first place. And what else has more life than an ancient tree? The second ingredient is a feather from the finest pheasant in the sky. This will guarantee your potion has no limits, like a bird in flight. It will ensure you can travel to lands far and wide, beyond your imagination. The third component is a liquefied lock and key that belonged to a true love. Just as this person unlocked your heart to a life of love, it will open the door of the literary dimensions your heart desires to experience. The fourth ingredient is two weeks of moonlight. Just as the moon causes waves in the ocean, the moonlight will stir your potion to life. Last, but most important, give the potion a spark of magic to activate all the ingredients. Send it a beam of joy straight from your heart. The potion does not work on any biographies or history books, but purely on works that have been imagined. Now, I must warn about the dangers of entering a fictional world: 1. Time only exists as long as the story continues. Be sure to leave the book before the story ends, or you may disappear as the story concludes. 2. Each world is made of only what the author describes. Do not expect the characters to have any knowledge of our world or the Otherworld. 3. Beware of the story’s villains. Unlike people in our world or the Otherworld, most literary villains are created to be heartless and stripped of all morals, so do not expect any mercy should you cross paths with one. 4. The book you choose to enter will act as your entrance and exit. Be certain nothing happens to it; it is your only way out. The

She had no need in her heart for either book or magazine. She had her own way of escape, her own passage into contentment: her rosary. That string of white beads, the tiny links worn in a dozen places and held together by strands of white thread which in turn broke regularly, was, bead for bead, her quiet flight out of the world. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And Maria began to climb. Bead for bead, life and living fell away. Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Dream without sleep encompassed her. Passion without flesh lulled her. Love without death crooned the memory of belief. She was away: she was free; she was no longer Maria, American or Italian, poor or rich, with or without electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners; here was the land of all-possessing. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over, a thousand and a hundred thousand times, prayer upon prayer, the sleep of the body, the escape of the mind, the death of memory, the slipping away of pain, the deep silent reverie of belief. Hail Mary and Hail Mary. It was for this that she lived.

A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the land, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy breast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing behind, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and, at last, a furlong away slowly pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us.

The mythological hero setting forth from his common-day hut or castle is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There, he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother battle, dragon battle, offering, charm) or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifiction). Beyond this threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamilir yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give him magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divination (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft), intrinsically, it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformational flight). At the return threshold, the transcendental powers must remain behind;; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (resurrection, return). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir, eternal life).

For Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of matter. Sartre denies this for the world, and specifically denies, in the passage just referred to, that without potentiality there is no change. He reverts to the Megaric view of the matter, which Aristotle took such trouble to correct. But this is not our affair. The fact is that even if you believe in a Megaric world there is no such thing as a Megaric novel; not even Paterson. Change without potentiality in a novel is impossible, quite simply; though it is the hopeless aim of the cut-out writers, and the card-shuffle writers. A novel which really implemented this policy would properly be a chaos. No novel can avoid being in some sense what Aristotle calls 'a completed action.' This being so, all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if this implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause. Novels, then, have beginnings, ends, and potentiality, even if the world has not. In the same way it can be said that whereas there may be, in the world, no such thing as character, since a man is what he does and chooses freely what he does--and in so far as he claims that his acts are determined by psychological or other predisposition he is a fraud, lâche, or salaud--in the novel there can be no just representation of this, for if the man were entirely free he might simply walk out of the story, and if he had no character we should not recognize him. This is true in spite of the claims of the doctrinaire nouveau roman school to have abolished character. And Sartre himself has a powerful commitment to it, though he could not accept the Aristotelian position that it is through character that plot is actualized. In short, novels have characters, even if the world has not. What about time? It is, effectively, a human creation, according to Sartre, and he likes novels because they concern themselves only with human time, a faring forward irreversibly into a virgin future from ecstasy to ecstasy, in his word, from kairos to kairos in mine. The future is a fluid medium in which I try to actualize my potency, though the end is unattainable; the present is simply the pour-soi., 'human consciousness in its flight out of the past into the future.' The past is bundled into the en-soi, and has no relevance. 'What I was is not the foundation of what I am, any more than what I am is the foundation of what I shall be.' Now this is not novel-time. The faring forward is all right, and fits the old desire to know what happens next; but the denial of all causal relation between disparate kairoi, which is after all basic to Sartre's treatment of time, makes form impossible, and it would never occur to us that a book written to such a recipe, a set of discontinuous epiphanies, should be called a novel. Perhaps we could not even read it thus: the making of a novel is partly the achievement of readers as well as writers, and readers would constantly attempt to supply the very connections that the writer's programme suppresses. In all these ways, then, the novel falsifies the philosophy.

Most of these reveal a psychological shrewdness about human fallibility: • A man of genius is but seldom ruined but by himself. • If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle. • There are people whom one should like very well to drop, but would not wish to be dropped by. • All censure of self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare. • Man’s chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature. • No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. • Very few can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves. • Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage you think is particularly fine, strike it out. • Every man naturally persuades himself he can keep his resolutions; nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment. Through his moral essays, Johnson was able to impose order on the world, to anchor his experiences in the stability of the truth. He had to still himself in order to achieve an objective perception of the world. When people are depressed, they often feel overcome by a comprehensive and yet hard to pin down sadness. But Johnson jumps directly into the pain, pins it down, dissects it, and partially disarms it. In his essay on sorrow he observes that most passions drive you to their own extinction. Hunger leads to eating and satiety, fear leads to flight, lust leads to sex. But sorrow is an exception. Sorrow doesn’t direct you toward its own cure. Sorrow builds upon sorrow. That’s because sorrow is “that state of mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past, without looking forward to the future, an incessant wish that something were otherwise than it has been, a tormenting and harassing want of some enjoyment or possession we have lost.” Many try to avoid sorrow by living timid lives. Many try to relieve sorrow by forcing themselves to go to social events. Johnson does not approve of these stratagems. Instead, he advises, “The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment…. Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life and is remedied by exercise and motion.

Evie shook her head in confusion, staring from her husband’s wrathful countenance to Gully’s carefully blank one. “I don’t understand—” “Call it a rite of passage,” Sebastian snapped, and left her with long strides that quickly broke into a run. Picking up her skirts, Evie hurried after him. Rite of passage? What did he mean? And why wasn’t Cam willing to do something about the brawl? Unable to match Sebastian’s reckless pace, she trailed behind, taking care not to trip over her skirts as she descended the flight of stairs. The noise grew louder as she approached a small crowd that had congregated around the coffee room, shouts and exclamations renting the air. She saw Sebastian strip off his coat and thrust it at someone, and then he was shouldering his way into the melee. In a small clearing, three milling figures swung their fists and clumsily attempted to push and shove one another while the onlookers roared with excitement. Sebastian strategically attacked the man who seemed the most unsteady on his feet, spinning him around, jabbing and hooking with a few deft blows until the dazed fellow tottered forward and collapsed to the carpeted floor. The remaining pair turned in tandem and rushed at Sebastian, one of them attempting to pin his arms while the other came at him with churning fists. Evie let out a cry of alarm, which somehow reached Sebastian’s ears through the thunder of the crowd. Distracted, he glanced in her direction, and he was instantly seized in a mauling clinch, with his neck caught in the vise of his opponent’s arm while his head was battered with heavy blows. “No,” Evie gasped, and started forward, only to be hauled back by a steely arm that clamped around her waist. “Wait,” came a familiar voice in her ear. “Give him a chance.” “Cam!” She twisted around wildly, her panicked gaze finding his exotic but familiar face with its elevated cheekbones and thick-lashed golden eyes. “They’ll hurt him,” she said, clutching at the lapels of his coat. “Go help him— Cam, you have to—” “He’s already broken free,” Cam observed mildly, turning her around with inexorable hands. “Watch— he’s not doing badly.” One of Sebastian’s opponents let loose with a mighty swing of his arm. Sebastian ducked and came back with a swift jab. “Cam, why the d-devil aren’t you doing anything to help him?” “I can’t.” “Yes, you can! You’re used to fighting, far more than he—” “He has to,” Cam said, his voice quiet and firm in her ear. “He’ll have no authority here otherwise. The men who work at the club have a notion of leadership that requires action as well as words. St. Vincent can’t ask them to do anything that he wouldn’t be willing to do himself. And he knows that. Otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this right now.” Evie covered her eyes as one opponent endeavored to close in on her husband from behind while the other engaged him with a flurry of blows. “They’ll be loyal to him only if he is w-willing to use his fists in a pointless display of brute force?” “Basically, yes.

Harry strained his ears. Distantly, from the floor above, and growing fainter still, he heard the voice: ‘… I smell blood … I SMELL BLOOD!’ His stomach lurched. ‘It’s going to kill someone!’ he shouted, and ignoring Ron and Hermione’s bewildered faces, he ran up the next flight of steps three at a time, trying to listen over his own pounding footsteps. Harry hurtled around the whole of the second floor, Ron and Hermione panting behind him, not stopping until they turned a corner into the last, deserted passage. ‘Harry, what was that all about?’ said Ron, wiping sweat off his face. ‘I couldn’t hear anything …’ But Hermione gave a sudden gasp, pointing down the corridor. ‘Look!’ Something was shining on the wall ahead. They approached, slowly, squinting through the darkness. Foot-high words had been daubed on the wall between two windows, shimmering in the light cast by the flaming torches. THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE. ‘What’s that thing – hanging underneath?’ said Ron, a slight quiver in his voice. As they edged nearer, Harry almost slipped over: there was a large puddle of water on the floor. Ron and Hermione grabbed him, and they inched towards the message, eyes fixed on a dark shadow beneath it. All three of them realised what it was at once, and leapt backwards with a splash. Mrs Norris, the caretaker’s cat, was hanging by her tail from the torch bracket. She was stiff as a board, her eyes wide and staring. For a few seconds, they didn’t move. Then Ron said, ‘Let’s get out of here.

then coiling his length together, roaring like thunder underground, he sped from his deep lair through its great door, out into the huge passages of the mountain-palace and up towards the Front Gate. To hunt the whole mountain till he had caught the thief and had torn and trampled him was his one thought. He issued from the Gate, the waters rose in fierce whistling steam, and up he soared blazing into the air and settled on the mountain-top in a spout of green and scarlet flame. The dwarves heard the awful rumour of his flight, and they crouched against the walls of the grassy terrace cringing under boulders, hoping somehow to escape the frightful eyes of the hunting dragon. There they would have all been killed, if it had not been for Bilbo once again. “Quick! Quick!” he gasped.

Later, I learned from several transgender friends that the TSA scanners are designed to alert agents to “anomalies” in the groin area. Specifically, agents are instructed to additionally screen all people whose groins appear to differ from their perceived gender. Across the country, large numbers of transgender people are also being forced to navigate similar invasive sexual traumas simply to board a plane. We are told that the procedures of the Transportation Security Administration are supposed to make us safer. I did not feel safe. I was terrified and without recourse. While I stood in the “private screening room” with tears rolling down my face, the least of my concerns was some random person living out a political vendetta against the United States during my flight. I was terrified of having my genitalia touched without my consent by a stranger as a requisite for passage to my next destination. This is body terrorism.

The issue I have with the current discussions about the Metaverse is that the conventional wisdom narrows the focus on the Metaverse to the next increment to social media or the next step beyond a Zoom call. Where's the vision? Think beyond. When Boeing leverages a digital twin for airplane design/modelling, is that a form of the Metaverse? How about Da Vinci which is a robotic surgical system? Have you ever been on Flight of Passage at Disneyworld? Shouldn’t AI training (like for autonomous cars) be more like the Metaverse? Conventional wisdom might say no, those are not Metaverse. I say, forget conventional wisdom and forget the social media/office use case for Metaverse. The use cases are there to extract value from the current state of Metaverse technology, but they are not within the scope of the current conversations.

Kern was the classic oldest son of a strong, iron-willed father, secretly afraid that he couldn’t live up to the model, and thus quite skittish and sensitive to criticism. Even his appearance suggested vulnerability. He had feathery auburn hair with red highlights, broad cheeks and trusting brown eyes that opened wide with disappointment when he was hurt. He mostly excelled at things that required a lot of solitude and a minimum of social contact, math and science, and his best friend was a science nerd and ham-radio freak who lived in the village nearby, Louie DeChiaro.

And you know, while I’m at it, I don’t care what arcane passage you pull out of the Old Testament and run through your Jeremiah-begat-Jedediah Decoder Ring, one of the definitive tenets of Christianity is tolerance. Trust me, there’s no version of the Bible that says Love thy neighbor unless he’s a Peter Allen fan. Any supposedly Christian doctrine must have at the core a belief in the concept of unqualified love for your fellow man. Unless of course he proves himself to be a total asshole. Then you can ditch him. Sure, God understands that, who do you think booked Satan’s flight? What he can’t understand is turning against someone because you don’t happen to agree with their sexual preference. Forget your linear, biblical interpretation that tells you to ostracize gays, and follow your heart. It’s like when your driving test instructor would tell you to run the stop sign. And you would, and then he’d flunk you. And you’d say, “But you told me to.” And he’d say, “Sorry, but you never run a stop sign.” And you never carpet bomb a group of people with hate because they’re different from you. Case closed, Tail-gunner Joe.

West was remote in the minds of most New Yorkers during the holiday season of 1948. But, despite the new wealth that was flooding into the city, and the self-confidence that victory naturally brought, there was a generalized sense of anxiety about the future. “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible,” the essayist E. B. White had observed that summer. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.” White was writing at the dawn of the nuclear age, and the feeling of vulnerability was quite new. “In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning,” he observed, “New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

The first work of revealed truth is to secure an unconditional surrender of the sinner to the will of God. Until this has been accomplished, nothing really lasting has been done at all. The reader may admire the rich imagery of the Bible, its bold figures and impassioned flights of eloquence; he may enjoy its tender musical passages, and revel in its strong homely wisdom; but until he has submitted to its full authority over his life, he has secured no good from it yet.

Until I read about it nearly twenty years later, in a book about instrument flying, I didn’t realize that I suffered throughout our flight from something called copilot vertigo. The phenomenon is especially severe in tandem-seat designs like Cubs, where visibility over the pilot in front is limited.

Non-violence (ahiṁsā) is the exhibitor and illuminating light for the spiritual passage that one should pursue. It is an island of relief for human beings who are drowning in the ocean of material existence. It is the salvation, shelter, and remedial state. It is the foundation on which the building of spiritual achievements rests. Non-violence is a comfort for those who fear any unwanted acts that might be inflicted against them. It is as beneficial as a flight in the open sky is for birds. It is quenching for the thirsty, and nutritious for the hungry. It is medicine to cure the sick and is akin to a ship of salvation upon the ocean of recurring life cycles. These are just a few instances, but non-violence is vastly more healing. It brings a surplus of welfare for all, auspicious for the earth, water, wind, fire, vegetation, seeds, and water-bound, earth-bound, air-bound, insects, and all other livings beings. Undoubtedly non-violence is like a mother who bestows life while protecting all living beings from vexatious elements. Non-violence is like an elixir of life with an endless supply, whereas violence is like a venom and a repository of toxic elements.

It seems to me just as imbecile, just as infernal, to have to go to the office on Monday,’ said Jonathan, ‘as it always has done and always will do. To spend all the best years of one’s life sitting on a stool from nine to five, scratching in somebody’s ledger! It’s a queer use to make of one’s… one and only life, isn’t it? Or do I fondly dream?’ He rolled over on the grass and looked up at Linda. ‘Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner. The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody’s ever going to let me out. That’s a more intolerable situation than the other. For if I’d been – pushed in, against my will – kicking, even – once the door was locked, or at any rate in five years or so, I might have accepted the fact and begun to take an interest in the flight of flies or counting the warder’s steps along the passage with particular attention to variations of tread and so on. But as it is, I’m like an insect that’ flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God’s earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I’m thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, ‘The shortness of life! The shortness of life! I’ve only one night or one day, and there’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.

Whenever you make an agreement with yourself, you have to stick to it.

The issue I have with most of what is written about the Metaverse is that the conventional wisdom narrows the focus on the Metaverse to the next increment to social media or a the next step beyond a Zoom call. Where's the vision? Think beyond. When Boeing leverages a digital twin for airplane design/modeling, is that a form of the Metaverse? How about Da Vinci which is a robotic surgical system? Have you ever been on Flight of Passage at Disneyworld? Conventional wisdom might say no, those are not Metaverse. I say, forget conventional wisdom and forget the social media use case for Metaverse. The use cases are there to extract value from the current state of Metaverse technology, but they are not within the scope of the current conversations.

Occasionally it is not the language, but the structure of the sentences, which is so inventive. A classic example is the way he finds a means to express the mesmeric effect created by wader flocks on tidal mud and also their random, chaotic shapelessness. The faint, insistent sadness of grey plover calling. Turnstones and dunlin rising. Twenty greenshank calling, flying high; grey and white as gulls, as sky. Bar-tailed godwits flying with curlew, with knot, with plover; seldom alone; seldom settling; snuffling eccentrics; long-nosed, loud-calling sea-rejoicers; their call a snorting, sneezing, mewing, spitting bark. Their thin upcurved bills turn, their heads turn, their shoulders and whole bodies turn, their wings waggle. They flourish their rococo flight above the surging water. As the passage demonstrates, Baker was never afraid of brevity, repetition or stating the obvious. One of my favourite sentences in The Peregrine is, ‘Nothing happened.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that went them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

He insisted that the highest sort of reason is intuitive, not logical. Learning intuitively, we will immediately notice the deterministic necessity of the existence of all things. Everything that is necessary cannot be otherwise. When we realize this, we will experience great relief and purification. We will no longer be unsettled by the loss of our belongings, by the passage of time, by aging or death. In this way we will gain control over our affects and attain some peace of mind. We must simply remember the primitive desire to judge what is good and what is bad, just as civilized man must remember primitive drives- revenge, greed, possessiveness. God, which is to say nature, is neither good nor bad; it's an ill used intellect that stains our emotions. Philip believed that all our knowledge of nature is in reality knowledge of God. This is what frees us from sorrow, the despair, the envy and anxiety that are our hell.

I don’t know whether it was that night or some other I found the soliloquy from Richard the Second. I only know that finding it let me sail off some blind cliff face into full-blown flight: —Of comfort no man speak: Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write our sorrow on the bosom of the earth… . Sure the passage was dark. But in my somewhat magical system of thought, pessimism served as a hedge against disaster. Think the worst, and you stave it off.

Every life moves far too swiftly. A few anecdotes, one or two passages of laughter, a midnight flight of sorrow, and then the end.

At the time your book was written, the full story of the monarch migration was unknown to humanity." "When did they find it out?" Preston asked. The answer, to Dellarobia's astonishment, was within Ovid's lifetime. He had been just a bit older than Preston when the discovery was announced in the National Geographic, in 1976. A Canadian scientist chased the mystery his whole life, devising a tag that would stick to butterfly wings, recruiting volunteers to help track them, losing the trail many times. And then one winter's day, as an old man on shaky legs, he climbed a mountain in Michoacan to see what must have looked like his dream of heaven... Ovid could still quote passages of the article from memory: They carpeted the ground in their tremulous legions. He said he remembered exactly where he was when he read that article, and how he felt. "Where were you?" "Outside the post office, sitting on a lobster crate. I spent a lot of Saturdays there. My mother let me read the magazines before they went to their subscribers. I was so excited by the photos in that article, I ran all the way down Crown Street, all the way to West End and out a sandy road called Fortuna to the sea. I must have picked up a stick somewhere, because I remember jumping up and whacking every branch I passed, leaving a trail of flying leaves. When I got to the sea I didn't know what to do, so I threw the stick in Perseverance Bay and ran back. It was the happiest day of my life." Dellarobia wanted, of course, to know why. "Why," he repeated, thinking about it. "It was just like any schoolboy. I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

She had no need in her heart for either book or magazine. She had her own way of escape, her own passage into contentment: her rosary. That string of white beads, the tiny links worn in a dozen places and held together by strands of white thread which in turn broke regularly, was, bead for bead, her quiet flight out of the world. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And Maria began to climb. Bead for bead, life and living fell away. Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Dream without sleep encompassed her. Passion without flesh lulled her. Love without death crooned the memory of belief. She was away: she was free; she was no longer Maria, American or Italian, poor or rich, with or without electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners; here was the land of all-possessing. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over, a thousand and a hundred thousand times, prayer upon prayer, the sleep of the body, the escape of the mind, the death of memory, the slipping away of pain, the deep silent reverie of belief. Hail Mary and Hail Mary. It was for this that she lived.

out, “‘and a most uncomfortable passage is a good possibility—’ “‘Oh—we wouldn’t go by ship. We would fly,’ said he.” Fly? McCrea was shocked. No U.S. president had flown while in office—ever. “This was a great surprise to me because I knew he did not regard flying with any degree of enthusiasm,” McCrea recounted. Mr. Roosevelt had not flown in a decade, in fact, since traveling to Chicago from New York before the 1932 election. In terms of the President’s safety, waging a world war, it seemed a grave and unnecessary risk—especially in terms of distance, and flight into an active war zone. But the President was the president. McCrea had therefore softened his objection. “I quickly saw that I was being stymied and I tried to withdraw a bit. “‘Mr. Pres.,’ said I, ‘you have taken me quite by surprise with this proposal. I would like to give it further thought. Right off the top of my head I wouldn’t recommend it.’” When, the next morning, Captain McCrea went upstairs to the President’s Oval Study, carrying with him some of the latest reports, secret signals, decoded enemy signals, and top-secret cables from the Map Room—of which he was the director—he’d recognized the futility of opposing the idea. It was a colossal risk, he still thought, but he knew the President

Gas She had never been in this part of Paris before—only reading of it in the novels of Duvain, or seeing it at the Grand Guignol. So this was the Montmartre? That horror where danger lurked under cover of night; where innocent souls perished without warning—where doom confronted the unwary—where the Apache revelled. She moved cautiously in the shadow of the high wall, looking furtively backward for the hidden menace that might be dogging her steps. Suddenly she darted into an alley way, little heeding where it led . . . groping her way on in the inky blackness, the one thought of eluding the pursuit firmly fixed in her mind . . . on she went . . . Oh! when would it end? . . . Then a doorway from which a light streamed lent itself to her vision . . . In here . . . anywhere, she thought. The door stood at the head of a flight of stairs . . . stairs that creaked with age as she endeavoured to creep down . . . then she heard the sound of drunken laughter and shuddered—surely this was—No, not that. Anything but that! She reached the foot of the stairs and saw an evil-smelling wine bar, with wrecks of what were once men and women indulging in a drunken orgy . . . then they saw her, a vision of affrighted purity. Half a dozen men rushed towards her amid the encouraging shouts of the rest. She was seized. She screamed with terror . . . better had she been caught by her pursuer was her one fleeting thought as they dragged her roughly across the room. The fiends lost no time in settling her fate. They would share her belongings . . . and she . . . Why! Was this not the heart of Montmartre? She should go—the rats should feast. Then they bound her and carried her down the dark passage, up a flight of stairs to the riverside. The water rats should feast, they said. And then . . . swinging her bound body to and fro, dropped her with a splash into the dark, swirling waters. Down she went, down, down. Conscious only of a choking sensation, this was death . . . then . . . "It's out, Madam," said the dentist. "Half a crown, please."—HITCH

If other planets dark as earth About dim trembling stars Carry frail freight of death and birth, Wild love, and endless wars; If from far, unseen motes in flight Life look down questioning This helpless passage through the night Is a less lonely thing:

A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.