Fragments Of My Mind Quotes

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action - Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

you came and I was crazy for you and you cooled my mind that burned with longing

If she is Shadow, then I am Flame. This girl is the very thing I can’t seem to escape—can’t seem to go anywhere without the remnants of her following. Where I am, she is. Whether it’s in the flesh or in the fragments of my mind. And where there is a flame, there is always a shadow. She is my inevitable.

This girl is the very thing I can’t seem to escape—can’t seem to go anywhere without the remnants of her following. Where I am, she is. Whether it’s in the flesh or in the fragments of my mind.

I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots.

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees.

What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania. “She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—” “Where did she get it from?” “Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.” Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.” Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound. He was barely breathing. “The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure, told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage, to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?

Already the dream was coming apart, its bright silk strands unwinding into nebulous emotions, little coloured clouds of feeling being dispersed by the movement of my waking-up mind. This is how it's always been with Light Bulb Fragment dreams; by the time I'm fully awake, they're gone.

there is a continuity of mind, as the Yogis call it. The mind is universal. Your mind, my mind, all these little minds, are fragments of that universal mind, little waves in the ocean; and

Maybe some hidden, fragmented part of me had feared that if I admitted to Bones how much he truly meant to me, then I'd be acknowledging to myself that he had the power to destroy me more thoroughly than anyone, even Apollyon or the vampire council, could. All the rest of the world could only kill or devastate my mind and body. Bones alone held the power to demolish my soul.

Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmented first into phrases and then words; finally, only sounds remained.

...my ability to trust had been shattered into splinters, its fragmented shards slicing through every darkened recess of my mind, his absolution won my over all the more.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.

Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

A pang of deep longing ripples through me. I’m torn between my promise to send Aydan to the Abyss and my need to keep him safe. The opposing forces fragment what remains of my mind, breaking me down once again.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments . . . . My Father, let my country awake. —Rabindranath Tagore

There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said, meditatively. “But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupation in my head—round and round continually.” He made a circular motion with his hands. “And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes—not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep—the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows –a crystal quiet, a growing expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying, as well as beautiful. For one’s alone in the crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand up, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be and end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously n some strange unheard-of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying; it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds and of all the fornications you’ll never commit.

Mostly I read at this hour, perusing the pile of books that live by my favourite chair, waiting to offer up fragments of learning, rather than inviting cover-to-cover pursuits. I browse a chapter here, a segment there, or hunt through an index for a matter that’s on my mind. I love such loose, exploratory reading. For once, I am not reading to escape; instead, having already made my getaway, I am able to roam through the extra space I’ve found, as restless and impatient as I like, revelling in the play of my own absorption. They say that we should dance like no one is watching. I think that applies to reading, too.

My mind will never be what it used to be. It will be fragmented and broken forever.Before, it only had a sliver of a crack inside of it, brought on by the years of abuse I suffered at Daddy's hand. Now, it's like a stick of dynamite was inserted into my brain at some point and my mind has blown up in front of me.

When I get up in the morning I go straight back to bed again. I feel best in the evening, the moment I dowse the candle, pull the eiderdown over my head. I raise myself up once more, look about the room with an indescribable peace of mind, and then it's goodnight, down under the eiderdown.

I do question everything. But I want to have my questions. I want to have more thoughts than my mind can hold, so many that I have to write them in fragments like a madman.

Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial. All this has afflicted them through their ignorance of true good and evil. But I have that the nature of good is what is right, and the nature of evil what is wrong; and I reflected that the nature of the offender himself is akin to my own -- not a kinship of blood or seed, but a sharing in the same mind, the same fragment of divinity. Therefore I cannot be harmed by any of them, as none will infect me with their wrong. Nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him. We were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work in opposition to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action; Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!” —Rabindranath Tagore

The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the domw of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture. There would be a landscape I have not seen before, unfamiliar melodic echoes, whisperings in a chaos of tongues.

At start of spring I open a trench In the ground. I put into it The winter’s accumulation of paper, Pages I do not want to read Again, useless words, fragments, errors. And I put into it the contents of the outhouse: light of the suns, growth of the ground, Finished with one of their journeys. To the sky, to the wind, then, and to the faithful trees, I confess my sins: that I have not been happy enough, considering my good luck; have listened to too much noise, have been inattentive to wonders, have lusted after praise. And then upon the gathered refuse, of mind and body, I close the trench folding shut again the dark, the deathless earth. Beneath that seal the old escapes into the new.

I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this "I" who would write himself? Even as he would enter into the writing, the writing would take the wind out of his sails, would render him null and void -- futile; a gradual dilapidation would occur, in which the other's image, too, would be gradually involved (to write on something is to outmode it), a disgust whose conclusion could only be: what's the use? what obstructs amorous writing is the illusion of expressivity: as a writer, or assuming myself to be one, I continue to fool myself as to the effects of language: I do not know that the word "suffering" expresses no suffering and that, consequently, to use it is not only to communicate nothing but even, and immediately, to annoy, to irritate (not to mention the absurdity). Someone would have to teach me that one cannot write without burying "sincerity" (always the Orpheus myth: not to turn back). What writing demands, and what any lover cannot grant it without laceration, is to sacrifice a little of his Image-repertoire, and to assure thereby, through his language, the assumption of a little reality. All I might produce, at best, is a writing of the Image-repertoire; and for that I would have to renounce the Image-repertoire of writing -- would have to let myself be subjugated by my language, submit to the injustices (the insults) it will not fail to inflict upon the double Image of the lover and of his other. The language of the Image-repertoire would be precisely the utopia of language: an entirely original, paradisiac language, the language of Adam -- "natural, free of distortion or illusion, limpid mirror of our sense, a sensual language (die sensualische Sprache)": "In the sensual language, all minds converse together, they need no other language, for this is the language of nature.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; … Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.53

The only dedication in one of the hosts of books I have had the privilege of knowing, is from the great contemporary thinker, Will Durant whose incredible encyclopedic mind had within it- the poetry of the heart, I quote: “ TO MY WIFE Grow strong, my comrade…that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.

For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever widening thought and action; Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!”5 RABINDRANATH TAGORE

I woke up with a start, a little after 5:30 in the morning, to that wonderful feeling that lasts only a fraction of a second, when you don’t know where you are—not even what continent you’re on! I jumped up from the futon and went over to my computer to make a note of the few fragments of the dream I could still hold on to before they completely melted away in the mind’s morning fog. The complexity and the confusion of the adventure put me in a good mood: I take such dreams as a sign that my brain is in good working order.

In one enciphering corner of my mind I believe still that every line in every poem is the orphaned caption of a lost photograph. By a related logic, each photograph sits in the antechamber of speech. Undissolved fragments of the past can be seen through the skin of photograph.

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...

For it is indeed pointless and foolish to seek to get from another what one can get from oneself. [32] Since I can get greatness of soul and nobility of mind from myself, shall I seek to get a patch of land from you, or a bit of money, or some public post? Heaven forbid! I won’t overlook my own resources in such a manner. [33] But if someone is abject and cowardly, what on earth can one do for him except write letters for him as though on behalf of a corpse, ‘Do please grant us the corpse of this man and a pint of his miserable blood’; [34] for in truth such a person is merely a corpse and a pint of blood, and nothing more. If he amounted to anything more, he would realize that no one suffers misfortune because of the actions of another.

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be “just like us,” so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple “selves” have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different “moods.” In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients.

Yes, I know that now that there is truth in beauty and beauty in truth. My nature is to be depressive and come out of it and write, and enjoy writing and feeling as if I have a passion and excitement and love and euphoria for it and then I go 'back to sleep again' where I can eat and watch television and not work, not be productive and then just as if a magic switch is turned on I can do it all over again. I don't mind the being depressed part. Sometimes it seems to fuel me. The anger though is gone now that was there in my twenties and even earlier in my youth. Your voice is Tolstoy’s, Hemingway’s, Updike’s, Styron’s, Mcewan’s, Greene’s, Fugard’s, Kundera’s, Rilke’s while I am the incarnate of Radcliffe Hall crossing both genders effortlessly. You betray nothing. There is son in the picture. A small boy but you don’t introduce him to me. Obsessions are unhealthy creatures. They make you mentally ill, emotionally unstable; leave you with a chemistry of deep sadness in your life. I have my writing. It keeps me from disintegrating into fractions. I should stop now before I begin to make myself cry.

There, there, best to bring it all up,' she said. My memory was in shreds. Imagine a photograph cut into narrow strips then jumbled up. Everything is there, but you can't see the whole picture and even the strips have no bearing on reality. I did know I had consumed a large amount of alcohol. But I must have done something crazier than just being found drunk to have a nurse sitting by my bed. I thought it would be a good idea to say something and planned it for several seconds. 'She's all right,' I said. 'Who is?' asked the nurse. 'Alice. I'm all right now.' As I spoke I wondered if I had said something wrong. didn't sound like me. There were so many voices muttering in the background it was hard to tell.

What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death. The thought of an after-life frightened and fatigued me. I had never been able to adapt myself to the world in which I was now living. Of what use would another world be to me ? I felt that this world had not been made for me but for a tribe of brazen, money-grubbing, blustering louts, sellers of conscience, hungry of eye and heart—for people, in fact, who had been created in its own likeness and who fawned and grovelled before the mighty of earth and heaven as the hungry dog outside the butcher’s shop wagged his tail in the hope of receiving a fragment of offal. The thought of an after-life frightened and fatigued me. No, I had no desire to see all these loathsome worlds peopled with repulsive faces. Was God such a parvenu that He insisted on my looking over His collection of worlds ? I must speak as I think. If I had to go through another life, then I hoped that my mind and senses would be numb. In that event I could exist without effort and weariness. I would live my life in the shadow of the columns of some lingam temple. I would retire into some corner where the light of the sun would never strike my eyes and the words of men and the noise of life never grate upon my ears.

All these my exaltation of mind has borne along with it and kept alive through the succession of the years, while all around them the paths have vanished and those who trod them, and even the memory of those who trod them, are dead. Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly in my mind like a flowering Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time - perhaps, quite simply, from what dream - it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I regard the Meseglise and the Guermantes ways. It is because I believed in this and in people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that still bring me joy.

Every thought rolling through my mind is an unconnected fragment.

Getting Sad is just something normal people feel but Depression is for the broken ones

Whispering wind, a quiet breath exhaled across years of tiny, fragments of light. Glowing in the breeze, like silent fireworks, accentuating my wanders through life’s debris. [Whispering Wind]

Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, these cockroaches were sadomasochists, looking for the most painful way to die. Once I swallowed one absent-mindedly drinking my tea. Traumatised, I rang the local chemist. The voice on the line was gently reassuring: cockroaches were not poisonous, ingesting one would cause me no harm. Though, the chemist added, in terms of protein they were not as nutritious as snails.

When I wasn't internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I'd heard over the course of my life - bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad.

In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.

I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners - whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter. The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us - those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us.

I say I think my poems now are finer than anything I've ever done; I only hope that is the judgement of a ruined mind, with critical faculties shocked and fragmented on grief; because if they are great ... they cost too much!

What is Required by Paul Allen (fragment) 1 All elsewhere being World, how many times have I stood in the bright shadows of a wood, no track or trail leading in, out- as though ground cover renewed as I went through? I sometimes own the moments where I stand alone. Everything else is air and arbitrary firings of neurons we call memory if they happened, fantasy if they didn’t- same pictures. Call it prayer, then, the moments where I’m not aware even of how lovely the moment is- not liking, not disliking- not aware there is a moment until I’m back in the world and remember it- construct it in my mind as having been beautiful. 4 I’m too often bitten by silence. My mother called it dawdling, the ex, brooding. My students call it absent-minded professor. The kindest students bring me back gently. But I live most when silence, shade, and light like this harvest me, a kind of prayer I’m gathered to, not the prayer I clutter with will or words.

In my heart I begged the escritoire forgiveness for the harsh treatment, while my mind found its doubt corroborated – that the outward after all is not the inward, and my empirical proposition confirmed – that luck is needed to make such discoveries.

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as 'fragments'. which are 'relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the person's life. A fragment might be a frightened child who holds the memory of one particular abuse incident.' In complex multiples, Dr Ross continues, the 'personalities are relatively full-bodied, complete states capable of a range of emotions and behaviours.' The alters will have 'executive control some substantial amount of time over the person's life'. He stresses, and I repeat his emphasis, 'Complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesia barriers are associated with 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse.' Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

it felt increasingly, as I became more whole, that I had made it all up, and that I was a phoney. I had to come to some place of acceptance. If I made it all up, then I am an unspeakably evil person, leading so many wonderful, intelligent people astray. What a scheming mind I must have. I knowledge will be hard too live with. But harder still is the thought that perhaps, just perhaps it is all true; that I really was horribly, ritualistically abused in a satanic setting, over and over again and as a result my mind fragmented. The implications of that are completely overwhelming. It was me, my body, that they did those things to. No, I would rather believe I am an evil and deceitful person. At least the I can change, and say sorry, and live a better life from now on.

These scattered fragments of Afropean experience had formed a mosaic inside my mind, not monolithic, but not entirely amorphous either, rather, the Afropean reality was a bricolage of blackness and I’d experienced an Africa that was both in and out of Europe.

I watch the disparate fragments float up and disappear, without comment. Pure unpretentious visions. In my mind, however, these simple scenes summon forth a sadness that I can find no words for. Like a ship sailing past a window, they appear only to disappear without a trace.

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery.

I must have been about four years old when Russia took hold of me with giant hands. That grip has never lessened. For me, the love of my heart, the fulfilment of the senses and the kingdom of the mind all met here. This book is the story of my obsession. In her essays, The Sentimental Traveller, Vernon Lee wrote of her emotion for Italy thus: ‘There are moments in all our lives, most often, alas! during childhood, when we possess the mystic gift of consecration, of steeping things in our soul’s essence, and making them thereby different from all others, for ever sovereign and sacred to us.’ So Italy became to her – so Russia to me.

This is a time in which very few activities seem right. Mostly I read at this hour, perusing the pile of books that live by my favourite chair, waiting to offer up fragments of learning, rather than inviting cover-to-cover pursuits. I browse a chapter here, a segment there, or hunt through an index for a matter that’s on my mind. I love such loose, exploratory reading. For once, I am not reading to escape; instead, having already made my getaway, I am able to roam through the extra space I’ve found, as restless and impatient as I like, revelling in the play of my own absorption. They say that we should dance like no one is watching. I think that applies to reading, too.

When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action is clear in mind when I start -- so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing it seems almost physically from my brain down the arm to my moving hand that they begin to live and move and have their being and assume a different kind of truth.

Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

Singing at the Edge of Need by Susan Laughter Meyers (fragment) Three things I turned my back to: light, the past, the trunk of an old tree. One by one each unfastened itself. To sit is to present when the roll is called. I knew that. I wore my hat of straw, fringed like fingers sifting a breeze. My hat collecting a thousand thoughts… …I had no map and few lessons yet to guide me. I was a study of questions. O Grandmother, I was small, sitting in the midst of wildness, a child thrilling at the boss of thunder. A rustle of leaves, moss tipping at me- I was small, I was hunger, I was thirst- wings flitting in a brush pile. O Grandmother, I was small, kneeling in the midst of wonder, quaking and singing at the edge of need.

The mind splices fragments of sensation and language into story after story. The blood in my veins and every blade of grass is oxygen, sugar, photosynthesis, genetic expression, electrochemistry, and time. I watch clouds crush the last bit of pink sky. Breath slips even as I inhale, even as snow falls out of season and mud thaws, even as lightning ignites a late spring.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

Ada rose even more in my estimation at that. I realized she had got completely lost in the male narrative and her mind, which had to be both sensitive and sharp, had been absorbing fragments of it here and there and compiling them into a logical account of herself. The holy Madonna cannot simply have sex in its most basic form. The act must, of course, lead to something magnificent.

I cannot lie to you,” he whispered. “You know my thoughts. You know the beast that dwells inside. I try to be gentle with you, to listen to you. Always that wildness breaks free, but you tame me. Raven, please, I need you. And you need me. Your body is weak, I can feel your hunger. Your mind is fragmented--allow me to heal you. Your body cries out for mine as mine does for yours. Kiss me, Raven. Do not give up on us.

He is a stud. He was made to mate. To procreate. And I want him like my next breath. I want him more than any one of these screaming women wants him. I want every fragmented part of him. I want his body. His mind. His heart. His beautiful soul. He says he’s mine, but I know that there’s a part of Remington Tate nobody will ever have. I am his, but he is untamable and unconquerable. The only one who can defeat Remington Tate is himself.

I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable— the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art. I was curious and eager to know only what I believed to be more real than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of showing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of nature as it appeared when left entirely to itself, without human interference. Just as the beautiful sound of her voice, reproduced by itself on the gramophone, would never console one for the loss of one's mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the Exhibition.

A person whom questions the purpose behind enduring life strafed with pain and self-doubt must construct a self-rescue plan. Does a demoralized person discover contentment and a meaningful life through expanded intellectual studies or by becoming engrossed in living deeply connected to nature? Should I seek personal conquest and eradication of ugly segments of my persona or merger and unification of the irrational splinters of a fragmented and traumatized personality? How does a person express what it means to be human? How does a person locate the incandescent flash of their flesh? If I shout into the wind with all my might, will responsive people hear my wild cry? Will placing pen to paper buffet the cantos of a troubled mind, expose the operatic musings of a madman’s ranting song, or will looking at each day through the diverse lens of both detachment and solipsism ignite an illuminating shaft of wisdom to grace the sinkhole of a fallen man?

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. This

...had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies: a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

Those who think that the realization of the dream of immortality is now only a matter of time have speculated on the scenario of downloading—or backing up—the entire contents of our brain on an extremely powerful computer. But haven't we for centuries now been downloading the contents of our mind onto sheets of paper, by writing or drawing? Already in antiquity, the invention of literature coincided with the notion of the immortality of those who write—because people continue to read them and, in a certain sense, converse with them, long after their death.

Am I clear? Am I making myself clear? And yet in Ischia I was happy, full of love. But it was no use, my head always finds a chink to peer through, beyond - above, beneath, on the side - where the fear is. In Bruno’s factory, for example, the bones of the animals cracked in your fingers if you merely touched them, and a rancid marrow spilled out. I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet in my mind. I can’t stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.

I am very often asked why, at the age of eighty-five, I continue to practice. Tip number eighty-five (sheer coincidence that I am now eighty-five years old) begins with a simple declaration: my work with patients enriches my life in that it provides meaning in life. Rarely do I hear therapists complain of a lack of meaning. We live lives of service in which we fix our gaze on the needs of others. We take pleasure not only in helping our patients change, but also in hoping their changes will ripple beyond them toward others. We are also privileged by our role as cradlers of secrets. Every day patients grace us with their secrets, often never before shared. The secrets provide a backstage view of the human condition without social frills, role-playing, bravado, or stage posturing. Being entrusted with such secrets is a privilege given to very few. Sometimes the secrets scorch me and I go home and hold my wife and count my blessings. Moreover, our work provides the opportunity to transcend ourselves and to envision the true and tragic knowledge of the human condition. But we are offered even more. We become explorers immersed in the grandest of pursuits—the development and maintenance of the human mind. Hand in hand with patients, we savor the pleasure of discovery—the “aha” experience when disparate ideational fragments suddenly slide smoothly together into a coherent whole. Sometimes I feel like a guide escorting others through the rooms of their own house. What a treat it is to watch them open doors to rooms never before entered, discover unopened wings of their house containing beautiful and creative pieces of identity. Recently I attended a Christmas service at the Stanford Chapel to hear a sermon by Rev. Jane Shaw that underscored the vital importance of love and compassion. I was moved by her call to put such sentiments into practice whenever we can. Acts of caring and generosity can enrich any environment in which we find ourselves. Her words motivated me to reconsider the role of love in my own profession. I became aware that I have never, not once, used the word love or compassion in my discussions of the practice of psychotherapy. It is a huge omission, which I wish now to correct, for I know that I regularly experience love and compassion in my work as a therapist and do all I can to help patients liberate their love and generosity toward others. If I do not experience these feelings for a particular patient, then it is unlikely I will be of much help. Hence I try to remain alert to my loving feelings or absence of such feelings for my patients.

Since I began meditating in 1979 (steadily, if not as regularly as intended), I have been a successful songwriter devoted to the greatest good, with my creative ego in service of the whole. Interestingly, I can’t recall any “writer’s block,” ever. Through a sustained channel of appreciative inquiry into the human and Divine, I’m flooded with ideas. (All the more reason to sit quiet, to bathe in the Akashic realm, in universal mind.) If anything, the number of song fragments and essay themes streaming in require more time and consideration than there are hours in a given day or week. This creative abundance is a great joy and, only sometimes, a burden.

I think in the ever growing diversity of the distinct and person-centred presentations of autism it is important to know and acknowledge the crucial differences between Autism & Asperger's Syndrome. Both are which are forms of autism but have different "mechanics" that drive them. I have Autism (as opposed to Asperger's Syndrome) I live in a world before the literal, words tumble in my mind into sounds I love tone, melody and beats they brings my world alive. I live in world world where visuals hold no significance fragmented and not in my "mind's eye" and need to be touched in order to be "seen". I like elevated gesture and tone when people speak dead words wander alive into my mind and give them meaning and circumstance. Where a sense of "self" is not wanting to be exposed by the directness of people but at the same time I want to understand "other" even if I struggle to at times. I am empathic young man and this not through lack of care nor wanting. I care deeply. Logic and literalism are not the name of the game for me to "decode" the word around me it's sensing, patterning and feeling to gain an "understanding". I am using a different part of my brain. So as with AS Autism has many different presentations too this is mine. I think it is important to know differences it has helped me so much to know that.

The only part of my existence in which I experience any sense of fragmentation is in that last strange conversation with the Other. And so I have to ask Myself: whose memory is at fault? Mine or his? Might he in fact be remembering conversations that never happened? Two memories. Two bright minds which remember past events differently. It is an awkward situation. There exists no third person to say which of us is correct. (If only the Sixteenth Person were here!) As for the Other's claim that I lose time and muddle days, I do not see how this can possibly be true, I invented the calendar I use, so how could it get 'out of sync' as he put it? There is nothing for it to get out of sync with.

I doubted it, but perhaps I was wrong. I wished, then, that I could go with Tim-quit my job at the record store, just take off and go. Maybe never return. Stay in Israel forever. Become a citizen. Convert to Judaism. If they'd have me. Tim could probably swing it. Maybe in Israel I'd stop mixing metaphors and remembering poems. Maybe my mind would give up trying to solve problems in terms of recycled words. Used phrases, bits ripped from here and there: fragments from my days at Cal in which I had memorized but not understood, understood but not applied, applied but never successfully. A spectator to the destruction of my friends, I said to myself; one who records on a notepad the names of those who die, and did not manage to save any of them, not even one

As there is no appearance of daylight, what is to be done during the night? It occurred to me that I would arise and examine, by my lamp, the wails of my cell. They are covered with writings, with drawings, fantastic figures, and names which mix with and efface each other. It would appear that each prisoner had wished to leave behind him some trace here at least. Pencil, chalk, charcoal, — black, white, grey letters; sometimes deep carvings upon the stone. If my mind were at ease, I could take an interest in this strange book, which  is developed page by page, to my eyes, on each stone of this dungeon. I should like to recompose these fragments of thought; to trace a character for each name; to give sense and life to these mutilated inscriptions, — these dismembered phrases.

This scroll is my personal obituary, a journal that documents my time toiling on this rocky orb. I labored to say who I am, how I lived, and frame the troubling questions regarding what I seek. I wrote in order to penetrate illusions, address the tedium of existence, gain insight into my true nature, and give conscious shape to the vestiges of a tormented man. I used this written journey of the mind to explore all prior reference points of self-identity and toiled to meld the disharmonious components of a fragmented psyche into a wholesome human being. Writing was a tool employed to use conscious suffering mercilessly to suppress a caustic ego and resurrect a more inclusive, synthetic, and unitive consciousness that no longer wants for anything or suffers from the travails of life.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalizing once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore.

It is necessary to make this point in answer to the `iatrogenic' theory that the unveiling of repressed memories in MPD sufferers, paranoids and schizophrenics can be created in analysis; a fabrication of the doctor—patient relationship. According to Dr Ross, this theory, a sort of psychiatric ping-pong 'has never been stated in print in a complete and clearly argued way'. My case endorses Dr Ross's assertions. My memories were coming back to me in fragments and flashbacks long before I began therapy. Indications of that abuse, ritual or otherwise, can be found in my medical records and in notebooks and poems dating back before Adele Armstrong and Jo Lewin entered my life. There have been a number of cases in recent years where the police have charged groups of people with subjecting children to so-called satanic or ritual abuse in paedophile rings. Few cases result in a conviction. But that is not proof that the abuse didn't take place, and the police must have been very certain of the evidence to have brought the cases to court in the first place. The abuse happens. I know it happens. Girls in psychiatric units don't always talk to the shrinks, but they need to talk and they talk to each other. As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. (Alice refers to her constant infections as a child, which were never recognised as caused by sexual abuse)

It is not easy being seventy-nine and lose your whole life- my life was that girl. I guess that my assignment in life is over my next stop is up on the hill, next to her I presume.' ‘Life goes by like a blink of an eye. I did the best I could, but I frequently wonder if my best was good enough. Maybe, I was too hard on her.' 'Maybe she was unhappy; maybe it was me? The only hobby I have, as I get older is looking at the scenery that surrounds me.' 'Looking over the pond that cascades a reflection of the trees on along the walkway. Plus, stumbling back and forth from the kitchen, I mumble in whispers, remembering her voice in my mind, while trying to write my fragmented thoughts down on paper, as they rush in my head faster than I can scribble with my pencil.' ‘Oddly Nevaeh is the writer I am not, yet I have given her all my notes about my memories.

You don’t mind Yssa poking around at your nav center?” I said to Teka, nudging her with my shoulder. We were on the nav deck--it was safe to walk around now that we were through the atmosphere--looking out at the depthless darkness in our path. I sometimes referred to it as “nothingness,” like most people did, but most of the time, I didn’t think of it that way. Space was not a finite container, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Asteroids, stars, planets, the currentstream; space debris, ships, fragmented moons, undiscovered worlds’ this was a place of endless possibility and unfathomable freedom. It was not nothing; it was everything. “What? Oh, no, I definitely want to smack her pokey little hands away,” Teka said, narrowing her eye at Yssa, who was still busy with the controls. “But the ship likes her, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.” I laughed a little.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

I have become comfortably numb.’ and I do not feel anymore. My dreams feel like real reality, and day-to-day life feels like I am not even there. My body is just like an empty shale that I am stuck in now, that seems to be cracking. My mind is still sprinting around the room. What to say, what not to say, what to do, what not to do. Do I look okay, does this uniform look good today, my hair looks like crap? AHH! Is it time to go home yet! My internal voice does not shut up; it runs fragmented thoughts constantly. Yet my exterior voice does not stand up for me, yet all those words have to make sense. So why say anything at all. Sometimes I jump five feet in the air when the voices come over the intercoms, and it screeches in my ears like Miss. Manco’s nails on the blackboard. The message sounds like it has no rhythm or conclusion. Just more shit my brain has to process.

It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’ This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually— ‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’ Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble. There. Can you see that? It's already starting... ‘What is?’ The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like— ‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’ Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores. ‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’ We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind. ‘But we were the first.’ Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.

I cannot remember who scored runs or took wickets, and I have always held in check the temptation to take an archaeological dig into Wisden to find out. Long ago I realised that to go looking for the evidence risked shaking loose the memories I already had; and possibly losing some of them as a consequence. So the important fragments of that day remain intact, shut and airtight in my mind, as if sealed in a jar. The scorecard my grandfather bought me - and filled in with a silver ballpoint pen - is long gone too. I have nothing that preserves our time together there except for the dozen or so still, square images which I can slide in a private show across my mind. These keep alive its broad outline, which is sufficient. The bold statistics don't matter anyway. What does matter is the imprint our journey to Trent Bridge left on me. It's evident in this book, which is also part-payment of an outstanding debt to my grandfather which I can never fully repay.

Why is it that you don’t know what to do when there is desire? I’ll tell you why. Because this rigid decision of yours is still in operation. All religions have told us to deny sex, to suppress it, because they say it is a waste of energy and you must have energy to find God. But this kind of austerity and harsh suppression and conformity to a pattern does brutal violence to all our finer instincts. This kind of harsh austerity is a greater waste of energy than indulgence in sex. Why have you made sex into a problem? Really it doesn’t matter at all whether you go to bed with someone or whether you don’t. Get on with it or drop it but don’t make a problem of it. The problem comes from this constant preoccupation. The really interesting thing is not whether we do or don’t go to bed with someone but why we have all these fragments in our lives. In one restless corner there is sex with all its preoccupations; in another corner there is some other kind of turmoil; in another a striving after this or that, and in each corner there is the continual chattering of the mind. There are so many ways in which energy is wasted. If one corner of my life is in disorder, then the whole of my life is in disorder. If there is disorder in my life in regard to sex, then the rest of my life is in disorder. So I shouldn’t ask how to put one corner in order, but why I have broken life into so many different fragments – fragments which are in disorder within themselves and which all contradict each other. What can I do when I see so many fragments? How can I deal with them all? I have these fragments because I am not whole inside. If I go into all this without causing yet another fragment, if I go to the very end of each fragment, then in that awareness, which is looking, there is no fragmentation. Each fragment is a separate pleasure. I should ask myself whether I am going to stay in some sordid little room of pleasure all my life. Go into the slavery of each pleasure, each fragment, and say to yourself, my god, I am dependent, I am a slave to all these little corners – is that all there is to my life? Stay with it and see what happens.

The author explores the contours of a restless mind racked with fear and doubt and questions the origins of his personal disenchantment and cynical bitterness. Do other people share similar feelings of disquiet and despair, and how does a person escape a vortex of suffering? Perchance he can marshal human beings’ innate gifts of memory, language, and consciousness to transform his vile existence. Perhaps by studiously examining the self and seeking to unite all disparate parts of a fragmented psyche, he will become a thoughtful, considerate, and affectionate man who lives joyfully without pangs of pain, shame, and misgivings. The goal of this vision quest is to attain personal harmony with the world and enjoy an admirable state of attentive mindfulness after investigating and expressing all that is sayable pertaining the meaning of existence and the unique features of being human. The author aspires to discard frivolous attachments, pierce mental delusions, and attain a peaceful state of serenity by accepting reality and appreciating the incomparable beauty of this magnificent world and the little pleasures that each unfolding day affords. Perhaps writing of his struggles to transcend his own pain and develop the wisdom and serenity of the mind that comes from living an examined life might even provide a template for other people explore their own life story.

I still find it strange how easy it is to see solutions for others but not for yourself. Those years I slogged out sixteen-hour days, no weekends, no holidays, no life—it’s hard to recognize compulsion when you’re in the thick of it. The compulsion to fill the hole you left, Dad. It’s only now I really see it. I’ve been replaying the same story. I’ve been replaying you, with every patient, replaying the imagined moment I could have fixed you. Over and over again. Classic PTSD. But I couldn’t have fixed you then. And I can’t fix you now. I didn’t see you that night at the bottom of the stairs, Dad, you didn’t put your coat on and leave; you were just a figment of my addled brain. You’re gone. At the back of my mind, I suppose, I always knew you died, but I was so enamored with the idea you might come back one day and explain it all. Explain it all away. Tell me you didn’t do what you did. Or I’d explain it for you, through someone else, through my job; finally I’d work out why you did what you did. Why people do the things they do. Somehow I’d uncover your reasons. But I’ve been scrambling around for too long now trying to gather together the broken pieces of you, the shattered fragments you left all over our lives. I’ve been so focused on putting those pieces—and you—back together again that somewhere along the way I came apart at the seams. But now it’s time for me to put myself back together.

It’s not that I want us to understand one another, be friends, talk, or be together. I don’t need them to understand me. I know they won’t, and I don’t wish them to. What I’m looking for is something harsher and more severe. I want to know. I want to understand. I want to know so I can feel relief. I want peace of mind, because ignorance is absolutely terrifying. Complete understanding is such a self-righteous, selfish, and arrogant thing to wish for. It’s despicable and repulsive, really. I’m beyond disgusted with myself for wanting it. But if—if we could feel the same way… If we could impose that ugly self-satisfaction on one another, if there’s some sort of relationship that could permit that arrogance… I know something like that is absolutely impossible. I bet I’ll never attain something like that. I’m sure the grapes out of my reach are sour. But I don’t need fruit sweet like lies. I don’t need false understanding or phony relationships. What I want is those sour grapes. Even if it’s sour, even if it’s bitter, even if it tastes bad, even if it’s pure poison, even if it doesn’t exist, even if I can’t acquire it, even if what I want cannot be allowed… “Still…” The word came out of me unbidden, and even I could hear it trembling. “Still, I…” I fought down the sob that nearly escaped and tried to swallow the sound along with the rest of the sentence, but they both came out in fragments. My teeth rattled, and my throat was tight as the words left my mouth anyway. “I want…something real.

Since I can see no answer to these questions, I draw the following conclusions. This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

My ice-cream is melting just as quickly as Danny’s and is dripping down my chin, across my wrist, and onto my thigh. I laugh, throwing my head back and covering my eyes so as not to be blinded by happiness, and it is in this moment of weightlessness that I am suddenly aware of the lightest touch on my skin, like the wings of a butterfly. It flutters against my thigh then lingers on my wrist, but before its delicate wings reach my face, I force my eyes open and see only fragments: pink lips, a tanned cheek, the features and lines of a face silhouetted against the bright sunlight. My nostrils draw in his scent for the very first time and it is so strong that he is not just next to me but intimately close. His smell instantly takes me prisoner, overpowering me to such an extent that I have forgotten who and where I am. I know that, moments before, Alex was using his lips and tongue to clean the melted ice-cream off my thigh and wrist and inadvertently treating me to the most ecstatic experience of my life. My body and mind are adrift in a sea of bliss, the sounds of the park suddenly fade away, and the world and everyone in it cease to exist. All I can see is a blindingly bright light and all I can feel are a man’s moist lips touching mine. Alex’s hot, passionate mouth is kissing me greedily as if there is finally enough air; as if he had been suffocating, but now he can breathe. I know that a kiss like this is neither flirting nor dating and can sense with every fibre of my being that it was a sudden impulse, unplanned and impetuous. When Alex comes to his senses and realises what he has done, I am already staring meaningfully into his eyes. He pulls away slowly and starts to apologise, but I assure him there is no need, just not to do it again. He replies that he won’t, but his eyes say otherwise: he looks as overwhelmed as I feel.

Come here,” he growled, his body so heavy with need that he was afraid he would explode into fragments if he took one step. She shook her head slowly, her tongue deliberately moistening her full lower lip. “I only want my true lifemate. I hunger tonight. My body is hungry.” Her hand drifted slowly, enticingly, over her satin skin, and his eyes followed the graceful movement while his body raged at him. Gregori covered the distance between them in a sudden surge, catching her up, the momentum taking them to the wall. He held her prisoner there, his mouth fastened on hers, commanding her response, feeding, devouring, his hands claiming her body for his own. “No one else will ever touch you and live,” he snarled, his mouth burning a trail of fire down her throat to her breast. He fed hungrily, his teeth grazing the creamy fullness. “No other, Savannah.” “Why, Gregori? Why can no other touch my body like this?” she whispered, her mouth on his skin, her tongue lapping at his pulse. “Tell me why my body is only yours and your body is only mine.” His hands cupped her bottom, brought her hard against him. “You know why, Savannah.” “Say it, Gregori. Say it if you believe it. I won’t have lies between us. You have to feel it in your heart as I do. You have to feel it in your mind. Your body has to burn for mine. But most of all, in your deepest soul, you have to know I’m your other half.” He lifted her, set her up high on the rim of the sleeping chamber, his hands parting her thighs. “I know I burn for you. Even in my sleep, the sleep of our people where there can be no thought, I burn for you.” He bent his head to taste her, his wet hair bathing her inner thighs as he dragged her body closer to him. Savannah cried out at the first touch of his mouth, the rush of hot desire turning her into a liquid, living flame. She bunched his hair into her fists and held him to her. “Say it, Gregori,” she bit out between clenched teeth. “I need to hear you say it.” I am saying it, lifemate. Can you not hear me?

I am a Carpathian male, long in the world of darkness. It is true that I feel very little, that my nature revels in the hunt, in the kill. To overcome the wild beast we have to find our one mate, our other half, the light to our darkness. You are my light, Raven, my very life. That does not take away my obligations to my people. I must hunt those who prey on mortals, those who prey on our people. I cannot feel while I do so, or madness would be my fate. Kiss me and merge your mind with mine. Love me for who I am.” Raven’s body ached and burned. Needed. Hungered. His heart beat so strongly. His skin felt so temptingly hot, his muscles hard against her softness. Every touch of his lips sent a jolt of electricity sizzling through her. “I cannot lie to you,” he whispered. “You know my thoughts. You know the beast that dwells inside. I try to be gentle with you, to listen to you. Always that wildness breaks free, but you tame me. Raven, please, I need you. And you need me. Your body is weak, I can feel your hunger. Your mind is fragmented--allow me to heal you. Your body cries out for mine as mine does for yours. Kiss me, Raven. Do not give up on us.” Her blue eyes continued to search his face and then came to rest on his sensual mouth. A small sigh escaped. His lips hovered over hers, waited for her answer. It was in her eyes first, that moment of complete recognition. Tenderness rushed over her, and she caught his head in her hands. “I think I’m afraid I made you up, Mikhail. That something so much a part of me, so perfect, can’t be real. I don’t want you to be what I dreamed of and the nightmare to be real.” She brought his face the inch separating them and fastened her mouth to his. Thunder pounded in her ears, in his. White-hot heat streaked and danced, consumed her, consumed him. His hand touched hers gently, tentatively, found no resistance, and he merged them together so that his burning need became hers, so that the wild, unbridled passion in him fed hers. So that she knew he was real and would never leave her alone, could never leave her alone.

Through the open doorway suddenly stepped a small woman, long ebony hair braided intricately, huge blue eyes flashing at Mikhail. As Byron shouldered his way inside behind her, she gave him a friendly smile and stood on her toes to brush his chin with a kiss. Mikhail stiffened, then immediately wrapped a possessive arm around her waist. “Carpathian women do not do that kind of thing,” he reprimanded her. She tilted her chin at him, in no way intimidated. “That’s because Carpathian males have such a territorial mentality— you know, a beat-their-chest, swing-from-the-trees sort of thing.” She turned her head to look at the couple lying on the floor. Her indrawn breath was audible. “Jacques.” She whispered his name, tears in her voice and in her blue eyes. “It really is you.” Eluding Mikhail’s outstretched, detaining hand, she ran to him. Let her, Gregori persuaded softly. Look at him. Jacques’ gaze was fastened on the woman’s face, the red flames receding from his eyes as she approached. “I’m Raven, Jacques. Don’t you remember me? Mikhail, your brother, is my lifemate.” Raven dropped to her knees beside the couple. “Thank God you’re alive. I can’t believe how lucky we are. Who did this to you? Who took you from us?” Shea felt the ripple of awareness in her mind. Jacques’ shock. His curiosity. He recognized those tear-filled blue eyes. Shea caught a glimpse, a fragment of memory, the woman bending over him, her hands clamped to his throat, pressing soil and saliva into a pumping wound. Shea held her breath, waiting. Jacques’ silent cry of despair echoed in her head. She forced herself to move, found his hand with hers, silently supporting him as she regarded the woman kneeling beside her. You didn’t tell me she was so beautiful, Shea reprimanded deliberately. In the midst of Jacques’ pain and agony, his possessive fury and maniacal madness, something seemed to melt the ice-cold core of murderous resolve. The urge to smile at that feminine, edgy tone came out of nowhere. Something snarling to be set free retreated, and the tension in him eased visibly. Is she? Jacques asked innocently. Shea’s green eyes touched his face, and warmth spread further inside him. And the beast was temporarily leashed. “Is this your lifemate, Jacques?” Raven asked softly. Shea looked at her then, this woman who had been a part of Jacques’ life. “I’m Shea O’Halloran.” Her voice was husky and ragged. “Jacques has been unable to use his voice since I found him.” Raven touched Shea’s bruised throat with gentle fingers. “Someone had better tell me what happened here.” Her blue eyes were studying the dark smudges closely. “Help her to the bed,” Gregori interceded, distracting Raven from her study. You owe me one, old friend, he sent to Mikhail.