Fruit Fly Quotes

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty Holding the leash of blood So that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surf In aromatic loam, or in sea music Beautiful nude Equally beautiful your feet Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound Your ears, small shells Of the splendid American sea Your breasts of level plentitude Fulfilled by living light Your flying eyelids of wheat Revealing or enclosing The two deep countries of your eyes The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of Burnished gold Fine alabaster To sink into the two grapes of your feet Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises Flowering fire Open chandelier A swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materials Agate? Quartz? Wheat? Did your body come together? Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remained Astonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body Yet suffocate itself So much is clarity Taking its leave of you As if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Richard wrote a diary entry in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiancée, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancée, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly.

Are You Ready for New Urban Fragrances? Yeah, I guess I'm ready, but listen: Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flowers in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality. Now today we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils' sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature. I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes. I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets. Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace. I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve. I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain. I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods. And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

...because once you've got one scar on your face or your heart, its only a matter of time before someone gives you another - and another - until a day doesn't go by when you aren't being bashed senseless, nor a town that you haven't been run out of, and you get to be such a goddamn mess that finally it doesn't feel right unless you're getting the Christ beaten out of you - amd within a year of that first damming fall, those first down borne fists, your first run out, you wind up with flies buzzing around your eyes, back at the same place, the same town, deader than when you left, bobbiong around in the swill - a dirty deadbeat whore in a roadside ditch. But a little part of you deosn't die. A little part of you lives on. And you make an orphan of that corrupt and contemtible part, dumping it right smack in the laps of the ones who first robbed you of your sweetness, for it is the wicked fruit of their crimes, it is their blood, their sin, it belongs there, this child of blood, this spawn of sin...

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass. - The Two Trees

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time. This is a moment:

Drosophila,” I said, remembering the word. “What?” Lily asked. “Why do girls always fall for guys with the at ention span of drosophila?” “What?” “Fruit flies. Guys with the attention span of fruit flies.” “Because they’re hot?” “This,” I told her, “is not the time for being truthful.

Writing tales of horror makes it hard to convince people that I'm a nice, gentle person. I love rainbows and wildflowers and butterflies and babies, and I wouldn't swat a fly unless it was diving directly into my fruit salad.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.

Time has a way of eternally looping us in the same configurations. Like fruit flies, we are unable to register the patterns. Just because we are the crest of the wave does not mean the ocean does not exist. What has been before will be again.

Happiness, do not leave me. I know you, a capricious monarch perching on the fortunate flowers you see. Hear me: I am too attached to this royalty now. Can I make you rest here somehow? I will offer you the nectar of every flower in blossom, the honey of every fruit in harvest. I will make the Earth a garden, the entire universe a forest. I beg of you not to flutter by. I beg of you not to leave me, butter-coloured fly. Nest here and for you, I will create a home.

This is about as simple as games get. There isn't even the paltriest context for what you're doing; you're not exacting revenge on limbless pigs or feeding your pet bitch-lizard. You're a ninja, fruit is flying up in front of you, and fuck fruit. Sitting around all smug on trees and in pies.

When did you start here?” I ask her. “Three days ago. Sir. Aspirant. Um—” She wrings her hands. “Veturius is fine.” She walks carefully, gingerly—the Commandant must have whipped her recently. And yet she doesn't hunch or shuffle like the others slaves. The straight-backed grace with which she moves tells her story better than words. She'd been a freewoman before this—I'd bet my scims on it. And she has no idea how pretty she is—or what kind of problems her beauty will cause for her at a place like Blackcliff. The wind pulls at her hair again, and I catch her scent—like fruit and sugar. “Can I give you some advice?” Her head flies up like a scared animal's. At least she's wary. “Right now you...” Will grab the attention of every male in a square mile. “Stand out,” I finish. “It's hot, but you should wear a hood or a cloak—something to help you blend in.” She nods, but her eyes are suspicious. She wraps her arms around herself and drops back a little. I don't speak to her again.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

Flies can be sitting in a garden and completely ignore the beautiful flowers around them. Instead they'll go right for the rotting banana peel or piece of trash. Bees, on the other hand, could be sitting in a room full of trash and find the tiniest speck of fruit or honey to land on. Don't be a fly. Become a bee and stay a bee. Look for the good in every circumstance, even the most horrible and disgusting places. There's always some honey to land on.

Saying that “life is short” is such a cliche. And it’s true. In fact, we only have five minutes to be here. In the really big scheme of things, not even that long. We humans don’t even have the lifespan of fruit flies if you look at the bigger picture. In other words, we don’t have a second—not even a second—to waste on petty drama, on living fake, shallow lives, on swallowing our truth, or on hiding our light. We only dance around the flame of this gorgeous human existence for moments and the one thing important at all is loving beautifully.

I do believe you think what now you speak, but what we do determine oft we break. Purpose is but the slave to memory, of violent birth, but poor validity, which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, but fall, unshaken, when they mellow be. Most unnecessary 'tis that we forget to pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt. What to ourselves in passion we propose, the passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy their own enactures with themselves destroy. Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament. Grief joys, joy grieves on slender accident. This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange that even our loves should with our fortunes change. For 'tis a question left us yet to prove, whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love. The great man down, you mark his favorite flies. The poor advanced makes friends of enemies. And hitherto doth love on fortune tend, for who not needs shall never lack a friend, and who in want a hollow friend doth try, directly seasons him his enemy. But, orderly to end where I begun, our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown. Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. So think thou wilt no second husband wed, but die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.

Yeah…I need to nip this Dean idea in the bud. I don’t know why he’s so eager to jump into bed with me again, but I’m confident he’ll get over it eventually. The guy has the attention span of a fruit fly, and the affection-giving habits of a puppy, offering his sexual devotion to whoever happens to be holding the treat. By which I mean the vagina.

I hear You saying to me: "I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way. "Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude. "Because of their enmity, you will soon be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you and reject you and you will be alone. "Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone. "Everything that can be desired will sear you, and brand you with a cautery, and you will fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you will die to all joy and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations. "You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved, and it will murder your heart and drive you into the desert. "You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them. "And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall being to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth. "Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it. "But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani: "That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.

Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends.

I wanted to yell at the television like Mama and Papa, but I had to learn how to properly do it. I gathered that being a mouse was better than being a mosquita muerta, and being a snake was better than being a man, because flies pretending to be dead could be crushed, mice were shy, and men were persecuted; but everybody always avoided snakes.

Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody Poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. And mutual fear brings peace, Till the selfish loves increase: Then Cruelty knits a snare And spreads his baits with care. He sits down with holy fears And waters the ground with tears: Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot. Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head, And the Catterpiller and Fly Feed on the Mystery. And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat, And the Raven his nest has made In its thickest shade. The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree, But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain.

The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain.

Fruit fly scientists, God bless ‘em, are the big exceptions. Morgan’s team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like ‘speck,’ ‘beaded,’ ‘rudimentary,’ ‘white,’ and ‘abnormal.’ And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The ‘turnip’ gene makes flies stupid. ‘Tudor’ leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. ‘Cleopatra’ can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, ‘asp.’ ‘Cheap date’ leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the “POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic” gene in mice—‘pokemon’—nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the ‘pokemon’ gene (now known, sigh, as ‘zbtb7’) contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn’t want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

All the world is God,' McVries said, and giggled hysterically. 'We're walking on the Lord, and back there the flies are crawling on the Lord, in fact the flies are also the Lord, so blessed be the fruit of thy womb Percy. Amen, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Our father, which art in tinfoil, hallow'd be thy name.

Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I'm living the life of a fruit fly - the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a "fresh start" that leads to the same moribund conclusions.

..And remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at least as far as the falls.

I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly. (...) Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lives without having to swat away any more flies.

Maybe we should remember to smile more often. You know, just for the sake of smiling.

Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It’s sort of like time travel. One minute you’re bending to unlace your shoes,and the next thing you know you’re paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?

Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies in the laboratory.

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

A Match If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pasture or gray grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf. If I were what the words are, And love were like the tune, With double sound and single Delight our lips would mingle, With kisses glad as birds are That get sweet rain at noon; If I were what the words are, And love were like the tune. If you were life, my darling, And I your love were death, We'd shine and snow together Ere March made sweet the weather With daffodil and starling And hours of fruitful breath; If you were life, my darling, And I your love were death. If you were thrall to sorrow, And I were page to joy, We'd play for lives and seasons With loving looks and treasons And tears of night and morrow And laughs of maid and boy; If you were thrall to sorrow, And I were page to joy. If you were April's lady, And I were lord in May, We'd throw with leaves for hours And draw for days with flowers, Till day like night were shady And night were bright like day; If you were April's lady, And I were lord in May. If you were queen of pleasure, And I were king of pain, We'd hunt down love together, Pluck out his flying-feather, And teach his feet a measure, And find his mouth a rein; If you were queen of pleasure, And I were king of pain.

Fearghus watched his sister grab several pieces of fruit. Her human body seemed shakier than usual. “Are you all right?” “That mad bitch threw a blade at my head.” He studied his sister. “What did you say to her?” Morfyd swung around to glare at him, fruit flying everywhere.“What did I . . . why do you . . . how dare you . . .”Morfyd stopped and pulled herself together. “I did nothing, brother. She was having a nightmare about Lorcan or something. I happened to walk in at the wrong time.

When the bright-winged bird sees a fallen cherry on the ground beneath a tree,’ Joanna said, ‘it seizes the fruit and flies, full of joy, and deals with the pit later.

The boy went back to his family there, in the distance, in a distance he did not find there in the distance. My grandfather died counting sunsets, seasons, and heartbeats on the fingers of his withered hands. He dropped like a fruit forbidden a branch to lean its age against. They destroyed his heart. He wearied of waiting here, in Damur. He said goodbye to friends, water pipe, and children and took me and went back to find what was no longer his to find there. Here the number of aliens increased, and refugee camps got bigger. A war went by, then two, three, and four. The homeland got farther and farther away, and the children got farther and farther from mother's milk after they had tasted the milk of UNRWA. So they bought guns to get closer to a homeland flying out of their reach. They brought their identity back into being, re-created the homeland, and followed their path, only to have it blocked by the guardians of civil wars. They defended their steps, but then path parted from path, the orphan lived in the skin of the orphan, and one refugee camp went into another.

It's like this, Bunny Boy, if you walk up to an oak tree or a bloody elm or something - you know, one of those big bastards - one with a thick, heavy trunk with giant roots that grow deep in the soil and great branches that are covered in leaves, right, and you walk up to it and give the tree a shake, well, what happens?' (...) 'I really don't know, Dad,' (...) 'Well, nothing bloody happens, of course!' (...) 'You can stand there shaking it till the cows come home and all that will happen is your arms will get tired. Right?' (...) 'Right, Dad,' he says. (...) 'But if you go up to a skinny, dry, fucked-up little tree, with a withered trunk and a few leaves clinging on for dear life, and you put your hands around it and shake the shit out of it - as we say in the trade - those bloody leaves will come flying off! Yeah?' 'OK, Dad,' says the boy (...) 'Now, the big oak tree is the rich bastard, right, and the skinny tree is the poor cunt who hasn't got any money. Are you with me?' Bunny Junior nods. 'Now, that sounds easier than it actually is, Bunny Boy. Do you want to know why?' 'OK, Dad.' 'Because every fucking bastard and his dog has got hold of the little tree and is shaking it for all that it's worth - the government, the bloody landlord, the lottery they don't have a chance in hell of winning, the council, their bloody exes, their hundred snotty-nosed brats running around because they are too bloody stupid to exercise a bit of self-control, all the useless shit they see on TV, fucking Tesco, parking fines, insurance on this and insurance on that, the boozer, the fruit machines, the bookies - every bastard and his three-legged, one-eyed, pox-riden dog are shaking this little tree,' says Bunny, clamping his hands together and making like he is throttling someone. 'So what do you go and do, Dad?' says Bunny Junior. 'Well, you've got to have something they think they need, you know, above all else.' 'And what's that, Dad?' 'Hope... you know... the dream. You've got to sell them the dream.

This morning I was walking through Manhattan, head down, checking directions, when I looked up to see a fruit truck selling lychee, two pounds for five bucks, and I had ten bucks in my pocket! Then while buying my bus ticket for later that evening I witnessed the Transbridge teller’s face soften after she had endured a couple unusually rude interactions in front of me as I kept eye contact and thanked her. She called me honey first (delight), baby second (delight), and almost smiled before I turned away. On my way to the Flatiron building there was an aisle of kousa dogwood—looking parched, but still, the prickly knobs of fruit nestled beneath the leaves. A cup of coffee from a well-shaped cup. A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room, landing on the porcelain handle as if to say, “Notice the precise flare of this handle, as though designed for the romance between the thumb and index finger that holding a cup can be.” Or the peanut butter salty enough. Or the light blue bike the man pushed through the lobby. Or the topknot of the barista. Or the sweet glance of the man in his stylish short pants (well-lotioned ankles gleaming beneath) walking two little dogs. Or the woman stepping in and out of her shoe, her foot curling up and stretching out and curling up.

The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-moving, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment. It appeared to be impossible to find the right kinds of food, or learn the right way to say even simple things. The children said very little that wasn't a complaint.

There are processes, nuclear waste build-up, urbanization, land disturbance, there are processes which, if allowed to run on indefinitely, would wreck the whole system and pitch it into chaos. Buy Confucius said "No tree grows to heaven," and what he meant by that was: it's fruitless to project any process to infinity because any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario. If no fruit flies died in six months the Earth would spin out of its orbit from the weight of fruit flies. Now, I don't thing that's true. (laughs) But what an image!

The wolf howled under the leaves As he spat out the bright feathers Of his feast of fowl: Like him, I devour myself. Lettuce and fruit Wait only to be picked; But the spider in the hedge Eats only violets. Let me sleep! Let me boil On the altars of Solomon. The broth runs over the rust, And flows into the Kidron. ——— At last– O happiness, O reason– I removed from the sky the blue that is black, and I lived, a glitter of gold in the light of nature. From joy I took an expression as clownish and distracted as possible: It is found again! What? Eternity. It is the sea merged With the sun. My eternal soul, Observe your vow In spite of the night And the day on fire. So you free yourself From human approbation, From common aspirations! You fly with . . . − Never any hope. Nul orietur. Science and patience, The torment is certain. No more tomorrow, Embers of satin, Your ardour Is your duty. It is found again! − What? − Eternity. It is the sea merged With the sun.

While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

Domestic Where's the wisdom in erasing a loved one's mess, so akin to his signature? Your honor, I only meant to strew the immaculate in his wake. To wipe the path ahead and behind reasonably clean. Futile, yes, but weren't such gestures essential to love's discipline once upon a time? Daily, I harvested dropped fruit peels and socks. I chased him through life with dustpan and broom, smoothed his body dents from the bed, soothed the mud tramped floors. Did I sin in this? Better to leave the habitat sweetly reeking of him than to spend years scrubbing up evidence of his existence. Archaelogists centuries hence may marvel at such relics: his mustard stained napkins, toothpicks chewed to splinters. Never let it be said that in my zeal to clean I robbed the future's museums. Who am I to call what flies to either side of the trail he blazes--half read magazines, cups of scummed over coffee and mashed out cigarettes--dirt?

Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star. (from Trout Fishing on the Bevel, page 21)

Like all animal species (including humans), plants must spread their offspring to areas where they can thrive and pass on their parents’ genes. Young animals disperse by walking or flying, but plants don’t have that option, so they must somehow hitchhike. While some plant species have seeds adapted for being carried by the wind or for floating on water, many others trick an animal into carrying their seeds, by wrapping the seed in a tasty fruit and advertising the fruit’s ripeness by its color or smell. The hungry animal plucks and swallows the fruit, walks or flies off, and then spits out or defecates the seed somewhere far from its parent tree. Seeds can in this manner be carried for thousands of miles. It may come as a surprise to learn that plant seeds can resist digestion by your gut and nonetheless germinate out of your feces. But any adventurous readers who are not too squeamish can make the test and prove it for themselves. The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal’s gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow on the latrine sites of aardvarks.

On Sunday, a lambent crevice opened up in the street outside my house, By Tuesday birds were flying into it. "I probably won't miss you," my mother said, "I'm only interested in the end of the world," I replied. Many find it difficult to breath without the atmosphere but we knew how. We just stopped breathing. We're at the Moonlite All-Nite Dinner and they're serving up fruit from the plants growing out of the waitress. The CLOSED sign whispers, "Please, don't touch me." We watch bodies fall to the ground outside like deep-sea creatures surfacing. You turn to me and ask, "Do you ever think about suicide?" I look away from you and close my eyes, eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth. Now you're in the only car in the parking lot at midnight and you're watching me throw stones at the moon, which hangs low in the sky so he can look into your house. Your sister tried to touch him from her bedroom window once, and he flinched; now he and the oceans watch her with a quiet concern. The lilac sky is trying to rest her head on his shoulder, all trees gradually growing through her. A hummingbird whispers to you, "Be careful, under her dress is her skin," and then builds his nest in the middle of the highway, I look back at you, and you close your eyes.

Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred." The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.

Let, then, thy soul by faith be exercised with such thoughts and apprehensions as these: “I am a poor, weak creature; unstable as water, I cannot excel. This corruption is too hard for me, and is at the very door of ruining my soul; and what to do I know not. My soul is become as parched ground, and an habitation of dragons. I have made promises and broken them; vows and engagements have been as a thing of nought. Many persuasions have I had that I had got the victory and should be delivered, but I am deceived; so that I plainly see, that without some eminent succour and assistance, I am lost, and shall be prevailed on to an utter relinquishment of God. But yet, though this be my state and condition, let the hands that hang down be lifted up, and the feeble knees be strengthened. Behold, 32the Lord Christ, that hath all fulness of grace in his heart, all fulness of power in his hand, he is able to slay all these his enemies. There is sufficient provision in him for my relief and assistance. He can take my drooping, dying soul and make me more than a conqueror.33 ‘Why sayest thou, O my soul, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint,’ Isa. xl. 27–31. He can make the ‘dry, parched ground of my soul to become a pool, and my thirsty, barren heart as springs of water;’ yea, he can make this ‘habitation of dragons,’ this heart, so full of abominable lusts and fiery temptations, to be a place for ‘grass’ and fruit to himself,” Isa. xxxv. 7. So God staid Paul, under his temptation, with the consideration of the sufficiency of his grace: “My grace is sufficient for thee,” 2 Cor. xii. 9. Though he were not immediately so far made partaker of it as to be freed from his temptation, yet the sufficiency of it in God, for that end and purpose, was enough to stay his spirit. I say, then, by faith, be much in the consideration of that supply and the fulness of it that is in Jesus Christ, and how he can at any time give thee strength and deliverance. Now, if hereby thou dost not find success to a conquest, yet thou wilt be staid in the chariot, that thou shalt not fly out of the field until the battle be ended; thou wilt be kept from an utter despondency and a lying down under thy unbelief, or a turning aside to false means and remedies, that in the issue will not relieve thee. The efficacy of this consideration will be found only in the practice.

I stretched my arms towards the sky like blades of tall grass The sun beat between my shoulders like carnival drums I sat still in hopes that it would help my wings grow So then I could really be fly And then she arrived Like day break inside a railway tunnel Like the new moon, like a diamond in the mines Like high noon to a drunkard, sudden She made my heart beat in a now-now time signature Her skinny canvas for ultraviolet brushstrokes She was the sun's painting She was a deep cognac color Her eyes sparkled like lights along the new city She lips pursed as if her breath was too sweet And full for her mouth to hold I said, "You are the beautiful, the stress of mathematics." I said, "For you, I would peel open the clouds like new fruit And give you lightning and thunder as a dowry I would make the sky shed all of it's stars, light and rain And I would clasp the constellations across your waist And I would make the heavens your cape And they would be pleased to cover you They would be pleased to cover you May I please, cover you, please

After 1656 the Dutch, who had gained control over the Moluccas, chose the islands that could be most easily defended. They then burned all the nutmeg trees on the other islands to make sure no one else could profit from the trees. Anyone caught trying to smuggle nutmeg out of the Moluccas was put to death. The Dutch also dipped all their nutmegs in lime (a caustic substance) to stop the seed from sprouting and to prevent people from planting their own trees. Pigeons, however, defied these Dutch precautions. Birds could eat nutmeg fruits, fly to another island and leave the seeds behind in their droppings.

The smells arose from everything, everywhere, flowing together and remaining as a sickening, tantalizing discomfort. They flowed from the delicatessen shop with its uncovered trays of pickled herrings, and the small open casks of pickled gherkins and onions, dried fish and salted meat, and sweaty damp walls and floor; from the fish shop which casually defied every law of health; from the kosher butcher, and the poulterer next door, where a fine confetti of new-plucked feathers hung nearly motionless in the fetid air; and from sidewalk gutters where multitudes of flies buzzed and feasted on the heaped-up residue of fruit and vegetable barrows.

I wished for one heart in which I could pour unrestrained my plaints, and by the heavenly nature of the soil blessed fruit might spring from such bad seed. Yet how could I find this? The love that is the soul of friendship is a soft spirit seldom found except when two amiable creatures are knit from early youth, or when bound by mutual suffering and pursuits; it comes to some of the elect unsought and unaware; it descends as gentle dew on chosen spots which however barren they were before become under its benign influence fertile in all sweet plants; but when desired it flies; it scoffs at the prayers of its votaries; it will bestow, but not be sought.

Even the primary visual areas in the brain show the special organizing function of space. Each patch of cortical real estate is dedicated to a fixed spot in the visual field, and contours in the world are represented as contours across the surface of the brain, at least on a large scale. Time also has a presence in the mind that is more than just any old attribute of an experience. Neuroscientists have found biological clocks ticking in the brains of organisms as simple as fruit flies. And just as we see stuff that is connected in space as an object, we see stuff that is connected in time as a motion, such as a trajectory or gesture, or, in the case of sound, as a melody or stretch of speech.

I shall desire you as I desire in turn the fruit that hangs out of reach, the far-off water, and the blissful little house that I pass by. In each place where my desires have strayed, I leave thousands and thousands of shadows in my own shape, shed from me: one lies on the warm blue rocks of the ledges in my own country, another in the damp hollow of a sunless valley, and a third follows a bird, a sail, the wind and the wave. You keep the most enduring of them: a naked, undulating shadow, trembling with pleasure like a plant in the stream. But time will dissolve it like the others, and you will no longer know anything of me until the day when my steps finally halt and there will fly away from me a last small shadow.

It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one’s face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.

It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne [Florida] -- a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother's new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn't seem to have moods anymore, and she didn't fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons.

Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom- apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the 'Mittel Land' ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillside like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadors would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point. Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water.

The fact is, that people cannot come to heartily like Florida till they accept certain deficiencies as the necessary shadow to certain excellences. If you want to live in an orange-orchard, you must give up wanting to live surrounded by green grass. When we get to the new heaven and the new earth, then we shall have it all right. There we shall have a climate at once cool and bracing, yet hot enough to mature oranges and pine-apples. Our trees of life shall bear twelve manner of fruit, and yield a new one every month. Out of juicy meadows green as emerald, enamelled with every kind of flower, shall grow our golden orange-trees, blossoming and fruiting together as now they do. There shall be no mosquitoes, or gnats, or black-flies, or snakes; and, best of all, there shall be no fretful people. Everybody shall be like a well-tuned instrument, all sounding in accord, and never a semitone out of the way. Meanwhile, we caution everybody coming to Florida, Don't hope for too much. Because you hear that roses and callas blossom in the open air all winter, and flowers abound in the woods, don't expect to find an eternal summer. Prepare yourself to see a great deal that looks rough and desolate and coarse; prepare yourself for some chilly days and nights; and, whatever else you neglect to bring with you, bring the resolution, strong and solid, always to make the best of things.

It is an inherent nature of life: Whenever success is in your reach, it tosses either an unexpected obstacle or an alluring offer, straight on your path. That unexpected manifestation, obstacle or offer, would either prompt you to press the panic button or distract your focus from your target. As you become busy dealing with the fresh situation, time, with its own flair, flies miles away from your reach, with the reward in offer. Those who endure, without getting disturbed by the obstacle or decoyed by the illusive offer, will reap the fruit. Others will flop, falling as victims to life’s conspiracy.

JAMES HALE sat at a side-street noodle-stall. The stall was set-up underneath the shade of a row of fruit trees. He watched a pair of pigeons courting beneath a fig tree. The male’s tail feathers were pushed up in self-promotion and his plumage was arrogantly puffed up. He danced his elaborate dance of love. The female didn’t look impressed. She turned her back to him. Birds were like gangster rappers, Hale thought. They sang songs about how tough they were and how many other birds they’d nested. They were egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Posers in a leafy street. The bastards flew at the first sign of danger. They couldn’t make it on the ground. Hale hated birds with their merry chirps and their flimsy nests. Tweet. Tweet. Fucking. Tweet. The only thing Hale admired about them was the fact that they could fly. That would be cool. Right now, flying would be good.

Constantly check your actions and intentions against each verse of this text, one by one, and any practice you engage in will progress and bear fruit with the greatest of ease. Permeate your mind with these teachings day by day, month by month, and without difficulty you will naturally awaken and develop within you all the qualities of a bodhisattva, just as a bee flying from flower to flower sips nectar from each, and from that nectar produces honey.

From fruit flies to house cats to mountain goats, from sunfish to bushbaby primates to Eurasian tit birds, scientists have discovered that approximately 20 percent of the members of many species are “slow to warm up,” while the other 80 percent are “fast” types who venture forth boldly without noticing much of what’s going on around them. (Intriguingly, the percentage of infants in Kagan’s lab who were born high-reactive was also, you’ll recall, about twenty.)

AWAKENING To open both your drowsy eyes, To stretch your limbs and realise That day is here. To watch the dancing, shifting beam Of sun, awake yet half in dream, Uncertain if the fitful gleam Be far or near. To turn with soft, contented sigh, And through the window watch the sky, All opal blue. To feel the air steal in the room, Made fragrant by the soft perfume Of lime-trees, when their scented bloom Is damp with dew. To hear the rustling voice of leaves, The chirp of birds beneath the eaves, But now awake. The tiny hum of timid things That fly with gauzy, fragile wings, Where yet the dusk to daylight clings, When mornings break. To feel the soul look forth and smile, Contented with each fruitful mile That it beholds. To hear the heart beat loud and strong, In unison with Nature's song, That echoes tremulous and long While dawn unfolds. To know yourself a thing complete, With strength of mind and limb replete, With vast desire; A creature made to dominate The lesser things of earth, a fate On whom the universe must wait, With force entire. And then to cry in deep delight God made the world and made it right; Dear Heaven above! Was ere completeness so complete, Was ever sweetness half so sweet, Was ever loving half so meet; Thank God for love.

They did not awaken quickly, nor fling about nor shock their systems with any sudden movement. No, they arose from slumber as gently as a soap bubble floats out from its pipe. Down into the gulch they trudged, still only half awake. Gradually their wills coagulated. They built a fire and boiled some tea and drank it from the fruit jars, and at last they settled in the sun on the front porch. The flaming flies made halos about their heads. Life took shape about them, the shape of yesterday and of tomorrow. Discussion began slowly, for each man treasured the little sleep he still possessed. From this time until well after noon, intellectual comradeship came into being. Then roofs were lifted, houses peered into, motives inspected, adventures recounted. Ordinarily their thoughts went first to Cornelia Ruiz, for it was a rare day and night during which Cornelia had not some curious and interesting adventure. And it was an unusual adventure from which no moral lesson could be drawn. The sun glistened in the pine needles. The earth smelled dry and good. The rose of Castile perfumed the world with its flowers. This was one of the best of times for the friends of Danny. The struggle for existence was remote. They sat in judgment on their fellows, judging not for morals, but for interest. Anyone having a good thing to tell saved it for recounting at this time. The big brown butterflies came to the rose and sat on the flowers and waved their wings slowly, as though they pumped honey out by wing power.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

But perhaps the newest and most exciting instrument in the neurologist’s tool kit is optogenetics, which was once considered science fiction. Like a magic wand, it allows you to activate certain pathways controlling behavior by shining a light beam on the brain. Incredibly, a light-sensitive gene that causes a cell to fire can be inserted, with surgical precision, directly into a neuron. Then, by turning on a light beam, the neuron is activated. More importantly, this allows scientists to excite these pathways, so that you can turn on and off certain behaviors by flicking a switch. Although this technology is only a decade old, optogenetics has already proven successful in controlling certain animal behaviors. By turning on a light switch, it is possible to make fruit flies suddenly fly off, worms stop wiggling, and mice run around madly in circles. Monkey trials are now beginning, and even human trials are in discussion. There is great hope that this technology will have a direct application in treating disorders like Parkinson’s and depression.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.About the orchids of that place we knew very little. About flies and beetles almost nothing, fungi nothing, most kinds of organisms nothing. Five thousand kinds of bacteria might be found in a pinch of soil, and about them we knew absolutely nothing. This was wilderness in the sixteenth-century sense, as it must have formed in the minds of the Portuguese explorers, its interior still largely unexplored and filled with strange, myth-engendering plants and animals. From such a place the pious naturalist would send long respectful letters to royal patrons about the wonders of the new world as testament to the glory of God. And I thought: there is still time to see this land in such a manner.

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about. They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three. There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters. They'll stop you at the river, he says. The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me? At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man. Who will? The United States Army. General Worth. They hell they will. Pray that they will. He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man? Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back. Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora. What's it to you, old man? The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be? How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.

Augustine, who assumed that Genesis 1 was chapter 1 in a book that contained the literal words of God, and that Genesis 2 was the second chapter in the same book, put the two chapters together and read the latter as a sequel. Genesis 2, he assumed, described the fall from the perfection and original goodness of creation depicted in chapter 1. So almost inevitably the Christian scriptures from the fourth century on were interpreted against the background of this (mis) understanding. The primary trouble with this theory was that by the fourth century of the Common Era there were no Jews to speak of left in the Christian movement, and therefore the only readers and interpreters of the ancient Hebrew myths were Gentiles, who had no idea what these stories originally meant. Consequently, they interpreted them as perfection established by God in chapter 1, followed by perfection ruined by human beings in chapter 2. Why was that a problem? Well I, for one, have never known a Jewish scripture scholar to treat the Garden of Eden story in the same way that Gentiles treat it. Jews tend to see this story not as a narrative about sin entering the world, but as a parable about the birth of self-consciousness. It is, for the Jews, not a fall into sin, but a step into humanity. It is the birth of a new relationship with God, changing from master-servant to interdependent cooperation. The forbidden fruit was not from an apple tree, as so many who don’t bother to read the text seem to think. It was rather from “the tree of knowledge,” and the primary thing that one gained from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was the ability to discern good from evil. Gaining that ability did not, in the minds of the Jewish readers of the book of Genesis, corrupt human nature. It simply made people take responsibility for their freely made decisions. A slave has no such freedom. The job of the slave is simply to obey, not to think. The job of the slave-master is to command. Thus the relationship of the master to the slave is a relationship of the strong to the weak, the parent to the child, the king to the serf, the boss to the worker. If human beings were meant to live in that kind of relationship with God, then humanity would have been kept in a perpetual state of irresponsible, childlike immaturity. Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden, not because they had disobeyed God’s rules, but because, when self-consciousness was born, they could no longer live in childlike dependency. Adam and Eve discovered, as every child ultimately must discover, that maturity requires that the child leave his or her parents’ home, just as every bird sooner or later must leave its nest and learn to fly on its own. To be forced out of the Garden of Eden was, therefore, not a punishment for sin, so much as it was a step into maturity.

I do believe you think what now you speak; But what we do determine oft we break.   135 Purpose is but the slave to memory, Of violent birth, but poor validity; Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, But fall unshaken when they mellow be. Most necessary ’tis that we forget   140 To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt; What to ourselves in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy Their own enactures with themselves destroy;   145 Where joy most revels grief doth most lament, Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident. This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange, That even our love should with our fortunes change; For ’tis a question left us yet to prove   150 Whe’r love lead fortune or else fortune love. The great man down, you mark his favourite flies; The poor advanc’d makes friends of enemies. And hitherto doth love on fortune tend, For who not needs shall never lack a friend;   155 And who in want a hollow friend doth try Directly seasons him his enemy. But, orderly to end where I begun, Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown,   160

Darwin, landing in Brazil in 1832, had a similar reaction, colored by his reading of his predecessor." Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred." The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.

Sunday Morning I Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. II Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. III Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star. Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue. IV She says, "I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?" There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings

Instead of hunting and gathering, instead of farming and harvesting in the area where we live, we are flying God’s fruits and vegetables around the planet, not eating foods designed for our terrain and climate. We are distributing, selling and consuming “fresh foods” (or so the package says) days and weeks after they have been harvested.

On average, odd years have been the best for me. I’m at a point where everyone I meet looks like a version of someone I already know. Without fail, fall makes me nostalgic for things I’ve never experienced. The sky is molting. I don’t know if this is global warming or if the atmosphere is reconfiguring itself to accommodate all the new bright suffering. I am struck by an overwhelming need to go to Iceland. Despite all awful variables, we are still full of ideas as possible as unsexed fruit. I was terribly sorry to be the one to explain to the first graders the connection between the sunset and pollution. On Venus you and I are not even a year old. Then there were two skies. The one we fly through and the one we bury ourselves in. I appreciate my wide beveled spatula which fulfills the moment I realized I would grow up and own such things. I am glad I do not yet want sexy bathroom accessories. Such things. In the story we were together every time. On his wedding day, the stone in his chest not fully melted but enough. Sometimes I feel like there are birds flying out of me.

Sun, moon and stars, by day and night, At God’s commandment give us light; And when we wake, and while we sleep, Their watch, like guardian angels, keep. The bright blue sky above our head, The soft green earth on which we tread, The ocean rolling round the land, Were made by God’s almighty hand. Sweet flowers that hill and dale adorn, Fair fruit trees, fields of grass and corn, The clouds that rise, the showers that fall, The winds that blow - God sent them all. The beasts that graze with downward eye, The birds that perch, and sing, and fly, The fishes swimming in the sea, God’s creatures are as well as we. But us He formed for better things, As servants of the King of kings, With lifted hands and open face, And thankful heart to seek His grace. Montgomery.

The Capitalist Class knows that what brings on the increased supply is not immigration so much, but the improved and ever improving machinery, held as private property. For every immigrant by whom the labor market is overstocked, it is overstocked by ten workingmen in the country whom privately owned machinery displaces. The Capitalist Class is full well aware that if this fact be known the conclusion would leap to sight ; to wit, that the solution oi" the Labor Problem is simply the public ownership of the machine. If fifty men, working ten hours a day, can, with improved machinery, produce as much as one hundred did before without such improved machinery, the publicly owned machine would not, as the privately owned machine does, throw out fifty men; it would throw out five of the former ten hours of work. It is clear as day to the Capitalist Class that it must raise dust over this fact so as to conceal it; and no better means to this end is offered than the fomenting of the plausible delusion that the evil lies in immigration. Anti-immigration laws are the fruit of these two purpose. Such laws kill two flies with one slap ; they draw attention away from the nerve that aches, and simultaneously they help to set the workers of the land in racial and creed hostility against the newcomers, who, of course, the Capitalist Class itself sees to shall not be lacking. Obviously, it is in the interest of the Working Class that this brace of fatal delusions be dispelled from their minds. What does the Labor Leader do? He helps nurse both delusions.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9 ¶ And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14 ¶ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. 20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

..he went to the kitchen to get a banana; after each mouthful he pulled back a fraction the four or five strips of striped skin, faded petals, which covered his fist as it clenched the base of the fruit; carefully he detached the friable, cardboard-flavoured filaments that run down its surface like meridian lines, in a word peeling his banana the way the anthropoid will forever peel his. He threw one of the filaments into the fly cage..

The final misconception is that evolution is “just a theory.” I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that evolution is unproven, because (following an unuseful convention in the field) it is a “theory” (like, say, germ theory). Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.

It made no sense to me. Scents were like rain, or birds. They left and came back. They told you their own stories, letting you know when the tide was low or the oatmeal was done cooking or the apple trees were getting ready to bloom. But they never stayed. Even as a young child, however, I understood that those scent-papers were different, magical somehow. They held entire worlds. I could recognize bits of them- the smell of a fruit, but one more full and sweet than anything I had ever tasted. Or an animal, lazier than any I had ever met. Many of the scents were utterly foreign, however- sharp and fast, smooth and unsettling. I wanted to dive into those worlds; I wanted to understand what made their smells. Even more than that, I wanted to be Jack the Scent Hunter, the hero of my father's stories, flying through the canopies of dripping jungles and climbing to the tops of mountains, all to catch the fragrance of one tiny flower.

Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all. For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line. Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs. We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like. Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now. To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful. By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.

Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!" But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths - Starbuck!" But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

Plants Fed On by Fawns" All the flowers: the pleated leaves of the hellebore; And the false blossom of the calla, a leaf like a petal— The white flesh of a woman bathing— a leaf over- Shadowing the small flowers hidden in the spadix; And fly poison, tender little flower, whose cursed root Pounded into a fine white powder will destroy flies. But why kill flies? They do not trouble me. They Are like the fruit the birds feed on. They are like The wind in the trees, or the sap that threads all things, The blue blood moving through branch and vine, Through the wings of dead things and living things.... If I lift my hand? If I write to you? The letters Can be stored in a box. Can they constitute the shape Of a love? Can the paper be ground? Can the box Be altar and garden plot and bed? Can there rise From the bed the form of a two-headed creature, A figure that looks both forward and back, keeping Watch always, one head sleeping while the other wakes, The bird head sleeping while the lion head wakes, And then the changing of the guard?.... No, The flies do not trouble me. They are like the stars At night. Common and beautiful. They are like My thoughts. I stood at midnight in the orchard. There were so many stars, and yet the stars, The very blackness of the night, though perfectly Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insubstantial, The whole veil of things seemed less substantial Than the thing that moved in the dark behind me, An unseen bird or beast, something shifting in its sleep, Half-singing and then forgetting it was singing: Be thou always ravished by love, starlight running Down and pulling back the veil of the heart, And then the water that does not exist opening up Before one, dark as wine, and the unveiled figure Of the self stepping unclothed, sweetly stripped Of its leaf, into starlight and the shadow of night, The cold water warm around the narrow ankles, The body at its most weightless, a thing so durable It will— like the carved stone figures holding up The temple roof— stand and remember its gods Long after those gods have been forsaken.

The Case of the Eyeless Fly The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)?

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? - Ode to a Nightingale

Homer's Hymn to the Earth: Mother of All O universal Mother, who dost keep From everlasting thy foundations deep, Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee! All shapes that have their dwelling in the sea, All things that fly, or on the ground divine Live, move, and there are nourished—these are thine; These from thy wealth thou dost sustain; from thee Fair babes are born, and fruits on every tree Hang ripe and large, revered Divinity! The life of mortal men beneath thy sway Is held; thy power both gives and takes away! Happy are they whom thy mild favours nourish; All things unstinted round them grow and flourish. For them, endures the life-sustaining field Its load of harvest, and their cattle yield Large increase, and their house with wealth is filled. Such honoured dwell in cities fair and free, The homes of lovely women, prosperously; Their sons exult in youth’s new budding gladness, And their fresh daughters free from care or sadness, With bloom-inwoven dance and happy song, On the soft flowers the meadow-grass among, Leap round them sporting--such delights by thee Are given, rich Power, revered Divinity. Mother of gods, thou Wife of starry Heaven, Farewell! be thou propitious, and be given A happy life for this brief melody, Nor thou nor other songs shall unremembered be

Only a fool says in his heart There is no Creator, no King of kings, Only mules would dare to bray These lethal mutterings. Over darkened minds as these The Darkness bears full sway, Fruitless, yet, bearing fruit, In their fell, destructive way. Sterile, though proliferate, A filthy progeny sees the day, When Evil, Thought and Action mate: Breeding sin, rebels and decay. The blackest deeds and foul ideals, Multiply throughout the earth, Through deadened, lifeless, braying souls, The Darkness labours and gives birth. Taking the Lord’s abundant gifts And rotting them to the core, They dress their dish and serve it out Foul seeds to infect thousands more. ‘The Tree of Life is dead!’ they cry, ‘And that of Knowledge not enough, Let us glut on the ashen apples Of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Have pity on Thy children, Lord, Left sorrowing on this earth, While fools and all their kindred Cast shadows with their murk, And to the dwindling wise, They toss their heads and wryly smirk. The world daily grinds to dust Virtue’s fair unicorns, Rather, it would now beget Vice’s mutant manticores. Wisdom crushed, our joy is gone, Buried under anxious fears For lost rights and freedoms, We shed many bitter tears. Death is life, Life is no more, Humanity buried in a tomb, In a fatal prenatal world Where tiny flowers Are ripped from the womb, Discarded, thrown away, Inconvenient lives That barely bloomed. Our elders fare no better, Their wisdom unwanted by and by, Boarded out to end their days, And forsaken are left to die. Only the youthful and the useful, In this capital age prosper and fly. Yet, they too are quickly strangled, Before their future plans are met, Professions legally pre-enslaved Held bound by mounting student debt. Our leaders all harangue for peace Yet perpetrate the horror, Of economic greed shored up Through manufactured war. Our armies now welter In foreign civilian gore. How many of our kin are slain For hollow martial honour? As if we could forget, ignore, The scourge of nuclear power, Alas, victors are rarely tried For their woeful crimes of war. Hope and pray we never see A repeat of Hiroshima. No more! Crimes are legion, The deeds of devil-spawn! What has happened to the souls Your Divine Image was minted on? They are now recast: Crooked coins of Caesar and The Whore of Babylon. How often mankind shuts its ears To Your music celestial, Mankind would rather march To the anthems of Hell. If humanity cannot be reclaimed By Your Mercy and great Love Deservedly we should be struck By Vengeance from above. Many dread the Final Day, And the Crack of Doom For others the Apocalypse Will never come too soon. ‘Lift up your heads, be glad’, Fools shall bray no more For at last the Master comes To thresh His threshing floor.

Homer's Hymn to the Earth: Mother of All Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition; dated 1818. O universal Mother, who dost keep From everlasting thy foundations deep, Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee! All shapes that have their dwelling in the sea, All things that fly, or on the ground divine Live, move, and there are nourished—these are thine; These from thy wealth thou dost sustain; from thee Fair babes are born, and fruits on every tree Hang ripe and large, revered Divinity! The life of mortal men beneath thy sway Is held; thy power both gives and takes away! Happy are they whom thy mild favours nourish; All things unstinted round them grow and flourish. For them, endures the life-sustaining field Its load of harvest, and their cattle yield Large increase, and their house with wealth is filled. Such honoured dwell in cities fair and free, The homes of lovely women, prosperously; Their sons exult in youth's new budding gladness, And their fresh daughters free from care or sadness, With bloom-inwoven dance and happy song, On the soft flowers the meadow-grass among, Leap round them sporting—such delights by thee Are given, rich Power, revered Divinity. Mother of gods, thou Wife of starry Heaven, Farewell! be thou propitious, and be given A happy life for this brief melody, Nor thou nor other songs shall unremembered be.

I call this our Thursday special. We have it regularly." This was a lie. In all the years not one single dish resembled another. Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared. The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls. Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewings of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch over steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat loaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her hands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life the way they must absolutely lead it.

(Pericles Funeral Oration) But before I praise the dead, I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great. Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own. Then, again, our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries; Our enemies have never yet felt our united strength, the care of a navy divides our attention, and on land we are obliged to send our own citizens everywhere. But they, if they meet and defeat a part of our army, are as proud as if they had routed us all, and when defeated they pretend to have been vanquished by us all. None of these men were enervated by wealth or hesitated to resign the pleasures of life; none of them put off the evil day in the hope, natural to poverty, that a man, though poor, may one day become rich. But, deeming that the punishment of their enemies was sweeter than any of these things, and that they could fall in no nobler cause, they determined at the hazard of their lives to be honorably avenged, and to leave the rest. They resigned to hope their unknown chance of happiness; but in the face of death they resolved to rely upon themselves alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist and suffer, rather than to fly and save their lives; they ran away from the word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast, and in an instant, at the height of their fortune, they passed away from the scene, not of their fear, but of their glory. I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men.

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day- very much such a sweetness as this- I struck my first whale- a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty- forty- forty years ago!- ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!- when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before- and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare- fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!- when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts- away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow- wife? wife?- rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey- more a demon than a man!- aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool- fool- old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!- crack my heart!- stave my brain!- mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!- lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!” “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.