Gap Between Friends Quotes

There should be a little gap between you and your friends, though you'll miss their companionship and you'll also miss their disrespect.

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum... and one night, one night they decide they don't like living in an asylum any more. They decide they're going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof, and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in the moon light... stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend didn't dare make the leap. Y'see... Y'see, he's afraid of falling. So then, the first guy has an idea... He says 'Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I'll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!' B-but the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says... He says 'Wh-what do you think I am? Crazy? You'd turn it off when I was half way across!

Miss Lilly.” Mr. Kan stood up and solemnly shook her hand. “When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years. It’s destiny that brings us together. I hope you will always think of me and Teddy as your friends.

We know ourselves by how we see ourselves mirrored in others’ eyes. So when a man lies habitually, he distorts the mirror he holds up to the world. In fooling others, he loses himself. Those who praise him? Those who love him? He knows they must simply be fools. He hates himself because there’s a gap between what he is and what he believes himself to be. If the gap grows too large, it becomes a tear, a schism. A man torn asunder lives in madness. So, my friend, do you know who you are?

I’ve learned difference between a friend and an acquaintance. Acquaintances provide a warm body in the room. They provide entertainment. They can keep you from feeling lonely. And acquaintances don’t involve sacrifice. If they don’t fit your schedule, it’s no big loss. You can know someone for decades, get together with them on countless occasions, and never become their friend. Friendship means cutting away a small piece of your heart and allowing another person to fill that gap. Friendship is anchored in love. When we put love into action, it communicates value.

But loneliness isn’t necessarily tied to whether you have a partner or a best friend or an aspirational active social life in which you’re laughing all the time. It’s a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationships you want. Loneliness lives in the gap.

Jesus is the true and better Adam, who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us (1 Corinthians 15). Jesus is the true and better Abel, who, though innocently slain, has blood that cries out for our acquittal, not our condemnation (Hebrews 12:24). Jesus is the true and better Abraham, who answered the call of God to leave the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void “not knowing whither he went” to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Isaac, who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us all. God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me, because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love, from me.” Now we can say to God, “Now we know that you love us, because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love, from us.” Jesus is the true and better Jacob, who wrestled with God and took the blow of justice we deserved so that we, like Jacob, receive only the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph, who at the right hand of the King forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses, who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant (Hebrews 3). Jesus is the true and better rock of Moses, who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert. Jesus is the true and better Job—the truly innocent sufferer—who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends (Job 42). Jesus is the true and better David, whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther, who didn’t just risk losing an earthly palace but lost the ultimate heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life but gave his life—to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah, who was cast out into the storm so we could be brought in.

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersall, the bearded and friendly curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, replied when I asked him the size of the total world archive of hominid and early human bones. The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inhabited territory from the Atlantic edge of Europe to the Pacific side of China, yet if you brought back to life every Homo erectus individual whose existence we can vouch for, they wouldn't fill a school bus. Homo habilis consists of even less: just two partial skeletons and a number of isolated limb bones. Something as short-lived as our own civilization would almost certainly not be known from the fossil record at all. In Europe, Tattersall offers by way of illustration, you've got hominid skulls in Georgia dated to about 1.7 million years ago, but then you have a gap of almost a million years before the next remains turn up in Spain, right on the other side of the continent, and then you've got another 300,000-year gap before you get a Homo heidelbergensis in Germany and none of them looks terribly much like any of the others. He smiled. It's from these kinds of fragmentary pieces that you're trying to work out the histories of entire species. It's quite a tall order. We really have very little idea of the relationships between many ancient species which led to us and which were evolutionary dead ends. Some probably don't deserve to be regarded as separate species at all.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

Hypocrisy is our friend. Power structures have to pretend to hold values in order to win the loyalty of at least some of society. We can use the gap between those professed values and reality to move people to try to change the reality towards the values.

Sort of?” she says, but there’s a gap between the way she’s responding and the way this concept of queer indispensability gutted me that day in the theater, still guts me to this day. And I know, I know why she doesn’t get it—it’s because I’m intellectualizing, I’m not telling her how I cried that night, quiet hot tears that I hid from the friends I was sitting next to. How my entire being seemed to implode, how I held every muscle tight to silence my sobs. How shocking and overwhelming this recognition felt.

Higher purpose: I am here to serve. I am here to inspire. I am here to love. I am here to live my truth. Communion: I will appreciate someone who doesn’t know that I feel that way. I will overlook the tension and be friendly to someone who has ignored me. I will express at least one feeling that has made me feel guilty or embarrassed. Awareness: I will spend ten minutes observing instead of speaking. I will sit quietly by myself just to sense how my body feels. If someone irritates me, I will ask myself what I really feel beneath the anger—and I won’t stop paying attention until the anger is gone. Acceptance: I will spend five minutes thinking about the best qualities of someone I really dislike. I will read about a group that I consider totally intolerant and try to see the world as they do. I will look in the mirror and describe myself exactly as if I were the perfect mother or father I wish I had had (beginning with the sentence “How beautiful you are in my eyes”). Creativity: I will imagine five things I could do that my family would never expect—and then I will do at least one of them. I will outline a novel based on my life (every incident will be true, but no one would ever guess that I am the hero). I will invent something in my mind that the world desperately needs. Being: I will spend half an hour in a peaceful place doing nothing except feeling what it is like to exist. I will lie outstretched on the grass and feel the earth languidly revolving under me. I will take in three breaths and let them out as gently as possible. Efficiency: I will let at least two things out of my control and see what happens. I will gaze at a rose and reflect on whether I could make it open faster or more beautifully than it already does—then I will ask if my life has blossomed this efficiently. I will lie in a quiet place by the ocean, or with a tape of the sea, and breathe in its rhythms. Bonding: When I catch myself looking away from someone, I will remember to look into the person’s eyes. I will bestow a loving gaze on someone I have taken for granted. I will express sympathy to someone who needs it, preferably a stranger. Giving: I will buy lunch and give it to someone in need on the street (or I will go to a café and eat lunch with the person). I will compliment someone for a quality that I know the individual values in him- or herself. I will give my children as much of my undivided time today as they want. Immortality: I will read a scripture about the soul and the promise of life after death. I will write down five things I want my life to be remembered for. I will sit and silently experience the gap between breathing in and breathing out, feeling the eternal in the present moment.

On the morning of November 22nd, a Friday, it became clear the gap between living and dying was closing. Realizing that Aldous [Huxley] might not survive the day, Laura [Huxley's wife] sent a telegram to his son, Matthew, urging him to come at once. At ten in the morning, an almost inaudible Aldous asked for paper and scribbled "If I go" and then some directions about his will. It was his first admission that he might die ... Around noon he asked for a pad of paper and scribbled LSD-try it intermuscular 100mm In a letter circulated to Aldous's friends, Laura Huxley described what followed: 'You know very well the uneasiness in the medical mind about this drug. But no 'authority', not even an army of authorities, could have stopped me then. I went into Aldous's room with the vial of LSD and prepared a syringe. The doctor asked me if I wanted him to give the shot- maybe because he saw that my hands were trembling. His asking me that made me conscious of my hands, and I said, 'No, I must do this.' An hour later she gave Huxley a second 100mm. Then she began to talk, bending close to his ear, whispering, 'light and free you let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully — you are going toward the light — you are going toward a greater love … You are going toward Maria's [Huxley's first wife, who had died many years earlier] love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.' All struggle ceased. The breathing became slower and slower and slower until, 'like a piece of music just finishing so gently in sempre piu piano, dolcamente,' at twenty past five in the afternoon, Aldous Huxley died.

And through of all those visits, Linh and Wylie became close friends—though some occasionally wonder if there might be more between them than friendship. That’s pure speculation, of course—and given the age gap between them (which is significant, since Linh has yet to register for the match), it also seems somewhat unlikely.

Although, to restless and ardent minds, morning may be the fitting season for exertion and activity, it is not always at that time that hope is strongest or the spirit most sanguine and buoyant. In trying and doubtful positions, youth, custom, a steady contemplation of the difficulties which surround us, and a familiarity with them, imperceptibly diminish our apprehensions and beget comparative indifference, if not a vague and reckless confidence in some relief, the means or nature of which we care not to foresee. But when we come, fresh, upon such things in the morning, with that dark and silent gap between us and yesterday; with every link in the brittle chain of hope, to rivet afresh; our hot enthusiasm subdued, and cool calm reason substituted in its stead; doubt and misgiving revive. As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds all nature with its cheerful beams, seems but to shine upon the weary obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave.

Third, it’s important to remember that a lot of cooperation doesn’t feel like “cooperation.” Friends are friends not only because of what they do together but also because of what they don’t do separately. Your friends don’t steal your stuff, make snide remarks about you, or try to bed your significant other. These everyday acts of nonaggression are inconspicuous forms of cooperation,

Second, if the idea of friendship as a cooperation device seems strange, that may be because of the unusually good times in which we live. In the feast-and-famine world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, having friends who were willing to have you over for dinner wasn’t just a nicety but a matter of life and death. The world of our ancestors was also a lot more violent. In our world, few friends can say that they’ve saved one another’s lives, but that might not have been true in the past.

Colby’s resourceful, I’ll give him that.” “You used to be good friends.” “We were, until he started hanging around Cecily,” came the short reply. “I’m not as angry at him as I was. But it seems that he has to have a woman to prop him up.” “Not necessarily,” Matt replied. “Sometimes a good woman can save a bad man. It’s an old saying, but fairly true from time to time. Colby was headed straight to hell until Cecily put him on the right track. It’s gratitude, but I don’t think he can see that just yet. He’s in between mourning his ex-wife and finding someone to replace her.” He leaned back again. “I feel sorry for him. He’s basically a one-woman man, but he lost the woman.” Tate packed back to the wing chair and sat down on the edge. “He’s not getting Cecily. She’s mine, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.” Matt stared at him. “Don’t you know anything about women in love?” “Not a lot,” the younger man confessed. “I’ve spent the better part of my life avoiding them.” “Especially Cecily,” Matt agreed. “She’s been like a shadow. You didn’t miss her until you couldn’t see her behind you anymore.” “She’s grown away from me,” Tate said. “I don’t know how to close the gap. I know she still feels something for me, but she wouldn’t stay and fight for me.” He lifted his gaze to Matt’s hard face. “She’s carrying my child. I want both of them, regardless of the adjustments I have to make. Cecily’s the only woman I’ve ever truly wanted.” Matt spread his hands helplessly. “This is one mess I can’t help you sort out,” he said at last. “If Cecily loves you, she’ll give in sooner or later. If it were me, I’d go find her and tell her how I really felt. I imagine she’ll listen.” Tate stared at his shoes. He couldn’t find the right words to express what he felt. “Tate,” his father said gently, “you’ve had a lot to get used to lately. Give it time. Don’t rush things. I’ve found that life sorts itself out, given the opportunity.” Tate’s dark eyes lifted. “Maybe it does.” He searched the other man’s quiet gaze. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was, having a foot in two worlds. I’m getting used to it.” “You still have a unique heritage,” Matt pointed out. “Not many men can claim Berber revolutionaries and Lakota warriors as relatives.

It may seem strange to conceive of friendship as principally about cooperation rather than, say, hanging out and having fun, but appearances can be misleading. First, nature’s purposes need not be revealed in our experience. Sex, for example, is primarily about making babies, but that’s not necessarily what motivates people to do the deed. Likewise, friendship may ultimately be about things that are far from our minds when we’re being friendly. Indeed, if you’re constantly thinking about the material advantages of your friendship, that’s a sign that you’re not really a friend.

inspire. I am here to love. I am here to live my truth. Communion: I will appreciate someone who doesn’t know that I feel that way. I will overlook the tension and be friendly to someone who has ignored me. I will express at least one feeling that has made me feel guilty or embarrassed. Awareness: I will spend ten minutes observing instead of speaking. I will sit quietly by myself just to sense how my body feels. If someone irritates me, I will ask myself what I really feel beneath the anger—and I won’t stop paying attention until the anger is gone. Acceptance: I will spend five minutes thinking about the best qualities of someone I really dislike. I will read about a group that I consider totally intolerant and try to see the world as they do. I will look in the mirror and describe myself exactly as if I were the perfect mother or father I wish I had had (beginning with the sentence “How beautiful you are in my eyes”). Creativity: I will imagine five things I could do that my family would never expect—and then I will do at least one of them. I will outline a novel based on my life (every incident will be true, but no one would ever guess that I am the hero). I will invent something in my mind that the world desperately needs. Being: I will spend half an hour in a peaceful place doing nothing except feeling what it is like to exist. I will lie outstretched on the grass and feel the earth languidly revolving under me. I will take in three breaths and let them out as gently as possible. Efficiency: I will let at least two things out of my control and see what happens. I will gaze at a rose and reflect on whether I could make it open faster or more beautifully than it already does—then I will ask if my life has blossomed this efficiently. I will lie in a quiet place by the ocean, or with a tape of the sea, and breathe in its rhythms. Bonding: When I catch myself looking away from someone, I will remember to look into the person’s eyes. I will bestow a loving gaze on someone I have taken for granted. I will express sympathy to someone who needs it, preferably a stranger. Giving: I will buy lunch and give it to someone in need on the street (or I will go to a café and eat lunch with the person). I will compliment someone for a quality that I know the individual values in him- or herself. I will give my children as much of my undivided time today as they want. Immortality: I will read a scripture about the soul and the promise of life after death. I will write down five things I want my life to be remembered for. I will sit and silently experience the gap between breathing in and breathing out, feeling the eternal in the present moment.

That pain of wanting, the burning desire to possess what you lack, is one of the greatest allies you have. It is a force you can harness to create whatever you want in your life. When you took an honest look at your life back in the previous chapter and rated yourself as being either on the up curve or the down curve in seven different areas, you were painting a picture of where you are now. This diagram shows that as point A. Where you could be tomorrow, your vision of what’s possible for you in your life, is point B. And to the extent that there is a “wanting” gap between points A and B, there is a natural tension between those two poles. It’s like holding a magnet near a piece of iron: you can feel the pull of that magnet tugging at the iron. Wanting is exactly like that; it’s magnetic. You can palpably feel your dreams (B) tugging at your present circumstances (A). Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon painted his vision of a more harmonious world in the song Imagine. Within the decade, he was shot to death. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates … our world can be harsh on people who talk about an improved reality. Visions and visionaries make people uncomfortable. These are especially dramatic examples, of course, but the same principle applies to the personal dreams and goals of people we’ve never heard of. The same principle applies to everyone, including you and me. Let’s say you have a brother, or sister, or old friend with whom you had a falling out years ago. You wish you had a better relationship, that you talked more often, that you shared more personal experiences and conversations together. Between where you are today and where you can imagine being, there is a gap. Can you feel it?

This is a profoundly important conclusion. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. That is why this book contains questions that are addressed personally to the reader. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée. It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has sometimes been appropriate to the modern demythologized apocalypse is something I shall take for granted; his is a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. The absurd dishonesty of all prefabricated patterns is cardinal to his beliefs; to cover reality over with eidetic images--illusions persisting from past acts of perception, as some abnormal children 'see' the page or object that is no longer before them --to do this is to sink into mauvaise foi. This expression covers all comfortable denials of the undeniable--freedom --by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are. Are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? Is the unavoidable, insidious, comfortable enemy of all novelists mauvaise foi? Sartre has recently, in his first instalment of autobiography, talked with extraordinary vivacity about the roleplaying of his youth, of the falsities imposed upon him by the fictive power of words. At the beginning of the Great War he began a novel about a French private who captured the Kaiser, defeated him in single combat, and so ended the war and recovered Alsace. But everything went wrong. The Kaiser, hissed by the poilus, no match for the superbly fit Private Perrin, spat upon and insulted, became 'somehow heroic.' Worse still, the peace, which should instantly have followed in the real world if this fiction had a genuine correspondence with reality, failed to occur. 'I very nearly renounced literature,' says Sartre. Roquentin, in a subtler but basically similar situation, has the same reaction. Later Sartre would find again that the hero, however assiduously you use the pitchfork, will recur, and that gaps, less gross perhaps, between fiction and reality will open in the most close-knit pattern of words. Again, the young Sartre would sometimes, when most identified with his friends at the lycée, feel himself to be 'freed at last from the sin of existing'--this is also an expression of Roquentin's, but Roquentin says it feels like being a character in a novel. How can novels, by telling lies, convert existence into being? We see Roquentin waver between the horror of contingency and the fiction of aventures. In Les Mots Sartre very engagingly tells us that he was Roquentin, certainly, but that he was Sartre also, 'the elect, the chronicler of hells' to whom the whole novel of which he now speaks so derisively was a sort of aventure, though what was represented within it was 'the unjustified, brackish existence of my fellow-creatures.

The family that had once welcomed him and been his as well, especially after his father deteriorated, took a step back. And he found he was instantly isolated, separated by their loyalty to Julia. No one ever said anything directly; no acknowledgement was ever made of how she was found. They were grieving the loss of their sister, their child. He was alone in grieving the loss of his marriage as well. The gap widened. An unspoken hostility grew between them, built from the unsaid words; a kind of defensiveness on both sides, which gradually hardened into a wall. Had they believed he had something to do with her infidelity? That he’d driven her to it through some neglect or unfaithfulness of his own? Had she confided in them about her lack of marital satisfaction? And so it spread outwards like a kind of web; extending to embrace her friends – friends he’d thought of as belonging to him too until they struggled to make eye contact with him at the funeral or no longer bothered to ring. He hadn’t been the one who’d cheated. But he was the one who felt punished for the affair. The one who was left. ‘It’s time you moved on,’ people began to say, as little as six months later. ‘You need to let go of that now.’ Yes, he needed to let go of it, accept it, and endure the increasing indifference of those he thought had loved him. He needed to grow up, get on. Life wasn’t fair. Who ever said life was fair? So she cheated. Time to get a girlfriend; buy a house…start again. Yet

Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden, a much more difficult garden, and whose obedience is imputed to us. Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for acquittal. Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing wither he went to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant. Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends. Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in. The Bible’s really not about you—it’s about him.

I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once, I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key…Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers. And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from outer space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes, I will think two maple keys. If I am maple key falling, at least I can twirl. Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It’s no self-conscious, so apparently moral, simple to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Ezekiel excoriates false prophets who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock- more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

if the Holy One of Israel is in the business of making a holy people for himself—then why does it seem unlikely that any of us are part of a denomination or ministry network or affiliation of friends that has recently been described as any kind of “holiness movement”? Remember, the Puritans (pure-itans) did not invent that name for themselves. Their opponents coined the term because they thought the Puritans were so intensely focused on being, well, pure. The pursuit of holiness does not occupy the place in our hearts that it did in theirs. More critically, a concern for holiness is not obvious in our lives like it’s obvious in the pages of Scripture.

Related to this first reason is the fear that a passion for holiness makes you some kind of weird holdover from a bygone era. As soon as you share your concern about swearing or about avoiding certain movies or about modesty or sexual purity or self-control or just plain godliness, people look at you like you have a moralistic dab of cream cheese on your face from the 1950s. Believers get nervous that their friends will call them legalistic, prudish, narrow-minded, old fashioned, holier-than-thou—or worst of all, a fundamentalist.

Nobody knows how old Petra is, but it was a thriving city when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, and for a full five thousand years it has had but that one entrance, through a gorge that narrows finally until only one loaded camel at a time can pass. Army after army down the centuries have tried to storm the place, and failed, so that even the invincible Alexander and the Romans had to fall back on the arts of friendship to obtain the key. We, the last invaders, came as friends, if only Grim could persuade the tyrant to believe it. The sun rose over the city just as we reached the narrowest part of the gut, Grim leading, and its first rays showed that we were using the bed of a watercourse for a road. Exactly in front of us, glimpsed through a twelve-foot gap between cliffs six hundred feet high, was a sight worth going twice that distance, running twice that risk, to see—a rose-red temple front, carved out of the solid valley wall and glistening in the opalescent hues of morning. Not even Burkhardt, who was the first civilized man to see the place in a thousand years, described that temple properly; because you can’t. It is huge—majestic—silent—empty—aglow with all the prism colors in the morning sun. And it seems to think.

She’d thought with time the distance between her and her friends would narrow, but that gap had only widened and she couldn’t find the energy to pretend otherwise. So she remained alone, working silently

We simply don’t believe that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4). Many Christians have the mistaken notion that if only we were better Christians, everyone would appreciate us. They don’t realize that holiness comes with a cost. Sure, you can focus on the virtues the world likes. But if you pursue true religion that cares for orphans and promotes purity (James 1:27), you’ll lose some of the friends you were so desperate to make. Becoming a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, requires you to resist the world which wants to press you into its mold (Rom. 12:1–2). Saving yourself for marriage, staying sober on Friday night, turning down a promotion to stay at your church, refusing to say the f-word, turning off the television—these are the kinds of things the world doesn’t understand. Don’t expect them to. The world provides no cheerleaders on the pathway to godliness. THE

Jay Levinson famously said, “Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.” We can expand this well beyond ads. All the storytelling you do requires frequency. You’ll try something new, issue a statement, explore a new market . . . and when it doesn’t work right away, the instinct is to walk away and try something else. But frequency teaches us that there’s a very real dip—a gap between when we get bored and when people get the message.

army of people paid to “gaslight” the public into thinking they are protected. Chapter 23, page 132. Trick #17 for Farming Humans is using stock markets to launder taxpayer backed, Fed created money to those who control the Fed. Chapter 25, page 136. Trick #18 for Farming Humans is the use of fake information to ensure that society never knows what is true and what is false. Elections, wars, headlines etc. Chapter 26, page 141. Trick #19 for Farming Humans is stimulation and distraction. This emotional hacking of humans is Trick #19 for Farming Humans. See Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking Book by Christopher J. Hadnagy Trick #20 for Farming Humans is the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and 83 media regulations, including requirement for “honest, equitable and balanced”. Chapter 28, page 153. Trick #21 for Farming Humans is governments as handmaidens to corporations, not people. Chapter 29, page 157. Trick #22 for Farming Humans is in the invisible connections between government, professionals and corporations. Chapter 31, page 162. Laws, lobby groups, lawyers. Trick #23 for Farming Humans is a militarized police used to serve and protect power instead of people. Chapter 32, page 170. World Trade Organization, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, etc. Trick #24 for Farming Humans is virtually zero enforcement of crime above a certain level of money or power. Invisible friends and powerful people cannot be prosecuted. Chapter 33, page 175. Trick #25 for Farming Humans is cooking the financial books. Chapter 34, page 180. Valeant Pharmaceutical, IFRS vs GAP accounting standards, audit numbers rigged. Trick #26 for Farming Humans is printing infinite money to exchange for finite goods…”let me handle that for you.” Chapter 35, page 184. Trick #27 for Farming Humans is public servants spying on the public, and not on the public servants. Chapter 36, page 188.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, as Magritte told us. There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified. An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are is not how happy you are.

They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’, A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. ‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.37 This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.

We will close this chapter with a lengthy quote from Tim Keller about how we should read the Bible and think about Christ even in the Old Testament: Jesus is the true and better Adam who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us. Jesus is the true and better Abel who, though innocently slain, has blood now that cries out, not for our condemnation, but for acquittal. Jesus is the true and better Abraham who answered the call of God to leave all the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void not knowing whither he went to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Isaac who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us. And when God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love from me,” now we can look at God taking his Son up the mountain and sacrificing him and say, “Now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your Son, your only Son, whom you love from us.” Jesus is the true and better Jacob who wrestled and took the blow of justice we deserved, so we, like Jacob, only receive the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph who, at the right hand of the king, forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant. Jesus is the true and better Rock of Moses who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert. Jesus is the true and better Job, the truly innocent sufferer, who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends. Jesus is the true and better David whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther who didn’t just risk leaving an earthly palace but lost the ultimate and heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life, but gave his life to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah who was cast out into the storm so that we could be brought in. Jesus is the real Rock of Moses, the real Passover Lamb, innocent, perfect, helpless, slain so the angel of death will pass over us. He’s the true temple, the true prophet, the true priest, the true king, the true sacrifice, the true lamb, the true light, the true bread. The Bible’s really not about you—it’s about him.51

The space between meeting a stranger and making a new friend can be a short distance or a gaping chasm. By understanding how to open a conversation well, you will be better able to bridge the gaps and build rapport more successfully.

In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an “illusion of intimacy”—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being “part of a circle of friends.” The two coined the term “para-social interaction” to describe this “intimacy at a distance.

My day just splits again, and I am at the table sitting with the girls, Jenny is hearing me say all this… I am saying at lunch to all of them not leaving out one gross detail- and Jenny said- ‘Damn I have loaded in my undies right now just leasing to this crap.’ Liv and Maddie are kissing like to ribbed- hot- b*tch dogs in heat over it, so yeah, it's hot. I said- ‘I am coming – OH-hh-Aaa- UM-mmm-COME-meeting!!!’ So loud that I know that the rooms in the apartments could hear me, one even said back to my god- yet Miss Wilddickersion is eighty-eight I know who you are… a girl over there, rolled my eyes feeling so award.’ I am so going to hell for this- I said out loud. Do you ever look back over the crap you say, and say what the freak was I thinking? I just had the thought of this crap I am saying. Jenny said- nope not really- my dad hears me coming all the time so- like last night he said- ‘Stop it! You’re going to go throw your bedroom floor girl, and it’s four in the morning! ‘Yet I hear their freaking headboard hitting my wall- but- but that’s okay?’ I said about to have the old b*tch over in the next apart room there getting off too- ‘We all do’ -said Maddie and Olivia. Have you ever had the cops come, over that crap? Jenny said- ‘Well- freak know- Maybe…? I’ve done an officer here at the school, said Jenny proudly, so the whole cafeteria could hear her. Hey- Jenny- no one cares to hear about you being a slutty ho,’ Said- Marcel, yelling it at a table or two away. Maddie- ‘So was it that good?’ ‘It’s good under the hood.’ Said Maddie, I said the same thing too, in a different way, I said- ‘If you know what you’re doing down there.’ Jenny- ‘I- am- the- one that showed you-you b*tch, and your sis too.’ It’s all good! I speak! Not sure if I am going to keep my nasty pizza down at this point really, I don’t want to have thoughts played around in my mind freaking and fingering my brain. I put my feet up all girly and per-die on the table, and he sits accused from me to check me out so why not give him what he wants, and I don’t give a crap if I am in a skirt, I spread them out sloughing like a dude, and Marcel turns bright red, I want him to see that, I was not wearing annoying underneath I know that someone took a picture of my p*ssy and all of his freaked-up face- yep jaw-dropping moments, good thing I shaved it! The teaching that was looking over us freaking fainted at the sight of my va-jay-jay, is that a good thing? Oliva was saying please don’t fart- please don’t fart- she had the set on the other side of me, yet she was all pressed up to Maddie, so I knew he could see all of this- YOU-NO! I said- ‘Dude shut up! You’re freaking me over, and I put my one hand down between my legs, and start to play with myself, caressing it all around, sometimes up and down or in a little circular pattern, making lots of sounds. I even put my long fingers down inside and feel all the wetness and wroth, and I hear voices coming out of me, so he could see the come on my fingers unstop of my dark purple nail polish, and I come right in front of everyone, but it was only for him to see.’ Jenny- ‘do I see a d*ick; you need one to freak that p*ssy? I said- ‘Nah- dude that’s just my heart throbbing clit, and I get written up by another old b*tch teach, that must have a hairy one, or something like that- she has always been up against my ass hole.’ ‘Sometimes you are as blunt as the butt end of a fork, freaking strapping you in the one boob!’ said- Oliva. I see Marcel in the lunch line making a cute almost kiss-ie face at me, and I rankle up my nose and turn my head off to the right side and shake it in a short fast yet deliberate quiver. I walk up to where more than friends and at this point, I hug him and the cafeteria gaps, he kisses me in front of everyone, and I look up before walking and saying with flirty eyes- (You’re such a weirdo!)

a Yale University psychology professor is developing an alternative SAT. Professor Robert Sternberg calls his test the Rainbow Project—and it certainly sounds like a lot more fun than the pressure-packed exam many of us endured as teenagers. In Sternberg’s test, students are given five blank New Yorker cartoons—and must craft humorous captions for each one. They must also write or narrate a story, using as their guide only a title supplied by the test givers (sample title: “The Octopus’s Sneakers”). And students are presented with various real-life challenges—arriving at a party where they don’t know anybody, or trying to convince friends to help move furniture—and asked how they’d respond. Although still in its experimental stages, the Rainbow Project has been twice as successful as the SAT in predicting how well students perform in college. What’s more, the persistent gap in performance between white students and racial minorities evident on the SAT narrows considerably on this test.

Australians: Men who forked snakes in the sun-baked desert, and popped the eyes out of dingoes with old ANZAC rifles, and surfed between gaping shark mouths, all while downing 20oz. cans of Victoria Bitter. Men trained by gap years padding about Thailand and India in a drunken stupor, flipping off the local constabulary. These men, friends of the groom, would dare each other to feats of athletic drinking. One of them, called Bonko or Rhino, would collapse off his chair half conscious as his comrades hooted with raucous delight.

He’s even trying to hurt me as I am coming. But the pain he is inflicting feels so good. It was like riding a thin line between pleasure and pain.

We stayed two more days in Kurkurast, getting well fed and rested, waiting for a road-packer that was due in from the south and would give us a lift when it went back again. Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our crossing the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it becomes a saga, full of traditional locations and even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from the mountain-gaps that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice, of the shadowless weather, of the night's darkness. I listened as fascinated as all the rest, my gaze on my friend's dark face.

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yes. Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yesss. - Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

There was the conventional generation gap between father and son—one familiar to many of David’s friends, several of whom had absent or dead fathers—yet Haywood’s youthful obsession with the entertainment world had not been entirely extinguished. Hence it was Haywood and David who, in January of 1964, came up with a “concocted” sales pitch for David’s new band. Shameless, “over the top,” according to George Underwood, Haywood and David’s joint concoction would kick off David’s career.

As Paul prepared his hesitant answer, a chorus of voices from the crowd shouted, “Yeah! Let him die!” These are the Northern herders. Paul couldn’t quite bring himself to agree—or disagree. He said that neighbors, friends, and churches should take care of such a man, implying, but not explicitly stating, that the government should let him die if no one else is willing or able to pay. As you might expect the more Southerly herders disagree. (Note:

Research by Katherine Kinzler and her colleagues indicates that humans are predisposed from an early age to use the original shibboleths—linguistic cues—as markers of group identity and as a basis for social preference. In a series of experiments using English and French children, they showed that six-month-old infants prefer to look at speakers who lack foreign accents, that ten-month-old infants prefer to accept toys from native language speakers, and that five-year-old children prefer to be friends with children who lack foreign accents. It seems that human brains, even before they can generate speech, use language to distinguish trustworthy Us from untrustworthy Them. Shibboleths

When acquaintances embrace, one can read the gap between them. When friends, when siblings embrace, no matter how close, there is still an infinitesimal distance, like a layer of molecules, separating them. When a mother hugs her child, they meet. But when lovers embrace, they don’t just meet but join. Tess

I surface from the simulation with a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I detach from the wires and get up. She’s still recovering from the sensation of almost drowning, shaking her hands and taking deep breaths. I watch her for a moment, not sure how to say what I need to say. “What?” she says. “How did you do that?” “Do what?” “Crack the glass.” “I don’t know.” I nod, and offer her my hand. She gets up without any trouble, but she avoids my eyes. I check the corners of the room for cameras. There is one, just where I thought it would be, right across from us. I take her elbow and lead her out of the room, to a place where I know we won’t be observed, in the blind spot between two surveillance points. “What?” she says irritably. “You’re Divergent,” I say. I haven’t been very nice to her today. Last night I saw her and her friends by the chasm, and a lapse in judgment--or sobriety--led me to lean in too close, to tell her she looked good. I’m worried that I went too far. Now I’m even more worried, but for different reasons. She cracked the glass. She’s Divergent. She’s in danger. She stares. Then she sinks against the wall, adopting an almost-convincing aura of casualness. “What’s Divergent?” “Don’t play stupid,” I say. “I suspected it last time, but this time it’s obvious. You manipulated the simulation; you’re Divergent. I’ll delete the footage, but unless you want to wind up dead at the bottom of the chasm, you’ll figure out how to hide it during the simulations! Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I walk back to the simulation room, pulling the door closed behind me. It’s easy to delete the footage--just a few keystrokes and it’s done, the record clean. I double-check her file, making sure the only thing that’s in there is the data from the first simulation. I’ll have to come up with a way to explain where the data from this session went. A good lie, one that Eric and Max will actually believe. In a hurry, I take out my pocketknife and wedge it between the panels covering the motherboard of the computer, prying them apart. Then I go into the hallway, to the drinking fountain, and fill my mouth with water. When I return to the simulation room, I spit some of the water into the gap between the panels. I put my knife away and wait. A minute or so later, the screen goes dark. Dauntless headquarters is basically a leaky cave--water damage happens all the time.

But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people's infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don't sense the danger as it's happening, because what's wrong with friendship? Why can't we have friends of the opposite sex--or of the same sex, for that matter--even if we are married? The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony--so long as the "walls and windows" of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass's theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world--that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage. What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself--your deepest yearnings and frustrations--and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.

replaced by a detail posted on a Web page, which may be more accurate but is probably less true. Gone is the friend you knew from home. Gone is the sled and the lake and the winter. Gone are the stories that existed in the gap between imagining and knowing and, with them, the distance that turned the particular into the universal and the mundane into the romantic.

I reach for her, pull her closer to me, wanting, no needing to hold her. “Yes, I do. I love you, Chloe Jane Morris. I think I always have and I just didn’t know what it was.” She crawls closer to me, climbing into my lap. Tears are streaking down her cheeks unchecked. Her smile could light up the whole town in a blackout. “I love you, Raif Montgomery,” she says, and the tension leaves my body. Finally. I don’t know how long I’ve been longing to hear those words from her, but it feels like an age. Her mouth is mere inches from mine as she murmurs, “I’ve loved you forever. I don’t know how to stop.” I pull her even closer. “Don’t ever stop, darlin’.” I plead with her as she closes the short gap between us and sears my mouth with her kiss.

One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” wrote Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in a recent post on the platform. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.

The company has also used its object recognition technology to analyze the characteristics of 160,000 people in the US who posted photos of cats or dogs. The public study found that “cat people” are more likely to enjoy sci-fi films, less likely to be in a relationship and have 26 fewer friends on average than “dog people”.

I saw other guys, including friends of mine, who were somehow able to do what I could not. They would make jokes, speak up in groups, and flirt with women. I saw myself as somehow different, or less than they were. This gap between them and me seemed like an insurmountable chasm, leaving me on the outskirts forever.

Though wildly different in both character and tastes, Jane and Mary shared a common bond aside from the royal blood which flowed in their veins: their religious devotion was unswerving, and the dominant factor in both of their lives. For Mary, the situation was heartbreaking. Jane's mother, Frances, had been a close childhood companion. Frances, like her husband and her daughter, was a Protestant, though perhaps not as fervent in her faith as her husband and eldest daughter. Despite the fact that she and Mary were on opposing sides of the religious fence, to all appearances their differing beliefs had never driven a wedge between the cousins. Frances was a seasoned courtier, and as such she was well skilled in the art of diplomacy. It seems likely, therefore, that when she was in the company of her childhood friend, the two women tactfully avoided conversing on the subject of religion. After all, there were many at court who managed to maintain friendships with people who held differing religious beliefs, and Mary had also been friendly with Jane's step-grandmother, Katherine Willoughby. But it was quite different with jane, for though Mary had tried her best with the teenager, and had done her utmost to be affectionate, the relationship was not a harmonious one. The age gap between them meant that to Jane, Mary was probably more like an aunt than a cousin. Mary may have been twenty years Jane's senior, but it was not age that lay at the heart of the matter; the reason for the distance between the two cousins was perfectly simple: religion.