Geometry Love Quotes

Frost grows on the window glass, forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry. Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition. Now it can build castles and cities and whole ice continents with your breath’s vapor. In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in . . . But first, you hear the crackle of their wings.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate. I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing. And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything. If only I could think! If only I could feel!

This love triangle had reached new heights, and as much as Matt loved geometry, this was not the sort of triangle he wanted anything to do with.

The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.

Mustardseed grinned at Bertie. "I was never any good at geometry, but you’re stuck in a love triangle, aren’t you?" "Shut up," she ordered even as Moth asked, "But what if there were four of them?" "That’s a love rectangle, and five people would be a love pentagon." "And what are six people in love?" Cobweb demanded. Mustardseed thought it over a moment. "Manslaughter, I suppose.

Besides, don’t you know basic geometry, Strategist Sima?” I make a triangle with my fingers and look through it. “A triangle is the strongest shape.

The way your mother rolls her eyes at you, your sudden decision to stop eating red meat, the immediate unexplainable sadness you felt when you saw your father’s shirt draped over the back of a chair. You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It’s a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you’re anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.

Also: Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not.

Why did you do all that, Frankie?" asked Porter. "I mean, it was brilliant, what you did, what you made us do - but why would you bother? That's what I can't figure out." Frankie sighed. "Have you ever heard of the panopticon?" she asked him. Porter shook his head. "Have you ever been in love?" He shook his head again. "Then I can't explain it," Frankie said. They went inside and took the geometry test.

As her lips changed the geometry, Her smile turned to poetry.

You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It's a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you're anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.

What if Loves are analogous to math? First, arithmetic, then geometry and algebra, then trig and quadratics…

As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property, and if it were a question of poetry we would likely find that she is the daughter of love.

When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.

Love is inexact, Henry said. It is not a science. It is barely a noun. It means one thing to one person, and one thing to another. It means one thing to one person at one point and then something else at another point. It doesn’t make sense. We are gathered here today to not make sense. We are gathered here today to listen to the ineffable. I’m supposed to be explaining it, but I can’t explain it. I love you, it’s a mystery. Because it’s a mystery, we have to take care of it. Feed it. It can go missing, but we can’t tie it up. We can only tie it to someone else. Other people. Then the world is like this: full of the geometry of my rope tied to you, and to you, and yours tied to him, and to her, and hers to someone else. I love you, it’s a mystery. A moment of silence.

She wanted to run her hands over him as he whispered the impassioned corollaries of non-Euclidean geometry.

Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of Pi. He would have been baking her a Pie! If Euclid had ever beheld a vision of loveliness like the one I see walking into my anti-math class, he would have forgotten all the geometry of lines and planes, and concentrated on the sweet simplicity of soft curves. If Pythagoras had ever had a girl look at him the way Gloria's eyes fix in my direction, he would have given up his calculations on the hypotenuse of right triangles and run for the hills to pick a bouquet of wildflowers.

Elric: We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocation of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things. John Sheridan: Such as? Elric: The true secrets, the important things. Fourteen words to make someone fall in love with you forever. Seven words to make them go without pain. How to say good-bye to a friend who is dying. How to be poor. How to be rich. How to rediscover dreams when the world has stolen them. That is why we are going away—to preserve that knowledge. Sheridan: From what? Elric: There is a storm coming, a black and terrible storm. We would not have our knowledge lost or used to ill purpose. From this place we will launch ourselves into the stars. With luck, you will never see our kind again in your lifetime. I know you have your orders, Captain. Detain us if you wish. But I cannot tell you where we are going. I can only ask you to trust us.

No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, percep- tions, sounds, the human kind .... no geometry of landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the fi rst, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservation.

It seemed impossible that he’d chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained.

Faith in God, then, is not at all the same as the kind of logical certainty that we attain in Euclidean geometry. God is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, the solution to a mathematical problem. To believe in God is not to accept the possibility of his existence because it has been “proved” to us by some theoretical argument, but it is to put our trust in One whom we know and love. Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

I told him I was a zero-dimensional, nonexistent point, floating in space, until I met him. Yes, I know. What an embarrassing love letter! Attempting to be poetic about geometry! A modern woman would never write such a thing. You should most definitely exist before you meet a man! You should have your own career, your own hobbies, your own thoughts, and your own financial plan!

Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man's welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

But the superheroes showed me how to overcome the Bomb. Superhero stories woke me up to my own potential. They gave me the basis of a code of ethics I still live by. They inspired my creativity, brought me money, and made it possible for me to turn doing what I loved into a career. They helped me grasp and understand the geometry of higher dimensions and alerted me to the fact that everything is real, especially our fictions. By offering role models whose heroism and transcendent qualities would once have been haloed and clothed in floaty robes, they nurtured in me a sense of the cosmic and ineffable that the turgid, dogmatically stupid "dad" religions could never match. I had no need for faith. My gods were real, made of paper and light, and they rolled up into my pocket like a superstring dimension.

In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my alcohol & geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gunpoint.

On Plato’s door, it says let no one enter who does not know geometry. On Love’s door, it says let no one enter who does not know cry!

How on earth am I supposed to know what love is if I can’t even pass a stupid high school geometry class?

The English teachers loved to pick apart the principal’s frequent, wordy missives; after all, Principal Kendricks had taught geometry before heading into administration.

I loved many before you, and I'll see many after you, and I met many when I was with you, but you are outside of the geometry of repetition.

unsolicited advice to adolescent girls with crooked teeth and pink hair When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boys call asking your cup size, say A, hang up. When he says you gave him blue balls, say you’re welcome. When a girl with thick black curls who smells like bubble gum stops you in a stairwell to ask if you’re a boy, explain that you keep your hair short so she won’t have anything to grab when you head-butt her. Then head-butt her. When a guidance counselor teases you for handed-down jeans, do not turn red. When you have sex for the second time and there is no condom, do not convince yourself that screwing between layers of underwear will soak up the semen. When your geometry teacher posts a banner reading: “Learn math or go home and learn how to be a Momma,” do not take your first feminist stand by leaving the classroom. When the boy you have a crush on is sent to detention, go home. When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boy with the blue mohawk swallows your heart and opens his wrists, hide the knives, bleach the bathtub, pour out the vodka. Every time. When the skinhead girls jump you in a bathroom stall, swing, curse, kick, do not turn red. When a boy you think you love delivers the first black eye, use a screw driver, a beer bottle, your two good hands. When your father locks the door, break the window. When a college professor writes you poetry and whispers about your tight little ass, do not take it as a compliment, do not wait, call the Dean, call his wife. When a boy with good manners and a thirst for Budweiser proposes, say no. When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boys tell you how good you smell, do not doubt them, do not turn red. When your brother tells you he is gay, pretend you already know. When the girl on the subway curses you because your tee shirt reads: “I fucked your boyfriend,” assure her that it is not true. When your dog pees the rug, kiss her, apologize for being late. When he refuses to stay the night because you live in Jersey City, do not move. When he refuses to stay the night because you live in Harlem, do not move. When he refuses to stay the night because your air conditioner is broken, leave him. When he refuses to keep a toothbrush at your apartment, leave him. When you find the toothbrush you keep at his apartment hidden in the closet, leave him. Do not regret this. Do not turn red. When your mother hits you, do not strike back.

Reverence for the natural environment, and experiencing the interconnectedness between all things has long guided me to create watercolor paintings of beauty and spirit. Life's continuing adventure has led me into an exciting exploration into the wisdom and symbolic imagery of Sacred Geometry. These paintings act as a bridge between this reality and a metaphorical world of healing, continuity, and transformation. I use multiple transparent watercolor glazes coupled with image overlapping techniques, and sacred geometry to produce visions of a multi-dimensional reality. It is my intention to create art that embodies the vibration of Universal Love and expresses the joy and gratitude I feel for the honor of being part of this earthwalk." ~Blessings, Francene~

A therapist who fears dependence will tell his patient, sometimes openly, that the urge to rely is pathologic. In doing so he denigrates a cardinal tool. A parent who rejects a child's desire to depend raises a fragile person. Those children, grown to adulthood, are frequently among those who come for help. Shall we tell them again that no one can find an art to lean on, that each alone must work to ease a private sorrow? Then we shall repeat and experiment already conducted; many know its result only too well. If patient and therapist are to proceed together down a curative path, they must allow limbic regulation and its companion moon, dependence, to make the revolutionary magic. Many therapists believe that reliance fosters a detrimental dependency. Instead, they say, patients should be directed to "do it for themselves" - as if they possess everything but the wit to throw that switch and get on with their lives. But people do not learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the names of state capitals. They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator, and they learn it implicitly. Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner does not experience the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates and becomes a natural part of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie one's shoes. The effortful beginnings fade and disappear from memory. (171)

no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It's a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you're anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.

The goat herder was so unaccustomed to human company that he was short of words even in his inner speech. It was common knowledge that the Yugoslavs hated each other more than they could ever hate a foreigner or an invader. A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven. Atrocities are something nothing less than the vengeance of the tormented. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry. Love delayed is lust augmented.

It’s not only the myths surrounding chess. Chess itself is a myth, you know? A game of hierarchy, of war. It’s a story that people have been using to explain complex concepts for eons. Mathematics, yes. Geometry. Business. Philosophy. Even love.

I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one.

People often complain that no one likes facts and numbers and reason and science anymore, but as someone who talks about those things in public, I can tell you that's not true. People love numbers, and are impressed by them, sometimes more than they should be.

People don’t realize how smart bees are, even smarter than dolphins. Bees know enough geometry to make row after row of perfect hexagons, angles so accurate you’d think they used rulers. They take plain flower juice and turn it into something everyone in the world loves to pour on biscuits.

I told him about how our second form teacher, Miss Crane, drew the tiniest chalk mark on the blackboard and explained that a point is “zero-dimensional,” meaning it doesn’t actually exist. But once you have two points—two nonexistent points—you can fill in the space between with lots and lots of points, and you get a line, which has length, so it’s now one dimension, which you could argue means it does now exist. Miss Crane dotted her chalk against the board, over and over, in a straight line, demonstrating how a series of nothings could become something. (Actually, you could also argue the line still doesn’t exist, it’s just a concept, but I’d learned by then not to add caveats to everything I said. This was, after all, a love letter.) I told Jack how I leaned forward that day in class as if I stood with my toes hanging over the very precipice of enlightenment. In my naivete, I believed Miss Crane was about to explain something that explained everything. Something I felt I almost already knew, but could not articulate; it was related to infinity and God, the ocean and space, the universe and my dad. Of course, I did not achieve enlightenment in my geometry lesson. Miss Crane put the chalk down and told us to take out our compasses and protractors. I told Jack that when I was with him, I felt like I was close to understanding what I had nearly understood that day.

In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded. That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds. Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboardEnvoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

I can whistle almost the whole of the Fifth Symphony, all four movements, and with it I have solaced many a whining hour to sleep. It answers all my questions, the noble, mighty thing, it is “green pastures and still waters” to my soul. Indeed, without music I should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is. I find that lately more and more my fingers itch for a piano, and I shall not spend another winter without one. Last night I played for about two hours, the first time in a year, I think, and though most everything is gone enough remains to make me realize I could get it back if I had the guts. People are so dam lazy, aren’t they? Ten years I have been forgetting all I learned so lovingly about music, and just because I am a boob. All that remains is Bach. I find that I never lose Bach. I don’t know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.

Our choices are us. Envisioning choices as sea blue circles places a marker on our decisions: every word, each coffee, every button, and choices in between. The blue circles upon our daily choices are reflection points and moments of consideration. This is a choice is the breath before you look fully at loved ones or strangers and the breath before you change and reframe a pattern so as to not misplace a moment. The breath before you say I love you to you. Again and again. This is a choice.

Baruch Spinoza" Bruma de oro, el occidente alumbra La ventana. El asiduo manuscrito Aguarda, ya cargado de infinito. Alguien construye a Dios en la penumbra. Un hombre engendra a Dios. Es un judío De tristes ojos y piel cetrina; Lo lleva el tiempo como lleva el río Una hoja en el agua que declina. No importa. El hechicero insiste y labra A Dios con geometría delicada; Desde su enfermedad, desde su nada, Sigue erigiendo a Dios con la palabra. El más pródigo amor le fue otorgado, El amor que no espera ser amado. A haze of gold, the Occident lights up The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite. Someone is building God in a dark cup. A man engenders God. He is a Jew With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin; Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in A river, is borne off by waters to Its end. No matter. The magician moved Carves out his God with fine geometry; From his disease, from nothing, he's begun To construct God, using the word. No one Is granted such prodigious love as he: The love that has no hope of being loved.

Books. More books than I had ever seen in my life. I gasped and crawled to my knees. I couldn’t breathe. Books galore. Music books, philosophy books. Math books. Geometry. Opera scores, logic. I sobbed and cradled the books. I hugged them to my naked chest and I cried. I smelled them and touched their spines. I remember how violently my fingers shook. I buried my nose in their pages and wept. Never had I ever held so many books in my life. And they were mine. All my very own. The orgasm still riddled my body. It had barely begun to fade. One orgasm ended, but the euphoria was just beginning.

History has already happened. We can’t do a damn thing about it. But we can be better. God, we can be better. I believe, as I hope you do, in a time one day—a while from now, but still attainably close—when the curses of poverty, misery, and death will seem as pointlessly tragic and avoidable as scurvy.  There is a long way to go yet, but we can get there. We can fucking get there. And it will be an honour to get there with you, or at least continue the brave walk towards adulthood our ancestors began millennia ago. Good luck out there and much, much love. Here come the wild twenties. See you on the other side.

The thought came to her mind of how hard it must be to leave the small things one loves: the painting one’s become attached to and looks at every day; the favourite teacup that you’ve drunk out of at the breakfast table for years and years; our small links with the world. And how pressing, then, must become the urge to do something to perpetuate that relationship with that which is loved; to have an heir; to know what is going to happen to your possessions. Or did you accept that all these things were part of a world that you were leaving; that they were not yours in any permanent sense, because there was no such thing as permanence?

But it wouldn’t have half the power of a story in which Jamie and Claire truly conquer real evil and thus show what real love is. Real love has real costs—and they’re worth it. I’ve always said all my books have a shape, and Outlander’s internal geometry consists of three slightly overlapping triangles. The apex of each triangle is one of the three emotional climaxes of the book: 1) when Claire makes her wrenching choice at the stones and stays with Jamie, 2) when she saves Jamie from Wentworth, and 3) when she saves his soul at the abbey. It would still be a good story if I’d had only 1 and 2—but (see above), the Rule of Three. A story that goes one, two, three, has a lot more impact than just a one–two punch.

The gnarled pine, I would have said, touch it. This is China. Horticulturalists around the world have come to study it. Yet no one has ever been able to explain why it grows like a corkscrew, just as no one can adequately explain China. But like that tree, there it is, old, resilient, and oddly magnificent. Within that tree are the elements in nature that have inspired Chinese artists for centuries: gesture over geometry, subtlety over symmetry, constant flow over static form. And the temples, walk and touch them. This is China. Don't merely stare at these murals and statues. Fly up to the crossbeams, get down on your hands and knees, and press your head to the floor tiles. Hide behind that pillar and come eye to eye with its flecks of paint. Imagine that you are the interior decorator who is a thousand years in age. Start with a bit of Tibetan Buddhism, plus a dash each of animism and Taoism. A hodgepodge, you say? No, what is in those temples is an amalgam that is pure Chinese, a lovely shabby elegance, a glorious new motley that makes China infinitely intriguing. Nothing is ever completely thrown away and replaced. If one period of influence falls out of favor, it is patched over. The old views still exist, one chipped layer beneath, ready to pop through with the slightest abrasion. That is the Chinese aesthetic and also its spirit. Those are the traces that have affected all who have traveled along China's roads.

All A players have six common denominators. They have a scoreboard that tells them if they are winning or losing and what needs to be done to change their performance. They will not play if they can’t see the scoreboard. They have a high internal, emotional need to succeed. They do not need to be externally motivated or begged to do their job. They want to succeed because it is who they are . . . winners. People often ask me how I motivate my employees. My response is, “I hire them.” Motivation is for amateurs. Pros never need motivating. (Inspiration is another story.) Instead of trying to design a pep talk to motivate your people, why not create a challenge for them? A players love being tested and challenged. They love to be measured and held accountable for their results. Like the straight-A classmate in your high school geometry class, an A player can hardly wait for report card day. C players dread report card day because they are reminded of how average or deficient they are. To an A player, a report card with a B or a C is devastating and a call for renewed commitment and remedial actions. They have the technical chops to do the job. This is not their first rodeo. They have been there, done that, and they are technically very good at what they do. They are humble enough to ask for coaching. The three most important questions an employee can ask are: What else can I do? Where can I get better? What do I need to do or learn so that I continue to grow? If you have someone on your team asking all three of these questions, you have an A player in the making. If you agree these three questions would fundamentally change the game for your team, why not enroll them in asking these questions? They see opportunities. C players see only problems. Every situation is asking a very simple question: Do you want me to be a problem or an opportunity? Your choice. You know the job has outgrown the person when all you hear are problems. The cost of a bad employee is never the salary. My rules for hiring and retaining A players are: Interview rigorously. (Who by Geoff Smart is a spectacular resource on this subject.) Compensate generously. Onboard effectively. Measure consistently. Coach continuously.

When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love. And you may say that only death has brought us to this. That one intensity must match another. That we have found each other because there is no one else, nothing else to find. It doesn’t matter – not the reasons for the death, nor the explanation of the love. It is happening, both together, and it is where we are, both together.

there are four things to be done or four jewels that should never be lost from sight: first, to accept the Truth; second, to keep it in mind continually; third, to avoid whatever is contrary to Truth and the permanent consciousness of Truth; and fourth, to accomplish whatever is in conformity with Truth. All religion and all wisdom is reducible—extrinsically and humanly—to these four laws: in every tradition we see indeed an immutable truth; then a law of “attachment to the Real”, of “remembrance” or “love” of God; and finally prohibitions and injunctions. Here we have a fabric of elementary certainties that encompasses and resolves every human uncertainty and in this way reduces the whole problem of earthly existence to a geometry at once simple and primordial.

is honest enough to admit that. I’m sorry if ignorance scares you. I’m sorry if you can’t stand the thought of dying before you’ve found the meta-yes. But that’s how this works, for now. And in the meantime, bookended by birth and death, riding about in bodies of carbon, loving, suffering, striving, for a short, short time, we get to be. If we’re forced to be in a mysterious universe, and that universe is mute on the subject of its own motivations for existing, I’ll still take living in honest ignorance over your metaphysical posturing any day. That’s real bravery. Not concocting blatantly contradictory stories to comfort oneself, not appealing to the vague transcendent every time you get your worldview in a twist. Ignorance. Brave, honest admission of one’s ignorance, and living with that ignorance in a kind, compassionate manner, treating each other well even if we know we eventually all go to dust and never happen again. We must try to be wise, to be good women, to be good men. The rite of adulthood is the admission

Islamic art in its many forms is of the greatest import for the understanding of the essence of Islam and a central means of transmitting its message to the contemporary world. When one thinks of Islam, one should go beyond the repetitive scenes on television of wars and battles, which unfortunately abound in today’s world, to behold the peace and harmony of Islamic art seen in the great mosques, traditional urban settings and gardens, and the rhythm and geometry of calligraphy and arabesque designs; read in the poems that sing of the love that permeates all of God’s creation and binds creatures to God; and heard in the strains of melodies that echo what we had experienced in that primordial morn preceding creation and our descent into this lowly world. Today more than ever before, the understanding of Islamic art is an indispensable key for the comprehension of Islam itself. Those who are sensitive to the language of traditional art and the beauty of a paradisal order that emanates from it as well as the intellectual principles conveyed through it can learn much from this art.

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test. College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. The slow spaciousness of the green felt mirrors some internal state you get to after a few beers. Back at school, I’d been trying to read the philosophy of art, which I was grotesquely unequipped to do but nonetheless stuck on. I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger. In those days the drug culture was pimping “expanded consciousness,” a lie that partly descended from the old postindustrial lie of progress: any change in how your head normally worked must count as an improvement. Maybe my faith in that lie slid me toward an altered state that day. Or maybe it was just the beer, which I rarely drank. In any case, walking around the pool table, I felt borne forward by some internal force or fire. My first shot sank a ball. Then I made the most unlikely bank shot in history to drop two balls at once after a wild V trajectory. Daddy whistled. The sky through the window had gone the exact blue of the chalk I was digging my cue stick in, a shade solid and luminous at once, like the sheer turquoise used for the Madonna’s robe in Renaissance paintings. Slides from art history class flashed through my head. For a second, I lent that color some credit, as if it meant something that made my mind more buoyant. But that was crazy.

The rolling hills we traveled through were lined with rows of crisscrossed crops- apple and pear trees, vines of grapes, and maize- creating bafflingly precise geometries. In the forested areas, the branches on the trees drooped lugubriously like the long sleeves of Druid priests. Jonathan pointed to the curved roads that cut through the hillsides and valleys. "Forged by Romans, Mina!" he said. "So many civilizations have come and gone on this land- Celts, Romans, Normans, Mongols, French. Who knows how many more?

With Ghirlandaio and Fillipino Luppi dead, and Botticelli in a permanent state of depression, Raphael found an affluent audience starved for works of the highest quality. Florentine mercantile society fell in love with his potrayals of the Madonna and Child and the Holy Family-and with him, personally, for his gentle character. The provincialism of his master Perugino had heretofore kept Raphael’s genius under wraps. Leonardo taught him the power of unified, lucid compositions based on geometry, particularly the triangle and the circle. During Michelangelo’s absence, Raphael’s company was sought by everyone, including Michelangelo’s valued friends Taddeo Taddei and Agnolo Doni. In fact, he was such a frequent guest at Taddei’s home, where he would have had plenty of opportunities to study Michelangelo’s tondo, that Raphael gave his patron two paintings as thanks for his many kindnesses, and painted the Madonna deil Cardellino as a wedding gift for his friend Lorenzo Nasi, Taddei’s cousin. In 1505, the Carrera year, Raphael painted the portraits of Doni and his wife, Maddalena. The out-of-towner whom Michelangelo had dismissed as a mere nuisance had grown up.

Possibilities! In the loop of possibilities, There is always one reality, As you enter this cycle of possibilities, You unknowingly make a pact with eternity, To seek the new and to seek the original, And as you leave one loop only to enter another, You wonder what is fake and what is original, Because the loops are infinite and they hold this universe together, Where real is never obvious and fake is hidden too, And as you seek the real with your relentless prudence, You are cast in the dimensions fake and real too, Then to establish the reality is what defines that crescendo of prudence, And as ripples of time move over these loops of possibilities, You somehow segregate the unreal loops from the real, And in this intertwining net of possibilities, Now you, your thoughts, your desires are true and real, Whatever you seek now, seeks you as well, And the infinity breaks its endless loop, Because now you are part of eternity as well, Where you now can tell the fake from the original loop, Then the dimensions of the universe attain a singular state, Where universe is like a geometry with just one rule, That it is you who defines its every known and unknown state, And you become part of the reality integrated in every rule!

Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world.But the marketplace does not need your intuition. It does not deal in love, in your sensibilities; it deals with solid and mundane things. For that, your intellect — which is the most superficial part — functions. Intellect is for the mundane life with others in the marketplace, in the world, to make you capable of functioning. It is mathematics, it is geography, it is history, it is chemistry — all science and all technology are created by your intellect. Your logic and your geometry are useful — but the intellect is blind. It simply goes on creating things, but it does not know whether they are being used for destruction or for creation. A nuclear war will be a war created by intellect. Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world.The master is hidden behind these three: the body, the mind, the heart. The master is hidden behind all these three — that is your being.

Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world.But the marketplace does not need your intuition. It does not deal in love, in your sensibilities; it deals with solid and mundane things. For that, your intellect — which is the most superficial part — functions. Intellect is for the mundane life with others in the marketplace, in the world, to make you capable of functioning. It is mathematics, it is geography, it is history, it is chemistry — all science and all technology are created by your intellect. Your logic and your geometry are useful — but the intellect is blind. It simply goes on creating things, but it does not know whether they are being used for destruction or for creation. A nuclear war will be a war created by intellect. Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world. The master is hidden behind these three: the body, the mind, the heart. The master is hidden behind all these three — that is your being.

ntellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world. But the marketplace does not need your intuition. It does not deal in love, in your sensibilities; it deals with solid and mundane things. For that, your intellect — which is the most superficial part — functions. Intellect is for the mundane life with others in the marketplace, in the world, to make you capable of functioning. It is mathematics, it is geography, it is history, it is chemistry — all science and all technology are created by your intellect. Your logic and your geometry are useful — but the intellect is blind. It simply goes on creating things, but it does not know whether they are being used for destruction or for creation. A nuclear war will be a war created by intellect. Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world. The master is hidden behind these three: the body, the mind, the heart. The master is hidden behind all these three — that is your being.

Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world. But the marketplace does not need your intuition. It does not deal in love, in your sensibilities; it deals with solid and mundane things. For that, your intellect — which is the most superficial part — functions. Intellect is for the mundane life with others in the marketplace, in the world, to make you capable of functioning. It is mathematics, it is geography, it is history, it is chemistry — all science and all technology are created by your intellect. Your logic and your geometry are useful — but the intellect is blind. It simply goes on creating things, but it does not know whether they are being used for destruction or for creation. A nuclear war will be a war created by intellect. Intellect has its use, but by some misfortune it has become the master of your whole being. That has created immense troubles in the world. The master is hidden behind these three: the body, the mind, the heart. The master is hidden behind all these three — that is your being.

There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine] A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes. In one session, a mortified engineer confessed, “Jeff, I screwed up a line of code and it cost us a million dollars in revenue.” After leading the team through the postmortem and fixes, Jeff concluded, “Did we get more than a million dollars in learning out of this?” “Yes.” “Then get back to work.”193 And it works in other settings too. A Bay Area public school, the Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit. As their principal, Wanny Hersey, told me, “These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.” In the 2012–2013 academic year, Bullis was the third-highest-ranked middle school in California.194

No, I'm no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations. Later, of course, we learn how to be more parsimonious; how to parse ourselves into constituent elements, how to be less indiscriminate and foolish in our enthusiasms. But if we're not to risk falling into that other absurd, in which we come unpeeled from all the objects of the world, and they all seem equally two-dimensional and stale, we must somehow preserve the memory and possibility of our childish, absurd affections. Insofar as we retain the capacity for our attachment, the energy of desire that draws us toward the world and makes us want to live within it, we're always returning. All we have to draw on is that first potent furnace, the uncomparing, ignorant love, the original heat and hunger for the forms of the world, for the here and now.

Right now, looking out my kitchen window on a summer day on Capitol Hill, I see a complex, shifting scene composed of about 50 percent brick and 50 percent trees. It’s lovely, a riot of organic forms bouncing in the wind. The brick is festooned with lichen, ivy, and moss, its rigid geometry softened and blemished by hundreds of years of wind, rain, and life, and illuminated by splintered sunlight refracted through blowing branches and leaves. A squirrel skitters along a power line, balanced, at ease, “natural,” as if he’s been evolving to do this for a hundred thousand years. The trees are diverse, some deciduous and some evergreen. They look happy, at home, healthy, and strong. They are permanent residents, compared to any people. The birds and rodents that nest, chase, chatter, and squeal among them seem at home as well.

The thought turned him topsy-turvy. It seemed to summarize the whole worthless way of the world--if there was one. And versions of it began to flutter wildly through his head. You have to look round to see straight. Good enough. Useful. And the rough places plain. But all that's geometry. But it measures the earth. You have to go slow to catch up. Eat to get thin? no, but fast to grow fat, that was a fine one. Then lose to win? fail to succeed? Risky. Stop to begin. The form made noiseless music--lumly lum lum or lum-lee-lee lum--like fill to empty, every physical extreme. Die to live was a bit old hat. But default to repay. And lie to be honest. He liked the ring of that. Flack! I'm white in order to be black. Sin first and saint later. Cruel to be kind, of course, and the hurts in the hurter--that's what they say--a lot of blap. That's my name, my nomination: Saint Later. Now then: humble to be proud; poor to be rich. Enslave to make free? That moved naturally. Also multiply to subtract. Dee dee dee. Young Saint Later. A list of them, as old as Pythagoras had. Even engenders odd. How would that be? Eight is five and three. There were no middle-aged saints--they were all old men or babies. Ah, god--the wise fool. The simpleton sublime. Babe in the woods, roach in the pudding, prince in the pauper, enchanted beauty in the toad. This was the wisdom of the folk and the philosopher alike--the disorder of the lyre, or the drawn-out bow of that sane madman, the holy Heraclitus. The poet Zeno. The logician Keats. Discovery after discovery: the more the mice eat, the fatter the cats. There were tears and laughter, for instance--how they shook and ran together into one gay grief. Dumb eloquence, swift still waters, shallow deeps. Let's see: impenitent remorse, careless anxiety, heedless worry, tense repose. So true of tigers. Then there was the friendly enmity of sun and snow, and the sweet disharmony of every union, the greasy mate of cock and cunt, the cosmic poles, war that's peace, the stumble that's an everlasting poise and balance, spring and fall, love, strife, health, disease, and the cold duplicity of Number One and all its warm divisions. The sameness that's in difference. The limit that's limitless. The permanence that's change. The distance of the near at home. So--to roam, stay home. Then pursue to be caught, submit to conquer. Method--ancient--of Chinese. To pacify, inflame. Love, hate. Kiss, kill. In, out, up, down, start, stop. Ah . . . from pleasure, pain. Like circumcision of the heart. Judgement and mercy. Sin and grace. It little mattered; everything seemed to Furber to be magically right, and his heart grew fat with satisfaction. Therefore there is good in every evil; one must lower away to raise; seek what's found to mourn its loss; conceive in stone and execute in water; turn profound and obvious, miraculous and commonplace, around; sin to save; destroy in order to create; live in the sun, though underground. Yes. Doubt in order to believe--that was an old one--for this the square IS in the circle. O Phaedo, Phaedo. O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all--at last it's proved. Between dead and living there's no difference but the one has whiter bones. Furber rose, the mosquitoes swarming around him, and ran inside.

Most of us were required to take three or four years of coursework in high school, starting with algebra and working up the chain: geometry, algebra 2, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus. Lockhart writes, “If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done—I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

We are Circles is an attempt to bring all of our choices into focus, discussion, analysis, and change. Into our center. Which is overwhelming! I know. So hopefully the simple metaphors and groupthink aspect of our evolving humanity circles up our collective choices into the here and now for love and life on Earth. We always start with a single choice.

Our choices are us. Envisioning choices as sea blue circles places a sticker across our days: every word, each coffee, every button, and choices in between. The blue stickers across our days are reflection points and moments of consideration. This is a choice is the breath before you look fully at loved ones or strangers and the breath before you change and reframe a pattern so as to not misplace a moment. The breath before you say I love you to you. Again and again. This is a choice.

Bella inspired this book through a series of questions and conversations that circled around how people live together. Growing up on Maui (and in California), she has observed the challenges of food production, housing, global economies, and environmental losses. She has watched people lose their options, and people fall through the cracks in systems. As a father, it is emotionally cutting to see pain and heartbreak in your daughter's eyes, to witness her start to realize social equations do not calculate toward equity. Her brilliance across these conversations has been the ever-present solutions, her ingenuity and moxie, and the art for creating visions for change. She inspires me to be more present with each choice that circles around her future.

I don’t know how to feel or think or love. I’m a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I’ve even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I’m always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I’m falling through a trapdoor, through infinite space… in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am the centre that exists only because every circle has one.

But my best hunch (and, full disclosure, I personally love geometry) is that people enjoy it because it marries logic and intuition. It feels good to use both halves of the brain.

This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics," observed commentator John Tierney. "No matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it. The Greeks decide to study, for no good reason, a curve called an ellipse, and 2,000 years later astronomers discover that it describes the way the planets move around the sun. Again, for no good reason, in 1854 a German mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, wonders what would happen if he discards one of the hallowed postulates of Euclid's plane geometry. He builds a seemingly ridiculous assumption that it's not possible to draw two lines parallel to each other. His non-Euclidean geometry replaces Euclid's plane with a bizarre abstraction called curved space, and then, 60 years later, Einstein announces that this is the shape of the universe.

Dad’s favorite subject was history, but he taught it with a decidedly west-of-the-Pecos point of view. As the proud son of an Irishman, he hated the English Pilgrims, whom he called “Poms,” as well as most of the founding fathers. They were a bunch of pious hypocrites, he thought, who declared all men equal but kept slaves and massacred peaceful Indians. He sided with the Mexicans in the Mexican-American war and thought the United States had stolen all the land north of the Rio Grande, but he also thought the southern states should have had as much right to leave the union as the colonies had to leave the British Empire. “Only difference between a traitor and a patriot is your perspective,” he said. * * * I loved my lessons, particularly science and geometry, loved learning that there were these invisible rules that explained the mysteries of the world we lived in. Smart as that made me feel, Mom and Dad kept saying that even though I was getting a better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I’d need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it’s not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it. MOM DID HER BEST to keep us kids genteel.

That console was in my bedroom from the time I was born until I left for college,” Aunt Nina says. “By any decent standard of justice, that console is mine.” “Well, that brings me to the breakthrough that Randy and Tom and Geoff and I finally came up with at about two A.M., namely that the perceived economic value of each item, as complicated as that is in and of itself, viz the Knapsack Problem, is only one dimension of the issues that have got us all on such a jagged emotional edge. The other dimension—and here I really do mean dimension in a Euclidean geometry sense—is the emotional value of each item. That is, in theory we could come up with a division of the set of all pieces of furniture that would give you, Nina, an equal share. But such a division might leave you, love, just deeply, deeply unsatisfied because you didn’t get that console, which, though it’s obviously not as valuable as say the grand piano, has much greater emotional value to you.” “I don’t think it’s out of the question that I would commit physical violence in order to defend my rightful ownership of that console,” Aunt Nina says, suddenly reverting to a kind of dead-voiced frigid calm.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall? Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams. Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived. An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting. ‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.

In geometry, whenever we had to find the area of a circle, pi * radius squared, I would get really hungry for pie. Square pie.

You know what I love about India, Mr Selvam?’ he asked softly. ‘It’s the birthplace of so many new thoughts. Religion. Philosophy. Science. Zero. Geometry. Trigonometry. Governance. But above all, tolerance. Take any topic, any era before the British Raj, and you will see that we’ve never persecuted anyone for the thoughts they had or the beliefs they propagated.

There was a lot of chance in love -- a lot of luck -- but there was not too much point in thinking about that, other than to thank whatever gods one believed in, or blind fate if one believed in none, for the way things had worked out.