Gill Man Quotes

Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

Queens II   Listen to me, girl: you have castles inside your bones, coronets in your heart. If he threatens you with battle, you raise him a whole war. The last time I checked, queens cower before no man.

Defined by no man, you are your own story, blazing through the world, turning history into herstory. And when they dare to tell you about all the things you cannot be, you smile and tell them, "I am both war and woman and you cannot stop me

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.

Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.

The ability to forgive is one of man’s greatest achievements.

Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with atowering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

No time is better spent than that spent in the service of your fellow man.

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: “Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.” —Halford E. Luccock

Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man--a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.

Listen to me, girl, you have castles inside your bones, coronets in your heart, if he threatens you with battle, you raise him a whole war, the last time I checked, Queens cower before no man.

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man’s cruelty and baseness.

The Couple Overfloweth We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad. (Negotiations)

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows. You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die? Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity. If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?

Our natural rights come from an authority beyond the petty rule of man.

As Gill says, "every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist." The small family farm is one of the last places - they are getting rarer every day - where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker - and some farmers still do talk about "making the crops" - is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.

Every time a man takes from a woman's body without her permission, he is disrespecting the womb from which he was born, he is defiling the place that protected him when he was at his most defenseless

The Coven   When they break your heart, run to a sister who will stroke your hair and remind you of what you are. When no one else understands, run to a sister who will hold you close and heal you with the kindest words. When the wound is fresh, your sisters are the only ones who know how to enchant away the pain. When a man scares you enough to choke on your own tears, text your sisters and they will hex him into hell for you. This is what covens will do: protect each other from the world, for this is what sisters do.

They won't tell you about how Red Riding was the wolf and Snow White went back to kill the queen. Or that Cinderella's step family mysteriously disappeared after she became queen. They are afraid to let you know that Aurora woke up screaming because a strange man was kissing her without her consent. Or how Ariel had no problem killing the two timing prince and restoring herself to the sea. The fairy tales we should tell our daughter should be about strong women with real flaws and incredible qualities. Let's raise girls who don't just wait to be rescued, but take destiny in their own hands and charge to battle dragons and their enemies.

Rolf Harris is a hard man to hate, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try

Despite the neck gills and greenish tint, the boy was gorgeous in that so-pretty-I’d-break-you kind of way.

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.

The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.

Every man is Shakespeare when he’s the only one in London with a pen.

[N]egative nihilism is replaced by reactive nihilism, reactive nihilism ends in passive nihilism. From God to God's murderer, from God's murderer to the last man.

The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes to do only when he is not at work.

Life on our planet is several billion years old, and we literally embody this deep history in our structures, our behaviors, our instincts, our genes. We humans retain, for example, the remnants of gill arches, much modified, from our fishy ancestors and even the neural systems that once controlled gill movement. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” We bear, too, an even older past; we are made of cells, and cells go back to the very origin of life.

Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

The privatization of the organs will only begin with the shame felt by man at the sight of man.

The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince.

Not for the first time in my life I had made it to the top. For some reason this made me hanker for a chili dog with chopped onions under a blanket of processed American cheese.

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.

That would be like me tellin' a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There's gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, [...], there might even be men with guns.

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

Of course, the happy shutterbug couldn't have known that his picture of a dildo keel would soon inspire a plot leading to murder and ensnare human beings like dolphins in a gill net. For he was just a San Diego cop who drove a boat, not a true man of the sea. Not one who understands in his soul that the actions of people are like the tides that chase the moon but invariably come crashing back, with all manner of thrashing things roiling in their foamy wake.

There are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves; there is no longer any need to burden the animal from the outside, it shoulders its own burden. Not that man is ever the slave of technical machines; he is rather the slave of the social machine. The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus value for ends that, taken as a whole, have nothing to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital, internalization of the infinite debt. "I too am a slave"—these are the new words spoken by the master.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day. Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

The incarnation, passion, and resurrection of the Son do not modify the Trinity. In becoming man, the Son 'enhanced human nature without diminishing the divine.' 'Even when the Word takes a body from Mary, the Trinity remains a Trinity, with neither increase nor decrease. It is forever perfect.

Überall stellen sie Bankautomaten auf, die uns überflüssig machen, und dann dürfen wir uns auch noch selbst um die Dinger kümmern. Das ist, als würde man einen außerirdischen Parasiten füttern, um ihn ein bisschen aufzupäppeln, ihm die Zähne putzen und die Haare kämmen, damit er einen dann am Ende auffrisst.

This history sets forth the only true account of the adventures of a daring Tipperary man named Darby O’Gill among the Fairies of Sleive na mon. These adventures were first related to me by Mr. Jerry Murtaugh a reliable car driver who goes between Kilcuny and Ballinderg. He is a first cousin of Darby O’Gill's own mother.

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.

Yeah. If you’ve never been knocked down, then you’ve never been in a fight.

I don’t give a fuck what you’re trying to do or what you want. I’d send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

It’s hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.

The soul of the ordinary man and woman is full of good will; but good sense, logical intelligence, is too rare.

My definition of a hero is a man who tests himself by a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last; he’s not competing in the world at all, he’s competing only against himself.

The widespread joy that greeted Rasputin’s assassination confused me. No matter what crimes the starets had committed, I was not accustomed to the idea of rejoicing at a man’s death, even less at his murder.

The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time.

Kit [Carson Kitteridge] watched me for a few moments before saying, "That was some impressive killing you did. Naked too." "I hope I didn't embarrass Office Palmer." "She said that after all she heard about you she thought your johnson would be bigger." "Tell her that the air conditioner was on.

You have a lot of these,” he said, examining the rest of her figurines. “They’re Universal movie monsters.” One look at the blank expression on his face told her he didn’t get it. “Classic horror movie monsters, like The Mummy? Wolf Man? Gill-Man? Dracula?” “I saw the Tom Cruise Mummy movie.” “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.

Gilles made up his mind, and snapped, 'D'you write Latin?' Sometimes Jerott forgot that the blazon of chivalry, with all the status it once had carried, was no longer his. In any case, he had an incredible headache. He stared at this enormous, round-shouldered old man in the filthy nightgown and buskins, and snapped back. 'Of course.

Ronald Reagan was a man who knew the diplomatic form. He also had a showman’s ear for a tune. So when, at an official dinner, the marine band slipped into ‘Edelweiss’, he stopped mid-anecdote, rose to his feet, placed a reverential hand over his heart and stared into the blank mid-distance out of respect for the Austrian national anthem.

The brain is a highly connected and interconnected organ, but the activation of those connections are constantly shifting. The great neurobiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, in his Gifford lectures titled Man on His Nature, described the brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days-that's something else.

Wir setzen uns an einen Tisch unter dem Platanen auf den alten Platz. Hier haben die Griechen einst die Agora der Stadt erbaut, die Akropolis. Heute steht an dieser Stelle die Église des Accoules, deren Name entweder von Anchovis, anchois, abgeleitet sein soll oder von den encoules, den kleinen Bögen, die die Kirche stützen. Die Historiker behaupten, dass die Kinder hier früher nach der Messe eine Pastete oder eine Wurst bekamen. Man sprach sogar von Unserer lieben Frau der Würste

Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Pslam" 1 The songbird that escapes from a burning house will build its nest in the shape of a cage. 2 This is one thing we know: song begs for the places that make it grow from seed to starling, 3 places that put the heart’s hemlock in an empty rowboat and heave it from the shore. 4 We only praise what we cannot keep: violin strings berried with rain, teacups overflowing with brandywine, radios sickened with static. 5 Glass tossed out with the tide will come back smoother and stranger, but never to the same person. 6 This is something we want to know. The woman in love never touches her ears. 7 The man in his house is always lost without her. 8 Morning pulls light from the dark like a boy hoisting a trout from the lake by its clean, pink gills. 9 When the woman escapes from a burning house she will know the path of the wind, 10 how it writes its scripture in peach blossoms blown into a baby’s empty pram. 11 She’ll feel it compose its words against her body, against the night, against the water, in an endless, artless psalm.

Six months from now her baby would be born. Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man-a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create and, having created, would become the battle-ground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. A thing would grow into a person, a tiny lump of stuff would become a human body, a human mind. The astounding process of creation was going on within her.

Is it not obvious? You will persist in writing these stories, full of splendid fellows of all different sorts, but never once have I heard one of your heroines to be blessed with a dashing sailor brother whom she admires and adores." "That is true." Jane laughed. Cassy looked up from her sewing and smiled to see her sister so at ease. After a successful reading of her own work to the family, she glowed as she never glowed otherwise. "But to do so would defeat my own purposes. It would strike right through the narrative. You must see that if a young lady is so fortunate as to have her own dashing sailor brother, she is spoiled then for any other hero I could create for her. For how, with such an example in her own background, could she fall in love on dry land? No man could match him.

By this deed, which, in the absence of a lawyer, the chaplain of the Touraine regiment, Father Verdier here, has been good enough to draw up for me, I duly recognize and legitimize my son Gilles Goëlo, born out of wedlock, as the sole heir of the house of Tournemine de la Hunaudaye, so that he may in future, subject to the King's approval, bear the name and the arms which are his by right of birth. You, Count, he looked at Rochambeau. 'I think you knew him before I. Will you honour us both by being the first to append your signature?' The honour is mine, Monsieur le Comte. All of us here, in our own ways, have come to know and value this young man. Not so much, perhaps, as our American friends, to whom he is already a legend, but enough to congratulate you on having such a son to carry on your name. You may die in peace for I give you my word, you leave it in good hands.

Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dream-bodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.

Chicken Roast Puff your plume in anger and fight, cock, delight the owner of knife smear sting with pollen and flap your wings As I said: Twist the arms and keep them bent roll the rug and come down the terrace after disturbed sleep Shoeboots-rifle-whirring bullets-shrieks The aged undertrial in the next cell weeps and wants to go home Liberate me let me go let me go home On its egg in the throne the gallinule doses asphyxiate in dark fight back, cock, die and fight, shout with the dumb Glass splinters on tongue-breast muscles quiver Fishes open their gills and enfog water A piece of finger wrapped in pink paper With eyes covered someone wails in the jailhouse I can't make out if man or woman Keep this eyelash on lefthand palm- and blow off with your breath Fan out snake-hood in mist Cobra's abdomen shivers in the hiss of female urination Deport to crematorium stuffing blood-oozing nose in cottonwool Shoes brickbats and torn pantaloons enlitter the streets I smear my feet with the wave picked up from a stormy sea That is the alphabet I drew on for letters. (Translation of Bengali original 'Murgir Roast')

and the two of you started dating… he proposed on New Year’s Eve and you married in April of the following year.’ I nod, twisting the wedding ring on my finger. ‘And, just to confirm, you had no suspicion that he was anyone other than Dominic Stephen Gill?’ I think back to the little anomalies. The tiny signs that I was only too happy to ignore. ‘No, not at all,’ I say. ‘I’d be more than happy to take a lie detector test to that effect.’ For Christ sake, why did you say that? I ask myself. What do you think this is, an episode of Law and Order? DS Sutherland’s sorrowful expression returns, as he closes the cover of the file. ‘That won’t be necessary, Ms Palmer.’ April arrives, with its cloud of blossom and canopy of acid-bright greenery. I sign the documents selling my interest in Comida Catering Ltd and bank a substantial sum of money. I attend my first antenatal ultrasound appointment as Alice Palmer, having first removed the rings from my left hand and shoved them into the back of a drawer. And I receive a Metropolitan Police compliment slip, with three handwritten words Please See Attached. The attached is a formal document, a ‘Recorded Crime Outcome’, confirming that there would be sufficient evidence to charge the individual using the alias Ben MacAlister with the murder of Dominic Stephen Gill, if said individual were still alive. A check of the envelope reveals nothing more. I take out my phone and

What happened was that when they brought me in this morning, poor Fräulein Engel was sitting at the table with her back to the door, busily numbering my countless recipe cards, and I frightened the living daylights out of her by braying in a deep, stentorian voice of command and discipline, ‘Achtung, Anna Engel! Heil Hitler!’ She catapulted to her feet and threw herself into a salute that must have nearly dislocated her shoulder. I’ve never seen her look so white around the gills. She recovered almost immediately and smacked me so hard she knocked me over. When Thibaut picked me up, she smacked me again just for the sheer hell of it. Wow wow wow is my jaw sore. I suppose they are not planning another phoney interview. I can never decide if it is worth it. It was a truly hilarious moment, but all I seem to have achieved this time is a totally unexpected collusion between Engel and Thibaut. Did I call them Laurel and Hardy? I meant sodding Romeo and Juliet. This is flirting, à la Gestapo underlings: She: Oh, you are so strong and manly, M’sieur Thibaut. Those knots you tie are so secure. He: That is nothing. Look, I pull them so tight you cannot undo them. Try. She: It is true, I cannot! Oh, pull them tighter! He: Chérie, your wish is my command. It is my ankles, not hers, which he is binding so tightly and with such masculine charm. She: I shall have to call you in tomorrow morning as well, to do this task for me. He: You must cross the cords, so, and knot them behind – Me: Squeak! Squeak! She: Shut up and write, ya wee skrikin’ Scots piece o’ shite. Well, no, she did not use those exact words. But you get the idea.

Now back to the p—Sealord. Reports aside, what do we really know about this Dilys Merimydion?” “We know that he’s wealthy, he’s a skilled warrior, he’s handsome, charming, and helped save the world from a dread god who would have plunged the whole of Mystral into unending winter,” Autumn added. “Not to ruin your determination to find something wrong with him, Viviana, but that last one tells me all I need to know. The man literally helped save the world.” She shrugged. “I can spend three months of my time being nice to him for that.” Spring sighed. “Yes, yes, but in the reports I’ve read, there isn’t one bad thing about him listed. Not one, and that’s just not normal.” “You’re complaining because the reports say Dilys Merimydion is a good man?” Summer shook her head. “Not just good. Too good. As in too good to be true. I’m just saying, something smells fishy to me." Autumn laughed. “You know, there’s a good joke in that remark.” Spring rolled her eyes. “Don’t. Please. Spare us.” In addition to her addiction to food, Autumn possessed a terrible love for pranks, puns, and bad jokes. Which, of course, she took inordinate glee in inflicting on her family. Autumn sniffed with mock indignation. “As if I would cast my pearls before swine. What were we talking about again? Oh, yes, Dilys Merimydion. The Scrumptious Sealord.” “Oh, dear gods,” Spring groaned. “You’ve nicknamed him. Alliteratively.” “I thought about Delicious Dilys. Or Manly Merimydion. After all, from what Storm said, he’s very easy on the eyes. I don’t know, after ten years of being pursued by the Verminous Vermese, I’m looking forward to being courted by a handsome, young suitor who actually respects women and considers them—gasp!—real human beings. Like men, but without the dangly bits. Shocking, I know, but there you have it.” Summer couldn’t help it. She started laughing. Spring glowered. “Stop that! Don’t encourage her!” She turned the glower on Autumn and said, “Aleta Seraphina Helen Rosalie Violet Coruscate, can you please, for one moment, take this seriously?” “You’re taking it seriously enough for the three of us, dearest Viviana.” Autumn lowered her voice and boomed..."he must be investigated. Something about him smells fishy.” Cupping a hand over her mouth, she quipped to Summer in a loud aside, “I dunno, do you think maybe it’s—you know—the gills?” Summer covered her mouth with both hands and spluttered with laughter.

Boy Lost Picture a sunset in a small port town by the sea. Two teenaged boys sitting on the docks watching the ships as they fly across the water. One reaches out and takes the other’s hand. In this brush of skin for skin, a thousand unspoken promises erupt between them, and both are determined to keep them. This is what youth is. The sheer belief that you will be able to keep every promise you made to someone else. That you will be able to love someone into a forever when you do not even understand what forever means. An evening spent in the headiness of love, they go back to their respective homes. One boy helps his mother with cooking and cleaning and looking after his little sister. His father is a good man, a sailor who brings home with him meagre wages, but a heart full of love and a quicksilver tongue that tells stories of faraway lands to enthral them all. But this boy, despite his blessings, is not happy. He may have been blessed with a loving family, but that faraway look is made of unrest and wanderlust, something about him says fae, changeling, wearing the skin of a boy who was always destined to fly, to leave.   The other boy returns home to a father who drinks and a mother who works so hard that she is never there. He is the unwanted creature in this home, a beating waiting for him at every corner. His father’s temper is a beast so powerful that a boy made of paper bones barely held together cannot fight him. He hides in his room. He lives for a boy at sunset, hope made into a human being. Now picture this. This boy of paper bones alone at the docks the next sunset. And this boy alone on the docks again on a rainy day. And this boy alone on the docks every day after, waiting for someone who promised him forevers he never intended to keep. This boy becoming a man, a heart wounded so young in youth that it never quite healed right. Imagine him becoming a sailor, searching land after land for a boy he once loved, thinking he was hurt, or stolen, just needing to know what happened to him. Now see him finally finding out that the boy he loved in his boyhood ran away to a magical land where he never grew up. That without a second glance, he just forgot every promise of forever. Imagine his rage, that ancient pain turning to a terrible anger and escaping from the forgotten attic of his mangled heart. Think of what happens when immense love turns into immense hate. An anger so intense it cannot be controlled. What he would give up to avenge the boy he once was, paper-boned, standing on the docks, broken without a single person to love him, simply all alone. A hand is a small price to pay for a magical ship that will take him to Neverland, a place that lives on a star. Becoming a villain called Captain Hook is a small exchange to show Peter Pan that you cannot throw away love and think you will get away unscarred.

I put my hand on his forearm, I don't know why I do this, and it's not exactly natural, although it's not unnatural, except that I really want to touch his skin. It's smooth and tan just a little bit and feels like summer, like something familiar and warm and good, like my skin did on the first days aboard 'Fishful Thinking' before it salted and burned and peeled. 'We broke up three years after that.' I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex and sometimes you can't really explain them to an outside party. 'I can't believe I just told you that' 'YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!' A third time. I am not imagining it. 'There you are.' This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm, and we are still touching, and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat. All my surroundings, the red formica table top, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market, they all come alive in vibrant technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life. 'Honesty in all things,' Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts. I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by his side, I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back, that's where it wants to be, that's Lily's lesson to me. Be present in the moment, give spontaneous affection. I'm suddenly aware I haven't spoken in a bit. 'Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?' As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize I sound like that kid from 'Jerry McGuire.' 'Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?' I hope my question comes off almost a fraction as endearing. 'No,' Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity, at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn't I'm too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it. 'It's true, one heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the heart, then two smaller branchial heart with gills that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.' 'What made you think of that?' I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first date conversation, but at least it doesn't bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet, and a vaguely dachshund shaped cloud above the horizon. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in love at first site. I don't believe in angels. I don't believe in heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us, but the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating, ti's hard not to hear Lily's voice dancing in the gentle wind, 'one! month! is Long! Enough TO! BE! SAD!' ... 'I recently lost someone close to me....I don't know, I feel her here today with us, you, me, her, three hearts, like an octopus,' I shrug. If I were him, I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to. Maybe it's because it's not rehearsed, maybe it's because it's as weird a thing to say as it is genuine, maybe it's because this is finally the man for me. Byron stands and offers me his hand, 'Let's take a walk and you can tell me about her.' The gentle untying of a shoe lace. It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away, and I put my hand in his, and it's soft and warm, and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we've been hand-in-hand all along, and we are touching again. ...

I quote George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill: ‘Woman is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man.

but at least she was married to the smartest, funniest man she had ever met, and that counted for everything.

Aunt Becky was born a Presbyterian, lived a Presbyterian, and died a Presbyterian. She had a hard man to please in Theodore Dark, but she made him quite as good a wife as he deserved. She was a good neighbour as neighbours go and did not quarrel more than anybody else in the clan. She had a knack of taking the wind out of people's sails that did not make for popularity. She seldom suffered in silence. Her temper was about the average, neither worse nor better and did not sweeten as she grew older. She always behaved herself decently, although many a time it would have been a relief to be indecent. She told the truth almost always, thereby doing a great deal of good and some harm, but she could tell a lie without straining her conscience when people asked questions they had no business to ask. She occasionally used a naughty word under great stress and she could listen to a risky story without turning white around the gills, but obscenity never took the place of wit with her. She paid her debts, went to church regularly, thought gossip was very interesting, liked to be the first to hear a piece of news, and was always especially interested in things that were none of her business. She could see a baby without wanting to eat it, but she was always a very good mother to her own. She longed for freedom, as all women do, but had sense enough to understand that real freedom is impossible in this kind of a world, the lucky people being those who can choose their masters, so she never made the mistake of kicking uselessly over the traces. Sometimes she was mean, treacherous and greedy. Sometimes she was generous, faithful, and unselfish. In short, she was an average person who had lived as long as anybody should live.

They've all known and they've failed her. They let a man do this. What right did he have? To break another human being just because he could? How could a woman deserve this? To be beaten down, made to cower?

The Buddhists tell you that you have to be mindful of every act, and acquiescence, in your life. They say that life, everything you do and don’t do, is an action that must be brought into the light of consciousness.

For nearly two centuries, everyone but trans women have monopolized the meaning of trans femininity. Fearful of interdependence, many have tried to violently wish trans femininity away. The non-trans woman has become gender critical, willing to dispose of her trans sister to secure her claim on womanhood. The gay man celebrates queens as iconic but separates himself anxiously from faggotry’s intimacy with trans femininity, claiming he is only on the side of sexuality, not gender. The straight man acts out in violence to disavow his desire for the girls he watches in porn, the girls he cheats on his wife with, and the girls from whom he buys sex. The state has used trans femininity most of all to generate the pretense it needs to expand its sovereignty as a monopoly on violence. And even queer and trans people, whether as cultural producers, activists, or scholars, have used the symbolic value of trans femininity to guarantee their political authenticity. But this is only to tell half of the story. The anxious and angry rejection of everyone’s interdependence with trans women is an attempt to refuse a social debt accrued, to refuse the power trans femininity holds.

It was a wrathful God who constructed man’s body with strength and hate enough to kill, but his conscience, his memory, to preserve such a sin. Such contradiction explained why man rose and fell in God’s once wild Eden. If man confessed, sought baptism among Earth’s winged and gilled creatures, God’s forgiveness was as assured as the hum of summer bees. But the wind rose and trapped unearthed anger beneath my skin, muting any such confession.

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1). As John Gill said, "The design of the apostle in this and some following verses, is to show the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and to set forth the sad estate and condemnation of man by nature, and to magnify the riches of the grace of God, and represent the exceeding greatness of His power by conversion.

They both stilled and looked guiltily at Jarrow, but Arran refused to let Rachel go. “My lord?” The other man looked a little green around the gills, but to be fair, it was his sister being kissed senseless. “As Rachel’s guardian, in regard to propriety…oh do cease and desist, Kyle, that deadly glare is wasted on me…I shan’t insist on separating you until marriage

But looking at Gilles’s tables and chairs and stools, his bowls and walking sticks, Gamache had the feeling he was looking at a remarkable fusion of old and new. The wood seemed destined to form these shapes, as though it had grown for hundreds of years in the forests of Quebec, waiting to be found by this man and put to this use. And yet the designs were anything but traditional. They were modern and bold.

They call it 'learned helplessness' finally a phrase after years of study to explain why we stay in hopelessness with men who leave our faces bloody; why we 'let' the cruel fists of a man determined to turn out bodies into a purple storm that began and ended with fingers that disembody our self respect, our courage in that moment, we forget we are somebody. There is a hierarchy to his chaos that one learns to simply accept. There is a beginning to his madness that one knows will eventually end. So like those caged animals they outlawed in circuses, you let the ringmaster be tyrannical even as your own soul winces. Years from now, they will ask you 'Why didn't you leave him?' Because, you will say quietly, he had convinced me I was no longer human.

My heart had found its soul mate. My love for this man who once was the enemy was simply divine and exquisite. He was my Italian Mafia King!

I couldn’t believe it had happened and also how it affected me, I’d never been so turned on in my life. I was also mortified that I was so insanely attracted to a man like that, especially an enemy of my family, the man that Papa wanted dead.

I had no idea what he was trying to do, but one thing was for sure, my body longed for his touch. For God's sake why was I reacting like that, this man was the enemy, he was after my family, wanting revenge and our blood smeared all over his hands, and here I was wanting him to throw me on the bed and have his way with me.

Beta?” she asked, turning to rummage through one of the storage containers. “Do you know where I put the welder?” “Miss Alys, I don’t think we’re alone anymore.” “Very funny. Did Dad send someone to find me, after all?” She yanked out what felt like a welder, but ended up being the broken end of a screwdriver. “Damn it.” “Alys!” Beta’s voice was a little harsher this time. “Turn around.” Sighing, she had a whole rant on the tip of her tongue to scold the droid for trying to scare her, but then all the words disappeared the moment the droid turned on the lights outside of the pod. A man floated outside of her sub. No, not a man. Something else entirely. His long, dark hair hovered around his head, graceful and delicate in comparison to the hard swath of muscles that tapered down from his broad shoulders to a very narrow waist. But that was all that looked human. She could see the delicate webs between his fingers that ended in deadly black claws. The gills that fluttered on the side of his neck and the bright green scales that created a tiger stripe pattern all down his body. It was... What was he?

King’s opponents were advertising their prejudiced practices and beliefs to the world. “Across a span of three years,” McGill wrote, “Dr. King’s extremist opposition has succeeded in making him an international symbol of a persecuted man.

The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes only when he is not at work.

By the time George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, Quinn was a different man, a practicing physician and a dedicated citizen who, knowing that he was going to be out of town for that election, had dutifully filed an absentee ballot.

The ability to forgive is one of man's greatest achievements.

Down a winding cobbled street from the church trips the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the most evocative and strangely dramatic of all morris dances, performed for perhaps hundreds of years, conceivably for thousands. They are led by a single fiddler, dressed in a rag coat, playing a tune that is childlike and simple, but also full of sadness and an ethereal, mordant power, like the soundtrack of a dream. Behind him come men carrying antlered fallow deer heads in front of their faces. Behind them, a man-woman, a hunter and a hobbyhorse. They dance in silence, slowly. The hunt turns and turns, casting patterns in the moonlight. You feel its mossy, shadowed meaning beyond understanding. A ghost dance, a silently keening sadness. The things we misplace always bear a heavier loss than the things we choose to grasp with white knuckles. And in the darkness, quite unexpectedly, I feel tears of mourning on my cheek.

The game jostled back and forth, and then came the final inning. Some player named Casey came to bat, like his teammates, looking like a rock. Lightning ripped through the air as rain came down in sheets. The scoreboard said the horses were beating the rocks by two points, but there were two men on base. If Casey hit a homerun, the rocks would beat the horses. If not, too bad for the rocks. This man, Ben, and the two people with him looked horrified as this Casey came to bat. They had red shirts with horses painted on them. They jumped up and down for joy when they saw the final pitch, and Casey sulking back to the dugout. He had struck out. After the game, the four hiked back to a very small car.

Veteran Pillsbury spokesperson, the Pillsbury Doughboy, died yesterday of a severe yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes to the belly. He was 71. Doughboy was buried in a slightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out, including Mrs. Buttersworth, the California Raisins, Hungry Jack, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies, Captain Crunch, and many others. The graveside was piled high with flours as longtime friend, Aunt Jemima, delivered the eulogy, describing Doughboy as a man who "never knew how much he was kneaded." Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with many turnovers. He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky at times, he even still, as a crusty old man, was considered a roll model for millions. Doughboy is survived by his second wife, Play Dough. They have two children, and one in the oven. The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.

Do not let your flesh cover what the spirit is trying to reveal. Your flesh is not the guide. Your flesh is not the winner. Your spirit is your guide. You must allow the spirit in you to guide your decision making. My prayer has been that my heart’s desire would be to only desire what God wants for me and my life. Too often, the enemy and his demons lay distractions before our eyes. Good looks, sex, money, fame and so many more things all look good to our natural eyes. Remember, these things are just temporary and they will fade away. You will be lost forever if you make a relationship decision based upon your flesh being pleased. God will be warning you. Your inner spirit man will be screaming at you to turn the other way. Do not get fooled or tricked into making a commitment because of momentary pleasures.       The spirit of God speaks to you to protect you, not to harm you or make your life as a Christian boring. It is better to deny your flesh from a temporary experience, and embrace the spirit of the Lord that will lead you into eternal joy. You can win the fight!

That was why he could not stop coming to her. She was for him what his wife was not; a nymph who craved his sexuality and seduced him with words, dress and behavior. He wondered why good women would draw in a husband and then when they married them, they would stop all erotic endeavors. It was as if the very thing that drew the man was turned off as soon as they were trapped in the marriage. It seemed that family killed the sexual drive of women. They became mothers with an inability to any longer be lovers. Men were fish caught and thrown into the boat, gills desperately sucking for the life-giving source of their simple and primal need. That was why Abishai felt it was so easy for him to go astray, because his vice seemed more primal than his virtue.

If you accuse a man of murder, you might be believed, but if you accuse him of eating children for lunch and dinner like Gilles de Rais, no one will take you seriously.

Yet even at this level of theological work, Jesus Christ is central. For he is not only the life and light of God in relation to men; he is also man subjected to evil and darkness and death He is not only the goal of the Christian life; he is also the way toward that goal, the movement from alienation to openness, from death to life. Men do not have to leave their lost condition and progress toward God before they can be in contact with Christ. In Christ, God reaches all the way to them in their lostness. Christ enters the realm of their evil so as to draw them to himself.