Grand Parents Quotes

Think of all the stories you've heard, Bast. You have a young boy, the hero. His parents are killed he sets out for vengeance. What next?" Bast hesitated, his expression puzzled. Chronicler answered the question instead. "He finds help. A clever talking squirrel. An old drunken swordsman. A mad hermit in the woods. That sort of thing." Kvothe nodded. "Exactly! He finds the mad hermit in the woods, proves himself worthy, and learns the names of all things, just like Taborlin the Great. Then with these powerful magics at his beck and call, what does he do?" Chronicler shrugged. "He finds the villains and kills them." "Of course," Kvothe said grandly. "Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.

Believe it or not, some of us have piercings and tattoos and dye our hair because we think it looks pretty, not for any deep sociological reason. This isn't an act of protest against cultural or social repression. It's not a grand, deliberately defiant gesture against capitalists or feminists or any other social group. It's not even the fashion equivalent to sticking two fingers up at the world. The boring truth of it, Gabriel, is that I don't dress like this to hurt my parents or draw attention to myself or make a statement. I just do it because I think it looks nice. Disappointed?

Parents start out with grand expectations for their kids. But when things don't go as expected, they just want their kids to be ordinary, thinking it's simple. But son, being ordinary is the hardest thing to achieve,

Well, sir, do you mean to remain there, commending my father’s taste in wine, or do you mean to accompany me to Ashtead?” “Set off for Ashtead at this hour, when I have been traveling for two days?” said Sir Horace. “Now, do, my boy, have a little common sense! Why should I?” “I imagine that your parental feeling, sir, must provide you with the answer! If it does not, so be it! I am leaving immediately!” “What do you mean to do when you reach Lacy Manor?” asked Sir Horace, regarding him in some amusement. “Wring Sophy’s neck!” said Mr. Rivenhall savagely. “Well, you don’t need my help for that, my dear boy!” said Sir Horace, settling himself more comfortably in his chair.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

me demostraré a mí misma que yo puedo hacer grandes cosas. Que soy digna, que merezco vivir mi vida y que... puedo ser importante. Para mí, para la sociedad..., para la gente.

On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.

Just because they aren't with us doesn't mean we don't have parents anymore.

We are all a beautiful jumble of layers, parts, and mixtures of experiences, but my most important part, and in my opinion everyone’s most valuable part, is the one that chooses self-love instead of self-harm in the grand sweeping ways but also the little ways every single day. Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love, forgiving yourself, and learning from all the decisions you made to get you to where you are - that’s the key to being fulfilled. Learning to be the dream parent cheerleader to yourself. It’s been in you the whole time. And no matter how down you get, you can always make a gorgeous recovery.

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.

This poem is very long So long, in fact, that your attention span May be stretched to its very limits But that’s okay It’s what’s so special about poetry See, poetry takes time We live in a time Call it our culture or society It doesn’t matter to me cause neither one rhymes A time where most people don’t want to listen Our throats wait like matchsticks waiting to catch fire Waiting until we can speak No patience to listen But this poem is long It’s so long, in fact, that during the time of this poem You could’ve done any number of other wonderful things You could’ve called your father Call your father You could be writing a postcard right now Write a postcard When was the last time you wrote a postcard? You could be outside You’re probably not too far away from a sunrise or a sunset Watch the sun rise Maybe you could’ve written your own poem A better poem You could have played a tune or sung a song You could have met your neighbor And memorized their name Memorize the name of your neighbor You could’ve drawn a picture (Or, at least, colored one in) You could’ve started a book Or finished a prayer You could’ve talked to God Pray When was the last time you prayed? Really prayed? This is a long poem So long, in fact, that you’ve already spent a minute with it When was the last time you hugged a friend for a minute? Or told them that you love them? Tell your friends you love them …no, I mean it, tell them Say, I love you Say, you make life worth living Because that, is what friends do Of all of the wonderful things that you could’ve done During this very, very long poem You could have connected Maybe you are connecting Maybe we’re connecting See, I believe that the only things that really matter In the grand scheme of life are God and people And if people are made in the image of God Then when you spend your time with people It’s never wasted And in this very long poem I’m trying to let a poem do what a poem does: Make things simpler We don’t need poems to make things more complicated We have each other for that We need poems to remind ourselves of the things that really matter To take time A long time To be alive for the sake of someone else for a single moment Or for many moments Cause we need each other To hold the hands of a broken person All you have to do is meet a person Shake their hand Look in their eyes They are you We are all broken together But these shattered pieces of our existence don’t have to be a mess We just have to care enough to hold our tongues sometimes To sit and listen to a very long poem A story of a life The joy of a friend and the grief of friend To hold and be held And be quiet So, pray Write a postcard Call your parents and forgive them and then thank them Turn off the TV Create art as best as you can Share as much as possible, especially money Tell someone about a very long poem you once heard And how afterward it brought you to them

Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention, and full engagement. Trust isn’t a grand gesture—it’s a growing marble collection.

Si vos parents tombent dans une faute, avertissez-les avec grande douceur. Si vous les voyez déterminés à ne pas suivre vos avis, redoublez vos témoignages de respect, sans vous opposer. Quand même ils vous maltraiteraient, n’en ayez aucun ressentiment. 

Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream. I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise—for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of rounds—the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream. Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream.

To summarize what I have said: Aim for the highest; never enter a bar-room; do not touch liquor, or if at all only at meals; never speculate; never indorse beyond your surplus cash fund; make the firm’s interest yours; break orders always to save owners; concentrate; put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket; expenditure always within revenue; lastly, be not impatient, for, as Emerson says, “no one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourselves.” I congratulate poor young men upon being born to that ancient and honourable degree which renders it necessary that they should devote themselves to hard work. A basketful of bonds is the heaviest basket a young man ever had to carry. He generally gets to staggering under it. We have in this city creditable instances of such young men, who have pressed to the front rank of our best and most useful citizens. These deserve great credit. But the vast majority of the sons of rich men are unable to resist the temptations to which wealth subjects them, and sink to unworthy lives. I would almost as soon leave a young man a curse, as burden him with the almighty dollar. It is not from this class you have rivalry to fear. The partner’s sons will not trouble you much, but look out that some boys poorer, much poorer than yourselves, whose parents cannot afford to give them the advantages of a course in this institute, advantages which should give you a decided lead in the race–look out that such boys do not challenge you at the post and pass you at the grand stand. Look out for the boy who has to plunge into work direct from the common school and who begins by sweeping out the office. He is the probable dark horse that you had better watch.

Ah, ninguna historia hace justicia a lo que de verdad contiene, ¿no? Por muy bien contada que esté, los mundos tras ella siempre son más grandes.

Si estamos juntas, no habrá jaula lo bastante grande para contenernos a todas.

Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married. How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?

Recently, I’ve begun to think of scoliosis as a metaphor for my life. I’ve struggled to please teachers, employers, parents, boyfriends, husbands, twisting myself into someone I can’t be. I hurt when I do this, because it’s not natural. And it never works. But when I stretch my Self, instead, the results are different. When I’m reaching for my personal goals—to be a good mother, wife, friend and writer—I feel my balance return. And the sense of relief, as I become more the woman I truly am, is simply grand.

In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I think of those millions of poor put-upon parents who must now pay to fly to Orlando and pay to buy wizard hats and wizard cloaks and wizard burgers washed down with wizard meade_STmk, the more I grind my teeth in jealous irritation. Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King's Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other—not 'mad'—and where the situation is usually saved by a good old British sense of HUMOUR. WITH A U. RIGHT? NOT HUMOR. GOTTIT?

We visited Mao's old house, which had been turned into a museum-cum-shrine. It was rather grand––quite different from my idea of a lodging for exploited peasants, as I had expected it to be. A caption underneath an enormous photograph of Mao's mother said that she had been a very kind person and, because her family was relatively well off, had often given food to the poor. So our Great Leader's parents had been rich peasants! But rich peasants were class enemies! Why were Chairman Mao's parents heroes when other class enemies were objects of hate? The question frightened me so much that I immediately suppressed it.

There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents' love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married. How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?

El mito y el terror asociados a él siempre será más grande que tú, al margen de quien seas, de lo que hagas, de lo que sientas.

Butterfly Kisses Aged imperfections stitched upon my face years and years of wisdom earned by His holy grace. Quiet solitude in a humble home all the family scattered now like nomads do they roam. Then a gift sent from above a memory pure and tangible wrapped in innocence and unquestioning love. A butterfly kiss lands gently upon my cheek from an unseen child a kiss most sweet. Heaven grants grace and tears follow as youth revisits this empty hollow.

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific. By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.

Hay muchos tipos de valentía, y no todas consisten en enfrentarse al peligro o a grandes bestias. Ni siquiera esa valentía es la más útil. La que cuenta es la que te impele a afrontar todo lo que crees que será insoportable.

I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.

On a grand scale, this explains why grandparents typically have a calmer approach to bringing up children than parents do. The grandparents have a more accurate grasp of how normal – and therefore less alarming – many problems are. Their calm is based on two key bits of knowledge. They know that whatever is done, one’s children will turn out very far from perfect – and therefore the intensely agitating worry that one might be making a mistake is usually a bit misplaced. But they also grasp that even when things go a bit wrong, children will generally cope well enough. Their sense of danger and their sense of hope have both been made more accurate by experience. History encourages the less panicky sides of ourselves.

I can't find a man I want, and I'm beginning to think the problem is me. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe I'm holding out for something that doesn't even exist." She'd voiced her secret fear. Maybe grand passion was just a dream. With all the kissing she'd done in the past few months, she'd not once been overcome with desire. Her parents certainly hadn't had any great passion between them. Come to think of it, she wasn't sure she'd ever seen grand passion outside of a movie theater or a book.

A child certainly allows himself to be impressed by the grand talk of his parents,” wrote Jung “but do they really imagine he is educated by it? Actually it is the parents’ lives that educate the child – what they add by word at best serves only to confuse him.

Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids — from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream — is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.

Takoví jsou to muži. Za svítání vyjdou s dvěma holýma rukama na trávník a dovnitř se vrátí z nově postavené verandy. Jakože cože? Já jsem dvěma holýma rukama leda tak vyhrál Grand Theft Auto IV. A to jsem použil cheat all weapons. Tvoji dědečkové si sami postavili domy v době, kdy ještě nebyl Google. Uvědomuješ si, co je to za výkon? To nejsou lidi. To jsou švýcarské armádní nože se strništěm na bradě.

And I, who have the world in my pocket, can bring them nothing to comfort their disappointment or reward their optimism, but supplicate the fatted calf which they killed so often before and so in vain. Parents' imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

Back at my parents’, Mum was waiting with a muffin for me. ‘Banana and pecan. I know it’s the wrong colour but would you try it? Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit …’ ‘Grand,’ I said. ‘It’s just the clouds. When it’s overcast like this, it does my head in.’ A strange expression passed over her face. ‘The sky is blue.’ I took a look out of the window; the sky was blue. ‘When did that happen?’ ‘It’s been blue all morning.’ But it didn’t make things any better. I was still uneasy, just in a different way. The empty sky looked hard and cold and merciless. Couldn’t they have put in some clouds to soften it up a bit?

Yeah, sure,” I scoffed. “You’re the picture of respectability and moral character…You expect me to believe you were your parents’ worst nightmare? What was your criminal act of choice—drunken bar fights? Or maybe grand theft auto? Don’t tell me you sold the crown jewels to buy drugs…It’s so disappointingly cliché.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

Ne hâte pas cet acte tendre, Douceur d'être et de n'être pas, Car j'ai vécu de vous attendre, Et mon coeur n'était que vos pas.

When it comes down to it, the primary goal of Christian parenting is not necessarily to produce godly children but, first and foremost, to be godly parents.

Les enfants commencent par aimer leurs parents ; devenus grands, ils les jugent ; quelquefois, ils leur pardonnent.

There is a dream, a grand idealism, that mixed-race people are the hope for change, the peacekeepers, we are the people with an other understanding, with an invested interest in everyone being treated equally as we have a foot and a loyalty in many camps, with all shades. We are like love bombs planted in the minefield of black and white. It is as if our parents intended to make us, with courage, and on purpose, as vessels of empathy, bridges for the cultural divide and diplomats for diversity and equality." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)

If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.” Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there. If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.

Adolescents, malgré les données d’intelligence et de tempérament, nous sommes en grande partie fabriqués par notre éducation, notre milieu, nos parents ; adultes, nous nous fabriquons par nos choix.

This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little.

That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they’ll have the instruments they need and that they’ll leave none behind. Pilots run through them, to ensure taking off safely and landing smoothly—preferably at the intended airport. Parents deploy them against all that can go wrong in transporting small children. Checklists pose common questions in situations that may surprise: the idea is to approach these having, as much as possible, reduced the likelihood that they will.

-¿Se te ha ocurrido alguna vez -preguntó, de pronto- que los padres no son más que niños grandes hasta que sus hijos les fuerzan a hacerse adultos? ¿Lo que generalmente ocurre entre los gritos y los pataleos de estos?

Boys disobey their parents with such great regularity that it’s barely worth a comment; and if yours is talented enough to rebel in such grand fashion, then you ought to consider it a point of pride that he’s such a sharp lad.

Como lo menciona Sherrie Eldridge en el libro Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew, los grandes villanos en los procesos de adopción son, en definitiva, la pérdida no resuelta y los duelos no efectuados.

Parents' imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

Poétise, poétise, fais-toi le grand cinéma de la liberté passée. Vrai que j'aimais ma vie, que je voyais l'avenir sans désespoir. Et je ne m'ennuyais pas. J'en ai réellement prononcé des propos désabusés sur le mariage, le soir dans ma chambre, avec les copines étudiantes, une connerie, la mort, rien qu'à voir la trombine des couples mariés au restau, ils bouffent l'un en face de l'autre sans parler, momifiés. Quand Hélène, licence de philo, concluait que c'était tout de même un mal nécessaire, pour avoir des enfants, je pensais qu'elle avait de drôles d'idées, des arguments saugrenus. Moi je n'imaginais jamais la maternité avec ou sans mariage. Je m'irritais aussi quand presque toutes se vantaient de savoir bien coudre, repasser sans faux plis, heureuses de ne pas être seulement intellectuelles, ma fierté devant une mousse au chocolat réussie avait disparu en même temps que Brigitte, la leur m'horripilait. Oui, je vivais de la même manière qu'un garçon de mon âge, étudiant qui se débrouille avec l'argent de l'État, l'aide modeste des parents, le baby-sitting et les enquêtes, va au cinéma, lit, danse, et bosse pour avoir ses examens, juge le mariage une idée bouffonne.

Honestly, my dad and her parents were so anxious to see what they wanted to see, it wouldn’t take much to convince them that their grand scheme was a success. Parents were lame like that. Make them think their idea worked, and it’d be smooth sailing from here.

— Les bijoux, c'est beau comme les fleurs. Mon père et ma mère éclatèrent de rire. Je trouvai leur réaction déplacée. Un doute se glissa en moi sur la qualité de leur intelligence. [...] Comparer des bijoux à des fleurs, était-ce signe de stupidité ? Le rire de mes parents traduisait cette indulgence que les grandes personnes manifestent devant les enfants qui leur tiennent des propos niais ou puérils. Je sentais que ma comparaison exprimait une idée essentielle. Elle devait être accueillie par le silence. Le rire en une telle circonstance devenait une incongruité.

Il me parle de sa mère. De ses grands silences et des berceuses qu'elle lui chantait. Il me parle de ses grands-parents qui s'occupent encore de leur élevage de chevaux, refusent de se reposer. Il croit qu'ils ont peur d'être inutiles, d'avoir rien d'autre à faire que de se laisser mourir doucement.

Tsundoku (Japanese) Buying books and not reading them; letting books pile up on shelves or floors or nightstands. My parents used to joke about making furniture out of them; instead of being coffee table books, they could be the coffee table. Ditto on nightstands, counters, roofs. When we were kids, my brother and I, teased about always reading, built a wall. Right through the middle of the neighborhood, protected ourselves with fiction and with facts. I loved the encyclopedias best; the weight of them, how my grandmother made me walk with one on my head to practice being a lady. It wasn’t until college that I built a grand stairway out of them; their glossy blue jackets looked like marble in the moonlight. I climbed it, to the top of the wall. Peering over, I found you, on the other side, alone in your bed, asleep. That was the first time you dreamed me. In your dream, you told me not to jump. But to be patient. (We were young then, it would be years before we’d meet) and then this morning, I found you in my bedroom. In your hands, How to Rope and Tie a Steer, a mug of coffee, a piece of slightly burned toast. I took The Sun Also Rises from the wall, made the first window into your heart.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the base Only sentries were stirring--they guarded the place. At the foot of each bunk sat a helmet and boot For the Santa of Soldiers to fill up with loot. The soldiers were sleeping and snoring away As they dreamed of “back home” on good Christmas Day. One snoozed with his rifle--he seemed so content. I slept with the letters my family had sent. When outside the tent there arose such a clatter. I sprang from my rack to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash. Poked out my head, and yelled, “What was that crash?” When what to my thrill and relief should appear, But one of our Blackhawks to give the all clear. More rattles and rumbles! I heard a deep whine! Then up drove eight Humvees, a jeep close behind… Each vehicle painted a bright Christmas green. With more lights and gold tinsel than I’d ever seen. The convoy commander leaped down and he paused. I knew then and there it was Sergeant McClaus! More rapid than rockets, his drivers they came When he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: “Now, Cohen! Mendoza! Woslowski! McCord! Now, Li! Watts! Donetti! And Specialist Ford!” “Go fill up my sea bags with gifts large and small! Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away, all!” In the blink of an eye, to their trucks the troops darted. As I drew in my head and was turning around, Through the tent flap the sergeant came in with a bound. He was dressed all in camo and looked quite a sight With a Santa had added for this special night. His eyes--sharp as lasers! He stood six feet six. His nose was quite crooked, his jaw hard as bricks! A stub of cigar he held clamped in his teeth. And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath. A young driver walked in with a seabag in tow. McClaus took the bag, told the driver to go. Then the sarge went to work. And his mission today? Bring Christmas from home to the troops far away! Tasty gifts from old friends in the helmets he laid. There were candies, and cookies, and cakes, all homemade. Many parents sent phone cards so soldiers could hear Treasured voices and laughter of those they held dear. Loving husbands and wives had mailed photos galore Of weddings and birthdays and first steps and more. And for each soldier’s boot, like a warm, happy hug, There was art from the children at home sweet and snug. As he finished the job--did I see a twinkle? Was that a small smile or instead just a wrinkle? To the top of his brow he raised up his hand And gave a salute that made me feel grand. I gasped in surprise when, his face all aglow, He gave a huge grin and a big HO! HO! HO! HO! HO! HO! from the barracks and then from the base. HO! HO! HO! as the convoy sped up into space. As the camp radar lost him, I heard this faint call: “HAPPY CHRISTMAS, BRAVE SOLDIERS! MAY PEACE COME TO ALL!

The dormitory had been carved out of those grand rooms once polluted by aristocrats and rich people. Beatrice had disappeared from my world. I was in Prague. Caught among buildings that were dark: a square of buildings. The poet of those buildings, Pierre, and I, lovers for many years, were fucking on a tattered red carpet in a hotel. I had to find my hotel. Pierre pointed to an old, as if marbled, red column that rose above the city, so far that I couldn't see its top. He explained to me that this is his family's home: the column runs through the sky horizontally over the whole city. I ascertained that Pierre's parents are wealthy. I had never known this before. Pierre left me. The dark square of buildings, named 'The Dormitory,' in which I was standing lies in the upper right quadrant of the city. A long, narrow, black plank or street connected this square to its twin that occupied the city's upper left quarter. I had to reach the second square so that I wouldn't be murdered. As I started walking the black plank, the sky above the black was yellow. Now I was in the second square, standing in a hotel, which was Pierre's hotel. So it must belong to Pierre. Since I hadn't wanted to be in his hotel, I had to be lost. I was lost in a foreign city, as I've been time and time again.

Quelques millimètres séparent nos visages, son nez se pose sur le mien, nos yeux ne se quittent plus. Plus aucun bruit ne s’élève, il n’y a que lui et moi – plus de meilleurs amis, ni de frères ou de parents ou qui que ce soit entre nous. Alors il m’embrasse, effaçant toutes mes appréhensions. Finalement, et à ma grande surprise, j’ai peut-être trouvé l’endroit où je pourrais survivre.

I have important things to tell you, but who can concentrate with all that racket?" That "racket" turned out to be because of flowers, hundreds of them, arriving by the cartful. Roses, orchids, lilies, daffodils, irises, and a dozen other varieties that she could not name. Heavy porcelain vases were mounted all around the grand ballroom and the royal gardens, displaying the arrangements in all their grandeur. But one arrangement stood out from the rest. From the duchess's window, Cinderella watched the gardeners erect a trellis studded with roses. When the palace staff wheeled out a barrow of flowers, white pearlescent roses intertwined with pink ones as flushed as the height of sunrise, she nearly gasped. Her parents' favorite flowers. White and pink roses, with a touch of myrtle. Charles had been listening.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

J'éprouvais une sorte de pitié ou en tout cas de tristesse pour ceux qui allaient dans de grands théâtres parisiens ou qui s'asseyaient à la terrasse d'un café sans comprendre leur chance, sans émerveillement, qui accomplissaient ces gestes comme ils les avaient accomplis dans leur enfance, comme leurs parents et leurs grand-parents l'avaient fait avant eux, parce qu'ils étaient nés dans un monde plus privilégié que moi. Mon privilège c'était d'avoir connu la vie sans privilège.

Now, religion professes a special role in the protection and instruction of children. "Woe to him," says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, "who harms a child." The New Testament has Jesus informing us that one so guilty would be better off at the bottom of the sea, and with a millstone around his neck at that. But both in theory and in practice, religion uses the innocent and the defenseless for the purposes of experiment. By all means let an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let Abraham offer to commit filicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means - for all I care - let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as sin.

Kevin's parents had bumped me from my upstairs room, The place where last weak i had read Death In Venice and luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power i wanted over a man. And i awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks-more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taught strings.

Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs.

Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limit of the bed. They chop at Landsman, stab him with their toes, grunt and mutter. They masticate the fiber of their dreams. Around dawn, something very bad happens in the baby’s diaper. It’s the worst night that Landsman has ever spent on a mattress, and that is saying a good deal.

I was already an atheist, and by my senior year I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war. My despair was particularly strange because, for the first time since the age of four, my life was perfect. I had a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and loving parents. I was captain of the track team, and, perhaps most important for a seventeen-year-old boy, I got to drive around in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Yet I kept wondering why any of it mattered. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I thought that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (ECCLESIASTES 1:14) . I finally escaped when, after a week of thinking about suicide (in the abstract, not as a plan), I turned the problem inside out. There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away? I don’t know whether this realization lifted my mood or whether an improving mood helped me to reframe the problem with hope; but my existential depression lifted and I enjoyed the last months of high school.

Thelma Cazalet MP, unlike most of the other British 'honoured guests' attending [the 1938 Reichsparteitag], was strongly anti-Nazi and had accepted Ribbentrop's invitation only because she thought it important 'to be aware of what was going on.' As she entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel on the first night, she immediately caught sight of Unity Mitford seated at the long 'British' table with her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale. 'Unity is alarmingly pretty,' she wrote in her diary, 'but I have never seen anyone so pretty with absolutely no charm in her face and a rather stupid expression.

Mon intégration d’enfant immigrante a passé par la honte de qui j’étais, le rejet de ce qui me constituait et une série de petites trahisons envers moi-même et mes parents. J’ai commencé à ne me concevoir qu’à travers les yeux des autres, en tentant d’anticiper leurs réactions. J’avais huit ans et j’avais déjà interdit à ma mère de mettre des trucs pouvant être perçus comme exotiques dans mes lunchs, m’aliénant ainsi de ma culture d’origine. Mener la bataille jusque dans mon assiette tous les midis constituait un trop grand défi dans ma vie d’écolière ; j’ai capitulé en me privant de ce qui me plaisait, me dépossédant ainsi de petits bouts de moi.

Anyway, my dad gave me a whole birth-control kit for college, so we don’t even have to worry about it.” Peter nearly chokes on his sandwich. “A birth-control kit?” “Sure. Condoms and…” Dental dams. “Peter, do you know what a dental dam is?” “A what? Is that what dentists use to keep your mouth open when they clean it?” I giggle. “No. It’s for oral sex. And here I thought you were this big expert and you were going to be the one to teach me everything at college!” My heart speeds up as I wait for him to make a joke about the two of us finally having sex at college, but he doesn’t. He frowns and says, “I don’t like the thought of your dad thinking we’re doing it when we’re not.” “He just wants us to be careful is all. He’s a professional, remember?” I pat him on the knee. “Either way, I’m not getting pregnant, so it’s fine.” He crumples up his napkin and tosses it in the paper bag, his eyes still on the road. “Your parents met in college, didn’t they?” I’m surprised he remembers. I don’t remember telling him that. “Yeah.” “So how old were they? Eighteen? Nineteen?” Peter’s headed somewhere with this line of questioning. “Twenty, I think.” His face dims but just slightly. “Okay, twenty. I’m eighteen and you’ll be eighteen next month. Twenty is just two years older. So what difference does two years make in the grand scheme of things?” He beams a smile at me. “Your parents met at twenty; we met at--” “Twelve,” I supply. Peter frowns, annoyed that I’ve messed up his argument. “Okay, so we met when were kids, but we didn’t get together until we were seventeen--” “I was sixteen.” “We didn’t get together for real until we were both basically seventeen. Which is basically the same thing as eighteen, which is basically the same thing as twenty.” He has the self-satisfied look of a lawyer who has just delivered a winning closing statement. “That’s a very long and twisty line of logic,” I say. “Have you ever thought about being a lawyer?” “No, but now I’m thinking maybe?

I recently told my mom about a hateful thing that had happened to me. Her response was to casually share a story I had never heard before. When she was new to the country, she was rammed by an irate fellow shopper in a grocery store, a random, race-motivated attack. Translation: What I had faced was nothing in comparison to how things used to be. According to my folks, I should get over it, because in the grand scheme of things, I am winning. But am I? Compared to what she had to face on the regular, yes. Compared to what I dream for myself, no. It is this personal accounting that gets me every time, listener friends. And here’s the truth of it all: Things are better for folks like me—the racialized, the marginalized, the Other. But because two truths can exist simultaneously in the universe, things are worse for us too. Real change is a boulder we keep pushing, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it doesn’t push back. Because it does. And sometimes it pushes back hard. In my parents’ time, simply being acknowledged as worthy of notice, as having your own history and worth, was enough. That’s not enough for me. I want to be included and celebrated. I want nuanced and plentiful stories to be told about my people, and I don’t want it to mean something when one of us breaks through, because there are so many of us breaking through, all the time, in every field.

My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

The message of EFT is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same. EFT focuses on creating and strengthening this emotional bond between partners by identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving relationship: being open, attuned, and responsive to each other.

Les jours de grande marée, on attend que la mer se soit bien retirée et on se dépêche, avant qu'elle ne remonte, d'aller à la pêche aux crabes. On se met des espadrilles en caoutchouc blanc pour ne pas déraper sur les algues et, le seau rempli d'eau de mer d'une main, l'épuiette de l'autre, on s'éloigne de la plage jusqu'à ce grand rocher bizarrement découpé, qui ferme la baie, et dans lequel on voit tantôt un our, tantôt un homme qui porte un enfant sur ses épaules. De cette journée il y a un moment délicieux : celui où l'on ressort d'une flaque une grouillée de crevettes et où sort d'une flaque une grouillée de crevettes et où les doigts délicats doivent être plus malins que ces corps translucides, faisant le mort, qui se confondent en glissant entre les mailles du filet.

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.

That exactly is how my father and mother met and became man and wife. There were no home ceremonials, such as the seeking and obtaining of parental consent, because there were no parent; no conferences by uncles and grand-uncles, or exhortations by grandmothers and aunts; no male relatives to arrange the marriage knot, nor female relations to herald the family union, and no uncles of the bride to divide the bogadi (dowry) cattle as, of course, there were no cattle. It was a simple matter of taking each other for good and or ill with the blessing of the ‘God of Rain’. The forest was their home, the rustling trees their relations, the sky their guardian and the birds, who sealed the marriage contract with the songs, the only guests. Here they stablished their home and names it Re-Nosi (We-are-alone). [41]

A constant producer, a man who is a " mother" in the grand sense of the term, one who no longer knows or hears of anything except pregnancies and childbeds of his spirit, who has no time at all to reflect and make comparisons with regard to himself and his work, who is also no longer inclined to exercise his taste, but simply forgets it, letting it take its chance of standing, lying or falling,-perhaps such a man at last produces works on which he is then quite unfit to pass a judgment: so that he speaks and thinks foolishly about them and about himself. This seems to me almost the normal condition with fruitful artists,-nobody knows a child worse than its parents-and the rule applies even (to take an immense example) to the entire Greek world of poetry and art, which was never " conscious " of what it had done. . . .

Qu’est-ce qui peut seul être notre doctrine ? — Que personne ne donne à l’homme ses qualités, ni Dieu, ni la société, ni ses parents et ses ancêtres, ni lui-même (— le non-sens de l’« idée », réfuté en dernier lieu, a été enseigné, sous le nom de « liberté intelligible par Kant et peut-être déjà par Platon).Personne n’est responsable du fait que l’homme existe, qu’il est conformé de telle ou telle façon, qu’il se trouve dans telles conditions, dans tel milieu. La fatalité de son être n’est pas à séparer de la fatalité de tout ce qui fut et de tout ce qui sera. L’homme n’est pas la conséquence d’une intention propre, d’une volonté, d’un but ; avec lui on ne fait pas d’essai pour atteindre un « idéal d’humanité », un « idéal de bonheur », ou bien un « idéal de moralité », — il est absurde de vouloir faire dévier son être vers un but quelconque. Nous avons inventé l’idée de « but » : dans la réalité le « but » manque… On est nécessaire, on est un morceau de destinée, on fait partie du tout, on est dans le tout, — il n’y a rien qui pourrait juger, mesurer, comparer, condamner notre existence, car ce serait là juger, mesurer, comparer et condamner le tout…Mais il n’y a rien en dehors du tout ! — Personne ne peut plus être rendu responsable, les catégories de l’être ne peuvent plus être ramenées à une cause première, le monde n’est plus une unité, ni comme monde sensible, ni comme « esprit » : cela seul est la grande délivrance, — par là l’innocence du devenir est rétablie… L’idée de « Dieu » fut jusqu’à présent la plus grande objection contre l’existence… Nous nions Dieu, nous nions la responsabilité en Dieu : par là seulement nous sauvons le monde.

I want to make sure we understand in this reminder what duʿā’ is not? Duʿā’ is not placing an order at a restaurant. Duʿā’ is not placing an order for a product. When you place an order, you pay something and you get what you expected. You place an order for French fries; you’re not supposed to get a burger. You’re supposed to get French fries. When you place an order for a laptop, you’re not supposed to get a phone in the mail. You get what you ordered, and when you order something you obviously pay for it. You paid for it, so you’re expecting what you paid for. When you and I make duʿā’, we pay nothing. We pay nothing. When you pay nothing, then you have no expectations, you have no right to complain about what you get. You don’t get to say, ‘Hey! Wait, I asked for a hundred on my exam. I made duʿā’ last night. I still got a forty. What is this Allah? I placed the right order!’ You and I don’t get to do that. Allah is not here to serve you and me as customers. We’re used to customer service in this world. We are used to it so much that we think the way we are going to deal with Allah, is the same. Some of the young people today; unfortunately, their relationship with their parents has become like their parents are supposed to provide them customer service. ‘Mum, I asked you to buy me Grand Theft Auto! How come you didn’t get it yet?’, ‘I told you I’m going to do my homework!’ Like your homework is payment or something, right? Because we feel so entitled all the time, we bring this entitled attitude when we turn to Allah and we make duʿā’ to Him. ‘Yā Allāh, heal me.’ ‘Yā Allāh, get me a promotion.’ ‘Yā Allāh, do this for me or do that for me.’ And it doesn’t happen; and you’re like: ‘Forget this, I don’t need prayer. I even took the time out to pray and He didn’t give!

Qu’il n’en ait pas toujours été ainsi, le mot même de « clergé » en fournit la preuve, car, originairement, « clerc » ne signifie pas autre chose que « savant », et il s’oppose à « laïque », qui désigne l’homme du peuple, c’est-à-dire du « vulgaire », assimilé à l’ignorant ou au « profane », à qui on ne peut demander que de croire ce qu’il n’est pas capable de comprendre, parce que c’est là le seul moyen de le faire participer à la tradition dans la mesure de ses possibilités. Il est même curieux de noter que les gens qui, à notre époque, se font gloire de se dire « laïques », tout aussi bien que ceux qui se plaisent à s’intituler « agnostiques », et d’ailleurs ce sont souvent les mêmes, ne font en cela que se vanter de leur propre ignorance ; et pour qu’ils ne se rendent pas compte que tel est le sens des étiquettes dont ils se parent, il faut que cette ignorance soit en effet bien grande et vraiment irrémédiable.

Our precious lives, when you step back and look at them, are a kind of game. Try imagining the game described by the exciting copy above. A literal once-in-a-lifetime adventure—the grand game of life. You start playing. First, there’s a random character creation process that proceeds automatically as a collaboration between your parents. There’s the heartwarming opening with your mom and your dad and a thousand blessings and all that, and then finally, you get to dive in. You get a rough grasp on the controls, and then you’re tossed into “school,” a microcosmic tutorial for the heavy seas of society— The game’s setting—Earth. Awaiting us as we’re tossed into a corner of that oversized map is a massive sandbox game. There we have a vast array of choices, a spectacular degree of freedom, and countless minigames. Inspired by the hype, we advance just as advertised, but it’s not long before we realize something. —We’ve been had.

les hommes doivent être dressés en vue des besoins de notre temps, afin qu'ils soient en mesure de mettre la main à la pâte ; qu'ils doivent travailler à la grande usine des "utilités" communes avant d'être mûrs, et même afin qu'ils ne deviennent jamais mûrs, — car ce serait là un luxe qui soustrairait au "marché du travail" une quantité de force. On aveugle certains oiseaux pour qu'ils chantent mieux : je ne crois pas que les hommes d'aujourd'hui chantent mieux que leurs grands-parents, mais ce que je sais, c'est qu'on les aveugle tout jeunes. Et le moyen, le moyen scélérat qu'on emploie pour les aveugler, c'est une lumière trop intense, trop soudaine et trop variable. Le jeune homme est promené, à grands coups de fouet, à travers les siècles : des adolescents qui n'entendent rien à la guerre, aux négociations diplomatiques, à la politique commerciale, sont jugés dignes d'être initiés à l'Histoire politique. Deuxième Considération intempestive, ch. 7

Paris is elegant and old. Being there made me feel elegant and young. It helped me forgive America for our arrogance and fury. In Paris, surrounded by ruins of ancient baths, guillotines, and churches more than a thousand years old, humanity’s mistakes and beauty are unfurled like a mural. In America, we are so new. We still fancy ourselves conquerors and renegades. We’re all still trying to be the “firsts” to do this or that. Can you imagine? We are all competing for our parents’ attention, and we have no parents. It makes us a little jumpy. Paris is not jumpy. Paris is calm and certain. It’s not going to startle easily, and it already knows the words to all the songs. Everywhere I looked in Paris, I found proof that leaders come and go, buildings are built and fall, revolutions begin and end; nothing—no matter how grand—lasts. Paris says: We are here for such a short time. We might as well sit down for a long while with some good coffee, company, and bread. Here, there is more time to be human, maybe because there has been more time to learn how.

Yes. I'm going to talk to her. Maybe." Kristoff huffed. "You, Bulda, Grand Pabbie... you act like this is so easy! They may be so-called love experts, but they've never left the valley." Sven snorted. "Hi," Anna interrupted, feeling funny. She was suddenly very aware of how she looked, and how he did, too. Kristoff had on a bright blue dress shirt and clean pants. She was wearing a green dress under a flour-and-icing-covered apron. Her braids, which she'd had in for two days, needed refreshing. "Were you looking for me? I mean, not actually looking, but you're here, so maybe... you're hungry?" He immediately blushed. "What? Yes. I mean, no. I..." He pressed a bunch of carrots into her hands. "I just wanted to give you what I owed you." "Oh." Anna looked down. "You didn't have to bring me back- oof!" Sven had bumped into Anna, sending her flying into Kristoff's arms. The two tumbled backward, falling onto several stacks of flour Anna's parents hadn't had a chance to bring into the shop yet. "This is awkward," Anna said, struggling to get up. 'Not because you're awkward. Because we're... I'm... awkward." She stood up. "You're gorgeous. Wait, what?

Sosem értettem, hogyan csinálják azok, akik egész életükben minimalisták. Őszintén szólva még Mondriant sem értem, aki pedig nem kifejezetten minimalista, de a De Stilj értelmét sosem fogtam fel. Eleinte biztos tök jó volt Mondriannak lenni, és a figuratív fákról áttérni a fekete vonalak és színes négyzetek alotta kétdimenziós és geometrius világba. Jól érzi magát tőle az ember. Jóval kevesebb gond van vele. Nem kell azzal gyötörnie magát, hogy arcképet, széket vagy csendéletet fessen. Reggel felkel, és csinál egy piros négyzetet meg két sárgát. Vagy Yves Klein azzal a faszom kékkel. Ó, anyám, milyen idegesítő Klein faszom kékje. Eleinte biztos jól érezte magát, amikor a kék képeit csinálta. Biztos azt gondolta, nagy ötlet. Biztos neki is jóval kevesebb gondja volt vele, még kevesebb, mint Mondriannak. Sosem kellett azon töprengnie, mit fessen, még csak azon sem, hogy egy négyzet vagy két négyzet vagy egy téglalap és öt négyzet legyen, mindig ugyanazt a kéket festette, az egész képet kékre. (…) Szóval fárasztó lehet Mondriannak és Kleinnek lenni egy életen át, kész fejlövés. Képzelem Klein feleségét, egy volt neki: „Szerelmem, gyere és nézd meg mit festettem!” Klein felesége megérkezett, és minthogy szerette, meg kellett játszania magát, és felkiáltania: „Szerelmem, ez gyönyörű! Még egy kék kép! Olyan büszke vagyok rád! Hogy jutott eszedbe?

You know,” I said, “you don’t owe New Fiddleham anything. You don’t need to help them.” “Look,” Charlie said as we clipped past Market Street. He was pointing at a man delicately painting enormous letters onto a broad window as we passed. NONNA SANTORO’S, it read, although the RO’S was still just an outline. “That Italian restaurant?” “Yes,” he smiled. “They will be opening their doors for the first time very soon. Sweet family. I bought my first meal in New Fiddleham from that man. A couple of meatballs from a street cart were about all I could afford at the time. He’s an immigrant, too. He’s going to do well. His red sauce is amazing.” “That’s grand for him, then,” I said. “I like it when doors open,” said Charlie. “Doors are opening in New Fiddleham every day. It is a remarkable time to be alive anywhere, really. Do you think our parents could ever have imagined having machines that could wash dishes, machines that could sew, machines that do laundry? Pretty soon we’ll be taking this trolley ride without any horses. I’ve heard that Glanville has electric streetcars already. Who knows what will be possible fifty years from now, or a hundred. Change isn’t always so bad.” “Your optimism is both baffling and inspiring,” I said. “The sun is rising,” he replied with a little chuckle. I glanced at the sky. It was well past noon. “It’s just something my sister and I used to say,” he clarified. “I think you would like Alina. You often remind me of her. She has a way of refusing to let the world keep her down.” He smiled and his gaze drifted away, following the memory. “Alina found a rolled-up canvas once,” he said, “a year or so after our mother passed away. It was an oil painting—a picture of the sun hanging low over a rippling ocean. She was a beautiful painter, our mother. I could tell that it was one of hers, but I had never seen it before. It felt like a message, like she had sent it, just for us to find. “I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.” “I think I like Alina already. It’s a heartening philosophy. I only worry that it’s wasted on this city.” “A city is just people,” Charlie said. “A hundred years from now, even if the roads and buildings are still here, this will still be a whole new city. New Fiddleham is dying, every day, but it is also being constantly reborn. Every day, there is new hope. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, there are doors opening.” I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “When we’re through saving the world,” I said, “you can take me out to Nonna Santoro’s. I have it on good authority that the red sauce is amazing.” He blushed pink and a bashful smile spread over his face. “When we’re through saving the world, Miss Rook, I will hold you to that.

It all just makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it? You spend your life barely surviving the grind, living in an endless cycle, doing the same thing over and over again, depending on drugs and the numbness they bring to see another day… and it’s all for nothing. In the grand scheme of things, you’re nothing.' He thinks on it for a while. ‘It makes a lot of things insignificant, true,’ he finally says. ‘The things we spend our lives worrying about, the pressure society puts on us… it suddenly seems like nothing in the face of the infinity of the universe or the endlessness of time. But look at yourself,’ he says. She scrunches up her face, half frowning, half smiling. ‘Myself?’ ‘Where did you come from?’ ‘The city?’ ‘Before that.’ ‘Eh, my parents?’ He nods. ‘And where did your parents come from?’ ‘Their parents,’ she says, smiling now but still confused. ‘Right. And we all come from this planet, which as far as we know, is the only place in the universe where life can naturally form and exist. The slightest change in temperature or pressure of the atmosphere, and that’ll be the end of us. But it’s not just that. For us to even have the smallest of chances to exist, Earth had to be just the right distance from the Sun, which had to be just the right temperature. Stars had to be born in the first place, atoms had to exist just the way they do. The Big Bang had to happen. For you to even be a possibility, the universe had to be born in just the right way.’ He turns to face her, and she returns his gaze. ‘We’re just two out of billions of people, on a rock orbiting a ball of fire, alive at a point in time that allows us to witness humanity make the biggest, most bewildering discoveries. Two people who could have been anywhere in the world, separated by time, space, circumstances. Yet after all we’ve been through, all that’s happened to us, here we are, now. Sharing this moment together. We’re not insignificant. We’re miracles.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

La société moderne a commis la sérieuse faute de substituer, dès le plus bas âge, l’école à l’enseignement familial. Elle y a été obligée par la trahison des femmes. Celles-ci abandonnent leurs enfants au kindergarten pour s’occuper de leur carrière, de leurs ambitions mondaines, de leurs plaisirs sexuels, de leurs fantaisies littéraires ou artistiques, ou simplement pour jouer au bridge, aller au cinéma, perdre leur temps dans une paresse affairée. Elles ont causé ainsi l’extinction du groupe familial, où l’enfant grandissait en compagnie d’adultes et apprenait beaucoup d’eux. Les jeunes chiens élevés dans des chenils avec des animaux du même âge sont moins développés que ceux qui courent en liberté avec leurs parents. Il en est de même des enfants perdus dans la foule des autres enfants et de ceux qui vivent avec des adultes intelligents. L’enfant modèle facilement ses activités physiologiques, affectives et mentales sur celles de son milieu. Aussi reçoit-il peu des enfants de son âge. Quand il est réduit à n’être qu’une unité dans une école, il se développe mal. Pour progresser, l’individu demande la solitude relative, et l’attention du petit groupe familial. C’est également grâce à son ignorance de l’individu que la société moderne atrophie les adultes. L’homme ne supporte pas impunément le mode d’existence et le travail uniforme et stupide imposé aux ouvriers d’usine, aux employés de bureau, à ceux qui doivent assurer la production en masse. Dans l’immensité des villes modernes, il est isolé et perdu. Il est une abstraction économique, une tête du troupeau. Il perd sa qualité d’individu. Il n’a ni responsabilité, ni dignité. Au milieu de la foule émergent les riches, les politiciens puissants, les bandits de grande envergure. Les autres ne sont qu’une poussière anonyme. Au contraire, l’individu garde sa personnalité quand il fait partie d’un groupe où il est connu, d’un village, d’une petite ville, où son importance relative est plus grande, dont il peut espérer devenir, à son tour, un citoyen influent. La méconnaissance théorique de l’individualité a amené sa disparition réelle.

metastases has become talk of a few months left. When I saw her in A&E, despite obvious suspicions, I didn’t say the word ‘cancer’ – I was taught that if you say the word even in passing, that’s all a patient remembers. Doesn’t matter what else you do, utter the C-word just once and you’ve basically walked into the cubicle and said nothing but ‘cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer’ for half an hour. And not that you’d ever want a patient to have cancer of course, I really really didn’t want her to. Friendly, funny, chatty – despite the litres of fluid in her abdomen splinting her breathing – we were like two long-lost pals finding themselves next to each other at a bus stop and catching up on all our years apart. Her son has a place at med school, her daughter is at the same school my sister went to, she recognized my socks were Duchamp. I stuck in a Bonanno catheter to take off the fluid and admitted her to the ward for the day team to investigate. And now she’s telling me what they found. She bursts into tears, and out come all the ‘will never’s, the crushing realization that ‘forever’ is just a word on the front of Valentine’s cards. Her son will qualify from medical school – she won’t be there. Her daughter will get married – she won’t be able to help with the table plan or throw confetti. She’ll never meet her grandchildren. Her husband will never get over it. ‘He doesn’t even know how to work the thermostat!’ She laughs, so I laugh. I really don’t know what to say. I want to lie and tell her everything’s going to be fine, but we both know that it won’t. I hug her. I’ve never hugged a patient before – in fact, I think I’ve only hugged a grand total of five people, and one of my parents isn’t on that list – but I don’t know what else to do. We talk about boring practical things, rational concerns, irrational concerns, and I can see from her eyes it’s helping her. It suddenly strikes me that I’m almost certainly the first person she’s opened up to about all this, the only one she’s been totally honest with. It’s a strange privilege, an honour I didn’t ask for. The other thing I realize is that none of her many, many concerns are about herself; it’s all about the kids, her husband, her sister, her friends. Maybe that’s the definition of a good person.

Children’s minds are cast in much the same mold as our own. Sternness and severity of manner chill them and set them back. It shuts up their hearts, and you will weary yourself to find the door. But let them see that you have an affectionate feeling towards them and that you really desire to make them happy and do them good, so that if you punish them, they know it is intended for their well-being. As they see that you, like the pelican, would give your heart’s blood to nourish their souls, they will soon be submitted and devoted to you.[2] But they must be wooed with kindness, if their attention is ever to be won. And surely, reason itself might teach us this lesson. Children are weak and tender creatures, and they need patient and considerate treatment. We must handle them delicately, like frail machines, for fear that by rough fingering we do more harm than good. They are like young plants and need gentle watering – often, and only a little at a time. We must not expect all things at once. We must remember what children are and teach them as they are able to bear. Their minds are like a lump of metal – not to be forged and made useful all at once but only by a succession of little blows. Their understanding is like narrow-necked vessels: we must pour in the wine of knowledge gradually, or much of it will be spilled and lost. Precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little must be our rule (Isaiah 28:10). The whetstone does its work slowly, but frequent rubbing will bring the scythe to a fine edge. Truly, patience is needed in training a child, but without it, nothing can be done. Nothing will compensate for the absence of this tenderness and love. A minister may speak the truth as it is in Jesus – clearly, forcibly, and unanswerably; but if he does not speak it in love, few souls will be won. Likewise, you must set before your children their duty – command, threaten, punish, and reason – but if affection is lacking in your treatment, your labor will be all in vain. Love is one grand secret of successful training. Anger and harshness may frighten, but they will not persuade the child that you are right. If he often sees you lose your temper, you will soon cease to have his respect. A father who speaks to his son as Saul did to Jonathan when his anger was kindled against him and he called him the son of the perverse rebellious woman (1 Samuel 20:30), can’t expect to retain his influence over that son’s mind. Try hard to maintain your child’s affections. It is a dangerous thing to make your children afraid of you. Anything is almost better than reserve and insecurity between your child and you, but hesitancy will result from fear. Fear puts an end to openness; fear leads to secrecy; fear sows the seed of much hypocrisy and leads to many lies. There is a mine of truth in the apostle’s words to the Colossians: Fathers, do not exasperate your children, so that they will not lose heart (Colossians 3:21). Be sure not to overlook the advice this verse contains.

I took a shower after dinner and changed into comfortable Christmas Eve pajamas, ready to settle in for a couple of movies on the couch. I remembered all the Christmas Eves throughout my life--the dinners and wrapping presents and midnight mass at my Episcopal church. It all seemed so very long ago. Walking into the living room, I noticed a stack of beautifully wrapped rectangular boxes next to the tiny evergreen tree, which glowed with little white lights. Boxes that hadn’t been there minutes before. “What…,” I said. We’d promised we wouldn’t get each other any gifts that year. “What?” I demanded. Marlboro Man smiled, taking pleasure in the surprise. “You’re in trouble,” I said, glaring at him as I sat down on the beige Berber carpet next to the tree. “I didn’t get you anything…you told me not to.” “I know,” he said, sitting down next to me. “But I don’t really want anything…except a backhoe.” I cracked up. I didn’t even know what a backhoe was. I ran my hand over the box on the top of the stack. It was wrapped in brown paper and twine--so unadorned, so simple, I imagined that Marlboro Man could have wrapped it himself. Untying the twine, I opened the first package. Inside was a pair of boot-cut jeans. The wide navy elastic waistband was a dead giveaway: they were made especially for pregnancy. “Oh my,” I said, removing the jeans from the box and laying them out on the floor in front of me. “I love them.” “I didn’t want you to have to rig your jeans for the next few months,” Marlboro Man said. I opened the second box, and then the third. By the seventh box, I was the proud owner of a complete maternity wardrobe, which Marlboro Man and his mother had secretly assembled together over the previous couple of weeks. There were maternity jeans and leggings, maternity T-shirts and darling jackets. Maternity pajamas. Maternity sweats. I caressed each garment, smiling as I imagined the time it must have taken for them to put the whole collection together. “Thank you…,” I began. My nose stung as tears formed in my eyes. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect gift. Marlboro Man reached for my hand and pulled me over toward him. Our arms enveloped each other as they had on his porch the first time he’d professed his love for me. In the grand scheme of things, so little time had passed since that first night under the stars. But so much had changed. My parents. My belly. My wardrobe. Nothing about my life on this Christmas Eve resembled my life on that night, when I was still blissfully unaware of the brewing thunderstorm in my childhood home and was packing for Chicago…nothing except Marlboro Man, who was the only thing, amidst all the conflict and upheaval, that made any sense to me anymore. “Are you crying?” he asked. “No,” I said, my lip quivering. “Yep, you’re crying,” he said, laughing. It was something he’d gotten used to. “I’m not crying,” I said, snorting and wiping snot from my nose. “I’m not.” We didn’t watch movies that night. Instead, he picked me up and carried me to our cozy bedroom, where my tears--a mixture of happiness, melancholy, and holiday nostalgia--would disappear completely.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

Peter Kemp observed that ‘Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James’s bowels.’ As the correspondence revealed, the young Henry suffered from chronic constipation. To alleviate it his parents dispatched him on a grand tour of Europe (doubtless hoping the foreign food would loosen his entrails).

Raise your kids and grand-kids not as strong men or strong women, not as good Christians, Jews, or Muslims, not as responsible Americans, Europeans or anything else, not as efficient professionals or smart academics, but as strong, good, responsible, efficient and wise human beings.

We are necessarily within arm’s length of large questions about whether your kids on their deathbeds will be able to look back on lives oriented toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. This book is not outlining any answers to the grand questions of meaning, but we should acknowledge that adolescents and their parent-guides are inevitably wrestling with the fundamental: What makes a life worth living? From the moment human beings were able

Well, here I am, something suitable to mark the occasion — well the whole idea of major and minor keys loud and soft fast and slow comprising suitability seemed fatuous — other grand sombre pieces came to my mind as if to say Of course that little prelude won’t do you want something bigger you want some more dissonances you want something very simple you want something tragic and it was stupid. It was the same when I went to practice, no matter what I did everything seemed stupid, I mean the things one tries to bring out in a passage seemed stupid, the trajectory of a piece seemed stupid, it’s one thing to work on technical difficulties everyone does that from time to time but sooner or later you’ve got to bring the piece to life & now they were just wooden puppets with wooden arms gesturing on a string — I thought, That’s it, I’ll never be able to play again, & I was trying to think of some job, & meanwhile if you can believe it my parents were urging me to get married — Anyway I really didn’t know what to do with myself.

I should have known if there was trouble that you would find it, Cassandra. You’re very like your parents in that way.” It was almost as if Agnese had read her mind. Cass watched the raindrops ping against the tiny waves as the gondola left the Grand Canal and entered the lagoon. Agnese wasn’t finished. She turned her attentions to Luca. “And you, Luca da Peraga. If you hope to make Cassandra your bride, you’ll have to learn to keep a much tighter rein on her.” Luca’s cheeks colored slightly as he shifted in the gondola. “Mi dispiace, Signora Querini,” he said. “But you speak of your niece as if she’s a horse instead of a beautiful young woman.” Luca dared to flash Cass a quick half smile. She smiled back. Luca’s willingness to defend her to her aunt made her feel as warm, as comforted, as his heroics in the wine room. Agnese harrumphed. “If I speak of her as an animal, it is because her antics are positively uncivilized at times.

Every statuette is a shape imagined in the point of convergence of the capable pro. The specialist has been pondering it for quite a while, the way by which a parent expects a child, or a brave life adornment envisions that her life partner will return home. Carved Wooden Figures By then they put their hands into the earth and make a remarkable pearl or emerge artful culminations if they are painters. Stone carvers are as regularly as conceivable energized by out of date Gods, unbelievable creatures, and marvellous holy people. They breathe life into the legend. Statues are dumbfounding, dynamic, survive and imaginative. They converse with you in a thousand of calm ways. They look perfect and inaccessible, comparatively as from a serene, pixie heaven. No doubt the Gods are to an amazing degree living in them, sitting tight for individuals to take in life in their signs from earth and marble. Carved Wooden Figures They advancement to us, they boggle, they whisper. Statues are tirelessly related to time everlasting. We scan for noteworthiness, we research, and we respect great statues of Egyptian cats. Carved Wooden Figures A bit of the statuettes looks so legitimate, it takes after they are living. There once carried on a stone expert named Pygmalion, who made a figure of a female shape so grand, that he started to look all starry looked toward at it. He respected Venus, the Goddess, and she offered life to his regarded statue. Her skin was pale, her carriage was to some degree firm, her eyes had a vacant look, regardless she had trademark tints on her lips, eyes, hair and chests. The grandness of an uncommon statue can enamour her creator, and despite breath life into stone.

I wanted something for myself, a cake that was complicated and beautiful, a cake that would take up time I didn't have with enough tricky steps to keep my mind completely off of the matters at hand. I thought about a chocolate layer cake with burnt orange icing and the orange in the icing made me consider a Grand Marnier cake instead. Finally, in a complete non sequitur, I settled on a charlotte. I would make a scarlet empress. I closed my eyes and imagined myself making a jelly roll, the soft sheet of sponge cake laid across my counter. I spread the cake with a seedless raspberry preserve and then I rolled it up with even ends. I was nearly asleep. My parents were floating away from me. I took a knife and started slicing off the roll, but I didn't let it end. No matter how many rounds I cut, there was more there for me, an endless supply of delicate spirals of cake. It was the baker's equivalent to counting sheep, lulling myself to sleep through spongy discs of jam. There were enough slices of jelly roll for me to shingle the roof, to cover the house, to lay a walkway out to the street. In my dreams I made the house a cake, and inside the cake our lives were warm and sweet and infinitely protected.

La nostra cultura è nella famiglia e nella comunità ed emerge quando ci mettiamo insieme a fare un lavoro concreto, a giocare, a raccontare storie, recitare, o quando qualcuno si ammala, muore o nasce, oppure in occasione di feste come il Giorno del Ringraziamento. Una cultura è una rete di comunità locali che ha radici e viene curata. Ha dei limiti ed è ordinaria. “È una persona colta” non dovrebbe significare “d'élite” ma piuttosto qualcosa come “ben fecondata”. (Il termine cultura rimanda a significati latini legati al verbo colere, coltivare, curare, venerare, rispettare. La radice kwel significa fondamentalmente girare intorno a un cerchio, ed è parente di wheel (ruota) e del greco telos, completamento di un ciclo, da cui teologia. In sanscrito la ruota o “la grande ruota dell'universo” è chakra e la parola hindi moderna corrisponde a charkha, arcolaio, la ruota per filare con cui Gandhi meditò sulla libertà dell'India mentre era in prigione).

There was a big wide world out there. We were just a small wildlife park in Australia. It was absurd to think the two of us could change the world. But our love seemed to make the impossible appear not only possible, but inevitable. I look back on the talk we had during the ride to the zoo from Cattle Creek as helping to create the basis of our marriage. No matter what problems came along, we were determined to stay together, because side by side we could face anything. Back at the zoo, while the documentary was being edited and before it was aired on Australian television, our sense of purpose became more firmly settled than ever. We officially took over stewardship of the zoo from Lyn and Bob, Steve’s parents, who had founded it in 1970 as the Beerwah Reptile Park. We wanted to make them proud. The new name would be simply Australia Zoo. We would build and expand. We wanted to increase viewing access to the croc enclosures so more people could see and appreciate these wonderful animals. We had grand plans.