Grip On Reality Quotes

When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. ("Going back to yesterday")

As we might be overwhelmed by the dictate of a mindset at odds with reality, and cannot get a grip on our unconsciousness, rather than curling up in the hive of uncomfortable expectations, let us cry out and unshackle our free will. ("Transcendental journey")

Be it as it may, if we are not ready to break new ground and get to grips with the recurrent challenges of our daily reality, we will never, ever be able to recognize the uncharted and colorful pictures on the canvas of our life, nor sense the pounding rhythm in the core of our being.

She was hot. You could take a poll, write a book, break down all the reasons, the intellectual and physical gifts that shaped her personality, and whatever that intangible part was. Write poems about it, document it all in photos and movies, try to stay woke, but the reality was, what it all came back to, she was hot.

We might not be able to know what reality is about, but we can’t but be aware of the explicitness of facts. To get a better grip on the intricate nature of the truth and its ambiguity, we have got to scrutinize facts and find out about their codes. But, yet, we can’t ignore that reality is a very intriguing place, since facts may be construed, receive variant contexts and create alternate outcomes, which, in turn, might spark new realities, over again. ("Imbroglio" )

Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures.

What else had I forgotten? What else would come back, knocking me off balance and reminding me how tenuous my grip on reality was?

You need to get your head out of the clouds and see the reality right in front of your face, Kara. My enemies have become yours which means you aren’t going anywhere.” Before she could reply, he crashed his mouth over hers, plunging his tongue into her mouth when she gasped, and he finally kissed her the way he’d been dreaming about.

You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.

To be chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive, but a compassionate choice. Our minds have great difficulty in coming to grips with such a reality. Maybe our minds will never understand it. Perhaps it is only our hearts that can accomplish this. Every time we hear about 'chosen people', 'chosen talents', or 'chosen friends', we almost automatically start thinking about elites and find ourselves not far from feelings of jealousy, anger, or resentment. Not seldom has the perception of others as being chosen led to aggression, violence, and war.

Her hand gripped his, and even amid the fear and danger he marveled at the feeling that came with the contact. If we die holding hands in this way, will we enter the next dream together?

I spent a long time trying to come to grips with my doubts, when suddenly I realized I had better come to grips with what I believe. I have since moved from the agony of questions that I cannot answer to the reality of answers that I cannot escape, and it's a wonderful relief.

Indeed, Clausewitz was wary of the general who tried to be too smart. He preferred those who kept their imaginations in check and a firm grip on the harsh realities of battle.

Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience. The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his public and even, if you like, more broadly, to people in general. On the contrary, because of his special awareness of his time and of the world in which he lives, the artist becomes the voice of those who cannot formulate or express their view of reality. In that sense the artist is indeed vox populi. That is why he is called to serve his own talent, which means serving his people.

When his lips met hers, she lost her grip on reality.

Something snaps. I hear a gasp. I spin around. I jump up, alert, searching for the sound. It seemed close by. Someone saw me. Someone— A civilian. She’s already darting away, her body pressed against the wall of a nearby unit. “Hey!” I shout. “You there—” She stops. Looks up. I nearly collapse. Juliette. She’s staring at me. She’s actually here, staring at me, her eyes wide and panicked. My legs are suddenly made of lead. I’m rooted to the ground, unable to form words. I don’t even know where to start. There’s so much I want to say to her, so much I’ve never told her, and I’m just so happy to see her—God, I’m so relieved— She’s disappeared. I spin around, frantic, wondering whether I’ve actually begun to lose my grip on reality. My eyes land on the little dog still sitting there, waiting for me, and I stare at it, dumbfounded, wondering what on earth just happened. I keep looking back at the place I thought I saw her, but I see nothing. Nothing. I run a hand through my hair, so confused, so horrified and angry with myself that I’m tempted to rip it out of my head. What is happening to me.

Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting—intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one’s own experience and sensations, to make one’s self heard and seen. Talent alone is not enough. Character and ethics, a point of view about the world in which you live and an education, can and must be acquired and developed.

Reality could be painful to acknowledge, but there came a point when we all realized we weren’t going to walk on the moon, star in a Hollywood movie, or be president of the United States. We’d be who we were, and we could either come to grips with this fact and like the person we’d become, or live with regret and disappointment.

With the smoke of the dead sailor's cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts--not the words, the realities--break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime.

My response came without thinking. I made a gesture that said, I know. I believe you. And when he held out his hand to help me up the bank, I took it without flinching, as I had done once before in a torrential downpour, when that hand had been my only grip on reality in a flight from death. I trusted him. He was a Briton, and I trusted him.

They’re politicians,” her father pointed out dryly. “A good grip on reality isn’t part of the job description.

When his lips met hers, she lost her grip on reality

In The Hunger Games, there's something for everyone. A gripping adventure. A political commentary. A love story. A cautionary tale. Some call it science fiction, some call it potential reality. Some say it's for teenagers, some say it's for adults. The book--and now the film--captures themes and concerns that seem timely. But its real strength, in the end, is that it's timeless. It speaks to us today, and it will speak--even more powerfully--tomorrow.

And so I urge you to still every motion that is not rooted in the Kingdom. Become quiet, hushed, motionless until you are finally centered. Strip away all excess baggage and nonessential trappings until you have come into the stark reality of the Kingdom of God. Let go of all distractions until you are driven into the Core. Allow God to reshuffle your priorities and eliminate unnecessary froth. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, 'Pray for me that I not loosen my grip on the hands of Jesus even under the guise of ministering to the poor.' That is our first task: to grip the hands of Jesus with such tenacity that we are obliged to follow his lead, to seek first his Kingdom.

Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures.

...ultimately, eventually, we let go. We do this not because we're ready. We do this not because we've mended. We do this not because we've mourned and come to terms and gotten over it and moved on. We never move on. We don't let go so much as lose our grip and fall because remembering is not enough..memory is imperfect. It is full of holes. It is more space than matter, like lace. It is at once sodden with sorrow and desiccated from lack of blood flow, the obvious result of a broken heart. It makes things up in hopeless attempts to comfort itself. It fills fissure with fantasy. It screws shut its eyes and balls up its fists and flings itself to the ground in a kicking, screaming, blind-rage temper tantrum against reality. But mostly,..memory keeps taking on more.

When we are in the grip of lust, the reality of God fades.

Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed…

You listen to me, and listen good!" she shouted, shocking me. "I am not evil because I have a thousand years of demon smut on my soul!" she exclaimed, the tips of her hair trembling and her face flushed. "Every time you disturb reality, nature has to balance it out. The black on your soul isn't evil, it's a promise to make up for what you have done. It's a mark, not a death sentence. And you can get rid of it given time." "Ceri, I'm sorry," I fumbled, but she wasn't listening. "You're an ignorant, foolish, stupid witch," she berated, and I cringed, my grip tightening on the copper spell pot and feeling the anger from her like a whip. "Are you saying because I carry the stink of demon magic, that I'm a bad person?" "No..." I wedged in. "That God will show no pity?" she said, green eyes flashing. "That because I made one mistake in fear that led to a thousand more that I will burn in hell?" "No. Ceri -" I took a step forward. "My soul is black," she said, her fear showing in her suddenly pale cheeks. "I'll never be rid of it all before I die, but it won't be because I'm a bad person but because I was a frightened one.

at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it.

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality.

(...) if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real.

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

The only thing that helps me keep my slender grip on reality is the friendship I have with my collection of singing potatoes.

One of the fastest ways to move through your pain is to get a grip on reality.

The more slender your grip on reality, the more dangerous the world becomes. On the other hand, the more rational the world you find yourself in, the more carefully it must be questioned.

you actually give up your common sense, sense of decency, sensitivity, even your grip on reality. It was like having a mental illness: the reality was hard for outsiders to grasp, in all of its dimensions.

I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.

Her next words took me by surprise. I lay as still as I could, barely breathing, afraid that if I moved she would stop speaking her heart. “My mom wanted six children. She only got me, and that sucks for her because I was a total weirdo.” “You were not,” I said. She twisted her head up to look at me. “I used to line my lips in black eyeliner and sit cross-legged on the kitchen table … meditating.” “Not that bad,” I said. “Crying out for attention.” “Okay, when I was twelve I started writing letters to my birth mother because I wanted to be adopted.” I shook my head. “Your childhood sucked, you wanted a new reality.” She snorted air through her nose. “I thought a mermaid lived in my shower drain, and I used to call her Sarah and talk to her.” “Active imagination,” I countered. She was becoming more insistent, her little body wriggling in my grip. “I used to make paper out of dryer lint.” “Nerdy.” “I wanted to be one with nature, so I started boiling grass and drinking it with a little bit of dirt for sugar.” I paused. “Okay, that’s weird.” “Thank you!” she said. Then, she got serious again. “My mom just loved me through all of it.

To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. ...That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle have something exceptional about them. ...I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.

Sexual energy in general has tremendous power, the power to concentrate one's attention like nothing else, to become the sole reality, to warp judgement, to obliterate pain and the perception of risk. The power to make all other considerations irrelevant. There is no force on earth that comes close to it in its power to blind and drive the individual in its grip.

I was standing in a line, balanced between reality and the ever-after. I could go either way. I wasn’t his yet. “One day a week,” I said, knees wobbling. “I give you Newt’s mark, you give me my name,” Al said, then wiggled his fingers as if he needed me to take them to finish the deal. I reached for it, and at the last moment, Al’s glove melted away, and I found myself gripping his hand.

Farewell, eyes that I loved! Do not blame me if the human body cannot go three days without water. I should never have believed that man was so truly the prisoner of the springs and freshets. I had no notion that our self-sufficiency was so circumscribed. We take it for granted that a man is able to stride straight out into the world. We believe that man is free. We never see the cord that binds him to wells and fountains, that umbilical cord by which he is tied to the womb of the world. Let man take but one step too many... and the cord snaps. Apart from your suffering, I have no regrets. All in all, it has been a good life. If I got free of this I should start right in again. A man cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live. I am not thinking of aviation. The airplane is a means, not an end. One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs for the sake of the plough. But the airplane is a means of getting away from towns and their bookkeeping and coming to grips with reality.

The warmth was pushed aside, as always, by the cold grip of reality.

To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it.

We must go back again and again to the gospel of Christ crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what He did and who we are in Him.

If you don't come to grips with what you're giving up, then by the time reality catches you, it's going to have grown into a terrifying beast.

How had so many of my fellow citizens been gripped by mysticism and the supernatural? By mass delusion? How had reality become so distorted?

Some of the best moments in life are ones where the reality has been twisted out, and for those few beautiful tainted hours, reality has no place. The past, present, and future don't matter because you’re in this black hole; escaping the death grip of reality and all the consequences it brings, and sometimes it only takes a small thing to pull you back to reality.

There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as 'war,' your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system.

So we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex; but rather show how "sex" is historically subordinate to sexuality. We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.

With this turnabout the lusting after reflection, the search to grasp the absolute in transitory experience, loses its grip. One no longer experiences things as objective and independent, but as reflections within knowing. Upstream of all necessity to focus attention, all conflict becomes a dance, all opposition melts as I and the ‘other’ are known as two faces of one reality.

In the beginning was the dream... In the eternal night where no dawn broke, the dream deepened. Before anything ever was, it had to be dreamed... If we take Nature as the great artist, then all presences in the world have emerged from her mind and imagination. We are children of the earth's dreaming. It's almost as if Nature is in dream and we are her children who have broken through the dawn into time and place. Fashioned in the dreaming of the clay, we are always somehow haunted by that; we are unable ever finally to decide what is dream and what is reality. Each day we live in what we call reality, yet life seems to resemble a dream. We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious - we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time, we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos... [.....] There is no definitive dividing line between reality and dream. What we consider real is often precariously dream-like. Our grip on reality is tenuous...

My mind was spinning from the symmetry of this equation I suddenly faced: magical on one side, scientific on the other, a dark pulsing myth and an acceptable reality.... The explanations were like two sides of the same coin, and the side that I favored revealed something essential about the person I was. Prior to investigating Ashley, with little hesitation I'd have believed the side most others would, the side that was logical, rational, exact. But now, much to my own shock, like a man who suddenly realized he was no longer a person he recognized, that other impossible, illogical, mad side still had a very firm grip on me.

what if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was—wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers “came to grips” with this problem a long time ago, Dr. Kellet had told her, rather wearily, it was one of the very first questions they addressed, so there was really no point in her fretting over it. But surely, by its very nature, everyone wrestled with this dilemma anew every time?

I love a man who tickles me awake with reality, and kisses me goodnight with fiction Braids my hair with simplicity to compliment my contradiction And calms the waging wars inside with a simple boyish look For he is as much a mystery as he is an open book When I am at my worst, I am beautiful by his side He draws me in yet keeps me free, the moon to my tide He relishes my quirks and antics just as much I love to keep him frantic And if I ever fall, he doesn’t catch me right away Because he knows I’ll glide And even more so, knows how much I enjoy the ride… With the strength I lack, he holds my insecurity safe in-between his fingers And if there is ever a doubt while I am out running about His steady grip lingers He drives me crazy just as much as he keeps me sane And has the wisdom to keep me wild knowing I’ll die if ever tame So when I am far, he frets not, because he knows he’s my favorite destination If ever I am down, he joins me on the ground and points out my favorite constellations He catches my sighs and lackluster replies With ageless humor and tenacity I draw blanks at his capacity And challenge his audacity But He wins because despite my stubbornness he is persistent Yet forever fails because he belongs to nonexistent

Night must fall. It fell hard tonight in Downtown Oakland, like a lead blanket. Started to sink in. What happened today. Slowly at first, like a dull ache. Then like a midnight jackhammer excavating my brain. That ordeal with the cops was a distraction that insulated me. Numbed me to the cold reality. But when I hit San Pablo driving past Phil’s place, a sensation started welling up from my gut—washing over me—pea-green nausea topped with a dollop of white rage. I gripped the wheel, composed myself.

Theatre is probably the only form of free expression, just as theatre is likely to be the only way to escape from the grip of the ego and separate reality. In theatre you can say and do anything, because you are clearly playing a part and whatever you say and do is not identified with yourself. In theatre you free yourself from the idea of yourself and you can give space to everything you are, being serious about it, but without the dangers and consequences that derive from being serious about it.

The Bodhisattva is in no rush. For once we have tasted a single drop of the bliss of bringing others into that freedom, with the Spirit of Enlightenment of love and compassion, once we have loosened the grip of the solid, separated, alienated self that is the core of self-centeredness, then we are already happy in a certain way. The Bodhisattva is always joyful, even when suffering. Bodhisattvas are always happy and cheerful under pressure, because they have felt the essence of reality as freedom (p. 223)

I squirmed in his hold, but it didn’t take me long to give up. His grip was too strong. My arms laced around his neck and I glared up at him. “That sounds more like you having your way until you decide to let me have mine.” “Yeah, that’s about right.” “I don’t want you to carry me.” “Well, what you want and what’s actually going to happen are two very different realities.” “What kind of convoluted crap is that?” “True convoluted crap. Now stop busting my balls and let me carry you.” I sighed, making sure it was long and overly dramatic.

I gripped Marcus’s notebook closer to my chest, tracing the words that he’d written, words that he’d written for my brother. I didn’t realize I was crying at first, but my tears fell to the page, staining the blue ink and forcing it to pool around the letters. I felt my grip on this reality slipping, the knowledge that my brother had this secret, one that he never thought to tell me. I cried for Marcus; I cried for his lost love and the future the two of them might’ve had. I cried for my parents and how awful their only living child had become, how they seemed to have lost both of their kids in a matter of weeks. I cried for Joel and Vanessa, how they’d hurt me, and how I’d hurt them. I cried for myself, and all the hurt I’d caused, and all the pain I felt. But most of all, I cried for Ethan because he was no longer here.

And do not try to be so brave. I am your lifemate.You cannot hide from me something as powerful as fear." "Trepidation," she corrected, nibbling at the pad of his thumb. "Is there a difference?" His pale eyes had warmed to molten mercury. Just that fast, her body ent liquid in answer. "You know very well there is." She laughed again, and the sound traveled down from his heart to pool in his groin, a heavy,familiar ache. "Slight, perhaps, but very important." "I will try to make you happy, Savannah," he promised gravely. Her fingers went up to brush at the thick mane of hair falling around his face. "You are my lifemate, Gregori. I have no doubt you will make me happy." He had to look away,out the window into the night. She was so good, with so much beauty in her, while he was so dark, his goodness drained into the ground with the blood of all the lives he had taken while he waited for her. But now,faced with the reality of her, Gregori could not bear her to witness the blackness within him, the hideous stain across his soul. For beyond his killing and law-breaking, he had committed the gravest crime of all. And he deserved the ultimate penalty, the forfeit of his life. He had deliberately tempered with nature.He knew he was powerful enough, knew his knowledge exeeded the boundaries of Carpathian law. He had taken Savannah's free will, manipulated the chemistry between them so that she would believe he was her true lifemate. And so she was with him-less than a quarter of a century of innocence pitted against his thousand years of hard study.Perhaps that was his punishment, he mused-being sentenced to an eternity of knowing Savannah could never really love him, never really accept his black soul.That she would be ever near yet so far away. If she ever found out the extent of his manipulation, she would despise him. Yet he could never,ever, allow her to leave him. Not if mortals and immortals alike were to be safe. His jaw hardened, and he stared out the window, turning slightly away from her. His mind firmly left hers, not wanting to alert her to the grave crime he had committed.He could bear torture and centuries of isolation, he could bear his own great sins, but he could not endure her loathing him. Unconsciously, he took her hand in his and tightened his grip until it threatened to crush her fragile bones. Savannah glanced at him, let out a breath slowly to keep from wincing, and kept her hand passively in his.He thought his mind closed to her.Didn't believe she was his true lifemate. He truly believed he had manipulated the outcome of their joining unfairly and that somewhere another Carpathian male with the chemistry to match hers might be waiting.Though he had offered her free access to his mind, had himself given her the power,to meld her mind with his,both as her wolf and as her healer before she was born,he likely didn't think a woman,a fledging, and one who was not his true lifemate, could possibly have the skill to read his innermost secrets.But Savannah could. And completing the ancient ritual of lifemates had only strengthened the bond.

I spent a long time trying to come to grips with my doubts, when suddenly I realized that I had better come to grips with what I believe. I have since moved from the agony of questions that I cannot answer to the reality of answers that I cannot escape . . . and it’s a great relief!

At times, reality is love’s great challenge. When our old stories and dreams are shattered, our first instinct may be to resist, deny, or cling to the way things were. But if we loosen our grip, often what fills the space is a tender forgiveness and the potential for a new and different kind of love.

Individuation, as Jung put it in one of his lectures, is “the psychological process that makes of a human being an individual – a unique, indivisible unit or ‘whole man’.” In other words, individuation is the process of cultivating wholeness and becoming our authentic and true selves. Not only is individuation the process of becoming a fully mature human being, but it is also the process of finding our essence, our very Souls. However, when this process of individuation gets disrupted within us due to various life experiences, we end up developing a weak sense of self and a tenuous grip on reality.

While coming to grips with my new reality wasn’t easy, and at times I couldn’t help but wonder—why did this happen to me?—I had to take responsibility for getting my life back. Instead of complaining about how things should be, I embraced how things were. I stopped putting energy into wishing my life were any different—into wishing bad things didn’t happen to me—and instead focused 100% on making the best of what I had. Since I couldn’t change the past, I focused on moving forward. I dedicated my life to fulfilling my potential and achieving my dreams so I could discover how to empower others to do the same.

other people can lose themselves in the world of her characters. Has she lost herself to them, as well? Is that what happened to Annette Klinger, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath? Do they give so much of themselves to people who aren’t real that they lose who they are? Their grip on what reality is or is not?

he found himself losing his mind. His grip on reality, already tenuous from sustained isolation in a city of scholars, became even more fragmented. Hours of revision had interfered with his processing of signs and symbols, his belief in what was real and what was not. The abstract was factual and important; daily exigencies like porridge and eggs were suspect. Everyday dialogue became a chore; small talk was a horror, and he lost his grip on what basic salutations meant. When the porter asked him if he’d had a good one, he stood still and mute for a good thirty seconds, unable to process what was meant by ‘good’, or indeed, ‘one’.

She relaxed her grip on his hair, combing through the curls lazily. The motion soothed him. He felt weightless, better than he ever had in his life. If the world ended right that second, he wouldn’t be surprised; something so perfect had to be followed by something as terrible. Otherwise reality would be out of balance.

People tend to look unfavorably upon the mentally ill, especially those of us who’ve been hospitalized. Losing your mind is indeed traumatizing, but doing so in front of a supposedly sane audience is mortifying. It’s not like getting cancer. No one rallies around you or shaves her head in solidarity or brings you sweets. “Normals” (or “normies,” as some of us “crazies” affectionately refer to them) feel uneasy around those of us who’ve lost a grip on reality. Perhaps they’re afraid we might attack them or drool on them or, worse yet, suck them into our alternate universe where slitting your wrists and talking to phantoms seem perfectly rational.

Reality could be painful to acknowledge, but there came a point when we all realized we weren't going to walk on the moon, star in a Hollywood movie, or be president of the United States. We'd be who we were, and we could either come to grips with this fact and like the person we'd become, or live with regret and disappointment.

Lack of empathy also reflects a lack of self-awareness, an indifference to the wants or needs of others, and little recognition of how the person’s behavior impacts other people. Lack of empathy can also be a driver of what can feel like an emotional “distance” or coldness that many experience with toxic and narcissistic people. Empathy drives the feeling of warmth people feel when they are understood. When you are with a person who lacks empathy, it is a bit like being in the presence of a mirror that does not reflect back, and that can leave you feeling unheard or uncared for, at a minimum or, in the extreme, it can leave you feeling as though you are losing your grip on reality.

While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that. “Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re hopeless, and it’s pointless to explain it to you, you can’t do it, it’s too obvious that it disgusts you. And he went on like that for a while, making speeches that became increasingly crude; with him vulgarity was normal. Then he wanted to explain clearly how things stood: he was marrying her because of the respect he felt for her father, a skilled pastry maker he was fond of; he was marrying her because one had to have a wife and even children and even an official house. But there should be no mistake: she was nothing to him, he hadn’t put her on a pedestal, she wasn’t the one he loved best, so she had better not be a pain in the ass, believing she had some rights. Brutal words. At a certain point Michele himself must have realized it, and he became gripped by a kind of melancholy. He had murmured that women for him were all games with a few holes for playing in. All. All except one. Lina was the only woman in the world he loved—love, yes, as in the films—and respected. He told me, Gigliola sobbed, that she would have known how to furnish this house. He told me that giving her money to spend, yes, that would be a pleasure. He told me that with her he could have become truly important, in Naples. He said to me: You remember what she did with the wedding photo, you remember how she fixed up the shop? And you, and Pinuccia, and all the others, what the fuck are you, what the fuck do you know how to do? He had said those things to her and not only those. He had told her that he thought about Lila night and day, but not with normal desire, his desire for her didn’t resemble what he knew. In reality he didn’t want her. That is, he didn’t want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last. He wanted her not to screw her—that word applied to Lila disturbed him. He wanted to kiss her and caress her. He wanted to be caressed, helped, guided, commanded. He wanted to see how she changed with the passage of time, how she aged. He wanted to talk with her and be helped to talk. You understand? He spoke of her in way that to me, to me—when we are about to get married—he has never spoken.

The crowd started going crazy. Like even crazier than when Romeo got up from the hit. I was clinging to the railing, wondering if I would like prison, when Ivy sighed. "I swear. You have all the luck." Confused, I glanced around. Romeo was jogging toward us, helmet in his hands. Quickly, I glanced at the big screen and it was showing a wide shot of me clinging onto the rails and him running toward us. When he arrived, he slapped the guard on his back and said something in his ear. The guard looked at me and grinned and then walked away. Romeo stepped up to where I was. At the height I was at one the railing, for once I was taller than him. "You're killing me, Smalls," he said. "I had to interrupt a championship game to keep you from going to the slammer." "I was worried. You didn't get up." "And so you were just going to march out on the field and what?" God, he looked so… so incredible right then. His uniform stretched out over his wide shoulders and narrow waist. The pads strapped to his body made him look even stronger. He had grass stains on his knees, sweat in his hair, and ornery laughter in his sparkling blue eyes. I swear I'd never seen anyone equal parts of to-die-for good looks and boy-next-door troublemaker. "I was going to come out there and kiss it and make it better." He threw back his head and laughed, and the stadium erupted once more. I was aware that every moment between us was being broadcast like some reality TV show, but for once, I didn't care how many people were staring. This was our moment. And I was so damn happy he wasn't hurt. "So you're okay, then?" I asked. "Takes a lot more than a shady illegal attack to keep me down." Behind him, the players were getting back to the game, rushing out onto the field, and the coach was yelling out orders. "I'll just go back to my seat, then," I said. He rushed forward and grabbed me off the railing. The crown cheered when he slid me down his body and pressed his lips to mine. It wasn't a chaste kiss. It was the kind of kiss that made me blush when I watched it on TV. But I kissed him back anyway. I got lost in him. When he pulled back, I said, "By the way, You're totally kicking ass out there." He chuckled and put me back on the railing and kept one hand on my butt as I climbed back over. Back in the stands, I gripped the cold metal and gave him a small wave. He'd been walking backward toward his team, but then he changed direction and sprinted toward me. In one graceful leap, he was up on the wall and leaning over the railing. "Love you," he half-growled and pressed a swift kiss to my lips. "Next touchdown's for you.

To perceive your personal fulfilment in service to something or someone else, in helping the weak and defenceless, or in giving yourself fully to someone else’s vision or idea is nothing more than an illusion and self-deception. In the illusion the mind has been seriously gripped by a pendulum and sees its happiness exclusively in service to it. However hard the mind tries to convince itself that it has found happiness in service to other people or to some lofty idea, this person’s heart will be miserable and forced back into its box with no strength to even verbalise its rights to personal happiness. The conviction that another person’s idea is one’s own or that another person’s happiness represents one’s own fulfilment is a misconception held by people who have been unable to find their own goal, or perhaps have not even tried.

Sin requires blood. I can’t explain why. It just is. Somewhere in here, I came to grips with the beautiful, tender, magnificent, barbaric, soul-shattering, eternal, unequivocal reality that the birth, life, and death of this innocent boy and magnificent Man are simply my King’s first step from throne to trough to cross to tomb to hell to God’s right hand. As a result, I am blood bought. Blood washed. And blood redeemed.

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

A man sat down by a tree every day for 2 weeks. It was a beautiful Wisteria tree with purple flowers. Every day, around the same time, he would come to the park and sit by this tree. On the fourteenth day, he came to the park and approached the tree and as he sat down, he closed his eyes as he always did. Only this time when he opened them, the tree withered and died before him. The man then looked around and before he knew it, he had found that he never came to the tree at all, but was in an asylum the whole time.

WRITER'S NIGHTMARE" "I felt a grip on my arm that shook my body, forcefully pulling me toward a tunnel of darkness.   The threat of consciousness stole my steady breath. For a moment I believed myself to be under siege; ripped from the sky in mid flight, my wings useless against the monstrous claws shredding my reality. I struggled to remain, to be left alone, aloft.  Reaching with wings that through the power of imagination were suddenly feathered arms, I grabbed at the air.  My hands clutched at something solid.  Wooden.  A desk.  My head spun as I held the furniture, suffering the illusion of falling.   "I was flying," I gasped, realizing suddenly that it had all been a dream. "My best fantasy ever." Lifting my head from its resting spot on the writing desk, I worked mentally to secure the fading images, hoping to capture their essence to memory before they faded away forever.  Bitterness tainted my heart against the hand that had jerked me into sensibility.  Why was I always so callously awakened while doing my best work?  Why not let me dream?

excited about a work of fiction? Reviews? Few see them. Awards or nominations? Most folks are oblivious to them. Covers? Good ones can cause a consumer to lift a book from its shelf, but covers are only wrapping. Classy imprints? When was the last time you purchased a novel because of the logo on the spine? Big advances? Does the public know, let alone care? Agents with clout? Sad to say, that is not a cause of consumer excitement. In reality there is one reason, and one reason only, that readers get excited about a novel: great storytelling.

Our famous scientific reality does not afford us the slightest protection against the so-called irreality of the unconscious. Something works behind the veil of fantastic images, whether we give this something a good name or a bad. It is something real, and for this reason its manifestations must be taken seriously. But first the tendency to concretization must be overcome; in other words, we must not take the fantasies literally when we approach the question of interpreting them. While we are in the grip of the actual experience, the fantasies cannot be taken literally enough.

My ideal man," Malak said ponderingly. "I'm not sure what that means. I don't want the ideal. I want complexity. I want passion. I want imperfection. "My ideal man is not ideal. But," she said, leaning forward, "I'll tell you about him." "I want him to have lunch at home. I want him to help me with my own mind. I want him to be bookish, wise, cunning, and exemplary. I want him to be a good storyteller, and always on my side." "Yes, I want him to be near me. A good conversationalist, proud, not afraid of the lofty heights." "I want him to be a singer, one who knows and loves a good song, can play an instrument, the oud or the ney, and preferably both. I want him to be a good mourner, know how to attend to the pain of others, a consoler who could assuage the grief I have for all those I loved and befriended and who are no longer here. I want him to be a healer, an expert in all that troubles me. I want him to be a fire that annihilates all danger that lies ahead and behind me and that which I have, somehow, without his help, found a way to avoid. I want him to be faithful---" "Incapable of deception. I want him to be constant__" "Constant in his love and in his prayers and, when those prayers are not answered, I want him to change reality with his own hands. I want him to be my lord-" "For all the world to see. I want him to make me proud, to make vanish old and fresh longings, new and unremembered regrets. I want him to be vigilant-" "To protect me from sorrows even once their great heights have passed. I want him to know how to deal with the past. I want him to be occasionally gripped by fear-" "The fear of losing me. I want him to be patient, to help me to endure the injustices visited upon the houses of those I love. But I also want him to be impatient-" "To lose all reason and hurry off, forgetting his shoes and hat, and ride-" "His horse flanked by wings of angry dust, galloping, if need be, all night to find the traitorous, to change my fortunes and avenge me." "And then I want him to return to me, to prosper by my side. I want to take him to the clearest stream, one only I know the way to, and there quench his thirst. I want him to look at me sometimes as if he does not know who I am. But I want to be forever recognized by him, come what may, to point me out in a crowd when, after the passage, we are reunited." "I want him to see me when I cannot see myself.

We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures. Studying

As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.” “Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!” “You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.

You seem to need a reality check on who the fuck you belong to, Mrs. King. This”—he pinches my arse cheek until I whimper, then slaps it, hard—“is mine.” Still gripping my arse with one hand, he releases my nape and reaches beneath my blouse, crumpling it and freeing it from the skirt, and then moves to my breast underneath the bra and squeezes my nipple in a painful, erotic pull. “These tits are also mine. But above all.” He slides his grip from my arse, cups my pussy through my panties, and strokes his finger on my swollen clit. “This cunt is fucking mine. The next time you offer it to someone else, I want you to remember that.

I did not think of myself as a violent man. But the more times we were attacked, the more lives we lost, the harder it was to keep those demons at bay. It was another moment I found myself thankful to have Jerry. He was the rational, intelligent one. He kept me from letting the anger completely consume me and from doing anything really stupid. He prevented me from running wild through the streets of Yusafiah. But it was clear I was losing my grip on reality. One evening I was on the roof of a building at an intersection in some little town. I wasn’t wearing my helmet or my vest. I was just in a T-shirt. The roofs were flat and there was about a two-foot-high wall at the ledge. I stood there with my right foot propped up on the wall and looked out at the little town. I felt fueled with power. Like I was having the ultimate manly man moment. I could see then why people say power is addictive. I felt high on it in that moment. All my life I had strived to be “manly.” Everything I did was about being “the man.” And in that moment that is how I felt: completely dominant. As I stood on that roof unprotected and not giving a shit, I looked out over the town and said to myself, but as if I were talking to all of them, “Work with me or against me. I can either destroy you or I can help you.” I believed every word of that. Nothing could touch me. No one could hurt me. I was completely invincible.

We may wish to control or influence the behavior of others in conflict, and we want, therefore, to know how the variables that are subject to our control can affect their behavior. If we confine our study to the theory of strategy, we seriously restrict ourselves by the assumption of rational behavior — not just of intelligent behavior, but of behavior motivated by a conscious calculation of advantages, a calculation that in turn is based on an explicit and internally consistent value system. We thus limit the applicability of any results we reach. If our interest is the study of actual behavior, the results we reach under this constraint may prove to be either a good approximation of reality or a caricature. Any abstraction runs a risk of this sort, and we have to be prepared to use judgment with any results we reach. The advantage of cultivating the area of “strategy” for theoretical development is not that, of all possible approaches, it is the one that evidently stays closest to the truth, but that the assumption of rational behavior is a productive one. It gives a grip on the subject that is peculiarly conducive to the development of theory. It permits us to identify our own analytical processes with those of the hypothetical participants in a conflict; and by demanding certain kinds of consistency in the behavior of our hypothetical participants, we can examine alternative courses of behavior according to whether or not they meet those standards of consistency. The premise of “rational behavior” is a potent one for the production of theory. Whether the resulting theory provides good or poor insight into actual behavior is, I repeat, a matter for subsequent judgment.

There’s a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about seventeen hundred years ago. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came, they said, “We will leave in the summer.” They went on like this for over fifty years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows. Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows—but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place. Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate. Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises. In this way, vagabonding is not a merely a ritual of getting immunizations and packing suitcases. Rather, it’s the ongoing practice of looking and learning, of facing fears and altering habits, of cultivating a new fascination with people and places. This attitude is not something you can pick up at the airport counter with your boarding pass; it’s a process that starts at home. It’s a process by which you first test the waters that will pull you to wonderful new places.

swirl together and our breathing clashes, my hips are busy rubbing against his. My legs spread just about as wide as I can get, forcing my pussy to open like a flower and hug his dick tight. Pushing off his chest, I lift up, grab his dick, and slam myself home. I almost can’t hear the harsh bite of his breath over my scream. I feel the rings hitting a spot deep within me that will have me begging in no time. The one pressed tight against my clit has my vision going hazy. “Have . . . to . . . move,” he warns, and once again, I find myself rolled onto my back. He doesn’t even pause when he flips and pounds into me. His hips slap against mine, his balls make a loud, wet sound as they hit my skin, and his eyes flash something I wish to God I understood. “H-h-harder!” He slams deep and leans up on his knees causing his dick to slip out almost completely. His large hands grab my hips and bring my body half off the bed. With my head still on the bed, the rest of my body hovers under his control as he pulls back and gives me my wish. My legs are dead weight, my hands clench tightly in the sheets, and my eyes hold his. The look in his eyes combined with the hard hitting of his piercings, and the awe-inspiring thrusts is enough to have me screaming. Screaming, begging, and pleading. I have lost control of my body. It is locked tight and shattering into pieces. His hips pick up speed but then slightly slow down towards the end of my release. He brings my body back down to the mattress and rocks his hips, causing a few more aftershocks to roll through my body. “Do you like my cock? Do you like having me so deep in your body you won’t be able to walk tomorrow? The way your pussy is gripping my dick and your wetness is coating my balls, I would say you fucking love it.” I whimper and he smiles. This isn’t the attractive smile he gives the public, no . . . this smile is pure fucking sexy evil. “Going to fuck you raw.” He warns before making true to his words. When he finally grabs my hips and locks our pelvises together, I have come twice and lost track of reality.

Don’t think, muñeca. Everything will work itself out.” “But--” “No buts. Trust me.” My mouth closes over hers. The smell of rain and cookies eases my nerves. My hand braces the small of her back. Her hands grip my soaked shoulders, urging me on. My hands slide under her shirt, and my fingers trace her belly button. “Come to me,” I say, then lift her until she’s straddling me over my bike. I can’t stop kissing her. I whisper how good she feels to me, mixing Spanish and English with every sentence. I move my lips down her neck and linger there until she leans back and lets me take her shirt off. I can make her forget about the bad stuff. When we’re together like this, hell, I can’t think of anything else but her. “I’m losing control,” she admits, biting her lower lip. I love those lips. “Mamacita, I’ve already lost it,” I say, grinding against her so she knows exactly how much control I’ve lost. She moves her hips in a slow rhythm against me, an invitation I don’t deserve. My fingertips graze her mouth. She kisses them before I slowly slide my hand down her chin to her neck and in between her breasts. She catches my hand. “I don’t want to stop, Alex.” I cover her body with mine. I can easily take her. Hell, she’s asking for it. But God help me if I don’t grow a conscience. It’s that loco bet I made with Lucky. And what my mom said about how easy it is to get a girl pregnant. When I made the bet, I had no feelings for this complex white girl. But now…shit, I don’t want to think about my feelings. I hate feelings; they’re only good for screwing up someone’s life. And may God strike me down right now because I want to make love to Brittany, not fuck her on my motorcycle like some cheap whore. I move my hands away from her cuerpo perfecto, the first sane thing I’ve done tonight. “I can’t take you like this. Not here,” I say, my voice hoarse from emotion overload. This girl was going to gift me with her body, even though she knows who I am and what I’m about to do. The reality is hard to swallow. I expect her to be embarrassed, maybe even mad. But she curls into my chest and hugs me. Don’t do this to me, I want to say. Instead I wrap my arms around her and hold on tight. “I love you,” I hear her say so softly it might have been her thoughts. Don’t, I’m tempted to say. ¡Noǃ ¡Noǃ My gut twists and I hold her tighter. Dios mío, if things were different I’d never give her up. I burrow my face in her hair and fantasize about stealing her away from Fairfield. We stay that way for a long time, long after the rain stops and reality sets in.

In all the seconds of life that beat solemnly from my heart, in all the hours of waiting for the release that binds us, in all the months of moons that guided our hopes, of all the years of yesterday that taught us the path of which we walk today: Today, I am true. Today I will write without release; without questions or care of the minds that do not understand the words that will lie before me in this letter. Licentia. The release of anything that covers my ears or blinds my eyes. Oh, licentia. The people shall call me insane because I have proven to remain unrelenting in the belief that freedom and justice and truth are all subject to change, but that the ideas are the spark which light the fire to continue my journey. These words have no value unless given an idea, and that is the only part that is bounded in this world: the idea. The idea to be free; no matter the cost of autonomy and decisions and conscious state of mind. The idea to have justice; without a governance to proclaim what it defines. The idea to seek truth; no matter how many lies claim to hold the reality. Licentia. The release of anything that covers my ears or blinds my eyes. Oh, licentia. It is the fear that controls the grip which lacerates our brains and chains our souls. It is the fear that without power or an entity that seeks it, that we will be dangerous. It is the fear of our ourselves that binds us. But once we are no longer afraid of the mirror that grants us our reflection, we begin to understand that the fear was simply an illusion. It is the pain that scares us into submission and breaks our vows to our hearts. It is the pain that makes an honest man beg on his knees to the wolves that seek to devour his ideas. It is the pain that creates the stage to which only fools applaud and puppets play. It is the pain that makes us see the ugliness of our soul. But once we are in pain, we realize that it was never the worst feeling to behold, but that the betrayal of our minds and the minds of others is. Licentia. The release of anything that covers my ears or blinds my eyes. Oh, licentia.

Looking back from a safe distance on those long days spent alone, I can just about frame it as a funny anecdote, but the reality was far more painful. I recently found my journal from that time and I had written, ‘I’m so lonely that I actually think about dying.’ Not so funny. I wasn’t suicidal. I’ve never self-harmed. I was still going to work, eating food, getting through the day. There are a lot of people who have felt far worse. But still, I was inside my own head all day, every day, and I went days without feeling like a single interaction made me feel seen or understood. There were moments when I felt this darkness, this stillness from being so totally alone, descend. It was a feeling that I didn’t know how to shake; when it seized me, I wanted it to go away so much that when I imagined drifting off to sleep and never waking up again just to escape it, I felt calm. I remember it happening most often when I’d wake up on a Saturday morning, the full weekend stretching out ahead of me, no plans, no one to see, no one waiting for me. Loneliness seemed to hit me hardest when I felt aimless, not gripped by any initiative or purpose. It also struck hard because I lived abroad, away from close friends or family. These days, a weekend with no plans is my dream scenario. There are weekends in London that I set aside for this very purpose and they bring me great joy. But life is different when it is fundamentally lonely. During that spell in Beijing, I made an effort to make friends at work. I asked people to dinner. I moved to a new flat, waved (an arm’s-length) goodbye to Louis and found a new roommate, a gregarious Irishman, who ushered me into his friendship group. I had to work hard to dispel it, and on some days it felt like an uphill battle that I might not win, but eventually it worked. The loneliness abated. It’s taken me a long time to really believe, to know, that loneliness is circumstantial. We move to a new city. We start a new job. We travel alone. Our families move away. We don’t know how to connect with loved ones any more. We lose touch with friends. It is not a damning indictment of how lovable we are.

I want you, Leilani. I'm so hard it hurts. But your scent entices me, lures me." He drew the sheet farther down, past her navel, along the soft swell of her stomach. "I want to taste, to savor. Here." He kissed his way to the tender flesh high inside her inner thigh. "And here." He traced a similar path to the other side. "But I want to feast... here." He drew his tongue along the center of her, and groaned at the sweet taste of her. Lani's hips started to pump harder, and he could feel a fine quivering begin along her skin. She rocked and keened, and when he plunged his tongue deeply into her, she cried out, reached down and buried her fingers in his hair. Guiding him, urging him, demanding him, release broke over her in wracking, wrenching waves. "Baxter, please... please." Her hips slowed, but her body continued to gather and jerk as the aftershocks kept twitching through her. "Now," she demanded. "I'm- I'm safe, protected, we don't need-" She broke off as he kissed his way back up the center of her torso while she continued to writhe beneath him. The way she responded to him, making herself vulnerable to him, moved him in unpredictable ways. He shifted so he was directly on top of her and pressed himself between her thighs, which she parted, wrapping them around his hips, digging her heels into his lower back as she lifted for him, and took him in. Take her, he did, sliding all the way in, groaning as she gripped him fully, so tightly, so wetly, so perfectly, it was the fulfillment of every fantasy he'd ever had. Even though his heart was drumming inside his chest, and his body was priming itself for a ferocious release, climaxing wasn't the only thing dominating his thoughts. He met her every hip thrust, echoed every groan, every growl, as they worked their every frenzied way to completion, together. He could feel her climb again as she rolled her hips beneath him, and reality continued to eclipse fantasy. "Come with me, yes," he said, claiming her mouth even as she was nodding in agreement. He pulled her into his arms and moved more deeply, as she instinctively shifted to take him more tightly inside her. They moved with a rhythm that was as old as man's creation, and uniquely and utterly their own.

No matter what level of instruction Marlboro Man gave me, no matter how many pointers, a horse trot for me meant a repeated and violet Slap! Slap! Slap! on the seat of my saddle. My feet were fine--they’d stay securely in the stirrups. But I just couldn’t figure out how to use the muscles in my legs correctly, and I hadn’t yet learned how to post. It was so unpleasant, the whole riding-a-horse business: my bottom would slap, my torso would stiffen, and I’d be sore for days--not to mention that I looked like a complete freak while riding--kind of like a tree trunk with red, stringy hair. Short of taking the rectal temperatures of cows, I’d never felt more out of place doing anything in my life. All of this rushed to the surface when I saw Marlboro Man walking toward me with two of his horses, one of which was clearly meant for me. Where’s my Jeep? I thought. Where’s my torch? I don’t want a horse. My bottom can’t take it. Where’s my Jeep? I’d never wanted to drive a Jeep so much. “Hey,” I said, walking toward him and smiling, trying to appear not only calm but also totally unconcerned about the reality that faced me. “Uh…I thought we were going burning.” I clearly sounded out the g. It was a loud, clanging cymbal. “Oh, we are,” he said, smiling. “But we’ve got to get to some areas the Jeep can’t reach.” My stomach lurched. For more than a couple of seconds, I actually considered feigning illness so I wouldn’t have to go. What can I say? I wondered. That I feel like I’m going to throw up? Or should I just clutch my stomach, groan, then run behind the barn and make dramatic retching sounds? That could be highly effective. Marlboro Man will feel sorry for me and say, “It’s okay…you just go on up to my house and rest. I’ll be back later.” But I don’t think I can go through with it; vomiting is so embarrassing! And besides, if Marlboro Man thinks I vomited, I might not get a kiss today… “Oh, okay,” I said, smiling again and trying to prevent my face from betraying the utter dread that plagued me. I hadn’t noticed, through all my inner torture and turmoil, that Marlboro Man and the horses had been walking closer to me. Before I knew it, Marlboro Man’s right arm was wrapped around my waist while his other hand held the reins of the two horses. In another instant, he pulled me toward him in a tight grip and leaned in for a sweet, tender kiss--a kiss he seemed to savor even after our lips parted. “Good morning,” he said sweetly, grinning that magical grin. My knees went weak. I wasn’t sure if it was the kiss itself…or the dread of riding.

Dom rose from his kneeling position, a keen hunger shining in his eyes. “Was that wicked enough for you, sweeting?” he drawled as he used his cravat to wipe his mouth. With her heart thundering loudly in her ears and her breathing staggered, it took her a moment to answer. “Not quite,” she managed, then tugged at the waistband of his drawers. “You still have these on.” That seemed to startle him. Then one corner of his lips quirked up. “I never guessed you were such a greedy little--“ “Wanton?” she asked before he could accuse her of being one. But he just shot her a smoldering smile. “Siren.” “Oh.” She liked that word much better. Feeling her oats, she gestured to his drawers. “So take them off.” With a laugh, he did so. “There, my lusty beauty. You have your wish.” “Yes…yes, I do.” Now she could study him to her heart’s content. But the reality was rather sobering. His member, jutting from a nest of dark curls, couldn’t possibly be hidden behind a tiny fig leaf like the ones on statues. “Oh my. It’s even bigger and more…er…thrusting without the drawers.” “Are you rethinking your plan for seduction now?” he asked, with a decided tension in his voice. “No.” She cast him a game smile. “Just…reassessing the…er…fit.” “It’s not as fearsome as it looks.” “Good,” she said lightly, only half joking. She looped her arms about his neck. “Because I’m not as fearless as I look.” “You’re a great deal more fearless than you realize,” he murmured. “But this may cause you some pain.” She swallowed her apprehension. “I know. You can’t protect me from everything.” “No. But I can try to make it worth your trouble.” And before she could respond to that, he was kissing her so sweetly and caressing her so deftly that within moments he had her squirming and yearning for more. Only then did he attempt to breach her fortress by sliding into her. To her immense relief, there was only a piercing pop of discomfort before he was filling her flesh with his. All ten feet of it. Or that’s what it felt like, anyway. She gripped his arms. Hard. He didn’t seem to notice, for he inched farther in, his breath beating hot against her hair. “God, Jane, you’re exactly as I imagined. Only better.” “You’re exactly…as I imagined,” she said in a strained tone. “Only bigger.” That got his attention. He drew back to stare at her. “Are you all right?” She forced a smile. “Now I’m rethinking the seduction.” He brushed a kiss to her forehead. “Let’s see what I can do about that.” He grabbed her beneath her thighs. “Hook your legs around mine if you can.” When she did, the pressure eased some, and she let out a breath. “Better?” he rasped. She nodded. Covering her breast with his hand, he kneaded it gently as he pushed farther into her below. “It will feel even better if you can relax.” Relax? Might as well ask a tree to ignore the ax biting into it. “I’ll try,” she murmured. She forced herself to concentrate on other things than his very thick thing--like how he was touching her, how he was fondling her…how amazing it felt to be joined so intimately to the man she’d been waiting nearly half her life for.

If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle. … Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself; (p. 6) In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. ... …; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth. (p. 8) At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10) It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12) Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17) That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism. (p. 31) Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32) The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism. (p. 38) The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42) Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42) According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43) It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49) Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49)

He recognized her deft hand and eye for detail immediately. He flipped through the pages, past vignettes of the dairymaid and her vague-featured gentleman engaged in a courtship of sorts: a kiss on the hand, a whisper in the ear. By the book’s midpoint, the chit’s voluminous petticoats were up around her ears, and the illustrations comprised a sequence of quite similar poses in varying locales. Not just the dairy, but a carriage, the larder, in a hayloft lit with candles and strewn with…were those rose petals? I’ll be damned. Gray was fast divining the true source of the French painting master’s mythic exploits. More unsettling by far, however, as he perused the book, he noted a subtle alteration in the gentleman lover’s features. With each successive illustration, the hero appeared taller, broader in the shoulders, and his hair went from a cropped style to collar length in the space of two pages. The more pages Gray turned, the more he recognized himself. It was unmistakable. She’d used him as the model for these bawdy illustrations. She’d sketched him in secret; not once, but many times. And here he’d nearly gone mad with envy over each scrap of foolscap she’d inked for once crewman or another. His emotions underwent a dizzying progression-from surprised, to flattered, to (with the benefit of one especially inventive situation in an orchard) undeniably aroused. But as he lingered over a nude study of this amalgam of the real him and some picaresque fantasy, he began to feel something else entirely. He felt used. She’d rendered his form with astonishing accuracy, given that it must have been drawn before she’d any opportunity to actually see him unclothed. Not that she’d achieved an exact likeness. Her virgin’s imagination was rather generous in certain aspects and somewhat stinting in others, he noted with a bitter sort of amusement. But she’d laid him bare in these pages, without his knowledge or consent. God, she’d even drawn his scars. All in service of some adolescent erotic fantasy. And now he began to grow angry. He had been handling the leaves of the book with his fingertips only, anxious he might smudge or rip the pages. Now he abandoned all caution and flipped roughly through the remainder of the volume. Until he came to the end, and his hand froze. There they were, the two of them. He and she fully clothed and unengaged in any physical intimacies-yet intimate, in a way he had never known. Never dreamed. Sitting beneath a willow tree, his head in her lap. One of her hands lay twined with his, atop his chest. The other rested on his brow. The sky soared vast and expansive above, gauzy clouds spinning into forever. The hot fist of desire that had gripped his loins loosened, moved upward through his torso, churning the contents of his gut along the way. Then it clutched at his heart and squeezed until it hurt. Somehow, this illustration was the most dismaying of all. So naïve, so ridiculous. at least the bawdy situations were plausible, if sometimes physically improbable. This was utterly impossible. To her, he'd never been more than a fantasy. It occurred to Gray that more secrets might be packed within these trunks. If he sorted through her belongings, he might find the answers to all his questions. Perhaps answers to questions he'd never thought to ask. In spite of this, he let the lid of the trunk clap shut and fastened the strap with shaking fingers. He'd suffered as many of her fantasies as he could bear for one day. It was time to acquaint her with reality.

flicker?" He points to the screen and pauses the vid. "That's when they switched the footage." I stare at the screen. "How do I know you're not the ones lying?" "You saw it yourself on the street," Meyer says. I glance up from the pad and lock eyes with Meyer. "What else are they lying about?" Jayson chuckles. "Well… that's going to take longer than we have." "Here's one," Meyer says. "Remember that last viral outbreak that killed a bunch of Level Ones?" "3005B?" My heart races. That's the virus that ultimately killed Ben thirteen years ago. "That's it. The one they use in all the broadcasts to remind citizens how important it is to get your MedVac updates? It wasn't an accident." We were always told a virus swept through Level One because they hadn't gotten their updated VacTech yet. Hundreds of people died in the day it took to get everyone up to date. "My brother died because of that." Everything I've found out over the last week suddenly grips me with fear. This can't be real. My breath shortens, and suddenly my head starts slowly spinning. Everything goes blurry. Then black. ~~~ "It's all right, kid," a distant voice, which must be Jayson's, echoes in the back of my mind. The room swirls around me. Their faces blur in and out of focus. "Meyer, get her." Blinking a couple of times, I try to sit up. I guess I fell. Meyer's warm hands rest on the back of my neck, my head in his lap. "Don't stand. You could pass out again," he says. He helps me sit up. "Are you okay?" "No, I'm not okay," I mumble. "This is too much." I feel like I should be crying, but I'm not. The reality is that the anger I feel is so much greater than any sadness. Neither Meyer nor Jayson speak, and let me mull over what I've just heard. "Why did they do that?" I eventually ask. "Two reasons, kid," Jayson says. "To cull the Level Ones, and to scare Elore into taking the VacTech. If viral outbreaks are still a threat, no one questions it, and continues believing inside the perimeter is the safest place for them." "I'm sorry about your brother," Meyer says as he stands, offering me his hand. His words are genuine, filled with the emotions of someone who has also experienced loss. "I hate to end this," Jayson interrupts, "but it's time to go." Meyer eyes Jayson, and then me. "I understand if you're not ready, but you need to choose soon. Within the next few days." I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. Words catch somewhere between my heart and throat. The old me wants to tell them to get lost and to never bother me again. It's so risky. Then again, I can't stand by while Manning and Direction kill people to keep us in the dark. Joining is the right thing to do. Feelings I've never experienced before well inside my chest, and I long to shout, When do we start? Instead, I stuff them down and stare at the ground. Subtle pressure squeezes my hand, bringing me back to the present. I never let go of Meyer's hand. How long have we been like that? He releases my hand as he mutters and steps back. The heat from his touch still flickers on my skin. You didn't have to go. I clear my throat and turn toward Meyer. Our eyes lock. "I've already decided," I tell him. "I'll do it. For Ben. Direction caused his death, and there's no way I'm standing by and letting them do this to more people." I barely recognize my own voice as I ask, "What do I do?" A slap hits my back and I choke. Jayson. "Atta girl. Meyer and I knew you had it in you." "Jayson, you have to give Avlyn some time." Meyer steps toward me and holds his handheld in the air toward Jayson. "I'll bring her up to speed." "Sure thing." Jayson throws his hands in the air and walks to the other side of the room. "Sorry," Meyer murmurs. "Jayson is pretty… overwhelming. At least until you know him. Even then…" "Oh, it's fine." A white lie. "He's a nice guy. Now, why don't you tell me the instructions