Horse Loss Quotes

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

Yes, it's worth it. The pain of sorrow is terrible and hard to bear, but the joy of love makes it worthwhile. p123

If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss. You have to turn into a dragon and stir up a whirlwind, tear the dark, brooding clouds asunder and soar up into the azure-blue sky.

It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

I dont know what happens to country.

So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.

The long tentacles of vision and understanding have withdrawn and all that is left to me is the ragged black hole of my loss. Loss and the world around. A noisy puzzle whose solution is another puzzle noisier and more stupid. The circle widens toward nothing. The answer is hiding somewhere, if I could only read.

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears. In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, “What on earth are you doing?” The sparrow replies, “I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.” The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, “Do you really think you’re going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?” And the sparrow says, “One does what one can.

My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It’s no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven’t we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?

If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then- singing- a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in. I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave. You can have that,' Franny said to me. 'Plenty of people do.' How do you make the switch?' I asked. It's not as easy as you might think,' she said. 'You have to stop desiring certain answers.' I don't get it.' If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vaccum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling,' she said, 'you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.' This seemed impossible to me. ... She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels- cream, a ridiculous color for towels- and monogrammed- also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living- to learn to accept? I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In some way I could not account for- had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?- I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.

There is equal beauty in the things called horrific. The act of destruction is an expression of beauty, too. I destroyed the bottle to make the horse. Is a pretty glass horse worth the loss of a bottle, but the sound of shattered glass and bits flying through the air isn’t? Is transformation only worthy if you approve of the end result?

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

Your absence clambers out of me from the crossing like horses through the thorn along some shore.

Now I know some guys think it’s a pussy thing to cry in front of their woman, but that’s bullshit. Crying over the loss of a loved one isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s part of what makes us human.

You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack--there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.

Finally a day will come when woken by the xylophone of sunthroughblinds you’ll realise that the beach was not the place where horses tore the sand to ribbon that the scent of him has lifted from the last of the sheets that he isn’t coming back that it hasn’t rained but the birds are pretending that it has so they can sing

Thieves! Thieves!’ he was now shouting in French. In despair, not so much over the loss of his horse as over the betrayal, he collapsed at the edge of the ditch, exhausted and dreadfully hungry. If his lovely horse had been stolen from him by the enemy he would not have given it a second thought; but to be betrayed and robbed by that sergeant he liked so much and those hussars he thought of as his brothers! That was what broke his heart.

A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t' attain to! If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat three: if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf: if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner: wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury: wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse: wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard: wert thou a leopard, thou wert german to the lion and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life: all thy safety were remotion and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? and what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!

All of us, while apparently separate and distinct individuals, are but the molecules of which the body of humanity is composed, and each of us feels a compulsion to function as a part of the whole. Consciously or subconsciously we long to be useful and accepted, regarded with favor. Loss of sight does not change this, I discovered; I needed to find a way to belong.

The lucky man loses his wife; the unlucky his horse. The old adage was justified for with the death of a wife, a new bride was brought into the house, together with a new dowry. But the death of a horse spelled financial loss and a gap in the stables.

Though loss did not pass from one person to another liker a baton; it just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And, she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horse's mane, it did not leave once lodged, did it, simply changed form and asked repeatedly for attention and care, as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider - smaller, sure, but never gone.

When my grandpa died, I had this same fear. I love Grandpa so much. He was Mom's dad, and he was my favorite person in the whole world. He lived up north, between Grayling and the Mackinaw Bridge. He had, like, twenty acres. He had horses and dirt bike and all this awesome stuff. I'd go up there for weeks at a time during the summers, and he'd let me do whatever I wanted. We'd go hunting and fishing and four-wheeling, and I'd stay up till midnight every night. Then one day, he died. All of a sudden, just like that that. I cried for days. Dad kicked the shit out of me for crying, but I didn't care. I loved Grandpa, and he was gone. Then, like a month after he'd died, I had this panic attack. I couldn't remember what he looked like. I thought it meant I didn't love him, or that I'd forgotten about him. It was the only time Dad was anything like helpful. He told me you have to forget what they look like. Otherwise, you can't learn to live without them. Forgetting is your brain's way of telling you it's time to try and move on. Not forget who they were, just...keep living.

He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman.

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

MYSTIC WARRIOR I’ve fought side by side with him through the centuries He holds the sword that doubles rainbows He negotiates with the moon Racing with the wind He annihilates all my demons He resuscitates my fallen battle horse Gallops next to me back to the front of the line and reminds me that courage must be in my every step in order to win for just an inkling of terror in the heart is the strategy of loss and to stay alive is to further one’s destiny but one has to struggle beyond simple existence to attain the outcome of fulfillment Excerpt: Soulmates by Sondra Faye

So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama's furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of Yankee sabre - a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital.

I’m going to leave,’ he said. ‘I was always going to leave. I stayed only because—’ ‘That’s right, you’ll leave. I won’t allow you to wreck us. You’ll command us to Ravenel, you’ll say nothing to him, and when the fort is won, you’ll get on a horse and go. He’ll mourn your loss, and never know.’ It

I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite. The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story..... I told the student that they were at an age when they might begin to choose the places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were much more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked each of them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who'd left the home they'd spent their whole lives in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them. I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world [of my family], everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.

Unicorns are bad. So, so bad.” I’m dying. I just slapped a unicorn. “Your loss, baby. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m hung like a horse.” Kyrin snorts disgustedly. I clap my hands over my ears. But it’s too late. Unicorns are ruined for me. My childhood dream just got crushed by a unicorn’s boner.

mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman. A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him.

And in what business is there not humbug? “There’s cheating in all trades but ours,” is the prompt reply from the boot-maker with his brown paper soles, the grocer with his floury sugar and chicoried coffee, the butcher with his mysterious sausages and queer veal, the dry goods man with his “damaged goods wet at the great fire” and his “selling at a ruinous loss,” the stock-broker with his brazen assurance that your company is bankrupt and your stock not worth a cent (if he wants to buy it,) the horse jockey with his black arts and spavined brutes, the milkman with his tin aquaria, the land agent with his nice new maps and beautiful descriptions of distant scenery, the newspaper man with his “immense circulation,” the publisher with his “Great American Novel,” the city auctioneer with his “Pictures by the Old Masters”—all and every one protest each his own innocence, and warn you against the deceits of the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that they all tell the truth—about each other! and then transact your business to the best of your ability on your own judgment.

As one takes leave of a friend, a place, How the loss of all one has loved rises up, And regret for what one has destroyed… Ah, now I know all the agony of living, So this is what it means to be mortal— — — One misses even what one has not valued, One regrets even misdeeds never done… One yearns to go, and yet one longs to stay… So the heart’s two halves are rent asunder, As if wild horses were pulling it apart, torn to pieces By contradiction, indecision, disharmony… —

Incessantly, it seemed, life plagued her with responsibilities, made her fall in love, ripped away any consolation she might find. Sisters and parents, brothers and horses… All staked their claim on her, each conspiring to weigh down her soul… Every day brought unwanted connections, losses, and complications that broke her heart.

It’s perfect,” Gregory handed the horse back to me. “And it has such feeling and expression to it. That I expected, but I would never have expected this level of detail from a demon. Honestly, I would have expected you to shoot the bottles off the railing or twist them into a horrific mass. Not create this delicate thing of beauty.” “There is equal beauty in the things called horrific. The act of destruction is an expression of beauty, too. I destroyed the bottle to make the horse. Is a pretty glass horse worth the loss of a bottle, but the sound of shattered glass and bits flying through the air isn’t? Is transformation only worthy if you approve of the end result?

Where's your dad now?" Thomas asked. "He's gone." The word gone echoed all over the reservation. The reservation was gone itself, just a shell of its former self, just a fragment of the whole. But the reservation still possessed the power and rage, magic and loss, joys and jealousy. The reservation tugged at the lives of its Indians, stole from them in the middle of the night, watched impassively as the horses and salmon disappeared. But the reservation forgave, too. Sam Bone vanished between foot falls on the way to the Trading Post one summer day and reappeared years later to finish his walk. Thomas, Chess, and Checkers heard the word gone shake the foundation of the house.

Sitting at the table, watching the cards being dealt, I heard a man say that the difference between an amateur and a pro is that the pro doesn't have an emotional reaction to losing anymore. It's just the other side of winning. I guess I'm a farmer now, because I'm used to loss like this, to death of all kinds, and to rot. It's just the other side of life. It is your first big horse and all he meant to you, and it is also his bones and skin breaking down in the compost pile, almost ready to be spread on the fields.

does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman

we are bound by a common love, a stronger bond now, as it extends to a common loss.

...there was no place as unknown as grief.

All men are equal on the turf or under it’—that’s the saying. But the folk who own the horses, it’s much more, for them, than an exciting day out. Here’s the ground of it, as I see it: a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman. A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him.

In the aftermath of loss, we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, “What on earth are you doing?” The sparrow replies, “I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.” The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, “Do you really think you’re going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?” And the sparrow says, “One does what one can.” So what can I do? Not much. Mother Teresa said that none of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. This reminder has saved me many times.

The question of accumulation,” Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. Adrian

Of the tens of thousands of men who died in combat in the war, possibly as many as half lost their lives in vain. Lee’s charges at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg, Burnside’s at Fredericksburg, Grant’s at Vicksburg, and many others left the dead strewn everywhere for no discernible military gain. The Sioux would never have followed men who led such bloody, futile assaults, but the Americans made heroes out of these generals—and the higher a general’s losses, it seemed, the greater the hero he became.

A racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted?

The war had destroyed many things, but one of the worst casualties was the loss of hope for a peaceful world. Yet every man who saw these horses at Hostau ended up with a smile on his face and an image in his mind of a world less troubled than the one in which he currently dwelled.

I feel the loss, dull the ache of it cause I had it, the place where his legs met his body, the muscular dark where his tunic flared up in the breeze as he went, I had it like telling the oldest story in the world cause there’s a very pure pleasure in a curve like the curve of a buttock : the only other thing as good to draw is the curve of a horse and like a horse a curved line is a warm thing, good-natured, will serve you well if not mistreated, and the curves of his sleeves concertina-ing down and back from his shoulders, blanket stitch then scallop-bite edge, round his waist a double yarnstrand to hold him well.

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.

...a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there. He wants to think he’s from the best breeding. He wants to think himself brave. Can he win against all comers? And if not, does he have self-mastery to take a loss, stay cool in defeat, and try again undaunted? Those are the great qualities of a great racehorse and a great gentleman.

Tell me of your family,” Prince Merrick continued. “Um…yes, sir. It is just my mother and my sisters Emily and Elizabeth. As you know, we lost my father.” “I am sorry for your loss,” the prince said, not for the first time. “And you take care of them?” he prompted before pulling the carrot from a stunned Cassius and feeding it to the horse. “Yes, I am all they have, but I want to care for them. They’re my family. I love them. My sisters…especially Emily, she is my heart.” Their eyes caught again, and Cassius could have sworn he saw a grin in the prince’s stare. “We have that in common too, then. My family is everything to me, and I love my sister more than anything.” “I can see that, Your Highness, in the way you spoke with her today

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities. She minded her place.

Damen said, ‘You haven’t told him.’ ‘You don’t even deny it?’ said Jord. A harsh laugh, when Damen was silent. ‘You hated us so much, all this time? It wasn’t enough to invade, to take our land? You had to play this—sick game as well?’ Damen said, ‘If you tell him, I can’t serve him.’ ‘Tell him?’ said Jord. ‘Tell him the man he trusts has lied, and lied again, has deceived him into the worst humiliation?’ ‘I wouldn’t hurt him,’ said Damen, and heard the words drop like lead. ‘You killed his brother, then got him under you in bed.’ Put like that, it was monstrous. It’s not that way between us, he ought to have said, and didn’t, couldn’t. He felt hot, then cold. He thought of Laurent’s delicate, needling talk that froze into icy rebuff if Damen pushed at it, but if he didn’t—if he matched himself to its subtle pulses and undercurrents—continued, sweetly deepening, until he could only wonder if he knew, if they both knew, what they were doing. ‘I’m going to leave,’ he said. ‘I was always going to leave. I stayed only because—’ ‘That’s right, you’ll leave. I won’t allow you to wreck us. You’ll command us to Ravenel, you’ll say nothing to him, and when the fort is won, you’ll get on a horse and go. He’ll mourn your loss, and never know.’ It was what he had planned. It was what, from the beginning, he had planned. In his chest, the beats of his heart were like sword thrusts. ‘In the morning,’ said Damen. ‘I’ll give him the fort, and leave him in the morning. It’s what I promised.’ ‘You’re gone by the time the sun hits the middle of the sky, or I tell him,’ said Jord. ‘And what he did to you in the palace will seem like a lover’s kiss compared with what will happen to you then.’ Jord was loyal. Damen had always liked that about him, the steadfast nature that reminded him of home. Strewn around them was the end of the battle, victory marked by silence and churned grass. ‘He’ll know,’ Damen heard himself say. ‘When word of my return to Akielos reaches him. He’ll know. I wish you would tell him then that I—’ ‘You fill me with horror,’ said Jord. His hands were tight on his knife. Both his hands, now. ‘Captain,

Third Woodcutter: Blood! First Woodcutter: They followed the urge of their blood. Second Woodcutter: But blood that sees the light the earth soon drinks. First Woodcutter: So? Better to die of loss of blood than live with poison in your veins. Third Woodcutter: Hush! First Woodcutter: Why? What do you hear? Third Woodcutter: Cicadas, frogs, and the night lying in wait. First Woodcutter: There's still no sound of a horse. Third Woodcutter: No. First Woodcutter: Then he's making love to her.

Anger had always been a secondary emotion anyway. That’s what her mother had once told her, that fury rode on a fast horse charging through a relationship, trampling right over loss, disappointment, and grief. And if one wasn’t careful, wrath crushed love too. “Pay attention to those forgotten feelings when you lose your temper, Jenny. Those are the trio of emotions that if not recognized and dealt with, will surely bring a soul down and make ire the driving force in your days. Wounds must grow new flesh.

Hippocrates asked the reason why he laughed. He told him, at the vanities and the fopperies of the time, to see men so empty of all virtuous actions, to hunt so far after gold, having no end of ambition; to take such infinite pains for a little glory, and to be favoured of men; to make such deep mines into the earth for gold, and many times to find nothing, with loss of their lives and fortunes. Some to love dogs, others horses, some to desire to be obeyed in many provinces,{233} and yet themselves will know no obedience.{234} Some to love their wives dearly at first, and after a while to forsake and hate them; begetting children, with much care and cost for their education, yet when they grow to man's estate,{235} to despise, neglect, and leave them naked to the world's mercy.{236} Do not these behaviours express their intolerable folly? When men live in peace, they covet war, detesting quietness,{237} deposing kings, and advancing others in their stead, murdering some men to beget children of their wives. How many strange humours

What most worried Burnham was fire. The loss of the Grannis Block, with his and Root’s headquarters, remained a vivid, humiliating memory. A catastrophic fire in Jackson Park could destroy the fair. Yet within the park fire was central to the construction process. Plasterers used small furnaces called salamanders to speed drying and curing. Tinners and electricians used fire pots for melting, bending, and fusing. Even the fire department used fire: Steam engines powered the pumps on the department’s horse-drawn fire trucks

Often, while the others were sleeping, I’d look out the window and watch the land flow by. Some nights there would be a moon, and the shadows it created were spectacular. Trees became many-armed creatures looming across the road. Lakes were shining phosphorescent platters. Ridges and scarps were fortresses capped with snow. Rivers were serpentine swaths of a deeper black. I loved every inch of it. I’d largely given up mourning the loss of my early life, those days on the land with my family. But the sadness filled me at times as we drove through the night.

Saturday evening, on a quiet lazy afternoon, I went to watch a bullfight in Las Ventas, one of Madrid's most famous bullrings. I went there out of curiosity. I had long been haunted by the image of the matador with its custom made torero suit, embroidered with golden threads, looking spectacular in his "suit of light" or traje de luces as they call it in Spain. I was curious to see the dance of death unfold in front of me, to test my humanity in the midst of blood and gold, and to see in which state my soul will come out of the arena, whether it will be shaken and stirred, furious and angry, or a little bit aware of the life embedded in every death. Being an avid fan of Hemingway, and a proponent of his famous sentence "About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” I went there willingly to test myself. I had heard atrocities about bullfighting yet I had this immense desire to be part of what I partially had an inclination to call a bloody piece of cultural experience. As I sat there, in front of the empty arena, I felt a grandiose feeling of belonging to something bigger than anything I experienced during my stay in Spain. Few minutes and I'll be witnessing a painting being carefully drawn in front of me, few minutes and I will be part of an art form deeply entrenched in the Spanish cultural heritage: the art of defying death. But to sit there, and to watch the bull enter the arena… To watch one bull surrounded by a matador and his six assistants. To watch the matador confronting the bull with the capote, performing a series of passes, just before the picador on a horse stabs the bull's neck, weakening the neck muscles and leading to the animal's first loss of blood... Starting a game with only one side having decided fully to engage in while making sure all the odds will be in the favor of him being a predetermined winner. It was this moment precisely that made me feel part of something immoral. The unfair rules of the game. The indifferent bull being begged to react, being pushed to the edge of fury. The bull, tired and peaceful. The bull, being teased relentlessly. The bull being pushed to a game he isn't interested in. And the matador getting credits for an unfair game he set. As I left the arena, people looked at me with mocking eyes. Yes, I went to watch a bull fight and yes the play of colors is marvelous. The matador’s costume is breathtaking and to be sitting in an arena fills your lungs with the sands of time. But to see the amount of claps the spill of blood is getting was beyond what I can endure. To hear the amount of claps injustice brings is astonishing. You understand a lot about human nature, about the wars taking place every day, about poverty and starvation. You understand a lot about racial discrimination and abuse (verbal and physical), sex trafficking, and everything that stirs the wounds of this world wide open. You understand a lot about humans’ thirst for injustice and violence as a way to empower hidden insecurities. Replace the bull and replace the matador. And the arena will still be there. And you'll hear the claps. You've been hearing them ever since you opened your eyes.

Is there a bird among them, dear boy?” Charity asked innocently, peering not at the things on the desk, but at his face, noting the muscle beginning to twitch at Ian’s tense jaw. “No.” “Then they must be in the schoolroom! Of course,” she said cheerfully, “that’s it. How like me, Hortense would say, to have made such a silly mistake.” Ian dragged his eyes from the proof that his grandfather had been keeping track of him almost from the day of his birth-certainly from the day when he was able to leave the cottage on his own two legs-to her face and said mockingly, “Hortense isn’t very perceptive. I would say you are as wily as a fox.” She gave him a little knowing smile and pressed her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell her, will you? She does so enjoy thinking she is the clever one.” “How did he manage to have these drawn?” Ian asked, stopping her as she turned away. “A woman in the village near your home drew many of them. Later he hired an artist when he knew you were going to be somewhere at a specific time. I’ll just leave you here where it’s nice and quiet.” She was leaving him, Ian knew, to look through the items on the desk. For a long moment he hesitated, and then he slowly sat down in the chair, looking over the confidential reports on himself. They were all written by one Mr. Edgard Norwich, and as Ian began scanning the thick stack of pages, his anger at his grandfather for this outrageous invasion of his privacy slowly became amusement. For one thing, nearly every letter from the investigator began with phrases that made it clear the duke had chastised him for not reporting in enough detail. The top letter began, I apologize, Your Grace, for my unintentional laxness in failing to mention that indeed Mr. Thornton enjoys an occasional cheroot… The next one opened with, I did not realize, Your Grace, that you would wish to know how fast his horse ran in the race-in addition to knowing that he won. From the creases and holds in the hundreds of reports it was obvious to Ian that they’d been handled and read repeatedly, and it was equally obvious from some of the investigator’s casual comments that his grandfather had apparently expressed his personal pride to him: You will be pleased to know, Your Grace, that young Ian is a fine whip, just as you expected… I quite agree with you, as do many others, that Mr. Thornton is undoubtedly a genius… I assure you, Your Grace, that your concern over that duel is unfounded. It was a flesh wound in the arm, nothing more. Ian flipped through them at random, unaware that the barricade he’d erected against his grandfather was beginning to crack very slightly. “Your Grace,” the investigator had written in a rare fit of exasperation when Ian was eleven, “the suggestion that I should be able to find a physician who might secretly look at young Ian’s sore throat is beyond all bounds of reason. Even if I could find one who was willing to pretend to be a lost traveler, I really cannot see how he could contrive to have a peek at the boy’s throat without causing suspicion!” The minutes became an hour, and Ian’s disbelief increased as he scanned the entire history of his life, from his achievements to his peccadilloes. His gambling gains and losses appeared regularly; each ship he added to his fleet had been described, and sketches forwarded separately; his financial progress had been reported in minute and glowing detail.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train. And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge — movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition. His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now? I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then? The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza’s inbrooding and Gant’s expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth.

Let’s define a Crapitalist: A well-connected friend of the powers that be who scores big bucks at taxpayer expense. From bagging millions in tax dollars for phony “green energy” companies that go bust, to vacuuming public coffers to build glitzy sports stadiums, to utilizing little-known tax credit loopholes to loot $1.5 billion a year for Hollywood movies—Crapitalists know how to use every trick to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Rather than playing and winning in the rough-and-tumble world of business competition, Crapitalists use government to rig the game in their favor and leave you and me—the taxpayers—holding the bill. These corporate sissies know their ideas suck, so they try to stack the deck to privatize their profits and socialize their losses. And there’s the rub: crony capitalism is socialism’s Trojan horse.

At the moment, however, she had an ever larger problem: what to do now, when two defenseless women were completely lost in the wilds of Scotland, at night, in the rain and cold. Shuffling footsteps sounded on the gravel path, and both women straightened, both suppressing the hope soaring in their breasts and keeping their faces carefully expressionless. “Well, well, well,” Jake boomed. “Glad I caught up with you and-“ He lost his thought as he beheld the utterly comic sight of two stiff-backed women seated on a trunk together, prim and proper as you please, beneath a black umbrella in the middle of nowhere. “Uh-where are your horses?” “We have no horses,” Lucinda informed him in a disdainful voice that implied such beasts would have been an intrusion on their tete-a-tete. “No? How did you get here?” “A wheeled conveyance carried us to this godforsaken place.” “I see.” He lapsed into daunted silence, and Elizabeth started to say something at least slightly pleasant when Lucinda lost her patience. “You have, I collect, come to urge us to return?” “Ah-yes. Yes, I have.” “Then do so. We haven’t all night.” Lucinda’s words struck Elizabeth as a bald lie. When Jake seemed at a loss as to how to go about it, Lucinda stood up and assisted him. “I gather Mr. Thornton is extremely regretful for his unforgivable and inexcusable behavior?” “Well, yes, I guess that’s the way it is. In a way.” “No doubt he intends to tell us that when we return?” Jake hesitated, weighing his certainty that Ian had no intention of saying anything of the kind against the certainty that if the women didn’t return, he’d be eating his own cooking and sleeping with a bad conscience and a bad stomach. “Why don’t we let him make his own apologies?” he prevaricated.

...the letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and everything becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early nineteenth century days, and faiths are lost and the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there is the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain, to their great, but silent grief, for in those days there were things that women hid like pearls in their breasts, without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (‘I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough’) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel's wings, scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house for ever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her notebook under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran down-stairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word-our tragedy. "The question of accumulation," Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack-there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Wendell was no sooner gazing at the silver sewing needles than he was brushing away a tear. "They are like my father's," he said wonderingly. "I remember the flicker of them in the darkness as we all sat together by the ghealach fire, with the trees surrounding us. He would bring them everywhere, even the Hunt of the Frostveiling---that is the first hunt of autumn, the largest of the year, when even the queen and her children roam through the wilds with spears and swords, riding our best---oh, I don't know what you would call them in your language. They are a kind of faerie fox, black and golden together, which grow larger than horses. My brothers and sisters and I would crowd round the fire to watch him weave nets from brambles and spidersilk. And all the moorbeasts and hag-headed deer would cower at the sight of those nets, though they barely blinked at the whistle of our arrows." He fell silent, gazing at them with his eyes gone very green. "Well," I said, predictably at a loss for an answer to this, "I hope they are of use to you. Only keep them away from any garments of mine." He took my hand, and then, before I knew what he was doing, lifted it to his mouth. I felt the briefest brush of his lips against my skin, and then he had released me and was back to exclaiming over his gifts. I turned and went into the kitchen in an aimless haste, looking for something to do, anything that might distract me from the warmth that had trailed up my arm like an errant summer breeze

Hey." Jesse leaned on a rail to watch as Wyatt bent to his task. "When did you get back?" Wyatt barely paused. "Not sure. Time passes,you know?" "Yeah." Jesse arched a brow. "Something eating you,cuz?" "I'm fine." "Yeah.I can see that." Jesse turned to Zane and rolled his eyes. "We're heading up to the north range. Want to ride along?" "I'm fine here." "Well,yeah,you're doing a great job on that stall.But when you're through shoveling manure,what're you planning on doing the rest of the day?" Instead of te laugh he was expecting, Wyatt swore. Loudly. Fiercely. "I guess that means you'd like to be alone." Jesse shoved his hands into his back pockets. "Speaking from experience as an old married man,I'd say this also means that you and the lovely Lee have had a lovers' spat." In response Wyatt dug the pitchfork into a pile of dung and tossed it Jesse's way. Jesse ducked,avoiding most of the mess, except for a few bits of straw that clung to his hair. From a safe distance Zane gave a roar of laughter. "I think that means he isn't seeking your sage device, O Ancient One." "Your loss,cuz.I could have told you that what women really want is for you to admire their minds. Even when they don't make any sense at all." Jesse picked out the pieces of straw and tossed them aside before turning to Zane. "Come on.We've got a herd to deal with. Let's leave Mr. Happy to work out his problems in this pile of...horse manure." Laughing,the two strolled out of the barn. Wyatt swore gain and continued shoveling until every stall sparkled. Then he moved on to the cow barns, working his way through a mountain of frustration.

Once people believed her careful documentation, there was an easy answer—since babies are cute and inhibit aggression, something pathological must be happening. Maybe the Abu langur population density was too high and everyone was starving, or male aggression was overflowing, or infanticidal males were zombies. Something certifiably abnormal. Hrdy eliminated these explanations and showed a telling pattern to the infanticide. Female langurs live in groups with a single resident breeding male. Elsewhere are all-male groups that intermittently drive out the resident male; after infighting, one male then drives out the rest. Here’s his new domain, consisting of females with the babies of the previous male. And crucially, the average tenure of a breeding male (about twenty-seven months) is shorter than the average interbirth interval. No females are ovulating, because they’re nursing infants; thus this new stud will be booted out himself before any females wean their kids and resume ovulating. All for nothing, none of his genes passed on. What, logically, should he do? Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating. That’s the male perspective. What about the females? They’re also into maximizing copies of genes passed on. They fight the new male, protecting their infants. Females have also evolved the strategy of going into “pseudoestrus”—falsely appearing to be in heat. They mate with the male. And since males know squat about female langur biology, they fall for it—“Hey, I mated with her this morning and now she’s got an infant; I am one major stud.” They’ll often cease their infanticidal attacks. Despite initial skepticism, competitive infanticide has been documented in similar circumstances in 119 species, including lions, hippos, and chimps. A variant occurs in hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it (remember that rule about never putting a pet male hamster in a cage with babies?). Another version occurs among wild horses and gelada baboons; a new male harasses pregnant females into miscarrying. Or suppose you’re a pregnant mouse and a new, infanticidal male has arrived. Once you give birth, your infants will be killed, wasting all the energy of pregnancy. Logical response? Cut your losses with the “Bruce effect,” where pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male. Thus competitive infanticide occurs in numerous species (including among female chimps, who sometimes kill infants of unrelated females). None of this makes sense outside of gene-based individual selection. Individual selection is shown with heartbreaking clarity by mountain gorillas, my favorite primate. They’re highly endangered, hanging on in pockets of high-altitude rain forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are only about a thousand gorillas left, because of habitat degradation, disease caught from nearby humans, poaching, and spasms of warfare rolling across those borders. And also because mountain gorillas practice competitive infanticide. Logical for an individual intent on maximizing the copies of his genes in the next generation, but simultaneously pushing these wondrous animals toward extinction. This isn’t behaving for the good of the species.

Reason says, I will beguile him with the tongue;" Love says, "Be silent. I will beguile him with the soul." The soul says to the heart, "Go, do not laugh at me and yourself. What is there that is not his, that I may beguile him thereby?" He is not sorrowful and anxious and seeking oblivion that I may beguile him with wine and a heavy measure. The arrow of his glance needs not a bow that I should beguile the shaft of his gaze with a bow. He is not prisoner of the world, fettered to this world of earth, that I should beguile him with gold of the kingdom of the world. He is an angel, though in form he is a man; he is not lustful that I should beguile him with women. Angels start away from the house wherein this form is, so how should I beguile him with such a form and likeness? He does not take a flock of horses, since he flies on wings; his food is light, so how should I beguile him with bread? He is not a merchant and trafficker in the market of the world that I should beguile him with enchantment of gain and loss. He is not veiled that I should make myself out sick and utter sighs, to beguile him with lamentation. I will bind my head and bow my head, for I have got out of hand; I will not beguile his compassion with sickness or fluttering. Hair by hair he sees my crookedness and feigning; what’s hidden from him that I should beguile him with anything hidden. He is not a seeker of fame, a prince addicted to poets, that I should beguile him with verses and lyrics and flowing poetry. The glory of the unseen form is too great for me to beguile it with blessing or Paradise. Shams-e Tabriz, who is his chosen and beloved – perchance I will beguile him with this same pole of the age.

Just as it is commonly said that Asclepius has prescribed someone horse-riding, or cold baths, or walking barefoot, so we could say that the nature of the Whole has prescribed him disease, disablement, loss or any other such affliction. In the first case 'prescribed' means something like this: 'ordered this course for this person as conducive to his health'. In the second the meaning is that what happens to each individual is somehow arranged to conduce to his destiny. We speak of the fitness of these happenings as masons speak of the 'fit' of squared stones in walls or pyramids, when they join each other in a defined relation. In the whole of things there is one harmony: and just as all material bodies combine to make the world one body, a harmonious whole, so all causes combine to make Destiny one harmonious cause. Even quite unsophisticated people intuit what I mean. They say: 'Fate brought this on him.' Now if 'brought', also 'prescribed'. So let us accept these prescriptions just as we accept those of Asclepius- many of them too are harsh, but we welcome them in the hope of health. You should take the same view of the process and completion of the design of universal nature as you do of your own health: and so welcome all that happens to you, even if it seems rather cruel, because its purpose leads to the health of the universe and the prosperity and success of Zeus. He would not bring this on anyone, if it did not also bring advantage to the Whole: no more than any given natural principle brings anything inappropriate to what it governs. So there are two reasons why you should be content with your experience. One is that this has happened to you, was prescribed for you, and is related to you, a thread of destiny spun for you from the first by the most ancient causes. The second is that what comes to each individual is a determining part of the welfare, the perfection, and indeed the very coherence of that which governs the Whole. Because the complete Whole is maimed if you sever even the tiniest of its constituent parts, and true likewise of its causes. And you do sever something, to the extent that you can, whenever you fret at your lot: this is, in a sense, a destruction. p37

It is foolish to be in thrall to fame and fortune, engaged in painful striving all your life with never a moment of peace and tranquillity. Great wealth will drive you to neglect your own well-being in pursuit of it. It is asking for harm and tempting trouble. Though you leave behind at your death a mountain of gold high enough to prop up the North Star itself, it will only cause problems for those who come after you. Nor is there any point in all those pleasures that delight the eyes of fools. Big carriages, fat horses, glittering gold and jewels – any man of sensibility would view such things as gross stupidity. Toss your gold away in the mountains; hurl your jewels into the deep. Only a complete fool is led astray by avarice. Everyone would like to leave their name unburied for posterity – but the high-born and exalted are not necessarily fine people, surely. A dull, stupid person can be born into a good house, attain high status thanks to opportunity and live in the height of luxury, while many wonderfully wise and saintly men choose to remain in lowly positions, and end their days without ever having met with good fortune. A fierce craving for high status and position is next in folly to the lust for fortune. We long to leave a name for our exceptional wisdom and sensibility – but when you really think about it, desire for a good reputation is merely revelling in the praise of others. Neither those who praise us nor those who denigrate will remain in the world for long, and others who hear their opinions will be gone in short order as well. Just who should we feel ashamed before, then? Whose is the recognition we should crave? Fame in fact attracts abuse and slander. No, there is nothing to be gained from leaving a lasting name. The lust for fame is the third folly. Let me now say a few words, however, to those who dedicate themselves to the search for knowledge and the desire for understanding. Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires. Knowledge acquired by listening to others or through study is not true knowledge. So what then should we call knowledge? Right and wrong are simply part of a single continuum. What should we call good? One who is truly wise has no knowledge or virtue, nor honour nor fame. Who then will know of him, and speak of him to others? This is not because he hides his virtue and pretends foolishness – he is beyond all distinctions such as wise and foolish, gain and loss. I have been speaking of what it is to cling to one’s delusions and seek after fame and fortune. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.

129. All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill. 130. All tremble at violence; life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill. 131. One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter. 132. One who, while himself seeking happiness, does not oppress with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will find happiness hereafter. 133. Speak not harshly to anyone, for those thus spoken to might retort. Indeed, angry speech hurts, and retaliation may overtake you. 134. If, like a broken gong, you silence yourself, you have approached Nibbana, for vindictiveness is no longer in you. 135. Just as a cowherd drives the cattle to pasture with a staff, so do old age and death drive the life force of beings (from existence to existence). 136. When the fool commits evil deeds, he does not realize (their evil nature). The witless man is tormented by his own deeds, like one burnt by fire. 137. He who inflicts violence on those who are unarmed, and offends those who are inoffensive, will soon come upon one of these ten states: 138-140 Sharp pain, or disaster, bodily injury, serious illness, or derangement of mind, trouble from the government, or grave charges, loss of relatives, or loss of wealth, or houses destroyed by ravaging fire; upon dissolution of the body that ignorant man is born in hell. 141. Neither going about naked, nor matted locks, nor filth, nor fasting, nor lying on the ground, nor smearing oneself with ashes and dust, nor sitting on the heels (in penance) can purify a mortal who has not overcome doubt. 142. Even though he be well-attired, yet if he is poised, calm, controlled and established in the holy life, having set aside violence towards all beings — he, truly, is a holy man, a renunciate, a monk. 143. Only rarely is there a man in this world who, restrained by modesty, avoids reproach, as a thoroughbred horse avoids the whip. 144. Like a thoroughbred horse touched by the whip, be strenuous, be filled with spiritual yearning. By faith and moral purity, by effort and meditation, by investigation of the truth, by being rich in knowledge and virtue, and by being mindful, destroy this unlimited suffering. 145. Irrigators regulate the waters, fletchers straighten arrow shafts, carpenters shape wood, and the good control themselves.

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

Members of highly reactive families, therefore, wind up constantly focused on the latest, most immediate crisis, and they remain almost totally incapable of gaining the distance that would enable them to see the emotional processes in which they are engulfed. The emotionally regressed family will stay fixed on its symptoms, and family thinking processes will become stuck on the content of specific issues rather than on the emotional processes that are driving those matters to become “issues.” The systemic anxiety thus locks everyone into a pessimistic focus on the pathology within the family, and it becomes almost impossible for such systems to reorient themselves to a focus on their inherent strengths. What also contributes to this loss of perspective is the disappearance of playfulness, an attribute that originally evolved with mammals and which is an ingredient in both intimacy and the ability to maintain distance. You can, after all, play with your pet cat, horse, or dog, but it is absolutely impossible to develop a playful relationship with a reptile, whether it is your pet salamander, no matter how cute, or your pet turtle, snake, or alligator. They are deadly serious (that is, purposive) creatures. Chronically anxious families (including institutions and whole societies) tend to mimic the reptilian response: Lacking the capacity to be playful, their perspective is narrow. Lacking perspective, their repertoire of responses is thin. Neither apology nor forgiveness is within their ken. When they try to work things out, their meetings wind up as brain-stem storming sessions. Indeed, in any family or organization, seriousness is so commonly an attribute of the most anxious (read “difficult”) members that they can quite appropriately be considered to be functioning out of a reptilian regression. Broadening the perspective, the relationship between anxiety and seriousness is so predictable that the absence of playfulness in any institution is almost always a clue to the degree of its emotional regression. In

Some accounts describe a thick mist that swallowed the ships and led them blindly to be dashed on the treacherous shores. In that one calamitous storm, 120 ships of the Viking fleet sank. Assuming that each of these ships was manned by an average of thirty men, this would have cost the Vikings thirty-six hundred men—a catastrophic loss. For

Csíkszentmihályi, a very brilliant psychologist, believed that what he called Flow was a state of complete absorption which produced the highest level of human happiness. It comes about when you are doing something which is difficult enough to require all your concentration and effort and skill, but not so hard that it defeats you. Because that activity takes everything you have got, you have no time to think about all the existential flies that swarm about your head. You can’t worry about money or love or death or taxes; you are simply thinking about this thing. You are your best, most authentic self. He said that, in this state of Flow, a person is ‘completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.’ He then got a little technical. There are, apparently, nine crucial states of achieving Flow, which include: ‘challenge-skill balance, merging of action and awareness, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, and autotelic experience.

ring. Three or four men come in, mounted on the merest skeletons of horses blind or blind-folded and so weak that they could not make a sudden turn with their riders without danger of falling down. The men are armed with spears having a point as sharp as a needle. Other men enter the arena on foot, armed with red flags and explosives about the size of a musket cartridge. To each of these explosives is fastened a barbed needle which serves the purpose of attaching them to the bull by running the needle into the skin. Before the animal is turned loose a lot of these explosives are attached to him. The pain from the pricking of the skin by the needles is exasperating; but when the explosions of the cartridges commence the animal becomes frantic. As he makes a lunge towards one horseman, another runs a spear into him. He turns towards his last tormentor when a man on foot holds out a red flag; the bull rushes for this and is allowed to take it on his horns. The flag drops and covers the eyes of the animal so that he is at a loss what to do; it is jerked from him and the torment is renewed. When the animal is worked into an uncontrollable frenzy,

He could handle his former lover under his roof for a couple of days. No sweat, right? But when Trevor’s eyes caught Edgard’s, the punch of lust whomped him as sharply as a hoof to the belly, making him just as breathless. Dammit, don’t look at me that way, Ed. Please. Edgard banked the hunger in those topaz-colored eyes and Trevor silently breathed a sigh of relief. The blank stare was a reaction they’d both mastered during the years they’d spent together on the road. If sponsors, promoters or fans caught wind of his and Edgard’s nocturnal proclivities they would’ve been blackballed. Or would’ve been beat to shit on a regular basis if the other rodeo cowboys suspected he and Edgard weren’t merely traveling partners. There’d been no choice but to become discreet. Nothing discreet about the way Edgard had eyeballed him. “Trev, hon, you comin’?” “Go on. I’ll be right in after I take care of this motor.” He retreated to the barn, needing to find his balance after being knocked sideways. Edgard was here. Trevor’s gut clenched remembering the last time he’d seen the man. Remembering the misery on Edgard’s face, knowing his face reflected the same desolation when they’d said goodbye three and a half years ago. Crippled by pain, fear, and loss, Trevor hadn’t had the balls to wrap Edgard in his arms one last time. He’d snapped off some dumbass comment and done nothing but sit on his ass in the horse trailer like a lump of moldy shit and watched him go. No. Let him go. He’d gotten drunk that night. And every night after for damn near six months. He’d f**ked every woman who’d crossed his path. Sex and booze did nothing to chase away the sense he’d made a huge mistake. Or on the really bad nights, his all-too smug relief that he’d never really felt “that way” about Edgard and he was glad the too-tempting bastard was gone for good.

I come for the woman,” the Comanche repeated, never taking his gaze from her. “And I bring my finest horses to console her father for his loss. Fifty, all trained to ride.” His black sidestepped and whinnied. The Indian swayed easily with his mount. “Send me the woman, and have no fear. She will come to no harm walking in my footsteps, for I am strong and swift. She will never feel hunger, for I am a fine hunter. My lodge will shelter her from the winter rain, and my buffalo robes will shield her from the cold. I have spoken it.

I come for the woman,” the Comanche repeated, never taking his gaze from her. “And I bring my finest horses to console her father for his loss. Fifty, all trained to ride.” His black sidestepped and whinnied. The Indian swayed easily with his mount. “Send me the woman, and have no fear. She will come to no harm walking in my footsteps, for I am strong and swift. She will never feel hunger, for I am a fine hunter. My lodge will shelter her from the winter rain, and my buffalo robes will shield her from the cold. I have spoken it.” Aunt Rachel crossed herself. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray--” “We don’t sell our womenfolk,” Henry called back. “You sicken my gut, tosi tivo. After you had bedded her, you would have sold her to that dirty old man.” With a sneer twisting his lips, he lifted Tom Weaver’s wool riding blanket from his horse’s withers and tossed it to the dirt. “Better you sell her to me. I am young. I will give her many fine sons. She will not wail over my death for many winters.” “I’d rather shoot her, you murdering bastard,” Henry retorted. “Then do it and make your death song.” The Comanche wheeled his horse, riding close to the window where Loretta stood. “Where is the herbi with such great courage who came out to face us once before? Does she still sleep? Will you hide behind your wooden walls and let your loved ones die? Come out, Yellow Hair, and meet your destiny.

These tactics, said Johnson, were brought out by Dimitrov, who invoked Greek history, the Battle of Troy, the Trojan horse, as the best model for what they were trying to do. He quoted Dimitrov: “Comrades, you remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy. Troy was inaccessible to the armies attacking her, thanks to her impregnable walls, and the attacking army, after suffering great losses, was still unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the Trojan horse, it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy’s camp.” In other words, said Johnson, what Dimitrov was saying “is that if you cannot take over the churches by frontal attack, take them over by the use of deception and guile and trickery, and that is exactly what the Communists practice in order to infiltrate and subvert the church and prepare them for the day when they would come under the hierarchical and authoritarian control of Moscow.

Loss of faith in democratic institutions, the turn of these institutions toward a technocracy, creates the opposite of democracy. A key example of this is the European Union, whose bureaucrats seem so totally cut off from the rough world of the people of Europe. The faith of these Brussels politicians and bureaucrats in techniques of management, often techniques of the banking world rather than the world of social development, has created a great deal of anger inside Europe that gave an advantage to the extreme right. The focus on immigration comes alongside the anger at the detachment of the European Union, as well as the racism of Brussels toward the Southern European countries. Racism shapes the heart of the European extreme right. In these circles, the hesitation demanded by Hayek is not followed. The extreme right is quite happy to try to change the world, to socially engineer the world in its own image, which includes a society without immigrants. This is a seam of neofascism that demands a kind of social welfare for certain kinds of people and not for others, based often on ideas of race and belonging, of blood and passports. Democratic institutions are set aside, liberal norms are not honored. The horse of the extreme right gallops right into anger and then stampedes through society.

Dave and the others walked around the building. The building was surrounded by clumps of bushes and vines grew up its walls, but it looked like it had once had a lovely garden. When they reached the other side of the building, they saw a minecart track. It led from inside the building and then went off across the savanna, disappearing into the distance. The track seemed to lead right up to the huge white walls. The minecart track was twice as wide as they usually were. Suddenly an old music box embedded into one of the walls crackled into life, almost making Dave jump out of his skin. “Welcome to Redstone Land Station!” said a recorded voice. “You’re about to have the most fantastic vacation of your life, enjoying all the fun rides and experiences that our theme park has to offer. Ride on a rollercoaster! Stay at our luxury hotels! Chill out by our swimming pools! Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, why not join one of our tour groups and take a two-day horse ride to Bedrock City? This mysterious city has been abandoned for centuries. What kind of people used to live there? Nobody knows! But what we do know is that our Bedrock City tours are a fantastic deal — only forty emeralds per person, and kids get to go free! And if you’re feeling even more adventurous, you can take one of our tours to the Far Lands. Yes, beyond Bedrock City is one of the four edges of the world, a mysterious place where anything can happen! But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, jump on the train and enjoy the leisurely ride to Redstone Land. The buffet carriage is at the back and is stocked with delicious food and drink! Terms and conditions apply. Redstone Land is not responsible for any injuries or loss of life experienced during one of our Bedrock City or Far Lands tours.” “Okay, that was weird,” said Carl. Suddenly the old music box spluttered into life once more and began to play the same message: “Welcome to Redstone Land Station! You’re about to have the most fantastic — “ WHAM! Carl slammed one of his golem fists into the music box, making it go POOF. A record fell out, and Carl picked it up and flung it across the savanna.

Certain moments in one’s life would always be returned to, even years, decades, later. Some of them were painful—heartbreak, mortification, loss—but there were others that held the clarity and perfection of cut gems, to sparkle against the velvet drape of memory. And, as the years progressed and unfolded in their relentless march, again and again would the mind revisit those moments. Eating a plum, the juices running down your hand, as you walked an esplanade along the shore. The day that the weather cleared and the ground was finally firm enough to be ridden upon, and the leap of your heart as your horse took the first fence. A new old book being delivered and unwrapped from its brown paper, sitting upon your desk, full of possibility, and the musty, rich smell of its pages as you opened it. You returned to these moments, sometimes to ease a current suffering, and sometimes for the simple pleasure of revisiting a past joy, but they were there, and held and treasured in the cupped palms of your mind.

Dark Child by Stewart Stafford Moondust down the fire curtain Carried Syd to the darkest side, Trespass became a prison term, A non-compos mentis dark child. From gambolling nymph with a lute, To an imp falling over instruments, A thousand-yard stare sucked in, Vacant eyes drew like a black hole. Riderless horse, a living déjà vu, The spectral shell of our brother, Ambled towards us at his nadir, We wept for the shuffling stranger. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

I was running hard, pushing myself past human limits, to the only place I knew could help. Home. I already could tell that my wound was fatal, and with every step the loss of blood made me more woozy. Orcs were hot on my trail, at least a dozen, howling for my head. I was certain they would not stop; they were stubborn and stupid, slow as well, but I was smart and fast. I was a dragon, after all… in a very man-like sort of way. By appearance, I was a man: big, long haired, and rangy—more than capable of whipping a few lousy dragon-poaching orcs, until they got the drop on me. So now I was running for my life, my dragon heart pounding in my chest like a galloping horse, mile after mile, until I had no choice but to come to a stop.

Whoa,” I murmured, trying to calm the animal enough to set it loose, not wanting it to come to harm. I gripped the reins, but the horse, its eyes wild with fear, snapped its head back, catching my hand in the leather strap, and I inhaled sharply from the sting. How long had the poor thing been out here? My senses on full alert, I glanced behind me at the busy street, weighing my options. Seeing no one, I hoisted up my skirt, and unsheathed the dagger I had kept. The instant I cut the reins, the horse bolted past me, almost knocking me over. Its owner would not be happy, but at least the animal would live to see another day. It wasn’t until someone clamped an arm around my waist, seizing the knife, that I realized I was no longer alone. So much for having reliable senses. “Well, aren’t you just incorrigible?” Imprisonment or execution was the punishment for bearing weapons in this new Hytanica. The dagger itself was a small loss, but I had to get away. I brought my elbow back, my mother’s reluctance to let me leave the house flashing like lightning in my brain. If I were arrested, killed, she would never forgive herself, even though she would bear no fault. “Empress, the bruises you’ve given me are too many to count!” I whirled around, dismayed that I had not succeeded in getting the Cokyrian to release me, at the same time recognizing the voice and the curse. Saadi pushed me against the side of the shop, leaning in so close to me that I could feel his breath upon my cheek, and his pale blue eyes stared me into submission. “I can’t call you a horse thief for what you just did,” he told me, glancing after the gelding. “At least, not a very good horse thief. But I can, and I must, bring you in for this little utensil of yours. Some niece of the captain you are.” “Are you going to take me to your sister?” I spat, and he grimaced, contemplating me for an instant before disregarding the barb. Gripping me by the upper arm, he hauled me toward the thoroughfare. “Come on. To the Bastion.” Though my question about Rava appeared to have had its intended effect, I was numb with fear. What if he did take me to her? Rava had been the one to order me lashed for my failed prank, she’d been the one to inflict punishment upon Steldor. It seemed no one could exert control over her, a thought that made me ill. The nearer we came to our destination, the more rapidly my heart beat, and by the time we reached the palace gates, I was again fighting Saadi. “Let…me…go!” I howled, unexpectedly pulling out of his grasp, but one of the Cokyrian sentries caught me, laughing at my plight. “Need some help, Saadi?” the burly man offered, shoving me back at my captor, who was rather slight in comparison to his comrade. “No,” Saadi grumbled and the sentry moved ahead to open the gates for us. As we passed through, the large man called, “Rava is at the city headquarters, minding the peacekeeping force. If you were looking for her, that is.” “I wasn’t.” Even though my circumstances were inarguably bleak, a wave of relief washed over me. She, at least, would not be the one to show me the error of my ways.

Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone...Out of my body, these beautiful monsters.

The two men stared at each other. “I’m surprised you didn’t kill him,” Myron said. “Then you really don’t know me.” A horse whinnied. Win turned and looked at the magnificent animal. Something strange came across his face, a look of loss. “What did she do to you, Win?” Win kept staring. They both knew whom Myron was talking about. “What did she do to make you hate so much?” “Don’t engage in too much hyperbole, Myron. I am not that simple. My mother is not solely responsible for shaping me. A man is not made up of one incident, and I am a far cry from crazy, as you suggested earlier. Like any other human being, I choose my battles. I battle quite a bit—more than most—and usually on the right side. I battled for Billy Waters and Tyrone Duffy. But I do not wish to battle for the Coldrens. That is my choice. You, as my closest friend, should respect that. You should not try to prod or guilt me into a battle I do not wish to fight.” Myron

We've been spending the last few weeks on the rifle range. I learned how to shoot from my grandma. When we were out with the sheep she would send me off away from the sheep, and I would practice. She called this time ‘loose time’when the sheep were finished grazing, and they were full and drowsy, and we stayed in one place for a while to watch them. When my grandma was little she actually used a bow and arrow to run the coyotes off. I know how primitive that sounds - most people probably wouldn’t believe it. My grandmother had her own herd at eight years old. If she lost a sheep she would be whipped, because it meant loss of food and livelihood. She wasn’t as hard on me, but the care and well-being of her sheep was the most important thing to her. I’ve seen my grandma ride full out, shrieking at a coyote, shooting from the back of her horse. My grandma probably would have made a good Marine, too. I’ll have to tell her that when I see her again. She’ll get a kick out of that.

I am sorry, Anna. I’ve talked about losing two brothers, both during my adulthood, and I never considered that you have losses of your own.” He did not raise the issue of the departed Mr. Seaton, for which Anna was profoundly grateful. “It was a long time ago,” Anna said. “My parents did not suffer. Their carriage careened down a muddy embankment, and their necks were broken. The poor horse, by contrast, had to wait hours to be shot.” “Dear God.” The earl shuddered. “Were you in that carriage, as well?” “I was not, though I often used to wish I had been.” “Anna…” His tone was concerned, and she found it needful in that moment to study her empty wine glass. “I have become maudlin by virtue of imbibing.” “Hush,” Westhaven chided, crawling across the blanket. He wrapped her in his arms then wrestled her down to lie beside him, her head on his shoulder. She cuddled into him, feeling abruptly cold except where his body lay along hers.

Lafayette was helped to remount his horse by his faithful aid, Major de Gimat, and insisted on remaining with the troops until the loss of blood made him too weak to go further. Then he stopped long enough to have a bandage placed on his leg. Night

Son, this is a sad thing,” Augustus said. “Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don’t you go attempting vengeance. You’ve got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I’ll kill him. But if I don’t, somebody else will. He’s big and mean, but sooner or later he’ll meet somebody bigger and meaner. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he’ll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he’ll just get old and die.” He

The moon taught me that only madness is pure. Once I’d made a start without it, my life was trodden territory, never really mine. At first I found this depressing, a sense of loss I could barely feel but which sapped me. In time I grew used to the feeling, which made it possible to bring more feet into my impure mind to track things up. If I couldn’t go back, I might as well go forward. I

Outside, men were helping with the horses and buggies. They used chalk to number the horses and buggies so they could be matched when it came time to hitch them up.

I enjoyed spending time with Ora Jay, but he had a bit of a wild streak. He had a new horse, a new buggy, and new clothes, and he even had an eight-track player in his buggy.

a store called Emma-town. We’d tie up our horses and hang out. The wilder youths in the community would go to the LaGrange Theater. Watching movies, of course, was something that was preached against.

My mother’s side came to the United States from Germany and Switzerland in the 1770s. In 1785 one of my descendants went west to Indiana on horseback. He sold his horse for a down payment on some property and then walked back to get the rest of the family. Most of our ancestors — from both sides — moved to Pennsylvania from Europe. I also have an Amish relative that many Amish know about

While Diana and her mother started planning guest lists, wardrobe requirements and the other details for the wedding of the year, the media vainly attempted to discover her hiding-place. The one man who did know was the Prince of Wales. As the days passed, Diana pined for her Prince and yet he never telephoned. She excused his silence as due to the pressure of his royal duties. Finally she called him only to find that he was not in his apartment at Buckingham Palace. It was only after she called him that he telephoned her. Soothed by that solitary telephone call, Diana’s ruffled pride was momentarily mollified when she returned to Coleherne Court. There was a knock on the door and a member of the Prince’s staff appeared with a large bouquet of flowers. However there was no note from her future husband and she concluded sadly that it was simply a tactful gesture by his office. These concerns were forgotten a few days later when Diana rose at dawn and travelled to the Lambourn home of Nick Gaselee, Charles’s trainer, to watch him ride his horse, Allibar. As she and his detective observed the Prince put the horse through its paces on the gallops Diana was seized by another premonition of disaster. She said that Allibar was going to have a heart attack and die. Within seconds of her uttering those words, 11-year-old Allibar reared its head back and collapsed to the ground with a massive coronary. Diana leapt out of the Land Rover and raced to Charles’s side. There was nothing anyone could do. The couple stayed with the horse until a vet officially certified its death and then, to avoid waiting photographers, Diana left the Gaselees in the back of the Land Rover with a coat over her head. It was a miserable moment but there was little time to reflect on the tragedy. The inexorable demands of royal duty took Prince Charles on to wales, leaving Diana to sympathize with his loss by telephone. Soon they would be together forever, the subterfuge and deceit ended. It was nearly time to let the world into their secret. The night before the engagement announcement, which took place on February 24, 1981, she packed a bag, hugged her loyal friends and left Coleherne Court forever. She had an armed Scotland Yard bodyguard for company, Chief Inspector Paul Officer, a philosophical policeman who is fascinated by runes, mysticism and the after-world. As she prepared to say goodbye to her private life, he told her: “I just want you to know that this is the last night of freedom in your life so make the most of it.” Those words stopped her in her tracks. “They felt like a sword through my heart.

His force was now greatly reduced from its original size. Polybius states that the army which went with him through the Pyrenees numbered only ‘fifty thousand foot and nine thousand horse’. This meant that his infantry force, by desertion, by policy, and by losses in battle, had been almost halved and his horse reduced by a quarter. Polybius, who was a distinguished general before he became a military historian, comments with practical wisdom: ‘He had now an army not so strong in number but serviceable and highly trained from the long series of wars in Spain.’ Hannibal may well have reckoned that, in view of the arduous campaigns which lay ahead, he was better off with this diminished force of battle-honed veterans than with one twice the size, less experienced and lacking in determination.