Illustration Travel Quotes

I brought them up here to illustrate the point of conformity: the difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs in the face of others. Now, those of you -- I see the look in your eyes like, "I would've walked differently." Well, ask yourselves why you were clapping. Now, we all have a great need for acceptance. But you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own, even though others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, "That's baaaaad." Robert Frost said, "Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

What seemed at first like an act of incandescent self-destruction turned out to be the onramp to a bleak treadmill, one that felt designed to eradicate my personality and identity. It didn’t end my self-recrimination and misery. Instead, it illustrated just how good I’d had it living on the street.

If people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

I could not sufficiently wonder at the intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who

They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for

and the first words I learnt, were to express my desire “that he would please give me my liberty;” which I every day repeated on my knees. His

it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

The empress, and young princes of the blood of both sexes, attended by many ladies, sat at some distance in their chairs; but

The emperor, and all his court, came out to meet us; but his great officers would by no means suffer his majesty to endanger his person by mounting on my body. At

truth, justice, temperance, and

He had therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be hardly supportable.

The Houyhnhnm’s notion of truth and falsehood. The author’s discourse disapproved by his master. The author gives a more particular account of himself, and the accidents of his voyage. M

I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my arm-pits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise about me; but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky.

petition to be excused from the said service, upon pretence of unwillingness to force the consciences, or destroy the liberties and lives of an innocent people.

The late John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Since women, for many years, were denied the journey, they were left with only one plot in their lives -- to await the stranger. Indeed, there is essentially no picaresque tradition among women novelists. While the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a change of tendency, women's literature from Austen to Woolf is by and large a literature about waiting, usually for love.

The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity.

Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It

Thus the young ladies are as much ashamed of being cowards and fools as the men, and despise all personal ornaments, beyond decency and cleanliness: neither did I perceive any difference in their education made by their difference of sex, only that the exercises of the females were not altogether so robust; and

The cottagers and labourers keep their children at home, their business being only to till and cultivate the earth, and therefore their education is of little consequence to the public: but

The chains that held my left leg were about two yards long, and gave me not only the liberty of walking backwards and forwards in a semicircle, but, being fixed within four inches of the gate, allowed me to creep in, and lie at my full length in the temple. ,

Lilliputians think nothing can be more unjust, than for people, in subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and leave the burthen of supporting them on the public. As

felt great numbers of people on my left side relaxing the cords to such a degree, that I was able to turn upon my right, and to ease myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great astonishment of the people; who, conjecturing by my motion what I was going to do, immediately opened to the right and left on that side, to avoid the torrent, which fell with such noise and violence from

I rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study or nature.

From this time my constant practice was, as soon as I rose, to perform that business in open air, at the full extent of my chain; and due care was taken every morning before company came, that the offensive matter should be carried off in wheel-barrows, by two servants appointed for that purpose. I

The emperor of Lilliput, attended by several of the nobility, comes to see the author in his confinement. The emperor’s person and habit described. Learned men appointed to teach the author their language. He gains favour by his mild disposition. His pockets are searched, and his sword and pistols taken from him.

In time, Arjuna tires of mere beauty and hearing tales about the valour of princess Chitrangada, he seeks her out. The princess then reveals her true self to Arjuna. Her words are one of the most beautiful declarations of the angst of a woman, ‘I am not beautifully perfect as the flowers with which I worship. I have many flaws and blemishes. I am a traveller in the great world-path, my garments are dirty, and my feet are bleeding with thorns. Where should I achieve flower-beauty, the unsullied loveliness of a moment’s life? The gift that I proudly bring you is the heart of a woman. Here have all pains and joys gathered, the hopes and fears and shames of a daughter of the dust; here love springs up struggling towards immortal life. Herein lies an imperfection which yet is noble and grand.

Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

The reader may remember, that when I signed those articles upon which I recovered my liberty, there were some which I disliked, upon account of their being too servile; neither

that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of

ineffable beauty

I slept about eight hours, as I was afterwards assured; and it was no wonder, for the physicians, by the emperor’s order, had mingled a sleepy potion in the hogsheads of wine.

In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of holding any public station; for,

I swam as fortune directed me, and

Stella knew that no matter how far a person traveled, there would always be places that held undiscovered treasure; the secrets of people and their hearts

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.

Although we couldn’t entertain on the same level we had previously enjoyed, we did have several friends over for dinner and managed to cook some delectable meals. For Mama’s birthday, we made a delicious chilled artichoke soup to accompany a French Provencal chicken dish served with leeks, rice, and John’s special green salad. We poured a classic white Burgundy and topped it off with a frozen lemon souffle. Not too bad for an out-of-work couple with a new baby.

However, in my thoughts I could not sufficiently wonder at the intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who durst venture to mount and walk upon my body, while one of my hands was at liberty, without trembling at the very sight of so prodigious a creature as I must appear to them.

VACILANDO v. Traveling when the experience itself is more important than the destination. The best laid plans are not usually conducive to spontaneous adventures. Not sure where to go? Great! Throw the map and the plans out the window, and follow your heart for a while instead. verb

door. It was likewise ordered, that three hundred tailors should make me a suit of clothes, after the fashion of the country; that six of his majesty’s greatest scholars should be employed to instruct me in their language; and lastly, that the emperor’s horses, and those of the nobility and troops of guards, should be frequently exercised in my sight, to accustom themselves to me.

Two days after this adventure, the emperor, having ordered that part of his army which quarters in and about his metropolis, to be in readiness, took a fancy of diverting himself in a very singular manner. He desired I would stand like a Colossus, with my legs as far asunder as I conveniently could.

Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, "Why was it made?" goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.

His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic. He

body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians. By which the reader may conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and exact economy of so great a prince., ,

beholders. His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic.

My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory. The last of these voyages not proving very fortunate,

I had as I before observed, one private pocket, which escaped their search, wherein there was a pair of spectacles (which I sometimes use for the weakness of mine eyes,) a pocket perspective, and some other little conveniences; which, being of no consequence to the emperor, I did not think myself bound in honour to discover, and I apprehended they might be lost or spoiled if I ventured them out of my possession. ,

I had been for some hours extremely pressed by the necessities of nature; which was no wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburdened myself. I was under great difficulties between urgency and shame. The best expedient I could think of, was to creep into my house, which I accordingly did; and shutting the gate after me, I went as far as the length of my chain would suffer, and discharged my body of that uneasy load.

I suspect that it refers to that friend of our childhood, the prince of the old folk tale; the young man who travels for seven miles and comes to seven gates guarded by seven dragons, and passes through all sorts of perils, which are marked at once by moral heroism and mathematical symmetry. It is he who is to be exhibited in as a despot and oppressor; as a despot of elfland and an oppressor of seven-headed dragons. As he is rather a remote as well as a romantic figure, it may be a little difficult for historians to discover what were his true colours. His true colours, so far as I am concerned, are silver and gold and crimson, and all the colours of the rainbow.

A good many young fellows envy their boss because they think he makes the rules and can do as he pleases. As a matter of fact, he’s the only man in the shop who can’t. He’s like the fellow on the tight-rope—there’s plenty of scenery under him and lots of room around him, but he’s got to keep his feet on the wire all the time and travel straight ahead.

girt round my neck, my hands, my body, and my legs.

whether a stranger, with a strong purse, might not influence the vulgar voters to choose him before their own landlord, or the most considerable gentleman in the neighbourhood?

blood

This made me reflect how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him

However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.

RESFEBER n. The restless beat of a traveler's heart before the journey begins, a mixture of anxiety and anticipation.

transcendentals,

mercurial

One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s “Lenore”:— “Denn die Todten reiten schnell”— (“For the dead travel fast.”)

It is not enough that you honor, respect, and love your wife. You must put this honor, respect, and love into the forms of speech and action.

The cards of the newly married couple are sent to those only whose acquaintance they wish to continue. No offense should be taken by those whom they may choose to exclude.

He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatenings, and others of promises, pity, and kindness. I answered in a few words, but in the most submissive manner, lifting up my left hand, and both my eyes to the sun, as calling him for a witness; and being almost famished with hunger, having not eaten a morsel for some hours before I left the ship, I found the demands of nature so strong upon me, that I could not forbear showing my impatience (perhaps against the strict rules of decency) by putting my finger frequently to my mouth, to signify that I wanted food. The hurgo

before I got to the shore, which I conjectured was about eight o’clock in the evening. I then advanced forward near half a mile, but could not discover any sign of houses or inhabitants; at least I was in so weak a condition, that I did not observe them. I was extremely tired, and with that, and the heat of the weather, and about half a pint of brandy that I drank as I left the ship, I found myself much inclined to sleep. I lay down on the grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remembered to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours; for when I awaked, it was just day-light. I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for, as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long

I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction.

Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. but just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original, The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters the sky on its first test flight. Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation,. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movement's in an illuminated tank).

Two monks were once travelling together down a wet and muddy road. The rain was torrential, making it almost impossible to walk along the path. As the two men were trudging along, a beautiful girl dressed in silk appeared. She was unable to cross the path and looked distressed. “Let me help you”, said the older monk. He picked her up and carried her over the mud. His younger male companion did not utter a word that night until they reached their lodging temple. Then after hours of restrained conversation, the younger monk exclaimed: “We monks do not touch females; it is too tempting for us and can create a bad outcome”. The older monk looked into the younger monks eyes and said, “I left the girl on the road. Are you still carrying her?” This ancient Zen story illustrates beautifully how so many of us are trapped in the habit of constantly “re-living” the past in our minds, thus dishonouring the present moment. The young monk wasted hours distressing himself with judgment, speculation, anxiety, resentment and ultimately self-perpetuated unhappiness as a direct result of not being mindful.

If you desire to withdraw before the party breaks up, take "French leave"—that is, go quietly out without disturbing any one, and without saluting even the mistress of the house, unless you can do so without attracting attention.

Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty’s mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians. By

To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travelers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled- we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there?

Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.

seen the moral of my own behavior very frequent in England since my return, where a little contemptible varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common-sense, shall presume to look with importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest persons of the kingdom.

The author’s economy, and happy life, among the Houyhnhnms. His great improvement in virtue by conversing with them. Their conversations. The author has notice given him by his master, that he must depart from the country. He falls into a swoon for grief; but submits. He contrives and finishes a canoe by the help of a fellow-servant, and puts to sea at a venture. I

Cords and rhizomorphs are a good reminder that mycelial networks are transport networks. Boddy’s mycelial road map is another good illustration. Mushroom growth is another: To push their way through asphalt, a mushroom must inflate with water. For this to happen, water must travel rapidly through the network from one place to another and flow into a developing mushroom in a carefully directed pulse.

This is stupid. Very, very stupid. I don't even have a tear-stained dog to wave bye to me. But I told everyone I was gonna do this, so I gotta do it... or I will be living a life of feminist-sounding somedays. And I will be more responsible, powerful, and amazing afterward. I will be able to do anything and not self-consciously stare at elevator numbers when the doors close. I will look the other person in right the eye and nod hello.

We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair- the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish- to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself- an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us- the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?

I have lingered in the cloisters Of the Northern wing at night, As the sky unclasped its oysters On the midnight pearls of light. For the long remorseless shadows Chilled me with exquisite fear. I have lingered in cold meadows Through a month of rain, my dear. Come my Love, my sweet, my Only, Through the parapets of Groan. Lingering can be very lonely When one lingers on one’s own. In dark alcoves I have lingered Conscious of dead dynasties. I have lingered in blue cellars And in hollow trunks of trees, Many a traveller through moonlight Passing by a winding stair Or a cold and crumbling archway Has been shocked to see me there.

John Bull is ignorant of the States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. [...] His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described ; it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence, - a University man, as the phrase goes, - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London ; among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter of law." He had never heard of the Scots law: nor did he choose to be informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots.

Because it wasn’t enough to be accompanied by the beast who scared the crap out of every god in Heaven, Xuanzang was assigned a few more traveling companions. The gluttonous pig-man Zhu Baijie. Sha Wujing, the repentant sand demon. And the Dragon Prince of the West Sea, who took the form of a horse for Xuanzang to ride. The five adventurers, thusly gathered, set off on their— “Holy ballsacks!” I yelped. I dropped the book like I’d been bitten. “How far did you get?” Quentin said. He was leaning against the end of the nearest shelf, as casually as if he’d been there the whole time, waiting for this moment. I ignored that he’d snuck up on me again, just this once. There was a bigger issue at play. In the book was an illustration of the group done up in bold lines and bright colors. There was Sun Wukong at the front, dressed in a beggar’s cassock, holding his Ruyi Jingu Bang in one hand and the reins of the Dragon Horse in the other. A scary-looking pig-faced man and a wide-eyed demon monk followed, carrying the luggage. And perched on top of the horse was . . . me. The artist had tried to give Xuanzang delicate, beatific features and ended up with a rather girly face. By whatever coincidence, the drawing of Sun Wukong’s old master could have been a rough caricature of sixteen-year-old Eugenia Lo from Santa Firenza, California. “That’s who you think I am?” I said to Quentin. “That’s who I know you are,” he answered. “My dearest friend. My boon companion. You’ve reincarnated into such a different form, but I’d recognize you anywhere. Your spiritual energies are unmistakable.” “Are you sure? If you’re from a long time ago, maybe your memory’s a little fuzzy.” “The realms beyond Earth exist on a different time scale,” Quentin said. “Only one day among the gods passes for every human year. To me, you haven’t been gone long. Months, not centuries.” “This is just . . . I don’t know.” I took a moment to assemble my words. “You can’t walk up to me and expect me to believe right away that I’m the reincarnation of some legendary monk from a folk tale.” “Wait, what?” Quentin squinted at me in confusion. “I said you can’t expect me to go, ‘okay, I’m Xuanzang,’ just because you tell me so.” Quentin’s mouth opened slowly like the dawning of the sun. His face went from confusion to understanding to horror and then finally to laughter. “mmmmphhhhghAHAHAHAHA!” he roared. He nearly toppled over, trying to hold his sides in. “HAHAHAHA!” “What the hell is so funny?” “You,” Quentin said through his giggles. “You’re not Xuanzang. Xuanzang was meek and mild. A friend to all living things. You think that sounds like you?” It did not. But then again I wasn’t the one trying to make a case here. “Xuanzang was delicate like a chrysanthemum.” Quentin was getting a kick out of this. “You are so tough you snapped the battleaxe of the Mighty Miracle God like a twig. Xuanzang cried over squashing a mosquito. You, on the other hand, have killed more demons than the Catholic Church.” I was starting to get annoyed. “Okay, then who the hell am I supposed to be?” If he thought I was the pig, then this whole deal was off. “You’re my weapon,” he said. “You’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang.” I punched Quentin as hard as I could in the face.

The succession of financial bubbles, and the amassing of personal and public debt, Whybrow views as simply an expression of the lizard-brained way of life. A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control’s color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern. The boom in trading activity in individual stock portfolios; the spread of legalized gambling; the rise of drug and alcohol addiction; it is all of a piece. Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

In everyday life we must often act without delay, it is a most certain truth that when it is not in our power to discern the truest opinions, we must follow the most probable." (Discourse III, AT VI: 25/CSM I: 123) [Descartes discusses a traveler lost in a forest to illustrate this. The traveler is lost, and he does not know how to get out of the woods. Descartes’ advice is that the traveler should pick a route, even if it is uncertain, and resolutely stick to it: "Keep walking as straight as he can in one direction, never changing it for slight reasons even if mere chance made him choose it in the first place; for in this way, even if he does not go exactly where he wishes, he will at least end up in a place where he is likely to be better off than in the middle of a forest." (Ibid.)]

Replace Sombreros with Dollar Street Children start learning about other countries and religions in preschool. Cute little world maps with people in folklore dress from across the world are intended to make them aware of and respectful toward other cultures. The intention is good but these kinds of illustrations can create an illusion of great difference. People in other countries can seem stuck in historic and exotic ways of life. Of course some Mexicans sometimes wear large sombreros, but these large hats nowadays are probably more common on the heads of tourists. Let’s show children Dollar Street instead, and show them how regular people live. If you are a teacher, send your class “traveling” on dollarstreet.org and ask them to find differences within countries and similarities across countries.

Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.

horizontal division between clearness and opacity, but were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor throughout. There was no perceptible motion in the air, not a visible drop of water fell upon a leaf of the beeches, birches, and firs composing the wood on either side. The trees stood in an attitude of intentness, as if they waited longingly for a wind to come and rock them. A startling quiet overhung all surrounding things—so completely, that the crunching of the waggon-wheels was as a great noise, and small rustles, which had never obtained a hearing except by night, were distinctly individualized. Joseph Poorgrass looked round upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken only by a heavy particle falling from a tree through the evergreens and alighting with a smart rap upon the coffin of poor Fanny. The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves. The hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were

I remember that a Korak once brought to me an old tattered fashion-plate from "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper," containing three or four full-length figures of imaginary ladies, in the widest expansion of crinoline which fashion at that time prescribed. The poor Korak said he had often wondered what those curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, perhaps I could tell him. He evidently had not the most remote suspicion that they were intended to represent human beings. I told him that those curious objects, as he called them, were American women. He burst out into a "tyee-e-e-e" of amazement, and asked with a wondering look, "Are all the women in your country as big as that at the bottom?" It was a severe reflection upon our ladies' dress, and I did not venture to tell him that the bigness was artificial, but merely replied sadly that they were.

Settling an Argument Mark 9:33–37 After Jesus and his disciples traveled to Capernaum, he asked them what they had been arguing about on the way. At first, the men were silent, too embarrassed and ashamed to answer his question. Finally, the disciples admitted that they had argued about which one of them was the greatest. Rank and position were important to the Jews, and in light of the messianic kingdom they expected Jesus to set up, they probably dreamed about status and honor. Jesus gave them a new perspective on greatness and leadership in the form of a paradox. To be important in God’s eyes, he explained, a person must voluntarily become a servant to other people. The goal is not to be first, but rather to take the last place. The highest positions in God’s kingdom go to those who are willing to be lowly enough to serve the needs of others. To illustrate this concept of service, Jesus put his arms around a little child, considered an insignificant person in that culture. He said that when anyone welcomed or showed kindness to a little child in his name, it was the same as doing it for Jesus himself. There’s nothing wrong with ambition or pursuit of excellence as long as they don’t become a source of pride. When we try to achieve greatness by chasing after positions of power, physical strength, popularity, or worldly success, we’re going in the wrong direction. God evaluates us on the basis of humility and service. If we look for opportunities to serve others and put their needs ahead of our own, if we never consider ourselves above doing tasks that seem menial, if we build others up instead of ourselves—that’s when we’re on the track to greatness in God’s eyes. And we just might discover that last place is the best place to be after all.

My attitude toward all other persons is well illustrated by this story from a celebrated traveler: He arrived one day in the midst of a tribe of savages, where a child had just been born. A crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks ― armed with rings, hooks, and cords ― surrounded it. One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of a peace- pipe unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his ear-lobes down to his shoulders." A third said: "He will never see the sunshine unless I slant his eyes." Another said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs." A fifth said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull." "Stop," cried the traveler. "What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than He. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, experience, and liberty.

For centuries, pilgrims have travelled to Ayodhya identifying it as the birthplace of Ram. But the exact location of the birthplace of Ram, in Ayodhya, is the subject of great dispute and political turmoil in India. Ever since colonial times, Hinduism has felt under siege, forced to explain itself using European templates, make itself more tangible, more concrete, more structured, more homogeneous, more historical, more geographical, less psychological, less emotional, to render itself as valid as the major religions of the Eurocentric world like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The fallout of this pressure is the need to locate matters of faith in a particular spot. The timeless thus becomes time-bound and the universal becomes particular. What used to once be a matter of faith becomes a territorial war zone where courts now have to intervene. Everyone wants to be right in a world where adjustment, allowance, accommodation and affection are seen as signs of weakness, even corruption.

urely, Epictetus isn’t saying that peace, leisure, travel, and learning are bad, is he? Thankfully, no. But ceaseless, ardent desire—if not bad in and of itself—is fraught with potential complications. What we desire makes us vulnerable. Whether it’s an opportunity to travel the world or to be the president or for five minutes of peace and quiet, when we pine for something, when we hope against hope, we set ourselves up for disappointment. Because fate can always intervene and then we’ll likely lose our self-control in response. As Diogenes, the famous Cynic, once said, “It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.” To want nothing makes one invincible—because nothing lies outside your control. This doesn’t just go for not wanting the easy-to-criticize things like wealth or fame—the kinds of folly that we see illustrated in some of our most classic plays and fables. That green light that Gatsby strove for can represent seemingly good things too, like love or a noble cause. But it can wreck someone all the same.

... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...

The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was illustrated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. “We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade,” Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife’s good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured. “We don’t like to think of our knives as being glued together,” Ive said. “Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless.” At most other companies, engineering tends to drive design. The engineers set forth their specifications and requirements, and the designers then come up with cases and shells that will accommodate them. For Jobs, the process tended to work the other way. In the early days of Apple, Jobs had approved the design of the case of the original Macintosh, and the engineers had to make their boards and components fit.

There are millions of thirsty souls. There is sufficient water in the 'well of salvation' to adequately quench every one of those thirsty souls. God is looking for vessels through which He might transmit this living water to them. It matters not regarding the apparent outward value of the vessel or the seeming lack of worth. The only kind of vessel that He can use to carry this living water to these dying souls is a vessel that is 'meet for the Master's use,' that is one that is first cleansed of sin and then emptied of self. Perhaps this truth can be more readily made clear by a simple illustration. Let us imagine a clear, crystal stream of living water flowing beside a broad way. There comes a tired, worn-out, thirsty traveller. He sees the water, but it flows under such circumstances as to make it impossible for him to reach this stream from his mouth. He spies three vessels: a golden goblet, a silver pitcher, and a tin cup. Upon investigation he finds that the golden goblet us filled with something else. The silver pitcher is empty, apparently ready for service but is soiled within; the tin cup alone is clean and emptied. We leave it to you to decide which one he chooses. To rightly get at the heart of this great truth, meditate on: Acts 24:16; 2 Tim. 2:20-21; and 1 Cor. 1:26-30. Which kind are you?

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

The Sailor-boy’s Gossip You say, dear mamma, it is good to be talking With those who will kindly endeavour to teach. And I think I have learnt something while I was walking Along with the sailor-boy down on the beach. He told me of lands where he soon will be going, Where humming-birds scarcely are bigger than bees, Where the mace and the nutmeg together are growing, And cinnamon formeth the bark of some trees. He told me that islands far out in the ocean Are mountains of coral that insects have made, And I freely confess I had hardly a notion That insects could world in the way that he said. He spoke of wide deserts where the sand-clouds are flying. No shade for the brow, and no grass for the feet; Where camels and travelers often lie dying, Gasping for water and scorching with heat. He told me of places away in the East, Where topaz, and ruby, and sapphires are found: Where you never are safe from the snake and the beast, For the serpent and tiger and jackal abound. I thought our own Thames was a very great stream, With its waters so fresh and its currents so strong; But how tiny our largest of rivers must seem To those he had sailed on, three thousand miles long. He speaks, dear mamma, of so many strange places, With people who neither have cities nor kings. Who wear skins on their shoulders, paint on their faces, And live on the spoils which their hunting-field brings. Oh! I long, dear mamma, to learn more of these stories, From books that are written to please and to teach, And I wish I could see half the curious glories The sailor-boy told me of down on the beach. Eliza Cook.

This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is 'autobiographical' the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical—that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than Gulliver's Travels cannot easily be imagined. This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer's main concern was to give fullness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man's portrait here. But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives—all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

CLOSE is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up. Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation. To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity. To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring. Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. What makes the rainbow beautiful, is not the pot of gold at its end, but the arc of its journey between here and there, between now and then, between where we are now and where we want to go, illustrated above our unconscious heads in primary colour. We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.

I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come upon the name Balbec in a book sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore. But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself cities, landscapes, historical monuments, as more or less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us— of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons— a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction or by a whim on the designer's part, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.

During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8).

As our steamboat touched at Port Townsend, Muir received a long telegram from a San Francisco newspaper, offering him a large sum if he would go over the mountains and down the Yukon to the Klondyke, and write them letters about conditions there. He brought the telegram to me, laughing heartily at the absurdity of anybody making him such a proposition. "Do they think I'm daft," he asked, "like a' the lave o' thae puir bodies? When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or on such a sordid mission. Ah! my old friend, they'll be spoiling our grand Alaska." He offered to secure for me the reporter's job tendered to him. I refused, urging my lack of training for such work and my more important and responsible position. "Why, that same paper has a host of reporters on the way to the Klondyke now," I said. "There is ——" (naming a noted poet and author of the Coast). "He must be half-way down to Dawson by this time." "—— doesn't count," replied Muir, "for the patent reason that everybody knows he can't tell the truth. The poor fellow is not to blame for it. He was just made that way. Everybody will read with delight his wonderful tales of the trail, but nobody will believe him. We all know him too well." Muir

My dearest wish was to reach for the sky. I actually wanted to be out there, up in the sky, among those stars, studying them, flying close to them, learning where they had come from. The wonders of the sky held a special fascination for me and if I knew then that my work as an adult would have me building satellites and rockets that travelled far above the earth and studied the sky and the land below, how happy I would have been!