Intimate Pictures With Quotes

Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic.

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end - at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

My mom was never the type to write me long letters or birthday cards. We never got mani-pedis together, she never gave me a locket with our picture in it. She wouldn't tell me I looked beautiful, or soothe me when a boy broke my heart. But she was there. She kept me safe. She did her best to make me tough. She fed me the most delicious home-cooked meals. For lunch, she'd pack me rare sliced steak over white rice and steamed broccoli. She sent me to private school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She is still there for me. She will always be there for me, as long as she's able. That's a great mom.

Each time we use our cell phones, snap pictures with a camera, or use a search engine’s algorithms, we benefit from the legacy of Muhammad’s modern mindset. His mindset is not tied to Mecca or Medina, for as the Golden Age political philosopher Al-Farabi observed, “Medina is not a location but the manner in which a community comes together.” Indeed, people of any culture or race can establish a “place of flowing change.” As Muhammad declared in the final days of his life, “My progeny are those who uphold my legacy!

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.

The sucess of your people pictures depends not so much on your mastery of f/stops and shutter speeds, as on the grace and wit with which you handle this intimate interaction with you subject.

…we need to find ways of sharing our intimate experiences of the Mystery, for we are one. It is through one another that we will know more of the Life that flows within us all. It is through sharing our fragments of insight that we will come to a fuller picture of the One who is at the heart of each life.

Edmund cleared his throat. "Pretty as a picture, isn't she?" Fade only nodded. His hungry stare brought color to my cheeks, and I was conscious of the warmth of his fingers when he touched me. Just on the arm, but my skin was bare, and it felt shocking, intimate, too darking in front of my foster parents.

Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation.

The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander.

Our right brain perceives the big picture and recognizes that everything around us, about us, among us and within us is made up of energy particles that are woven together into a universal tapestry. Since everything is connected, there is an intimate relationship between the atomic space around and within me, and the atomic space around and within you - regardless of where we are. On an energetic level, if I think about you, send good vibrations your way, hold you in the light, or pray for you, then I am consciously sending my energy to you with a healing intention. If I meditate over you or lay my hands upon your wound, then I am purposely directing the energy of my being to help you heal.

Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and a picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between he individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came to adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

we're the adults here so we take naps in the middle of the afternoon with the window open. there's an ice cream truck singing down the street and I haven't hung up my clothes. I text your mother a picture of you on your first day of work and say isn't he handsome. our toothbrushes sitting in a cup on the edge of the sink are the most intimate thing I have ever known.

Later, several members of the Communist Party in Hollywood who had been involved in the attempted takeover went public and described in intimate detail how Moscow was trying to take over the picture business.

Working outward in concentric circles from the single mother's situation, we can easily draw a picture of what a 'good' mother-son relationship needs in order to flourish. In its ideal form, mom would be experiencing physical, material, social, and emotional support from four interdependent sources: an intimate partner who is also attached to the child; a select group of close friends and family; a wider community that supports mom's values and goals; and a maternity-flexible workplace.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.

It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together—a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions.

As I prepare to leave she walks with me, half deaf and blind, under several ladders in her living room that balance paint and workmen, into the garden where there is a wild horse, a 1930 car splayed flat on its axles and hundreds of flowering bushes so that her eyes swim out into the dark green and unfocussed purple. There is very little now that separates the house from the garden. Rain and vines and chickens move into the building. Before I leave, she points to a group photograph of a fancy dress party that shows herself and my grandmother Lalla among the crowd. She has looked at it for years and has in this way memorized everyone's place in the picture. She reels off names and laughs at the facial expressions she can no longer see. It has moved, tangible, palpable, into her brain, the way memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way her tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace.

Friendship is something to be achieved over years of deep and intimate connection, not by clicking on a small picture and requesting it.

How else could we identify another weirdo or outlier? These symbols intimated a belief system, a way of thinking not just about music but about school and friends and politics and society. It was also a way to separate yourself, to feel bold or try on boldness without yet possessing it. A little inkling of the nonconformist person you could be—you wanted to be—but weren’t quite ready to commit to. I papered my walls with band posters and what little I could find in mainstream magazines about alternative and punk, maybe a picture of Babes in Toyland from Spin or Fugazi from Option. The iconoclast images and iconography covered my room, a jarring contrast to the preppy blue-and-white-striped wallpaper I’d insisted on in elementary school. I resented the parts of myself that were late to adopt coolness, late to learn—I wanted to have always possessed a savviness and sophistication, even though I clearly had neither.

The picture that emerged from the Minnesota study was not that reared-apart twins were identical, but that they shared a powerful tendency toward similar or convergent behaviors. What was common to them was not identity, but its first derivative.

Whatever the tests of admission, the social set when formed is not a mere economic class, but something which more nearly resembles a biological clan. Membership is intimately connected with love, marriage and children, or, to speak more exactly, with the attitudes and desires that are involved. In the social set, therefore, opinions encounter the canons of Family Tradition, Respectability, Propriety, Dignity, Taste and Form, which make up the social set's picture of itself, a picture assiduously implanted in the children.

I guess Chook is about twenty-three or -four. Her face is a little older than that. It has that stern look you see in old pictures of the plains Indians. At her best, it is a forceful and striking face, redolent of strength and dignity. At worst it sometimes would seem to be the face of a Dartmouth boy dressed for the farcical chorus line. But that body, seen more intimately than ever before, was incomparably, mercilessly female, deep and glossy, rounded—under the tidy little fatty layer of girl pneumatics—with useful muscle.

My friend Jim Richardson, a National Geographic photojournalist, likes to make the distinction between being a "traveler" and a "sightseer." According to Jim, a traveler seeks engagements with the local people and culture, while the sightseer just clicks off sights in the guidebook, a "been there, done that" mentality. A sightseeing photographer stands apart from the culture and "steals" pictures from a distance, while a travel photographer becomes involved with his or her surroundings and the people, and the resulting pictures become more intimate.

Let us suppose you give your three-year-old daughter a coloring book and a box of crayons for her birthday. The following day, with the proud smile only a little once can muster, she presents her first pictures for inspection. She has colored the sun black, the grass purple, and the sky green. In the lower right-hand corner, she has added woozy wonders of floating slabs and hovering rings; on the left, a panoply of colorful, carefree squiggles. You marvel at her bold strokes and intuit that her psyche is railing against its own cosmic puniness in the face of a big, ugly world. Later at the office, you share with your staff your daughter's first artistic effort and you make veiled references to the early work of van Gogh. A little child can not do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer. "A father is delighted when his little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. As he holds hi little one close to him, he cared little whether the child is looking around, her attention flittering from one thing to another or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be with the father, confident of the love, the care, the security that is hers in those arms. Our prayer is much like that. We settle down in our Father's arms, in his loving hands. Our minds, our thoughts, our imagination may flit about here and there; we might even fall asleep; but essentially we are choosing for this time to remain intimately with our Father, giving ourselves to him, receiving his love and care, letting him enjoy us as he will. It is very simple prayer. It is very childlike prayer. It is prayer that opens us out to all the delights of the kingdom.

Beyond the terrace, a light breeze stirred the reeds at the edge of the pond. Looking out at this intimate vista, one could see the reeds and a stone lantern and the brightest of the evening's stars floating on the gloaming mirror of the pond. Then the breeze came again to crack the water's surface, and the picture was flooded.

What if the solution to the structure of DNA could be achieved by the same “tricks” that Pauling had pulled? X-ray pictures would help, of course—but trying to determine structures of biological molecules using experimental methods, Crick argued, was absurdly laborious—“like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.

But the domesticity that the picture conjures, just like the soft, intimate tone his voice took last week when he answered the call . . . very clearly, Levi has a home. A place in the world, just for himself. Someone to go back to every night. And on top of that, his career is more stable than mine. Levi Ward, lord of a thousand glares and a million rude nods, belongs. And I don’t. The universe is truly not fair.

There are those who sail through a ‘visit from Auntie Flo’, enduring little more than a twinge in the abdomen. And then there are people like me, who firmly believe their uterus is re-enacting the Battle of the Somme. Allow me to paint a picture for you. It’s fucking ugly. Your body bloats, your tits hurt and you sweat uncontrollably. Your crevices start to feel like a swamp and your head is pounding all the time. You feel like you have a cold – shivering, aching, nauseous – and have the hair-trigger emotions of someone who has not slept for days. But we’re not done yet. The intense cramping across your lower abdomen feels like the worst diarrhoea you’ve ever had – in fact, you’ll also get diarrhoea, to help with the crying fits. As your internal organs contract and tear themselves to blooded bits so you can lay an egg, blasts of searing pain rip through you. You bleed so much that all ‘intimate feminine hygiene products’ fail you – it’s like trying to control a lava flow with an oven mitt. You worry people can smell your period. You are terrified to sit on anything or stand up for a week in case you’ve bled through. And as you’re sitting, a crying, sweaty, wobbly, spotty, smelly mess, some bastard asks ‘Time of the month, love?’ And then you have to eat his head.

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

... You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose. ----- I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that has not much improved my opinion of them. ---- I am who I am and I have the need to be. ---- It is far more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself correctly, then you are truly a man of wisdom. ----- Straight ahead you can not go very far. ----- Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him. If you say to the grown-ups: 'I've seen a lovely house made of pink brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the rood', they are unable to picture such a house. You must say: I saw a house that come a hundred thousand francs.' Then they cry out: 'How pretty!' ---- One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.

These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence?

If you have the impression that I am minimizing the place of the Bible in the life of the Christian, you are missing my point. I know the Bible speaks about the importance of feeding from God’s Word daily. However when a person’s goal is simply to read the Bible, he isn’t seeing the big picture. We should read the Bible because we want to know Christ in a more intimate way, not just to fulfill a religious duty. Nobody in the New Testament was more committed to studying the Bible than the Pharisees. They could quote long passages from memory. They knew the content of their Bible because they pored over it daily. But Jesus had a word to say about their kind of Bible study: “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal

Of what subtle substance is the Fatherland then made, that it too can travel, emigrating with us in agreement with our vagrant fantasies or our forced exiles? However far our destiny may take us, it seems as if always a little of it kept company with us, exhaling its fragrance wherever we pitch our tent. Something familiar in the face of a stranger passing, a scrap of song caught in a gust of wind, the shadow of a tree, the fugitive emanation of a perfume—less yet, a detail, a meaningless trifle, a nothing—and something within us sounds a mysterious call; a sudden combination works upon our most intimate essence—eliminates all that is contrasting, groups all that frames into the loved picture of the distant Fatherland. The Breton soul lends itself more readily than any other to this mysterious work

Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.

The boy under the power of the Mama's Boy is what is called autoerotic. He may compulsively masturbate. He may be into pornography, seeking the Goddess in the nearly infinite forms of the female body. Some men under the infantile power of the Mama's Boy aspect of the Oedipal Child have vast collections of pictures of nude women, alone or making love with men. He is seeking to experience his masculinity, his phallic power, his generativity. But instead of affirming his own masculinity as a mortal man, he is really seeking to experience the penis of God—the Great Phallus—that experiences all women, or rather that experiences union with the Mother Goddess in her infinity of female forms. Caught up in masturbation and the compulsive use of pornography, the Mama's Boy, like all immature energies, wants just to be. He does not want to do what it takes to actually have union with a mortal woman and to deal with all the complex feelings involved in an intimate relationship. He does not want to take responsibility.

God’s goodness comes to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But he is humble and meek, a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our needs or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result. The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel. But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far less interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts - they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of the story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands. So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we rise to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness. For when God arrives as the healer, we learn anew that the anguished hopes we carry are held within God’s hand like the hazelnut of Mother Julian’s vision. The story he weaves for us may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives, we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.

... You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose. ----- I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that has not much improved my opinion of them. ---- I am who I am and I have the need to be. ---- It is far more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself correctly, then you are truly a man of wisdom. ----- Straight ahead you can not go very far. ----- Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him. If you say to the grown-ups: 'I've seen a lovely house made of pink brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the rood', they are unable to picture such a house. You must say: I saw a house that come a hundred thousand francs.' Then they cry out: 'How pretty!' ---- One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word “mouse” had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word and the picture of the gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw “horse”, she heard him pawing at the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word “running” hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed sound of each letter and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading, She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was a poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel the closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

The helix contains two intertwined strands of DNA. It is "right-handed"-twisting upward as if driven by a right-handed screw. Across the molecule, it measures twenty-three angstroms-one-thousandth of one-thousandth of a millimeter. One million helices stacked side by side would fit in this letter: o. the biologist John Sulston wrote, "We see it as a rather stubby double helix, for they seldom show its other striking feature: it is immensely long and thin. In every cell in your body, you have two meters of the stuff; if we were to draw a scaled-up picture of it with the DNA as thick as sewing thread, that cell's worth would be about 200 kilometers long." Each strand of DNA, recall, is a long sequence of "bases"-A,T,G,and C. The bases are linked together by the sugar-phosphate backbone. The backbone twists on the outside, forming a spiral. The bases face in, like treads in a circular staircase. The opposite strand contains the opposing bases: A matched with T and G matched with C. Thus, both strands contain the same information-except in a complementary sense: each is a "reflection," or echo, of the other (the more appropriate analogy is a yin-and-yang structure). Molecular forces between the A:T and G:C pairs lock the two strands together, as in a zipper. A double helix of DNA can thus be envisioned as a code written with four alphabets-ATGCCCTACGGGCCCATCG...-forever entwined with its mirror-image code.

You’re the one who didn’t keep his word. And speaking of your word and its dubious worth, don’t change the subject. I saw the looks you and Miss Turner were exchanging. The lady goes bright pink every time you speak to her. For God’s sake, you put food on her plate without even asking.” “And where’s the crime in that?” Gray was genuinely curious to hear the answer. He hadn’t forgotten that shocked look she’d given him. “Come on, Gray. You know very well one doesn’t take such a liberty with a mere acquaintance. It’s…it’s intimate. The two of you are intimate. Don’t deny it.” “I do deny it. It isn’t true.” Gray took another swig from his flask and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Damn it, Joss. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to trust me. I gave you my word. I’ve kept it.” And it was the truth, Gray told himself. Yes, he’d touched her tonight, but he’d never pledged not to touch her. He had kept his word. He hadn’t bedded her. He hadn’t kissed her. God, what he wouldn’t give just to kiss her… He rubbed the heel of his hand against his chest. That same ache lingered there-the same sharp tug he’d felt when she’d brought her foot down on his and pursed her lips into a silent plea. Please, she’d said. Don’t. As if she appealed to his conscience. His conscience. Where would the girl have gathered such a notion, that he possessed a conscience? Certainly not form his treatment of her. A bitter laugh rumbled through his chest, and Joss shot him a skeptical look. “Believe me, I’ve scarcely spoken to the girl in weeks. You can’t know the lengths I’ve gone to, avoiding her. And it isn’t easy, because she won’t stay put in her cabin, now will she? No, she has to go all over the ship, flirting with the crew, tacking her little pictures in every corner of the boat, taking tea in the galley with Gabriel. I can’t help but see her. And I can see she’s too damn thin. She needs to eat; I put food on her plate. There’s nothing more to it than that.” Joss said nothing, just stared at him as though he’d grown a second head. “Damn it, what now? Don’t you believe me?” “I believe what you’re saying,” his brother said slowly. “I just can’t believe what I’m hearing.” Gray folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “And what are you hearing?” “I wondered why you’d done all this…the dinner. Now I know.” “You know what?” Gray was growing exasperated. Most of all, because he didn’t know. “You care for this girl.” Joss cocked his head. “You care for her. Don’t you?” “Care for her.” Joss’s expression was smug. “Don’t you?” The idea was too preposterous to entertain, but Gray perked with inspiration. “Say I did care for her. Would you release me from that promise? If my answer is yes, can I pursue her?” Joss shook his head. “If the answer is yes, you can-and should-wait one more week. It’s not as though she’ll vanish the moment we make harbor. If the answer is yes, you’ll agree she deserves that much.” Wrong, Gray thought, sinking back into a chair.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

Nine hundred species of native plants. I have a feeling you’re someone who will appreciate that we grow the real beauties here,” Eudora said. “Not the gaudy sun perennials that want to flash everything they’ve got like cheap hookers. You have to look hard to find the pockets of beauty in my garden.” “Your garden?” But Eudora was no longer listening. She strode ahead, slowing down when they entered an intimate fairy-tale forest. The path narrowed and switched to pale stone. Crazy paving, Tom would have called it—stone slabs haphazardly slotted together in a way that defied time, feet, and the extremes of weather. The formal, structured sweep of the Historic Gardens was replaced by a hint of controlled but wild beauty. Above the towering hemlocks, the clouds broke apart to reveal slashes of blue sky. Eudora was right—so many pockets of beauty if you looked hard enough: trailing catkins and clusters of reddish pitcher plants that looked like rhubarb stalks with curling ends. (Such fascination he’d had for carnivorous plants after Tom had shown him a picture of a Venus flytrap in Encyclopædia Britannica.) A dead stick jutted up through the leaves; the sign next to it read “Northern Catalpa.” He would research that on the Web when he got to the office. See if he could find a picture of it in full leaf. “Here, smell this.” Eudora had stopped by a small, unimpressive tree, but as Felix moved close, he spotted tiny pom-poms of reddish blooms. He had never seen anything quite so weird or wonderful. Ella should definitely plant one of those. “Hmm.” “Witch hazel.

Gina flopped back on her cot, arm up over her eyes. “Oh, my God, Molly, what am I going to do? The fact that he came here tonight at all is . . . He’s clearly interested, but that’s probably just because he thinks I’m a total perv.” “Whoa,” Molly said. “Wait. You lost me there.” Gina sat up, a mix of earnestness, horror, and amusement on her pretty face. “I didn’t tell you this, but after I first spoke to Lucy’s sister—we were in the shower tent so no one would see us—I let her leave first and then I waited, like, a minute, thinking we shouldn’t be seen leaving the tent together. And before I go, he came in.” He. “Leslie Pollard?” Molly clarified. Gina nodded. “I freaked out when I saw him coming, and it’s stupid, I know, but I hid. And I should have just waited until I heard the shower go on, but God, maybe he wouldn’t have pulled the curtain, because he obviously thought he was in there alone . . .” Molly started to laugh. “Oh my.” “Yeah,” Gina said. “Oh my. So I decide to run for it, only he’s not in one of the changing booths, he’s over by the bench, you know?” Molly nodded. The bench in the main part of the room. “In only his underwear,” Gina finished, with a roll of her eyes. “Oh, my God.” “Really? Molly asked. Apparently Jones was taking his change of identity very seriously. He hated wearing underwear of any kind, but obviously he thought it wouldn’t be in character for Leslie Pollard to go commando. “Boxers or briefs?” Gina gave her a look, but she was starting to laugh now, too, thank goodness. “Briefs. Very brief briefs.” She covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh, my God, Molly, he was . . . I think he showers at noon because he knows no one else will be in there, so he can, you know, have an intimate visit with Mr. Hand.” Oh, dear. “And now I know, and he knows I know, and he also probably thinks I lurk in the men’s shower,” Gina continued. “And the fact that he actually came to tea tonight, instead of hiding from me, in his tent, forever, means . . . something awful, don’t you think? Did I mention he has, like, an incredible body?” Molly shook her head. Oh dear. “No.” “Yes,” Gina said just a little too grimly, considering the topic. “Who would’ve guessed that underneath those awful shirts he’s a total god? And maybe that’s what’s freaking out the most.” “You mean because . . . you’re attracted to him?” Molly asked. “No!” Gina said. “God! Because I’m not. I felt nothing. I’m standing there and he’s . . . You know how I said he reminds me of Hugh Grant?” Molly nodded, too relieved to speak. “Well, I got the wrong Hugh. This guy is built like Hugh Jackman. And beneath the hats and sunblock and glasses, he’s actually got cheekbones and a jaw line, too. I’m talking total hottie. And, yes, I can definitely appreciate that on one level, but . . .” She glanced over at the desk, at her digital camera. She’d gotten it out of her trunk earlier today. Which, Molly had learned, meant that she’d spent more time this afternoon looking at her saved pictures. Which included at least a few of Max. Molly’s relief over not having to deal with the complications of Gina having a crush on Leslie felt a whole lot less good. She wished someone would just go ahead and steal Gina’s camera already. Maybe that would help her move on.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, not any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

Birth and death belong equally to life, and hold the balance as mutual conditions of each other, or, if the expression be preferred, as poles of the whole phenomenon of life. The wisest of all mythologies, the Indian, expresses this by giving to the very god who symbolizes —destruction and death (just as Brahma, the most sinful and lowest god of the Trimurti, symbolizes generation, origination, and Vishnu preservation), by giving, I say, to Shiva as an attribute not only the necklace of skulls, but also the lingam, that symbol of generation which appears as the counterpart of death. In this way it is intimated that generation and death are essential correlatives which reciprocally neutralize and eliminate each other. It was precisely the same sentiment that prompted the Greeks and Romans to adorn the costly sarcophagi, just as we still see them, with feasts, dances, marriages, hunts, fights between wild beasts, bacchanalia, that is with presentations of life’s most powerful urge. This they present to us not only through such diversions and merriments, but even in sensual groups, to the point of showing us the sexual intercourse between satyrs and goats. The object was obviously to indicate with the greatest emphasis from the death of the mourned individual the immortal life of nature, and thus to intimate, although without abstract knowledge, that the whole of nature is the phenomenon, and also the fulfilment, of the will-to-live. Now man is nature herself, and indeed nature at the highest grade of her self-consciousness, but nature is only the objectified will-to-live; the person who has grasped and retained this point of view may certainly and justly console himself for his own death and for that of his friends by looking back on the immortal life of nature, which he himself is. Consequently, Shiva with the lingam is to be understood in this way, and so are those ancient sarcophagi that with their pictures of glowing life exclaim to the lamenting beholder: Natura non contristatur (Nature is not grieved.).

These associations—Cavafy, my mother polishing the silver, a missionary aunt who fled the familiar turf of Tennessee for the otherness of Korea (presumably with the intent of teaching them something, hopefully with the result of being taught), my Mamaw’s fragrant old bureau with its smell of wax and polish—all of them would be brought to bear upon my painting of peppermints, but none of them would be visible; there’s no reason the viewer would know any of this. I could render only what can be seen—color and form, though the painter’s splendid artifice reveals to us texture, too, and rich associations of scent and flavor, all arriving through the gates of the eyes. And yet there is something more here, and that something is what nags at me to write this book, what tugs at my sleeve and my sleep. Why, if all that is personal has fallen away, should these pictures matter so? Why should they be alight with a feeling of intimacy? Interiority makes itself visible. In my imaginary still life, the “context and commentary” of my experience would be gone, but something would remain, something distilled and vibrant in the quality of attention itself. Is that what soul or spirit is, then, the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world? Coorte’s asparagus, his gooseberries and shells, distill this quality down to its quietest, most startling essence: the eye suffuses what it sees with I. Not “I” in the sense of my story, the particulars of my life, the way my father tended his old asparagus beds each spring, the way my beloved loved the forms and colors of shells. But “I” as the quickest, subtlest thing we are: a moment of attention, an intimate engagement. Is that the lesson, then, that ultimately I becomes an eye? What is left of Adriaen Coorte but this? Isn’t that enough? […] That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of the sayable, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.

They came in to look. I watched them. Most people go through museums like they do Macy's: eyes sweeping the display, stopping only if something really grabs their attention. These two looked at everything. They both clearly liked the bicycle picture. Yup, Dutch, I decided. He was a few steps ahead when he got to my favorite painting there. Diana and the Moon. It was-surprise surprise-of Diana, framed by a big open window, the moon dominating the sky outside. She was perched on the windowsill, dressed in a gauzy wrap that could have been nightclothes or a nod to her goddess namesake. She looked beautiful, of course, and happy, but if you looked for more than a second, you could see that her smile had a teasing curve to it and one of her hands was actually wrapped around the outside frame. I thought she looked like she might swing her legs over the sill and jump, turning into a moth or owl or breath of wind even before she was completely out of the room. I thought she looked, too, like she was daring the viewer to come along. Or at least to try. The Dutch guy didn't say anything. He just reached out a hand. His girlfriend stepped in, folding herself into the circle of his outsretched arm. They stood like that, in front of the painting, for a full minute. Then he sneezed. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue.He took in and, without letting go of her, did a surprisingly graceful one-handed blow. Then he crumpled the tissue and looked around for a trash can. There wasn't one in sight. She held out her free hand; he passed over the tissue, and she stuck it right back into her pocket. I wanted to be grossed out. Instead, I had the surprising thought that I really really wanted someone who would do that: put my used Kleenex in his pocket. It seemed like a declaration of something pretty big. Finally,they finished their examination of Diana and moved on.There wasn't much else, just the arrogant Willings and the overblown sunrise. They came over to examine the bronzes. She saw my book. "Excuse me. You know this artist?" Intimately just didn't seem as true anymore. "Pretty well," I answered. "He is famous here?" "Not very." "I like him." she said thoughtfully. "He has...oh, the word...personism?" "Personality?" I offered. "Yes!" she said, delighted. "Personality." She reached behind her without looking. Her boyfriend immediately twined his fingers with hers. They left, unfolding the map again as they went, she chattering cheerfully. I think she was telling him he had personality. They might as well have had exhibit information plaques on their backs: "COUPLE." CONTEMPORARY DUTCH. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOVE, FOR THE VIEWING PLEASURE (OR NOT) OF ANYONE AND EVERYONE.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

People who binge drink tend to do so frequently,” says Brewer. “Most people who drink too much aren’t addicted to alcohol. Most of these people are not dependent. What’s the big picture? This is a major public health problem.

But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people's infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don't sense the danger as it's happening, because what's wrong with friendship? Why can't we have friends of the opposite sex--or of the same sex, for that matter--even if we are married? The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony--so long as the "walls and windows" of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass's theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world--that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage. What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself--your deepest yearnings and frustrations--and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.

In introducing his Greek New Testament Erasmus writes of Christ and the Scriptures: “Were we to have seen Him with our eyes, we should not have so intimate a knowledge as they give us of Christ speaking, healing, dying, rising again, as it were, in our very presence.” “If the footprints of Christ are shown us in any place, we kneel down and adore them. Why do we not rather venerate the living and breathing picture of Him in these books?” “I wish that even the weakest woman might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. I wish that they were translated into all languages, so as to be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but even by Saracens and Turks. But the first step to their being read is to make them intelligible to the reader. I long for the day when the husbandman shall sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, when the weaver shall hum them to the time of his shuttles, when the traveller shall while away with their stories the weariness of his journey.

By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen—along with five others—as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales. I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defense, which was the most likely alternative. I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be. In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for an interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks. Doug, our quiet American on loan from the U.S. Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in skeptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his mustache, and said, “Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?” I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. “Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’re probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the line. I’m just there to make it look democratic.” The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. “Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Lucky bastard!” Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks. While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got around to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation. As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity, and a glamour beyond our gray steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else for more than a thousand years, since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen. Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marveled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messhalls and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.

In a good book, we get an intimate and nuanced picture of someone—to the point that our own prejudices are displaced (or almost entirely displaced)by the world created by the author. This is an extraordinarily important kind of social discipline: It reminds us that an important part of what it means to be human is to replace our snap judgments about people with the empirical evidence about themselves that they offer us. ~ Malcolm Gladwell in interview at back of the book. 277

The Swedish press had of course yet to grasp what was happening – what a lively scene had been created in the capital over the last few years – but what did it matter when Angello’s girlfriend had her own blog? Among pictures of high heels and skincare pointers, she talked about when her boyfriend spun in the booths at the clubs at Stureplan – the nightlife centre of Östermalm – at the venues that Filip Åkesson dreamed of one day getting into. She gossiped about the drinks at Grodan, F12 and Laroy, and posted pictures of Axwell and Sebastian Ingrosso, two other producers with whom Steve Angello was increasingly collaborating.

A bit playful and a little ironic – as if to emphasise how small yet prominent the Swedish scene was – they had started calling their trio Swedish House Mafia. In the summer they travelled to Ibiza, the party island in the Mediterranean that Filip already knew was the kingdom of heaven and played the clubs there. The pictures on the blog showed Sebastian Ingrosso with a sizeable drink in his hand at the legendary spot Pacha, where they performed with the star David Guetta. Steve Angello sat with a sunhat on the beach and read about himself in the music magazine Mixmag. The dream life.

Middle-aged men of privilege could be seen on corner couches in the embrace of somebody not their wife. Steve usually had a photographer circulating, given free access by his boss to take pictures of the most intimate situations. The photos proved very useful and helped to ensure that those in the know would not turn on their political master—a conspiracy of silence that proved remarkably successful

Once we get intimate with Jesus we are never lonely and we never lack for understanding or compassion. We can continually pour out our hearts to Him without being perceived as overly emotional or pitiful. The Christian who is truly intimate with Jesus will never draw attention to himself but will only show the evidence of a life where Jesus is completely in control. This is the outcome of allowing Jesus to satisfy every area of life to its depth. The picture resulting from such a life is that of the strong, calm balance that our Lord gives to those who are intimate with Him.

 “Isn’t that kind of an intimate thing to say to a stranger?” Her tone betrayed her. I knew how to read body language, and hers was telling me that she was interested. I’d more than piqued her curiosity. “Ah, we’re not strangers, Annie,” I whispered against her lips. “We’ve already shared a cozy elevator ride, I’ve cleaned your top, and you’ve sent me a very odd a picture of a question-mark clock. We’re practically dating.

For me and Zach, forbidden entry to school in our unsplit state, reading had been a furtive and therefore somehow intimate act. The two of us, under our mother’s tutelage or, more often, alone together, scratching out the shapes of letters in the clay banks of the river, or in the dust of the yard behind the house. Later, there were books, but only a few. A reading primer with pictures that our father had kept from his own childhood. The Village Book, held in the Village Hall and laboriously inscribed with histories of the area, of the local Councilmen, and of the laws they oversaw.

First, educate the traffick-aged victim on how to stay safe - especially in regards to social media. I don’t think they have nay idea that once they hit that send button just how far that message or picture can go and how it can be used. I think we should help parents understand their responsibility and what they can do to keep their kids safe. In addition to that, I think to educate the schools and school counselors, school nurses, teachers to be aware of the signs of the student who suddenly either begins to withdraw or become hyper-sexualized. Something is going on there.   Also, I think society as a whole needs to look at prostitution differently. There is no girl who wants to become a prostitute. It’s just not like that. And, we really didn’t play with hooker Barbies when we were kids and say “that’s what I want to be when I grow up.” No, we wanted to be nurses or stewardesses or something else. Don’t drive by prostitutes and look down at them and call them names and be hateful to them - but love them, pray for them.   Everybody can help in some way whether it’s through prayer, financial support, or volunteering. Everyone can help in some way.   Selling people for sex is a profitable business right now. I would love for the purchasers to stop buying. I think that’s wrong. If there’s no buying of the product, people will quit trying to sell the product, so it would end the market. I’d like that!

Neurotic shame is the root and fuel of all compulsive/addictive behaviors. My general working definition of compulsive/addictive behavior is “a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences.” The drivenness in any addiction is about the ruptured self, the belief that one is flawed as a person. The content of the addiction, whether it be an ingestive addiction or an activity addiction (such as work, shopping or gambling), is an attempt at an intimate relationship. The workaholic with his work and the alcoholic with his booze are having a love affair. Each one alters the mood to avoid the feeling of loneliness and hurt in the underbelly of shame. Each addictive acting out creates life-damaging consequences that create more shame. The new shame fuels the cycle of addiction. Figure 2.3, which I have adapted from Dr. Pat Carnes’s work, gives you a visual picture of how internalized shame fuels the addictive process and how addictions create more shame, which sets one up to be more shame-based.

Surprised at Kaye’s belated display of maternal instincts, Sean relented, promising he’d get in touch with Lily. Besides, he knew his own mother would never forgive him if he refused such a simple request. As he made his way down the narrow streets to the pensione opposite the Pantheon, where Lily and her roommate were staying, Sean steadfastly refused to acknowledge any other reason for agreeing to take Lily out. It had been three years since they’d left for college, not once had she come home to visit. But Sean still couldn’t look at a blonde without comparing her to Lily. He’d mounted the four flights of narrow, winding stairs, the sound of his steps muffled by red, threadbare carpet. At number seventeen, he’d stopped and stood, giving his racing heart a chance to quiet before he knocked. Calm down, he’d instructed himself. It’s only Lily. His knock echoed loudly in the empty hall. Through the door he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. Then it opened and there she was. She stood with her mouth agape. Her eyes, like beacons of light in the obscurity of the drab hallway, blinked at him with astonishment. “What are you doing here?” The question ended on a squeak. As if annoyed with the sound, she shut her mouth with an audible snap. Was it possible Kaye hadn’t bothered to tell Lily he’d be coming? “I heard you were spending a few days in Rome.” Sean realized he was staring like a dolt, but couldn’t help himself. It rattled him, seeing Lily again. A barrage of emotions and impressions mixed and churned inside him: how good she looked, different somehow, more self-confident than in high school, how maybe this time they might get along for more than 3.5 seconds. He became aware of a happy buzz of anticipation zinging through him. He was already picturing the two of them at a really nice trattoria. They’d be sitting at an intimate corner table. A waiter would come and take their order and Sean would impress her with his flawless Italian, his casual sophistication, his sprezzatura. By the time the waiter had served them their dessert and espresso, she’d be smiling at him across the soft candlelight. He’d reach out and take her hand. . . . Then Lily spoke again and Sean’s neat fantasy evaporated like a puff of smoke. “But how did you know I was here?” she’d asked, with what he’d conceitedly assumed was genuine confusion—that is, until a guy their age appeared. Standing just behind Lily, he had stared back at Sean through the aperture of the open door with a knowing smirk upon his face. And suddenly Sean understood. Lily wasn’t frowning from confusion. She was annoyed. Annoyed because he’d barged in on her and Lover Boy. Lily didn’t give a damn about him. At the realization, his jumbled thoughts at seeing her again, all those newborn hopes inside him, faded to black. His brain must have shorted after that. Suave, sophisticated guy that he was, Sean had blurted out, “Hey, this wasn’t my idea. I only came because Kaye begged me to—” Stupendously dumb. He knew better, had known since he was eight years old. If you wanted to push Lily Banyon into the red zone, all it took was a whispered, “Kaye.” The door to her hotel room had come at his face faster than a bullet train. He guessed he should be grateful she hadn’t been using a more lethal weapon, like the volleyball she’d smashed in his face during gym class back in eleventh grade. Even so, he’d been forced to jump back or have the number seventeen imprinted on his forehead. Their last skirmish, the one back in Rome, he’d definitely lost. He’d stood outside her room like a fool, Lover Boy’s laughter his only reply. Finally, the pensione’s night clerk had appeared, insisting he leave la bella americana in peace. He’d gone away, humiliated and oddly deflated.

My life has been fortunate in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met, lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is UPON THE LIVES OF THESE THAT I BASE WHAT I WRITE. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best that good men and good women can do at level best.

2014 Andy’s message continues   You know, Young, before you came along, the other students I chaperoned were mere duties to me. Life with them was much simpler. When you came into the picture, it became more difficult for me to separate the sex act and the intimate relationship we shared. I would often end up at an emotional crossroads when you were summoned to perform sexual duties. No matter how I told myself that you were merely performing a sexual favour and that love doesn’t enter into that equation, an acrid taste plagued me, even when I busied myself with passionate projects while waiting for you to complete your tasks. These negativities ate at my core, challenging my sanity and begging me to snatch you away from the sexual situations. A part of me wanted to possess you rather than permit you to come into your own. Yet as soon as I saw you, happy and bouncing into view, my levelheadedness and sound judgement would return. Once again, I could wrap you in my arms and surround you with my love. Although I may have seemed composed, those were indeed trying times. I had to restrain my irrationality so I wouldn’t jeopardise our E.R.O.S. statuses. Like you, I was also pushing the green-eyed monster back into its abysmal lair. Reflecting on those experiences, I’m surprised I managed to constrain myself. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m grateful for my Bahriji training and E.R.O.S. experiences – without them, I would not have been as strong or resilient. I remember Eric Hoffer, the American moral and social philosopher, who wrote, “Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.” Though I don’t consider E.R.O.S. recruits and members sinners, I think our experiences were, in a way, saintly – were they not?               Well, young one (you will always be my ‘young one’), I’ll message you again. For now I bid you au revoir mon ami. I’ll be in touch.               Love,               Andy

Before long, Khawlah lifted the black robe from her lover.  I could see clearly the face of the other woman, who was the beautiful Gharam; she was a cousin of Nasreen and Khawlah's lady-in-waiting. I had assisted each of them in the fashion makeover. They were often spotted in each other’s company, although on the surface they seemed more like friends than lovers. I suppose they were much like Andy and me, portraying a picture perfect male friendship, yet we were lovers in private. In both cases, intimate companions and lovers were all rolled into one.

In the Sultan Suite   Andy was eagerly awaiting my reappearance. He had nailed as many engaging pictures as he could, and he had done superbly – but I didn’t know that yet.               When I regained position, Lihaar had straddled Aziz’s firmness, and Jabril’s thickness was gyrating within her derriere. The men rocked into her in rhythmic synchronicity while moans of zealous fervencies rose in crescendo from the singer’s throat. Coraline seized the opportunity and plunged her tilting pelvis onto the actress’s face. As if executing a perfect dance the Indian twirled her lecherous tongue into the big sister’s blossoming crevice. Afraid the dark-haired female would evade her pleasure vault, Coraline’s tenacious hands gripped her tightly.               Aziz drove his slithering tongue into Narnia’s wetness, teasing her nether region to groans of rapturous ecstasy. His probing fingers buried deep in her rousing bottom, driving her to bouts of climactic liberations. She shuttered unquenchably to each heaving motion of intimate deliverance. Waves of euphoric ecstasies filled her girlishness. She delivered her youthful exuberance again and again until her heaving breasts laid heavy against the Arab’s muscular chest. After all, I had been taught by great masters of the day – and I was the sorcerer’s apprentice. Therefore, no encouragements were required for me to capture affectionate kisses and private embraces from every bewitching angle. But my task was by no means over. Exotic shots of erotic discharges arrived in the shapely form of Ms. Lihaar riding both phalluses with abandon. Like her little sister Narnia, Coraline had delivered curls of billowing euphoria onto the actress’s face, coating the flawless beauty with dribbling wetness before lapping at her deliverance with sensual jubilations.               The men could no longer withhold their deposits. Sprays of masculinity filled the actress as she milked their pounding manliness to blissful nirvana. Together, my chaperone and I had garnered superlative shots for our patron when we left the Sultan cavern quietly, returning to the Maharajah in pursuit of a saturnalia of unbridled revelry.

Debbie truly had Tess’s best interest at heart with the promoting of romanticized contemplation, and she hoped that such contemplation would make transparent a roses and chocolate candy theme that would ignite a passionate desire in her friend for deep intimate companionship that would make lengthy modifications until it became a candlelight connection that would light up brightly and cause a common smile to take form in the lives of two singles. But the detailed scene of Tess’s grander purview on the overall picture placed her friend’s intent in a corner of stagnant nothingness that had no realistic chance of ever modifying into the romantic reality that she advocated.

Adnan was deluged with letters, notes, pictures, and prayers. Some were short messages of support, others were pages and pages of personal divulgences. Adnan was stunned at the sometimes very intimate nature of the letters, people pouring out their pain and tribulations to a stranger. He realized it was sometimes easier for people to share their deepest sorrows with a stranger than with people they knew. I told him that’s how the Internet mostly works. Students

I don’t take kindly to any of you shanty boys touching me,” she said. “So unless I give you permission, from now on, you’d best keep your hands off me.” With the last word, she lifted her boot and brought the heel down on Jimmy’s toes. She ground it hard. Like most of the other shanty boys, at the end of a day out in the snow, he’d taken off his wet boots and layers of damp wool socks to let them dry overnight before donning them again for the next day’s work. Jimmy cursed, but before he could move, she brought her boot down on his other foot with a smack that rivaled a gun crack. This time he howled. And with an angry curse, he shoved her hard, sending her sprawling forward. She flailed her arms in a futile effort to steady herself and instead found herself falling against Connell McCormick. His arms encircled her, but the momentum of her body caused him to lose his balance. He stumbled backward. “Whoa! Hold steady!” Her skirt and legs tangled with his, and they careened toward the rows of dirty damp socks hanging in front of the fireplace. The makeshift clotheslines caught them and for a moment slowed their tumble. But against their full weight, the ropes jerked loose from the nails holding them to the beams. In an instant, Lily found herself falling. She twisted and turned among the clotheslines but realized that her thrashing was only lassoing her against Connell. In the downward tumble, Connell slammed into a chair near the fireplace. Amidst the tangle of limbs and ropes, she was helpless to do anything but drop into his lap. With a thud, she landed against him. Several socks hung from his head and covered his face. Dirty socks covered her shoulders and head too. Their stale rotten stench swarmed around her. And for a moment she was conscious only of the fact that she was near to gagging from the odor. She tried to lift a hand to move the sock hanging over one of her eyes but found that her arms were pinned to her sides. She tilted her head and then blew sideways at the crusty, yellowed linen. But it wouldn’t budge. Again she shook her head—this time more emphatically. Still the offending article wouldn’t fall away. Through the wig of socks covering Connell’s head, she could see one of his eyes peeking at her, watching her antics. The corner of his lips twitched with the hint of a smile. She could only imagine what she looked like. If it was anything like him, she must look comical. As he cocked his head and blew at one of his socks, she couldn’t keep from smiling at the picture they both made, helplessly drenched in dirty socks, trying to remove them with nothing but their breath. “Welcome to Harrison.” His grin broke free. “You know how to make a girl feel right at home.” She wanted to laugh. But as he straightened himself in the chair, she became at once conscious of the fact that she was sitting directly in his lap and that the other men in the room were hooting and calling out over her intimate predicament. She scrambled to move off him. But the ropes had tangled them together, and her efforts only caused her to fall against him again. She was not normally a blushing woman, but the growing indecency of her situation was enough to chase away any humor she may have found in the situation and make a chaste woman like herself squirm with embarrassment. “I’d appreciate your help,” she said, struggling again to pull her arms free of the rope. “Or do all you oafs make a sport of manhandling women?” “All you oafs?” His grin widened. “Are you insinuating that I’m an oaf?” “What in the hairy hound is going on here?” She jumped at the boom of Oren’s voice and the slam of the door. The room turned quiet enough to hear the click-click of Oren pulling down the lever of his rifle. She glanced over her shoulder to the older man, to the fierceness of his drawn eyebrows and the deadly anger in his eyes as he took in her predicament.

There is a quiet core, a center inside each of us, where our spirit resides. This is the intimate place where we commune with God. This is the origin of our prayer life and our inner place of refuge when the world gets crazy. For me, I picture this place like a kelp forest on the ocean floor. There may be a storm above, but the depths remain calm. I picture myself diving deep down within myself when I sense a storm on the horizon of my life. I practice going there in ordinary times so I can get there quickly when the waves are too big for me. Our steadiness lies within. Kristin Armstrong

Show off,” Taylor told him. “Just because Brody has only human strength right now.” Veris grinned. “Let me enjoy the superiority while I can.” She rolled her eyes. “Men. Who cares who is stronger?” Brody slid his hand over her waist. “He’s stroking his own ego, anyway. He’s always stronger, even when I’m vampire.” “And I’ve always told you strength is mostly a mental thing…” Veris drew in a breath and caught Brody’s face between his hands. “Guds, I missed you.” He kissed him, slowly and deeply, and Taylor’s body fizzed and bloomed as she watched them share the intimate expression. She loved this side of their three-way relationship. She loved watching them together and she loved catching hints of their long, long past together. Both of them were typical males; they didn’t share intimacies and didn’t like talking about themselves except for moment like now when their guard was down and they felt completely secure and safe. Taylor pieced together the story of their relationship before she had met them one fragment at a time and she still didn’t have the full picture for it was a story that stretched over a thousand years.

Just because Eve does not speak does not mean she does not think. Or want. Or wonder. Just because Eve says very little in this story does not mean she is passive and dumb. Isn't it just as likely that she was a curious, growing being full of ideas and questions with no one to talk to? I imagine her left alone, bursting with curiosity and imagination, exploring the peripheries of the garden, delving into the mystery of the forbidden and the secret, far from center stage. How else could she have run into a character like the serpent? [......] It seems obvious that the serpent would choose Eve to talk to and not Adam, because the serpent could sense that Eve was craving dialogue. The serpent, with its sharp intellect, its curiosity and knowledge, becomes a psuedo-G-d, opening Eve's eyes to possibilities that exist only in her dormant imagination. The serpent is referred to as male, but perhaps it is more interesting to imagine it as Lilith in disguise. Though it was probably meant to show Lilith's satanic nature, an illustration in a sixteenth-century text does show Lilith with the body of a snake tempting Eve. The serpent seems to have some Lilith-like qualities: a powerful gift of speech, an intimate knowledge of G-d, a quality of defiance and a strength of will- surprising in an ideal garden. I like the picture this makes- While G-d teaches Adam about planting and sowing, Lilith teaches Eve about power and freedom.

I don’t understand,” Jackie said. “I mean, okay, the thing with the eye socket. But how does that say anything except he’s a sick bastard?” “You have to try to go inside his mind,” I said, and I took a deep breath. “Try to picture what he was thinking.” “I’d rather not,” Jackie said softly, but I was already hearing the far-off whisper of wings and the slow rising of shadows and I closed my eyes and tried to see it, reaching down into the Dark Basement and stroking the thing that uncurled there, petting it until it purred, stretched, and sprang up into the black interior sky and showed me all the pictures of Eternal Nighttime pleasure.… And I see her, see the way she thrashes, moans, twists wildly against the ropes, fighting to get a scream past the gag, seeing nothing but her approaching death and not even seeing the all-important Why of it, the reason it must be, the Me who is doing this to her because she has refused to notice—and even now her eyes are on the knife and not the hand holding it and I need to make her see ME, need to make her pay attention to ME, and I drop the knife and I move closer, more direct, more intimate, and I begin to use hands, feet, fingernails, teeth—and still she will not see ME and so I grab her by the hair, that perfect golden hair, and I haul her face around to look and she has to see ME at last. And she does.

Friendship is something to be achieved over years of deep and intimate connection, not by clicking on a small picture and requesting it. As much as we can be aware of the differences between embodied friendship and the social network version, as every politician knows, a lie repeated hundreds of times becomes truth.

up the pathway to the front door.  She’d called and left him a message, letting him know that she was coming, and that she’d leave the documents with the housekeeper if he wasn’t there.  Ringing the doorbell, she couldn’t stop the blush that stole up her cheeks as she remembered the last time she’d been here.  Had it really been only two days ago?  It seemed like a lot longer.  Did he still have those stockings?  Surely he’d tossed them out by now.  And no, she hadn’t dared to purchase another pair.  Not after the last debacle.  When the door opened, she was bracing herself to face Hunter once again.  Her plan was to congratulate him, just as she would any other client, hand him the champagne and the closing documents, and then leave as quickly as possible.  Just as she would all of her other clients.  They were all trying to unpack, overwhelmed with the process but excited about their new purchase.  She very seriously doubted if anything overwhelmed Hunter, but she was going to go through her routine anyway.  All of her clients deserved the same treatment, and she shouldn’t slack off with Hunter simply because…well, because he could make her feel things that… “Goodness, come in out of the heat, my dear!” the housekeeper urged, waving Kara into the cool interior.  “Mr. West is out back in the pool, but he said he was expecting you and that you’d know the way.  If he needs anything at all,” she said, as she hefted a purse onto her shoulder that Kara suspected could substitute for a suitcase, “just tell him to give me a ring.” Kara opened her mouth to stop the woman as the two of them exchanged places, the housekeeper moving to the outside even as Kara was nudged inside.  Kara went so far as to lift her hand, trying to indicate that she wanted to say something, but the efficient woman bustled out of the house, closing the front door in the process.  Kara stared at the closed door for several long moments, wondering how that had just happened.  Her plan had been simple.  Just hand over the bottle and documents, convey her congratulations and head back.  What had just happened?  Kara turned around.  It felt strange to be standing here, alone, in Hunter’s house.  She’d been here two days ago, but the house hadn’t been his.  The man now owned the house, all the furniture, and the acres of land and waterfront.  It felt much more intimate now for some reason.  Looking around, she wished that she could just leave the documents on the kitchen counter or the rough, wooden coffee table that looked perfect next to the white sofas.  Everything felt and looked clean and comfortable, exactly as she would have decorated this area.  The pops of green were vibrant and exhilarating, a perfect accompaniment to the fresh, white furniture.  With a sigh, she turned away from the alluring great room décor and searched out the man of the moment.  As she stepped past the sofas, she saw him.  In the pool.  Without any clothes on! Oh goodness, she thought with a strangled breath.  It took her several moments to realize that she needed to inhale, her breath caught in her throat as she watched the man’s bare skin, and all the muscles, and…well, all of him!  Okay, so he wasn’t naked, he was wearing a bathing suit but his broad, muscular back and those arms…they were even more ridged with muscles than she’d thought.  He was spectacular!  Never in her wildest imaginings had she pictured him that buff, but there

Pans and other such objects are the very opposite of monuments. They don't commemorate revolutions or victories on the battlefield; don't allude to great contracts or those moments of upheaval that have an undeniably transformative effect on society. It's rarely possible to link them to one specific date, to say: 'From that day on, everything was different.' They belong not to the so-called big picture of history but instead to a realm that is far more intimate. Quiet, and overlooked. A realm that was long considered female--and, accordingly, insignificant.

museums struggle to offer intimate encounters with art. Adding more guards, more security cordons, more fortified display cases, more glass-fronted picture frames, and more electric eyes is not likely to improve the experience.

As holy fear grows within us according to our increased comprehension of God’s glory, it purifies our motives, frees us from the fear of man, and produces true holiness in our lives. The manifestation of holy fear is immediate and complete obedience to God regardless of whether we see a reason or benefit or how painful it is. With this knowledge, we can now turn our discussion to this unique gift’s benefits, and in this section we’ll focus on what is undoubtably the greatest benefit of all: intimacy with God. The word intimate comes from two Latin words: intus, which means “within,” and intimus, which means “very secret.”1 In joining the two, we come up with “innermost secrets.” This gives a very good picture of intimacy, a word used to describe an affectionate connection between two close friends on levels far deeper than merely an acquaintance, which is someone you’ve met and know slightly but not well.

In an effort to get fresh ’n’ clean and to look like the dewy, virginal women pictured on the packages of Massengill, women can make themselves dirtier than ever. Douching kills off the beneficial lactobacilli and paves the way for infestation by anaerobes and their trails of cadaverine. So while I rarely dispense medical advice, this one is easy: don’t douche, ever, period, end of squirt bottle.

I did see pictures of Mom posing nude in the backyard Reno left on the dresser one time and I had an intimate look at my mother.

Our conversations were more open and intimate than any lovers'. I imagined how wonderful it would be if indeed we could be lovers. I longed for the warmth of her skin on mine. I pictured us married, living together. But I had to face the fact that Sumire had no such romantics feelings for me [...] Still, the time I spent with her was more precious than anything. She helped me forget the undertone of loneliness in my life. She expanded the outer edges of my world.

A woman’s personal altar evokes her particular--her intimate--relationship to the divine, human, and natural realms. There she assembles a highly condensed, symbolic model of connection by bringing together sacred images and ritual objects, pictures, mementos, natural materials, and decorative effects which represent different realms of meaning and experience--heaven and earth, family and deities, nature and culture, Self and Other. By actively engaging the Divine at the self-created sacred place, she makes her altar a living instrument of communication, a channeling device for integration, reconciliation, and creative transformation.[xxvi]

Searching for models in art as well as literature, he had roamed the picture galleries during his trip to London, visiting the Dulwich and Vernon collections, the newly established National Gallery, the royal collections at Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, and the vast private collection of Samuel Rogers. He had seen seascapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorrain, and was particularly drawn to those of J. M. W. Turner, in which he saw intimations of what, in Moby-Dick, he was to call the “howling infinite.

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head—my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world. That is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere. Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us. However, and conversely, our models fall far short of representing the world fully. That is why we make mistakes and why we are regularly surprised. In our heads, we can keep track of only a few variables at one time. We often draw illogical conclusions from accurate assumptions, or logical conclusions from inaccurate assumptions. Most of us, for instance, are surprised by the amount of growth an exponential process can generate. Few of us can intuit how to damp oscillations in a complex system.

Friendship is acting out God's love for people in tangible ways. We were made to represent the love of God in each other's lives, so that each person we walk through life with has a more profound sense of God's love for them. Friendship is an opportunity to act on God's behalf in the lives of the people that we're close to, reminding each other who God is. When we do the hard, intimate work of friendship, we bring a little more of the divine into daily life. We get to remind one another about the bigger, more beautiful picture that we can't always see from where we are.

Jesus divines what hard thoughts men think of God under the burden of unfulfilled desire; how they doubt His goodness, and deem Him indifferent, heartless, unjust. He shows His intimate knowledge of their secret imaginations by the cases He puts; for the unkind friend and unnatural father, and we may add, the unjust judge, are pictures not indeed of what God is, or of what He would have us believe God to be, but certainly of what even pious men sometimes think Him to be. And He cannot only divine, but sympathize.

Even as you strive for a big-picture view of your business, you need to become intimate with it at the ground level. After all, you’re leading a group effort. You need to connect with people throughout the business so that you can both inspire them and learn from them. If you don’t fill them in on your thinking, they’re not likely to make strategy part of their agenda. And if you don’t enlist their knowledge in creating plans, you are wasting an invaluable resource: As the people who talk with the customers and do a lion’s share of the work, they possess information

THAT SUMMER, before shipping out to Vietnam, Mogie Crocker came home for a visit. “We were at dinner one evening,” his mother recalled, “and just talking in generalities about the war. And he said, ‘Of course if I were Vietnamese I probably would be on the side of the Viet Cong.’ I puzzled over that. And my husband did, too. I suppose Mogie was relating it to our American Revolution, that he saw their need for their own freedom. But as an American citizen, he also saw the larger picture of trying to prevent communism.

In one picture, ten loggers sat side by side in a wedge-shaped cut sawed out of a massive cedar. James could almost hear the thunderous, splintering crash that giant must have made when it fell. The thought filled him with a strangely intimate sort of woe.  On

was a problem and so he passed the apartment entrance and continued to walk down the street. The porter eventually caught up with him and explained that the Via Firenze apartment had been raided. In the succeeding hours and days however, it became clear that this was the limit of the breach of the organisation’s security as all the priests reported back that the other locations were safe. New security arrangements were immediately put in place by Derry. Escapees were moved to different billets and a strict limit was put on the amount of knowledge available to those who were assisting the groups. The total picture was known only to O’Flaherty, Simpson and Derry. Clearly, however, Kappler, Koch and their associates knew what was going on in general terms. Intimation of this came in the form of an invitation to O’Flaherty to attend a reception at the Hungarian Embassy. This particular Embassy was one that the Germans often chose for informal diplomatic activities. Accepting this invitation would involve O’Flaherty leaving the sanctuary of his accommodation and there was a suspicion it might be a trap, given recent developments. However, in typical fashion, he decided to attend. As it turned out, there were not many guests but the German Ambassador was one of them. Towards the end of the evening, von Weizsaecker asked the Monsignor for a quiet word. The Ambassador explained to the Monsignor that they knew precisely the activities he was involved in so, while the Ambassador would guarantee him safe conduct back to the Vatican that night, he added, ‘If you ever step outside Vatican territory again, on whatever pretext, you will be arrested at once. Despite the consequences one could foresee, that decision has been agreed in your case and I cannot alter it. Now will you please think about what I have said?’12 O’Flaherty smiled down at the Ambassador and in a cheerful voice, which he raised so others in the room could hear, replied, ‘Your Excellency is too

Teens, when did logging on to social networking sites delete common sense? Intimate personal details, embarrassing pictures, derogatory language; is this the image you want to portray to teachers, clergy and potential employers? Before you put your worst on display for a quick laugh remember; a momentary lapse in judgment could permanently ruin your life.

Chaz thought that he would eventually charm his new bride into sharing her vast inheritance. He had pictured the intimate ceremony taking place in the bedroom, of course, after a night of athletic lovemaking—Joey, still aglow, unfolding the pre-nup and holding it to the flame of a lilac-scented candle. It had never happened, though, and after nearly two years of waiting Chaz had given up hope. Joey wasn’t hoarding the family fortune so much as ignoring it, which Chaz regarded as a crime against nature. What was the point, he’d asked himself, of staying wed to a wealthy woman who refused to act like one? The answer: There was no point.

The body’s initial response to a noxious local insult is to produce a local inflammatory response with sequestration and activation of white blood cells and the release of a variety of mediators to deal with the primary ‘insult’ and prevent further damage either locally or in distant organs. Normally, a delicate balance is achieved between pro- and anti-inflammatory mediators. However, if the inflammatory response is excessive, local control is lost and a large array of mediators, including prostaglandins, leukotrienes, free oxygen radicals and particularly pro-inflammatory cytokines (p. 72), are released into the circulation. The inflammatory and coagulation cascades are intimately related. The process of blood clotting not only involves platelet activation and fibrin deposition but also causes activation of leucocytes and endothelial cells. Conversely, leucocyte activation induces tissue factor expression and initiates coagulation. Control of the coagulation cascade is achieved through the natural anticoagulants, antithrombin (AT III), activated protein C (APC) and tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI), which not only regulate the initiation and amplification of the coagulation cascade but also inhibit the pro-inflammatory cytokines. Deficiency of AT III and APC (features of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC)) facilitates thrombin generation and promotes further endothelial cell dysfunction. Systemic inflammation During a severe inflammatory response, systemic release of cytokines and other mediators triggers widespread interaction between the coagulation pathways, platelets, endothelial cells and white blood cells, particularly the polymorphonuclear cells (PMNs). These ‘activated’ PMNs express adhesion factors (selectins), causing them initially to adhere to and roll along the endothelium, then to adhere firmly and migrate through the damaged and disrupted endothelium into the extravascular, interstitial space together with fluid and proteins, resulting in tissue oedema and inflammation. A vicious circle of endothelial injury, intravascular coagulation, microvascular occlusion, tissue damage and further release of inflammatory mediators ensues. All organs may become involved. This manifests in the lungs as the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and in the kidneys as acute tubular necrosis (ATN), while widespread disruption of the coagulation system results in the clinical picture of DIC. The endothelium itself produces mediators that control blood vessel tone locally: endothelin 1, a potent vasoconstrictor, and prostacyclin and nitric oxide (NO, p. 82), which are systemic vasodilators. NO (which is also generated outside the endothelium) is implicated in both the myocardial depression and the profound vasodilatation of both arterioles and venules that causes the relative hypovolaemia and systemic hypotension found in septic/systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) shock. A major component of the tissue damage in septic/SIRS shock is the inability to take up and use oxygen at mitochondrial level, even if global oxygen delivery is supranormal. This effective bypassing of the tissues results in a reduced arteriovenous oxygen difference, a low oxygen extraction ratio, a raised plasma lactate and a paradoxically high mixed venous oxygen saturation (SvO2). Role of splanchnic ischaemia In shock, splanchnic hypoperfusion plays a major role in initiating and amplifying the inflammatory response, ultimately resulting in multiple organ failure (MOF). The processes involved include: • increased gut mucosal permeability • translocation of organisms from the gastrointestinal tract lumen into portal venous and lymphatic circulation • Kupffer cell activation with production and release of inflammatory mediators.

for one of the stock products of Hollywood had become anti-Nazi pictures, and Lanny’s intimate stories would be useful to writers, producers, directors, costumers, property men, and on down the line.

James Theimer: This is great! I will send you a “how- to” on reviews as soon as I’m back at my computer. Daria O'Brien: “77 Days delivers a masterful blend of political intrigue and heart-pounding action that makes every page turn feel like a necessity rather than a choice. Set against the powder keg of a disputed presidential election, this novel doesn't just describe a nation on edge – it throws you headlong into the chaos and refuses to let go. The author weaves together medical drama, family relationships, and military tension with the precision of a skilled surgeon and the dramatic flair of a seasoned storyteller. While most political thrillers are content to live in the halls of power, this one dares to show us both the big picture and the intimate human cost of a democracy in crisis. From its explosive opening to its breathless conclusion, 77 Days proves itself to be that rare thriller that manages to be both intellectually stimulating and viscerally entertaining. This is one of those books that will have you both calling in sick to work and questioning your assumptions about modern American politics.