Islands Of Abandonment Quotes

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.

A song of despair The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

We're the unmended, the untended, cold soldiers of the shoe. We're the neglected, the never resurrected, agonies of the few. We're the once kissed, unmissed and always refused. Because we're the unfinished and feared and we're never pursued. And just that easily, on my behalf, I come around. Because I'm burning. The beast of War feeds only on the meats of War. And now I'm for carnage. Here's how my anguish frees. Destroy everyone of course. Because I'm unwanted and unsafe. And I'll take tears away with torments and rape, killings and fears not even the dead will escape. Encircling the Guilty, Ashamed, Blameless and Enslaved. Absolved. Butchering their prejudice. Patience. Their Value. Because I'm without value. I'm the coming of every holocaust. Turning no lost. Rending tissue, sinew and bone. Excepting no suffering. By me all levees will break. All silos heave. I will walk heavy. And I will walk strange. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am only revolutions Of ruin. Because I am too soon. Because without You, I am only revolutions Of ruin. I'm the prophecy prophecies pass. Why need dies at last. How oceans dry. Islands drown. And skies of salt crash to the ground. I turn the powerful. Defy the weak. Only grass grows down abandoned streets. For a greater economy shall follow Us and it will be undone. And a greater autonomy shall follow Us and it too will be undone. And a greater feeling shall follow Love and it too we will blow to dust. For I am longings without trust. The cycloidal haste freedom from Hailey forever wastes. Dust cares for only dust. And time only for Us. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am only revolutions Of ruin. Because I am too soon. Because without You, I am only revolutions Of ruin. We are always sixteen...

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave. He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him. So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now. But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time. He really left. Because it was all that we could do.

The whole island is spotted with derelict cottages and abandoned churches like this one. They sit in pastures as invisible to the Irish as a mother is to a teenage girl.

I did remember. Mr. Rector and Mr. Endicott had basically taken a beautiful island paradise and bulldozed it into an ugly subdivision, complete with tennis courts and a tiki bar.

Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. For relationships too must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits -- islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

I asked her to leave with me on our wedding night.” “What?” my grandfather said, his composure further weakened. He too had believed this was all a childish bluff and suddenly felt the ground shifting under his feet. “Oh, yes. We could have been in the Epidi Islands by now, or Mur. I would have taken her anywhere she wanted,” Eugenides assured him. “She wouldn’t abandon her people—she knew how Erondites would rule if she did.

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

She collected grudges and heartaches the way she’d once collected Barbies, never sharing, never abandoning.

Time is, after all, the great healer. The question is: How long does it need?. Then, How long have we got'. It may not be long

We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us.

Life enticed you to love it. It lured you on with the sweet, terrible music of happiness. Life told you: Love, Get Married, Work, Hope, Pray, Put Everything on My Altar. And in the end it abandoned you without a backward glance...

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself.

In so many places, we are so busy playing at being stewards of the Earth, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Once we have left our mark on an ecosystem, we show no hesitation in throwing open the hood again later to fiddle with its workings. We run the Earth as if it were one giant botanical garden to tend; passing judgment on species, playing God. I

They’re all pretty wasted by now and, besides, they’ve abandoned the tables for the dance floor. It’s absolutely crammed in there. There are all these thirty-somethings slut-dropping and grinding on each other as though they’re in some shit noughties club dancing to 50 Cent, not a marquee on a deserted island with some guys playing fiddles.

Knowledge deepens appreciation.

I would abandon my island for you. (This is probably untrue.)

If one has been absent for decades from a place that one once held dear, the wise would generally counsel that one should never return there again. History abounds with sobering examples: After decades of wandering the seas and overcoming all manner of deadly hazards, Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca, only to leave it again a few years later. Robinson Crusoe, having made it back to England after years of isolation, shortly thereafter set sail for that very same island from which he had so fervently prayed for deliverance. Why after so many years of longing for home did these sojourners abandon it so shortly upon their return? It is hard to say. But perhaps for those returning after a long absence, the combination of heartfelt sentiments and the ruthless influence of time can only spawn disappointments. The landscape is not as beautiful as one remembered it. The local cider is not as sweet. Quaint buildings have been restored beyond recognition, while fine old traditions have lapsed to make way for mystifying new entertainments. And having imagined at one time that one resided at the very center of this little universe, one is barely recognized, if recognized at all. Thus do the wise counsel that one should steer far and wide of the old homestead. But no counsel, however well grounded in history, is suitable for all. Like bottles of wine, two men will differ radically from each other for being born a year apart or on neighboring hills. By way of example, as this traveler stood before the ruins of his old home, he was not overcome by shock, indignation, or despair. Rather, he exhibited the same smile, at once wistful and serene, that he had exhibited upon seeing the overgrown road. For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.

You're here because you know what it's like to feel powerless. Everyone you see here has been given every privilege that money can buy, but at the end of the day, there are some privileges that money can't buy. Money doesn't keep people from telling girls who look like me to go back to the other side of the border. And no matter what your family name is, or how white your skin, I'm willing to bet that there are still people who tell you to smile, because you look so pretty when you smile." She paused, just for an instant. "we all play by rules our brothers will never even have to know. "You want to know why we go cliff-diving and off-roading and drag you out to abandoned islands in the night?" Victoria's voice was no louder, but her delivery was suddenly crystal clear. "Because we can. Because when people say that well-behaved women rarely make history, they leave out the little tidbit that the women who do make history rarely do so alone.

He reached the foot of the embankment, and waved with one arm, shouting at the few cars moving along the westbound carriageway. None of the drivers could see him, let alone hear his dry-throated croak, and Maitland stopped, conserving his strength. lie tried to climb the embankment, but within a few steps collapsed in a heap on the muddy slope. Deliberately, he turned his back to the motorway and for the first time began to inspect the island. 'Maitland, poor man, you're marooned here like Crusoe - If you don't look out you'll be beached here for ever...' He had spoken no more than the truth. This patch of abandoned ground left over at the junction of three motorway routes was literally a deserted island. Angry with himself, Maitland lifted the crutch to strike this meaningless soil.

An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that 'burned up the earth' in the remote past and that is destined to return: 'The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail ... Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong with nature on the earth, and a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The Holy Spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. ... The comet burnt everything to the ground. There wasn't a thing left ... There is a prophecy that the comet will destroy the earth again. But it's a restoration. The greatest blessing this island [Turtle Island/America] will ever have. People don't listen to their spiritual guidance today. There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars when the comet comes down again.

This is a corrupted world, yes - one long fallen from a state of grace - but it is a world too that knows how to live. It has a great capacity for repair, for recovery, for forgiveness - of a sort - if we can only learn to do it so.

Again—this latency of life. It drifts around us all the time, invisible, like an ether. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink. Savor it: each breath, each sip, is thick with potential. In this cup of nothing is the germ of everything.

The neuroscientist David Eagleman once proposed that we have three deaths: the first at the point at which the body ceases to function, the second upon burial, and the third being “that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Anywhere you wanted to travel to?” ‘I’m suffocated by the darkness and this question. I wish I was brave enough to have travelled. Now that I don’t have time to go anywhere, I want to go everywhere: I want to get lost in the deserts of Saudi Arabia; find myself running from the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas; stay overnight on Hashima Island, this abandoned coal-mining facility in Japan sometimes known as Ghost Island; travel the Death Railway in Thailand, because even with a name like that, there’s a chance I can survive the sheer cliffs and rickety wooden bridges; an everywhere else. I want to climb every last mountain, row down every last river, explore every last cave, cross every last bridge, run across last beach, visit every last town, city, country. Everywhere. I should’ve done more than watch documentaries and video blogs about these places.

Toward the end of her life these memories intermingle with memories of the stories she has loved: homesick Ulysses abandoning his raft in the storm and swimming toward the island of the Phaeacians, Aethon-the-donkey wrapping his soft lips around a stinging nettle, all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.

HOW ENGLISH BECAME A DOUBLE LANGUAGE After the Romans conquered England in the first century AD, they hired German and Scandinavian mercenaries from Anglia and Saxony to help fend off pirates and put down rebellions by the native Picts and Celts. When the Roman Empire abandoned England in 410 AD, more Anglo-Saxons migrated to the island, marginalizing the Gallic-speaking Celts, wiping out the Latin of the Romans, and imposing their Germanic tongue throughout England. But 600 years later Latin came back this roundabout way: In 911 AD Danish Vikings conquered territory along the north coast of France and named it after themselves, Normandy, land of the Norsemen. After 150 years of marriage to French women, these Danes spoke what their mothers spoke, a thousand-year-old French dialect of Latin. In 1066 King Wilhelm of Normandy (a.k.a. William the Conqueror) led his armies across the English Channel and defeated the English king. With that victory, French came to England. Throughout history, foreign conquests usually erase native languages. But England was the exception. For some mysterious reason, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons and the Latinate French of the Normans merged. As a result, the vocabulary of what became modern English doubled. English has at least two words for everything. Compare, for example, the Germanic-rooted words “fire,” “hand,” “tip,” “ham,” and “flow” to the French-derived words “flame,” “palm,” “point,” “pork,” and “fluid.

To the friends I have abandoned: 
I am so sorry for cutting you off.
 Anxiety has found a home deep within my bones. 
I shake in marrow earthquakes; tremors send fissures through my soul.
 A love for you still exists; I feel it when I am most alone.
 This island I’ve become, it is not a permanent home.
It’s just hard to be around other people
 when I can hardly stand being in my own skin.

Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, “reserv[ing] and set[ting] apart for the settlement of the negroes . . . the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida,” to be subdivided “so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.

Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead. Beneath it was a photo of me-my most recent school photo. “Oh, no.” My heart filling with dread, I took the paper from Mr. Smith’s hands. “Couldn’t they have found a better picture?” Mr. Smith looked at me sharply. “Miss Oliviera,” he said, his gray eyebrows lowered. “I realize it’s all the rage with you young people today to toss off flippant one-liners so you can get your own reality television shows. But I highly doubt MTV will be coming down to Isla Huesos to film you in the Underworld. So that can’t be all you have to say about this.” He was right, of course. Though I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, because John was in the room, and I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he already did. But what I wanted to do was burst into tears. “Is that about Pierce?” John looked uneasy. Outside, thunder rumbled again. This time, it sounded even closer than before. “Yes, of course, it is, John,” Mr. Smith said. There was something strange about his voice. He sounded almost as if he were mad at John. Only why would he be? John had done the right thing. He’d explained about the Furies. “What did you expect? Have you gotten to the part about the reward your father is offering for information leading to your safe return, Miss Oliviera?” My gaze flicked down the page. I wanted to throw up. “One million dollars?” My dad’s company, one of the largest providers in the world of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries, was valued at several hundred times that. “That cheapskate.” This was all so very, very bad. “One million dollars is a lot of money to most people.” Mr. Smith said, with a strong emphasis on most people. He still had that odd note in his voice. “Though I recognize that money may mean little to a resident of the Underworld. So I’d caution you to use judiciousness, wherever it is that you’re going, as there are many people on this island who’ll be more than willing to turn you in for only a small portion of that reward money. I don’t suppose I might ask where you’re going? Or suggest that you pay a call on your mother, who is beside herself with worry?” “That’s a good idea,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I felt much better already. I could straighten out this whole thing with a single conversation. “I should call my mom-“ Both Mr. Smith’s cry of alarm and the fact that John grabbed me by the wrist as I was reaching into my book bag for my cell phone stopped me from making calls of any sort. “You can’t use you phone,” Mr. Smith said. “The police-and your father-are surely waiting for you to do just that. They’ll triangulate on the signal from the closest cell tower, and find you.” When I stared at him for his use of the word triangulate, Mr. Smith shook his head and said, “My partner, Patrick, is obsessed with Law & Order reruns.

Hence there are many things that governments, corporations and individuals can do to avoid climate change. But to be effective, they must be done on a global level. When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet. The Republic of Kiribati – an islands nation in the Pacific Ocean – could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero and nevertheless be submerged under the rising waves if other countries don’t follow suit. Chad could put a solar panel on every roof in the country and yet become a barren desert due to the irresponsible environmental policies of distant foreigners. Even powerful nations such as China and Japan are not ecologically sovereign. To protect Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo from destructive floods and typhoons, the Chinese and Japanese will have to convince the Russian and American governments to abandon their ‘business as usual’ approach.

Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall; the general law of increasing disorder is on the rise. What is it to be a cause without an effect, an effect without a cause, to abandon time-bound thinking, the use of tenses, the temporally related emotions of impatience, expectation, hope, and fear? But I can’t. At the edge of the lake I watch ducks. Like them, my thinking rises and falls on the same water.

I focused my speech on the way in which 1960s leftists had betrayed their own ideals by doing an about-face on civil rights and supporting race preferences, by abandoning the Vietnamese when they were being murdered and oppressed by communists, and by helping to crush the island of Cuba under the heel of the Castroist dictatorship. I also described my experiences with the Black Panther Party, a gang led by murderers and rapists whom the left had anointed as its political vanguard and whose crimes leftists continue to ignore to this day.

Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely. It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not thinking of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had completely forgotten the late Morrison. It is true that to a certain extent he had forgotten also where he was. Thus, unchecked by any sort of self consciousness, Heyst walked up the central passage.

If anything, the current state of the world is already a testament to our inability to either imagine a possible world different to ours or to abandon the raft of the medusa that is our present. The reality of this world seems to have bottomed out into a Hobbesian jungle in which we are stuck and which constantly grows and is cut back in vain. In the Hobbesian or game-theoretic jungle, no matter how drastically your social and political convictions differ from those of your supposed adversary, no matter how much your experience of the world seems truer or more authentic, auto-cannibalization is unavoidable. In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive. We as either Hobbesians or as Platonic Universalists ought to pay attention to the truth of particularity. Universalists think that the commensuration between human experiential or local particularities is an easy path. The true enemies of universalists—the neoreactionaries—think what is universalist is misguided but they nevertheless go on and build island-utopias. The problem of both factions is that the real issue is not the universal which both camps to different degrees endorse, but the specific and discrete particularities of the human experience. Not paying attention to the problems of the latter is a sure recipe for failure, not just for rationalist universalism but also for the neoreactionary craft of methodological individualism. Without the proper attention to the depth of particularities or local conditions, we are all doomed to the cannabalistic jungle for which Hobbes is a prophet.

Failure. Failure shapes the world. History is the story of failure; progress is the succession of failures. Development! says the futurist. Loss, states the rebel. Hangover! cries the moralist from the back row. Faliure: the rebel gets angry. Time is pale, he says. The failure of the Creator - an introduction to an era. Kras Mazov shoots himself in the head, and Abadanaiz, together with Dobreva, takes poison on the Ozonne Islands. Beneath the palms the wind blew the flesh from their bones into sand. Who could've known? All the good people in the world came together. Teachers, writers, migrant workers squatting in the trenches... young soldiers abandoned their battalions. What beautiful songs they sing! It seems to them that brave children are the favourites of history, as they wave white flags with a crown of silver horns. And then, they lose.

I was straining to understand the worldview of the islanders whom we moved and lived among—and I had been doing so since before Guam, when I let myself sink deep into the coral-pebble speed-checkers subworld around the sakau bowl in Pohnpei. I had come here to learn, I figured, and not just a few things about some far-flung places and people. I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world. This was a hopelessly New Age wish, and I would never have mentioned it to Bryan. But it came out in my quickness to pick up local expressions, local lore, wherever we found ourselves, and in my wholehearted admiration for subsistence farmers and fishermen, and the ease with which I fell into a kind of intimacy with many of the people we met. I had that facility with strangers, but it had a new intensity now, and I wondered if Bryan sometimes felt abandoned by me, or disgusted.

Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism (...) is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected. The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair. Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. (...) Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.

The current generation of huts might help creative folk focus on making new work but the bothy's original function was more egalitarian. It wanted to offer shelter in remote Scottish locations for walkers and climbers, the idea being that if hikers made the sacrifice to explore extreme locations they should be rewarded by basic accommodation that was free of charge. The concept was rolled out across the country and aroused a new kind of generosity among landowners. More than a hundred of these shelters are provided by estate owners on the proviso they are left clean and undamaged. "Bothying" came about as agricultural methods changed and farmsteads were increasingly abandoned. During the 1940s the idea of leisure was shifting as it began to mean roaming in the hills and countryside. Walkers looked for shelter on their meanderings and these small buildings did the trick. All share the same unique highlight: they are sited within some of the most breath-taking scenery that rural Scotland has to offer. To come across a bothy is the closest experience Scotland has to a palm tree dotted island mirage after hours stranded out at sea. With one slight difference: this vision is real.

The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him. He resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. He backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street. I triumphed by my former process. Within the next six hundred yards he crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration. He abandoned the gate business after that and went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation. I noticed this latter circumstance, and it soon began to fill e with apprehension. I said to myself, this creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other - no horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just for nothing. The more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I became, until the suspense became almost unbearable and I dismounted to see if there was anything wild in his eye - for I had heard that the eyef this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive. I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I found that he was only asleep.

On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools

authorities were less vigilant during a storm. Even so, he was nervous. He had flown in to Cuba many times. But never here. And tonight he would have preferred to have been going almost anywhere else. Cayo Esqueleto. Skeleton Key. There it was, stretching out before him, twenty-five miles long and six miles across at its widest point. The sea around it, which had been an extraordinary, brilliant blue until a few minutes ago, had suddenly darkened, as if someone had thrown a switch. Over to the west, he made out the twinkling lights of Puerto Madre, the island’s second-biggest town. The main airport was farther north, outside the capital of Santiago. But that wasn’t where he was heading. He pressed down on the joystick and the plane veered to the right, circling over the forests and mangrove swamps that surrounded the old, abandoned airport at the bottom end of the island. The Cessna had been equipped with a thermal intensifier, similar to the sort used in American spy satellites. He flicked a switch and glanced at the display. A few birds appeared as tiny pinpricks of red. More dots pulsated in the swamp: crocodiles or perhaps manatees. And a single dot about twenty yards from the runway. He turned to speak to the man called Carlo, but there was no need. Carlo was already leaning over his shoulder, staring at the screen. Carlo nodded. Only one man was waiting for them, as agreed. Anyone hiding within half a mile of the airstrip would have shown up on the radar. It was safe to land.

Supernatural hope is the virtue that strips us of all things in order to give us possession of all things. We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. So the soul that hopes in God already belongs to Him, and to belong to Him is the same as to possess Him, since He gives Himself completely to those who give themselves to Him. The only thing faith and hope do not give us is the clear vision of Him Whom we possess. We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope. Spes quae videtur non est spes.* Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it. Without hope, our faith gives us only an acquaintance with God. Without love and hope, faith only knows Him as a stranger. For hope casts us into the arms of His mercy and of His providence. If we hope in Him, we will not only come to know that He is merciful but we will experience His mercy in our own lives.

However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the most temptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest to Rothschild were the islands’ colorful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very small populations inhabiting extremely specific ranges. The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, and rare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killed by Rothschild’s ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot for Rothschild’s collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensive collecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more. Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost. Others in fact were more ruthless. In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with “joy.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

In the February 9, 1935, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, an article appeared written by Frank Vanderlip. In it he said: Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive—indeed, as furtive—as any conspirator.... I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.... We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told, further, that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson, where Senator Aldrich's private car would be in readiness, attached to the rear end of a train for the South.... Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as "Ben," "Paul," "Nelson," "Abe"—it is Abraham Piatt Andrew. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises, abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville, after those two aviation pioneers, the Wright brothers.... The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all, and it was the names of all printed together that would have made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.

King João II did not wait long before retaliating against Jews who overstayed or failed to pay the required tax. In his most shocking action, he enslaved Jewish children, had them converted to Christianity, and then shipped them to a new experimental colony in São Tomé, an uninhabited island near the equator, about 120 miles off the African coast. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese had already established profitable sugar plantations on the island of Madeira, and the king hoped to emulate this success in São Tomé, using Jews, criminals, and African slaves from northern Angola as laborers. Several later Jewish commentators bewailed the mistreatment of these children, whose suffering on the island reportedly included being eaten by crocodiles. As recorded by Samuel Usque in the mid-sixteenth century: “They were thrown ashore and mercilessly left there. Almost all were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island, and the remainder, who escaped these reptiles, wasted away from hunger and abandonment. Only a few were miraculously spared that dreadful misfortune.8

At last, I came to the Lost Dog's Home which my map told me marked teh turnoff to Shelly Beach. You could hear some of the dogs barking, calling out for their owners to come and get them away from there... I hated going to those places because I always wanted to take all the dogs home or let them go free, even though I knew most of them would go straight out and be hit by a car or starve to death. I sometimes wished I could have a place where I could take those dogs and let them live. The Phantom had this sanctuary called Eden and all the animals there lived together, even tigers and baby deer, because they'd never learned it's kill or be killed. The maneaters ate fish out of the lagoon and the island was protected by the Bandar poison pygmies and by the piranha fish in the lagoon. I would have liked there to be such a place for pets who had been dumped of abandoned. They could feed the owners to the piranha.

The event recalled to him the thinking of a horse, which is neither reasoned nor reasoning, but steadfast and untiring against all contrary tides. He knew that a horse, if stubborn enough, was capable of running through prickly wire; it would tangle itself until it was shredded hide to bone before abandoning its determined run. If the roan, like a man, had pondered on and fretted over the difficulty of swimming a half mile to a small island, it most likely would have given up, let the water take it, its churning thoughts working as surely as weights around its legs.

Life would be much simpler if I abandoned my humanity and ran wild with them, gave myself over to animalistic pleasures, free of the burdens of duty and responsibility.

As is well-known among those who still remember Marxism, the ambiguous central point of its theoretical edifice concerns its premise that capitalism itself creates the conditions for its self-overcoming through proletarian revolution - how are we to read this? Is it to be read in a linear evolutionary way: revolution should take place when capitalism fully develops all its potentials and exhausts all its possibilities, the mythic point at which it confronts its central antagonism ("contradiction") at its purest, in its naked form? And is it enough to add the "subjective" aspect and to emphasize that the working class should not just sit and wait for the "ripe moment," but to "educate" itself through long struggle? As is also well-known, Lenin's theory of the "weakest link of the chain" is a kind of compromise-solution: although it accepts that the first revolution can take place not in the most developed country, but in a country in which antagonisms of the capitalist development are most aggravated, even if it is less developed (Russia, which combined concentrated modern capitalist-industrial islands with agrarian backwardness and pre-democratic authoritarian government), it still perceived October Revolution as a risky break-through which can only succeed if it will be soon accompanied by a large-scale Western European revolution (all eyes were focused on Germany in this respect). The radical abandonment of this model occurred only with Mao, for whom the proletarian revolution should take place in the less developed part of the world, among the large crowds of the Third World impoverished peasants, workers and even "patriotic bourgeoisie," who are exposed to the aftershocks of the capitalist globalization, organizing their rage and despair. In a total reversal (perversion even) of the Marx's model, the class struggle is thus reformulated as the struggle between the First World "bourgeois nations" and the Third World "proletarian nations.

Now Wall Street's financial manipulation takes on a larger meaning. Although the Japanese had appeared to make the most of the internal strife within Russia during 1905, it was U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt who mediated a peace treaty that forced Russia to give up its Eastern and Baltic fleets and cede the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan. The Russian monarchy further agreed to hand over Manchuria to Japan and to abandon protection of Korea, which japan then annexed in 1910, to little international objection.

Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all. I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures.

It is one of those circular facts of history that, in the three great receiving cities to which southern blacks fled—the cities that drew Ida Mae, George, and Robert—blacks had been among the first nonnatives to set foot on the soil and to establish settlements centuries before. Black mestizos were among the forty-four Mexican settlers arriving in 1781 at the pueblo that would become Los Angeles. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a fur trader born of an African slave woman in Haiti, built, in 1779, the first permanent settlement in what is now known as Chicago.43 Jan Rodrigues, a sailor of African descent working for and later abandoned by Dutch merchants on an untamed island in the New World, created the first trading post on what is now known as Manhattan, in 1613.

Shanghai was a mess in the 1940s. It was called a solitary island, abandoned by the rest of the world.

And so for a hundred years a forest grew up across the land, tall and dark and impenetrable, whose undergrowth curled and snarled into a thicket of bramble and black thorn. This was a forbidden forest, a tangled briarwood that protected not sleeping princesses in their castles, but the horrors of war that still lay dormant under a thin skin of earth.

Damloup--where offering lie in tribute to the spirits of the ancestors, whose buildings' spectral forms seem to shimmer between the columns of trees, and--the sharp edges of the stones are dressed in felted green, and the water troughs made planters of their own accord. Where the scarlet berries burn like embers under lacquered leaves, and pale butterflied somersault through the shafting light.

As soon as I start talking about images, even if it’s to say they should be used sparingly, images are born in me; as soon as I stand up from myself to repudiate something I don’t feel, I start feeling that very thing, and even my repudiation becomes a feeling trimmed with embroidery; as soon as I want to abandon myself to the wind, having lost faith in my efforts, a placid phrase or a sober, concrete adjective suddenly, like sunlight, makes me clearly see the dormantly written page before me, and the letters drawn in my ink are an absurd map of magic signs. And I lay myself aside like my pen, and wrap myself in the flowing cape of obliviously leaning back, far away, intermediate and submissive, doomed like a castaway drowning within sight of marvellous islands, engulfed by the same purplish seas that he had so truly dreamed in distant beds.

Faith, in the end, is what environmentalism boils down to.

No one doubts that eventually the Matabele will be conquered, and that our flag will wave triumphantly over the remnant of them in the same way it waves triumphantly over the workhouse pauper and the sailors' poor whore in the east end of London. Let it wave on over an empire reaching from north to south, from east to west, wave over every island, hitherto ungrabbed, on every sterile desert and fever-haunted swamp as yet unclaimed, over the sealer amid the icebergs, stripping the fur from the live seal, on purpose to oblige a lady; over the abandoned transport camel, perishing of thirst in the Sudan: and still keep waving over Leicester Square, where music halls at night belch out crowds of stout imperialists.

The fear is this: a surge of foreign invaders into an isolated ecosystem will disrupt food chains, alter soil chemistry, upset bacterial communities and mycorrhizal networks beneath the ground, outcompete slower-moving natives, carry in diseases.

Generally, critics feel that by embracing novel ecosystems, we are abandoning hope of undoing the damage done by humans, or offering a free pass to companies or governments that damaged them in the first place. Still, with around a third of all ice-free land now thought to be covered by novel ecosystems, it grows increasingly important to wrestle with what these mongrel, immigrant communities mean for the future of our planet as a whole. And it is in abandoned places, where human-impacted land is not being managed—where non-native species and native species alike are left to their own devices, without heavy-handed but well-meaning intervention—that we might begin to view alien invasions over a longer period of time, and perhaps come to to appreciate that, in time, an ecosystem might start to adapt to its new citizens and find a new sense of balance.

Human industry has changed, and is continuing to change the world. Even if we were all to be wiped out tomorrow—factories falling silent; generators shuddering to a halt; cargo ships drifting and colliding, sinking to the seabed, sending sediments billowing—we have set in motion evolutionary forces that will continue to act upon the genetic makeup of almost every other species alive on this Earth. They shape-shift and metamorphose, transmute and adapt, in ways that we cannot anticipate and certainly cannot control. They want to live, if they can.

became aware that the old black bull was lying on his side on the ground some distance from the herd. He looked dead but the odd twitch of his tail indicated that there was still some semblance of life . . . About an hour later when passing Rose Cottage we became aware that a number of the cattle, being led by the young black bull, had left the main herd and were making for the old bull who was obviously in a distressed state. The group certainly gave the impression of being genuinely concerned and were nudging and making physical contact, providing some form of comfort to him in what was a dire situation . . . [I]t is difficult to find the language that can touch that experience . . . Their behavior expressed compassion, grief, comfort and a willingness to afford assistance. I can only describe the actions of the cattle as reverential. Such glimpses into the unseen, unrecorded culture of the cattle that has formed up on Swona in our absence afford us insight into the true nature of an animal too often dismissed as a dim-witted, cud-chewing automaton. They give us insight into the weight afforded to death among a species we farm and slaughter on an industrial scale. If we do not see the remnants of this behavior among those more carefully tended, it is because we do not give them the chance: they have not the freedom to demonstrate it; they do not typically see out their lifespans to their natural conclusions.

After a certain amount of time, feral animals become wild beasts, no matter their domesticated past. By then they will be evolutionary works of art all their own.

For more than a hundred and fifty years, Peru and Ecuador were locked in a bitter territorial dispute over the Cordillera del Cóndor, an offshoot of the Andes rising between the two countries, leaving large areas undeveloped as a result: pristine forests unlogged and rich gold and copper seams unmined. Environmental surveys in the 1990s revealed the region to be one of the most biologically diverse (and least-studied) habitats in the world; almost every visit to its slopes reveals yet more species unknown to science. This environmental storehouse became a key plank of talks—something of significance that the two countries now shared—and, as part of the 1998 peace agreement, both sides committed to creating extensive reserves on both sides of the border. Transnational reserves of this sort are known as “peace parks”—powerful demonstrations of the healing power of nature, in more ways than one. One

For many months after a death, the cattle will visit and revisit the bodies of their fallen—the way elephants are said to do in the African savannah. They sniff them, touch them. As months pass and the flesh slips away and the skeletons are laid bare, they will unintentionally step upon them and break them apart. In this way, over time, the bones will be ground down and returned to the earth. An ancient ritual of the cattle that otherwise we might never see.

Supervolcanoes pose true existential threats: when Indonesia’s Toba erupted 74,000 years ago, it is believed by some to have caused a volcanic winter of such ferocity that humans were almost entirely wiped out – the entire global population falling to between only three and ten thousand individuals.

A hundred miles beyond the point, the farthest point, the most distant point on the horizon. Out past the alkali flats and sinks; Misfit and Stillwater, Humboldt and Carson. Out over the mountains, ice age islands and archipelagos, Ichthyosaur, Columbian Mastodon boned talus slopes and scree fields. Beyond the Saltbrush, Bitterbrush, Creosote Plants and Rabbitbrush, petrified Redwood forests and Mount Mazama blowouts. Out over the playas, hoodos and springs, koi ponds and basins. Beyond the mustangs, horned lizards, whiptails and rattlers and over the abandoned mines; silver and gold, copper, bornite and cinnabar. Out past the hematite and jasper, chert and agate. Out over Lovelock, Spirit Cave and Wizard's Beach. Beyond the grinding rocks, diorite and granitic boulders cast adrift in a sea of sand, dust and wind. Beyond the Rye Grass, Rice Grass and Bunchgrass. Out over the land into the distance and beyond. The distance of a thousand years, a million years, a century, a lifetime. A distance of roads forgotten and graves abandoned, misplaced Iris and Lilac the only indication of a person's passing. Out past Bonneville, Daggett, Donner and Walker. The two tracks, the single tracks, the deer and coyote tracks, lizard tracks and no tracks at all. Out over the land.....

A hundred miles beyond the point, the farthest point, the most distant point on the horizon. Out past the alkali flats and sinks; Misfit and Stillwater, Humboldt and Carson. Out over the mountains, ice age islands and archipelagos, Ichthyosaur, Columbian Mastodon boned talus slopes and scree fields. Beyond the Saltbrush, Bitterbrush, Creosote Plants and Rabbitbrush, petrified Redwood forests and Mount Mazama blowouts. Out over the playas, hoodos and springs, koi ponds and basins. Beyond the mustangs, horned lizards, whiptails and rattlers and over the abandoned mines; silver and gold, copper, bornite and cinnabar. Out past the hematite and jasper, chert and agate. Out over Lovelock, Spirit Cave and Wizard's Beach. Beyond the grinding rocks, diorite and granitic boulders cast adrift in a sea of sand, dust and wind. Beyond the Rye Grass, Ricegrass and Bunchgrass. Out over the land and into the distance and beyond. The distance of a thousand years, a million years, a century, a lifetime. A distance of roads forgotten and graves abandoned, misplaced Iris and Lilac the only indication of a person's passing. Out past Bonneville, Daggett, Donner and Walker. The two tracks, the single tracks, the deer tracks, coyote tracks, lizard tracks and no tracks at all. Out over the land.....

This is Amani, high in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, but I could be anywhere at all. This abandoned botanical garden offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of transporting species around the world. But Amani may too show us a glimpse of something else: of the surprising ability of species to rub along with one another, even if they ought never to have met. Their success in finding novel ways of coexisting offers us hope that in Amani, and in so many other sites around the world, ecosystems may be more flexible than we have assumed.

remind myself: if one goes in search of nature in its wildest forms, you shouldn’t expect it will be pleased to see you.

I'm instantly reminded that I'm trapped on a near-abandoned island with two strangers. One of them hates me, and is currently deep in the clutches of a brain demon. That's what my mom used to call nightmares when I was young, and I haven't been able to think of them any other way.

Inhabitants of sites of mass abandonment, most notably in the city of Detroit, have come to characterise the aestheticising of their predicament – the presentation of its photogenic results without social context – as a form of voyeurism, even ‘ruin porn’.

They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer's star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings. At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, "Everything," so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts.

Shackleton made the decision on the spot: they would abandon the effort to reach Clarence or Elephant Island

All that the Earth may need to soak up enormous, climate-altering quantities of carbon is to be left alone.

among them the exquisite brown shield-moss, whose thin tendrils loft targes to the sky like an army in miniature.

Over the space of a half-century, these once-bare wastelands had somehow, magically, shivered into life.

What draws my attention, however, is not the afterglow of pristine nature as it disappears over the horizon, but the narrow band of brightening sky that might indicate a fresh dawn of a new wild as, across the world, ever more land falls into abandonment.

Grief comes and goes, but it never abandons you.

My feet sink into the soft gravel of war, the precipitate of man’s self-annihilating impulse. A circle of barren ground left like a fingerprint at a crime scene, evidence of a war unprecedented in its scale and destruction, in its reckless devastation.

Poveglia is a small island that’s grand with infamy, reported to be the most haunted place in the world and for good reason, too. During the plague it was used as a lazaretto to confine the dying. Rumors have it that there were so many plague-ridden bodies burned on the island that the soil is comprised mostly of human ash. I don’t think that’s a rumor though, I’ve been there once just passing through on a boat, and I didn’t even have to step on the island to smell how deep the stench of death goes. After the plague, it was used as a quarantine station for those entering Venice, then it was turned into an insane asylum, naturally, then a hospital and care home for the elderly to spend their last days, until it was finally closed in the 1960s. Now it’s completely abandoned, though the hospital and watchtower remain.

But Rhys shook his head. “We tried. Azriel went to Cretea.” The island where Miryam, Drakon, and their unified human and Fae peoples had secretly lived for the past five centuries. “It was abandoned,” Azriel said. “In ruin. With no trace of what happened or where they went.

Bosun Calhoun then launched into an account of the attack the day before and reviewed the damage suffered by the sunken battleships. He said the USS Nevada was berthed astern of the Arizona when she was struck by a torpedo in her bow. She managed to get under way with her guns blazing, the only battleship able to do so. As she rounded the southern tip of Ford Island, she was smashed with an avalanche of bombs, which started intense fires. When the thick, pungent smoke from the fires poured into the machinery spaces, the black gang, or engineers, headed for topside and fresh air. This forced abandonment left the pumping machinery inoperative. The forward ammunition magazines were purposely flooded to prevent explosions from the fires, but the after magazines were also flooded by mistake, which caused the ship to sink lower and lower in the water. In addition, ballast tanks were flooded on the starboard side to correct a port list. As more water entered the ship, many fittings that passed through watertight bulkheads began to leak, flooding all machinery spaces and causing loss of all electrical and mechanical power. Nevada was sinking in the ship channel.

Bryce swallowed the dryness in her mouth. “I came back here to help everyone, not to abandon them to the mercy of the Asteri.” “Perhaps Urd sent you to that other world to establish a safe harbor. Have you considered that?” Bryce exploded, “What was all this for, then? The stealth, the ships, the Ophion contacts? What the fuck was it for if you just want to run away from the Asteri in the end?” Eyes blacker than the Melinoë Trench pinned her to the spot. “Do not dare question my dedication, girl. I have fought and sacrificed for this world when no one else would. Once, my kingdom was vaster than you can imagine—but the Asteri came, and entire islands withered into the sea in despair, taking the very heart of this world with it. The very heart of the mer, too. If there is anyone who understands how futile it is to stand against the Asteri, it is I.

But the unplanned nature preserves that have formed up in the buffer zones have come to serve as a focus for bilateral cooperation after hostilities are over.

What happened to me? That's no myth. A few days ago, if you'd told me some story about a girl who had to go live with a guy in his underground palace for six months out of the year, I'd just have laughed. You think that girl has problems? I'll tell you who has problems: Me. Way bigger ones than Persephone. Especially now, after what happened the other night in the cemetery. What really happened, I mean. The police think they know, of course. So does everyone at school. Everyone on the island, it seems, has a theory. That's the difference between them and me. They all have theories. I know. So who cares what happened to Persephone? Compared to me, that's nothing. Persephone's lucky, actually. Because her mom showed up to bail her out. No one's coming to rescue me. So take my advice: Whatever you do? Don't blink.

Further back, cooling ponds strewn with rusted pipes were busy with teals and moorhens. An old concrete streetlight stood incongruously in the woods beyond: some ravaged Narnia. Jays catcalled overhead.

Just as Britain, bypassed, remained to become a floating arsenal and launching platform for Germany's destruction, a whole generation of Americans would have to wrestle with the islands of people and principle abandoned in Eastern Europe by Rooseveltian diplomacy.

Emi’s grief was buried beneath Jeju International Airport. At the time it was a military airfield, abandoned by the Japanese imperial air force when they left the island after the Second World War ended. More than seven hundred political dissidents were held there,

Fujiwara blamed Japan’s descent into militarism on its abandonment of samurai values and its embrace of prevailing western thought. In its quest to become a Great Power, it aped the colonial ways of that other island nation, Britain, he said. ‘I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally. For the past 200 years, after the industrial revolution, westerners relied too much on logical thinking. Even now, they tend to think that, if you really depend on logic and reason, then everything will be all right. But I don’t think so. You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is something that can come on top of those things. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion like Christianity or Islam. So we need to have something else – deep emotion. That is something we have had for twenty centuries.

WARM SALT "A grad student investigates the tragic death of a diving partner and stumbles on a crime ring in Eshleman's debut thriller. An often engaging action novel, bolstered by its exotic setting and realistic protagonist." - Kirkus Reviews ICE BRINE "A diving pro and part owner of a Canadian undersea salvage company tangles with international criminals and multiple intelligence agencies. An exhilarating thriller; Clive Cussler fans will find that Peter Case floats their boat." - Kirkus Reviews CASE CLOSED "In Eshleman's 1980s-set novel, the third in his Peter Case trilogy, Case and sidekick Hal McDonald reluctantly abandon their marine salvage business on Vancouver Island to investigate a series of suspicious deaths. A quiet revenge story that morphs into a high-impact tale." - Kirkus Reviews

Ahead, the dry hills of the opposite coast rise, arid and sculptural, as a ribbon along the horizon, all that separates vast prismatic sky from looking-glass sea.

year-old man in a matter of hours.”13 Moored alongside the West Virginia inboard to Ford Island, the Tennessee had taken two bomb hits from the high-altitude bombers of the first wave. Far more seriously, the Tennessee had been inundated by a wall of blazing oil and debris blowing onto its stern from the burning Arizona. The heat was intense, and fires started on the stern and port quarter of the ship. There were no thoughts about abandoning ship, but with his crew engaged in major firefighting efforts, the Tennessee’s captain tried to move his ship forward to escape the inferno astern. He signaled for all engines ahead five knots, but the Tennessee didn’t budge. The battleship was wedged too tightly against the quays by the stricken West Virginia. Nonetheless, its engines were kept turning throughout the day and long into the night so that the propeller wash would keep the burning oil from the Arizona away from its stern as well as the West Virginia. As it was, one of the Tennessee’s motor launches caught fire from the burning oil and sank as it tried to rescue survivors.

It is much harder to recognise the value of lead when it sits so pale against the flash of silver or gold.

The new forest that invades the city rumples the road, pushing its roots under the asphalt like limbs beneath a bedspread.

The Arcadian dreamscape celebrated by the colonial pioneers was, in fact, a post-apocalyptic one.

An organic process, ruination: these artificial structures are just as vulnerable to decay as we are – they need constant attention, maintenance, occupation. Our presence is their beating heart.