Isolated Travel Quotes

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are. If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.

The decisions you make today matter. Every decision points your life in the direction you are about to travel. No decision is an isolated choice. It’s a chain of events. If you choose wisely, your future will reflect that. But if you don’t choose wisely, the decisions you make now will take you to places you don’t want to be later.

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Wallace travelled independently and was challenged every step. He had no government or military support system. He had little cash — he earned enough to survive by sending natural history specimens to his agent in London for sale to collectors and museums. He had visceral moments of excitement when he discovered a beautiful new butterfly or adopted a baby orangutan he had just orphaned by shooting its mother. He lived simply, often in the rainforest on isolated islands, in a manner completely different to the expected behavior of other Western explorers and colonials.

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn't afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes--there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way--she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

One of the disadvantages of traveling alone is that when you fall there is none to assist you.

All these years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

If you want to be in optimum emotional health, realize that social isolation stands between you and it. Reach out to others. Join groups—to drum, meditate, sing, sew, read, whatever. Find communities—to garden, do service work, travel, whatever. We humans are social animals. Spontaneous happiness is incompatible with social isolation. Period.

He was seated on the bench now. He had his left elbow on his knee, his right arm across his lap, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. White face, red hair: snow and fire, like something from an old tale. The book I had noticed earlier was on the bench beside him, its covers shut. Around Anluan's feet and in the birdbath, small visitors to the garden hopped and splashed and made the most of the day that was becoming fair and sunny. He did not seem to notice them. As for me, I found it difficult to take my eyes from him. There was an odd beauty in his isolation and his sadness, like that of a forlorn prince ensorcelled by a wicked enchantress, or a traveller lost forever in a world far from home.

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.

I had never been much interested in Pluto, too few facts and too much isolation.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species’ obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparking Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by “human suffering,” the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But those are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s “Last Messiah.” It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.

All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.

I move from place to place in search of unknown Leaving behind the traces of my deserted entity Isolated in the space of emptiness and struggle Recapping the chapters of my temporary reality

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

Empirical studies show that New Zealanders are the most widely traveled people on the planet. The computer and the Internet have made a major difference. Insularity, distance, and isolation may have been important in an earlier period of New Zealand’s history, but not today. The rapid progress of communications has wrought a revolution in the spatial condition of New Zealand, and yet its culture remains very distinctive. This fact suggests that distance itself is not the key.

The elasticity of our dreams can take us to unspoken worlds, but our innate horror of the unknown is what weighs us down. Fight it. Travel to the isolated coils of smoldering dust trapped in our dusky sky or explore the unseen timeless vibration of dancing particles that fashions existence. Whatever choice you make can change your life forever. The same applies to a story. Words are the atoms of a tale, and together they compose a universe.

I am not mad here, but clear and calm. I am not transformed, but allowed to be wholly myself.I am isolated, but have never felt more connected to people. I am not imprisoned, but free. I am not cut off from my family and my roots, but am brought back to them. I am not living alone with dogs, but permitting my dogs to lead me somewhere I need to go, and it has been a great trip. We have more distance to travel together, I'm sure, before we are through.

The more we live as 'free individuals' . . . the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities--we have to be impelled or disturbed into freedom. . . . This paradox thoroughly pervades the form of subjectivity that characterizes 'permissive' liberal society. Since permissiveness and free choice are elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on subjects' freedom: they have to appear as (and be sustained by) individuals experiencing themselves as free. There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become 'entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel . . . we are constantly bombarded by imposed 'free choices'; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals--since the more we act freely the more we become enslaved by the system--we need to be 'awakened' from this 'dogmatic slumber' of fake freedom.

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:“Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound...Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly.

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both— must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

The nights were long...The innkeeper could not travel to his village, but he was well supplied. He made soups and stews. He sat by the fire and read books he had been meaning to read...He drank whiskey and wine. He read more books.

It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, recognize myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them.

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.

It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.

The development of objective thinking by the Greeks appears to have required a number of specific cultural factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-speaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth was the Iliad and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the persistence of these factors for 1,000 years.

The country through which we had been travelling for days has an original beauty. Wide plains were diversified by stretches of hilly country with low passes. We often had to wade through swift running ice-cold brooks. It has long since we had seen a glacier, but as we were approaching the tasam at Barka, a chain of glaciers gleaming in the sunshine came into view. The landscape was dominated by the 25,000-foot peak of Gurla Mandhata; less striking, but far more famous, was the sacred Mount Kailash, 3,000 feet lower, which stands in majestic isolation apart from the Himalayan range.

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days.

Recently a promising chemical called resveratrol has been isolated. Resveratrol, found in red wine, helps to activate the sirtuin molecule, which has been shown to slow down the oxidation process, a principle component in aging, and therefore it may help protect the body from age-related molecular damage.

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.

Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings. All along—not only since she left, but for a decade before—I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who—because no one thought she was a person—had no one to really talk to.

For me, disability wasn't in the chronic pain I experience to this day, nor the inability to sit or stand or walk for long periods of time, nor in being unable to carry bags while shopping or traveling, nor losing feeling and function in my right arm. It existed in all the places I couldn't go, all of the activities I couldn't engage in. And it existed in my isolation.

They knew where they were headed but they didn’t know where they were going. Retina shrugged the thought. Roma complained about the possibility they were walking into a trap. After all, he was one of the scientists that decided Solstice’s fate. Retina was adamant no one knew him. Lorenzo didn’t care about anything much but reaching Zharfar after Retina surgically removed his Unicell Groper. They were headed to Africa in what seemed a semi commercial private plane. Eight people including the pilots travelled. They weren’t supposed to know any more particulars. But Lorenzo’s watch placed the coordinates in both numbers and words. They were in West Africa, country Nigeria, state Osun, and township Isura. None of them had ever heard of it, the town, but they were there. And they had travelled for miles, over highly forested nonresidential areas and mountain peaks before they stopped. Wherever they were going was greatly isolated, Roma thought.

The basic principle of structural analysis, I was explaining, is that the terms of a symbolic system do not stand in isolation—they are not to be thought of in terms of what they 'stand for,' but are defined by their relations to each other. One has to first define the field, and then look for elements in that field that are systematic inversions of each other. Take vampires. First you place them: vampires are stock figures in American horror movies. American horror movies constitute a kind of cosmology, a universe unto themselves. Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf. On one level they are the same: they are both monsters that can bite you and, biting you, turn you, too, into one of their own kind. In most other ways each is an exact inversion of the other. Vampires are rich. They are typically aristocrats. Werewolves are always poor. Vampires are fixed in space: they have castles or crypts that they have to retreat to during the daytime; werewolves are usually homeless derelicts, travelers, or otherwise on the run. Vampires control other creatures (bats, wolves, humans that they hypnotize or render thralls). Werewolves can't control themselves. Yet—and this is really the clincher in this case—each can be destroyed only by its own negation: vampires, by a stake, a simple sharpened stick that peasants use to construct fences; werewolves, by a silver bullet, something literally made from money.

LOVE JUNKIE travels tenderly and boldly into the despair, isolation, and tenacity of sex and love addiction. Rachel Resnick's gift for language and storytelling craft a vivid picture of her journey and her heart shines pure.

Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive—as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper's art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

But in no epoch has the struggle to find sanctuary in a foreign country been as arduous as in the present day, as countries isolate themselves behind hostility and jealousy (from The House of a Thousand Fortunes / Das Haus der tausend Schicksale, 1937)

Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.

In order to become, to be, to move, Imagine leaving here, going to a cliff above the sea. Watch the sea Dive into the air, down into the sea. Dive deep toward the bottom. Feel the entities in the sea, in the cool darkness, the pressure. Listen and communicate with them. They know the secret way of escape from here. Escape into other places far from this planet. Move up from the sea's depths. Slant up through the dark clod, up to the warmth. Move out of the sea's surface, into light. Travel through the earth's air space, out. Accelerate toward our star, the sun. Feel its radiance increase, its energy. This energy started, maintains us, is us. Enter the sun's flaming self, be its light, Be its energy, share the star as you. Be the sun, shining into space. Move away on its energy, become greater that this star. Spread as its light in all directions. Fill the universe with thee, be the universe. Be all the stars, the galaxies are your body. Be empty space spread self to infinity. Be the creative potential in the empty spaces. BE the potential, infinite in the absolute zero of nothing.

Part of Wordsworth’s complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not, by themselves, have eradiated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him. The poet accused the cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall of what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire to new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder that it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,’ wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbors, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other’s names.

The development of objective thinking by the Greeks appears to have required a number of specific cultural factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-speaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth was the Iliad and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the persistence of these factors for 1,000 years. That all these factors came together in one great civilization is quite fortuitous; it didn’t happen twice.

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

The book was Shelley, and it opened at a passage that he had cherished greatly two years before, and marked as “very good.” “I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

Pavlov formulated his findings into a general rule in which the speed of learning positively correlated with quiet isolation. The totalitarians have followed this rule. They know they can condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation. In the totalitarian technique of thought control, the same isolation applied to the individual is applied also to the groups of people. This is the reason the civilian populations of the totalitarian countries are not permitted to travel freely and are kept away from mental and political contamination. It is the reason, to, for the solitary confinement cell and the prison camp.

I am always amused by those couples- lovers and spouses- who perform and ask others to perform musical chairs whenever they, by random seat selection, are separated from each other. 'Can you switch seats with me?' A woman asked me. 'So I can sit with my husband?' She wanted me, a big man, who always books early, and will gratefully pay extra for the exit row, to trade my aisle seat for her middle seat. By asking me to change my location for hers, the woman is actually saying to me: 'Dear stranger, dear Sir, my comfort is more important than yours. Dear solitary traveler, my love and fear- as contained within my marriage- are larger than yours.' O, the insult! O, the condescension! And this is not an isolated incident. I've been asked to trade seats twenty or thirty times over the years. How dare you! How dare you ask me to change my life for you! How imperial! How colonial! But, ah, here is the strange truth: whenever I'm asked to trade seats for somebody else's love, I do, I always do.

Decades later, in 2014, Amy Wagers at Harvard University reexamined this experiment. Much to her surprise, she found the same rejuvenation effect among mice. She then isolated a protein called GDF11 that seems to underlie this process. These results were so remarkable that Science magazine chose it as one of the ten breakthroughs of the year.

My prescription,” he said, “is that you take him to Long Branch for the summer. It’s a small, rather isolated place on the New Jersey shore known for its sea cure. I’ll send you with laudanum and paregoric. He should be outside as much as possible. Encourage him to wade in the ocean, if he’s able. By fall, perhaps he’ll be recovered enough to travel home.

It was the my-father-got-rid-of-my-piano story; something she’d share one day with her college roommates, her husband, her children, and her psychiatrist. It would earn a few crucial frames in her final reel of memories and travel with her into the next life. When it comes to the bad stuff, there’s nothing too small that’s not worth dwelling on forever. I say, anyway.

My prescription,” he said, “is that you take him to Long Branch for the summer. It’s a small, rather isolated place on the New Jersey shore known for its sea cure. I’ll send you with laudanum and paregoric. He should be outside as much as possible. Encourage him to wade in the ocean, if he’s able. By fall, perhaps he’ll be recovered enough to travel home.” Perhaps I would be home with

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There’s no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him. His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection which he never gave. No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that’s the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

Stafford's Hypothesis on The Transference of Existence: Even if you self-isolated, stood still, and held your breath after traveling into the past, you would still be a pebble diverting the flow of time in some way. The very transference of existence via wormholes, not interaction with past actors or events, creates paradoxes. Time Transference has three stages: 1. The distance traversed between the origin or starting point of the wormhole and the rip in the Chronosphere (space-time continuum). 2. The transference of biological material through the rip in the Chronosphere without damage to or mutation of the genetic code of the chrono-commuter. 3. Arrival at the endpoint of the time transference - the reconstruction of the chrono-commuter's genetic material and the sealing of the rip in the Chronosphere.

his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts.

I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professional, educated classes, with the texts it generated being consumed and reviewed in the same way as other travel literature: compared, criticised for inaccuracies, assessed for topographical or antiquarian interest, and so on.

Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, traveling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.

This provision meant that dispossessed Arab owners could neither buy back nor lease what had once been their property, nor could any other non-Jew. Such moves were crucial to the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a Jewish state, since only about 6 percent of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948. The Arab population inside Israel, isolated by military travel restrictions, was also cut off from other Palestinians and from the rest of the Arab world. Accustomed to being a substantial majority in their own country and region, they suddenly had to learn to make their way as a despised minority in a hostile environment as subjects of a Jewish polity that never defined itself as a state of all its citizens. In the words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was in effect second-class citizenship.” Most significantly, the martial regime under which the Palestinians lived granted the Israeli military near-unlimited authority to control the minutiae of their lives.

I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.

But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another. The

CHAPTER 1: Fourteen year old Augustus Tomlin's day started out just like any other—normally. He got out of bed, dressed, brushed his teeth, then headed for the kitchen to join his adoptive parents, Earl and Marge for breakfast. This was the first day of their vacation, and admittedly, Augie (as he liked to be called) wasn't as excited about it as he would've been had Earl and Marge decided to take them all to Disneyland instead, because firstly, he'd been dealing with a paralyzing fear of water all of his life, and secondly, they were staying in a cabin on an isolated stretch of beach in the Florida Keys. Nevertheless, there was no way for Augie to know just then that by the end of the day he'd be traveling in an under-sea carriage drawn by four of the most incredible creatures he'd ever laid eyes upon, heading for destinations untold somewhere at the bottom of the ocean at a million miles an hour.

Her disillusionment with the business had intensified as the need to simplify her stories increased. Her original treatments for Blondie of the Follies and The Prizefighter and the Lady had much more complexity and many more characters than ever made it to the screen, and adapting The Good Earth had served as a nagging reminder of the inherent restraints of film. Frances found herself inspired by memories of Jack London, sitting on the veranda with her father as they extolled the virtues of drinking their liquor “neat,” and remembered his telling her that he went traveling to experience adventure, but “then come back to an unrelated environment and write. I seek one of nature’s hideouts, like this isolated Valley, then I see more clearly the scenes that are the most vivid in my memory.” So she arrived in Napa with the idea of writing the novel she started in her hospital bed with the backdrop of “the chaos, confusion, excitement and daily tidal changes” of the studios, but as she sat on the veranda at Aetna Springs, she knew she was still too close to her mixed feelings about the film business.48 As she walked the trails and passed the schoolhouse that had served the community for sixty years, she talked to the people who had lived there in seclusion for several generations and found their stories “similar to case histories recorded by Freud or Jung.” She concentrated on the women she saw carrying the burden in this community and all others and gave them a depth of emotion and detail. Her series of short stories was published under the title Valley People and critics praised it as a “heartbreak book” that would “never do for screen material.” It won the public plaudits of Dorothy Parker, Rupert Hughes, Joseph Hergesheimer, and other popular writers and Frances proudly viewed Valley People as “an honest book with no punches pulled” and “a tribute to my suffering sex.

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation.

What is the future of men who have lost sight of the past? Earl Hollsopple lived on the edge of civilization in a deserted shack for nearly forty years. His life was one beautiful night of stargazing after another, until a helicopter flies overhead, and exposing his meager world. It is a sign; it is time for him to return to civilization. Unknowingly, Earl’s journey parallels another he had deeply repressed, and that is his return from the Vietnam War. The lone survivor of a plane crash, Earl waits for rescue that never came. He is left to find his way home alone. On both his quests, old Earl and young Earl learn lessons of survival, overcoming isolation and handling conflicts; his travels teach him not just about himself, but humankind. Reaching pivotal points in both journeys, Earl meets fateful loves, leading to destinies that are ultimately intertwined. Everything in life circles until we are able to answer the riddles that plaque man and humanity. Only until we take the journey, solve the problems of our own existence, do we find our way home.

WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere. The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

The Grosse Pointe that he was raised in was an isolated place of provincial splendor. It is unlikely that in pre-World War II America there was another community quite so sheltered and quite so rich. There was neither economic nor social diversity. Catholics were viewed with suspicion and, on occasion, hatred. (When Henry as a young man married a Catholic and converted, it sent shivers throughout the community; his oldest friends regarded it as at least partly a declaration of independence from his past.) Jews too were unwelcome, and there was a great deal of dinner-party discussion as to whether Walter Chrysler was actually, despite what he claimed, Jewish. Neither World War II nor the coming of modern communications and transportation, which so changed and expanded people’s lives, had yet occurred. It was a secure, comfortable, insular place, largely untouched by the modern world. If Grosse Pointers traveled to New York, they traveled by train, on The Detroiter, where they knew the porter and he knew them; if they traveled to Europe they traveled with each other. The assumption was that Grosse Pointe was the center of the universe; once, announcing the engagement of a Grosse Pointe girl to a young man from Cincinnati, the Detroit Free Press used the headline “Local Girl to Marry Eastern Man.

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

on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.” “True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it quite that way.” I was sitting back. I was listening. And I was hearing something about her and about windows and mirrors. Chuck Parson was a person. Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings. All along—not only since she left, but for a decade before—I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who—because no one thought she was a person—had no one to really talk to. And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago. And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017). These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.

If the human race ever wishes to master time travel then the answer is through chemical and not mechanical means. Speed is time travel. It will pilfer away at the space-time around you without your consent, propelling you forward through time. The human body is a vehicle of flux. It is exhilarating to move rhythmically, pulsing, stepping through pockets of your existence in fluid motions. The time that speed steals from you, it gives back with interest, cold and hard on a Monday morning. It brings with it a terrifying despair that creeps upon you. It is a black, slow-motion suicide. The ceiling begins to drip and ooze grey-brown sludge. Aural hallucinations, the demons of psychosis, speak wordless words of pure dread... Sometimes I would laugh and giggle hysterically at inane nonsensical stories that would play out in my mind. I would watch them unfold, like a lucid dream, weird images, Boschian forms, twisted nightmares... And I would weep. I would weep for nothing with salty tears, rivers of anguish and existential pain running down my face, dripping quietly onto the carpet. Day after day, I would unravel myself, dissect, and analyse my life over and over until I was exhausted and insane. Speed is not an insightful drug. It will not delude you into a false sense of spirituality like hallucinogens. It is the aftermath and the come down from speed that will rip open your ego and show you the bare, horrible bones of yourself. It will open the beautiful black doorway inside you and it will show you nothing. Through the darkness of internal isolation, the amphetamine comedown will show you no god, no spirituality, no soul, just your own perishable flesh, and your own animal self-preservation. It will show you clearly just how ugly you really are inside. In the emptiness of yourself, there is only the knowledge of your eventual death. When you have truly faced yourself and recognised yourself as purely animal then you become liberated from the societal pretence that you are above or better than any other creature. You are a human animal. You are naturally motivated to be selfish. Everything you do, every act you partake of, is in its essence an act of survival. No act of the human-animal happens without the satisfaction of the ego’s position in existence…

Bartók, like Janáek, carried out a considerable amount of research into folk music. He would travel into the countryside with his camera and his Edison wax disks to record Hungarian, Romanian and Slovakian folk music and customs. He went to Turkey and to north Africa to pursue the origins of these. ‘We must isolate the very ancient, for this is the only way of identifying the really new’, he said.

A combination of business travel and technology creates isolation,

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ ¤ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board. Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann "sheep" grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial. But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time. I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets. What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that'd last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don't pretend it'll be simple! Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity. One thing's clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What'll be needed, frankly, are mongrels… people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it.

Where is hell, anyway? Ancient man believed that hell was underground, in the center of the earth, where it was hot. This belief was based on the erroneous notion that the earth was the center of the universe. When science proved that the sun was the center of the solar system, then what? Well, the Bible and Sacred Tradition never again tried to define the exact location of hell. Because God created hell as a place to incarcerate the devil and all the bad angels who rebelled with him, and because angels are pure spirits and have no bodies that take up space, hell isn’t a physical place. It’s as real as heaven or purgatory, but you can’t travel to it anymore than a spaceship can reach heaven. The essence of hell isn’t a million degrees of heat from fire but from the heat that comes from hatred and bitterness. Hell is a lonely and selfish place; no matter how many souls it contains, not one of them cares about anyone else. It’s utter isolation as well as eternal torment, which is why everyone should want to avoid it at all cost. Heaven, on the other hand, is a place of happiness and joy because everyone there knows and loves each other. And, most of all, heaven is desirable because of what’s called beatific vision — seeing God face to face for eternity. Being in the presence of the Supreme Being who is all truth and all goodness ought to be the desire of every person.

Isolation filled with loud silence is a writer’s paradise. I wonder how far north toward the Mediterranean must I travel to get there.

What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? 'Are you talking about my community? You didn't even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God's gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That's your solution? Time travel is easier than passing affordable child care? Jennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blame so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens face by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead. The same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.

if you have not yet traveled to Israel, GO.  See the land and the people for yourself.  See the historical record of the Jewish people engraved all over the land of our ancestors.  Experience the vibrancy of everyday life in a country that—despite repeated attempts to destroy it militarily and now to isolate it economically and politically—has reconstituted the Jewish nation in its homeland as a center of democracy and freedom, in a region where both of those values have been extraordinarily difficult to establish.

In these pages, traveling “solo” does not necessarily mean “alone.” The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. “Solo” by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience.

Kisa Gotami hears of the Buddha, who had been teaching in India, and travels to him with the body of her deceased boy draped in her arms. She throws herself at the Buddha’s mercy and pleads for a cure to bring her son back. It’s said that the Buddha considers her case for a moment and then promises that he will do as she asks if she collects a single mustard seed from the home of a family that has not experienced loss. Kisa Gotami springs into action, knocking on every door in the village with her singular request. As the story goes, at each door she is confronted with stories of loss. The death of a daughter. A wife. A cousin. A friend. No home in the village could fulfill her request. It is then that Kisa Gotami realized the universality of sorrow, and she returned to the Buddha. The recognition that her grief wasn’t isolated in some ways healed her.

The mountains made travel difficult much of the year and at times impossible. But industry had no trouble finding what it wanted and removing it. Corporations lay track into thousands of hollows and pulled billions of dollars in lumber and coal from the region over the following century. Still, those searching for the causes of poverty in Appalachia—throughout the twentieth century and even today—blame its isolation.

Sporadic cases of plague were discovered throughout the summer and fall of 1900. Most alarming, at least to the native-born American population of San Francisco, was the first white plague victim discovered in August. In January 1901, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage, who oversaw both the Marine Hospital Service and the Immigration Bureau, commissioned three nationally prominent plague experts to investigate the health conditions in San Francisco. Their report, using the best bacteriological methods then available, confirmed that plague did, in fact, visit San Francisco. The experts explained that the wisest precaution to take against plague's potential return was not to isolate people based on race but, instead, to intensify cleansing and fumigation efforts in any area where plague was found. Between March 1, 1900 and February 29, 1904, 121 cases of plague were diagnosed in San Francisco with 113 resulting in death. Of these deaths, 107 were Chinese, 4 were Japanese, and 2 were white.59 Alas, this episode hardly brought an end to the all-too-reflexive impulse Americans often have in establishing quarantine or public health policy based on race, ethnicity, or social disen-franchisement.

When the Satmar Rebbe announced his plans for a kehillah, a community, in Williamsburg, Zeidy pledged his allegiance before he even knew what it entailed, and in doing so he tied his whole family, and all of its future generations, to this community. Back in Europe, Zeidy’s family didn’t live like this. They weren’t extremists; they were educated people who had homes with wooden floors and Persian carpets, and they traveled freely throughout the Continent. It was the rebbe who decided I couldn’t read English books or wear the color red. He isolated us, made it so we could never blend in on the outside. If I wasn’t there when the agreement was made, why am I still obligated to follow all these rules? Can Zeidy really expect me to walk in the rebbe’s shadow as blindly as he did, when he was scared and lonely, as all the survivors were, and there was nowhere else to turn that felt safe?

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner.

His strategy for survival was a kind of spiritual withdrawal, similar to what his hero, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, chooses once he understands the limitations of ordinary society. Ibn Tufayl’s choice was not heroic. In a way, it was escapist. But a more outspoken philosopher might never have lived to write a book at all. Ibn Tufayl’s modus viven- di was neither isolation nor self-immolation, but accommodation. He could not take many others with him, but he did not travel entirely alone, and the book he left behind was his invitation to others, including many whom he never met, to join him on the flights that took him beyond the realm Plotinus so tellingly had called “this blood-drenched life.

We’re not really in this game, except insofar as it affects us. We’re in the business of dispersing the human race to as many worlds as possible. But so far, only two colony ships have taken off. And it will be another generation before any of them lands. Far longer before we know whether the colonies will take hold and succeed. Even longer than that before we know if they’ll become isolated worlds or trade will be profitable enough to make interstellar travel economically feasible. That’s all we care about. But to accomplish it, we have to get recruits from Earth, and we have to pay for the ships—again, from Earth. And we have to do it without any hope of financial return for a hundred years at the best. Capitalism is not good at thinking a hundred years ahead. So we need government funding.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.

Major Negro population centers like Chicago’s South Side were represented as shining fortresses. Smaller neighborhoods and enclaves were marked with towers or oases. Isolated hotels and motels were inns with smiling keepers. Tourist homes—private residences that lent rooms to Negro travelers—were peasant huts, or tree houses, or hobbit holes. Less friendly parts of the country were populated by ogres and trolls, vampires and werewolves, wild beasts, ghosts, evil sorcerers, and hooded white knights. In Oklahoma, a great white dragon coiled around Tulsa, breathing fire onto the neighborhood where Atticus’s father and Uncle George had been born.