Isolation Season Quotes

A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that next time you feel alone.

The therapist's worldview is in itself isolating. Seasoned therapists view relationships differently, they sometimes lose patience with social ritual and bureaucracy, they cannot abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings.

A caterpillar must endure a season of isolation before it turns into a butterfly. Embrace the time you have alone, it will only make you stronger.

The words “I love you” could contain all the bloodthirsty despair of the abattoir, all the hopelessness of the most isolated, frozen gulag, all the lurid sadness of death row.

Who are we without our addictions; without our media-induced hungers? So often the voices we hear echoing in our mind are not our own but that of our influencers. Isolation, while arguably going against human nature, is essential for mental and emotional health. Solitude is a detoxification of all that distorts our personality and misguides our path in life. It allows us to filter out the foreign opinions and hear our own voice—reach our authentic character—and practice fidelity to self.

Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?

A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that the next time you feel alone.

Our lives are a journey. As we move forward, we will not only figuratively experience the geography of life: the exhilaration of high mountains, the tranquility of calm meadows, the isolation of treacherous canyons, but we will also experience the seasons of life: the hope of spring, the abundance of summer, the harvest of autumn, and yes, the darkness and depression of winter.

The contemplative man always lives alone. Regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world.

To her eyes, used to diversity, there was a troubling uniformity about them all, something that spoke of isolation, and a dull and thoughtless cruelty.

The contemplative man always lives alone, regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world.

The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism the pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owners way of life.

I've questioned this goddamn place since i could talk, some of us have depth we can't quite understand until we are much older. We rally across the world in seek of silencing this unbearable urge to speak a different tune and vibe a different energy, to fit in to a world unlike this. The isolation felt amongst thousands who don't really know you will one day have you gravitating towards a place where you can learn about yourself. Don't fight it, change with the seasons and give your life a reason. Solitude is so inviting you'll wonder why it took you this long to open its door.

From time to time, we all must go unto a landscape—be it inner or outer landscape—where there are no hiding places. Allowing the stark awe and silence to aid us in both communing and confronting the depth of ourselves. We fear emptiness because we know that within those places of nothingness we will come face-to-face with who we are and gaze into the internal mirror. But what is the alternative? Shall we go our entire life without hearing our own voice . . . without ever having met who we are when isolated from all?

No wires tender even as nerves can transmit the impact of our seasons, our catastrophes while we are closed inside them

If happiness required me to ignore my thoughts and questions, then I hoped to never be happy.

After all, the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel. And being aware of how lonely you are (dry laugh) can make anywhere feel more empty.

But all of a sudden the scene changed; it was the memory, no longer of old impressions but of an old desire, only recently reawakened by the Fortuny gown in blue and gold, that spread before me another spring, a spring not leafy at all but on the contrary suddenly stripped of its trees and flowers by the name that I had just murmured to myself: “Venice”; a decanted springtime, which is reduced to its own essence and expresses the lengthening, the warming, the gradual unfolding of its days in the progressive fermentation, no longer, now, of an impure soil, but of a blue and virginal water, springlike without bud or blossom, which could answer the call of May only by the gleaming facets fashioned and polished by May, harmonising exactly with it in the radiant, unalterable nakedness of its dusky sapphire. Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, and urbane and refined civilization, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a somber azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals.

The water is long gone, and this is another isolated, lonely location where naive people, who feel safe in the arms of Mother Nature, can be surprised by a sociopath spawned by decadent civilization but entirely at home in the barrens and the wilds.

The circus becomes a strange place after enough decades. The seasons follow one after another, but the people around you never change, as if time has stopped. As if this place were a bubble isolated from the rest of the world, blind to the miseries of others.

Our campaigns have not grown more humanistic because our candidates are more benevolent or their policy concerns more salient. In fact, over the last decade, public confidence in institutions-- big business, the church, media, government-- has declined dramatically. The political conversation has privileged the nasty and trivial. Yet during that period, election seasons have awakened with a new culture of volunteer activity. This cannot be credited to a politics inspiring people to hand over their time but rather to campaign, newly alert to the irreplaceable value of a human touch, seeking it out. Finally campaigns are learning to quantify the ineffable—the value of a neighbor's knock, of a stranger's call, the delicate condition of being undecided-- and isolate the moment where a behavior can be changed, or a heart won. Campaigns have started treating voters like people again.

People always talk about the health benefits of Japanese food,’ he said, ‘but I’m fascinated by other aspects of the Japanese dining experience. Like the whole system of serving food at a counter like this, with the customers all facing the same direction, instead of each other. It’s strange when you think about it. At a sushi bar, for example, everyone’s facing the itamae-san, and you discuss the things you’re eating – what type of squid this is, and where they’re caught, and how this is the season for them but they’ll only be at their best for another couple of weeks, and so on. Discussing the food with the chef even as you eat it – that’s a peculiar system.’ ‘I suppose it is, isn’t it? I don’t go to sushi restaurants very often – they’re so expensive – and I could probably count the number of times I’ve sat at the counter, but I know what you mean. There’s something about that atmosphere.’ ‘At its worst, it’s almost an atmosphere of collusion.’ ‘Collusion?’ ‘Everyone at the counter becomes a member of the group. In some sushi bars, all the customers are regulars and they all know each other. As an outsider, you need courage to walk into a place like that and take a seat. It’s a tight-knit little community, and harmony is of the utmost importance. Nobody’s confronting anyone else individually. The conversation all proceeds through the chef, who’s like a moderator or a master of ceremonies. You couldn’t spend some quiet time with a lover, for example, in a place like that, because you’d be isolating yourselves from the others and spoiling the atmosphere for everyone.

And yet, as she heard herself recount for Kesgrave the events of her first season, she felt a fresh stab of pain as she recognized the depth of her isolation. She’d never said those words out loud before because she had never had anyone to say them aloud to. It was mortifying, Bea thought, to realize that she could still discover new ways to feel bad about herself.

To Evelyn our relationship is yellow and blue, but to me it’s a gray place, most of it blacked out, bombed, footage from the film in my head is endless shots of stone and any language heard is utterly foreign, the sound flickering away over new images: blood pouring from automated tellers, women giving birth through their assholes, embryos frozen or scrambled (which is it?), nuclear warheads, billions of dollars, the total destruction of the world, someone gets beaten up, someone else dies, sometimes bloodlessly, more often mostly by rifle shot, assassinations, comas, life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigures itself into a soap opera. It’s an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and no one ever asks me for any identification.

You couldn’t see it, Eliza, all the ways he was hurting you.” He sighs. “Shira and I were beside ourselves, but you couldn’t see it. He was isolating you from people, shifting who you were allowed to be around. He was always making those little digs about your job, the ones that were supposed to come off as jokes but never did. Like the ones he made all the time about what you were eating, and you got so thin. And all that mess about the wedding . . . you were so unhappy, ahuva, but he had you so twisted around about everything, you hardly knew which way was up.

I try to think for the first time what it was like to be them: our father, islanding his life, protecting both us and himself, in the midst of war and in a poor country, the effort it must have taken to sustain his illusions of reason and benevolent order, and perhaps he didn’t. Our mother, collecting the seasons and the weather and her children’s faces, the meticulous records that allowed her to omit the other things, the pain and isolation and whatever it was she was fighting against, something in a vanished history, I can never know. They are out of reach now, they belong to themselves, more than ever.

I have found myself leaning heavily on this pain. At first I tried to silence it, thinking it would go and leave me to my agitated content. That it would linger for a season, a firm reminder of the disquiet that lurks and coils below the surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our lives. Far from going, it became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me, cockroachy, dark and intimate, emitting thick, stinking fumes that reeked of loneliness and terror. When I woke up in the morning, I groped for it, then sighed with plunging recognition as I felt it stirring inside me, alive and well.

Although I have afflicted you, . . . I will afflict you no more. (Nahum 1:12) There is a limit to our affliction. God sends it and then removes it. Do you complain, saying, “When will this end?” May we quietly wait and patiently endure the will of the Lord till He comes. Our Father takes away the rod when His purpose in using it is fully accomplished. If the affliction is sent to test us so that our words would glorify God, it will only end once He has caused us to testify to His praise and honor. In fact, we would not want the difficulty to depart until God has removed from us all the honor we can yield to Him. Today things may become “completely calm” (Matt. 8:26). Who knows how soon these raging waves will give way to a sea of glass with seagulls sitting on the gentle swells? After a long ordeal, the threshing tool is on its hook, and the wheat has been gathered into the barn. Before much time has passed, we may be just as happy as we are sorrowful now. It is not difficult for the Lord to turn night into day. He who sends the clouds can just as easily clear the skies. Let us be encouraged—things are better down the road. Let us sing God’s praises in anticipation of things to come. Charles H. Spurgeon “The Lord of the harvest” (Luke 10:2) is not always threshing us. His trials are only for a season, and the showers soon pass. “Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5). “Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). Trials do serve their purpose. Even the fact that we face a trial proves there is something very precious to our Lord in us, or else He would not spend so much time and energy on us. Christ would not test us if He did not see the precious metal of faith mingled with the rocky core of our nature, and it is to refine us into purity and beauty that He forces us through the fiery ordeal. Be patient, O sufferer! The result of the Refiner’s fire will more than compensate for our trials, once we see the “eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Just to hear His commendation, “Well done” (Matt. 25:21); to be honored before the holy angels; to be glorified in Christ, so that I may reflect His glory back to Him—ah! that will be more than enough reward for all my trials. from Tried by Fire Just as the weights of a grandfather clock, or the stabilizers in a ship, are necessary for them to work properly, so are troubles to the soul. The sweetest perfumes are obtained only through tremendous pressure, the fairest flowers grow on the most isolated and snowy peaks, the most beautiful gems are those that have suffered the longest at the jeweler’s wheel, and the most magnificent statues have endured the most blows from the chisel. All of these, however, are subject to God’s law. Nothing happens that has not been appointed with consummate care and foresight. from Daily Devotional Commentary

You couldn’t see it, Eliza, all the ways he was hurting you.” He sighs. “Shira and I were beside ourselves, but you couldn’t see it. He was isolating you from people, shifting who you were allowed to be around. He was always making those little digs about your job, the ones that were supposed to come off as jokes but never did. Like the ones he made all the time about what you were eating, and you got so thin. And all that mess about the wedding . . . you were so unhappy, ahuva, but he had you so twisted around about everything, you hardly knew which way was up.” “I should have seen it,” I whisper. “How could you? It doesn’t matter if you’re trained to see it in others; it’s different when it’s you. He was very good at it. It’s not like he slammed into it all at once either. He worked up to it too slowly for you to see. And you were never going to see it, Eliza. Not when he wasn’t the only one doing it.” “What do you mean?” “Your mother’s been doing it your whole life.

The small family living unit lacks space, earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilised or sexually isolated, extremely limited in its exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods. This is the material process which lies behind the truism that pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owner’s way of life. Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet. (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.) The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognises this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected. But, since in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost (the owner has become the-special-man-he-is-only-to-his-pet, and the animal has become dependent on its owner for every physical need), the parallelism of their separate lives has been destroyed.

Wind in a Box" —after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals, your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip. I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song. Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006) When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song

Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation was the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called it “the new tribalism of the Electric Age.” Hair and dress and music played a significant part in shaping this culture, but what defined it more than anything was its glorification of the peer attachment that gave rise to it. Friends took precedence over family. Physical contact and connection with peers were pursued; the brotherhood of the pop tribe was declared, as in the generation-based “Woodstock nation.” The peer group was the true home. “Don't trust anyone over thirty” became the byword of youth who went far beyond a healthy critique of their elders to a militant rejection of tradition. The degeneration of that culture into alienation and drug use, on the one hand, and its co-optation for commercial purposes by the very mainstream institutions it was rebelling against were almost predictable. The wisdom of well-seasoned cultures has accumulated over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Healthy cultures also contain rituals and customs and ways of doing things that protect us from ourselves and safeguard values important to human life, even when we are not conscious of what such values are. An evolved culture needs to have some art and music that one can grow into, symbols that convey deeper meanings to existence and models that inspire greatness. Most important of all, a culture must protect its essence and its ability to reproduce itself — the attachment of children to their parents. The culture generated by peer orientation contains no wisdom, does not protect its members from themselves, creates only fleeting fads, and worships idols hollow of value or meaning. It symbolizes only the undeveloped ego of callow youth and destroys child-parent attachments. We may observe the cheapening of cultural values with each new peer-oriented generation. For all its self-delusion and smug isolation from the adult world, the Woodstock “tribe” still embraced universal values of peace, freedom, and brotherhood. Today's mass musical gatherings are about little more than style, ego, tribal exuberance, and dollars.

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.

You may be going through a dark season, you may feel isolated and alone, but you are not unnoticed and you are never alone. The heavens are cheering you on. In another realm an unseen group of people is rooting for you to accomplish God’s plans of bringing the heavenlies to earth. Moses and Abraham, grandmothers and departed friends, all the saints who went before you. The great cloud of witnesses cheers you on from heaven. And it isn’t as far away as you might think.

When we discuss the successful dietary programs of the various groups from the standpoint of their ability to control tooth decay and prevent deformity we find that for the people in the high and isolated Alpine valleys their nutrition is dependent largely on entire rye bread and dairy products with meat about once a week and various vegetables, fresh in the summer season and stored for the winter season. An analysis in my laboratory of the dairy products obtained from the Loetschental Valley in Switzerland through a series of years has shown the vitamin content to be much higher than the average throughout the world for similar foods during the same seasons. The milk in these high valleys is produced from green pasturage and stored green hay of exceptionally high chlorophyll content. The milk and the rye bread provided minerals abundantly

When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. (Acts 16:7) What a strange thing for the Lord to prohibit, for they were going into Bithynia to do Christ’s work! And the door was shut before them by Christ’s own Spirit. There have been times when I have experienced the same thing. Sometimes I have been interrupted in what seemed to be quite productive work. And at times, opposition came and forced me to go back, or sickness came and forced me to rest in some isolated place. During such times, it was difficult for me to leave my work unfinished when I believed it was service done in the power of His Spirit. But I finally remembered that the Spirit requires not only a service of work but also a service of waiting. I came to see that in the kingdom of Christ, there are not only times for action but times to refrain from action. And I also came to learn that a place of isolation is often the most useful place of all in this diverse world. Its harvest is more rich than the seasons when the corn and wine were the most abundant.

A Sunset I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens, Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens, In numerous leafage bosomed close; Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere On cloudy archipelagos. Oh, gaze ye on the firmament! A hundred clouds in motion, Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion, Their unimagined shapes accord: Under their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through, As if some giant of the air amid the vapors drew A sudden elemental sword. The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold; And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold, The thatched roof of a cot a-glance; Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze; Or pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze, Great moveless meres of radiance. Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track, Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back, A triple row of pointed teeth? Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide, The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side With scales of golden mail ensheathe. Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees. Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice Ruins immense in mounded wrack; Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown When the earthquake heaves its hugy back. These vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronz¨¨d glows, Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose, Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms, 'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep, As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep His dreadful and resounding arms! All vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated, Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red Into the furnace stirred to fume, Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire, Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire The vaporous and inflam¨¨d spaume. O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale, In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil? With love that has not speech for need! Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite: If winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night Fantasy them starre brede.

Season's Greetings by Stewart Stafford Season's Greetings To those we are needing, While I am leading The Festive charge. Christmas love is fleeting, The snow is sleeting, And there's every chance of feeling, A thaw in my cold heart. Season's Greetings everywhere, Let War cease and all be fair, A heart that's full of Christmas cheer, Bravely faces the New Year. And so, we feast and celebrate, For those we've lost, we contemplate, Christmas is an emotional stocktake, Of those still here and those that are late. The year winds down to that last date, Resolutions tempting fate, New Fear's Eve, many hate, And choose to socially-isolate. Season's Greetings while you can, To every woman, child, and man, Season's Greetings, don't you wait Hold back now, and it's too late. And in the end, all we do, Is create memories for the few, Who mattered while we strode this earth, Then back to the place before our birth. Season's Greetings, decorations down, Bittersweet crunching sounds, Topple the tree to live again, Twelfth Night, the inevitable end. © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.

In my life I've done more suffering than thinking— though I believe one understands better that way. You see, dogs aren't enough any more. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants. . . It seems that the elephants Morel was trying to save were purely imaginary and symbolic, a parable, as they say, and that the poor bastard was really defending the old human rights, the rights of man, those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals of another age - another geological epoch. . . you announce this salvation as coming *soon’— though I suppose that in the language of paleontology, which is not exactly that of human suffering, the word soon’ means a few trifling hun- dred thousands of years. Earth was his kingdom, his place, his field— he belonged. . The lorry was literally stuffed with ‘trophies’: tusks, tails, heads, skins— an orgy of butch- ery. De Vries, was certainly not collecting for museums, because most of them had been so riddled with shot as to be unrecognizable and in any case unsuitable for the pleasure of the eye. I suppose there are things that nothing can kill and that remain forever intact. It’s as if nothing could ever j^ppen to human beings. They’re a species over which it’s not easy to triumph. They’ve a way of rising from the ashes, smiling and holding hands. "Well, I finally got an idea. When he fails, do like me: think about free elephant ride through Africa for hundreds and hundreds of wonderful animals that nothing could be built—either a wall or a fence of barbed wire—passing large open spaces and crush everything in its path, and destroying everything—while they live, nothing is able to stop them—what freedom! And even when they are no longer alive, who knows, perhaps continue to race elsewhere still free. So you begin to torment your claustrophobia, barbed wire, reinforced concrete, complete materialism imagine herds of elephants of freedom, follow them with his eyes never left them on their run and will see you soon feel better ... " years of isolation in the depths of the jungle have no power against a tenacious hope, and that a hundred acres of land at the height of the rainy season are easier to clear than are certain little intimate nooks of our soul. she understood perfectly well how unconvincing this sounded, but she couldn’t help it: it was the truth. He felt that, at his age, patience was ceasing to be a virtue and was becoming a luxury he could less and less afford. He strove for one last time to look at the affair with all the detachment and all the serenity suitable to a man of science. the immense sky, filled with absence. with the impassive face of a man who feels perfectly sure of having the last word. Of course to the pure all things are pure.

In 2013, on the auspicious date of April 1, I received an email from Tetlock inviting me to join what he described as “a major new research program funded in part by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency within the U.S. intelligence community.” The core of the program, which had been running since 2011, was a collection of quantifiable forecasts much like Tetlock’s long-running study. The forecasts would be of economic and geopolitical events, “real and pressing matters of the sort that concern the intelligence community—whether Greece will default, whether there will be a military strike on Iran, etc.” These forecasts took the form of a tournament with thousands of contestants; the tournament ran for four annual seasons. “You would simply log on to a website,” Tetlock’s email continued, “give your best judgment about matters you may be following anyway, and update that judgment if and when you feel it should be. When time passes and forecasts are judged, you could compare your results with those of others.” I did not participate. I told myself I was too busy; perhaps I was too much of a coward as well. But the truth is that I did not participate because, largely thanks to Tetlock’s work, I had concluded that the forecasting task was impossible. Still, more than 20,000 people embraced the idea. Some could reasonably be described as having some professional standing, with experience in intelligence analysis, think tanks, or academia. Others were pure amateurs. Tetlock and two other psychologists, Barbara Mellers (Mellers and Tetlock are married) and Don Moore, ran experiments with the cooperation of this army of volunteers. Some were given training in some basic statistical techniques (more on this in a moment); some were assembled into teams; some were given information about other forecasts; and others operated in isolation. The entire exercise was given the name Good Judgment Project, and the aim was to find better ways to see into the future. This vast project has produced a number of insights, but the most striking is that there was a select group of people whose forecasts, while they were by no means perfect, were vastly better than the dart-throwing-chimp standard reached by the typical prognosticator. What is more, they got better over time rather than fading away as their luck changed. Tetlock, with an uncharacteristic touch of hyperbole, called this group “superforecasters.” The cynics were too hasty: it is possible to see into the future after all. What makes a superforecaster? Not subject-matter expertise: professors were no better than well-informed amateurs. Nor was it a matter of intelligence; otherwise Irving Fisher would have been just fine. But there were a few common traits among the better forecasters.

Ano ang magiging buhay ng isang masigla, matalas ang pag-iisip at independiyenteng 88 taong gulang tulad niya? Paano niya tatanggapin ang isolation, ang walang katiyakang pagtigil sa loob ng bahay?

In turn, the Hadza have become so used to visiting scientists that hosting the researchers who observe them has become a way to supplement their income. Sadly, visiting scientists who want to emphasize how much they are studying bona fide hunter-gatherers sometimes turn a blind eye to the degree to which the Hadza’s way of life is changing as a result of contact with the outside world. These papers rarely mention how many Hadza children now go to government schools, and how the Hadza’s territory is almost entirely shared with neighboring tribes of farmers and pastoralists, with whom they trade and whose cows tramp all over the region. As I write this, the Hadza don’t yet have cell phones, but they are not isolated as they once were. Despite these limitations, there is still much to learn from the Hadza, and I am fortunate to have visited them on a couple of occasions. But to get to the Hadza is not easy. They live in a ring of inhospitable hills surrounding a seasonal, salty lake in northwestern Tanzania—a hot, arid, sunbaked region that is almost impossible to farm.13 The area has some of the worst roads on the planet. Of the roughly twelve hundred Hadza, only about four hundred still predominantly hunt and gather, and to find these few, more traditional Hadza, you need sturdy jeeps, an experienced guide, and a lot of skill to travel over treacherous terrain. After a rainstorm, driving twenty miles can take most of the day. Many things surprised me when I first walked into a Hadza camp mid-morning on a torrid, sunny day in 2013, but I remember being especially struck by how everyone was apparently doing nothing. Hadza camps consist of a few temporary grass huts that blend in with the surrounding bushes. I didn’t realize I had walked into a camp until I found myself amid about fifteen Hadza men, women, and children who were sitting on the ground as shown in figure 2. The women and children were relaxing on one side, and the men on another. One fellow was straightening some arrows, and a few children were toddling about, but no one was engaged in any hard work. To be sure, the Hadza weren’t lounging on sofas, watching TV, munching potato chips, and sipping soda, but they were doing what so many health experts warn us to avoid: sitting.

In nature, nothing transforms without breaking first. Flowers can't bloom until they're deeply, wholly roots. Seasons can't turn until the cold has come and killed off the remnants of the past. Butterflies don't spread their wings before being cocooned up in isolation for weeks, and stars don't become supernovas before facing their own implosion.

Five miles of irregular upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who “conceive and meditate of pleasant things.

he wrote in the Bakinskii proletarii in August 1909, would bury the party rather than renovate it. In order to overcome the present state of party crisis, it was necessary, first, to end the isolation from the masses and, second, to unify party activities on a nationwide basis. And speaking like the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?, Stalin suggested that the latter objective could best be achieved by creating an all-Russian party newspaper. There was, however, one difference: Stalin insisted upon the paper’s being based inside the country rather than abroad, where party organs, being “far removed from Russian reality,” could not effectively fulfill the unifying function.[245] A seasoned professional revolutionary, a completely committed Bolshevik whose whole world lay in party affairs and who found his element in clandestine activity, Stalin was too rare a resource for Lenin to ignore. Nor did he permit himself to be ignored.

To understand how revolutionary Pasteur’s contributions were, consider the previously popular ideas that attempted to explain why people got sick. For nearly two thousand years, the medical profession believed that four different bodily fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—dominated the health and moods of people. When they were in harmony, all was right with the world. When they were out of sync, people fell ill or into “bad humor.” The theory was known as humorism. Doctors were never quite certain what caused imbalance among these humors—ideas ranged from seasons to diet to evil spirits. So they experimented by trial and error to restore the necessary harmony of fluids—often with now seemingly barbaric methods such as bloodletting, which at the time was said to remedy hundreds of diseases. Sometimes, people got better. But most of the time, they got worse. And doctors were never sure why. By the nineteenth century, people began to blame disease on “miasmas” or “bad airs” that floated around dangerously. As hare-brained as it sounds today, “miasma theory” was actually an improvement over humorism because it spawned sanitary reforms that had the effect of removing real disease agents—bacteria. For example, in 1854, when cholera gripped London, the miasma explanation inspired massive, state-sponsored clearing of the air by draining cesspools. A physician of the time, John Snow, was able to isolate the pattern of new cholera cases and to conclude that new cases correlated to proximity to a specific water pump on Broad Street. Disease, he concluded, correlated with that pump—and therefore cholera was not transmitted through miasma, but likely through contaminated water. Snow’s work saved countless lives—and he has subsequently been recognized as one of the most important physicians in history. But while an improvement, Snow’s analysis still didn’t get to the root cause of what actually made those people sick.