Key West Quotes

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

I saw what a mess a lot of people could make of their lives when they're smitten. Some of them go temporarily insane. They find a person who they think holds the key to their happiness-the only key to their happiness... My work has always been my greatest happiness

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

The plum-colored night sky was shifting to pink to make room for the day, which looked as though it might turn out “glorious and whimsical,” as the Key West Citizen had promised.

I’d love to try to sell a blank white canvas to an art dealer. And when he asks what it is, I’d tell him, “It’s a landscape painting of Key West, from the perspective of an optimistic blind man.

If you don't believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying "Country Roads," try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to "West Virginia, mountain mama," you're going to be singing along, and by the time he's done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who's been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

A fallow mind is a field of discontent.

I tucked the keys into my pocket so they wouldn’t jingle and rushed back outside. Once out, I picked up my pace to a run. I was not a runner. I did not like to run. But I ran like I meant it. Maybe I should’ve joined the cross-country team after all because I wasn’t half bad at this. For about one stretch of sidewalk. By the time I made it to the Science building, I had cursed not only the entire cross-country team, but the sport as a whole. I had a cramp that was sending a painful jolt up my side and I could barely breathe.

Okay, okay, already," I said, holding up both hands in an I-surrender sort of gesture. "I'll try it your way from now on. I'll do the touchy-feely stuff. Jeez. You West Coasters. It's all backrubs and avocado sandwiches with you guys, isn't it?

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.

The key to having a good day is to eliminate everything from your life that causes you stress.

my family's going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they're trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That's what I hear. I hear they're buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they're going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.

Give me the keys.

Natives of the Florida Keys often refer to themselves as Conchs, and for good reason: They have been drinking.

People ask how you’re doing, but they don’t really want to know if you’re struggling or not; they want the answer that enables them to go about their day without feeling guilty.

Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.” It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little. “And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.

Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the East, he'd certainly experience many new things, but he'd find first, that the food is under lock and key and second, that humans are considered to be a miserable, destructive, greedy lot, just as they are in the West.

When I pointed out this fallacy in her thought process, however, all she said was, “Just do it,” only not the way they say it in Nike ads. She said it the way the Wicked Witch of the West said it to the winged monkeys when she sent them out to kill Dorothy and her little dog, too.

The Idea of Order at Key West She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea. It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds

When they lived in Key West Justin thought the Everything lived in the ocean. Sometimes he thought the ocean was God. But if the Everything lives anywhere, it's in a river. Because the river moves along and touches every little thing on it's way. An he thinks the Everything would be quiet like a river. Event still sometimes. The ocean is always moving and noisy. The sky's always changing. But rivers are always there, even when the water has moved on. You've got to find the Everything wherever you are.

if there is any part of our lives that we haven’t turned over to Christ, the devil reminds him, ‘No, that one isn’t totally yours. I still have this patch of ground here.’ “Jesus is totally committed to us. And until we learn to be totally surrendered to him, we’ll never find the joy of what it means to fully belong to him. That is the key to every believer’s life — full ownership by Christ. Everything we are and want to be belong to him. “The Lord wants to have ownership of your life. If there is anything hindering this from happening, I invite you to come forward now and lay it before Christ.

For a man to find true freedom, he must free himself from the grip of his fears.

The imprisonment of impossible love is a comfort zone I have never mustered the courage to escape.

This is where the disillusioned gathered to look for new illusions

You can’t train a monkey to show character in times of peril, to be selfless, to be kind when there’s no percentage in it, or to exercise pride without haughtiness.

You can live a fair share of adventures in other people’s stories.

The day we stop fighting for others is the day we might as well pack it all up and go home.

Life happens whether you’re worrying about it or not, and it seems presumptuous to think we have much of a say in how things play out.

One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.

13 words: "Where the Hudson takes a hard right, West Point teaches the Harder Right." W. Bahr, USMA '69 © 2014 After the Hudson’s hard left, what happens next, "right" at Trophy Point?

I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker’s remark about how he’d “never rode in a convertible before.” Here’s this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he’s never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up—and, besides, I had plans for this car. I was looking forward to flashing around Las Vegas in the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious drag-racing on the Strip: Pull up to that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic: “Alright, you chickenshit wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn light flips green, I’m gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutless punks off the road!” Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to the crosswalk, bucking and skidding with a bottle of rum in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music … glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish … a genuinely dangerous drunk, reeking of ether and terminal psychosis. Revving the engine up to a terrible high-pitched chattering whine, waiting for the light to change … How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

It’s strange how quickly everything can change. How your life can be on one path, and suddenly, you’re on a completely different one with little to no warning at all, ill-prepared for the challenges ahead.

In the new world order of the Wise Men of the West—the most powerful of the Genuine Globalists—the rights and freedoms of the individual would be based on positive law: that is, on laws passed by a majority of those who will be entitled to vote on the various levels of the new system of governmental administration and local organization. Ultimate rule, however, will be far removed from the ordinary individual.

Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That’s why Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.” Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.

It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly.

Soon enough it was explained to Buck Nance that Key West was a bad location to be making fun of homosexuals, and also African-Americans. This bulletin was delivered by a 275-pound biker who happened to be both gay and black, and owned a right hand that fit easily around Buck's stringy, hirsute neck.

Man is a thinking reed,” D. T. Suzuki, one of the early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, once said, “but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.

You have reached the home and workplace of Roberto Natchez. I do not often take calls. I make no promise to return them. I have much to do. You may leave a message if you wish.

Seems to me it sailed out of Cartagena in one of the early 1700 fleets, but it was recorded as lost to piracy. Absolutely one of the significant lost treasures of that era.

When a marriage works, it is in no small part because a woman and a man have come to recognize in precise measure when enough has been said.

Cooks are dashing, improvisational, wayward, intuitive; bakers are measured, careful, rational, precise.” —Diana Abu-Jaber

The fucking you get ain't worth the fucking you get.

Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

There's spring on the west coast of Florida, but it only stops for a cup of coffee before heading north to do the heavy work.

As I sat in Mallory Square the next morning, waiting for Iliza, the pale yellow light of the sun reflected off the water as if to parody the jaundice of the island’s locals.

Dating on this island is like fishing in the Hudson River. There's a real strong chance that anything you catch is either toxic, diseased, or dead inside.

Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another.

We are defined by what we do for others, by our relationships, by what we have to offer.

philosophers in the West often trained in wrestling and boxing,

Trust your instincts, follow your bliss, make plans, work hard, learn to let things go. Don’t be late. Remember that fortune favors the brave. Live. If you need to run, try and run toward something. Study for tests. Laugh at silly cartoons. Be organized. If you fall seven times, get up eight. Always carry an extra pen. Believe you can do everything. Find your key.

There's a look that two people share when it is inevitable that they're becoming lovers; that they've become lovers, in spirit if not yet in deed. The look is the bond that sex confirms.

The key to the conquest strategy is to coerce the West into accepting a Muslim right to resist assimilation, to regard sharia as superseding Western law and custom when the two conflict.

Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places, doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Her twenty-seven books have won many awards, including the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Judy lives in Key West and New

George Lucas, go fuck yourself. I hope you’re dead. I hope a fuckin‘ zombie busted in your house and knocked over your golden Yoda statue right onto your once creative head. These movies are terrible.” An

The guy stood a yard inside the dark room and waited, blinking, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the hot whiteness of the Key West sun. It was June, dead-on four o’clock in the afternoon, the southernmost part of the United States. Way farther south than most of the Bahamas. A hot white sun and a fierce temperature. Reacher sat at his table in back and sipped water from a plastic bottle and waited.

am not making any predictions, but the Bible seems to indicate that instead of the Palestinians taking over the West Bank, the Israelis will in due course establish some kind of governmental control over the East Bank. You may say, “That is not what the experts anticipate.” Frankly, that does not disturb me! There is no situation in modern history about which the “experts” have been so consistently wrong as the reestablishment of Israel.

The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post--Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations. In sum, the post--Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational.

Most symphonies, however, are wordless. They are built only of tones, nonlinguistic sounds vibrating in the air, and somehow, we take them to heart and feel that they speak to us more deeply than words ever could. Cultures make up certain rules for music that we learn without even recognizing them; for example, in the West, we have decided that music in minor keys tends to sound sad or anxious, while music in major keys conveys confidence, triumph. Other cultures have made other decisions.

Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.” “You aren’t?” asked Coleman. “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.

While Republicans since the 1980s have insisted the symbol of the United States is the whitewashed American cowboy who dominated the West with manly individualism, in fact the key to survival in the American West was family and friends: kinship networks, trading partners, neighbors who would show up for a barn raising. Working together, across racial lines, ethnic lines, gender lines, and age lines, was what enabled people to defend their rights against a small group of elites determined to keep control of the country.

have a war memorial of my own at Greenway. In the library, which was their mess-room, an artist has done a fresco round the top of the walls. It depicts all the places where that flotilla went, starting at Key West, Bermuda, Nassau, Morocco, and so on, finally ending with a slightly glorified exaggeration of the woods of Greenway and the white house showing through the trees. Beyond that again is an exquisite nymph, not quite finished–a pin-up girl in the nude–which I have always supposed to represent the hopes of houris at journey’s end when the

As to the time factor involved, those of us who are under seventy will see at least the basic structures of the new world government installed. Those of us under forty will surely live under its legislative, executive and judiciary authority and control. Indeed, the three rivals themselves—and many more besides as time goes on—speak about this new world order not as something around a distant corner of time, but as something that is imminent. As a system that will be introduced and installed in our midst by the end of this final decade of the second millennium.

Arin undid the ring, slipped off two keys, and set them in Kestrel’s hand. “These are for your suite. Keep them.” She gazed at the dull metal on her palm. She recognized one key. The other…“Is this one for the garden door?” “Yes, but”--Arin looked away--“you wouldn’t want to use it.” Kestrel had guessed that Arin lived in the west wing suite, and that it had been his father’s as hers had been his mother’s. But it wasn’t until then that she understood what the two gardens were for: a way for husband and wife to visit each other without the entire household knowing.

Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?

At the end of 2006, people concerned with the “Cat” article could not agree on whether a human with a cat is its “owner,” “caregiver,” or “human companion.” Over a three-week period, the argument extended to the length of a small book. There were edit wars over commas and edit wars over gods, futile wars over spelling and pronunciation and geopolitical disputes. Other edit wars exposed the malleability of words. Was the Conch Republic (Key West, Florida) a “micronation”? Was a particular photograph of a young polar bear “cute”? Experts differed, and everyone was an expert.

The Soviet Constitution provides a key to the understanding of Soviet psychiatry. In the West, our tradition of human rights pits the citizen against the State. Very occasionally, a politician will, like John Kennedy, ask us to think what we can do for our country. But, in general, we have rights without any major duties other than the duty to obey the law. If I wish to live as a tramp or to devote my life to a study of butterflies, it’s my business and my right to do so as long as I hurt no one else. The Soviet constitution proclaims a rather different relationship. The citizen is meant to be a productive member of the socialist community. If I choose to be a tramp or butterfly-maniac, I am hurting others because I am depriving the State of my labour. This is not necessarily bad, just odd given Western traditions. But being a ‘parasite’ is an actual crime much like being a vagrant was in Tudor England.

For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver. Maybe it’s the dream of the open highway. The romantic myth of the West. A reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have. Know something about this country that you haven’t yet figured out. If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

Fear is a strange thing. There are several kinds, from mild trepidation and sweaty armpits, to shaky hands and stuttering, but the worst is the cold fear of uncertainty, the specter in the darkness — the one you can’t exactly see, the one that drives your imagination wild, crawls into your intestines, and digs at you with tiny, mean claws.

young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.

None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.35 Conversely, countries owned by other countries, whether in the colonial period or in Africa today, have been less successful, most notably because they have tended to specialize in areas without much prospect of future development and because they have been subject to chronic political instability.

Trust your instincts, follow your bliss, make plans, work hard, learn to let things go. Don’t be late. Remember that fortune favors the brave. Live. If you need to run, try and run toward something. Study for tests. Laugh at silly cartoons. Be organized. If you fall seven times, get up eight. Always carry an extra pen. Believe you can do everything. Find your key.

remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

Over twenty-five hundred years into this experiment we call the West, is there any chance of reconciling the two competing worldviews that clashed so dramatically at the end of the fourth century AD? If so, then, as with any good compromise, there will be plenty of disappointment on both sides. People of reason may have to concede that modern science has its limits. Not everything of value can be weighed and measured. People of faith may have to admit that we can no longer afford legend over history, or obedience over curiosity. In a rapidly accelerating world Big Religion has failed to keep up with a younger generation that prefers fact over fiction. But Big Science and Big Technology may be going too fast, distracting us from the ancient search for meaning that defined the original religion of Western civilization. How do we bridge the gap?

THE NINTH KEY The Ninth Enochian Key warns of the use of substances, devices or pharmaceuticals which might lead to the delusion and subsequent enslavement of the master. A protection against false values. ... THE NINTH KEY (English) A mighty guard of fire with two-edged swords flaming (which contain the vials of delusion, whose whings are of wormwood of the marrow of salt), have set their feet in the West, and are measured with their ministers. These gather up the moss of the Earth, as the rich man doth his treasure. Cursed are they whose iniquities they are! In their eyes are millstones greater than the Earth, and from their mouths run seas of blood. Their brains are covered with diamonds, and upon their heads are marble stones. Happy is he on whom they frown not. For Why? The Lord of Righteousness rejoiceth in them! Come away, and leave your vials, for the time is such as reqireth comfort!

Glancing around the entrance hall, she realized the crate was no longer in the corner. The twins must have raced downstairs the moment it had been mentioned. Clutching it on either side, they lugged it furtively toward the receiving room. "Girls," Kathleen said sharply, "bring that back here at once!" But it was too late. The receiving room's double doors closed, accompanied by the click of a key turning in the lock. Kathleen stopped short, her jaw slackening. West and Helen staggered together, overcome with hilarity. "I'll have you know," Mrs. Church said in amazement, "it took our two stoutest footmen to bring that crate into the house. How did two young ladies manage to carry it away so quickly?" "Sh-sheer determination," Helen wheezed. "All I want in this life," West told Kathleen, "is to see you try to pry that crate away from those two." "I wouldn't dare," she replied, giving up. "They would do me bodily harm.

... you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like what did I think of Kanye West's music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn't just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, 'Stop it! Act your age!' ... I didn't do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn't. 'Honor thy father,' you know what I'm saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you're stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he's younger than you are.

because, once the competition has been decided, the world and all that’s in it—our way of life as individuals and as citizens of the nations; our families and our jobs; our trade and commerce and money; our educational systems and our religions and our cultures; even the badges of our national identity, which most of us have always taken for granted—all will have been powerfully and radically altered forever. No one can be exempted from its effects. No sector of our lives will remain untouched.

We take the stairs down to the first level of the parking garage and I lead us toward the area reserved for doctors. She makes her way toward a black Audi, turns, and waits for me to join her. I smirk. “That’s not my car.” She nods. “Right, of course. I see it now.” She goes to a bright yellow Ferrari that belongs to one of the plastic surgeons. The vanity license plate reads: SXY DOC88. “Here we are.” “Not even close.” “Oh, okay. I get it. You aren’t flashy. Maybe that gray Range Rover over there?” I press the unlock button on my key fob and my rear lights flash. There she is, the car I’ve driven since I was in medical school. “You’re kidding. A Prius?! Satan himself drives a Prius?!” She turns around as if hoping to find someone else she can share this moment with. All she’s got is me. I shrug. “It gets good gas mileage.” She blinks exaggeratedly. “I couldn’t be more shocked if you’d hitched a horse to a buggy.” I chuckle and open the back door to toss in her backpack. “Get in. Traffic is going to be hell.” We buckle up in silence, back up and leave the parking garage in silence, pull out into traffic in silence. Finally, I ask, “Where do you live?” “On the west side. Right across from Franklin Park.” “Good. I have an errand I need to run that’s right by there. Mind if I do that before I drop you off?” “Well seeing as how you stole my backpack and forced me into your car, I don’t really think it matters what I want.” I see. She’s still pouting. That’s fine. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” She doesn’t think I’m funny.

For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.

The key stone of Westem civilization is the sphere of spontaneous action it secures to the individual. There have always been attempts to curb the individuais initiative, but the power of the persecutors and inquisitors has not been absolute. It could not prevent the rise of Greek philosophy and its Roman offshoot or the development of modem science and philosophy. Driven by their inborn genius, pioneers have accomplished their work in spite of ali hostility and opposition. The innovator did not have to wait for invitation or order from anybody. He could step forward of his own accord and defy traditional teachings. In the orbit of ideas the West has by and large always enjoyed the blessings of freedom. Then came the emancipation of the individual in the field of business, an achievement of that new branch of philosophy, economics. A free hand was given to the enterprising man who knew how to enrich his fellows by improving the methods of production. A horn of plenty was poured upon the common men by the capitalistic business principie of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses.

Furthermore, if we look at the historical record, it does not appear that capital mobility has been the primary factor promoting convergence of rich and poor nations. None of the Asian countries that have moved closer to the developed countries of the West in recent years has benefited from large foreign investments, whether it be Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan and more recently China. In essence, all of these countries themselves financed the necessary investments in physical capital and, even more, in human capital, which the latest research holds to be the key to long-term growth.

WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY | 838 words A slippery situation in the Gulf Black Horizon (Harper, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062109880), the 11th book in James Grippando's popular series featuring Florida attorney Jack Swyteck, opens with the two most important words of the lawyer's life: "I do." (Ha, ha—you thought I was going to say, "Not guilty.") The beach wedding in scenic Key Largo goes wildly awry when an epic storm arises in the Gulf, launching manifold repercussions for Swyteck and his new bride. One of the victims of the storm is a young Cuban oil rig worker whose wife emigrated to the U.S. ahead of him. He had planned to follow, but the deadly combination of high winds and an explosive oil spill have put paid to those plans forever. Now his wife would like Swyteck to file a wrongful death suit against the Chinese/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban consortium that owns the oil rig. This is no easy feat, since the rig is in Cuban waters, and the only tenuous tie to the U.S. legal system is the wife's residency in Key West. The situation is volatile; the adversaries are lethal; and the backdrop is a toxic oil slick poised to slime the Florida coast. Black Horizon is timely, relentlessly paced and a thrill ride of the first

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

One might say that, until now, the social, cultural, and political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place. I first became aware of this problem several years ago, when walking across the Charles Bridge, a major tourist attraction in what was then newly democratic Prague. There were buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and, every fifteen feet or so someone was selling precisely what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot. Paintings of appropriately pretty streets were on display, along with bargain jewelry and 'Prague' key chains. Among the bric-a-brac, one could buy Soviet military paraphernalia: caps, badges, belt buckles, and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms. The sight struck me as odd. Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.

In the long evenings in west Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the french mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12 year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line. Now he was in his mid-twenties - if he was still alive - a gunboy, no more. A gunman, no doubt...

Brian and Avis deliver their stacks and try to refuse dinner, but the waiters bring them glasses of burgundy, porcelain plates with thin, peppery steaks redolent of garlic, scoops of buttery grilled Brussels sprouts, and a salad of beets, walnuts, and Roquefort. They drag a couple of lawn chairs to a quiet spot on the street and they balance the plates on their laps. Some ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trips they used to make to the Keys. Ten years after they'd moved to Miami they'd left Stanley and Felice with family friends and Avis and Brian drove to Key West on a sort of second honeymoon. She remembers how the land dropped back into distance: wetlands, marsh, lazy-legged egrets flapping over the highway, tangled, sulfurous mangroves. And water. Steel-blue plains, celadon translucence. She and Brian had rented a vacation cottage in Old Town, ate small meals of fruit, cheese, olives, and crackers, swam in the warm, folding water. Each day stirring into the next, talking about nothing more complicated than the weather, spotting a shark off the pier, a mysterious constellation lowering in the west. Brian sheltered under a celery-green umbrella while Avis swam: the water formed pearls on the film of her sunscreen. They watched the night's rise, an immense black curtain from the ocean. Up and down the beach they hear the sounds of the outdoor bars, sandy patios switching on, distant strains of laughter, bursts of music. Someone played an instrument- quick runs of notes, arpeggios floating in soft ovals like soap bubbles over the darkening water.

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I don’t know what happened the day after

He pulled out a thick iron ring with dozens of keys. He turned it, staring as the keys slid and rang. Arin shut them up inside his fist. “My house,” he said thickly. He looked at Kestrel. “Keys can be copied.” His eyes pleaded with her. “I have no idea how many sets Irex’s family had. Cheat could have had this one, somehow, even before Firstwinter.” She saw how what he said might be true. She didn’t think anyone could fake the horror on Arin’s face when he first saw Kestrel on the floor. Or the way he looked now: as if what had happened to her was happening to him. “Believe me, Kestrel.” She did…and she didn’t. Arin undid the ring, slipped off two keys, and set them in Kestrel’s hand. “These are for your suite. Keep them.” She gazed at the dull metal on her palm. She recognized one key. The other…“Is this one for the garden door?” “Yes, but”--Arin looked away--“you wouldn’t want to use it.” Kestrel had guessed that Arin lived in the west wing suite, and that it had been his father’s as hers had been his mother’s. But it wasn’t until then that she understood what the two gardens were for: a way for husband and wife to visit each other without the entire household knowing. Kestrel stood, because Arin was standing and she had had enough of crouching on the floor. “Krestrel…” Arin’s question was something he clearly hated to ask. “How badly are you hurt?” “As you see.” Her eye was swelling shut, and the carpet had skinned her cheek raw. “My face. Nothing more.” “I could kill him a thousand times and still want to do it again.” She looked at Cheat’s slumped body as it soaked the carpet with blood. “Somebody had better clean that up. It won’t be me. I’m not your slave.” Quietly, he said, “You’re really not.” “I might believe you if you gave me the whole set of keys.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Ah, but would you have any respect for my intelligence?

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.

Like an earthquake, World War II had shaken and destabilized the nation’s racial system. After Black men had fought and died to save democracy and freedom, the hypocrisy of their treatment became more difficult for some white people to ignore, especially as Black people organized to do something about it. The key to the organizers’ success, Myrdal said, would be finding allies among those newly awoken white Americans. “The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American,” he wrote. “It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.” But Myrdal suffered a serious blind spot, as he later acknowledged: he largely ignored the structural inequality in the American North and West, failing to anticipate that many liberal white people would find it easy to criticize the South but difficult to accept change in their own communities. King would major in sociology at Morehouse, and he would go on to call out the hypocrisy of northern whites who explained away their own discriminatory systems of housing, education, employment, and law enforcement.

Alex Honnold, free solo climbing phenom: The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and others: ambitones like The Zen Effect in the key of C for 30 minutes, made by Rolfe Kent, the composer of music for movies like Sideways, Wedding Crashers, and Legally Blonde Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, CEO of Automattic: “Everyday” by A$AP Rocky and “One Dance” by Drake Amelia Boone, the world’s most successful female obstacle course racer: “Tonight Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins and “Keep Your Eyes Open” by NEEDTOBREATHE Chris Young, mathematician and experimental chef: Paul Oakenfold’s “Live at the Rojan in Shanghai,” Pete Tong’s Essential Mix Jason Silva, TV and YouTube philosopher: “Time” from the Inception soundtrack by Hans Zimmer Chris Sacca: “Harlem Shake” by Baauer and “Lift Off” by Jay Z and Kanye West, featuring Beyoncé. “I can bang through an amazing amount of email with the Harlem Shake going on in the background.” Tim Ferriss: Currently I’m listening to “Circulation” by Beats Antique and “Black Out the Sun” by Sevendust, depending on whether I need flow or a jumpstart.

But science, dominated by the spirit of religion is the key to progress and the hope of the future. For example, evolution's beautiful theory of the creation of the world offers many perplexing problems to the inquiring mind. Inevitably, a teacher who denies divine agency in creation, who insists there is no intelligent purpose in it, will infest the student with the thought that all may be chance. I say, that no youth should be so led without a counter balancing though. Even the skeptic teacher should be fair enough to see that even Charles Darwin, when he faced this great question of annihilation, that the creation is dominated only by chance wrote: "It is an intolerable thought than man and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long, continued slow progress." And another good authority, Raymond West, said, "Why this vast [expenditure] of time and pain and blood?" Why should man come so far if he's destined to go no farther? A creature that travels such distances and fought such battles and won such victories deserves what we are compelled to say, "To conquer death and rob the grave of its victory.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

If the emotion of disgust is an evolved defense against disease, several predictions follow. One is that disgust should be evoked most strongly by disease-carrying substances. The second is that these disgust elicitors should be universal across cultures. Empirical research supports both predictions (Curtis & Biran, 2001). People from cultures ranging from the Netherlands to West Africa find foods potentially contaminated by parasites or unhygienic preparation to be exceptionally disgusting. Examples are rotting flesh, dirty food, bad-smelling food, food leftovers, moldy food, a dead insect in food, and witnessing food preparation by someone with dirty hands. Foods that have had contact with worms, cockroaches, or feces evoke especially strong disgust reactions. A third prediction is that the disgust should activate the immune system. One study found that showing people images of contaminated food actually elevated their body temperature—one of the key features of immune response to disease (Stevenson et al., 2012). A fourth prediction is that the people should show an especially good memory for objects that have been touched by sick or diseased individuals—a prediction supported in studies conducted in both Portugal and the United States (Fernandez, Pandeirada, Soares, & Nairne, 2017).

I’m sorry,' [Marty] said unexpectedly. “Huh?” “That we never got to perform that duet together. Don’t you remember? For the Spring Concert?” “Oh, yeah. What was that song we were going to sing?” I asked. She placed her right hand on her hip and mock-pouted at me. “James Garraty, don’t tell me you forgot.” I gave her an impish who, me look. When she smiled, I said in a more serious tone: “‘Somewhere,’ from West Side Story.” I hummed the song’s first measure; it sounded a half-octave off key. Marty frowned. “You haven’t practiced lately,” she said disapprovingly. “No, I haven’t,” I said, and as I said it waves of melancholy washed over me like a cold dark tide. Marty saw my expression change; she walked up to me and placed her arm around my shoulder comfortingly. “I know,” she said softly, “how much you were looking forward to it, Jim. I was looking forward to singing that duet with you, too.” “Really?” I asked. “Really. You’re a terrific singer. Who wouldn’t want to sing a duet with you?” “I bet,” I said, “you say that to all the boys.” She laughed. My heart jumped as it usually did when she laughed. A thought clicked in my brain: What was it I’d written just a while ago? You are the one person who has the ability to brighten up a sour day. You have always managed to make me return a smile to someone else.

During this time my father was in a labor camp, for the crime of wanting to leave the country, and my mother struggled to care for us, alone and with few provisions. One day she went out to the back patio to do the wash and saw a cute little frog sitting by the door to the kitchen. My mother has always liked frogs, and this frog by the kitchen door gave her an idea. She began to spin wonderful stories about a crazy, adventurous frog named Antonica who would overcome great odds with her daring and creativity. Antonica helped us dream of freedom and possibilities. These exciting tales were reserved for mealtime. We ate until our bowls were empty, distracted from the bland food by the flavor of Antonica’s world. Mamina knew her children were well nourished, comforted, and prepared for the challenges and adventures to come. In 2007, I was preparing to host a TV show on a local station and was struggling with self-doubt. With encouragement and coaching from a friend, I finally realized that I had been preparing for this opportunity most of my life. All I needed was confidence in myself, the kind of confidence Antonica had taught me about, way back in Cuba. Through this process of self-discovery, the idea came to me to start cooking with my mother. We all loved my Mamina’s cooking, but I had never been interested in learning to cook like her. I began to write down her recipes and take pictures of her delicious food. I also started to write down the stories I had heard from my parents, of our lives in Cuba and coming to the United States. At some point I realized I had ninety recipes. This is a significant number to Cuban exiles, as there are ninety miles between Cuba and Key West, Florida. A relatively short distance, but oh, so far! My effort to grow closer to my mother through cooking became another dream waiting to be fulfilled, through a book called 90 Miles 90 Recipes: My Journey to Understanding. My mother now seemed as significant as our journey to the United States. While learning how she orchestrated these flavors, I began to understand my mother as a woman with many gifts. Through cooking together, my appreciation for her has grown. I’ve come to realize why feeding everyone was so important to her. Nourishing the body is part of nurturing the soul. My mother is doing very poorly now. Most of my time in the last few months has been dedicated to caring for her. Though our book has not yet been published, it has already proven valuable. It has taught me about dreams from a different perspective—helping me recognize that the lives my sisters and I enjoy are the realization of my parents’ dream of freedom and opportunity for them, and especially for us.

And by the end of March one of them had already begun his journey. Twenty-two years old, an A.B. and LL.B. of Harvard, Francis Parkman was back from a winter trip to scenes in Pennsylvania and Ohio that would figure in his book and now he started with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, for St. Louis. He was prepared to find it quite as alien to Beacon Hill as the Dakota lands beyond it, whither he was going. He was already an author (a poet and romancer), had already designed the great edifice his books were to build, and already suffered from the mysterious, composite illness that was to make his life a long torture. He hoped, in fact, that a summer on the prairies might relieve or even cure the malady that had impaired his eyes and, he feared, his heart and brain as well. He had done his best to cure it by systematic exercise, hard living in the White Mountains, and a regimen self-imposed in the code of his Puritan ancestors which would excuse no weakness. But more specifically Parkman was going west to study the Indians. He intended to write the history of the conflict between imperial Britain and imperial France, which was in great part a story of Indians. The Conspiracy of Pontiac had already taken shape in his mind; beyond it stretched out the aisles and transepts of what remains the most considerable achievement by an American historian. So he needed to see some uncorrupted Indians in their native state. It was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence. It is our misfortune that he did not understand the smallest part of it. No other historian, not even Xenophon, has ever had so magnificent an opportunity: Parkman did not even know that it was there, and if his trip to the prairies produced one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature, it ought instead to have produced a key work of American history. But the other half of his inheritance forbade. It was the Puritan virtues that held him to the ideal of labor and achievement and kept him faithful to his goal in spite of suffering all but unparalleled in literary history. And likewise it was the narrowness, prejudice, and mere snobbery of the Brahmins that insulated him from the coarse, crude folk who were the movement he traveled with, turned him shuddering away from them to rejoice in the ineffabilities of Beacon Hill, and denied our culture a study of the American empire at the moment of its birth. Much may rightly be regretted, therefore. But set it down also that, though the Brahmin was indifferent to Manifest Destiny, the Puritan took with him a quiet valor which has not been outmatched among literary folk or in the history of the West.

By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.59 This is a revealing statement by a man reported to have won some sixty bouts, virtually all of which ended in the death of his opponent (not surprising, when you consider that the samurai long sword, the tachi, was a four foot blade of steel, sharp as a modern razor, and strong enough to chop cleanly through a water pipe.) Once you accept Musashi’s dictum as a strategic principle, then you might ask how to carry it out, how to actually defeat the opponent’s spirit. Musashi was no mystic, and he grounded all his methods in real actions his students could take. We will encounter him and his techniques many times in this book. The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.

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

As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the