Ladder Of Years Quotes

Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years and allowed readers to catch up.

Will's face turned grave. "Be careful with it, though. It's six hundred years old and the only copy of its kind. Losing or damaging it is punishable by death under the Law." Tessa thrust the book away from her as if it were on fire. "You can't be serious." "You're right. I'm not." Will leapt down from the ladder and landed lightly in front of her. "You do believe everything I say, though, don't you? Do I seem unusually trustworthy to you, or are you just a naive sort?

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things - held down a job, for example - I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

Would there be no end to publishing, he wondered? Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years, and allowed readers to catch up.

The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.

You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.

I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against the wood’s coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember? I envy the table’s calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs.

As Annabeth hung in the air, descending hand over hand with the ladder swinging wildly, she thanked Chiron for all those years of training on the climbing course at Camp Half-Blood. She’d complained loudly and often that rope climbing would never help her defeat a monster. Chiron had just smiled, like he knew this day would come.

It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.

Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

He'd been meaning to buy a cat anyhow, he said. (But notice how he'd used the word "buy", apparently unaware that true animal lovers would not be caught dead in a pet shop.)

You will hold this book in your hands, and learn all the things that I learned, right along with me: There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in. After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonley street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

You see, nobody gets to the top alone. Over the years, people who seem to ‘have it all’ have captured the hearts and conquered the minds of hundreds of others who helped boost them, rung by rung, to the top of whatever corporate or social ladder they chose.

Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten, or dropped penny.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)

This is what my love looks like. Here, on this hill, waiting for my girl. For as many hours, as many days, as many years as it takes, I'm here. Even if you'll never be ready for me, I'll still be her, waiting for you.

I feel completely embarrassed and remember the lock on the door and think: He knows, he knows, it shows, shows completely. “He’s out back,” Mr. Garret tells me mildly, “unpacking shipments.” Then he returns to the papers. I feel compelled to explain myself. “I just thought I’d come by. Before babysitting. You, know, at your house. Just to say hi. So . . . I’m going to do that now. Jase’s in back, then? I’ll just say hi.” I’m so suave. I can hear the ripping sound of the box cutter before I even open the rear door to find Jase with a huge stack of cardboard boxes. His back’s to me and suddenly I’m as shy with him as I was with his father. This is silly. Brushing through my embarrassment, I walk up, put my hand on his shoulder. He straightens up with a wide grin. “Am I glad to see you!” “Oh, really?” “Really. I thought you were Dad telling me I was messing up again. I’ve been a disaster all day. Kept knocking things over. Paint cans, our garden display. He finally sent me out here when I knocked over a ladder. I think I’m a little preoccupied.” “Maybe you should have gotten more sleep,” I offer. “No way,” he says. Then we just gaze at each other for a long moment. For some reason, I expect him to look different, the way I expected I would myself in the mirror this morning . . . I thought I would come across richer, fuller, as happy outside as I was inside, but the only thing that showed was my lips puffy from kisses. Jase is the same as ever also. “That was the best study session I ever had,” I tell him. “Locked in my memory too,” he says, then glances away as though embarrassed, bending to tear open another box. “Even though thinking about it made me hit my thumb with a hammer putting up a wall display.” “This thumb?” I reach for one of his callused hands, kiss the thumb. “It was the left one.” Jase’s face creases into a smile as I pick up his other hand. “I broke my collarbone once,” he tells me, indicating which side. I kiss that. “Also some ribs during a scrimmage freshman year.” I do not pull his shirt up to where his finger points now. I am not that bold. But I do lean in to kiss him through the soft material of his shirt. “Feeling better?” His eyes twinkle. “In eighth grade, I got into a fight with this kid who was picking on Duff and he gave me a black eye.” My mouth moves to his right eye, then the left. He cups the back of my neck in his warm hands, settling me into the V of his legs, whispering into my ear, “I think there was a split lip involved too.” Then we are just kissing and everything else drops away. Mr. Garret could come out at any moment, a truck full of supplies could drive right on up, a fleet of alien spaceships could darken the sky, I’m not sure I’d notice.

Believer, your life is too essential to waste on pettiness or word wars, greed or ladder climbing, anger or bitterness, fear or anxiety, regret or disappointment. Life is too short. We must run, not walk, the way of Isaiah 58, embracing authentic faith manifested through mercy and community. Living on mission requires nothing less. It is a grand adventure, a true voyage into the kingdom of God. Would you lose days, months, years pointing fingers and quarreling, or would you rather break yokes of oppression? Imagine what would happen if we all chose the latter.

Following that 350-year period of perfectly legal subjugation, a mere half century—less than a single lifetime—separates us from whites-only lunch counters, water fountains, and schools. How much have things changed since then?

Each life is a kind of assignment, I believe," Eliza told her. "You're given this one assigned slot each time you come to earth, this little square of experience to work through. So even if your life has been troubled, I believe, it's what you're meant to deal with on this particular go-round.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean's edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving. Where they were going without her. How to say goodbye.

See, I’ve always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you. I keep asking myself: couldn’t Thelma have found us a place with a few more levels to it?

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

There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.

they finished building a year before I purchased Jacob’s Ladder.

Even after all these uneventful years on Jacob’s Ladder, I still lock the door every night.

A leader in 10 minutes can unlock your potentials which in reality would have taken you 10 years to do without them.

And sometimes," he said, "you get to what you thought was the end and you find it's a whole new beginning.

All those years when I was a child, longing for it to be 'my turn,' it hadn't ever occurred to me that my turn would be over, by and by.

Would there be no end to publishing? he wondered. Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years and allowed readers to catch up.

The dust of thirty years hung lifeless in shafts of morning light, the gilding of perfectly prim pages shone incanescent, the shriek of rolling ladders mourned in perennial soliloquy.

AI has been climbing the ladder of cognitive abilities for decades, and it now looks set to reach human-level performance across a very wide range of tasks within the next three years.

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the imcomparable milk of wonder.

That is the essence of the emptiness of life in here. There are no more goals. No exams to pass, no career ladders to climb, no children to raise. We are too old, even, to babysit the grandchildren.

Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry— Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there’s a story in a book about it: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. You must not mind a certain coolness from him Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. As for the woods’ excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone’s road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you’re lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall. First there’s the children’s house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny’s A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. (I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The “rising tide” theory rested on a notion of separate but equal class ladders. And so there was a class of black poor and an equivalent class of white poor, a black middle class and a white middle class, a black elite and a white elite. From this angle, the race problem was merely the result of too many blacks being found at the bottom of their ladder—too many who were poor and too few who were able to make their way to the next rung. If one could simply alter the distribution, the old problem of “race” could be solved. But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal—that to be a member of the “black race” in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the white ladder. Whites in the middle class often brought with them generational wealth—the home of a deceased parent, a modest inheritance, a gift from a favorite uncle. Blacks in the middle class often brought with them generational debt—an incarcerated father, an evicted niece, a mother forced to take in her sister’s kids. And these conditions, themselves, could not be separated out from the specific injury of racism, one that was not addressed by simply moving up a rung. Racism was not a singular one-dimensional vector but a pandemic, afflicting black communities at every level, regardless of what rung they occupied. From that point forward the case for reparations seemed obvious and the case against it thin. The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery. On the contrary, slavery was but the initial crime in a long tradition of crimes, of plunder even, that could be traced into the present day. And whereas a claim for reparations for slavery rested in the ancestral past, it was now clear that one could make a claim on behalf of those who were very much alive.

They say it has several hundred floors. How do you get to the top? With a ladder called an elevator. To get to the top floor, you board the elevator early in the morning and you reach your floor by sunset.

If you’re like most people, you’ll do one thing for two to three years, then something else for two to three years, and then—somewhere in that five- to seven-year distance from Yale—you’ll see a need to fully commit to something that’s a longer-term project: graduate school, for example, or a job you need to stick with for some real time. The question is: where do you need to be with yourself such that when the time comes to ‘cast your whole vote,’ you’re reasonably confident you’re not being either fear-based or ego-driven in your choice . . . that the journey you’re on is really yours, and not someone else’s? If you think of your first few jobs after Yale in this way—holistically and in terms of your growth as a person rather than as ladder rungs to a specific material outcome—you’re less likely to wake up at age forty-five married to a stranger.” Yikes!

All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind. Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them.

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

You see, nobody gets to the top alone. Over the years, people who seem to "have it all" have captured the hearts and conquered the minds of hundreds of others who helped boost them, rung by rung, to the top of whatever corporate or social ladder they chose.

Didn't it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking.

It was a relief to see his father, who'd always been an unfailing source of reassurance and comfort. They clasped hands in a firm shake, and used their free arms to pull close for a moment. Such demonstrations of affection weren't common among fathers and sons of their rank, but then, they'd never been a conventional family. After a few hearty thumps on the back, Sebastian drew back and glanced over him with the attentive concern that hearkened to Gabriel's earliest memories. Not missing the traces of weariness on his face, his father lightly tousled his hair the way he had when he was a boy. "You haven't been sleeping." "I went carousing with friends for most of last night," Gabriel admitted. "It ended when we were all too drunk to see a hole through a ladder." Sebastian grinned and removed his coat, tossing the exquisitely tailored garment to a nearby chair. "Reveling in the waning days of bachelorhood, are we?" "It would be more accurate to say I'm thrashing like a drowning rat." "Same thing." Sebastian unfastened his cuffs and began to roll up his shirtsleeves. An active life at Heron's Point, the family estate in Sussex, had kept him as fit and limber as a man half his age. Frequent exposure to the sunlight had gilded his hair and darkened his complexion, making his pale blue eyes startling in their brightness. While other men of his generation had become staid and settled, the duke was more vigorous than ever, in part because his youngest son was still only eleven. The duchess, Evie, had conceived unexpectedly long after she had assumed her childbearing years were past. As a result there were eight years between the baby's birth and that of the next oldest sibling, Seraphina. Evie had been more than a little embarrassed to find herself with child at her age, especially in the face of her husband's teasing claims that she was a walking advertisement of his potency. And indeed, there have been a hint of extra swagger in Sebastian's step all through his wife's last pregnancy. Their fifth child was a handsome boy with hair the deep auburn red of an Irish setter. He'd been christened Michael Ivo, but somehow the pugnacious middle name suited him more than his given name. Now a lively, cheerful lad, Ivo accompanied his father nearly everywhere.

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought that if I did normal things-held down a job, for example, I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime.

Independence changed everything. Independence changed nothing. Eight years after the British left, we now had free government schools, running water and paved roads. But Jaipur still felt the same to me as it had ten years ago, the first time I stepped foot on its dusty soil. On the way to our first appointment of the morning, Malik and I nearly collided with a man carrying cement bags on his head when a bicycle cut between us. The cyclist, hugging a six-foot ladder under his arm, caused a horse carriage to sideswipe a pig, who ran squealing into a narrow alley. At one point, we stepped aside and waited for a raucous band of hijras to pass. The sari-clad, lipstick-wearing men were singing and dancing in front of a house to bless the birth of a baby boy. So accustomed were we to the odors of the city—cow dung, cooking fires, coconut hair oil, sandalwood incense and urine—that we barely noticed them.

Didn’t it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking. One of life’s many ironies.

In the 1970s, when Norman Sunshine won an Emmy for the graphics and title design he had created for one of Alan Shayne’s television productions, “Alan and I agreed it was not a good idea for us to be seen together at an industry event,” he remembers. “Alan, after all, was one of the very few homosexuals who had such a powerful, high profile job, and who lived openly with a man. Homophobia had its adherents and some ruthless climber up the executive ladder would certainly love an opportunity to use it… 'Better to be seen with a woman,’ we were advised by a very trusted friend, ‘Makes everyone more comfortable.

But make no mistake about it, the moral arguments that undermined slavery were not enough to bring about the abolition of it; many people and countries had to be dragged kicking and screaming up the moral ladder, as evidenced by the fact that after it outlawed slavery in 1807, the British Royal Navy had to patrol the African coast in search of illegal slave trade for more than sixty years, until 1870, seizing nearly 1,600 ships and liberating more than 150,000 slaves in the process.32 And, as previously noted, in the United States it took the deaths of more than 650,000 Americans in the Civil War to finally bring about slavery’s end there.

I could see the stories that stretched for years into the future, much like the ones that stretched back years into the past. More bombs, more sudden death, more adrenaline. Never had I felt as alive as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so close to chaos, so constantly reminded of how precious, temporary, and fragile life was. I had certainly grown here. I knew how to find money in a war zone, how to flatter a warlord, how to cover a suicide bombing, how to jump-start a car using a cord and a metal ladder, how to do the Taliban shuffle between conflict zones. I knew how to be alone. I knew I did not need a man, unless that man was my fixer. But also, I knew I had turned into this almost drowning caricature of a war hack, working, swearing, and drinking my way through life and relationships.

I pulled it in place and walked up the ladder, telling him, “I’ve always wanted to use one of these.” “I remember.” “What?” I hadn’t ever told him that. “You wrote that post last year, titled your ‘Book Bucket List’ of all the book-related things you wanted to do.” “You read that?” I smiled over at him from the third step of the ladder. “I read all of your posts. I’m your number one fan. Remember?

The poet replied: “I always am, my child; you will be too in a few years. While one is climbing the ladder, one sees the top and feels hopeful; but when one has reached that summit, one sees the descent and the end which is death. It is slow work ascending, but one descends rapidly. At your age one is joyous; one hopes for many things which never come to pass. At mine, one expects nothing but death.

The corporate myth is over. If you’ve spent years climbing the corporate ladder, have you ever stopped to notice the view? What view, you ask? The rear end of the person in front of you. That’s what you get to look forward to. If that’s the way you want to view the rest of your life, then this book probably isn’t for you. But if you are sick and tired of looking at someone else’s behind, then read on.

Thus we find ourselves at the foot of the crucifix, which is the ladder by which we pass from these temporal years to eternal ones. May this next year be followed by others, and may all of them be usefully employed for the conquest of eternity. Live a long, holy, and happy life among your own here below during these perishable moments, so that you may live again eternally in that unchanging happiness for which you yearn.

As for how much aerobic exercise you need to stay sharp, one small but scientifically sound study from Japan found that jogging thirty minutes just two or three times a week for twelve weeks improved executive function. But it’s important to mix in some form of activity that demands coordination beyond putting one foot in front of the other. Greenough worked on an experiment several years ago in which running rats were compared to others that were taught complex motor skills, such as walking across balance beams, unstable objects, and elastic rope ladders. After two weeks of training, the acrobatic rats had a 35 percent increase of BDNF in the cerebellum, whereas the running rats had none in that area. This extends what we know from the neurogenesis research: that aerobic exercise and complex activity have different beneficial effects on the brain.

Superstition Very superstitious, writings on the wall, Very superstitious, ladders bout' to fall, Thirteen month old baby, broke the lookin' glass Seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past When you believe in things that you don't understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain't the way Very superstitious, wash your face and hands, Rid me of the problem, do all that you can, Keep me in a daydream, keep me goin' strong, You don't wanna save me, sad is my song When you believe in things that you don't understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain't the way, yeh, yeh Very superstitious, nothin' more to say, Very superstitious, the devil's on his way, Thirteen month old baby, broke the lookin' glass, Seven years of bad luck, good things in your past When you believe in things that you don't understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain't the way, no, no, no

It wasn’t until I got to the law firm that things started hitting me. First, the people around me seemed pretty unhappy. You can go to any corporate law firm and see dozens of people whose satisfaction with their jobs is below average. The work was entirely uninspiring. We were for the most part grease on a wheel, helping shepherd transactions along; it was detail-intensive and often quite dull. Only years later did I realize what our economic purpose was: if a transaction was large enough, you had to pay a team of people to pore over documents into the wee hours to make sure nothing went wrong. I had zero attachment to my clients—not unusual, given that I was the last rung down on the ladder, and most of the time I only had a faint idea of who my clients were. Someone above me at the firm would give me a task, and I’d do it. I also kind of thought that being a corporate lawyer would help me with the ladies. Not so much, just so you know. It was true that I was getting paid a lot for a twenty-four-year-old with almost no experience. I made more than my father, who has a PhD in physics and had generated dozens of patents for IBM over the years. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me; what the heck had I done to deserve that kind of money? As you can tell, not a whole lot. That didn’t keep my colleagues from pitching a fit if the lawyers across the street were making one dollar more than we were. Most worrisome of all, my brain started to rewire itself after only the first few months. I was adapting. I started spotting issues in offering memoranda. My ten-thousand-yard unblinking document review stare got better and better. Holy cow, I thought—if I don’t leave soon, I’m going to become good at this and wind up doing it for a long time. My experience is a tiny data point in a much bigger problem.

Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that “he is responsible for himself and himself alone.” The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him.

They never asked, "Were you able to work today?" Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they'd gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected - those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone. When Mari came in, Jonna was on a ladder building shelves in her front hall. Mari knew that when Jonna started putting up shelves she was approaching a period of work. Of course the hall would be far too narrow and cramped, but that was immaterial. The last time, it was shelves in the bedroom and the result had been a series of excellent woodcuts. She glanced into the bathroom as she passed, but Jonna had not yet put printing paper in to soak, not yet. Before Jonna could do her graphic work in peace, she always spent some time printing up sets of earlier, neglected works - a job that had been set aside so she could focus on new ideas. After all, a period of creative grace can be short.

No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can. After thirteen years in the industry, I was damn near terminal. With each step up the corporate ladder I received a slightly smaller laptop, a slightly-harder-to-adjust office chair. To compensate they offered free donuts and coffee cards. Weekends off. 401K vesting. Medical insurance that I had to have because they were turning me into a half-blind hunchback with diabetes. The

Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues: • Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today’s America—framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent—has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy. • Equality of opportunity and social mobility. The prospects for the next generation—that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it—pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture. Beginning with the “all men are created equal” premise of our national independence, Americans of all parties have historically been very concerned about this issue.

I’ll find you something else to read. Catch.” He let it fall without looking, and Tessa had to dart forward to seize it before it hit the floor. It was a large squarish volume bound in dark blue velvet. There was a pattern cut into the velvet, a swirling symbol reminiscent of the marks that decorated Will’s skin. The title was stamped on the front in silver: The Shadowhunter’s Codex. Tessa glanced up at Will. “What is this?” “I assumed you’d have questions about Shadowhunters, given that you’re currently inhabiting our sanctum sanctorum, so to speak. That book ought to tell you anything you want to know—about us, about our history, even about Downworlders like you.” Will’s face turned grave. “Be careful with it, though. It’s six hundred years old and the only copy of its kind. Losing or damaging it is punishable by death under the Law.” Tessa thrust the book away from her as if it were on fire. “You can’t be serious.” “You’re right. I’m not.” Will leaped down from the ladder and landed lightly in front of her. “You do believe everything I say, though, don’t you? Do I seem unusually trustworthy to you, or are you just a naïve sort?

After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment. The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds. They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

In the 1970s, when Norman Sunshine won an Emmy for the graphics and title design he had created for one of Alan Shayne’s television productions, “Alan and I agreed it was not a good idea for us to be seen together at an industry event,” he remembers. “Alan, after all, was one of the very few homosexuals who had such a powerful, high profile job, and who lived openly with a man. Homophobia had its adherents and some ruthless climber up the executive ladder would certainly love an opportunity to use it… 'Better to be seen with a woman,’ we were advised by a very trusted friend, ‘Makes everyone more comfortable.

Without being aware of it, Carlos was making a distinction in relationships that Aristotle had made more than two thousand years earlier in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle wrote that there is a kind of a friendship ladder, from lowest to highest. At the bottom—where emotional bonds are weakest and the benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility: deal friends, to use Carlos’s coinage. You are friends in an instrumental way, one that helps each of you achieve something else you want, such as professional success. Higher up are friends based on pleasure. You are friends because of something you like and admire about the other person. They are entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or smart, for example. In other words, you like an inherent quality, which makes it more elevated than a friendship of utility, but it is still basically instrumental. At the highest level is Aristotle’s “perfect friendship,” which is based on willing each other’s well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous that is outside either of you. This might be a friendship forged around religious beliefs or passion for a social cause. What it isn’t is utilitarian. The other person shares in your passion, which is intrinsic, not instrumental. Of

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

The hereditary Emperor is nearly dead and has been for many centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in a stasis field which keeps him in a state of perpetual unchangingness. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means that without any drastic political upheaval, power has simply and effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder, and is now seen to be vested in a body that used to act simply as advisers to the Emperor—an elected governmental assembly headed by a President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such place. The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had—he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Have you ever stood before a shelf of books that stretches from the floor to the ceiling, looking at the names on the spines of the books, running your hands over them, sometimes squatting down on the floor to look carefully at the books kept on the bottom shelf, and then bringing over a step ladder or stool to climb up and see the books that have been kept high up? Finding the copies of books I was searching for, or bringing down a dusty copy of a forgotten book that no one had issued in many years and taking it away with me to read was a thrilling new experience. Till today I read all kinds of books. Many authors send me their books just to hear what I will say, and I have come across so many interesting new voices in this way.

Geoffrey Cohen and colleagues harnessed the power of values to combat the achievement gap between black and white students. They created an intervention consisting of several short writing exercises that were administered during the course of a school year. In the experimental group, each writing assignment involved writing about a personally important value. Students in the control group also completed the writing exercises but wrote about values that were important to other people. When researchers examined the students’ grade point averages at the end of the year, there was a substantial gap between the GPAs of the black and white students in the control group, but that gap was reduced by 40 percent in the important-values group.

Esoteric tradition teaches us that until we find the Grail, and it should be clearly understood that it is not a physical object in this time-space continuum, Lucifer must play out his role as the sacrificial king. He is doomed to incarnate in a ‘cloak of flesh’ as an avatar for the human race and pay the ultimate price as a scapegoat on their behalf. This is the ultimate sacrifice for being the light-bearer who brought down from Heaven the illumination of Gnostic wisdom and the primal fire of creativity. Lucifer eternally dies and is reborn to save humanity of itself. As the human race progresses spiritually so he can slowly ascend the Ladder of Lights back to the realm of the Gods beyond the Pole Star. He is the Lord of the Morning Star and the Lux Mundi (Light of the World) whose rebirth from darkness we celebrate every year at the winter solstice.

The most insidious of our country, the greediest and highest rung of our socioeconomic ladder, line their pockets with misappropriated funds as military personnel and hordes of civilians are maimed or killed. It’s not their children out there, blinded by manufactured patriotism or lured into the service with the promise of economic stability, all with the sanctimonious blessings of misguided public consent by way of corporate, state-sponsored media. It won’t be their children who are terrorized by Wahabbist insurgents tearing through city blocks and rural areas as only an ever-devouring plague could. It won’t be any of their loved ones watching thousands of years of civilization unraveling like an old sweater as each thread of wool is lit on fire or stolen to sell on the black market for greedy consumers with a fetish for hijacked Mesopotamian artifacts.

LEAP. It’s as simple as four steps, one for each letter of the acronym: Lean into the change with expectancy. When you notice that a change is desirable or necessary, that’s your green light. Punch the gas pedal. That inkling is all you need to get going. Engage with the concept until you achieve clarity. Don’t let the feeling pass. Work with it until you’ve got a sense of what to do. That nagging thought in the back of your mind might be the start of a whole new adventure—or the ladder you need to climb out of a deep rut. Activate and do something—anything. Sometimes we wait to move until we have all the information. That’s a mistake. Clarity comes in degrees. And you only need enough light for the next step. Even if you get off on the wrong foot, the rest of the journey will become clearer as you go. Pounce and do it now. Once you’ve determined your next step, take it. Don’t wait. Waiting feels safe, but waiting kills dreams.

At the outset of his career circumstances seemed to authorize the most sanguine of these expectations. For at twenty-seven, after two years of advanced theology and philosophy, young Father Grandier received his reward for so many long semesters of diligence and good behavior. By the Company of Jesus, in whose gift it lay, he was presented to the important living of Saint-Pierre du Marché at Loudun. At the same time, and thanks to the same benefactors, he was made a canon of the collegial church of the Holy Cross. His foot was on the ladder; all he now had to do was to climb. Loudun, as its new parson rode slowly toward his destination, revealed itself as a little city on a hill, dominated by two tall towers—the spire of St. Peter’s and the medieval keep of the great castle. As a symbol, as a sociological hieroglyph, Loudun’s skyline was somewhat out of date. That spire still threw its Gothic shadow across the town; but a good part of the townspeople

Ted and Rick. Ted graduates from university and starts his climb up the corporate ladder. Every day he works long hours. He spends Saturday on projects to try to get ahead. No time for sports, no time for relationships, and no money to save. Every month he reviews his goals to see how far he can climb the corporate ladder. Extra meetings, extra projects. Gradually, Ted begins his climb to the top. And after 18 short years, Ted has his chance. He could become the next new, semi-young, chief executive of the company. But the owner gives the chief executive job to his recently graduated grandson, who promptly fires Ted. Ted has lost 18 years of his life, his dignity, his hard effort, and is again unemployed. Ted’s friend, Rick, also leaves university, but takes an ordinary job. However, Rick does something different. In the evenings, after work, Rick starts his part-time network marketing business. Four years later, Rick fires his boss, and lives the rest of his life on the earnings of his network marketing business.

Most people in the Great Britain of (Adam) Smith's day lived in what most of us would regard as poverty. Hundreds of thousands were willing to risk the possibility of death in transit and years in indentured servitude for the chance to escape to the New World. Yet the population of Britain was probably better off economically than that of any major nation on the globe. To put relative poverty and wealth in perspective, let us take the standards of apparel considered necessary by ordinary day laborers, the lowest of the working poor, as recounted in The Wealth of Nations. In England, Smith reports, the poorest day laborer of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without leather shoes. In Scotland, a rung lower on the ladder of national wealth, it was considered inappropriate for men of this class to appear without shoes, but not for women. In France, a rung rower still, custom held that both men and women laborers could appear shoeless in public. Below France there were many rungs in Europe. And below Europe there were many more rungs still. (p. 56)

walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for

Alf caught the child and gave him to Father. She was gripping Coral, thrusting her out. Willing, anxious hands were holding a blanket. She was trying to make the boy Walter jump too. But the children were terrified, and dazed by the smoke. They would not jump. They would not obey. Hannah lifted them, then dropped them on to the blanket. ‘Hannah, come down. Jump yerself. Quick! Quick!’ Alf was struggling to fight his way in through the flames but was beaten back —the place was a furnace. He tried yet again and was beaten back. ‘Us Bullens sticks together!’ he was shouting. ‘That’s me sister, that’s Hannah Bullen in there. I’m goin’ to get ‘er. Us Bullens sticks together!’ Then all in a moment he reeled and fell, and they saw that his face and chest were blackened. ‘Hannah! Hannah!’ ‘My Gawd, she don’t ‘ear us...’ ‘The room’s roarin’!’ ‘Someone go and get ‘old of the captain. Captain, for Gawd’s sake come on down ‘ere!’ ‘Fetch a ladder, we might get ‘er out through the winder.’ ‘Hannah! Hannah Bullen!’ ‘Oh, Christ, the roof...’ With a sudden sharp crash the roof fell in and the cottage blazed up magnificently, like a beacon set on the crest of the hill. It was New Year’s Day. It was Hannah’s birthday.

Big Clock" When the big clock at the train station stopped, the leaves kept falling, the trains kept running, my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker, and my father’s body kept filling up with time. I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar. We slept under the stopped hands of the clock until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder. He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key. No one but he knew what he saw. Below him, the mortal faces went on passing toward all compass points. People went on crossing borders, buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another. Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back, waiting room to moving train and back, war zone to safe zone and back. Crossing between gain and loss: learning new words for the world and the things in it. Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it. And collecting words in a different language for those three primary colors: staying, leaving, and returning. And only the man at the top of the ladder understood what he saw behind the face which was neither smiling nor frowning. And my father’s body went on filling up with death until it reached the highest etched mark of his eyes and spilled into mine. And my mother’s hair goes on never reaching the earth.

After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don't look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?

In other words, you have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing-system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success. First nursery school or kindergarten, then the grades or forms of elementary school, preparing you for the great moment of secondary school! But then more steps, up and up to the coveted goal of the university. Here, if you are clever, you can stay on indefinitely by getting into graduate school and becoming a permanent student. Otherwise, you are headed step by step for the great Outside World of family-raising, business, and profession. Yet graduation day is a very temporary fulfillment, for with your first sales-promotion meeting you are back in the same old system, being urged to make that quota (and if you do, they’ll give you a higher quota) and so progress up the ladder to sales manager, vice-president, and, at last, president of your own show (about forty to forty-five years old). In the meantime, the insurance and investment people have been interesting you in plans for Retirement—that really ultimate goal of being able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all your labors. But when that day comes, your anxieties and exertions will have left you with a weak heart, false teeth, prostate trouble, sexual impotence, fuzzy eyesight, and a vile digestion.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed. Yet one person cannot be robbed of her futurity: my daughter, Cady. I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters – but what would they really say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is 15; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. That message is simple. When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

She ran into a problem at the tunnel exit, though. Her father chose one of the exits with a ladder up to the sky, where a Wingwatcher stood guard at the bottom. Ivy crouched behind a bench carved out of the rock. Her heart was pounding. She’d never been this close to this exit before — certainly never without permission. It smelled different here. She didn’t think she was imagining that. “Hello, Holly!” Heath boomed cheerfully as he approached the bottom of the ladder. “It’s Foxglove, sir,” the Wingwatcher said. Ivy didn’t know her very well, although Foxglove had left school only a couple of years ago to train with the Wingwatchers. Her hair was shaved into a close dark fuzz over her head and her forest-green uniform was neat and unwrinkled. Most interestingly, Foxglove’s expression was hard to read. It wasn’t the usual adoring gaze Ivy’s father got all over Valor. She looked calm, focused … unimpressed. Ivy smushed her face around, trying to imitate her. Violet and Daffodil would be so startled if Ivy could make a cool “I don’t care” expression like that. “Any dragon sightings today?” Heath asked, ignoring the name correction. “No, sir.” “Too bad, too bad.” He cracked his knuckles. “Can’t wait to meet another dragon with the pointy end of this guy.” He patted the sword at his waist with a grin. Foxglove raised her eyebrows but said nothing. “Well, I’ll be back soon,” Heath said. He put one hand on the ladder.

All the talk and publicity accompanying the centennial [of the Emancipation Proclamation] only served to remind the Negro that he still wasn't free, that he still lived a form of slavery disguised by certain niceties of complexity. As the then Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, phrased it: "Emancipation was a Proclamation but not a fact." The pen of the Great Emancipator had moved the Negro into the sunlight of physical freedom, but actual conditions had left him behind in the shadow of political, psychological, social, economic and intellectual bondage. In the South, discrimination faced the Negro in its obvious and glaring forms. In the North, it confronted him in hidden and subtle disguise. The Negro also had to recognize that one hundred years after emancipation he lived on a lonely island of economic insecurity in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Negroes are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the basis of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty. The average Negro is born into want and deprivation. His struggle to escape his circumstances is hindered by color discrimination. He is deprived of normal education and normal social and economic opportunities. When he seeks opportunity, he is told, in effect, to lift himself by his own bootstraps, advice which does not take into account the fact that he is barefoot.

How quickly the years fall away and the passage of time ceases meaning. We have each a purpose: we are bred to it, engineered for it, or we are drawn to it out of some fathomless innate longing that we cannot explain. Some unlucky few must discover—or create—it on their own, but those are rarer in these days, when by the grace of the forebears we are manufactured to our place in the order of the world. We have our destinies. We race for them, fight for them, fulfill them. Or we fail them. Listen, Perceval. Do you hear your long immortal life stretched out before you, before the stars? I have so much to teach you, my dear. The young do not believe in endings. They do not believe in death. They do not believe in time. Everything takes forever to happen, and twenty years is a long time. Under those circumstances, the apocalypse can seem sexy. Death is a fetish, a taste of the edge. It is not real. And so the days are long, and though time holds us green and dying, we cannot yet feel the drag of our chains hauling us forward to the end. But the old, Perceval. The old have forgiven time. Whatever time you may have is too little. If you live a thousand years—as I nearly have, and you surely will—it does not matter. Unless you have given up, laid down your tools, and folded idle hands to wait, beloved, you will still be in the middle of something when you die. The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it. And that is fine and just. For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.

You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind. “If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border. “You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them.

The long year passed slowly. Then one day, as October winds blew golden leaves around the farm, Autumn heard his mother say that even though her son was gone she would bake a pumpkin pie for Halloween. And of course she would need a pumpkin. At last an idea came to Autumn. If he could just get his mother to the barn and up to the loft she would find the magic pumpkin. Autumn began to pull at his mother’s apron. “What’s wrong with you today?” cried his mother. “I have many things to do and I have no time for playing.” But Autumn kept pulling on her apron until she was out of the house and in the barnyard. Then he ran into the barn, barking louder than he ever had. His mother followed him into the barn, where it was so dark she could not see the little dog. “Now where have you gone?” she cried. Autumn began barking again and it seemed to come from above her. She looked up and dimly saw Autumn at the top of the loft ladder, barking wildly. “What are you carrying on about up there? There’s nothing up in that old loft.” But Autumn did not stop barking. “All right, all right, I’ll come up and take a look,” she said as she began to climb the ladder. When she got to the top, the morning light lit up the corner of the loft where Autumn, smiling as much as a dog can smile, stood next to a very large pumpkin. It was one of the largest pumpkin she had ever seen. “Now, how did this pumpkin get up here?” Of course there was no one there to answer her question except Autumn and he could not talk. So she decided to use the pumpkin for the pie she planned to bake. She pulled at it and rolled it, and finally after a great effort she managed to get the magic pumpkin down the ladder and into the kitchen, where Autumn ran barking around the table. “Calm down, Autumn, and let me get to work on this pie.” As she was about to cut the stem from the pumpkin, she thought of the days when her husband carved the jack-o’-lantern for Angus. “Well, maybe I’ll just do the same.” She went to Angus’s room and found one of his old drawings. She traced a jack-o’-lantern face onto the pumpkin. Then, taking a large kitchen knife, she cut into the pumpkin. When only one eye was carved, there were streams of light. And when she carved the nose, and the smiling mouth, great shafts of light like sunbeams filled the room. Again Autumn began to bark. But when she turned to quiet him, there, standing in the wonderful light, was her son.

In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion. 22. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the angel with the rubber stamp. 22.​Courtesy of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The Portuguese government – which had little desire to accept any of these refugees – sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.2 The sanctity of written records often had far less positive effects. From 1958 to 1961 communist China undertook the Great Leap Forward, when Mao Zedong wished to rapidly turn China into a superpower. Intending to use surplus grain to finance ambitious industrial projects, Mao ordered the doubling and tripling of agricultural production. From the government offices in Beijing his impossible demands made their way down the bureaucratic ladder, through provincial administrators, all the way down to the village headmen. The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output. As the fabricated numbers made their way back up the bureaucratic hierarchy, each official exaggerated them further, adding a zero here or there with a stroke of a pen. 23.

Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber “made it” in one-fifteenth of the time. How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon? The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey. When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence. But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero. “Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success. The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R& B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience. They helped him polish his performing skills, and in four years Bieber had sold 15 million records and been named by Forbes as the third most powerful celebrity in the world. Without Raymond’s and Braun’s mentorship, Biebs would probably still be playing acoustic guitar back home in Canada. He’d be hustling on his own just like Louis C.K., begging for attention amid a throng of hopeful entertainers. Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history. Socrates mentored young Plato, who in turn mentored Aristotle. Aristotle mentored a boy named Alexander, who went on to conquer the known world as Alexander the Great. From The Karate Kid to Star Wars to The Matrix, adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master: Obi Wan Kenobi. Mr. Miyagi. Mickey Goldmill. Haymitch. Morpheus. Quickly, the hero is ready to face overwhelming challenges. Much more quickly than if he’d gone to light-saber school. The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself. “A master can help you accelerate things,” explains Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and career coach behind the bestseller The Success Principles. He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.

He adopted his standard mocking approach. “Having trouble getting out of the pool, Lily? There’s a ladder on the side for the old ladies who come and do aqua aerobics.” Everything inside her stilled. That condescending wretch. She felt him come closer, and was careful not to stir an inch, not even a hair. “You should get out of the pool and take a long hot shower. It’ll make you feel better,” he suggested, not ungently. His brow furrowed with worry. She ignored the thread of concern in his voice and concentrated on not moving too suddenly. Slowly, as if in unbearable agony, she lifted her head. He was dressed once more in his khakis and shirt, his sneakers were in one hand, his gear bag in the other. Good. She let her face crumble, her expression slip into wretchedness. Her lower lip trembled, a special added effect. “I—I’m not sure I can even make it to the ladder,” she confessed haltingly. “My whole body’s shot.” Damn, she must be hurting worse than he’d imagined. Trying not to stare at her lush lower lip quivering helplessly, Sean dropped his gear bag and stepped forward. “Here,” he said, leaning over, stretching out his hand. “Grab my hand. I’ll pull you out.” She’d braced her feet against the wall of the pool, knowing she’d have to strike fast. They grasped hands. The second his tightened about her forearm, she jerked backward with all her strength. Physics were on her side. Caught off balance, Sean somersaulted through the air, with only enough time to yell, “Shit!” before he landed with a cannonball-sized splash. Lily braced her arms on the pool deck. She’d intended to jump out and make a mad dash for the ladies’ locker room but her efforts were hampered by her convulsive laughter. A surprised “Oof!” flew from her lips. Sean’s arm had snaked out and wrapped around her waist, dumping her backward into the water. She pushed to the surface to find Sean glowering menacingly. He was sopping wet and just as furious. Lily’s laughter redoubled, then died away when his hands took her by the shoulders and pulled her close. Mere inches separated their bodies. “What are you doing?” Her voice came out an alarmed squeak. Her eyes flew to his. They sparkled with green and gold lights. “Payback time, Lily. You’ve pushed me once too often. I had my cell phone in my pocket. I don’t think it’s waterproof. My leather wallet is in my rear pocket, crammed with pictures of my adorable niece and nephew. Basically, Banyon, you owe me. Big time.” His tanned face, with drops of water still clinging to its chiseled planes, descended. He was going to kiss her, she realized, panic-stricken at the thought. “Don’t, Sean, don’t!” “I think I have to. It’s been a long time coming. Oh, by the way, I like lots of tongue.” Indignant, her mouth opened, ready to skewer him. But Sean was quicker. He shut Lily up the way he’d been dreaming of for so long. For years she’d driven him mad, made him crazed with desire. Now, by God, he was going to taste her. The passion and frustration inside him erupted. He seized her mouth, molding her lips to his own. Carnal fantasies gave way to a reality a thousand times sweeter. Starved for her, Sean’s lips plundered, boldly claiming her as his.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

Later, while Andrew Demont was in hospital in Halifax, Ed White visited him and told him that the water had been up to Demont’s lips by the time White was able to secure him in the rope-harness. Demont told me that at the top of the shaft he could smell nothing, but that as he started down the ladder, a foul-smelling odor had overwhelmed him. As he looked into the shaft he could see Karl Graeser sitting underwater, with only the very top of his head showing. Andrew said he saw Bobby, his eyes closed, supporting his dad’s head just above the waterline. Andrew said he placed his hand on Bobby’s shoulder, and then he, too, drifted into unconsciousness. Apparently he stayed like that as the water slowly rose around him, until Ed White came to rescue him. Many years later I was told that the gas that overwhelmed the men was probably hydrogen sulphide, a lethal gas that can form when rotting vegetation is combined with salt water. Apparently, it can be odourless or have a foul rotten-egg smell, depending on the concentration. There is no doubt in my mind that there was salt water in the ground near the new shaft. Right beside it were two tall apple trees. The apples that grew on those trees looked like a type we call “Transparents” in Ontario. Those two trees looked exactly like others on the island, but they bore delicious, crisp, tangy fruit, whereas apples from similar trees were tasteless. A local woman told me that when apple trees grow near the sea in a mix of fresh water and salt water, they produce juicy, sharp, flavourful apples. Could the salt water that nurtured those apples have reacted with the coconut fibre, eel grass, and other old vegetation that had lain dormant for so long in the pirates’ beachwork, producing the deadly hydrogen sulphide? Could the “porridge-like” earth that was encountered only at this location on the island be in some way related to this toxic combination? We may never know.

I’d better come down there and help you get him up. The thing is--” He investigated the ladder. “I don’t know if this’ll hold my weight. It could have been here since the outlaw days--seventy, eighty years or more.” He shrugged. “Guess I’ll have to give it try.” He turned to put his boot on the first fragile crosspiece. “Wait.” Sophie had been thinking. “Take off your shirt.

life was more like a game of Snakes and Ladders than a straight line.

He saw no sign of his sister. Or a monstrous, wild jackal. Zet tore down the steep ladder to the front room. "Kat?" he shouted. She was there, clinging to their mother. They were staring out the open front door. He could tell by the way Kat's shoulders were up around her ears that she was terrified. Still, she took the time to shoot him a reproachful glance. "Shush!" his eleven-year-old sister hissed. "Not so loud!" "What's out there?" Zet demanded, coming up behind them and trying to get past. "Stay back," his mother said. "Both of you." "Let me see," he said, standing on tiptoe. From outside, another unearthly howl sent a chill racing

I've traveled the world, I've searched the literature. Nothing has answered my questions like the life and words of Jesus. I'm not into religion, I'm into a relationship with him. Several years ago I was in a Seattle airport washroom during an earthquake (what a place to die!). I'd been on a trip to check out a job offering three times my current salary. I'd been dreaming about a step up the ladder, about all the stuff I could buy, all the prestige I could have. But the earthquake shook me hard. (As the place shook, the guy in the stall next to me yelled, 'Did I do that?') Back on the plane, I wrote down my definition of success on an airline napkin: 'I will consider myself a success when I'm walking close to Jesus every day, when I'm building a strong marriage and performing meaningful work. I'll consider myself a success when I'm making others homesick for heaven.' That's my life mission and I can't believe how much fun I'm having following it.